Becky called on Saturday afternoon to find out if Gentian would mind her asking Erin to have dinner and spend the evening with them.
“Sure,” said Gentian. “We could just ask her to spend the night, too—I don’t have any super-private news.”
“I thought of that, but her mother doesn’t want her gone two nights in a row.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“When’s your lunar eclipse?”
“Sunday night. Well, Monday morning. Midnight-twenty-six.”
“Too bad it’s not tonight.”
“I know, it’s supposed to be clear as clear and very cold. Perfect conditions.”
“I meant you could bring the telescope over.”
“Well, it’s kind of cumbersome. And the moon’ll be in the south. I think there’s a house in the way. You could have come over here, if it was tonight.”
“It’d just be a pity if it suddenly stopped working for the eclipse.”
“I know, but it’s been fine.”
“Well, I’ll see you this evening.”
Erin was already there when Gentian arrived at Becky’s. Becky’s parents were going out, so the three of them got to have their supper on trays in Becky’s room, a great relief. Jeremy had to come eat with them—his baby-sitter wasn’t there yet—but he was, if less wonderful than Becky thought him, at least a perfectly reasonable child. He wanted to recite long passages of Dr. Seuss, but Erin could match him, so they had a pleasant enough time.
“Thanks for letting me crash your party,” Erin said to Gentian, when Becky had taken the trays and her brother downstairs, to keep him company until the baby-sitter arrived.
“It’s okay. Is something the matter?”
“Not exactly. I did want to talk to you guys.”
“You talked to me all day yesterday.”
“Yes, but I wanted to talk to both of you.”
“Is this Giant Ant business?”
“Yes,” said Erin, in a tone that did not encourage further questions.
“Tell me what you’ve been reading,” said Gentian.
Erin had been reading The Origin of Species, Rock ’n’ Roll Summer, Weetzie Bat, The Night Gift, The Giver, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and Morphogenesis.
Gentian inquired respectfully after all the ones she had not read. Before she became an astronomer, she too had read as copiously and voraciously as Erin. She had even looked in astronomical catalogs for the special filter that, according to the Mushroom Planet books, would allow her to see Basidium through a telescope. She should remember how much there was to read, the next time she was balked by the weather. The alternative seemed to be to get seriously to work on mathematics— Maria Mitchell had been a brilliant mathematician—and she did not want to face that just now. Besides, there were computers these days, which ought to make some sort of difference. She had to learn to use a camera with the telescope, too, and it seemed standard for astronomers to develop their own pictures. Well, nineteenth-century ones, anyway. Professional ones today didn’t necessarily do that.
“You’re woolgathering again,” said Erin.
“Sorry. Is The Night Gift as good as Moonflash?”
Becky came back, having handed Jeremy over to the babysitter, and put in the middle of the bed a tin of chocolate-chip cookies, one of Chinese sausage rolls, and one of pancakes stuffed with spinach, potatoes, and cauliflower.
“Now,” she said to Erin, “what’s up?”
“Alma thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“Alma?” said Gentian. “I thought you were going to say Steph thought so.”
“Steph knows you are and figures everything will be fine when she unveils her Plan, whatever it is.”
“I’m not avoiding Alma, truly.”
“She says she knows you think she moved the planchette, because you’re a materialist, and if it moved one of us must have moved it, and she’s the obvious candidate.”
Gentian snorted. “Only Alma would think she’s the obvious candidate. She doesn’t know the meaning of stealth.”
“She says your friend says you think she did it.”
“What friend?”
“Come on, Genny.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t get it.”
“She said you’d know, and after yesterday I know too.”
Dominic?” said Gentian. “I’ll kill him. I never told him anything of the sort—and I bet he didn’t say anything straight out to Alma, either, he wouldn’t know how. He just made her think that was what he meant.”
“Is that somehow better?” said Erin.
“Not if he did it on purpose, but I don’t know if he did.” Of course he did, and why was she defending him?
“Does she think I think so too?” said Becky.
“She thinks you’re avoiding her out of loyalty to Genny.”
“I bet Dominic insinuated that, too,” said Gentian. She jumped off the bed. “I’d better call Alma, right now. Can I use the phone?”
“She’s at Steph’s.”
“Oh, great, the chance of getting through is about like the chance of discovering a comet with binoculars.”
