Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "Let's see," said her father, turning the typewritten pages. "You know how this kind of thing works. Once anybody reports seeing a ghost, people will see it all over the place. And all the stories get warped and embellished. It's the folk process and the evolution of literature all in miniature. Now. Here are the first three accounts, which are remarkably consistent with one another. The man who wrote them down didn't check for collusion among his sources, but as far as I've been able to discover it wasn't very likely. And here are accounts of all the later sightings that are consistent with the first few. These here are the obviously crazy inventions, and these might or might not be actual sightings. I don't know if you want to bother with them or not. I'm going to grade these hell-begotten freshman essays—speak up if you have any questions."

  With which typical professorial instruction, he turned to his desk.

  Janet sat in his old green armchair with the broken spring and read. Her father wrote an easy and unassuming prose when he felt like it, though he was capable of startling flights of jargon in the literary essays he published.

  Victoria Thompson had killed herself on Hallowe'en, at about nine o'clock in the evening, in the year of grace 1897. Somebody or something had first hurled books out the windows of her room in Ericson in the fall of 1904. This apparently began a twenty-year tradition of throwing books out the windows on the evening of Dead Day every term; it was therefore difficult to determine which of these had been thrown by fleshly and which by ghostly students. People were not very good at noting which volumes were flung, though the housemother who reported the first defenestration had mentioned both Liddell and Scott and the Fifth Reader. It was this that had caused one Dr. Bishop, Professor of Victorian and Early Modern Literature and the first person to bother cataloguing the Thompson Collection, to propose that it had been the ghost of Victoria Thompson who threw books in the first instance. Somebody had in fact tossed eight books out of Ericson onto Dr. Bishop's head in the fall of 1925, but since one of those was a collection of his own essays on Hardy, Housman, and Shaw, he was inclined to blame an earthly instigator.

  Janet had rather taken to Dr. Bishop, and was disappointed when his account was succeeded by others. She went on reading. The books that might most plausibly have been thrown by Victoria Thompson (always supposing it was reasonable that her ghost should be able to throw only the books it had owned in life) had always been thrown in the fall; where the date was noted more precisely, it was always October and often Hallowe'en. She seemed particularly fond of—or was it displeased with—Liddell and Scott. The Scarlet Letter came in second for frequency of flinging. ("Dad," said Janet, "isn't this alliteration a little frivolous?" "It's my way of amusing myself," said her father. "I might cut it before submission.") A little green book called, grandly, The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland, compiled by one John S. Roberts, was next, and after that the Fifth Reader. The other books thrown varied quite a lot.

  "Dad?" said Janet. "Has anybody ever seen poor old Victoria, or is it just books flying around?"

  "People say they've seen her," said her father, "but the only consistency in the descriptions seems to have arisen from word of mouth—we don't have any independent descriptions that tally. And the independent ones vary so wildly, and they don't settle down into any time or place the way the book flinging does. Just beer and moonlight and mental overexertion, I think. You can read about them if you want; it's Chapter 5-A."

  Janet read about them. Victoria Thompson had been reported in a variety of dresses, but not in any of those actually in the Thompson Collection. She had also been reported in a long white gown; in a riding habit, with whip and, twice, with horse also; and in nothing at all. Since Blackstock's tradition of streaking—running through some public event in the dead of winter clad in nothing but shoes and a ski mask—was of considerably more recent vintage, she suspected that they had made it all up.

  "Thanks," she said at last. "I think you should finish this. It's very good."

  "Bless you, my child," said her father, laying down his red pencil and rubbing his eyes. "But I've started feeling a little guilty about it. Here's this poor girl who got herself pregnant and felt she had to commit suicide, and I'm callously collecting data on her alleged posthumous appearances. I ought to write her biography, don't you think—to even the score?"

  "Well, you could do that afterward."

  "I guess it's having a daughter her age," said her father, still ruminating on his revulsion of feeling. "And another one coming up on it—and, oh, God, Lily's going to be trouble like nothing on this earth."

  He put his glasses on and stared through them at her. "Look," he said. The mere tone of voice made Janet want to squirm, but she sat firmly. If you snubbed them they just got more upset. "Look," said her father again. "I know your mother's talked to you about this already—but you do know we'll take care of you even if there are suddenly two of you—don't you?"

  Janet grinned; she couldn't help it. "You mean I can bring Nick to stay?"

  Her father hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand, and Janet took pity on him. "I won't take the modern equivalent of laudanum, I promise," she said. "I'll come straight home and tell you. Really. And you'll wish I hadn't."

  "No, I won't," said her father. "It would be better tha n having you throwing contraceptives out the windows—I know you wouldn't throw a book—for all time. Think of how our reputation would suffer."

  "Think what a book you could write about it."

  "I'll forgo the pleasure," said her father. He was looking anxious again, as if he thought his being flippant about it would convince her he didn't mean what he said.

  "I'll tell you before I do anything," said Janet. "Honest."

  "Well, shake on it, then," said her father; and they did.

