Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  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.

  Chapter 14

  December began gloomily. On the first, there was freezing drizzle, cheating Gentian out of Saturn and a good look at the Winter Triangle. She and Steph agreed to cancel their shopping trip and try again later in the week. On the second, it grew very cold and perfectly calm, fine stargazing weather had it not been accompanied by an invasion of cloud that grew lower and denser day by day. On the third of December, Gentian and Steph had an argument at lunch about whether to brave the weather and shop downtown, or go to the Mall of America, generally referred to by Gentian’s father and all the Giant Ants as the Mall of Anomie.

  “There’s lots of cool stuff there,” said Steph, “and it’s warm and it’s easy to get to on the bus.”

  “I hate it,” said Gentian. “It gives me a kind of gigantic claustrophobia. It’s too big. What if there were a fire or an earthquake?”

  “I’ll take care of you,” said Step comfortingly.

  Gentian hated being humored, but she decided to get the shopping over with. They met in the awful, towering, echoing mall at eleven on Saturday morning—it was still cloudy—outside the Pottery Barn, since Steph knew of several things she wanted to buy there.

  Gentian had forgotten to bathe again, and was only reminded of the fact when she began nervously twisting her hair around one finger and realized how greasy the hair was and how grimy the finger. She did not often find herself alone with Steph, and now she was going to have to feel grubby too. When Steph showed up with her hair shining and curling all down her back, in white corduroy pants and a huge red sweater and red halfboots, for heaven’s sake, Gentian felt not only grubby but resentful.

  “Now show me your list,” said Steph, “in case I become inspired.”

  “I haven’t got one,” said Gentian. “It’s just my family and the Giant Ants.” She wondered what Dominic would do if she gave him a present. Since she had no idea what he might like, it hardly mattered.

  She trailed Steph into the store, ducking glittering ribbons and shying away from precarious displays of fragile glassware and transparent Christmas-tree ornaments. Gentian had a very steady hand for a telescope, but in a store she became like her father. She dropped things, sometimes without even picking them up first. She cast a revolted glance at three simpering tissue-paper angels hung by their heads from a green-and-gold rope, and followed Steph into the back of the store.

  Steph was having a saleswoman show her a set of little golden spoons with handles shaped like crooked twigs. “These are for my aunt,” she said. “I wondered if Juniper might like them.”

  “She probably would; they could go with the tea set she never uses. But I’m not sure I like her enough to get her a set.”

  “You could just get her two, or go in with Rosemary.”

  “I’ll get her two. The only person she ever has to tea is Sarah, and anyway it’ll give her something to complain about.”

  “Now,” said Steph, “here’s the other reason I thought we should come here.” She showed Gentian a set of bins full of assorted wooden and papier-mache Christmas-tree ornaments. Many of them were standard: Santa Claus, angel, wrapped present, so-called star, camel, candy cane. But there were also small sailing ships; bright houses and castles; books closed and opened, including one with tiny but readable writing, which, when Gentian read it, regrettably turned out to be a verse from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; rolltop desks, quill pens, typewriters; and, as Steph demonstrated, diving to the bottom of the last bin and emerging triumphant, telescopes.

  “Oh,” said
Gentian, and then, “but I can’t get something for myself.”

  “I thought you could give one to each of us, to remind us of you,” said Steph.

  “You won’t be very surprised then, will you?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’d get you all something else, too, anyway,” said Gentian after a moment. “I don’t know, Steph, it seems a little egoistic.”

  “Well, think about it,” said Steph. “There are lots more stores. And I have to get Caitlin some napkins.” She wandered away towards the middle of the store, and Gentian went on sifting absently through the ornaments.

  “For loveliness,” said a familiar voice next to her, “needs not the foreign aid of ornament, but is when unadorned adorned the most.”

  Gentian dropped the ship she was looking at and turned. Yes, it was Dominic, in black for a change. In her unkempt condition, any remark about loveliness and adornment sat particularly ill with her.