“What would a comet want with binoculars?” said Becky. Gentian stuck out her tongue and dialed Steph’s number. Sure enough, the line was busy.
“Just as well,” said Gentian, returning to the bed and taking a handful of cookies. “She’s so stubborn, we’ll need a plan.”
“I’m upset with Alma,” said Becky. “Why did she believe Dominic, and why didn’t she talk to us?”
“Because it’s a scientific issue, or a religious one, I think,” said Erin, appropriating the tin of sausage rolls. “She thinks her defense is something you won’t believe in, so she’s screwed.”
“She’s a bonehead, is what she is,” said Gentian. “Her defense is that she’s honest and we know it.”
“But what happened on Halloween, then?”
“How should I know? I keep an open mind. I haven’t got a hypothesis.”
“I think you’d better, before you talk to Alma.”
“Well, I haven’t, what am I supposed to do, make one up?”
“I think you’d better.”
“No, wait, that’s silly,” said Becky. “Let’s just test Alma’s hypothesis. No, I mean, let’s test what she thinks Gentian’s hypothesis is.”
“What?” said Erin.
“Yes!” said Gentian. “We’ll have another seance without Alma and see what happens. If the planchette goes crazy—oh, gosh, I’ll have to get another one, that one’s just about disintegrated—then we’ll have proved she didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“What if nothing happens?” said Erin.
“Then we’ll have to wait for next Halloween when the conditions are similar and maybe by then she won’t be such a bone-head.”
“I guess it’s worth a try,” said Erin, dubiously.
“It’s not a proper controlled experiment,” said Gentian, “but it will—it will—demonstrate our confidence in her, don’t you think? And I bet the four of us will find something just as weird happening. I really don’t have a hypothesis, but I bet it’s just us, because we’ve been together so long and know how one another think. Thinks? What’s wrong with that sentence?”
“Steph won’t stand for it,” said Becky, not only refusing the grammatical question but perpetrating an ambiguous response.
Gentian was sure that Becky was aware of this, and while she couldn’t help smiling, she decided not to say anything about it. “Well,” she said, answering what Becky meant rather than what she said, as Becky was always being asked to do by other people, “nobody thinks Steph did it, so she doesn’t have to be there.”
“I’m not sure that’s a very scientific assertion,” said Erin.
“I don’t care about being scientific, I don’t see how you can be about something like a ouija board anyway. I just want to make Alma stop thinking we think she did it.”
“Put a big red mark on the calendar,” said Erin to Becky. “Gentian has just said that she doesn’t care about being scientific.”
“To be accurate,” said Gentian, “I don’t think it applies to the situation.” Her mother had said that the year her father took in a pregnant dog and offered to build a kennel in the back yard.
Gentian called Steph’s house again, and got a busy signal again. They settled down to play Scrabble, trying Steph’s number again between games. Erin won two, and they had to outlaw two-letter words and speak to her very sternly, but she finally entered into the spirit of things in the third and produced “androgyne,” while Becky triumphed with “Alexandria.” Gentian managed, even in her distraction, to uphold her dignity by spelling “Xanthippe” in the fourth game, where the best Becky could do was “settlement” and Erin tried to make “prestidigitation” and left out two syllables.
By then they had decided not to call Alma at Steph’s after all because it would mean they could not conceal from Steph the plan to have another seance. Possibly Alma would not agree to concealment anyway, but she could not be expected to take a long, agitated telephone call at Steph’s house and not tell her what it was all about. Gentian would call Alma tomorrow when she woke up.
Becky’s parents came back, and gave Erin a ride home when they took the baby-sitter. Gentian and Becky sat and looked at one another over the Scrabble board and the empty tins.
“I think you’d better tell me about Dominic,” said Becky.
Gentian had been expecting the question, and had even framed several answers. She found it remarkably hard to begin. It was like revealing something you had promised to keep a secret. She had to eat two cookies and drink half a glass of milk before she could manage. Becky sat watching her with a vaguely anxious expression.
“All right. Well. He doesn’t say things straight out,” said Gentian. “He uses a lot of quotations and he is the absolute king of the non sequitur. He makes my father look like the most linear thinker in the entire universe. So it’s not exactly easy to figure out what he’s getting at. He insinuates things, or you think he might be; and if you ask him what he means, he just quotes something else or changes the subject again.”
“I can’t imagine why anybody puts up with him.”
