Pamela Dean (19 page)

"I don't
own
a skirt," she said reproachfully.

"Put on that daishiki with the elephants," said Janet. "It's nice and festive. Those boys won't dress up anyway, you know."

Molly, grumbling, shed her sweatshirt, washed her face vigorously, put on a bra, made disgusted noises, took it off again, and put on the daishiki. Those boys, when they arrived at five o'clock, had left on their patched and faded jeans, but had changed sneakers for boots and put on white shirts, a plain muslin one in Robin's case and a silk one with ruffles in Thomas's. Robin swept Molly a bow and said, "Milord Hannibal, my felicitations."

"I only did it to please Janet," said Molly. "She thinks elephants are festive."

"Oh, they are," said Thomas. "More suited to some other play, maybe—but never mind."

They went across campus to the Student Union, a small, square building of yellow brick, with a clock tower to it, that contained very little of interest aside from the students'

mailboxes. They settled on its steps to wait for the bus, a station that gave them an excellent view of the Chapel with the sunlight on its clean lines, and of the little red maples that surrounded the Bald Spot. Chester Hall lurked among its larches in the distance, and the Music and Drama Center swore at Olin over the heads of ten or so people and three dogs playing Frisbee. It had been a warm day, but it was getting chilly. Janet had her green jacket and Molly's sweatshirt in her knapsack, but the boys were going to get cold.

They didn't look cold. Robin was teasing Thomas about something that had happened that morning in their Aristophanes class. Professor Medeous taught that one, and apparently delighted in making her students explain, in detail, the dirty jokes in Aristophanes. Thomas was attempting to uphold the theory that she invented jokes where there were none, the ambiguous nature of the Greek language and the uncertainties of translation making this an easy task.

Robin kept saying to him, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," which was making Thomas rather angry. The bus was late. Molly was watching the entire business with a sardonic eye. Janet finally said to Robin, "Have you been reading
Hamlet
too? I thought I'd better; sometimes it's hard to understand the lines when they're spoken."

"It certainly is," said Robin, grinning. "Speak the speech trippingly, my ass."

"The review said this bunch was doing the play in American accents," said Thomas,

"except for the actor doing Polonius, who's British."

"That will help," said Robin.

The bus arrived in a cloud of exhaust, and they got on it. Janet would just as soon have sat with Molly, but Robin, laughing, drew Molly into a seat next to him. Janet and Thomas sat behind them; Janet got the window. Robin promptly turned around, rested his chin on the back of his seat, and proceeded to harangue Thomas about the production of
The
Revenger's Tragedy
they would be doing with Nick winter term. Robin was worried about the lighting, apparently, while Thomas kept telling him he ought to be thinking about the wigs instead. They finally abandoned this contest and began to discuss the play itself.

After about fifteen minutes in which terms like "masque" and "satirical tragedy" and

"amorous subplot" warred with long Italian names for supremacy, and nobody listened to Janet or Molly if either of them did try to speak, Molly gave Janet a wry grin over her shoulder, took Janet's copy of
A Tan and Sandy Silence
out of the front pouch of her daishiki, and settled down to read it.

Janet had Arthur Koestler's
The Watershed
(the next book for Professor Soukup's class) in her knapsack, but reading on the bus made her sick. She looked out the window in time to catch the best view of Blackstock, as the bus climbed the hill that led them out of the river valley the town was built in. The buildings between which she ran and bicycled and trudged laden down with books made one tight cluster, the chapel tower, the brick battlements of Taylor, the black glittering clock tower of the Student Union, the brick stack of the heating plant and the mellow sandstone of the Anthro building crammed in the center of a circle of trees, green and red and yellow. You could have put the whole thing in your pocket.

Janet tapped Molly on the head and pointed Molly closed her book rather impatiently, but once she had looked, she went on looking. "It looks ready to sail away," she said. "On a sea of trees. Over the Arboretum and the game preserve to Canada and the end of the world."

"They'd have to put up the sails first," said Thomas. "I don't envy them the job. I climbed that smokestack my freshman year."

"Why on earth would you do that?" said Molly.

