Pamela Dean (46 page)

"I want it to be carried far away," said Tina. "It'll just bob up and down there till spring and annoy the ducks. And it's got my name on it."

"Well take it off, then," said Molly.

"No, that's cheating. Come on. I want the other stream. It's hardly ever frozen."

They trudged up the hill to Dunbar and down its other side. Half Dunbar's windows were still lighted; Janet saw that Nick and Robin's was dark and Thomas and Kevin's, next to them, was dimly lit, as with one desk lamp rather than all the overheads. Go to sleep, dummy, thought Janet.

Up the snow-caked asphalt road, past the playing fields and the ruined bones of the lilac maze, down the hill to the highway, a black ribbon in all this blue and white. No traffic. They ran across the highway—one always ran, for some reason—and slogged through the snow. Past the stone wall, a mere lumpy drift of snow, down the narrow path, which you could tell from the buried underbrush only because it didn't crackle under your weight, and so to the little humped bridge, also half hidden in whiteness.

They plunged to the middle of the bridge, pushed the snow off its railing, and leaned on it. The stream was a sunken wriggle of white in a white field. Even the trees hardly showed; they were either white with snow, or as black as the dark between them.

"It's no go, Tina," said Molly. "It's frozen."

"Listen a minute," said Janet, who knew this stream.

They were quiet. The fog of their breath billowed out over the silent snow. No, not quite silent. A remote trickle, as of a faucet dripping in a distant room, rewarded Janet's attentive ear. She listened closer, and could hear the faint rush of the water going about its business under the stifling cloak of winter. "Hear that?" she said.

"That's all very well," said Molly, "but it's frozen up here just the same."

"We could jump on the ice," said Tina.

"You certainly could not," said Janet. "We could find a rock, though. Isn't there a pile of them just the other side of the bridge?"

"We forgot our flashlights," said Molly.

"Well, they're for finding pipers, you know. Come on, let's just scrabble a little."

Molly did this with a will, and while Janet was still entangled in a dead branch, she came up with three round, heavy stones. Janet flung the branch from her and followed Molly back to the center of the bridge.

"One rock each," said Molly. "All together, or one at a time?"

"All together," said Tina, picking up a rock. "Ready, set, go."

They lifted the rocks over their heads and hurled them onto the ice. Molly's bounced harmlessly under the bridge; Tina's produced a lovely spiderweb of black cracks and a glorious splintering noise; and Janet's, hitting this a little off-center, made a hollow crunch followed by a jagged black hole.

"Go for it, Tina," cried Molly.

Tina dug in her pocket and extracted her round box of pills. She leaned alarmingly far over the railing and shied it at the hole. It slid neatly across the ice, paused, and dropped in with a faint splash, like something falling down a well. Molly cheered. Tina joined her.

Janet leaned, staring. The hole in the ice seemed to go down forever; and yet this was not a deep stream.

"It's cold," she said to her roommates. "Let's go home."

The next evening was Thursday, which she always spent with Nick in his room. Robin and Molly would betake themselves to various places, as the mood took them; several times Janet had come home to find them lying on the floor of the room in Eliot, studying or arguing. After she and Nick had made up for a week of neglect—he was taking one of the dread twenty-four-credit terms, having decided on a double major in Music and Classics or possibly Music and English, and it left him even less leisure than usual—Janet told him about Tina and the pills.

"I'm not sure that was wise," said Nick, lying back amid the disarranged bedclothes and looking very sober. His sheets were dark green with huge sprays of lilac on them, and as a background to his wild dark hair and odd features made him look distinctly faunlike.

"And it doesn't bode well for Thomas, does it?"

"Why does everybody persist in thinking Tina's the only girl for Thomas, when everybody including Thomas agrees they never really suited one another to begin with?

Tina says every girl in the folk-dancing group has a crush on him, and they were all dreadfully disappointed that he didn't keep on attending after she broke up with him, even if he couldn't dance and couldn't learn to."

"Have you told him so?"