He’s beautiful, thought Gentian. But it wasn’t just that. If he were stupid or banal rather than perplexing, he might be nice to look at but she would not continually want to talk to him. “Well,” she said. “It’s a little like a computer game, maybe. No, that’s not what I mean. Like a puzzle. No, not that either.”
“Erin’s met him?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“She didn’t like him.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least I know I like Micky.”
“Oh, gosh, yes, you went to a movie yesterday. How was it?”
“Mixed,” said Becky. “Definitely mixed. We did go see Henry V, and he just hated it.”
“Why?”
“Well, he doesn’t really like Shakespeare at all, but he thought, if you had to do Shakespeare, you shouldn’t do it that way.”
“I don’t see what right he has to an opinion of how to stage something he doesn’t like.”
“Well, there is that.”
“So what was the good part?”
“Well, some of that was. We had a good argument. And I liked trying to figure out how he thought. And he does have a sense of humor, and he likes Emily Dickinson, so he’s not totally devoid of literary taste.”
“It’s the same thing,” said Gentian. “It’s the same reason I keep talking to Dominic. It’s a puzzle. You want to know how somebody can think like that.”
“That’s how I feel about Steph,” said Becky. “Except that we’ve known her longer and we know she’s smart and sensitive and thoughtful and laughs when you don’t expect it.”
“And she won’t let you down,” said Gentian.
They looked at each other.
“Yes, that’s what we don’t know yet about Micky and Dominic.”
“What else did you do?”
“We went to Lac Vien and argued about food, and then we walked along the river and argued about nature, and then we went to the movie, and my dad picked us up and we argued about how to get to Micky’s house.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you liked to argue so much.”
“I don’t know if I’d like it all the time.”
“Do you guys agree about anything except Emily Dickinson?”
“That we like to argue.”
“Great.”
“It beats never saying anything right out and upsetting Alma.”
“It’s not the same thing. I’m not going out with Dominic.”
“Would you, if he asked?”
“How would I know he was asking?” said Gentian, and they dissolved into giggles. But as they sprawled on the bed later, listening to the soundtrack of Henry V, she knew that while Becky had first instituted the comparison between Micky and Dominic, she had perpetuated it, and that denying its validity was dishonest.
When they got up, she called Alma’s house, but Alma was still at Steph’s. Gentian packed up her belongings and went home. It was bright and extremely cold outside. People were still shoveling their walks, and some, perhaps having gone away for Thanksgiving, had not done it yet. Gentian plowed happily along, and sometimes when she struck a patch of cleared, salted pavement, she walked in the piled-up snow instead. It scattered in dense sunny sparkles, like stars in light instead of darkness. Maybe the core of the galaxy was like that.
When she got home, their half of the driveway had been shoveled and her mother was working on the front porch. The sidewalk was still pristine.
“When icicles hang by the wall,” Gentian’s mother sang, from inside a cloud of fine snow. It was her snow-shoveling song.
Rosemary didn’t like it. She thought “Then nightly sings the staring owl” was creepy and “While greasy Joan doth keel the pot” was gross. “Well, that’s why we didn’t name any of you Joan,” her mother would say cheerfully. “Or Marian, come to that. No sense in being teased about your nose all winter.” Gentian, having climbed the unshoveled steps, stood thinking of this and regarding her mother with the sense of disbelief and resignation her parents regularly inspired in her. Only they could possibly believe that having a name from an obscure song in Shakespeare would subject a child to more teasing than being called after a bunch of plants—especially plants nobody else was named after.
“Oh, hello,” said her mother breathlessly. “I didn’t see you. If you’ll finish the steps and shovel the walk, I’ll make tea and cinnamon toast.”
“Let Daddy make it,” said Gentian, taking the shovel and handing her mother her suitcase. “You always burn it.”
“That’s just my shorthand,” said her mother. “Good Lord, what is in this, neutronium? When I say I’m going to cook something, I almost always mean I am going to ask your father to do so.”
She went inside, whistling the tune of her song, and Gentian started shoveling. It was one of her most hated tasks, but she hoped to see Dominic. She thought of singing something herself, so he would know it was she out there, and not her mother, but her singing voice was not one of her more admirable attributes. She couldn’t think of a suitable song, anyway.
