Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  Mr. X had kissed Juniper good night at the foot of the terrace steps, in the shadow of the honeysuckle bush. Gentian knew from the diary that this was not Juniper’s first kiss, but it seemed to have impressed her more than the others.

  The last line of the entry was, “And then I showed him that I am an intellectual after all.”

  Gentian stared at this with intense frustration, and turned over several leaves to make sure the entry was not somewhere continued. Then she read rapidly through all the other entries. Juniper mooned over Mr. X. a great deal, but she never wrote down how she had shown him that she was an intellectual. It didn’t matter, though. Her date was almost certainly The Light Prince.

  They had another date over Thanksgiving weekend.

  Gentian closed the diary and put it back into the chair cover. She shut off the light in the sunroom and came slowly back into the bedroom, tripping over cushions and dirty laundry and recovering herself absently. She sat in the desk chair and looked at the computer. Juniper must have agreed to go out with him just to prove him wrong. It didn’t seem like her. She was always blathering on and on about soulmates and perfect agreement being the only basis for a romantic attachment—which, of course, didn’t make much sense when you thought about it, because she loved to argue so much.

  Gentian turned the computer on, got it to call the BBS, and logged on. She remembered that her password was “SCRABBLE,” and it was still good.

  On the chat echo, the discussion of whether Juniper and Crystal were the same person was still raging. Juniper had not said anything in her own person or in Crystal’s; she had to write for Jason, of course, since it was he who had made the accusation. Gentian, skimming a number of uninspired messages, thought that Juniper had truly missed a bet. If anybody had accused either Juniper and Jason or Crystal and Jason of being the same person, the argument would have been much more interesting and much more germane to Juniper’s alleged inquiry, because people would certainly have begun explaining why Jason could not be female or Juniper male.

  Hot Dud had run Juniper and Crystal’s messages through a style checker and come out with different indexes for each. He said he offered this for what it might be worth.

  Gentian got out of there and looked at the culture echo. The conversation about whether Junie was an intellectual was still going on, but without the benefit of either Juniper or The Light Prince. They were engaged in a furious and not very pleasant argument about whether women should be allowed in combat. Juniper’s feminism, though raging, was not of the same sort as Gentian’s: Juniper believed women were different from, but either just as good as or better than men, depending on the context. The Light Prince believed women were different, but at the same time he thought they were terribly impressive for having children and completely unimpressive at much of anything else. If Junie ever brings him home, I’ll have to kill him, thought Gentian. And if he thinks Junie would make a good mother, he’s out of his mind. She’d have a fit if her daughter spent eight hours in the henhouse waiting for an egg.

  The argument was so far advanced, and The Light Prince was making so many assumptions at once, that it would be hours of work to catch up with and dismantle all of them. Juniper could get at most of them, anyway, if she would calm down long enough to think about it.

  Gentian couldn’t bear it, though. She finally posted a brief message, still as Betony, recommending The Mismeasure of Woman “to everybody on either side of this controversy.” She hoped this would make the people on the wrong side more likely to read it, if she did not say outright that it could be used to demolish their arguments; but then again, the title itself might tell them too much.

  Gentian left them to it and went upstairs. I wonder how much credit that kiss is good for, she thought; I wonder if she’ll still go out with him in a month if he keeps this up.

  Her room was beautifully cold. Maria Mitchell hopped out of the bathtub when Gentian opened the bedroom door, walked halfway across the wooden floor picking her feet up and shaking them as if she were walking in water, and finally bolted back into the bathroom, muttering.

  Gentian put on a wool sweater and her fingerless gloves, and sat down with her telescope. Saturn was up. When she had finished doting on it, she took a farewell look at the Summer Triangle, pondering Deneb, Vega, and Altair as if she had never seen them before. Since she was there, she looked long and happily at Epsilon Lyrae, which was one star to the naked eye but two to the telescope, and had the further valuable trait of being an actual binary, two stars that orbited each other; as opposed to two stars that simply seemed very close together from where the Earth happened to be. Then she teased out Zeta Lyrae, another true binary but a much tighter pair—like Becky and me, she thought, while Epsilon is more like Erin and me. Zeta Lyrae benefited from the use of averted vision to bring its fainter component better into view. That wasn’t like Gentian and Becky, though; you had only to look right at them to see that they were best friends.

  She moved away from the neighborhood of Vega and found, between Deneb and Altair, the third true binary in this bit of sky. Sixty-one Cygni, hanging against the powdering of the Milky Way, was two fine clear stars. Finally she looked at Albireo, at the foot of the Northern Cross: a bright yellow star with a dimmer blue one behind it. This was not a confirmed binary, but she liked it anyway.

  Gentian yawned and then shivered. It was only ten o’clock, and she would have liked to revisit the North American Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula, but the moon was full; and, frail, faint, gray as they were on even the darkest night, with the most averted of vision, they would not be visible. Besides, she still had some homework to do. She shut away the telescope, closed the windows, and turned the radiator back on.