  “I can just see telling my mother that when she wants us to help trim the tree,” she said. “Are you Christmas shopping?” Oh, Lord, she thought, maybe he’s Jewish.

  “I would not spend another such a night were it to buy a world of happy days.”

  Gentian looked at him dubiously. She thought about asking outright and decided not to. The whole atmosphere of his conversation made such questions difficult, and he had snubbed at least one direct personal inquiry from her.

  “Gentian,” said Steph, appearing on her other side, “come and tell me if Becky would like one of these mugs.”

  “Steph,” said Gentian, “this is Dominic Hardy. Dominic, this is my friend Stephanie Thornton.”

  “Every noble crown is of thorns,” said Dominic.

  There’s no need to be ironic, thought Gentian. But Steph said, “Yes, I know, it’s a silly name. My parents swear they didn’t know. But they have a very strange sense of humor, really, and people in church look at them oddly sometimes when they hear my name. My middle name’s Rosa, so that’s no better, though it does raise fewer eyebrows in church.”

  “No rose that in a garden ever grew,” said Dominic.

  Just because she’s got on a little makeup, thought Gentian indignantly. But Steph said, “Yes, it is nice to have a name with some resonance, with some history in it.”

  Gentian looked at her, amazed.

  Dominic said, “History, that excitable and lying old lady.”

  “Don’t you like your name, then?” said Steph.

  “Chance may crown me without my stir.”

  “Let’s see, Dominic means belonging to the Lord, doesn’t it? Not that we all don’t anyway.”

  Dominic, being pale already, could not really be said to have lost color in his face. But his hair and brows and eyes looked blacker somehow, and his lips redder. “I am the cat who walks by himself,” he said, “and all places are alike to me.”

  “Your last name’s all right, then.”

  “A mind not to be changed by place or time,” said Dominic. He sounded so implacable that Gentian took Steph’s arm.

  “Sorry,” said Steph. “We’ve got an awful lot of shopping to do, so I’m going to take Gentian away now. I hope yours goes well.”

  “Til it be done, whate’er my woes, my haps are yet begun.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Steph, and towed Gentian towards the racks of mugs.

  “I’m sorry he was so rude,” said Gentian.

  “What? He was adorable. A little like a crossword puzzle, though.”

  “He said you were no rose that in a garden ever grew.”

  “Gentian. Really. That’s a line from a poem by Millay. Becky loves it. It’s about the effect of literature on life and love.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now, would Becky like this? I thought she could drink tea out of it while she composed her odes.”

  Becky had never composed an ode in her life, but the mug was beautiful, large and iridescent, with a handle you could actually get your fingers through. “I think she would,” said Gentian.

  They found presents for all the Giant Ants and for Gentian’s mother, but not for the rest of her family. Gentian ran out of tolerance for the mall at about two o’clock and took the bus home, leaving Steph to wander happily for the rest of the day and meet her sister for dinner and a movie.

  Saturday went on being cloudy. On Sunday there was a snowstorm in northeastern Minnesota, but in the city it just went on being cloudier. Gentian’s entire family was home all weekend, which meant that using the computer or reading Junie’s diary was impossible. They were all rather fractious, except for Rosemary, who was happily making paper chains for Christmas and leaving strips of paper and pasty bits all over everything. Gentian retreated upstairs and grimly tried to read a very dry book about celestial mechanics, wishing it had less to do with mathematics and more to do with repairing stars. Maria Mitchell had occasionally had trouble with calculations, but not with theory, merely with the fact that in the absence of a computer or even a calculator, some astronomical calculations were maddening and took forever.

  When celestial mechanics palled, she tried to fathom what Dominic had been saying, or what Steph had thought he was saying. That remark about not being changed by place or time did not bode well for the time machine. And maybe it was just as well.

  “He said,” she remarked to Murr, who was sitting on her knee and occasionally chewing gently on the corner of the textbook, “that he was the cat who walked by himself. But he’s nothing like you.”