It clouded over and began to snow again while she was working, small constant flakes from a sky the color of Mrs. Zimmerman’s hair. That ought to mean she would have company soon, even if it wasn’t Dominic. The Meriweathers and the Zimmermans had always shared the shoveling of the vacant lot’s sidewalk, and Mrs. Zimmerman didn’t believe in putting off unpleasant tasks.
Gentian shoveled her way down the remaining porch steps, the short flat walk, the long flight of terrace steps, in a glow of virtue and a cloud of small sparkles. When she got to the bottom of the steps and paused for breath she found Mrs. Zimmerman standing, shovel in hand, regarding the clean bare sidewalk in front of the new house.
“You did all of it!” cried Gentian.
“No,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, consideringly.
“They did it?”
“No. Look at it, Gentian.”
Gentian looked. From the far side of the driveway the Meriweathers now shared with the Hardys to the place where Mrs. Zimmerman’s sedums brushed the sidewalk, the concrete in front of the new house was not only clear of snow, but dry.
“Eugh,” said Gentian. “Did they spread some new awful chemical on it?”
“They didn’t do anything,” said Mrs. Zimmerman. “I’ve been out here, or in the yard, all day.”
Gentian stood and squinted at the falling snow. The flakes were so tiny that it was hard to follow a single one to its resting place. She half expected many things: to see the snow all deflected from the sidewalk to the grass on either side; to see the flakes land and sizzle instantly like water on a griddle; to see the snow blown aside. She saw none of these. The snow fell, but it did not reach the sidewalk.
“That’s very weird,” she said.
“I’d give a year’s good compost,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, “to know that woman’s first name.”
“Would you?” said Gentian, whose compost piles never heated up, so that she had to wait three years for anybody else’s one-year compost. Then, with a jolt, she thought, But I haven’t got a garden any more. There’s nowhere to put the compost. She glared at the Hardys’ snow-covered lawn. No tomatoes, no basil, no bitter-juiced gentian, bluer than anybody’s eyes; no snowdrops and no chrysanthemums. Why didn’t it bother me before, she thought, what was I paying attention to instead? Astronomy, sure, but they always fit together. The thing closest to hand and the thing farthest away, Mom said. Stay up all night stargazing, weed before it gets hot, go to bed.
Dominic, I’ve been paying attention to Dominic. Only he’s a lot more like a star than like a plant. She grinned, saw that Mrs. Zimmerman was looking at her curiously, and said hastily, “Because I think I can find out. I mean, if you don’t want to just ask her.”
“I don’t, and neither do you,” said Mrs. Zimmerman.
Gentian thought of the drab medium-sized woman in the shapeless clothes, her hesitancies, her conventionalities. She looked at Mrs. Zimmerman, all six foot four of her, in a long red down coat and a black scarf, her dark gray hair spangled with snow.
“Don’t you?”
“No compost for just asking her,” said Mrs. Zimmerman. “Now, let’s finish your walk, shall we?”
Gentian went on thinking on how Dominic could have distracted her from the disappearance of her garden. A daytime star, she thought, like a supernova. Maybe I should try looking at him with averted vision. Only why, when he’s so bright? She tossed a shovelful of snow onto the growing pile and giggled. Why, because he might be associated with dim companions, or with a nebulosity. His mother was dim enough, his father less noticeable than the nebulae.
When they had finished shoveling, Gentian invited Mrs. Zimmerman in for the promised tea and cinnamon toast. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. Junie was making rum balls in the kitchen, and glared ferociously. She would require careful handling. Gentian was still choosing both her words and her overall strategy, while Mrs. Zimmerman took her boots off, when her father came into the kitchen.
“That was fast,” he said.
“The Hardy’s walk didn’t need shoveling,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, shaking snow off her braid onto the rag rug that Rosemary had made in Girl Scouts.
“Didn’t it?” said her father.
Gentian watched their eyes meet.
“Look,” said Juniper, with suppressed violence. “I’m trying to work in here.”
“Come into my parlor,” said Gentian’s father to Gentian. “We can make Rosemary some cocoa in the microwave.” He always called Mrs. Zimmerman Rosemary, which caused a lot of confusion and made his daughter Rosemary mopey.
Gentian was annoyed that Juniper could drive away three people, two of whom were grownups, a different two of whom had just done some real work outside, but she followed obediently. She hoped her father and Mrs. Zimmerman would go on talking about the Hardys’ sidewalk.