"A bet," said Thomas, a little grimly.

"I thought freshmen had to climb the water tower," said Janet. Blackstock's policy of having no fraternities or sororities had not prevented a certain amount of informal hazing of freshmen, especially the boys; but at least, if you had any backbone at all, you could

thumb your nose at the crowd you'd gotten in with and go find some group whose initiatory rites were more to your taste—people who read science fiction, or liked to fly kites, or play Ping-Pong, or get up at five in the morning to gather mushrooms. She wondered exactly what group of young idiots had decided climbing the heating-plant stack was the only gate to the inner circle.

"I started out as a Poli Sci major," said Thomas, just as if she had spoken. "They were getting a lot of grief from the guys in the hard sciences, and decided to prove their manhood by risking their necks. I should have switched majors right then; it would have saved me a lot of time."

"You're going to want it, next year," said Robin, soberly.

"I can take Latin in the summer, I hope," said Thomas. He looked over Janet's head, out the window. "Look how the light picks out the ridges of the stubble fields."

"Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said Janet, unthinking.

"Oh, do you know the rest?" said Thomas. "It drives me crazy that Keats died when he did; I think that Ode shows a whole new direction for him. Such a waste. Say it for us."

Janet collected herself and did so. It was not one of her favorites, being rather unlike Keats in many ways. It was probably the one she should have said for Nick, but she had not been aware until now that she knew all of it. She stumbled on the last two lines of the second verse, but Robin knew those. He declaimed them with a slightly exaggerated air that made Janet wonder if he shared Nick's prejudices, but on the whole she thought things had worked out very well.

Robin then started in declaiming the Player King's speeches from the play-within-a-play from
Hamlet,
with such unctuous exaggeration that he had all three of them laughing until they cried. Luckily there were only two other students on the bus, well toward the front, and the driver was used to far worse demonstrations.

One of their fellow passengers eventually got up and swayed carefully down the aisle toward them. It was Diane Zimmerman, in a red velvet off-the-shoulder dress and high heels. "Are you going to see
Hamlet?"
she said. "I thought I recognized that awful verse.

I'm taking my brother; he thinks he doesn't want to go, but he's wrong."

"It's amazing how Blackstock captures whole families," said Molly. "Half the people I know have a brother or a sister here. My aunt went here."

"Amazing," said Thomas; Janet thought she heard a sour note in his voice, but when she looked at him he was simply gazing in admiration at Diane's beautiful shoulders; so it was probably something else she had heard.

"Why does your brother think he doesn't want to see
Hamlet?
"
she asked Diane.

"Oh, he thinks all literature should be political, and he's completely certain that nobody before 1700 had a social conscience."

"But that's folly," said Robin, hotly. "Hasn't the child read anything?"

"He
stayed
a Poli-Sci major," said Thomas.

"I thought that was a good department," said Molly.

"Well, it was," Robin said, "but Goldstein went to be President of some Eastern university and Marquez went to teach somewhere—Grinnell or Colgate or one of the other ACM places, and nobody left has any sense of history. They read Aristotle so they can feel superior and then they start on Rousseau and those fellows, and the time between is as the void to them."

"My God," said Thomas, "that's my speech."

"That doesn't necessarily prevent its being true," said Robin, grinning, "though it does create a strong presumption of falsity."

Thomas looked at him hard.

"I cry you mercy," said Robin, "that word was ill-chosen. Fancifulness, may I say rather?"

"If you must," said Thomas, but he looked less disturbed.

"You
have
been reading
Hamlet,"
said Diane to Robin.

"Oh. You know us theater types," said Thomas. "A head full of quotations, in no good order."

"Do you think
Hamlet
's the best choice to show your brother he's wrong?" said Janet to Diane.

"Yes, I do. Or at least, if the reviews of this production are right, this production is the right one. The guy in the paper said that productions of
Hamlet
usually cut all the political stuff—Fortinbras, and all the speeches about usurpation and disease in Denmark; but this one leaves it all in."

"What does it leave out, then?" said Thomas.

"He said a lot of the antic disposition gets cut."

