Summer of the Dragon Read online

  ELIZABETH

  PETERS

  Summer of the

  Dragon

  For Beth and Brian— the anthropologists Contents

  ONE

  I went to Arizona that summer for my health.

  Talk…

  1

  TWO

  The stewardess asked me if I’d like a little more…

  20

  THREE

  De Karsky’s final comment—not one of the most encouraging remarks…

  43

  FOUR

  In one of her few relapses into sarcasm, my mother…

  71

  FIVE

  Sunlight woke me—dazzling, shifting light reflected from the whitewashed walls.

  90

  SIX

  You would not believe how many grown-up, supposedly sensible people…

  119

  SEVEN

  After the smashing production starring Edna and Madame, Jesse suggested…

  146

  EIGHT

  162

  Dragons pursued me all night. I woke up when one…

  NINE

  Having nothing of any magnitude on my conscience, I sleep…

  195

  TEN

  I slept for several hours. The light was fading when…

  220

  ELEVEN

  Wrong again. I woke up next morning with an awful…

  253

  TWELVE

  I was brought back to reality by a groan from… 290

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  BOOKS BY ELIZABETH PETERS

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  CHAPTER 1

  I went to Arizona that summer for my health. Talk about irony….

  No, I don’t have asthma, or anything like that. What I had—and still have, for that matter—was a bad case of parents. Two of them.

  Mind you, they are marvelous. I love them. Separately they are unnerving but endurable. Together…disaster, sheer disaster. Ulcermaking. Productive of high blood pressure, nervous tension, hives, indigestion, and other psychosomatic disorders.

  I had not meant to mention my parents. I don’t want to hurt their feelings. However, there is no way of accounting for my presence at Hank Hunnicutt’s ranch that summer unless I make unkind remarks about Mother and Dad. Pride prevents me from allowing anyone to suppose I went there of my own free will.

  Oh, well. It’s unlikely that they would read a book like this. Mother only reads cookbooks and Barbara Cartland; Dad has

  1

  2 / Elizabeth Peters

  never been discovered with any volume less esoteric than the Journal of Hellenic Studies.

  I am not knocking my mother’s literary tastes. She is probably the best cook in the entire Western world, and if, after a life which has included economic depression, World War II, and assorted personal tragedies, she can still believe in Barbara Cartland, then more power to her. I wouldn’t mind her believing in Ro-mance, with the accent on the first syllable, if she didn’t try to foist her opinions on me.

  Mother thinks every nice girl ought to get married, read cookbooks, and have lots of children so she can be a grandmother. I don’t know why she expects me to produce the grandchildren. I have four brothers and sisters. But I’m the oldest, and Mother’s grandmotherly instincts began to burgeon when I hit puberty.

  Dad thinks that every nice girl, and every nice boy, and all the boys and girls who aren’t nice, should be archaeologists. He can’t really understand why anyone would want to do anything else. He feels that there are too many people in the world anyway, so if they would just stop perpetuating themselves, then they could all live in the houses that have already been built, and grow just enough food to give themselves the strength to perform mankind’s most vital en-deavor—digging things up.

  If he had left me alone, I might have turned out to be a classical archaeologist. It was a case of Summer of the Dragon / 3

  overkill. The first toy I can remember playing with was not a doll, or a toy train, or a stuffed kitty. It was a Greek stater. (That’s an ancient silver coin.) The reason why I remember it is because I swallowed it, and the ensuing hullaballoo left a deep impression on my infant mind.

  My room, during my formative years, was a horrible mixture of my parents’ tastes. Mother contributed dolls that wet their diapers and threw up. Dad sneaked in copies of antique statues. The walls were hung with drawings of Winnie the Pooh and photographs of the Parthenon. When I outgrew my crib, Mother bought me a canopied bed with ruffles dripping from the top.

  And Dad found, God knows where, a bedspread with heads of Roman emperors printed on it.

  So it went, all the way along: cooking lessons from Mother, visits to museums with Dad. It’s no wonder that when I went to college I promptly flunked the in-troductory Greek course.

  At the time I was absolutely crushed. I studied for that course. My God, how I studied! Six hours a day.

  I’d go in for an exam, smugly sure that I had memorized every ending of every declension, and then my mind would go totally blank. I can see now why it happened, but five years ago, when I was eighteen, I could only conclude that I was hopelessly stupid. I contemplated slashing my wrists. I mean, one takes things so seriously at that age. The day my adviser called me in, to tell me as kindly as possible that I had better drop

  4 / Elizabeth Peters

  Greek before it dropped me, I got sick to my stomach at the very idea of calling Dad to tell him I was a failure. I even got out a bottle of aspirin—it was the deadliest drug I owned—and sat contemplating it for about two and a half minutes. Then I remembered that poem of Dorothy Parker’s:

  Guns aren’t lawful;

  Nooses give;

  Gas smells awful;

  You might as well live.

  It made better sense than anything I had heard in Greek class. So I went out and had a double hot-fudge banana split and, thus fortified, called Dad.

