Tam Lin Read online

  Andrew, fidgeting about and scuffing his feet on the sidewalk, said, "Dad, those girls say there's a ghost in Jan's room."

  "On Fourth Ericson?" said her father. "Is it the same old story, or a new one? What sort of ghost?"

  "Classics major!" said Andrew, and laughed immoderately.

  "Ha ha," said his father. "You know it's time to replace the campus joke when small boys find it funny."

  "Better the Classics Department than yours," said Janet's mother. "I shudder to think what they could find to say about the English Department if they put their minds to it."

  "Now, Janet," said her father, oblivious, "don't take English 10 from Brinsley."

  "I know," said Janet. "Senior Seminar from Brinsley. English 10 from Evans if I want to do it right, or Tyler if I want to be usefully irritated. And Chaucer only from Brinsley, and if I'm very, very good, I can take the Romantics from you next year. Go away now, I have to unpack."

  She hugged her parents; gave Andrew a chance to hug her, which he surprised her by taking; and looked speculatively at her sister.

  "I hope you get roommates worse than me," said Lily.

  Well, that was that. She ran up the four flights of red-carpeted steps and encountered another group of girls in the wide hall of the fourth floor. The RA was among them. What was her name, for heaven's sake. Irma? Norma? Nora, all right.

  "What can I expect from the ghost?" Janet asked her. If they were having fun, you might as well let them have it.

  "Not much," said Nora. "She throws books out the window."

  "That could get annoying in the winter."

  "Not your books—ghost books."

  "Whose? All the ones she hated?"

  "It's hard to read the titles when they're flying around," said Nora dryly. The three other girls, all clearly new students as well, giggled a little, in a hopeful way.

  They either knew nothing, or were dreadfully unim

  aginative. "I'd better get

  unpacked," Janet said, and went into her room.

  There she sat on her desk and surveyed it all. Ericson was one of the older dormitories, which meant high ceilings, slightly scarred oak woodwork, wide windowsills, and an old white porcelain sink, with mismatched faucets, in what might once have been the fourth roommate's closet. The carpet was red, like the stairs'; the walls and ceiling were clean white. You could paint them if you wanted to, but it would be a lot of trouble, and the Office of Residential Life was stingy in its allowance of colors. The iron bunk beds were painted white, too; the other furniture matched the woodwork, though it was rather more used-looking. The room had southern, eastern, and northern exposures; the four largest windows looked eastward, and Janet had claimed the desk that looked north. It was all warm, clean, and pleasant. Janet looked at the tumble of books on the bottom shelf, and sniffed.

  She had given up this useless exercise and was putting writing paper and sealing wax and typewriter ribbons into the drawers of her desk when someone knocked on the door and then came in.

  "Hello!" called Janet, so as not to startle the newcomer.

  "Hi," said a comfortingly midwestern voice, and the first of the two roommates—unless there were three—came around the corner. Janet went on smiling, but her stomach protested a little. This roommate—probably the Chicago one, who had written, since she had a tennis racket under one arm and a tape player under the other—was about six feet tall and looked perfectly pleased with this condition. She was dressed more or less as Janet was, except that her blue corduroy pants had been ironed; her Oxford-cloth shirt was not only ironed, but pink, and tucked in, too; her tennis shoes were of a dazzling blueness. She had a nice healthy face with large blue eyes, and a head of straight blond hair, cut just above the shoulders, that put even Lily's to shame. Why doesn't she grow it long?

  thought Janet. All over the country were girls wearing Indian cotton dresses and Earth shoes who would kill for hair like that.

  "Hi," said the roommate, a little less certainly. "I'm Christina. Which—no, let me guess. Are you Molly?"

  "Why, do I look like somebody who doesn't answer letters?"

  "Janet, then. Didn't she answer yours? She sent me a nice one, but it was a little strange."

  Janet bit her lip on the next obvious question; Christina looked earnest, and would therefore probably take it the wrong way. "I was glad you wrote, anyway."