Her father’s office was a sunroom originally intended as a breakfast room. It had four windows overlooking the back yard and another two facing the sharp drop into the Mallorys’ side yard. It was painted bright yellow, with dazzling white trim, somewhat marred by fingerprints and some smudges where Pounce periodically rubbed his whiskers.
Her father had two filing cabinets, two black metal bookcases, another of Rosie’s rag rugs, an old chrome-and-formica kitchen table with a computer on it, and a spindly, improbable-looking, insanely comfortable office chair. He gave this to Mrs. Zimmerman. Gentian, as usual, sat on the rug. It was red, green, yellow, black, and white, and she liked to find shapes in it.
Her father busied himself with the cocoa. Pounce slid out from under the computer table and climbed onto Gentian’s lap. Mrs. Zimmerman took her father’s copy of Strunk and White from his desk and opened it seemingly at random.
“Well, R. A.,” said Gentian’s father, shutting the door of the microwave on the cocoa and starting the oven humming, “how goes the neighborhood?”
“Still abuzz,” said Mrs. Zimmerman. “Is there a Mr. Hardy? Well, you never see him. She’s so closed, don’t you think? And always borrowing strange tools.”
“Well, that last makes sense,” said Gentian’s father, sitting on one of his filing cabinets. “They have ordinary tools; they just need to borrow the odd ones.”
“Nobody with a brand-new house should need a snake, a fish, and a punch-down tool all within three months.”
“It’s an ill-built brand-new house,” said Gentian’s father. The microwave chimed, and he took the mugs out one by one, peered at them, stirred each with an old red enameled chopstick, and handed them around.
“Well,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, “what can you expect from something that went up so fast?”
Gentian’s father lifted his head from blowing on his cocoa. He looked like Maria Mitchell about to pounce on a dustball.
“No,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, just as if he had spoken. “Ira doesn’t think so either.”
“No,” said Gentian’s father. “Neither does Kate.”
“Odd,” said Mrs. Zimmerman.
“Only if it were a matter of perception.”
“It is a matter of perception.”
Gentian had been looking at Pounce’s ears when the shape of the conversation changed. Now she had to go on looking at Pounce, lest they remember she was there and change the subject.
Pounce’s ears were very pink and clean on the inside and covered with short dense white fur on the outside. Her father had found him hiding in the empty rabbit hutch on a cold day in February, so they had named him after Junie’s first rabbit, an ill-tempered and ill-fated creature who challenged a German shepherd to a duel with horrible, if predictable, results. Junie had seemed largely unperturbed, but Rosie, who was four at the time, still had nightmares about it.
Pounce began to purr. Neither adult in the room had said anything more. Gentian did not think it was because they had suddenly remembered her presence. She could feel them arguing without arguing. Her parents did that sometimes too. Rosie was very good at it. Junie never did it; Junie was an overt arguer par excellence.
“Well,” said Mrs. Zimmerman at last.
If her mother had said that, it would have meant something like, This is too pleasant a setting for an argument, I’ll get back to you later, which Rosemary had in fact once heard her say not to their father but to her visiting roommate from college.
When Mrs. Zimmerman said it, it seemed to mean something more like, Yes, all right, the situation is more complicated than I make it sound. Steph said that a lot. She had to, because she was so fond of sweeping pronouncements that nobody would let her get away with.
Gentian’s father said peaceably, “There’s perception and perception.”
“Kate’s,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, “is more like interception.”
Gentian blinked at her; why make peace and then insult her mother for no reason? Her father, however, laughed, and asked Gentian if her cocoa was bitter enough.
“It’s fine,” said Gentian. She fixed Mrs. Zimmerman with the glare she used on Steph. “Tell him about the sidewalk.”
“He saw it, Gentian,” said Mrs. Zimmerman.
Gentian looked at her in disbelief. She sounded as parental as any parent, much worse than either of Gentian’s own, a lot more like Steph’s. That utterly dismissive use of one’s name was almost more pedagogical than parental—the way teachers at her other schools had talked to her before she got into the open school, where they assumed you were human even after you filled the counselor’s office with balloons.
Mrs. Zimmerman’s tone of voice was, in short, odious, and completely unlike anything in their long friendship.
Mrs. Zimmerman seemed oblivious to this, but Gentian’s father looked as though he might have noticed. “I saw that the sidewalk was dry,” he said to Gentian, “but not what happened to the snow.”