  He didn’t yell at me. I knew he wouldn’t. He was just sweet and pitying and encouraging, which is lots worse than being yelled at. He’s felt sorry for me ever since. Poor girl, she will never be able to read Homer in the original….

  I slid into anthropology through the back door. It was the closest thing I could find to archaeology that didn’t require any dead languages. If I ever get to my Ph.D., I’ll have to pass an exam in German or French or something, but I do all right with spoken languages; and everybody knows how ridiculous those graduate language exams are.

  Anthropology had another advantage. It disap Summer of the Dragon / 5

  pointed both my parents. I mean, living with those two required a delicate balance. International dip-lomacy is nothing compared to the skill and wit involved in keeping Mother and Dad more or less even in their fond disapproval of my activities. If I pleased one of them, the other fell into a deep depression, while the favored parent gloated offensively. No, the only way to handle them was to keep them both in a gentle sweat of frustration.

  I needn’t mention what Mother’s idea of a suitable college major was, do I? Right. Domestic science, or whatever they call it these days. I wouldn’t know. I never got near that part of the university, if there was such a part. I took pains not to find out.

  I seem to be wandering off the track here. I was going to get right into the mainstream of the symposium, as one of my duller professors used to say, and explain how I got to Arizona. But you can’t possibly understand why I did without some background. I’m almost through with that, but there is one more thing I’ve got to explain.

  My name. I sign all my papers D.J. Abbott. My friends call me D.J. They call me that or they don’t s
tay friends with me. That includes even my childhood friends, who know my real names; I’d have kept the horrible truth from them if I could have, but there was no way of concealing it with Mother bellowing my first name out the

  6 / Elizabeth Peters

  front door every afternoon at supper time, and Dad greeting me by my middle name whenever we happened to meet. They couldn’t agree on a name any more then they could agree on any other vital subject, so my first name is Mother’s contribution and my middle name is Dad’s. They reflect the personalities….

  I’m stalling. I still hate to write it.

  Deanna Jowett Abbott is my name, and humble is my station; Cleveland is my dwelling place—but I doubt that heaven is my destination. There, that’s done. Every female over fifty who reads this will know where Mother got Deanna. “She had such a bee-yootiful voice,” Mother would murmur. “And you look like her, too.” They don’t rerun Deanna’s movies very often, but I caught her once, on the Late Late Show, and I do look a little like her; not as much as Mother thinks, but I’ve got longish dark hair and one of those round, dimpled faces. Too round, alas, and too dimpled; I don’t resort to hot-fudge sundaes only when I’m disturbed. I eat them when I am happy, or working hard, or relaxing, or celebrating, or…. That’s right, most of the time. I also like pizza and potato chips and cheeseburgers and anything else that is heavier in cal-ories than in food value.

  There I go again, getting off the track. Writing a book isn’t as easy as I thought, not if you have a disorganized mind.

  But before I go into the subject of my disorganized mind I had better finish explaining about my Summer of the Dragon / 7

  name. Jowett is not a family name. It is the name of a famous English scholar whose translations of Thucy-dides, Plato, and that crowd, are classics. Can you imagine a man greeting his five-year-old daughter with “Good afternoon, Jowett”? That tells you all you need to know about my father. I needn’t have bothered to say anything else.

  You may be mildly curious about the names of my brothers and sisters. Ready? Mickey Grote ( History of Greece) Abbott; Judy Meyer ( Geschichte des Altertums) Abbott; Shirley Zimmern ( The Greek Commonwealth) Abbott, and the baby, little Donald Buchsenschutz ( Die Hauptstatten des Gewerb-fleisses im klassischen Alterthume) Abbott. You will not be surprised to learn that Don will turn and run rather than meet Dad out on the street.

  So now you know why I insist on being called D.J.

  I used to sign myself Deejay, when I was a kid. But that’s a little too cute for a graduate student.

  Surprisingly enough, I did fairly well in anthro. Or perhaps it is not so surprising, since the field probably offers more diversity than almost anything else a person can study. Everybody specializes these days; you can’t just be a lawyer, you have to major in criminal law or commercial law or torts—whatever they are. But the specialties in other fields are much more closely related than the hodgepodge of subjects lumped together under the name of anthropology. The word means “the study of man.” That’s a broad field.

  8 / Elizabeth Peters

  One problem about anthro is that you can’t dabble.

  You have to decide fairly early in the game whether you are going to major in cultural anthropology—the social habits of modern man—or physical anthropology—the physical characteristics of persons living and dead. Each of these subdivisions has its subdivisions.

  Cultural anthropologists study everything from the dating habits of American teenagers (an exotic subspe-cies if ever there was one) to the nuances of cannibal-ism. Physical anthropologists can specialize in fossils—the various petrified ancestors of man—or in the characteristics of living populations. I’m trying to keep this simple, but it isn’t easy, because the topic is complicated, and it slides over into other disciplines, such as geology, biology, paleontology, and so on.

