Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  “I’m not good enough.”

  “It’s not really a much bigger part than Antonio.”

  “Well, maybe not, but it’s harder. Especially with Erin playing Viola. I think she’s perfect, and I think Sebastian would need to walk and talk like her. You’d need a good actor, and, I don’t know, somebody with not much ego, or a funny kind of ego, who’d take pride in looking like Erin instead of working everything out from scratch.”

  “But would you do it if we absolutely couldn’t find anybody?”

  “I don’t know, Steph. Let me think about it.”

  They paid for their food and found a minute round table in a corner.

  “Well, think quickly,” said Steph.

  Gentian mumbled something around a mouthful of bagel.

  Steph took a paperback of the play out of her purse and began ruffling through it, frowning.

  “If music be the food of love, play on,” said Dominic behind Gentian.

  Gentian swallowed her mouthful carefully. Dominic came around her left side and smiled faintly at her. He was wearing black. He stood very straight. He had a vaguely ironic look. He said, mellifluously, “Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.”

  Gentian considered him. He might make a good Orsino. If Mrs. Morgan truly couldn’t find anybody else, it might not matter that he didn’t go to their school, though his own school, always supposing he had one, might have something to say about it.

  Steph put her book down and said, “Oh, hello. Sit down if you like, though we’re about to rush off to go shopping.”

  Dominic pulled out a chair and sat down, gracefully. He looked from Gentian’s laden plate to Steph’s cup and said, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

  Gentian felt piggish and irate. She took a larger bite of bagel. Steph laughed. “I’m not virtuous, I just have a nervous stomach.”

  “An army marches on its stomach,” said Dominic, thoughtfully.

  “Yes, but luckily a shopper doesn’t.”

  “I cannot eat but little meat,” Dominic told her. “My stomach is not good.”

  “Oh, I hope you’re not getting the flu. It’s going around.”

  “Here, have some of this soup,” said Gentian, seized by mischief. “I’ll get you some. I’ll get you some tea.” She leapt up, almost spilling her own tea, and went back to the counter. If he was a vampire, let him get out of this.

  When she came back to the table with the new tray, Steph and Dominic were laughing. She put the tray down in front of him and said, “That should settle things.”

  Dominic gave her a level, limpid gaze, and then he smiled. “To taste,” said he, “think not I shall be nice.” And he put a spoonful of soup into his mouth, and swallowed it.

  Well, thought Gentian, as he went on eating, and then drank his tea, I guess that’s that. I hope Rosie isn’t too disappointed. Well, unless he’s going to excuse himself now and go get rid of it all.

  “We’d better go,” said Steph. “I’ve still got lots of shopping to do. We’re going to the Museum Company, Dominic, if you’re interested.”

  Dominic came along with them, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, looking remote and austere but hardly uncomfortable. They went into the Museum Company and dispersed, Gentian heading for the reproductions of Egyptian cat statues and gargoyles and Steph making for the jewelry. Dominic went along with Steph, and she could from time to time hear them laughing. Gentian decided to get her father a small cat statue; he would be short a cat since Junie had adopted his latest find. She was still looking for something for Rosie. A store with camping equipment might be a better choice than here.

  There was a great burst of laughter from Steph and Dominic. Gentian looked around, and saw them coming towards her, picking their way past stacks of jigsaw puzzles of famous paintings and pyramids of replica ship’s bells and hourglasses.

  “Genny,” said Steph, “you’re saved.”

  “Oh, good. What from?”

  “Playing Sebastian. Dominic can do it. He even stands like Erin.”

  Gentian looked at him. He did. He had the slight tilt of the chin right too, and the way Erin raised a sardonic eyebrow at very little provocation. He had not used to have Erin’s mannerisms. She wanted to tell him to stop it at once. And what would Erin think of this dark mirror?

  “But you don’t go to our school,” she said.

  “I have knowledge never learned in schools.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Steph. “Anyway, I thought I’d tell her he was my cousin, or something, come to stay with us.”

