Pamela Dean (7 page)

"I wouldn't have thought of her," said Janet, reflectively. "I know she's the Resident Advisor for Ericson, but she's not the kind of person you run to if you're in trouble."

"Too shiny," said Sharon.

Janet grinned. "Polished," she agreed.

"She'll eat you alive," said Nora.

"Not me," said Sharon. "I'd choke her."

Nora laughed. Janet wanted to ask a number of questions, but all of them were indicative of an unhealthy and inappropriate curiosity.

Melinda Wolfe had advised her not to take the philosophy section she attended after lunch, but Melinda Wolfe had been wrong. Professor Soukup did indeed have a very heavy accent that made Janet think, the first time she heard it and always, of spy movies. But he could, it appeared, see very well, through his thick bifocal glasses, the particular kind of puzzled expression generated by an inability to understand what he was saying, as opposed to what he meant by it. When he detected this expression on any of the twenty-two students in the class, he would first repeat what he had said and then paraphrase it. This was not nearly so wearying as Janet had been afraid it might become after she had heard him do it once or twice. Partly t his was because, if you were not the one puzzled, you could make a game out of how exactly he would choose to rephrase himself. And partly it was because the material he was offering in his slow, blinking, bald way was both complex and fascinating.

Janet emerged from her first seventy minutes of him with a heavily scribbled syllabus—because of course the list posted in the bookstore was quite wrong, it always was; Professor Soukup supposed it must be his handwriting. She felt the same kind of euphoria she had experienced when she opened
The Worm Ourobouros
at random and read, "O Queen, somewhat I know of grammarie and divine philosophy, yet must I bow to thee for such learning, that dwellest here from generation to generation and dost commune with the dead."

Anthropology 10, in the uncertain grasp of one Mr. King, boded no such delights.

If Janet had met Mr. King as a fellow student, she would have liked him. He was tall and thin, with unruly brown hair, a long nose, glasses almost as ramshackle as Nick Tooley's, and the nervous, earnest air of somebody who knows a great deal but is at a loss as to how to impart it.

He did not look old enough to be teaching; and in fact taught nothing, taking instead half an hour of his seventy minutes to go over the syllabus with the class, and to explain how many papers they would be expected to write and when said papers would be due. Nor did it seem that he communed with the dead—the dates on all the books except one showed that the authors were either still alive or but recently dead, and their titles did not make communion sound worth the trouble anyway. The exception,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific,
did have an intriguing title. Janet hoped she could make the best of it all.

She had forty extra minutes to make the best of right now, emerging from the dim hall of the old library into the sunlight. She could go to the bookstore, which had been a palace of wild delight to her from the age of seven; except that her checkbook was in her room. She could go for a walk.

She marched along the campus's central sidewalk, under the huge yellowing elms, past the pale chapel with its spiked tower, past the Music and Drama Center, its sides full of Olin Hall and little fluttering trees. She dodged around Forbes Hall's uninspiring square, skidded down the dusty gully in the steep hill that both Forbes and Eliot sat on, and arrived in a flurry of dead leaves at the point where the lower of Blackstock's two small lakes met the stream that she had watched the ducks sail on at lunch. There was a weathered wooden bridge here, with a pleasing arch to it, and on its right on the near bank of the stream an enormous half-dead willow in whose hollow trunk a duck would usually lay her eggs in the spring. Janet peered into the hollow, out of habit; and four ducks that had been diving desultorily in the middle of the stream righted themselves and sped in her direction, making mild and hopeful comment.

When they arrived in the shadow of the willow and she still had not thrown anything into the water, their remarks became ruder. Janet felt in the pockets of her pants and discovered the last of her stolen apples. She bit a few pieces from it, spat them into her hand, and flung them onto the green, moving water. The ducks billed them morosely and went back to their diving.

Janet took a bite for herself and crossed the bridge. She could now turn right and follow the stream through the Upper Arboretum, emerging eventually in her own neighborhood; or she could follow the sidewalk between the lower lake and Dunbar Hall, climb a hill, scramble through the lilac maze, cross a highway, and plunge into the Lower Arboretum, from which, if one did not eventually retrace one's steps, one would not emerge for three days.

