Pamela Dean (47 page)

Exams went by; people went home for spring break, or to northern Minnesota with Medeous. Janet retired to her bedroom and read mystery novels. It snowed three times during the ten days the college was closed; but the sharpness of deep winter had vanished from the air. Lily had discovered horses and was making a predictable and very reassuring nuisance of herself. Andrew had actually learned to play recognizable music on the flute, and was deeply disappointed that Nick was not going to come over during break and hear him demonstrate it.

Janet's father received the lists of his forthcoming students in campus mail, and was horrified to find his own daughter in his Romantics class.

"Don't do this to me," he said to her over the breakfast pancakes on the last Saturday of break. "For heaven's sake, I won't know where to look. Take Romantics from Simpson next winter; she'll make a fine job of it, and she likes Keats better than I do."

"I can't. I have to take Victorian literature next winter, because I took Shakespeare last winter instead."

"Well, take 'em both; it will give you a nice continuity."

"I can't. I have to take Spenser from Brinsley and I want to take Euripides."

"What do you want to take Euripides for? Isn't that the fellow who invented the deus ex machina?"

"I'll let you know," said Janet.

There was an obstinate pause, during which Lily and Andrew had a vociferous argument over who was supposed to take the dog for a walk, and Janet's mother went into the kitchen, where she would probably stay until it was all over.

"I'll be unfair to you," said her father. "I won't be able to hel p it. I'll overcompensate."

"Fine. I look forward to it."

"My head aches," said her father, getting up, "and a drowsy numbness pains my sense.

I suspect Keats had a teenage daughter."

"No, he was one. A teenager, I mean. I won't be any trouble, honest."

"I know you won't, my child—but I will. Oh, well, perhaps they will be a dull lot and you'll liven it up."

"No, they won't. You get Thomas and Robin both."

"Not Nick?"

"No—I think he's settled on Music and Classics."

"Probably just as well," said her father; "it saves competition in the family circle."

He went into the kitchen and began to talk to his wife. Janet sat staring after him, and only Andrew's upsetting the syrup pitcher made her move from the table.

She went to the first session of the Romantics class with a certain trepidation. It was a bitter March day with a blinding sky and a wind that made you long for February. The class was on the second floor of Masters Hall, in the back, with a bleak view of the mottled brown-and-white playing fields and the bare gray trees of the Lower Arboretum. Janet met Thomas coming up the stairs; Robin was already in the classroom, making Diane Zimmerman and Anne Beauvais laugh by imitating Charlie Caspar's struggles with the optative mood. He chose to sit, however, with Thomas and Janet, who had retreated with one accord to the very back of the small classroom.

There were nineteen students in the class. Janet's father trudged in about five minutes late, wearing the despised gray suit he always began his terms in, and an orange-and-purple tie given him by Andrew and Lily three years ago. He said the combination of the chaste suit and the profligate tie weeded out the faint of heart. Janet tried to watch Thomas and Robin at the same time. Thomas's eyes got big, but he kept them resolutely turned away from her. One of Robin's dimples appeared, briefly, and vanished.

Her father sat down on his table and began, in his mild voice, a short speech of praise for the poetic tradition overturned by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Romantic Revolution, he said, like the French, had perpetuated a number of excesses that half defeated its purpose, though it had not, at least, ended up with the literary equivalent of Napoleon Bonaparte and the subsequent Restoration of an Augustan Age now decadent, forgetful, and mindlessly autocratic.

He moved briskly through the French and American Revolutions, the accession and defeat of Napoleon, the restoration of despotism throughout continental Europe, William Godwin's
Inquiry Concerning Political Justice,
Jacobin hysteria in England, enclosure, the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of the outrages Charles Dickens was to suffer and write about half a century later, Disraeli's Two Nations. He spoke briefly on the Preface to

Lyrical Ballads,
which they would read; and listed the schools into which contemporary critics of the Romantic poets had divided them: the Lake School of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; the Satanic School of Byron, Shelley, and their lesser followers; the Cockney School of Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats. Each of these was colored differently by the politics of the day.

