Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  The week before Thanksgiving, Janet carried her winter-term schedule card to Melinda Wolfe for approval.

  She had allowed ample time to find again that buried office. The spaces between the temporary buildings were silted full of brown leaves. The ivy was red as blood. Melinda Wolfe had hung a different wreath of dried plants on her door: huge orange and yellow marigolds, round purple chive flowers, the blue sprigs of rosemary with their stiff gray-green needles, two flat-topped bunches of white elder flowers, and a scattering of yellow yarrow, the ferny leaves of which formed the base of the wreath. It smelled sharp and medicinal in the mellow air. Janet knocked on the door, and was told to come in.

  Melinda Wolfe's office looked as if she, like everybody else, was falling behind in her work. Papers and folders were piled four feet tall on her desk and on the floor around it. She herself was sitting in the desk chair, which she had wheeled around to the front of the desk.

  She wore a blue sweater, probably cashmere, and a plaid skirt in blue and yellow and green.

  She was not falling behind in personal grooming.

  She smiled at Janet and gestured her to the other chair. "I found your file," she said.

  "Almost a miracle. It was still in the drawer. What have you thought of for winter?"

  No ceremonies, thought Janet. All right. She proffered the card. She had put down Swimming, Shakespeare, Astronomy, and Greek Literature in Translation. "You do know that the Astronomy Department consists of one professor who still holds to the fifty-five-minute class period?" said Melinda Wolfe, groping along the edge of her desk.

  "But he can show me how to use the telescope?"

  "Oh, yes, he can do that," said Melinda Wolfe, and, having found a pen in the pile she was investigating, removed it. "All right. It's good to get the Phys Ed out of the way; and Anne Beauvais is helping to teach swimming next term."

  "Is she a student of yours?"

  "Yes; specializing in Neander's account of the travels of Alexander." Melinda Wolfe signed the card and handed it back. "She tells me you threatened her sister."

  This was not how one's advisor was supposed to go on—especially after feeding one with the delights of Paradise and telling dirty jokes like a teenager. "Did she say what I threatened her sister with?" said Janet.

  "Yes. I do," said Melinda Wolfe, "keep my fingers on the pulse of Ericson, no matter how unruly it may seem to you."

  "They were putting an unconscionable burden on Nora," said Janet, too angry to be afraid, "and I don't think I should have to wear a gas mask to walk down the hall." Faced with Melinda Wolfe's unblinking scrutiny, she found herself quoting, with considerable vigor, one of Dorothy Sayers's characters. " Some consideration for others is necessary in community life."

  Her advisor, mercifully, began to laugh. "Never mind," she said. "But do think, how much of the burden did they bind on Nora, and how much of it did she take herself?" She handed the pink card back to Janet. "See you next term," she said. "Good luck on your finals."

  Janet thanked her with restraint, and emerged with profound relief into the narrow alley. She shut the door with more force than necessary, and one of the brittle flowers of yarrow bounced off the wreath and landed on the sleeve of her jacket. Janet thought of tucking it back into the wreath, but the entire structure looked far too dry and fragile to be messed with. She slid the flower into her pocket and left in a hurry.

  Back in her room, she found Molly and Robin in the throes of an argument. She had left them peacefully intending to sing "Box of Rain" in two-part harmony. Robin was asserting that the reason this was impossible was that the original perpetrators were so very bad at singing. Since he had already, in previous sessions, asserted that Stephen Stills could not sing without whining and Bob Dylan brayed like an ass (which last, Janet thought, was more or less true), Molly was less tolerant than she had been. She had, it appeared, just given up arguing in the abstract, and was about to start insulting him personally.

  Janet snatched her English textbook and retired to the lounge with John Donne, Thomas Campion, and Thomas Wyatt. Their subject matter did not help her forget Molly and Robin. That relationship seemed to her utterly mad—but it endured, and Molly even seemed happy. What they had said to one another the night they walked in the woods till dawn, Molly had never told her in detail, despite a great deal of nagging.