A squirrel streaked down the lawn of Dunbar Hall, stopped in the middle of the sidewalk just in front of her, and looked hopeful.

"You'll be sorry," said Janet, biting off a chunk of apple and dropping it onto the sidewalk. The squirrel snatched it up, took it into the long grass on the shore of the lake, dropped it, sniffed it, ran up a tree, and regarded Janet upside-down with a cold rodent stare that made her rather uneasy. She had been feeding animals on Blackstock's campus for eleven years, and although always impudent, the squirrels had never behaved quite like this.

"I had no idea you guys were so fussy," she said to it.

"Are you addressing us?" said a nice southern voice.

Janet jumped a little and looked back at the sidewalk, where an entwined couple stood smiling at her. The boy was stocky and brown-haired and burned red by the sun; he suited his voice. The girl was a head taller, as blond as Christina but ethereally built. She was probably from California.

"No, to the squirrel," said Janet; the truth was easier. "I bit it off a piece of apple with my own teeth, and you'd think its mother told it never to eat after anybody."

"They're all spoiled," said the boy. "They like godawful things—that pasty bread the Food Service gives you, or I saw some dumb freshman feeding one of them a Twinkie the other day, and the little bugger just gobbled it down."

"The ducks wouldn't touch the apple either," said Janet.

"Well, that's more reasonable," said the girl. "Apples don't grow in the water.

There's a couple of swans down on the river that eat anything, if you want to try them."

"Thanks," said Janet, "but I don't mind eating it myself, it's just they all expect to be fed."

"Spoiled rotten," said the boy. "Make stew out of them, that's what I say"

"He's a Physics major," said the girl pityingly to Janet; "he gets these notions."

She propelled the boy on down the sidewalk, where he seemed perfectly pleased to go.

Janet looked after them, and the squirrel began to scold her. The girl had the kind of shining charisma that the boys Peg had pointed out in Taylor had; but she talked like a Bio major. Well, it was silly to generalize on the basis of what people were majoring in, anyway. She went on past Dunbar toward the Upper Arboretum, past several students sprawled on beach towels, reading
Paradise Lost, Ulysses,
and Volume I of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature.
English majors studying for their comprehensive examinations, probably; it was really to o early to be doing mere

classwork so assiduously. None of them looked up as she went by.

She had forgotten what a mistake it was to come to the lilac maze in the autumn.

The twenty-foot-high tangles of unpruned bushes, glazed with powdery mildew and hung about with dead blossoms, enclosed her in a cheerless world of trampled grass, unfruitful brambles, and seeding dandelions. Janet moved faster, but the ground was lumpy and the bent-over grasses like snares. In the center of the maze she came across another couple, flat on the grass and oblivious. Both of them were tall, with long dark hair. Janet backed quietly away and became entangled in the byways of the maze, which the College never seemed to prune the same way two years in a row. By the time she burst out onto the mowed slope that separated the maze from the highway, she was breathless and sweaty and more than half inclined to go back.

She could at least have brought a book with her. Just across the highway was a clearing with flat rocks in it; she could have sat there. Janet untucked the tails of her blouse, tied them around her waist, and marched down the hill; the walk had become a duty rather than a pleasure; but having decided to do it, she would. She waited for two pickup trucks to go by, and then darted across the highway. There was a square gravelly space for visitors to park their cars in; a narrow, dusty path that plunged steeply down between rows of spirea bushes gone wild, a wide rocky space scattered with burdock; and a minor branch of the river, with another weathered wooden bridge over it.

Janet made a ceremonial stop in the middle of the bridge. She knew this stream in all its manifestations, from cracked mud set about with slimy green rocks to the foaming mass that covered the knees of the trees and lapped at the concrete wall that separated the parking area from the woods. Today it was about midway between those two. All the rocks were covered, and the grass that overhung the banks like combed hair drifted sideways in a mild brown current. The air was full of dusty sunlight and a slow fall of yellow elm leaves. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, thought Janet, recalling favorite poems with a pleasurable melancholy. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. When icicles hang by the wall.

