Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  There was a crack in the tiled wall behind the toilet. Somebody had written in large black letters on the plaster wall above it, "I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all: it is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention."

  No attribution, despite the businesslike and scholarly use of those square brackets.

  Janet spent a relatively pleasant fifteen minutes trying to remember the source of the quotation, and finally tracked it to Northanger Abbey. Catherine, who was so silly, and read only gothic novels, had said it, which meant perhaps one was not supposed to take it seriously; and yet it would be exactly like Jane Austen to put something like that in the mouth of a character like Catherine; it gave her the pleasure of saying it and the probability that nobody would take her to task for it.

  It was an odd thing to put on a bathroom wall, which might explain why the people whose job it was to remove such effusions had not cleaned it off. How long had it been here? This was the first time she had been in this stall, which was the farthest from the door.

  Her primary feeling, running into the bathroom, had not been to accommodate her rebellious stomach so much as to hide herself.

  Which was impossible, of course. Janet got up slowly, flexing her cramped knees. It was five-thirty. A dull gray light was beginning to suffuse the bathroom and drip into the hallway. Janet went back to her room, fetched her toothbrush and paste, and spent some time brushing her teeth. Then she took a shower. Out, damned spot. Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. Without gold and women, there would be no damnation.

  I wish I'd read some modern poets, thought Janet, rinsing shampoo out of her hair.

  Some of them might have written about being pregnant out of wedlock, at the very start of your life, just when you began to think you might be a good critic—the most moral job in the world, if you can believe Pope—and thought of going to graduate school to see about it.

  But no, they're all men, too, except Sylvia Plath—and if I read The Bell Jar right now I

  would kill myself. How in the world did I get into this? I was so sensible. I wonder if one could sue the drug company for maintenance of the baby? Oh, God, what's Mom going to say? Well, she already said it: no form of birth control is completely reliable. I know just how those medieval monks felt about the treachery of the body—except theirs never did

  this to them. Men, men, always men. Not that it's fair to blame Thomas; the woman tempted him. He can go away, that's what's so galling, while nowhere I can go would be far enough. Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell.

  I don't believe it. Birth-control pills don't fail like that; they just don't. My lord, the chances of conceiving from unprotected intercourse are only about one in four. Something has gone all wrong with the world, Elizabethan actors attending colleges, people getting pregnant while on birth-control pills. Maybe if I go out I'll see the sheeted dead all squeak and gibber in the American streets. No, that doesn't sound at all likely. Victoria Thompson never squeaked or gibbered; she just threw books.

  Good God, Victoria Thompson. Is that it? Am I doomed to relive her tragedy, because I lived in her dorm? What was that Tina said about the girl who killed herself and made Nora buy a copy of the PDR—in consequence of which, I mean, Nora did it; there are less drastic ways to make people buy books, I'd hope. Oh, God, I'm going crazy. Though Mr.

  Evans would just say it's the damage caused by too early an exposure to thought. I wonder how much exposure to thought would have prevented this mess?

  She went back to the room with her ears full of water and got dressed in her dearest old smock and green denim pants. Luckily Tina woke up before Janet had to decide whether to wake her. For the first time in their acquaintance, she was glad that Tina was a morning person. She put her question while Tina was shrugging into her bathrobe.

  "I can't remember. You could ask Sharon."

  Sharon lived with Peg. "Think."

  "You shouldn't get up so early," said Tina, "it's bad for your disposition. I'll think in the shower, okay?" She made a dignified exit, but came tearing back ten minutes later, wearing a pink towel and a great many soapsuds in her hair. "Margaret," she called in the door, so loudly that Molly rolled over. "Margaret Roxburgh. I remember somebody going on and on about how Roxburgh was the same as Rochester, and then they got on to talking about Jane Eyre. Nobody around here can ever stick to the poi nt. Can I take my shower

  now?"

  "Go, go," said Janet, rather in the manner of Lady Macbeth.

  Tina vanished; Janet ran to the door and yelled, "Thanks!" down the hall. The bathroom door swung in answer.

  Janet grabbed her old green jacket and ran to the library, which was of course closed until eight-thirty. Janet sat down on the low brick wall in front for perhaps twenty seconds; she could not seem to keep still. She slipped between the library and Masters Hall, skidded down the dewy hill, ran across the field and the highway, and trudged up the highway until she came to the gravel patch and the wooden bridge, where she stood dropping sticks into the water and trying to think of something cheerful, like Lewis Carroll or the wonderful habits of Dr. Johnson's sentences.

  It was a curious thing that, while bad prose was invariably maddening (unless it was funny), good prose was not invariably cheering. She said aloud to the burbling water and the dragonflies: "'That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard that is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.'"

  She had heard students reading Dr. Johnson aloud and laughing; but since these people invariably liked either Kahlil Gibran, Richard Brautigan, the anthropologists of the Mangled-English school, or the prose of James Fenimore Cooper, she was not impressed.

  That was a gorgeous sentence. The balance and clarity of it were a wonder. And it was true, too. She thought of Nick and Keats.