  Christina dumped the racket, the tape player, and a bulging shopping bag onto the nearest lower bunk, and looked at the contents of the bookshelves. "Are all these yours?"

  The dangerous question. "Yes."

  "These are kids' books."

  She sounded more puzzled than disapproving, but whatever tone it was said in, that remark boded no good. Janet held her tongue. "Oh, well," said Christina cheerfully, "I brought my teddy bear." She extracted a gray floppy object from her shopping bag and propped it up against the brown-paper package of bedding provided by the Office of Residential Life.

  Useless, Janet decided, but tolerant. Whether this made her worse than Lily was a question that would bear a deal of examination.

  "Did you have a nice trip?" said Christina.

  "I live in town," said Janet, who had said as much in her letter. "Where's the rest of your stuff?"

  Somebody else knocked. Janet and Christina both called, "Come in!" Janet thought she could grow to hate that hallway with the closets; you always had to wait for who was coming.

  Who was coming, as it lumped around the corner, appeared to be composed largely of scuffed blue suitcases. It dropped these, panting, and emerged as another tall person, maybe five eight, with curly brown hair, a sharp, freckled face, and the clothes that should have gone with Christina's hair. Not the Indian cotton, but well and truly faded blue jeans, old sandals, a denim shirt with a peace symbol embroidered on one pocket and a rose on the other.

  "Hello, Molly," said Janet.

  "Hi. Which of you is—oh, far out! " She lunged at the bookshelves, brought up with her nose an inch away from the books, and tilting her head sideways read her way down every spine there, nodding and exclaiming. "I hate Hermann Hesse," she said, wheeling around, "but the rest of these are my very favorites."

  "They're mine," said Janet, beaming at her.

  "So you're Janet. Can you really read Hesse?"

  "My best friend likes him," said Janet, "and he's very intense."

  "I thought he was boring," said Molly, "but never mind. What else have you got in here?" She folded herself to the floor and looked expectantly at Janet. Janet, feeling unfairly that Christina would have just ripped the boxes open, supposing she was interested at all, sat down too, and reached for the one containing the new books, the ones getting ready for college had not left her time to read.

  "I left my stuff down in the lobby," said Christina. This was merely a statement of fact, Janet thought, intended to explain why she was going out the door instead of joining in the examination of the box; but both Janet and Molly, without exchanging a glance, scrambled to their feet and accompanied her down the four flights of steps, and toiled back up them again with suitcases, footlocker, and four cardboard boxes. These last were too light to contain books.

  Christina promptly ripped the brown paper from her bedding and made up one of the bottom bunks. Janet and Molly unloaded the box of new books.

  "I haven't had time to read these," Janet said.

  "Well, let's see," said Molly, turning the books over one by one. She had very long fingers. Till We Have Faces, All the Myriad Ways, Jack of Shadows, The Children of Llyr, More Than Human, The Daughter of Time, The Crystal Cave, and A Tan and Sandy Silence fell through her searching hands, accompanied by exclamations of approval and puzzlement and anticipation. Janet watched them, and wished for a quiet corner with any one of them. They would let her read here, all right, until her eyes fell out of her head and she babbled of green fields; but they wouldn't let her read any of these.

  "Oh, do you read mysteries?" said Christina, peering over Mol
ly's shoulder at the entirely misleading cover of The Daughter of Time. "I love Agatha Christie."

  You would, thought Janet. She said temperately, "I used to like the Tommy and Tuppence books a lot." Christina looked as if she, too, were thinking, you would.

  She turned to Molly, looking, Janet thought, martyred, and said, "Which desk do you want?"

  "I don't care," said Molly. "I work on my bed. At least"—and she cast a jaundiced eye at the bunk beds—"I did at home. Do we have to have these things?"

  "You can't type on your bed," said Christina. "Do you want the desk by Janet's bookshelves or the one by my bed?"

  "Wanna bet?" said Molly. "I don't care, really; but you do have a point. Do we want to clump up in little corners, or go wandering through each other's territory all the time?"