  “His coloring isn’t really right, you know.”

  “We’d just need to lighten it a bit, or darken Erin’s. She went gray for Jane Goodall, I bet she’d go dark for this.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gentian. “I’d do a lot more for Jane Goodall than I would for Viola.”

  “Well, we can ask, anyway.”

  “Sure.” Why am I protesting, she thought. I’d see Dominic all the time; we’d have a project in common. But I’ll have to share him with all the Giant Ants. Especially Steph. Steph was not, however, being flirtatious in the least; she seemed more sisterly, talking to Dominic in very much the same way as she talked to Gentian. Having him in the play might, in fact, be better than trying to do a science project with him and Juniper, who certainly would flirt with him. Then she remembered her bet with Erin, and Alma’s saying, “There’s something the matter with him.” When they had found Rosie a compass and a flashlight and said good-bye to Dominic and boarded a bus for home, Gentian said to Steph, “You know, Alma can’t stand Dominic and Erin doesn’t think much of him either.”

  “I think Alma misunderstood him.”

  “Well, Erin didn’t, and she doesn’t like him.”

  “Theater is about learning to work with lots of different people,” said Steph, stubbornly. “Gentian, doesn’t he live next door to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t he take this bus, then?”

  “I have no idea. Steph, really, Alma and Erin can’t stand him. It’ll be very awkward.”

  “We need a Sebastian,” said Steph, “and not somebody Mrs. Morgan digs out of the woodwork because she thinks it’ll be good for him to be in a play. We need somebody good. You said yourself we need somebody who can imitate Erin.”

  Gentian looked at her. Against the dark window of the bus her profile was unyielding. Steph seldom dug her heels in like this, but when she did, direct argument was not the way to budge her. Gentian sighed, and said nothing until she bid Steph good night and got off the bus.

  She trudged through puddles just beginning to skin over with ice, amid the wreck of all the snowdrifts, under a slightly hazy sky. When she let herself in the front door, she saw a blue envelope lying on the hall table. It was her letter to Dominic, stamped, “No Such Address.” Gentian stood holding it. She went back out onto the porch and looked at Dominic’s house. It was there. It had numbers on the door. Gentian was as ready as anybody to complain about the post office, but she was not at all sure they had really had anything to do with it.

  She put the letter into her pocket and went back inside. Her family was just finishing supper and had not left her any. “We thought you and Steph would eat downtown,” said her mother. Since she and Steph had done just that, there was nothing much to say. Gentian made herself a tuna-and-olive sandwich, grumbling, and stomped upstairs and called Becky.

  “Steph has become as stone,” she said.

  “Oh-oh. What about?”

  “She thinks Dominic should play Sebastian.”

  “Oh. Well. I asked Micky if he would, but we could give him Orsino, if he’s allowed to clown.”

  “That might work. Orsino takes himself seriously, but I think he’s pretty funny. But Becky, look, Alma and Erin have met Dominic and they don’t like him.”

  “Oh, great. So he’s going to play the beloved of one and the tw
in of the other.”

  “Well, Steph wants him to. Nobody’s asked Mrs. Morgan yet.”

  “Steph’s got a lot of credit with her after rounding us up and drilling us like that. She’ll probably say yes.”

  “I suppose it’s good theatrical practice,” said Becky.

  “That’s what Steph said, but I think it’s a very bad idea.”

  “Is she going to talk to Alma and Erin, or just spring it on them?”

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. She was vastly unyielding.”

  “I’d trust them to talk her out of it, I think.”

  “I don’t know. She’s very set.”

  “So you keep saying. You know, Gen, I hate to say it about a friend of yours, but Dominic causes a lot of trouble.”

  “He’s not a friend of mine, and he didn’t do anything; Steph just took one look at him and decided he looked enough like Erin.”

  “I never put no bullet in the furnace,” said Becky, laughing, “and stop talking about my mother.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Never mind. My parents have been playing their Bill Cosby records again. Well, at least I’ll get to meet Dominic.”