  Promptly at dinnertime, Nick's violent whistle ascended the staircase ahead of him. It was his own setting for Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream," which Janet was firmly persuaded nobody else in the universe would think of putting to music. She put down her book and crept down the hall to meet him. The quarreling voices in her room had not abated a whit.

  "Shhhh," she said as Nick came through the swinging doors. "They're fighting again."

  "That's not fighting," said Nick. "That is just getting ac quainted. Come into the

  lounge, then; I have something to show you."

  He shut the door behind them, and sat next to Janet on the orange couch. The room was scattered with last Sunday's newspaper, which was always left until its successor came, to give harried students more time to read it. The battered college-issue sofas and chairs and tables were littered with soda cans, pens, somebody's tennis racket, several people's geology books, a number of Styrofoam cups half full of cold coffee, a large stuffed tiger belonging to Nora that she had donated for the desperate who wanted to hug something at four in the morning, one hundred and sixty-four crayons, all out of their box, the box itself, and a great many sheets of drawing paper, most of which contained either abortive maps or drawings of geological strata. Janet had turned on one table lamp to read by; the rest of the room was dim except where a single band of red sunlight edged through the window and striped the far wall.

  Nick took a wad of white tissue out of his jacket pocket and unwrapped it. In the dim light of that untidy institutional room its contents struck the eyes like a sheet of lightning.

  Janet opened her mouth, and said nothing. It was a necklace made of thin linked rose leaves and stems and thorns, with a rose and a bud as the pendant. It looked like ruddy gold, which might have been an effect of the light.

  "I didn't make it myself," said Nick, a little anxiously. "I drew up the design, and got Robin to make it. And then I couldn't wait until Christmas to give it to you."

  She couldn't take it. For more reasons than her muddled mind could marshal, she knew she could not. But it was very hard to say so, especially without hurting his feelings, especially since this was a relationship whose emotional boundaries she, not he, had tried to enlarge.

  "It's all right, really," said Nick. "Robin is making another one for Molly. He'll have it by her birthday. But your birthday is no use; it's in August."

  "Is hers just the same?"

  "Certainly not. Hers has French lilies."

  Janet picked up the delicate thing. It was almost weightless in her palm, but the thorns pricked faintly.

  "Here," said Nick, and gathered the rebellious mass of her hair in his two fists and held it out of the way while she put the necklace on and fastened the clasp. It was briefly cold, and then seemed not to be there at all. The thorns did not prick her neck.

  "I don't know how to thank you," said Janet; and bit her lip at the extremely unfortunate nature of this common remark.

  "Your eyes will do it nicely," said Nick, and kissed her hand.

  It was the curious custom of Blackstock College to hold classes on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, so that nobody could go home for a four-day weekend. Janet, having ascertained that her father had invited only two of his own students to Thanksgiving dinner, proposed to bring along Tina, Thomas, Molly, Robin, and Nick; and was given permission.

  The two students he had invited were Diane Zimmerman, who was in his Rhetoric class, and Peg Powell, who was not in any of his classes, but to whom he had garnered an introduction through Professor Medeous so he could pick Peg's brain about the Fourth Ericson ghost.

  Ni
ck had already been to dinner three times, and had been an enormous hit with everybody except Janet's mother. He had not given up trying to charm her; but he sensibly refrained this time. Given the way her mother was eyeing the necklace of roses, Janet was grateful for his restraint.

  Diane seemed to find Andrew delightful. Peg sat in a corner, smiling. Janet came to keep her company, and watched with amusement as Lily took immediately to Tina and her father to Robin and Molly and her mother and Vincentio to Thomas, while Andrew, having exhausted the charms of Diane's storytelling and the contents of her knapsack, gamboled among the rest of them but seemed most pleased with Nick, who had let him play the flute to accompany the guitar. He let him do it again, too, after dinner. He played some of his own songs, the ones to do with autumn and winter and Greek heroes and the profoundly silly one about elephants that he had written to Molly's daishiki, which she was wearing.

