Pamela Dean (52 page)

From Thomas came letters typed on erasable bond, much smudged and bearing unmistakable evidence of a mind that moved faster than the fingers it drove. He was still fretting about Tina, which gave Janet license to fret back about Nick, and they used up dozens of pages of paper and innumerable typewriter ribbons. Thomas's last letter, received three days before the start of fall term, said he would be arriving on September 18, probably by the one-fifteen bus, and that he was grateful for all the discussion of romance its vicissitudes that she had allowed him. "I think I'll abandon the entire business for the remainder of my time at Blackstock," he wrote, "except for a judicious selection of drama.

I have obtained two sets of Student Season Tickets at the Old Theater, and hope you will find time to occupy the other seat."

Janet moved herself into the room she and Tina and Molly bad secured on Second Ericson, on the seventeenth of September, and had hardly put down her suitcases before she was assailed by a violent melancholy. This was her senior year. It was her last fall at Blackstock. All this time had gone by like a dream. You couldn't stay, unless like Thomas you had managed to muck up your graduation requirements. You could sometimes come back; there were scores of Blackstock graduates working here as instructors and librarians and counselors and secretaries and anything you liked to name; but that was different. It might in some way reproduce the social atmosphere, but it would not make up for the history courses you had not taken and the English courses you had failed to extract the best out of and the Latin you had completely forgotten to think about.

"Our revels now are ended." If you could call them revels. Yes, they had been that.

Evans, Medeous, Ferris, Davison, Fleisher, had all served as Master of the Revels, each in his own manner, with her own flourishes, using his own language, her own music.

Janet shook herself, and began to unpack her clothes. There were three terms left—three appallingly heavy terms finished up, for English majors, by a six-hour written examination concocted by all the formidable teachers in the department, not to mention people like Mr. Fleisher who were vague and kindly in appearance but death on paper; and, if you survived the written exam, a three-hour catechism conducted by three members of the department for each one quavering student, so that they might catch you out if you were not very quickwitted. Revels, indeed. It was probably very much as her mother described pregnancy—by the end you were so fed up with it, you positively welcomed the labor and delivery that had scared you silly eight months ago.

Neither Molly nor Tina had come back by one o'clock the next afternoon, when Janet left to meet Thomas at the bus station. Tina's mother was driving her up from Chicago, because of the cat. Molly was coming on student standby to save money, because she wanted to go on the Biology Department's winter seminar to Bermuda. That was depressing, too: only two more terms with Molly, and the College might put somebody else in the room with Janet and Tina.

It was raining, spottily and not very hard: the sidewalk outside Ericson was wet, the walkway up to the chapel was dry, the sidewalk that ran by Murchison and so downtown was damp. The sun came out briefly from time to time and lit up the top of the chapel or gilded an elm branch here and a telephone wire there. The bus station was in the lobby of the Murray Hotel, a building that might possibly have been a cousin to Ericson or Masters, except that it had been coated with the kind of shiny pale gray paint you normally saw on basement floors, and then left to itself for about fifty years. Lily, Janet, and their mother used to wait here to catch the bus to the city and go shopping. Lily usually got sick on the bus.

When she heard the grinding and roar of the arriving bus, she got up and went outside again; it would do Thomas no good to have to peer about in that gloomy cave. He came out last, behind a group of giggling high-school girls and three more Blackstock students, with his luggage slung all over him like Robin's bagpipes. He waved wildly when he saw her, grinning all over his face. Janet went forward and relieved hi m of a duffel bag and the

smaller of his two knapsacks. "Don't you believe in the luggage compartment?" she said.

"Not since they sent the rough draft of a term paper I'd spent all spring break composing all the way to Fargo and took five weeks to give it back so I had to rewrite the whole thing to make my deadline, I don't."

"What was it about?"

"The pattern of revolutions in the Dominican Republic. I was still in Poli Sci. How are you? You look glum."

"I'm being foolish," said Janet, as they crossed Main Street and went up the steep hill that led to campus. "It struck me, while I was unpacking, that this is my last fall term here.