“Nothing happened to it,” said Gentian. “It just wasn’t there.”
“Maxwell’s demon,” said Gentian’s father.
“Pity they can’t patent it,” said Mrs. Zimmerman.
“It would cost too much,” said Gentian’s father.
Gentian knew how much a patent search would cost because Erin had investigated the matter when she thought she had invented a new kind of bicycle pump; but she did not think her father was talking about money.
After she had drunk her cocoa and ascertained that the two adults were going to talk about politics, Gentian went into the kitchen and made cinnamon toast. She had planned to do so whether Junie was there or not, but Junie had departed, leaving a smell of rum and spices and four large tins with threatening notes stuck to them. Gentian took her toast upstairs and called Alma’s number, and after she had gone through two furry-voiced brothers, one of whom regaled her with the news that his hamster had just had babies and the other of whom yelled, “Alma! Telephone! It’s Gentian!” with the regularity of a foghorn while apparently standing right next to the owner of the hamster, Alma shooed them away and said, “Genny?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“You aren’t mad?”
“Yes, I am, you dodo, I’m mad you thought for a moment we’d believe you moved the planchette.”
“But nothing else could have happened that you’d believe.”
“I believe I don’t know what happened!”
“Do you?”
“What the hell has your church been telling you about scientists now?”
“Nothing, and don’t swear at me. It was Dominic.”
“And what did he say?”
“Praised you to the skies,” said Alma, with an unaccustomed note of irony. “Said how you were so objective and clear-minded and logical and so good at eliminating wrong answers.”
Gentian felt slightly winded. She bit her lip hard on an impulse to say, “He did?” so as to make Alma say it all over again, or say more. “So,” she said, and had to clear her throat, “so, he didn’t say I thought you did it, you just deduced he meant that?” “He also said,” said Alma, more ironically, “that you were so fucking honest yourself you couldn’t forgive dishonesty in anybody else, even in your very dearest friends.”
“He didn’t say fucking.”
“Nope. Too much of a gentleman, I’m sure.”
“But, well, so what? Why did you believe him?”
“Come on, Gentian. You know what he’s like. What he gave me to understand was that you had talked to him about it all and he was providing a friendly warning.”
“Well, I didn’t, and I wasn’t. Well, I mean, I did tell him about it, but I didn’t say you did it, because you didn’t.”
“Oh, that’s real logical.”
“Listen, God damn it.”
“Don’t blaspheme at me.”
“Then don’t be an idiot. Look. Becky and Erin and I are going to do a control experiment. We’re going to have another seance without you.”
“And without Steph.”
“Well, yeah, she wouldn’t come, and it’d be nice if you didn’t tell her.”
“I don’t know if I can promise that.”
“Well, think about it.”
“What good will another seance do, anyway?”
“I think,” said Gentian, goaded into claiming a hypothesis despite herself, “that it was just the mental influence of the Giant Ants that moved the planchette, so the three of us having another seance should make it happen again, and you won’t be there, and then you’ll be cleared. Not that we think you need clearing, but it’s the only way to persuade you.”
“It might work better than swearing at me.”
“I take it that means, not very well.”
“I didn’t feel what Steph felt,” said Alma, “but I don’t think seances are an especially hot idea. I don’t mean anything supernatural even. But look how much trouble this one’s caused.”
“Only because you’re a dodo.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Only because Dominic said a lot of ambiguous things to you and you acted like a dodo about it.” Only, she thought suddenly, because I talked to Dominic and gave him something to talk to Alma about. “When did he talk to you, anyway?”
“I was putting salt on the sidewalk Thanksgiving Day and he just walked up to me.”
“Huh.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk to him about me,” said Alma. “If you have to talk to him.”
“Okay, I won’t. But don’t you listen to him that way, either. I don’t think he could have made you think we were accusing you if you weren’t already worried.”
“See, that’s just it, he made me worried, when he talked to me before.”
“But why? Who is he anyway? Why do you care what he thinks?”
“I think he’s crazy,” said Alma.
When she had hung up the phone, Gentian tried to settle down to her homework, while keeping a wary eye on the weather. She dispatched her history and her algebra and then sat looking at Julius Caesar. She could ask her family to read Act IV, but they might not like having missed Act III. Her study group would read it tomorrow, laboring and stumbling and, for a change, giggling; but she wanted to look at it by herself first.