"No; I don't see much of him—privately, anyway. Why don't you tell him? He lives next door."

"He's not there much," said Nick, "but I'll make a note of it." He wound his fingers in a stray lock of her hair, and smiled. "This is getting nice and long."

"If I keep it long all summer, you'll know I take you seriously."

"If I thought you did not," said Nick, "I should be very upset."

Janet looked at him. His expression was earnest but not overly concerned. Having brought the conversation to this point, she was not sure she would be wise to go on with it.

She remembered what Thomas had said. There had certainly been no time this term.

"How's the corrupt and despicable Classics Department?" she said.

Nick was leaning on his elbows; on the word "despicable," he flung up both his hands with enough violence to push his head and shoulders into a crevice between the pillows.

"I'd really rather you said you didn't believe me, than to take that tone about it," he said in a muffled voice.

"I do believe you," said Janet, "at least, I don't think you'd lie to me about it—I believe you intellectually, but it's hard to get an emotional grasp on something like that with so little solid information."

"Do you think all those jokes about Classics majors being about in their heads are based on nothing?"

"Having met some of you," said Janet, giving him a poke in the ribs, "I know they're not. But—"

"It's been a quiet time," said Nick. "These things run in cycles. We are due for an unpleasantness in a year or two."

"Wonderful. Why don't you tell me about unpleasantnesses in the past: I'm sure they make wonderful gossip."

Nick didn't move. After a moment he said consideringly, "From time to time somebody's spouse finds out about Medeous."

"Finds out what about—oh." Janet started to ask for names, and stopped. Brilliant, cherubic Professor Ferris, with his dry-spoken wife; the intense and humorous Janie Schafer, who had switched to the History Department but whose jokes Peg and Kit still remembered, who had a husband; even Melinda Wolfe, who was not married at all—did she really want to hear about the eruption of their private lives into the violent public light?

"Gossip is mischievous," said Hesiod, "light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of." She remembered it so well because it had fallen to her to sight-read it in Medeous's class. "Wait a minute. You say it's all Medeous's fault, but how long has she been here?"

"Five years, so."

"There were jokes about Classics majors long before that."

"True for you."

Janet sighed. When he got Irish, there was very little to be done with him. She was greatly surprised when he sat up suddenly and said, "The head of the department has often been a trifle odd."

"Victoria Thompson was a Classics major," said Janet, struck by a revelation. "Was it the head of the Classics Department who got her pregnant?"

Nick began to laugh, in much the way Robin did instead of with his own usually moderate chuckle. "Oh, dear dear dear," he said at last, wiping his face upon the blanket.

"My dear girl, the head of the Classics Department in 1897 was our own Professor Medeous's grandmother. Think of the outrage of the biologists."

"Maybe she just hounded her righteously, then," said Janet, smiling a little sourly.

"She was not at any time a righteous woman," said Nick. "Why are you brooding over poor Victoria?"

"Tina's pills, probably," said Janet, giving up on rational conversation and lying down again. "If Victoria had had any, she never would have gotten into trouble in the first place."

"If she'd lived in a time that made any decent provisions for such trouble, she'd have got out again."

"Well, maybe."

The term wound to its close. The February thaw came in March, and having melted every flake of snow and icicle in sight and covered all available surfaces with a thin film of water, withdrew again in favor of an arctic cold spell that froze everything solid.

The Biology Department canceled Biology 13, obliging Janet and also Nick, whose distribution credits were in rather worse shape than hers, to sign up for Physics 20. This class was thrillingly titled, "Revolutions in Physics," but was referred to by Kevin, witheringly, as "Physics for Poets." It irked him that majors in the humanities should have a physics course tailored for them, while the hapless science major who needed a couple of English or history courses had to take English 10 with the terrifying Evans or History 12

with the incalculable Wallace like anybody else. Sharon suggested that the College must figure science majors were smarter than humanities majors, but this only got Nick and Robin as irked as Kevin.