  Then there’s archaeology. For a number of reasons, none of which would interest you, New World archaeology is generally considered a subdivision of anthropology, instead of a separate discipline like classical archaeology or Egyptology. Not that anthropologists have refrained from dabbling in Old World archaeology; they get their sticky little fingers into almost everything sooner or later. Look at Margaret Mead.

  But none of the Near Eastern civilizations influenced the cultures of the Western hemisphere until the descendants of Socrates and Khufu met the Aztecs and did their damnedest to exterminate them. So much for civilization.

  Summer of the Dragon / 9

  Sorry. I’m off the track again. What I’m trying to explain, in my fuzzy way, is that an anthropologist can be an expert in anything from fossil bones to Pueblo Indian pottery, from Eskimo sexual habits to African music. But he (she) has to specialize. I had to specialize.

  I had no strong leanings toward any of the subdivisions of the field, which is not surprising when you consider that I took it up out of spite. I ended up specializing in fossil man, more or less by accident. I had taken a course my junior year and found it fairly interesting. Then our local museum came up with a grant for a summer job. They had gotten lots of money from one of the foundations and had decided to begin by excavating their storerooms. They found all kinds of things they had forgotten they owned, including bones—not only originals, but plaster casts of well-known skulls. So they decided to set up an exhibit: “Who Was Who Among Fossil Man.” The job was one of the few things Mother and Dad ever agreed on.

  Mother thought it would be nice if I stayed home that summer, and Dad was more or less on speaking terms with the curator of the museum. They used to sit around and drink beer and sneer at one another’s fields.

  So I spent the summer classifying and cleaning and preserving bones. I worked about twelve hours a day, six days a week, and acquired an enviable reputation for diligence, which was undeserved, because the only reason I spent so much

  10 / Elizabeth Peters

  time at the museum was because I didn’t want to go home. I went off to grad school with these unmerited laurels wreathing my brow, and with an amorphous feeling that I never wanted to see another skull. But, being basically a drifter by nature, I slid along through the year, and somehow or other it got to be April. Not until I heard my fellow students discussing their summer plans did I realize that I had none.

  Bunny threw a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate Frank’s grant. The International Council on Giving Away People’s Money had just awarded him umpteen-thousand dollars to investigate cooperation and conflict as modes of social integration among the Ubangi. We all pretended to be unselfishly delighted when an associate got a deal like this. In reality we were all green with envy, and some of us let it show.

  “Strange that they took so long to let you know,”

  said Bunny, twirling her wineglass. What she meant to imply was that all the other applicants must have died or come down with leprosy, otherwise Frank would never have gotten the grant.

  “Well, the bigger the grant, the longer it takes to hear,” Frank answered, implying that miserable little grants like Bunny’s five hundred dollars (to correlate statistical data on the anthropometry of Tenetehara Indians) were just handed out to any idiot who bothered to apply.

  They went on sniping at each other, with other Summer of the Dragon / 11

  “friends” tossing in rude comments. I didn’t say anything. I had eaten all the cheese. There wasn’t much.

  Bunny is awfully cheap. She’s the only one of the crowd who has an independent income—child support, from a rich, guilty ex-husband who had run off with her best friend—and you’d think she could at least supply enough supermarket cheddar.

  Eventually one of the gang turned to me.

  “What are you doing this summer, D.J.?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I said. “Is there any more cheese?”

  “No,” Bunny said.

  Next morning I went to see my adviser. I had been thinking about the problem all night (except for nine long, dreamless hours of sleep—I’m as good a sl
eeper as I am an eater), and by the time I faced Dr. Bancroft across his littered desk I was feeling pretty panicky.

  “I tell you, I’ve got to get a grant for this summer,”

  I said, summing up a long, passionate statement.

  “You should have thought of that six months ago,”

  said Bancroft heartlessly.

  “It’s not six months ago, it’s now,” I pointed out.

  “Let us deal with the situation as it exists, not as it might have been.”

  “The situation is that it’s too late to apply for aid,”

  said Bancroft, shoving his flints around.

  He does that when he’s nervous or bored. In this case I assumed it was the latter, since I, not 12 / Elizabeth Peters

  he, was the nervous one. Flints—arrowheads, lance points, scrapers, you name it—compose most of the litter on his desk, though it also includes unanswered letters, rough drafts of articles he’ll never finish, and the scraps of his last few lunches. Flints are his passion.

  He knows more about Folsom points than anybody in North America. Isn’t that impressive? He carries flints around in his pockets, and rumor has it that he takes a few to bed with him. You can imagine the commentary on that, when his students have had a few drinks—and even when they haven’t. Anyway, he plays with the darned things all the time. As one of the women said, better them than me. He looks like one of the less comely Neanderthal reconstructions, and there are black hairs on the backs of his fingers.

  He arranged his arrowheads in a circle, with the points toward the center, before continuing.

  “You kids are too damned spoiled. In my day there wasn’t all this research money available. We had to work, by God. I earned my way by scrubbing pots in a greasy spoon….”

  I had heard this before, so I let my mind wander to what I was going to wear Friday night for my date with Bob, until Bancroft ran down.