All around me I feel the ghosts of lost opportunities."

"I know what you mean."

"You've had seven falls here, at least; I was dumb enough to be obedient and allow myself to be booted out in a mere four."

"Since," said Thomas, "to look at falling leaves, Fifty years is but a sieve, About the woodland we will run To see the elm gold in the sun."

Janet dropped his duffel bag and sat on it until she could stop laughing. "I hope," she said at last, "that A. E. Housman's ears are sufficiently stopped with earth that he did not hear that. Are you suggesting that we take a walk, or merely commenting on the vanity of human wishes?"

"Both," said Thomas, mildly. "Get off that bag, it's got cheese and apples in it."

They went along to Forbes, where Thomas and Robin had a room on the second floor.

Robin would not be arriving until tomorrow. "Thomas," said Janet, dumping the knapsack on the nearest desk, "have Nick and Robin had a falling-out?"

"I think so, but you know Nick and I never really got along, and you know Robin never says anything germane if he can help it. Do you want some of this cheese, or shall we just go walking?"

The rain had stopped. The trees and grass were still green as summer, but the air and sky had thinned indefinably, as they did in autumn, and the first few leaves, dropped from what trees you could never tell, were drifting downwards in the sunlit air.

"Did they have it over Nick and Peg?" said Janet, as they walked by the stream in the Lower Arb and apologized to the ducks.

Thomas did not pretend that he could not construe her sentence, which was decent of him. "I think so," he said.

"So Nick and Peg comprise an entity that Robin might object to."

"You wretched girl," said Thomas, sitting down abruptly on a rotting log and plucking a black-eyed Susan with unnecessary force, "if you wanted to know that, why didn't you just ask?"

"I thought it was easier this way." Janet sat down too. "Robin seems to take his friends'

love affairs very seriously. You should have heard him trying to bully me into making Tina take you back—what a sentence—after she broke up with you."

"He's trying to forestall fate," said Thomas. "Having beyond all expectation found the one woman in seven or eight thousand who would put up with him, he feels uneasy in his luck, and thinks that by maneuvering the affairs of his friends, he will be able to put off the disaster that inevitably attends on good fortune."

"You've been reading too much Greek tragedy."

"Maybe," said Thomas. "Supposing this to be possible. Look. What sort of a schedule have you got this term?"

"Aristophanes, Math 10, American Literature (bah). And Outdoor Fitness."

"Rather light, for you, isn't it?"

"Mr. Fleisher is a dangerous man. He talked me out of Shakespeare."

"It's probably just as well. Look. Since you're feeling nostalgic already and I'm feeling terrified at the prospect of actually leaving this place, shall we take a month off and be frivolous? Walk and bicycle to all those places we always meant to get to, and attend the extracurricular activities of which we always said, who has time to do
that?
We could collapse exhausted at the end of October and catch up on all our classes and curse one another."

Janet looked at him. There was a feverish note in his voice that she did not altogether like the sound of. He had bent his head over the flower as if he had never seen one before, and his fine straight profile and waving yellow hair told her nothing. Since what he wanted to do was very like what she wanted to do, she answered, "I'd love to. May we have Molly and Tina sometimes?"

"Certainly," said Thomas. "I wasn't proposing to monopolize you. Robin, too, I imagine. Speaking of which, when do your roommates get back? Molly owes me a letter."

"Tina's probably there now, feeling neglected. Molly's coming standby, so God knows."

"Well, let's go and see. I want to renew my acquaintance with Pyewacket."

Tina was there when they got back, unpacking with the assistance of Amoeba, who had become all legs and tail, in the manner of adolescent animals everywhere. He had not lost his charming disposition. Tina hugged Janet while the cat swarmed all over Thomas; then she solemnly shook hands with Thomas, which he appeared to find amusing, though he only asked her how she was.

"I'm fine now," said Tina, plugging in her desk lamp, "but as soon as classes start it's going to be awful."

"Does that mean you don't want to come gambol with Janet and me?"