Robin uttered a dismayed cry at such a volume that the bus driver looked over his shoulder and said, "No fighting back there!"

"It's intellectual distress," called Thomas.

"Hasn't your brother got ears?" said Molly to Diane.

"He's sulking," said Diane.

"How can they cut the antic disposition?" said Robin heatedly. "Are they mad? Do they want to gut the play? Don't they know Hamlet must be his own clown?"

"Are you going to behave yourself?" said Molly.

"Let him rant now," said Thomas, "or there's not a hope he'll be quiet in the theater."

"I've got a canvas bag," said Molly. "Suppression will occur on demand. Or provocation."

"And did they also cut all the references to Hamlet's madness?" demanded Robin of Diane.

"No," said Diane, backing off a couple of steps and catching hold of the back of a seat as the bus rounded a sharp corner, "the review said that Hamlet is simply assumed to be truly mad."

"Oh, for God's sake," said Thomas, over a renewed cry from Robin. "If I'd known that I'd have gotten tickets to something else."

"There, there," said Janet. "We can have a nice malevolent discussion about it afterwards."

"The only comfort," said Thomas, gloomily, "is that companies that fuck Hamlet up invariably do an impeccable job on
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."

Diane went back to her brother, Molly returned to Janet's book, Robin and Thomas began an idle discussion of exactly why a director and company that could do a superb job of Stoppard's play couldn't seem to manage
Hamlet,
and Janet looked out the window, where the mild rolling fields of corn stubble and soybean debris, dotted with barn, silo, house, and spiderlike rusted farm machinery, were being replaced by the little frame houses, used-car dealerships, and fast-food restaurants of the city's outermost suburbs. In the low light of sunset they looked like the set of a modern play in which everybody talks interminably and nothing is resolved.

Janet wondered, for the
n
th maddening time, where Nick had gone after English this morning. She hadn't even thought of calling him; he was never in, and nobody on Fourth Taylor liked to answer the telephone. Molly could never get Robin on the phone, either; but he would at least send her notes via Campus Mail, which was often faster than leaving a phone message and waiting for an answer to it. She could send Nick a note this evening.

She had meant to ask him what he wanted to do about dinner, and tell him where to meet to catch the bus, when she saw him after English, and then he had inconsiderately taken himself off.

She wondered how he would get along with Thomas. She wondered what Tina would make of the whole enterprise. Nick and Thomas could probably talk theater until they were blue in the face, leaving Janet to either join in and abandon Tina, or make boring tennis or girl-talk with Tina and miss all the fun. She glared at Molly's curly head, and the bus pulled into the theater lot.

The Old Theater was in fact a ten-year-old building of stark appearance, made of a particularly muddy sort of yellow brick, entirely without windows, and shaped like a slightly squashed pear laid on its side They walked up the sidewalk that made the stem, and entered through huge glass doors. The flat or squashed bottom of the pear was connected to an art museum, some of the possessions of which were generally on display in the lobby of the theater. This time, presumably in honor of
Hamlet
, there was a vast silk and canvas cloud somewhat in the shape of a camel, hanging from the ceiling, and an extensive display of sixteenth-century fans and perfume bottles in the glass cases.

Janet ruthlessly dragged Molly away from this and led her into the cramped little gift shop, where you could gape at porcelain masks of tragedy and comedy, copies of all the plays the theater had done in its history, toy copies of the Globe and the Old Theater, puppets in historical costume, paperweights with famous theatrical scenes in them, mugs written with quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw and Euripides and Ibsen, collections of critical essays, penny whistles, and little clay owls.

Molly was very satisfactorily delighted with all this, and had in fact to be prevented from spending her next term's book money on a miniature model of the Old Theater complete with the costumed cast of
The Lady's Not for Burning.

They went to their seats about ten minutes before curtain time. Robin had refused to take a program book, because they all contained rubbish, he said; but once they had sat down, he insisted on reading Janet's over her shoulder. "Oh, Lord, they've raked up that Olivier nonsense again," he groaned. "Tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind, indeed. What poppycock. What insolent rubbish. How anyone can watch the play and say such things I do not know."