  On Tuesday it rained. November was a notoriously cloudy month, and Gentian had never been resigned to it, even before she became an astronomer. She asked her mother at dinner about putting in some of those outlets she had done the wiring for in the attic, in preparation for helping Dominic with his science project.

  “I don’t think he ever is going to do it,” said Rosemary. “We’ve never even seen him since.”

  “I saw him on Halloween,” said Gentian, “and he said he still meant to do it, but he didn’t seem to have a schedule.”

  Juniper dropped her fork, but when she picked it up again she was smiling. Gentian supposed she had designs on Dominic still and planned to commandeer the project.

  “I’ve got a lot of Girl Scout stuff right up until Christmas,” said Rosemary, “and I’m going winter camping in January.”

  “I’m very busy until Christmas too,” said their mother, “but if somebody with slightly more manual dexterity than a jar of peanut butter,” and she smiled across the table at their father, who rolled his eyes at her, “would like to help me, we can put in a half-dozen outlets in pretty short order next weekend.”

  “I can help you,” said Gentian, “as long as it’s not dark outside.”

  “I’d prefer to do it during daylight myself; it’s cold in that attic.”

  “We astronomers get used to that,” said Gentian loftily.

  Rosemary laughed; Juniper sneered.

  On Wednesday it was warm and hazy. On Thursday it rained. That evening the rain changed to snow, and it snowed all day on Friday. It stopped snowing on Saturday, but it was still cloudy. Gentian helped her mother put in outlets and thought about looking Dominic up in the phone book. She certainly knew his address. She called Becky instead and on Sunday afternoon they went with Steph, at Becky’s suggestion, to the Art Institute and looked at jade. Steph told Gentian that if she ever wanted to talk about the seance she must call Steph at once, even in the middle of the night. Gentian was able to say truthfully that if she ever did change her mind she would certainly let Steph know right away.

  On Monday afternoon while Gentian was reading Act IV of Julius Caesar with her study group, their teacher having decreed that if they could not schedule time out of class to get together, they must read it
in class, the sun came out, but by sunset clouds were oozing over the horizon again. On Monday, when she got up at 6: 15 to look at Venus and Jupiter, the sky was gray; and then after all that upper atmosphere preparation, it only sprinkled lightly in the afternoon. On Tuesday there were no clouds, but an amazing number of thick contrails created exactly the same effect. Gentian cursed Minnesota weather and any technology more modern than that necessary to make a good telescope, and pored moodily over a map of Arizona.

  On Tuesday the sky was a determined dark gray. Gentian came home from school and loitered about in the front yard, looking at the grass plugs in the lawn and at the bare flower beds, both of which hid bulbs, and tried to think about spring. When those bulbs first came up, there would not be much in the way of planetary doings, but she would see the Milky Way curved along the western sky, overlaid by Perseus and Betelgeuse, with Orion and Sirius and Aldebaran and the Pleiades all between it and the horizon; and overhead would be the Big Dipper and Regulus and the Coma Berenices. She still remembered how excited she had been when she read Heinlein’s short story about the blind singer Rhysling and realized that one of Rhysling’s songs, “Berenice’s Hair,” which she had thought was just more soppy romance, might actually refer to that constellation.

  When the flowers bloomed, in May, there would be not only the most dramatic partial eclipse of the sun available to watchers in these latitudes until sometime in 2017, there would also be a partial lunar eclipse later in the month. Besides that, Mercury would be visible to the naked eye, making a short backwards loop in the west-northwest between the middle of May and the middle of June. Venus and Jupiter would both be evening stars as well, and she would be able to study the constellation of Hercules, with the globular cluster M13 hiding in its keystone. When you turned the binoculars on that seeming single star, it became a small patch of fuzz; but when you gave it to the telescope it flowered into a brilliant patchy blue-and-white center surrounded by fine distinct points of light. Averted vision brought out more and finer points still.

  Gentian sighed heavily. If only her parents would move to Arizona. If only they would send her to Arizona. Why was there no astronomical boarding school for hopeful beginners?

  “Why so pale and wan, fond lover?” said Dominic just beside her.

  Gentian was so startled that she didn’t even jump. She simply froze. Then, as her mind processed what he had said, she blushed. I wish I were like Erin, she thought; if he said that to her she would just feel sardonic.

  “It’s the weather,” she said.

  “Very seasonable for the time of year.”

  “Yeah, right, and when a fellow’s hungry, what he wants is some victuals,” said Gentian, automatically, this being the Giant Ants’ response to any statement of the extremely obvious.

  Dominic had apparently not read the Narnia books, since he looked blank.

  “Did you have a nice Halloween?” said Gentian; she could talk to him about it now that the party was past.

  “Oh, indeed, I did such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.” His cool tone was more animated than usual, enough that Gentian found herself wondering when she had last seen Mrs. Hardy. She caught herself up quickly. Dominic quoted Hamlet all the time; it was not to be supposed he meant to be literal about it.