  She rolled the syllables of "consolatory expedients" over her tongue again. That was what she needed, some consolatory expedients. She thought again of the women in Shakespeare. Shakespeare was full of bastards, but very little time was given to their mothers. The only young woman in Shakespeare who was pregnant out of wedlock, at least that Janet could remember, was Juliet in Measure for Measure; and while the suddenly oppressive rule of Angelo had made Juliet suffer, the real concern of the play seemed to be with Mariana, who couldn't get her husband to sleep with her, and Isabel the nun, who had to choose between sleeping with the abominable and hypocritical Angelo or having her brother executed, and who later ended up engaged to the Duke. And Ophelia—everybody argued about Ophelia, but surely it had been virginity that Hamlet had condemned her to.

  The thing you remembered about Ophelia was Gertrude saying, "I thought your bridebed to have decked, sweet maid, and not have strewed thy grave." Shakespeare fussed about lust, but he also worried about virginity. It wasn't his pregnant characters who went crazy.

  Janet leaned her forehead on the rough wooden rail and laughed. There, then, that's all right, she thought. If you were a character in Shakespeare, you wouldn't go crazy. She looked at her watch. It was eight-twenty.

  The student assistant who unlocked the main doors of the library gave her a sympathetic smile; he thought she had a paper due later today and was beginning to panic.

  If that were all, she thought, making for the room where they would hand you microfiches of old newspapers. She had forgotten to ask Tina in what year Margaret Roxburgh had killed herself, but if Nor
a had been at Blackstock it would be 1969 or 1970, probably, or the spring of '71. She poked about in the indexes to the two tiny local newspapers and to the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers, though she doubted the event would have penetrated their august attention. There was no index to Blackstock's own student paper, but at least those were only eight pages. She handed a depressingly long list of articles to the young woman behind the counter, adding a request for back issues of Taking Stock for the years 1966

  through 1971, just to be certain.

  Most of the student suicides turned out to have happened at various branches of the University of Minnesota. Margaret Roxburgh merited a paragraph in the Minneapolis paper, four paragraphs in the less agriculturally centered of the two local papers, and two columns, with picture, in Taking Stock. She had killed herself on Hallowe'en in 1967. She had been two months pregnant and had known it. She possessed a pleasant face, straight dark hair, a pair of the silly-looking glasses people had worn then, and a lot of freckles. She had been, as Molly or Tina had already mentioned, a Classics major.

  "You don't get me," said Janet to the wobbly viewer. She sat staring at it, trying to think. The birth-control pills that were supposed to work had not worked; therefore she needed to try something that was not supposed to work, because it would. This was not very useful: there was, after all, a huge number of activities and substances that did not induce miscarriage. It should be, then, something that people had once thought would induce miscarriage but in fact did not. She thought of Nick's herbal tea, which probably ought not to have worked but had. She went upstairs and thumbed a little feverishly through the card catalog; then she went back downstairs, collected six or seven books, and sat down at the nearest table.

  She started with Nicholas Culpeper's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, because it was the oldest book there. It had been published in 1683, and this was not a reprint or a facsimile, but the thing itself—sitting around in the stacks for anybody to check out. She looked in the index. It gave her a certain amount of trouble; she finally realized that it was arranged by letter, in normal alphabetical order, but that within each letter the headings were in no order at all—or possibly the order in which they appeared in the book. She found "Abortion hindereth," and "Miscarriage," and dutifully copied down all the herbs listed. Then she surveyed what she had left, and settled on Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs, which had a reassuring look to it.

  Unfortunately, most of the herbs Nicholas Culpeper thought caused miscarriage did cause it, according to Rodale—in many cases, it appeared, by being poisons of such virulence that they simply killed the mother. Some of the herbs he thought hindered abortion actually encouraged it; most of the rest of them were dangerous in other ways.

  Janet looked in turn at rue, angelica, pennyroyal, and tansy. None of them was considered really safe.

  She sighed, stretching with both hands thrust into the pockets of her jacket, which she had forgotten to take off. Down in the bottom of one pocket was a hard crumbly dry thing.

  Janet pulled it out. Brown and withered, it was nevertheless still recognizable as the flower of yarrow that had fallen out of Melinda Wolfe's wreath two years ago.

  Janet looked for yarrow in Culpeper, but he had not dealt with it. Given the nasty things he did deal with, this was more encouraging than otherwise. She looked it up in Rodale. It had a long and honorable history. Culpeper was said to have recommended it for wounds, which must have been in some other book. Research from the 1960s, said Rodale, showed that yarrow contained some thujone, which in sufficient quantities can cause abortion. But yarrow was not generally considered toxic, though some people were allergic to it. Only the American Indians were listed as having used it as an abortifacient.

  "All right," said Janet, to the line drawing of yarrow's lovely fernlike leaves and tiny clustered flowers, "we'll try you. If I have to I'll steal Melinda Wolfe's wreath off her door."

