chapter 6

What got me away from Madison was my intel ect. It had always been precocious, leading me to talk and read before other children my age. Aided by a prodigious, photographic memory-which made it easy for me to recal the layouts of textbooks and spit out the required information on tests-my schoolwork was soon established as a place where my family's magical legacy was irrelevant. I'd skipped my final years of high school and started col ege at sixteen.

There I'd first tried to carve out a place for myself in the theater department, my imagination drawn to the spectacle and the costumes-and my mind fascinated by how completely a playwright's words could conjure up other places and times. My first few performances were heralded by my professors as extraordinary examples of the way good acting could transform an ordinary col ege student into someone else. The first indication that these metamorphoses might not have been the result of theatrical talent came while I was playing Ophelia in Hamlet. As soon as I was cast in the role, my hair started growing at an unnatural rate, tumbling down from shoulders to waist. I sat for hours beside the col ege's lake, irresistibly drawn to its shining surface, with my new hair streaming al around me.

The boy playing Hamlet became caught up in the il usion, and we had a passionate though dangerously volatile affair.

Slowly I was dissolving into Ophelia's madness, taking the rest of the cast with me.

The result might have been a riveting performance, but each new role brought fresh chal enges. In my sophomore year, the situation became impossible when I was cast as Annabel a in John Ford's ' Tis Pity She's a *****. Like the character, I attracted a string of devoted suitors-not al of them human-who fol owed me around campus. When they refused to leave me alone after the final curtain fel , it was clear that whatever had been unleashed couldn't be control ed. I wasn't sure how magic had crept into my acting, and I didn't want to find out. I cut my hair short. I stopped wearing flowing skirts and layered tops in favor of the black turtlenecks, khaki trousers, and loafers that the solid, ambitious prelaw students were wearing. My excess energy went into athletics.

After leaving the theater department, I attempted several more majors, looking for a field so rational that it would never yield a square inch to magic. I lacked the precision and patience for mathematics, and my efforts at biology were a disaster of failed quizzes and unfinished laboratory experiments.

At the end of my sophomore year, the registrar demanded I choose a major or face a fifth year in col ege.

A summer study program in England offered me the opportunity to get even farther from al things Bishop. I fel in love with Oxford, the quiet glow of its morning streets. My history courses covered the exploits of kings and queens, and the only voices in my head were those that whispered from books penned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was entirely attributable to great literature