  “Junie went as Hamlet,” she said, “with his doublet all unbraced, you know. What did you go as?”

  “Myself, as I am,” said Dominic.

  “You look a little like Hamlet anyway, I guess.”

  “I am what I am.”

  Who isn’t, thought Gentian irritably. Or maybe he was quoting Popeye. It was awfully uphill work talking to him, really; he seemed to be better at doing. She did not feel she could bring the time machine up again so soon, though, after having been snubbed the last time.

  “Do you want to go see if Alma wants to play soccer?” she said desperately. She remembered in the next moment that Alma disliked Dominic, as she had every reason to do.

  “Hide fox, and all after?”

  “I don’t know that game.”

  “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

  “It sounds like a telemarketing scheme,” said Gentian, and giggled.

  Dominic looked blank again. This was some small revenge for the way he usually made her feel, but she still wanted to make the most of this encounter. She could suggest they call Erin and arrange to meet her in the park, but Erin didn’t like him either.

  “If I got my sisters to come out,” she said, “would you like to play soccer with us?”

  “They have pinned the door with a silver pin and put soft pillows under my head,” said Dominic, “but truly he seems to me to be equal to a god, who sitting opposite you gazes at you and hears you sweetly laughing.”

  Gentian was simultaneously flattered, amused, and stymied. This was not exactly what she had wanted to make of this encounter; what she wanted was to be sure of their continuing to see one another. Anybody could, she supposed, spout sweet phrases when he happened to run across her. For all she knew it was very tiring to feel equal to a god and he wouldn’t want to do it often. Not to mention that people who felt equal to a god would probably be laying down the law, sooner or later. She didn’t want to be sweetly laughing all the time, anyway.

  “Come sit on the porch,” she said, boldly, “and I’ll tell you something strange that happened on Halloween.”

  “To hear is to obey,” said Dominic, and followed her up the steps.

  It was really too cold to sit on the porch, but the wisteria had not yet dropped all its leaves, which helped stop the wind, and her mother hadn’t gotten around to taking in the cushions. Dominic sat very straight in one corner of the swing. Gentian curled herself into the other corner with her feet tucked under her and told him the story of the seance.

  His face, however beautiful, was not very expressive, and she could not tell what he made of what she was saying. When she had finished, he still sat silent. Gentian was goaded into becoming philosophical. “I don’t believe in the supernatural,” she said, “but I think it’s a very interesting study in psychology, that nobody moved that planchette and we all felt something strange, but not exactly the same thing. I’m not surprised Steph felt something evil, she believes in it.”

  “But it does move,” said Dominic.

  He was quoting Galileo, which made Gentian beam on him. “You mean the planchette?”

  “Virtue never will be moved.”

  “Do you agree with Steph, then?”

  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “You don’t agree with Steph, then.” Gentian stared at him. “You think one of us moved it?” She remembered the conversation at lunch. It was not Alma’s style, she was honest and straightforward almost to a fault. Steph might, on another evening in a very different emotional atmosphere, have done it to get attention, but she had been happy with the party and genuinely horrified and frightened by the moving planchette. Becky said she hadn’t moved it, so that was that; Erin couldn’t have; Gentian knew she herself had not exerted any pressure on the planchette. If anybody had consciously done it, it had to be Alma.

  That meant that nobody had consciously done it.

  “There is a dark inscrutable workmanship,” said Dominic. Gentian almost ordered him off her porch, except that she had invited him onto it and while she knew he was accusing Alma, he had merely, on the surface, uttered another poetic non sequitur.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “You are fortunate.”

  “No, I just have some common sense.”

  When he spoke, she mouthed the words along with him. “Common sense is not so common.”

  “I should go in soon,” said Gentian, feeling that what her father called her courteous reserves were in danger of exhaustion.

  “My science project still awaits,” said Dominic.

  “Well—we’re still ready to help, I guess. When d
o you want to start?”

  “When the days are darker,” said Dominic. “Give you good night,” and he stood up, bowed to her, and walked down the steps.

  Gentian sat holding her knees. She had wanted him to go, but it was maddening of him to do so before she had dismissed him. He might well be a terrible pain to work with. A time machine would be very interesting, or his theory of it would; she wasn’t persuaded he could really build one. But as for Dominic, she thought, Junie could have him.

  Then again, it wasn’t Junie he had said made him feel the equal of a god.

  “Bah,” said Gentian, and went inside.

  Chapter 12

  November continued cloudy. Gentian did manage to read all her back issues of Sky and Telescope and to continue her ongoing study in all the miscellaneous astronomy textbooks she had been collecting from used bookstores and the university bookstores for several years. When she got to a part she didn’t understand, she would either skip it or go read another book for a while and come back to the hard book later. If the other book had hard parts too, she might have to start a third. She had once been reading eight at the same time, but that was when she was only eleven and, according to the child psychology books her mother sometimes read, had not yet developed her reasoning faculty. Gentian was pretty sure she had developed a reasoning faculty at about the age of five, but she didn’t say so.