  He did not play any of his own love songs, but he and Robin did sing a number of their Elizabethan rounds, making everybody else learn the words too.

  At some point during this exercise, Janet's father brought his folding chair over to where Janet and Peg were sitting. "I understand," he said to Peg, offering her a plate of cranberry bread, "that you pick up after the Fourth Ericson ghost."

  Peg looked at him warily from behind her glasses.

  "Does she always throw the same books?"

  "Well," said Peg, "yes—but that's not to say the same three or four. There are about a hundred and fifty of them."

  "What do you do with them after you pick them up?"

  Peg gave him the kind of look a timid and dutiful student gives to a teacher who is being an idiot. "I put them back in the library," she said.

  "Why does—oh," said Professor Carter. "She throws the Thompson Collection."

  "Well, that's who she was, " said Peg, irately.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because those are her books, and because she talked to me once."

  "What did she say?"

  "She said that her name was Victoria Thompson and she was homesick. She came from North Dakota. She thought Minnesota was too hilly, and everybody talked strange."

  Janet's father then put a series of questions about which books the ghost threw how often, for all the world as if he were examining Peg for her comprehensives preparatory to graduating her. Janet sat watching the flames of the disregarded candles on the dinner table reflected in Peg's glasses, and feeling as Horatio must have when Marcellus and Barnardo told him the ghost of King Hamlet was stalking around the battlements.

  In the house she had grown up in, surrounded by the smells of turkey and bayberry and chocolate sauce, with Vincentio ranging around the table hopefully, she dragged into the light of normality the night she and Molly had first gone out to find the piper, and been pelted with books from the windows of their own room. How strange that they had not thought it stranger. It had in fact been altogether peculiar, even if you recalled that they never locked their door, and that Tina was a heavy sleeper.

  Janet got up and went into the kitchen, where her mother

  was scraping the dishes,

  helped predictably by Diane and Molly, and astonishingly by Thomas. "Can I spend the night?" she said.

  "I thought you might like to," said her mother, "for post-Thanksgiving breakfast. I'm sorry I can't put up the whole lot of you, but you can all come back for buckwheat pancakes if you like."

  "I've got a nine-thirty class," said Janet tardily.

  "So has your father. I don't know what's the matter with Blackstock," said her mother, as she had said every Thanksgiving for fifteen years. "Why can't they do away with their precious midterm break and give you a couple of days off for Thanksgiving?"

  "The latest theory," said Diane, who had somehow received the job of stripping the turkey carcass and was up to her elbows in grease and bits of stuffing, "is that it would be too hard on the kids who can't afford to go home. Midterm break isn't over a holiday, so they don't mind so much. Theoretically."

  "The kids who can afford to go home usually do it anyway," said Janet.

  "Yeah, but they're not supposed to," said Diane. "It permits a glow of righteousness to emanate from the rest of us."

  "Blackstock students have one of those anyway," said Janet's mother.

  Janet walked her friends to the end of the block, kissed Nick, and trudged back slowly under the high frosty stars. All the puddles in the road were rimmed with white ice. She could see her breath, and tried, as always, and failed, as always, to blow rings of it. Smoke, of course, was denser; but that was not enough reason to take up smoking.

  She read Andrew a chapter of The Wind in the Willows, which he was hating violently but insisted on finishing just the same. Then she went to bed. Her bed felt too soft, and the quiet in the room was amazing. She lay staring into the dark and assembling the forces of her intellect. There was something at Blackstock that deadened thought. No, not all thought—she had not had the slightest difficulty in absorbing Milton, Aristotle, Malinowsky, or anybody else who could write English or be translated felicitously into it.