  The day before winter-term classes began, Blackstock College and its immediate environs received fifteen inches of snow in nine hours. It made all the old brick dormitories and lecture halls into suitable subjects for postcards; rendered the chapel suddenly grim and gloomy, like the one remaining tower of a castle; softened the horrible contours of Forbes and Dunbar and even Murchison; and lay upon the irregular red surfaces of the Music and Drama Center like icing on a very botched cake.

  It was all still there next day, under a dark gray sky promising more of the same, when Janet and Molly wallowed their way to Shakespeare. The east side of campus was all plowed and shoveled, but the Shakespeare class was in Masters Hall, and the sidewalk between Chester and Masters was still untouched. Somebody had swept the steps of Masters, and when they emerged, snowy to the eyebrows, they found Nick stamping snow off himself and undoing half the sweeping. He helped brush them off; then they went inside, took off their coats, and shook snow all over the pristine stone floor. They went upstairs to the third floor, hung their coats on the usually neglected hooks so they could drip all over the scuffed hardwood floor up here, and found their classroom. It was large enough for twenty or so students, but the three of them only made the number up to eight.

  Professor Davison was sitting on the long table provided for the teacher, swinging her feet in a pair of gaudy pink ski boots. The painter's overalls and bulky blue sweater that comprised the rest of her outfit made her look like a rather young freshman. She looked surprised as the three of them tumbled into the room. "Well!" she said. "This is better than I'd expected. I'm sorry we began without you. Come and get your syllabuses, and sit where you like."

  They did as they were told, and sat in a row behind the other five, with Janet happily in the middle. "Now," said Davison, consulting her class book, "you are Molly Dubois and Janet Carter from English 13; and you, sir, are—?"

  "Nick Tooley."

  "Thank you—there you are." She marked them all present and then looked intently at Nick. "Mr. Tooley, do you mean to specialize in Shakespeare studies?"

  "No, ma'am, I'm a Classics major."

  "It's probably just as well," she said. She looked as if she were tr
ying to share a joke with him, but Nick had put on the blankest expression he owned.

  Davison had been at the performance of The Revenger's Tragedy; might that have something to do with it? Janet could hardly ask why if Nick wouldn't, so she settled herself to attend to the lecture.

  This began with the usual lightning summary of Shakespeare's life and times, followed by a pause for questions.

  Nick raised his hand and said, "What about the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare?"

  Janet turned her head and stared at him. His expression was one of hopeful inquiry, just as if Tina had not asked him the same question when Janet and Molly were taking English 13, and had her head bitten off at the very notion.

  Davison looked as if she would have liked to bite Nick's head off, too; her jaw set and she looked rather pink. Then she let out the breath she had taken, and settled her shoulders under the blue sweater. "You may research the subject scrupulously, Mr. Tooley," she said,

  "and report to us just after midterms. See me after class, if you like, for a partial bibliography. The rest of you, please annotate your syllabuses to show an oral report from Mr. Tooley for February seventh. We'll probably be able to pick up a day before then, with such a motivated class; or we can do without Measure for Measure, which is really a problem play rather than a comedy."

  Janet soberly entered these comments on her syllabus, quivering with interior mirth that must on no account escape. Hoist with his own petard, she thought, oh 'tis most sweet, when in one line two crafts directly meet. Miss Davison might look as if she would forget her own name if you asked her roughly, but she was a match for Nick.

  Miss Davison, looking not in the least smug, talked to them for a little about Elizabethan views of history, the sources for his histories, the sorts of alterations he made to the facts, and how the histories prefigured both the later comedies and the tragedies.

  Then she took up a battered Riverside Shakespeare and read to them from it for half an hour.

  "Well," said Molly, as they emerged into a steady fall of large snowflakes. "That was very promising."

  "Yes," said Janet, "it was. I've been reading the tragedies and romances since I was eight, but I never could get through the histories. But the way she read that passage from

  Richard the Second—"

  "And the way she read Falstaff!"

  "Much too refined," said Nick suddenly. "A little bit of a woman like that hasn't got the lungs for Falstaff."

  "Yes, Nicholas, I know," said Molly patiently, "but she put the right emphasis on the words, which is more than I've ever managed."

  "She made Olivia too vivacious, too," said Nick.

  "What's the matter?" said Janet.

  Molly looked at him, too, and suddenly hooted. "You're just mad at her because she said it was just as well you weren't going to specialize in Shakespeare. Is that why you asked about Bacon?"

  "What did she mean, anyway?" said Janet.

  "Some esoteric scholarly joke, I suppose," said Nick.

  He darted suddenly forward, made a huge sloppy snowball from a pile on Chester Hall's bicycle stand, and hit Molly smack in the chest with it. Then he ran. Molly dropped her books on the frozen pavement and took off after him. When Janet, lugging her books and Molly's too, and further encumbered with Nick's dropped sc arf, caught up with them between Chester and the M&D Center, Molly had Nick down in the snow and was insisting that he say Uncle. He finally consented to say, "Aunt," allowed Molly to make him say it with a midwestern broad "A" sound, and was permitted to get up. They went to lunch and talked about the new songs he and Robin and Anne had learned over vacation.