She had a bit of Act III left, having quit in disgust when Antony became so bloodthirsty. She found the place and read on. At the beginning of Act IV, the Plebians—people like me, thought Gentian, moodily, who are going to have to work for a living— demanded to be satisfied about Caesar’s death. Brutus and Cassius both agreed to speak to them. Brutus made a very pretty speech; Gentian made a note to show it to Becky, for its sentences if not for its sentiment. Its sentiment seemed to be that Caesar was wonderful but too dangerous to live.
Gentian sat thinking about it. If I hadn’t gotten so mad at Antony for his last speech, about the dogs of war, she thought, I’d like this a lot. It’s very reasonable. On the surface it’s not a bit like Antony. But this last part, who is so base that would be a bondman, who is so vile, that would not love his country— implying that if you think they shouldn’t have killed Caesar, you must be a bondman and not love your country—that’s stirring them up too, just like Antony wanted to. Well, not just like; Brutus doesn’t want them rampaging all over the place murdering people’s babies. But still.
Brutus ended, “As I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.”
This sat a little better with Gentian. The Plebians liked it a lot, yelling that Brutus should live, and be brought with triumph home, and be given a statue with his ancestors, and be proclaimed Caesar.
“Whew,” said Gentian.
Brutus persuaded them to let him go home alone, and to stay and listen to Antony. They let him go, and grumbled about how it was certain that Caesar was a tyrant, and that they were well rid of him, and that Antony had better not speak any harm of Brutus.
Antony then gave his famous speech. Gentian was familiar with bits and pieces of it, and had heard people in speech class declaim the entire thing. In context, it was really wicked. He did point out a few facts: that Caesar had brought home captives to fill Rome’s coffers (and who cares how they felt about it? thought Gentian), that he had wept when the poor cried (and a fat lot of good that did them, thought Gentian), and that he had refused the crown thrice. Now, that was true, it had happened earlier in the play. Antony added, after each fact, “But Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious; and Brutus is an honorable man.”
It impressed the Plebians tremendously. They decided that Caesar had not been ambitious after all, and that Antony was the noblest man in Rome.
The crowd demanded that he read them Caesar’s will. He explained that he couldn’t because it would inflame them. They demanded again. Antony said he feared he had wronged the honorable men who slew Caesar, and the crowd cried that those men were traitors and demanded again to hear the will. Antony did not read the will, but gave a long speech about Caesar’s mantle and whose dagger had stabbed where and how what really killed Caesar was not the knives but the knowledge that Brutus had betrayed him.
“Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.”
“Wow,” said Gentian. She remembered reading Act I with her family, and Cassius saying, “No, Caesar hath it not, but you and I, and honest Casca, we have the falling-sickness.”
Caesar had had it, though, in both senses. I bet everybody in this play has it, thought Gentian. I don’t think I want to read the rest of this.
She had better finish Act IV, at least, or she wouldn’t understand it when they read it tomorrow. The study group’s reading aloud did not, as a rule, aid understanding; it was more likely to cloud it. She read on. Antony ended his speech by whipping the mantle away and showing the body of Caesar. The crowd moved from, “Oh piteous spectacle!” to “We will be revenged!” in short order, and yelled, “Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” The dogs of war, thought Gentian.
Antony told them not to let him stir them up to mutiny, and added that he couldn’t do it, anyway, because he was not eloquent as Brutus was, but that if he were Brutus, he would certainly move the very stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
Gentian sat back for a moment, feeling slightly dizzy. What a hypocrite, she thought. The crowd, of course, said it would mutiny, and just to make sure he read them Caesar’s will after all. They scattered shouting about burning and tearing things up, and Antony said, “Now let it work.”
In the last scene, a crowd killed Cinna the poet because he had the same name as one of the conspirators.
“Bleah,” said Gentian, in heartfelt tones, and shut the book smartly. Maybe Romeo and Juliet would have been better after all.
By evening a pall of low cloud had settled over everything and was emitting a maddening mist of light snow. Gentian stayed up just in case, and might have seen a dull glow behind the clouds where the moon was, but it was hopeless.
“I am going to live on the moon,” she said to Maria Mitchell. Then she laughed, because of course you could not study an eclipse of the moon while you were on the moon itself.