  She put the books back and emerged into the air again. Yarrow was said by Rodale to grow on roadsides and in fields and waste places; but she was practically certain she had seen some flowering on the south side of Chester Hall. It had been hidden behind the lavender for most of the summer, but the lavender had stopped flowering in late August and was now, after two mild frosts, beginning to droop a little. And indeed, on the south side of Chester Hall where the sun came in between two larches, she found a large patch of yarrow, in full flower and still, this late in the year, buzzing with bees.

  Janet approached cautiously, and began plucking it down near the ground, holding it at arm's length, and shaking the bees from it. Some of them departed, and some of them zoomed back to unmolested flowers. Janet wasn't certain how much of this stuff she would need; she went on picking it.

  "What the hell are you doing?" said Thomas's resonant, shaky voice.

  Janet dropped her armful and stood looking at the south wall of Chester. The sun on its windows glared back at her. "I was picking yarrow, until you scared me half to death."

  "What for?"

  Janet turned to look at him. He was unwashed, uncombed, and extremely pale. She said, "You wouldn't look like that if you didn't know."

  "Molly told me she thought you thought you were pregnant.

  "I do think so."

  "What are you going to do with that?"

  "Make it into a tea and drink it."

  Thomas let out a long and wavering breath; he looked on the verge of tears. He also looked like a man who could not make up his mind what to do, like somebody who saw no way out. Since he wasn't pregnant, there seemed no cause for this. Nobody was going to come along as Angelo had in Measure for Measure and haul Thomas off to jail and threaten to execute him. Janet bent and picked up the scattered stalks of yarrow. It was used to cast the I Ching. She wondered what future she had just scooped up unread.

  "Look," said Thomas, "I know it's your body. But will you at least talk to me before you do this?"

  "Do you think it will work?"

  "Talking? I certainly—"

  "No, the yarrow."

  "I thought you knew, or why are you picking it?"

  "Because the pills didn't work."

  Thomas frowned, painfully; more as if he had a headache than as if he failed to understand her. "I've sent Robin away for a few hours. Come up to my room and talk."

  "I didn't want to talk," said Janet, "I just wanted to get it over."

  "Look, if you want to get it over, I'll help you. But I want to tell you something first.

  Oh, Christ," said Thomas, "I didn't mean this to happen. I should have known Chester Hall would do this."

  "Do what?" She had every dropped bit of yarrow back up, and they were walking toward Forbes. Janet felt the last of her momentum leaking away. She ought to go now and brew this tea and drink it, but she was too tired. Damn Molly anyway.

  They went without speaking up to Forbes's second floor and into Thomas and Robin's room. Robin's side was as neat as a nun; Thomas's was in a state of wild confusion. Thomas flung the bedspread over his unmade bed and made Janet sit down on it, and sat down himself.

  "Let's try to start at the beginning," he said. "You asked me to go to bed, not the other way around."

  "I know that! I wasn't blaming you. I was just trying to fix things." Janet realized she was still clutching the armful of yarrow, and laid it to one side.

  "That's not what I mean. Look. I'm in a mess so terrible that I can't even begin to describe it, and if you would have the goodness to stay pregnant until after Hallowe'en, you would help me more than I can say. I know you don't want to help me, you hate my guts; but if you do, I'll stand by you any way I can, whatever you decide to do."

  "I can't possibly still be pregnant on Hallowe'en."

  "Why not? It's only four days away."

  Janet told him, not altogether coherently, about Victoria Thompson and Margaret Roxburgh.

  "They killed themselves because their lovers betrayed them," said Thomas.

  "How do you know?"
<
br />   Thomas stood up and began prowling the paper-strewn carpet as The Meebe did when he wanted to go run up and down the hall. His voice filled the room. "Because I knew their goddamned lovers, that's how, the bastards. Picking out nice sensitive intelligent neurotic types because it's easier to pull the wool over their eyes, and then cackling like some fucking Victorian villain and saying, ha-ha, you're pregnant so you have to do what I say.

  Every once in a while Medeous picks somebody who deserves it." Thornas stopped, rather as if he were a tape recorder somebody had pushed the STOP button on—which Janet thought was a fine idea.

  She closed her eyes. "Begin at the beginning," she said, "go on until you get—"

  "And they didn't see any way out." Nobody had pushed the STOP button; he had just been musing. He stood by Robin's desk and rattled at her, "You've got a way out. You've got dozens. I won't desert you. I didn't mean to get you pregnant at all; I thought I'd just go through with it."

  "With what, for pity's sake?"

  "I don't know where to start."

  "I'm easy these days," said Janet sourly. "I half convinced myself that Nick and Robin were some of Shakespeare's actors. What can you tell me that's half as silly as that?"

  "They are some of Shakespeare's actors."

  "They are?"

  "They are."

  The world opened out suddenly, replete with possibilities. "They knew Shakespeare?"

  "They won't talk about him much. Nick said he was the sweetest-tempered man in England, but they don't really remember all that much." Thomas sat down on Robin's desk and hugged himself.

  "Why on earth not?"