  She had written critical papers that had not been utterly scorned; she had learned the rules of fencing, past and present; she had passed quizzes on philosophy and anthropology and, when Evans became impatient with the quality of class discussion, on the progression of metaphor in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

  There was something at Blackstock that made it difficult to think about particular topics. The Fourth Ericson ghost and anything connected with her—including, for some odd reason, Peg's remark about having bunk beds in her room when she hadn't. Assuming there was a ghost, why would she exert this influence when, apparently, she had told Peg all about herself anyway? If she were hiding, why throw books out the window? She seemed rather flexible for a ghost; most of the ones Janet had read about had been confined to appearing at a particular time in a particular place to perform particular actions, whether washing blood out of a garment, weeping hysterically, or putting down milk for a cat whose ghost did not, after the manner of cats, oblige by appearing also. This seemed like a cross between a ghost and a poltergeist. Well, there were certainly enough upset adolescents, the generally assigned cause for poltergeists, whether supernatural or natural, around Ericson.

  What else? She revolved the incidents of her first weeks at Blackstock through her mind. It suddenly struck her as odd that everybody should be so averse to using Melinda Wolfe as Melinda Wolfe's position required, as an advisor and mediator, the last resort before making an official report that the College would have to take notice of, with unpleasant effects. Unless, of course, Melinda Wolfe had explained to all the RA's that she did keep her finger on the pulse of Ericson and the RA's were to stay quiet and let her work in her own way.

  What an aversion to asking Melinda Wolfe for help might have in common with the ghost of Victoria Thompson, aside from the fact that Janet had found them difficult to think about at Blackstock, was another question entirely. Janet turned on the bedside lamp, dragged notebook and pen out from under the bed, and wrote down everything she had thought of. She sat up a while longer, considering Tina's weird mixture of denseness and perspicacity; Robin's peculiar way of conducting a romance; Molly's rare detachment from herself and her preoccupations; Nick's inability to say he would not be somewhere; Thomas's transformation from a raging maniac to a soft-spoken charmer; Peg's sleepwalking; Nora's conscience; Sharon's speech patterns. They were too familiar to her now; she could not reconstruct how she had seen them when they first met, except for Thomas, and he had never behaved like that again. It was as if she had met another person entirely in the library.

  Nothing at Blackstock—except the pressures of work—was keeping her from thinking about any of those things. It was the ghost and Melinda Wolfe off whose oddities thought seemed to slide like rain down a window. Janet was getting sleepy. I wonder, she thought, turning off the lamp and sliding back under the patchwork quilt her grandm
other had made, if I should sleep at home once a month, just to clear my mind.

  A week later, on the eve of final exams, Janet and Tina had a birthday party for Molly.

  They had found a local bakery, tolerant of college students, that would make a three-layer chocolate cake and write on the top, in red icing, "If it doesn't work, it's Physics." Molly was, in fact, scowling over her physics book when they marched in, singing, with the cake.

  Thomas and Nick came behind them with the toy theater, which they were to quietly insinuate into Janet's closet until it was wanted. She had had to clean up the closet floor for this purpose, greatly astonishing Molly. "I can see rereading The Lord of the Rings instead of studying for finals," she had said, "but why clean your closet?"

  Now she lifted her head with great deliberation from her book and surveyed them all, Tina and Janet and Robin and Thomas and Nick, with as forbidding an expression as freckles and large blue eyes would allow. Janet had a sudden awful feeling that Molly did not like surprises. Then Molly grinned. "Lucky for you idiots I didn't decide to study in the library," she said; and flinging the despised physics book in the general direction of the sink, she bounced off the bed and blew out the candles on her cake.

  Robin had already given her the necklace that morning; she was wearing it now, with a Grateful Dead T-shirt, having remarked in passing that it was a pity the Dead had not chosen lilies as their flower, since Janet's necklace would have been more becoming to the shirt as it was. She clearly had no expectation of any presents aside from the cake. Tina and Janet had left it to Thomas to decide when to bring the thing out of the closet, and he seemed in no hurry about it.

  Tina handed Molly a long knife abstracted from the Food Service by Thomas, who was on financial aid and worked in Taylor, poor creature, five mornings a week. Molly used the point of the knife to pry off all the sugar roses, which she then distributed at mathematically exact locations around the cake. Everybody got one and a half of them.