  "We have to dress all in a row in the hallway," said Christina, rather wearily. Janet looked at her for the first time since the conversation began and saw that she was clutching a Smith-Corona portable typewriter case, presumably with typewriter inside it.

  "Put Molly by my books," she said hastily. "You take that desk."

  Christina thumped the typewriter down on the desk indicated, the one under the eastern windows. Janet walked over and considered the view: a bit of lawn, a circle of asphalt with a bed of geraniums in the middle of it, and the square brick building, like an elementary school, that the asphalt provided access to. Forbes Hall, one of the modern dormitories. Boring, but at least not distracting. Janet tried the southern window: a large lawn spattered with dandelions, bordered by a line of large pines where it met the street, and presently the site of two Frisbee games and a futile attempt to teach a large brown dog to fetch a stick. Janet thought her lake was probably more conducive to reflection; but it depended partly on what subject one had to reflect on. "What are you majoring in?" she asked Molly.

  "Biology," said Molly.

  "So am I," said Christina, as if she were reconsidering it. "Premed?"

  "God, no," said Molly. "I want to study tidepools."

  "I'm premed," said Christina.

  "Be sure to tell us good-bye when the term starts," said Molly kindly. "And we'll give you a welcome-back party just before vacation. Unless Janet's premed too?"

  Janet hooted, until she saw Christina's face. "I'm not a Biology major at all," she said.

  "Well, what?"

  "English."

  "What for?" said Christina.

  "Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal-arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?"

  "But what will you do after that?"

  "Go to graduate school and read some more."

  Christina sighed. Janet relented. "I guess I'll teach," she said. You did not, clearly, tell Christina that you wrote poetry. You might tell Molly later, or you might not.

  "Well," said Christina, not visibly placated, "what are we going to do about this room?"

  Molly kicked the nearest bunk bed lightly, then said, "Ha!" and dived into her pile of possessions again. She came up with a battered wooden thing like a misshapen boomerang, with a few flakes of red and white paint still clinging to its surface.

  "What's that?" said Christina.

  "My teddy bear," said Molly, rolling onto the bottom bunk Christina had made up and staring fixedly at the underside of the upper bunk. "Yep," she said, with considerable satisfaction. She got up again, gripped the wooden thing firmly, and smacked one of the uprights of the bunk bed with it.

  "What?" said Christina in her weary tone.

  "It's a field hockey stick," said Molly.

  Janet began to laugh. "And you think Hesse is boring."

  "Field hockey is the quintessence of skill and dispatch," said Molly, and took another swing at the bed. There was an ungodly bang—she had used a great deal more force this time—and the bunk wobbled.

  "Do you sleep with it?" said Christina.

  Molly said, "No, I keep it under the bed to repel boarders. It's still my teddy bear.

  Stand back, Tina, I don't want to get you on the backswing." She swung again.

  Between the thumps of the hockey stick Janet could hear echoing thumps on the door. She staggered to her feet and went and opened it. It was one of the girls from the ghost discussion. She was as short as Janet, and much thinner, with gold wire-rimmed glasses, huge brown eyes, and brown hair in braids. She was wearing a red Blackstock T-shirt so much too big for her that the lion and the snake of the Blackstock seal were touching noses and the dove had disappeared entirely in a fold. She said with some asperity, "What is going on in here?"

  "We're taking apart the bunk beds," said Janet, with her best semblance of demureness.

  "Really? May I watch? We've got them too, and they're nothing but trouble." She eyed Janet dubiously, and added, "My name's Peg Powell; I'm in four-ten.

  Sophomore. Classics."

  Janet introduced herself and led Peg Powell down the room's little hallway. She was possessed of an intense desire to ask, "Are all Classics majors really crazy?" She said instead, "Do you know anything else about the Fourth Ericson ghost?"

  "Oh, certainly. She throws Chase and Phillips and B. F. Skinner out the window."

  "But then what does she use to prop up her bookcase?"

  "Skeat," said Peg, with every evidence of sincerity.

