Tibor had loaded up his tray without really thinking about what he was going to eat. Tibor never thought about what he ate. Bennis had taken a wilted-looking chef’s salad that seemed to be blanketed by indeterminate cheese. Gregor, remembering all those picnic baskets in the back of the van, had settled for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. He knew he wasn’t going to starve. There were two dozen honey cakes on the way. Now they were approaching the cash register, Tibor with his green card out. The man who had been talking about spatiotemporality was just paying up.
“I don’t know what was wrong with Lenore,” Tibor was saying. “She never did anything like that before. She says ‘Hello.’ She says ‘Good-bye.’ She says ‘Good luck.’ To Dr. Branch she says ‘You have a nice ass.’ I think Dr. Crockett taught her to do that. She does not scream like a banshee in its death throes.”
“If she says all those things, she’s a he,” Gregor said. “Female ravens can’t be taught to imitate talk.”
“That’s a sexist thing to say,” Bennis said.
Gregor gave her a withering look. “Sexist or not, that’s nature. Here, I’ll do another sexist thing. I’ll buy your lunch.”
Tibor had already passed beyond the cash register, waving his green card and smiling vaguely at the student who was manning it. He was walking briskly through the large room toward a table next to one of the tall windows. Watching him, Gregor realized he had been wrong to think, as he had at first, that the dining hall had not been decorated like the rest of the campus for Halloween. The decorations were there, but the room was so large and well proportioned it swallowed them. Every table had a tiny jack-o’-lantern in the middle of it, candlelit from within. Every column had a bouquet of Indian corn tied to the center of it. It all looked superfluous.
“Six ninety-five,” the student at the cash register said.
Gregor gave her a ten, took his change, and motioned Bennis to follow him to Tibor’s table. She had been listening to the conversation behind her—something about the intergenerational reenactments of mythic gravities that Gregor hadn’t really heard—and Gregor wasn’t sure she’d seen where Tibor had gone.
“Over there by the windows,” Gregor told her, as they passed between two students who were, blessedly as far as Gregor was concerned, talking about the latest Star Wars movie. “He’s been joined by a man who looks like a cover model for one of your L.L. Bean catalogs.”
The man not only looked like the model for the cover of one of Bennis’s L.L. Bean catalogs, he behaved the way Gregor had always suspected those men would behave. As soon as Gregor and Bennis reached the table, he leapt to his feet. Then he reached out, took Bennis’s tray, and put it down for her. Gregor’s tray was already on the table, so he didn’t bother with that. He simply put out his hand, smiled heartily, and said,
“How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Dr. Kenneth Crockett.”
Father Tibor Kasparian never leapt to his feet for anyone, although he’d done it once or twice from sheer excitement. He stared at Dr. Kenneth Crockett for a moment in utter astonishment, then waved Dr. Crockett, Gregor, and anyone else who might be in the vicinity into their seats.
“This is Miss Bennis Hannaford,” Tibor said. “Miss Hannaford is a member of my parish.”
Gregor nearly choked on his coffee. Had Bennis told everyone on earth, except him, that she was buying that apartment?
“We have been talking,” Tibor was going on, “about Lenore. Have you seen Lenore today, Dr. Crockett?”
“Call me Ken,” Dr. Crockett said. It sounded automatic, as if he’d gotten used to telling Tibor this same thing over and over again. “I’ve seen Lenore a couple of times. I’ve been wondering if she’s ill.”
“She sounded like she was strangling when we met her,” Bennis said.
“I haven’t heard her talk. I was up at the cabin today—we have a rock-climbing club here; the club keeps a log cabin up near Hillman’s Rock—anyway, she was out there, circling around this morning. I’ve never known her to circle as much as she has the last few days.”
“The last two,” Tibor corrected “She was all right the day before yesterday. I had her in my office, eating out of my hand, and she was talking away just as usual.”
“Maybe the circling has something to do with sex,” Bennis said. “Maybe she’s getting ready to mate or looking for a mate or something like that.”
Gregor found it absolutely astounding, how Bennis could manage to bring sex into any conversation. It was a trait he had come to decide was universal in her generation of women, and he didn’t like it. He took a bite out of his doughnut, which was stale. He took a sip of his coffee, which was nearly as bad as the stuff Tibor made at home. Then he pushed the whole mess away from him and said, “In the first place, as I was telling you before, if it talks, it’s a him, not a her. In the second place, ravens don’t mate in the fall and they don’t mate by circling, either. They circle when they’re coming in for a kill.”