  “You’ll probably hate him too. Though he does talk very poetically. Let’s not talk about him, all right? Tell me about Micky.”

  For the next week Gentian devoted herself to astronomy. It was the only thing besides Maria Mitchell that did not irritate her. She was annoyed with Steph for being stubborn; and with Dominic for dropping his science project without a second thought to cavort in Shakespeare, just because Steph asked him; with Mrs. Morgan for saying Dominic could do the cavorting; with Alma and Erin for failing to talk Steph out of it and refusing to quit the play themselves, or even to threaten Steph with quitting. The three of them had had a long solemn conversation in which Gentian tried to remind them how much they disliked Dominic and they explained to her that letting Steph down would be worse than putting up with Dominic in the play. Gentian didn’t think saving somebody from her own foolishness and stubbornness constituted letting her down, but neither Alma nor Erin would agree with her.

  She was annoyed with her family for going on and on idiotically about a commercial holiday based remotely on a religious event none of them believed in. She was annoyed with all her teachers, with bus drivers, mail carriers, pigeons, squirrels, and two out of the three cats in the house.

  Only the telescope, despite earlier freaks, did not betray her. She considered Capella, Procyon, and Sirius; she stared into the dark winding depths of the Horsehead Nebula; she considered the Crab Nebula, which was the tattered and still-glowing shells of a supernova whose light had reached Earth in 1054 a. d. The Chinese had called it a guest star. There was a pulsar in the middle of it, the collapsed and tight-clenched fist of what matter the original star had not blown away from itself.

  Her telescope did not show her much detail, and most of the interesting aspects of the Crab Nebula were looked at by radio astronomy and spectroscopy. But she liked thinking about it. She liked looking at it when she herself felt crabby. She felt tempted to do the equivalent of its spectacular act, to burn everything around her with a huge explosion and then curl up into a sphere so perfect that nothing could get in or out. But she was not a star, and while she had the energy for the explosion, she did not have the mass for collapsing afterwards. If she blew up, she would have to take the consequences.

  Maria Mitchell sat on her lap, or at her feet, or on the bed in the middle of the electric blanket when the room was coldest, and made an occasional interrogatory sound, and purred thunderously when, at three or four or five in the morning, Gentian fell stiff and dry-eyed into bed.

  On the twentieth of December the warm spell ended, and on the twenty-first it snowed. Gentian had to go to bed early when the clouds came in, so she was up by ten, and on her way to school by ten-thirty.

  The whole outside sparkled dimly, in the diffuse cloudy light, with fine powdery snow. At least, if they had to have Christmas, it would come with the right weather. All the Giant Ants had family commitments on the day itself, but maybe they could go sledding the day after. Gentian scuffed through new snow and old ice, down all the steps to the sidewalk. Nobody in Gentian’s family had shoveled any snow before rushing off to their day’s occupation, but the Hardys’ walk was bare and dry.

  “Merry meet again,” said Dominic.

  Gentian jumped, which added another drop to the large pool of her annoyance. He had come down the driveway without making a sound.

  “Hello,” she said resignedly.

  “I hoped to catch you before you went.”

  Gentian stared. He had said a rational English sentence, without poetic reference, that conveyed information. “Well, here I am,” she said.

  “I would like to begin my science project.”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was going to school.” She looked at him. He was as pale and beautiful as ever, but he did have on a red shirt with his black pants and boots and jacket. It might be as well to encourage his rationality and initiative. Besides, if he got involved in the science project, maybe he would change his mind about the play. “I guess I can miss a day,” she said. She had no specific appointments with any of the Giant Ants, and it might be a relief to just not see any of them for a day. They were terribly excited about the play and had already learned most of their lines, which they recited with abandon at every opportunity, until they were almost as annoying to talk to as Dominic in his usual mode.

  “Sure,” she said. “Come on in.”

  “In a moment. I have equipment to bring.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “I shall bring it inside and you carry it upstairs.”