Janet, as always when considering history, felt oppressed and miserable. She looked at Thomas, who was scribbling impassively, his mouth set rather hard; and then past him at Robin. Robin's face held a kind of impatient resignation. Then he, too, looked at Thomas, and went on looking until Thomas lifted his eyes from the notebook. Robin smiled.

Thomas's hair hid his face from Janet; but after a moment Robin laid a hand on his wrist. It was the first time Janet had ever seen him touch anyone of his own accord.

Thomas's neck and ear turned red. He picked up his pen again, wrote a line or two, and pushed the notebook toward Robin. Robin read what he had written, while Janet valiantly did not try to.

"Does anybody have any questions?" said Janet's father.

Thomas jumped, Robin removed his hand unhurriedly, and Diane Zimmerman asked about the Peterloo Massacre.

Janet stayed after class for a few minutes, waited for the people who had questions about the midterm and the weekly papers to clear out, and said to her father, "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"You held your hand, that's all," said her father. "When we get to Keats, you'll spear me with some question I've never thought of. If you were anybody else I'd be grateful; but if it's you I'll say something unforgivable."

"Phooey," said Janet, and went out into the hallway.

Robin and Thomas were waiting for her, and seemed still to be speaking to one another. Thomas was at the end of a long and impassioned speech; Janet had been aware of his voice while she was still in the classroom. He was saying, ". . . the whole reason I quit Political Science. It's fucking intolerable; people have been doing the same damn stupid things, collectively and individually, over and over and over, since—"

"Adam delved and Eve span," said Robin amiably.

"I wish I thought they ever had," snapped Thomas.

"This world uncertain is," said Robin, a little less amiably, as you might offer a five-year-old a bowl of ice cream after it has already refused cake, cookies, and candy.

"Fine!" said Thomas, with such force that people starting down the stairs at the other end of the hall turned their heads and stared at him.
"
You
say farewell earth's bliss, then."

He slammed his book bag over his shoulder and stalked away. The bars of thin winter sunlight lit up his hair as he flung through them. The gapers disappeared hastily down the stairs.

Robin, staying where he was and not raising his voice, said, "An thou takest it not on thyself, knave, I may well."

Thomas's shoulders jerked, but he walked on.

"You know you shouldn't quote Shakespeare at him when he's upset," said Janet.

"What?" said Robin, vaguely; Janet thought it was probably the only unguarded utterance she had ever heard pass his lips.

"What's the matter?" she said.

"Life," said Robin, in a sepulchral tone that was just on the edge of parodying itself.

Janet rather dreaded the next class, but aside from making her sit between them, Thomas and Robin made no sign that anything out of the ordinary had happened, or ever would.

It was the unregarded physics class that actually caused th e trouble. The theoretical

part of it was fine. Professor Livingston was a brisk young man with an arid sense of humor, and the material he was presenting was the scientific side of Mr. Soukup's philosophy class. It was very satisfying. But every other week he devised some laboratory work for them.

Janet and Nick had naturally agreed to be partners. Janet was even eager to get into something nice and clean like a physics laboratory, which contained nothing either dead or explosive. On first glance, indeed, it contained a wholly delightful collection of weird objects that could be put together or smashed together: inclined planes for rolling little steel balls down, to replicate the experiments of Galileo; bits of two-by-four fitted up with the wheels off roller skates and wired up to an ingenious harness that would draw a line on a graph for you, flat, transparent, and mysteriously marked pans of water that could be made to vibrate at various speeds, for the study of wave mechanics.

But as they had once had the bakery write on Molly's cake, it didn't work. They had agreed that Nick would write up the reports but Janet would do the actual experiments; Nick had seemed thoroughly alarmed by the notion of a physics laboratory. But after they spent six hours with the inclined planes and steel balls, and two weeks later seven hours with the pans of water, and in both instances had to reason backward from what they already knew to discover what they were supposed to be proving, and then fake up some data that was not too perfect, he suggested that Janet let him take a hand.

