OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone pa g e 51 The infirmary was in another stone building identical to the one housing the library. Ever since she'd been a postulant in a little black veil, Polycarpana had always been uncritically fond of these old twin buildings, with their touchingly grandiose stonework, all pretty and yellowish, laid down by simple folk a century ago. "Showpiece of the Rockies" was the proud caption on the old sepia daguerreotypes in the refectory. "This whole place used to be a TB hospital a hundred years ago," she said, feeling a little gentle jingoism as she played the tourguide. Dr. Edwine cut in. "Oh yeah. That explains the sleazy-fancy masonry up there. That sort of fake medieval crap. Those disproportionate battlements and hollow turrets and dummy crenellations and so on around the top. Probably these buildings were designed to appeal to the Gothic imaginations of people a century ago. Readers of Sir Walter Scott, romantic enough to contract consumption instead of the customary black lung stuff here in good old ail-American mining country. See, just a phoney rim of medieval gingerbread bullshit to top off a purely utilitarian Rocky Mountain-western dumpy-assed shoebox." He paused in a patch of aspen shade and stretched and basked the way most people would do in a patch of sunlight, and he preened himself and grinned down on her as if to say, Aren't I a good talker? Don't I possess at my fingertips a rather impressively large store of information on architecture, which, mind you, isn't even my field of specialty at all? Crenellations? Turrets? Hah? Nothing is immune from my tooth! Shanny was right. He was cute. In a monstrous sort of way. Polycarpana thought he might be about to drum his chest. Instead, he pressed on, |