No, thought Janet, not just yet. She pushed herself away from the railing and went on across the bridge. She hesitated between the sandy path that plunged aimlessly about in the evergreen plantation and the gravel road that led to the river, and chose the latter.

The river was full too, and much more violently so. It raged between the tree roots that snaked down its banks, and hurled sticks and dead leaves up and down. A few ducks huddled in the backwaters and made noises at Janet that seemed to expect the answer no. She offered them the apple core, but they billed it aside. She threw it into the nearest foaming circle the river offered, climbed along the muddy banks for a short time, found another gray wooden bridge, a much larger version of the previous two, and walked across it to Forbes Island.

Nobody had been pruning out here, either, and the entire place was overgrown with wild raspberries. Janet edged along the shores of the island, which was shaped like a capital L drawn by a kindergartner, until she found one narrow path. This led to the island's center, where there were a number of flat rocks, a tumbledown stone fireplace, well blackened, and a wobbly picnic table, gray grown over with green lichen. Janet lay on her back on the largest rock and watched the oak and willow branches scouring out the bowl of the sky. The wind had risen while she toiled about in the woods. It was probably going to rain again. Janet said over to herself as much as she could remember—which was most, but not all—of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," trying to extrapolate from the fragments of music she had heard the sound of the finished piece. She knew nothing about music, but it was a pleasant exercise.

When she had gone right through to "human voices wake us, and we drown," a shiver overtook her; the sort of feeling people must mean when they said that somebody had walked over their graves. The sky was darkening rapidly. Janet got up and went back to campus.

She climbed the long hill to Forbes and, sneering automatically at its shoe-box shape, turned her back on it and went into Ericson.

The door to their room was open, and voices and laughter came from it. Janet walked in, calling, "Hello!"

"There you are!" said Molly, as Janet came around the corner. "We've been waiting and waiting."

One of the Roberts—Armin, Janet thought, of the straight blond hair and reddish-blond beard—was sitting on the floor with his back to Molly's bed. Nicholas Tooley was sitting on the end of Christina's bed. They both looked perfectly at home.

Christina, also sitting on her own bed, was the one who looked nervous.

"This is Janet," said Molly. "Jan, this is Robin Armin, and that's Nick Tooley."

"How do you do?" said Janet to Robin.

"Very well," he said gravely. He had a beautiful voice and a mouth that looked as if it were on the verge of making a joke, or had perhaps already made one nobody had noticed.

"And we've met," said Nick, grinning at her. He got up and walked over to her bookshelves. "Tina says all these are yours."

"I'm afraid so," said Janet. She was peripherally aware that Tina was less than pleased. That Nick Tooley was six inches too short for Tina was no excuse for not feeling guilty, let alone for feeling smug. "Do you read children's books?"

"I'm afraid so," said Nick. "I started when I was young, you know, and never got out of the habit." He touched the black spine of
The Worm Ourobouros.
"How's this?"

"Gorgeous," said Janet. "Eddison wrote at the beginning of this century, but my father says it's written in something very like genuine Elizabethan English. The beginning is a little distracting, but the main story is just like the language."

"Elizabethan English, hmmm?" said Nick. "Think I could manage that, Robin?"

"Not a chance," said Robin, still gravely. "You can't even manage Samuel Johnson."

"Give it a try," said Janet, pulling the book out and handing it to him. He flinched a little, probably at the garish cover, but took it and opened it at random.

"What," said Janet to Molly, "were you waiting for me for?"

"Robin and Nick want our bunk beds," said Molly, "and t hey'll give us two single beds in exchange."

"Listen to this," said Nick. When he began to read, his voice altered and grew stronger. The broad vowels of his Iowan accent moved a little sideways into something half-Southern and half-British in sound. Christina, who had been fidgeting, stopped. "'O Queen,' said Juss, 'somewhat I know of grammarie and divine philosophy, yet must I bow to thee for such learning, that dwellest here from generation to generation and dost commune with the dead. How shall we find this steed? Few they be, and high they fly above the world, and come to birth but one in three hundred years.'" His glasses had slipped down his nose, but the gaze he bent on Robin when he finished reading was not vague or myopic. "How's that, then?" he said.