"I don't play Bingo," said Tina vaguely, from the depths of a box full of tea mugs and dusty black enamel bookends.

Janet laughed, affronting the cat; and Thomas explained.

"Well," said Tina, "let me know when you want to go gambol, anyway. Where should we put the litter box, Jan?"

Janet found the month of September alarming. The only classes she had ever skipped had been Modern Poetry and Mr. King's anthropology class when he wasn't talking about Malinowski. She refused to skip Aristophanes, because it had only seven students and Professor Medeous, who was teaching it, had a way of looking at you, the first time she saw you after an absence, as if you had just sold Athens out to the Persians. But Math 10, even under the competent and humorous aegis of Mr. Brunner, and American Literature, even

under the dry and articulate flag of Mrs. Simpson, saw her once a week at best.

She and Thomas bought children's books in the college bookstore and read them in the Arboretum; they went to amateur puppet shows at the public library downtown; they attended every movie the Blackstock Student Association chose to offer them; they canoed on the river, rode their bicycles to an allegedly haunted house that Janet had been hearing about for ten years (it was sad and dreary, but not apparently haunted); they went, with Tina and Molly, to see Amoeba's mother's next litter, and barely escaped returning with two more kittens; and in the third week of September they went up to the city to see
The
Lady's Not for Burning
at the Old Theater. Molly couldn't come with them, having a lab the next morning, but she charged them with getting her a ticket for later in the term.

It was a peculiar performance, being understated in the extreme and performed in modern dress, which rather seemed to miss the point. But its cumulative effect, whether owing to the overwhelming nature of Fry's verse or to the director's having more sense than was immediately evident, was still powerful. When Jennet Jourdemayne told Thomas Mendip that she would let him go after another fifty years, and Thomas Mendip agreed to put up with "hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed, Lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham And all possible nitwittery" because he was too well brought up not to see her home, even though nobody knew where in the wide world it was, the balance of tears and laughter canceled itself and produced in the theater a perfect silence. It occurred to Janet that, more than any author she had read in her admittedly still small experience, Fry had the knack of showing you the tragic but allowing the comic to prevail. He was a little like Jane Austen in that regard, though possibly in no other.

She offered these observations to Thomas on the bus trip home; he received them pleasantly, but with no apparent desire to enter into a discussion. Janet fell silent herself.

She ran her mind over the production and felt increasingly wrought up and distracted. She had not noticed before that it was about two people named Thomas and Jennet. It had a highly unsympathetic Nicholas in it, too. She knew perfectly well that, if examined with the eye of logic, these associations would unravel, since the plot of the play bore no relation to the events of the last three years. She did not cast the eye of logic over her ruminations.

She shut the eye of logic up in the back of her head, where it could look on darkness and sigh over the exigencies of human folly.

And she said to Thomas as they were walking up the hill to campus, "I know you don't want fifty years of me, but do you think you might like fifty minutes?"

There was a long silence. They paced past Murchison, turned right, walked by one end of Taylor and past the red sandstone building, put together from a hundred curlicues of stone, that made up the old library.

"Fifty days, even," said Thomas, taking her hand. His was cold. It always had been.

"Fifty days just about exactly," said Thomas, and laughed.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind. We'll try the fifty minutes first, and see if you want another fifty after that. The question is, where? My roommate is wrestling with angels, in the form of New Testament Greek; yours are suffering agonies from Genetics and Statistical Mechanics—though why Tina is taking that I'll never know—yes, I know I'm babbling, dear heart, and so should you be, if I would shut up long enough to make you nervous."

"You can't make me any more nervous than this."

"Let's go where nerves are ravaged, then. Chester Hall is open, and the practice rooms are soundproof and have locks on the doors."

Janet burst out laughing.

"Have you got a better suggestion?" said Thomas, sounding less affronted than apologetic. "Or if you want to withdraw the offer, we can go drink milk shakes and talk about how we refuse to be the toys of irresponsible events."

"No, by all means let it be the practice room. It's a form of irony I especially like."