And when he was performing the experiment, the equipment submitted meekly to him and they finished deducing the law of conservation of momentum (that was what the bits of wood with roller-skate wheels were for) in an hour and a half.

"Let's just try those balls again," said Nick; set up the apparatus in about ten minutes, and was merrily rolling balls down its Escheresque windings and demanding that Janet record the data.

"It's bewitched, that's what it is," grumbled Janet. She had a large and recalcitrant chunk of Pindar to read for Friday and did not relish the notion of having to write up lab reports.

"It's nothing of the sort," said Nick, so sharply that she stared at him. "It just wants a little sensible handling."

From the man who could not change the tire on his own bicycle and had let Janet put up the hardware for hanging his curtains, this was abominable. If he had shrugged and said he was lucky; if he had been as smug as he liked about the roller-skate experiment but had not insisted on trying the others over again; if he had even refrained from speaking to her in that tone of voice—but he hadn't.

Janet had no legitimate cause for complaint. "Look," she said, "it's no use doing those again; we've turned in the reports and I don't suppose you really want to go confess that we faked them. Let's go; I've got Greek to do."

"I just want to make sure we were right," said Nick.

"We got an A on the first report and a B+ on the second; what do you want?"

"You go ahead; I'll see you later."

"You can write up the lab report," said Janet, and left in a hurry, before she said something regrettable.

She was willing to forgive him by dinner, but he clearly felt innocent of any crime, and he continued to be so pleased with himself over every lab they did that Janet felt perpetually cross with him. He did eventually notice that, though the original incident seemed to have gone right over his head. He became snappish in his turn, and it made for a very uncomfortable term. When he told her, on a rare walk in the woods at the end of May, that he would be spending the summer in England with his family, she was a little relieved.

Nick seemed genuinely regretful, which made her feel more kindly toward him. She decided not to try to sort out all the squabbles they had had; it would only spoil the little time they had left.

* * *

She got her job at the greenhouse back. Molly went back to Maine and wrote long letters on lined yellow paper. Robin had sent Molly a four-page letter to the lab, so that it was waiting for her when she arrived. It analyzed their relations, mourned over his own faults, and exalted her virtues. Molly was delighted, and found her old high-school flame much less of a temptation.

Tina wrote short letters on white paper with pink borders. She sounded much the same as she had last summer, but Janet was interested to see that the examples of journal writing seemed to at least have taught her how to express her sense of humor. Several letters describing lunch with ill-assorted feuding colleagues in the company cafeteria made Janet laugh so much that Lily pounded on the wall shared by their rooms and demanded that she be quiet. Lily had taken up meditation, and the least little thing disturbed her.

Nick wrote once a week, three or four very thin sheets covered with small writing in peacock-blue ink. He did a fine job of describing England, seeming to know just what she most wanted to hear about. He spent four pages on Tintern Abbey, and only one on Brighton, which showed a good sense of proportion. But he hardly mentioned his family, and his letters were rather weak in romantic or even affectionate passages. He did say he wished she had been with him to see a production of
Measure for Measure,
but he could probably have said the same thing to Robin.

Janet spent three weeks reading the most mindless literature she could lay her hands on, including a pile of awful teen romances that Lily had tossed into the garbage can. She helped her mother in the garden and proofread three essays of her father's; but she was beginning to find time very heavy on her hands. Danny Chin was taking a summer seminar in nineteenth-century German philosophy, and would not be home until a week before Blackstock started up again.

On June 23 after supper she walked over to Blackstock; it was too hot to bicycle up that last hill. There was a thunderstorm threatening in the northwest, after a rather dull and dry spell, and she thought she would like to go stand on the veranda that encircled Eliot, and watch the lightning. She walked slowly along the southern edge of campus, admiring the wild roses that lined the walk to the chapel and were now in full riot. The College had put out big wooden tubs of white carnations on the plaza of the Music and Drama Center; Ericson was surrounded with lavender, which was not generally hardy in Minnesota; Forbes had foxglove, which was, but seldom bloomed this early. Eliot, where they would be living again next year, one floor down, rose out of a nest of bridal-veil spirea. That at