  “So much for chivalry,” said Gentian, but quietly.

  The equipment appeared to be arranged in chronological order. Dominic first brought two leather trunks full of thick glassware and scrolls tied up with ribbon and brass instruments; then a series of wooden boxes with more glassware and more brass instruments and leather-bound printed books; then wooden boxes of vacuum tubes and wires and strange small heavy metal boxes, and an old black Royal typewriter; then a series of unboxed greasy objects that looked as if they had once been part of a car; then cardboard boxes of cables and cards and keyboards, and computer manuals; and finally one more large cardboard box heaped with a tangle of headphones, binoculars, CDs, tapes, small speakers, and floppy disks.

  Gentian hauled all these to the second floor, gasping. Then she ran down to the basement and borrowed a couple of her mother’s trouble lights, abstracting as well two desk lamps used to illuminate the laundry room and the workbench. Her parents didn’t like overhead lights. She lugged them upstairs, dumped them on the hall floor, and unlocked the padlocked door. She considered the bulk of the things Dominic was bringing, and decided they would have to work in the main attic. She plugged in the lights, turned them on, shooed Maria Mitchell out again, and went downstairs to get Dominic’s equipment.

  After she had toiled upstairs with all of it, she went into the kitchen and got herself a Coke. She didn’t like soft drinks as a rule, but right now a nasty jolt of sugar and caffeine seemed exactly right. She went back to the front porch and found a few more cardboard boxes and a large pile of lumber interspersed with tapestry cushions and an entire box of old calendars. Gentian sat on the porch swing, enjoying the winter air on her overheated self, waiting for Dominic.

  He came up the porch steps about five minutes later, a towering pile of boxes, with legs. He put them down lightly, and emerged neither flushed nor breathless.

  “Is that all?” said Gentian.

  “A woman waits for me, she contains all,” said Dominic, “nothing is lacking.”

  Gentian sighed. He was back to normal, and now she was stuck with him.

  Chapter 17

  Dominic left after they had brought everything upstairs; he said, “I will return when I may,” and walked out of the attic and dow
n the stairs, leaving every door open. By the time Gentian had got over her surprise and anger and gone after him, he was nowhere to be seen. She shut the front door and went back upstairs, shutting other doors as she went. She looked into the main attic to see if everything was really there. Yes, in piles and stacks, all over. There seemed to be more than either of them had carried up—where had that strange stark ergonomic office chair come from, or that tattered tapestry, or this enormous wooden radio from, what, the 1920s? They might have been there already and she had failed to notice them; but she and her mother had cleared this attic out thoroughly when they did the wiring, and she had inspected it herself not very long ago. She would have to ask her parents if they had been storing things up here.

  She went into her own room. Maria Mitchell hissed at her and vanished into the closet. Gentian checked the food bowl, but it was only half empty. She topped it off and changed the water for fresh, but no cat appeared. She stuck her head into the closet and coaxed, but Murr only bundled herself into the very back under some old notebooks, and hissed. She might be sick; or she might have sneaked downstairs, engaged in battle with Pounce or Yin-Yang, and ended up with an abscess. Gentian’s father would have to come look at her when he got home from wherever he was.

  “How will I practice astronomy with no cat in my lap?” she asked.

  Murr growled. It was in any case still cloudy. Gentian read some history and solved some algebra problems, periodically putting her head into the closet and speaking to her cat, who hissed and growled at her.

  Gentian went downstairs to see if her father was home. He wasn’t, but Rosemary had come in and was making herself some cocoa. “What’s that box on the porch?” she asked.

  Gentian went out and looked. One more small wooden chest banded with leather and padlocked shut. She picked it up, grunting—it was extremely heavy—and lugged it to the foot of the stairs.

  “It’s part of Dominic’s time machine,” she said. “We must have missed it when we took everything upstairs.”

  “Oh, let me see!”

  “It’s not built yet, but you can look at what we brought. Are you going to help?”