  Janet had gotten a B in Eighteenth-Century Literature and an A in Modern Poetry, which upset her considerably. She had hoped that she would be better served by her tardy appreciation of Pope's Dunciad, wherein he laid into all the critics who offended him much as Janet would have liked to lay into the anthropologist who couldn't write, only he did it with infinite grace and elegance in a form crammed with classical in-jokes. She would have felt much happier being the sort of person who could understand Swift, Pope, and Johnson but floundered hapless among the moderns than the other way around.

  And she had the feeling it was worse than that. Her grade in Mr. Tyler's class had been based primarily on the term paper, and all the term paper showed was that she had a good grasp of the way in which Christopher Fry treated romantic love. She had neglected all the religious issues of his plays and failed to read one or two of them altogether. She also felt obscurely that she had wronged Professor Tyler. He had been generous and tolerant to her, letting her hare off and read Fry; but she had doodled and fidgeted her way through all his lectures and, except for a grudging admiration of Wallace Stevens, had emerged untouched. It wasn't fair. She reread the Fry paper, dwelling gloomily on all Tyler's laudatory remarks, and felt even worse. She was rather taken with the Fry concept of romantic love, and none of its varied forms was anything like what she and Nick were engaged in.

  She put the paper away, sighing, and tried to sit down and translate the first thirty lines of The Iliad. Mr. Ferris had read them aloud to give everybody confidence and inspiration, but these emotions did not survive the peculiar Homeric constructions of the first five lines.

  Janet stared at the angular Greek letters and brooded. Nick was awfully testy this term. She compared her state to that of Tina, who seemed content to hang around with the folk dancers in a large amorphous group, going to movies and dances with whoever was handy; and then with that of Molly, who had discovered a whole new field for argument with Robin. Molly was entirely entranced with Professor Davison and all her literary theories.

  Robin thought Professor Davison, who had been his freshman advisor, was a nice girl, but too serious, and he thought her literary theories were nonsense. This subject could keep Molly and Robin happy for hours. Nick, rather oddly given that his main attitude towards Davison was not benign, nevertheless agreed with Molly about the literary theories. But when he joined the argument things were apt to get less happy.

  Janet went back to the Greek, absently looked the particle te up in Liddell and Scott, realized with irritation that it was the first one she had learned in Greek 1 and that, further, she had neglected to translate its invariable companion kai—no, she hadn't, there was no kai up there. She shut up The Iliad and picked up the fat blue Robinson edition of Chaucer.

  But the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, which she had in any case read already in English 10, begins in April; reading it in a snowstorm was just too much. Janet shut up the Chaucer, too, and gazed out across the clean white expanse of Bell Field, set about with bare black trees and crowned with the icy stream.

  Then she got up and ran down to the second floor, where the telephone for Column A was kept, and she called Thomas.

  The phone was answered on the second ring by a woeful male voice that said it would fetch Thomas if she wouldn't talk to him for very long. Janet promised, and in a moment Thomas said dully, "Hello."

  "It's Janet; what's the matter?"

  "Winter. What's up?"

  "Would you like your revenge?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I want to complain to you about my love life. Then you can make a suggestion that will result in a breakup, and we'll be even."

  "What seems to be the problem?"

  "Do you have to talk like a doctor? I told that boy who answered the phone that I wouldn't talk long."

  "Oh, Juan. Yes, he's waiting for a call from his girlfriend— except I don't think he'll get it. But okay, sure, where do you want to go?"

  "Why don't I meet you on the bridge and we can go over to the TR? I could use some nice greasy French fries."

  "See you in ten minutes," said Thomas, and hung up.

  It was three o'clock in the afternoon, very cold and windy, and getting on for dark. The lake was frozen solid; on the other side of the bridge, there was a small pool of open water where the effluent from
Eliot came down. Two disconsolate ducks revolved slowly around it. Janet found a stale bun in her pocket and had just finished feeding it to them when Thomas came walking hollowly over the bridge. The ducks took off, squawking; Janet jumped and then smiled at Thomas. He was well wrapped in a scarf, but his head was bare.

  Janet didn't say anything, but fell into step beside him.

  They climbed the trodden snow between Forbes and Eliot, passed Ericson, and without consultation kept to the southern side of the Music and Drama Center, even though it meant a longer walk. Olin, Chester, the M&D Center, and the chapel among them channeled the wind beautifully, though you would have thought they were too far apart to do it; it was better to walk along the edge of campus and duck sideways only when you had to. They did this in silence; they trudged past the charming sandstone castle that had been the original library, and past the vast brooding front of Taylor, and past the student Union with its clock tower, and came finally into the steamy warmth of the Tea Room.

  A number of people appeared to share Janet's craving for greasy fries; there was a short line at the counter. Janet and Thomas went and stood at the end of it. Janet looked at Thomas, in the good light, without the encumbrance of her hat or his scarf, and was shocked. Where his face had been nicely hollow, it was gaunt. She saw a lily on his brow, though it was not moist with anguish or anything else. He needed a shave, and he had not washed his hair in too long. Such symptoms were fairly common at the end of the term, but not in the first week.