  On Sunday night it snowed and snowed, which was pleasant in itself and also hopeful; and in fact Monday was almost viciously clear and sunny. Gentian ran home to make sure the telescope was still working, and cried, “Hell, hell, hell!” as the red side of the house next door slapped her in the eyes. She dived for the phone and called Becky.

  “Come over here and make this telescope work!”

  “I couldn’t fix it last—”

  “No, I mean, just be here and see if that helps.”

  “We never did test that out, did we?” said Becky thoughtfully. “I was too flummoxed by your session with the binoculars.”

  “Bring your homework if you want, and I’ll find you something to eat. But I want to see Saturn; it won’t be an evening star much longer.”

  Becky arrived at six o’clock, clutching the journal she had to keep for Creative Writing. Gentian shooed her up the stairs, handing her a peanut-butter sandwich on the way. Becky sat down and peered through the eyepiece of the telescope. “Looks fine to me.” She got out of the way fast.

  It was fine. In the south-southeast, Saturn burned and wavered amid the stars of Capricorn, its rings bulging it out on either side. She had missed the last time the rings were wide open; she had not had a telescope then. They would be edge-on in 1995 and almost impossible to see. The first time Galileo saw Saturn with its rings edge-on, after originally observing them in about the same position she saw now, he had asked whether Saturn had in fact, as in legend, devoured its own children. Gentian looked forward to seeing what Galileo had seen—and more, since she had a considerably better telescope. She went on looking until she saw a moon, and then another. Then she blinked. Saturn was usually fairly sedate, but just now the northern belts were oddly broken up and spotty. She would have to remember to see if Sky and Telescope said anything about this: if she had observed it, others had as well.

  She said, “Becky, do you want to look at Saturn? You can see the rings and a moon or two, and it’s a little more agitated than usual.”

  “Sure,” said Becky, and took Gentian’s place at the telescope. “That’s a nice color,” she said. “I like that rich yellow and the way it goes greener at the poles. Is that real or some kind of telescopic artifact?”

  “Mostly real, I think. Do you see the moons?”

  “No, but I see the rings—oh, wow, there, that must be a moon. You know, this is really extremely cool, but I couldn’t stand all the finicky bits. And how in the world does anybody make any obser
vations when it jumps around like that?”

  “Well, you can look at stuff I’ve finicked up whenever you like. Move a minute and I’ll find you Beta Cygni. It’s called Albireo as a single star, but it’s really a double.” She found Deneb and moved down the Northern Cross to its foot. Albireo was a large brilliant gold star accompanied by a clear and vivid blue one, with behind them not blackness but the profound and myriad glitter of the Cygnus Star Cloud. A lot of the colors described in astronomy books were easier to imagine than to see, but Albireo was an abiding surprise; it was always brighter and more itself than she remembered. She focused the eyepiece and then scrupulously displaced the focus just a little, as recommended for the best color value, and gave her position at the telescope to Becky.

  Becky sat quite still for so long that Gentian got fidgety, calmed herself, and took out her history homework.

  “That is the most amazing thing,” said Becky. “Here, take back your magical instrument. I have to write something down.” She made a dive at her journal and began scribbling vigorously. Gentian went back to the telescope and gloried in the Cygnus Star Cloud for a while; then she began ranging upwards until she came to Andromeda and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, a ghostly canted oval with a splotch of companion galaxy above and another below it. It was 2. 3 million light years away, the farthest object discernible by the naked eye. Gentian gazed and gazed at its millions of stars all crowded into a disk with, if you used averted vision, a few half seen, half imagined spirals of dark gas and dust for flourish, tracking it as the Earth moved, and wondered if anybody were looking back at her.

  She sat away from the telescope, blinking. Becky was still writing, less furiously. It was getting late.

  “Should I see if my father will take you home?”

  “Oh, are you back?” said Becky. “No, I called my mom and she’ll come get me. You need to stay here and see if the telescope goes on working as I recede from it.”

  “This is so absurd,” said Gentian, “but I’ll watch, and let you know.”