  Janet, who had spent the past month in a somewhat overwrought state and been up most of the previous night packing—for why hurry when you had only half a mile to travel to college?—collapsed upon Molly's desk, whooping.

  "You didn't look like a giggler," said Molly, shaking her hands briskly and gripping the hockey stick again. Christina's bed was beginning to resemble a drawing of an irregular geometrical solid.

  "Sorry," said Janet, with the tears running down her fac e. Her stomach felt as if

  Andrew had jumped on it."No, no, that's a good thing. Nobody wants a stuffy roommate, even if she does read Madeleine L'Engle. Hello, what can we do for you?"

  "Carry on," said Peg Powell. "If that works, I want to borrow your hockey stick."

  "See?" said Molly, generally. "She knows what it is."

  "I went to a pretentious Eastern girls' school," said Peg apologetically.

  "So did I," said Molly.

  Christina and Janet looked at one another with what Janet recognized as complete sympathy, the first moment of it that they had experienced. Neither the apologetic tone nor the deprecatory adjective alleviated their reaction in the slightest.

  For two seconds the Midwest was arrayed against the East. This threesome might work after all. Then Molly hit the bed again.

  With a prolonged screeching, the upper bunk slid down its uprights and landed on the lower bunk, on Christina's pink-and-blue patchwork quilt, with a force that made the springs groan. A collection of dust and anonymous bits of stuff sprang out and suffused the sunny air of the room. Peg Powell said, "O moi egoh." Christina made a pathetic but muffled noise, as if somebody had stepped on her foot in church.

  Janet managed not to laugh again; if that had been her own quilt, she would have been furious. Molly, utterly unperturbed, dropped the hockey stick and examined the joints that connected the bed. "Uh-huh," she said. "Now that they've been loosened, these just twist off." And she twisted them off. The uprights swayed.

  "What you ought to do," said Peg, "is put up a notice on the bulletin board in one of the new dorms with the tiny rooms—Dunbar or maybe Forbes. They've got normal beds and no space, so maybe they'll trade. May I borrow that hockey stick?"

  "Well," said Molly dubiously, "I don't know. I think I've cracked it."

  "Try women's Phys Ed," said Janet. "There's a field hockey course this term; I saw it in the catalog."

  "If I can get one," said Peg to Molly, "will you come and apply it to the bed?"

  "Sure," said Molly. "If you help us lift Christina's top bunk off her bottom one."

/>   "Peg's not very big," said Christina. "We can do it, Molly."

  "Though she be little, yet she is fierce," said Janet.

  Nobody paid the slightest attention to this; Peg merely remarked, "You need four people to balance it," and the four of them, gasping, moved the upper piece of the bed off the lower and let it fall, which it did with an unmelodious groan and a thump that bounced dust out of the rug.

  "The downstairs neighbors'll be up here next," said Christina.

  Peg went off with a remark about meeting them at dinner if they wanted to eat in Taylor Hall. Christina brushed the bits of bed off her quilt and resumed her unpacking.

  "What did Peg say that was so funny?" said Molly to Janet, sitting down on Janet's desk.

  Janet laughed again, and told her.

  "What's Skeat?" said Molly.

  "It's the standard Chaucer text," said Janet.

  "Why is that funny?"

  "It's the same size as the remedial math book."

  "What?"

  "That's what I say, too," said Christina.

  Janet filled them in on the campus folklore about the old bookcases; they were polite but puzzled.

  "Tell you what," said Molly, delving about in Janet's sealing wax and trying to fit the signet onto her thumb, "we'll use it as an index of college-induced madness. You tell us the same thing next fall, and the fall after, and see if we laugh."

  "All right," said Janet. She put the unread books up next to the Hermann Hesse.

  Something was perturbing her; something was wrong with the joke. A member of the class of 1899 would not, of course, have had a remedial math book, the educational system having been better organized back then. And if she were a Classics major, she would need the Chase and Phillips for other things, even if she hadn't thrown it out the window. So it made sense for her to prop up her bookcase with Skeat. If she would have had Skeat. But would she have had Chase and Phillips?