Janet was amused, having heard the entire argument in ev ery possible form every year since she was ten years old. It was her private conviction that anybody could be taught to read a poem usefully but that some people could not be taught mathematics no matter how you went about it. She kept this theory to herself, knowing already the sort of trouble that expressing it would cause.

She also registered for her father's class in the Romantic Poets and, after a struggle with Melinda Wolfe, for Greek Lyric Poetry. Melinda Wolfe wanted her to have one, or preferably two, of the tragedians under her belt before tackling lyric poetry; she also recommended Plato or Herodotus or Thucydides. But it became clear fairly early in the interview that she would rather Janet took the wrong Classics course than no Classics course at all. Janet thought this was odd, but was happy to employ it to her advantage.

She was in fact a little worried about the lyric poetry class, Homer having shaken her confidence in her linguistic abilities. She had gotten an A, but at the expenditure of roughly three times the effort she had expected to use. She dared Greek Lyric Poetry largely because she was certain she knew everything her father would be teaching. Even if she didn't, she had certainly read everything he would assign. So the lyric poetry could be given the attention due to two classes.

Thomas and Robin were both in the Romantics class. She asked Nick why Robin should bother, and was told rather shortly that Robin was rethinking his position on Keats and thought he would like some help doing it.

"I hope your father's a ruthless realist," said Nick.

"What
have
you got against Keats?" said Janet, closing her Shakespeare and glaring at him.

It was the afternoon of Dead Day, a cold and rainy one, and they were sitting in Janet's room with Molly, ostensibly studying for the Shakespeare final. Miss Davison had had a brainwave and occupied the last class period with a group reading of
Richard III.
She had given Nick the part of Richard, which had annoyed him. He had done a very quiet and melancholy Richard, reminding Janet of Hamlet's description of himself—Richard had lost all his mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and was delighted by neither man nor woman.

This did not work very well.

Molly had been stuck with the part of Anne, and she told Janet later that being seduced over her father's coffin by a mournful puppy dog who appeared to have done all his murders in his sleep had made her want to smack Nick with the Penguin Shakespeare and end everybody's misery. Janet assumed that this was Nick's revenge on Professor Davison. She had feared he would exact it in his oral report on Bacon, but that turned out to be a lively and well-researched performance indeed; its conclusion being that nobody who thought the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship dubious had any business putting forward any other candidates. All this excitement had not only squeezed
Measure for
Measure
out of the syllabus, but left certain gaps in everybody's understanding of the third part of
Henry VI.

"I bet Keats is too swoony for Nick," said Molly.

"He is not swoony," said Janet, indignantly.
"
Swinburne
is swoony."

"He is, though," said Nick. "You will go on about how he's the only poet remotely like Shakespeare to come along; but when Keats swoons, it's in dead earnest—"

Molly burst out laughing and fell off her bed, and remained on the floor, still laughing, until Janet went and got her a bottle of Coke out of the machine.

"I am sorry," she gasped, sitting up and wiping her eyes and accepting the bottle. "All I could think of was that horrible joke about necrophiliacs."

"When Keats swoons," said Nick, smiling but dogged, "he is entirely serious about it.

In Shakespeare, people swoon only in the comedies."

"Haven't you read
Venus and Adonis?
" demanded Janet.

Nick looked considerably startled, but after a moment he said, "It's not the same sort of swooning."

"Have a heart," said Molly. "He was ten years younger when he started writing than Shakespeare was when he started—I mean, Keats was nineteen and Shakespeare was twenty-nine."

"And Keats," said Janet, "never even
got
to twenty-nine."

"All right," said Nick. "If you really want to know what I have against Keats, that's it.

Everybody is always weeping over him and talking about how great a poet he'd have been if he'd lived. If he
had
lived he'd have written a lot of third-rate swoony plays and nobody would mark him in the least."

Janet opened her mouth, and caught Molly's warning look. Molly was right, of course, because it was the same in Molly's dealings with Robin—when either of them got this way, there was no use in arguing. And at least she had managed to find out what Nick had against Keats.