Greensleeves

  By the time my head hit the pillow thirty seconds later, so had I.

  4

  I woke up, lonesome, to a Portland with no Sherry in it—and to a relentlessly clear memory of everything I’d made up my mind to last night. My mind was still made up, though I lay about in bed several minutes trying my best to poke holes in all that depressing logic. No use—my subconscious had even added a few items to it while I slept, besides supplying me with a perfectly obvious destination.

  I climbed out of bed, wound the cuckoo so he could finish last night’s “—oo” and get started on today, then sluggishly began to dress. I was reaching for my green uniform when I was suddenly sickened by the idea of trying to be Georgetta for even one more day. I dropped into a chair to think about this and to come to grips with some of the immediate, practical aspects of my decision. I had to go to work; Mr. Bruce expected me. He might need me for several days or let me quit at once; either way I must show up this morning. As Shannon, then? Sans accent, sans eyes shadow, hair down, the whole works at once—just start this minute being old Nobody But Me? Well, why not? I thought. All I have to do is use my new secret weapon and be honest. I can’t go through my whole life dodging the issue, I might live to be ninety-nine—unless I bored myself to death years before.

  Suddenly I was ready—I couldn’t wait to shed my domino and be free of it forever. And I must say I was delighted to be quit of the gluey morning ritual of Georgetta’s coiffure. I threw her hair spray into the wastebasket—and on second thought her hairpins and shoe bows and eye shadow and earrings. Then, feeling as if I’d just shed a particularly outgrown snakeskin, I brushed my hair and again reached for my uniform—at which point my memory presented me with a brilliant solution to the whole problem of my job. I put on my yellow linen instead, bundled all three uniforms under my arm, and started for the Rainbow.

  Dave was trimming the grass edge in front of the hydrangea bushes as I started down the steps. His head turned casually, then stayed turned. I could feel him staring, but he didn’t speak and I didn’t stop. It was a morning like yesterday, big and shining, and well along by now, since I’d wakened late. I was due behind that counter in fifteen minutes.

  Helen’s replacement, a cheerful sophomore, was behind it when I came in. I doubt if she recognized me as her banana-split teacher of Saturday, but Mr. Bruce’s eye fastened on me at once, alert but as usual unsurprised. When I asked if I could talk to him privately a few minutes, he simply nodded and led the way into his little office off the kitchen.

  I slid into the chair he offered, wondering how to begin. I murmured, “I haven’t been in here since the day you hired me.”

  “And this is the day you’re quitting, isn’t it?” Mr. Bruce said calmly, sitting down with a creak in his swivel chair.

  “How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen it coming for quite a while. It’s all right, Miss Sm—Miss—Greensleeves.”

  “Lightley is the name,” I said dryly. “Did you know that, too?”

  “No, I only knew it must be something different from the one you chose to go by here. That was all right, too. Perfectly all right. Entirely your own business.”

  “Well, not—” I took a long breath, looking into those patient, unsurprisable, faintly mournful gray eyes. “—not entirely, Mr. Bruce.” His expression didn’t change; he merely nodded gravely. I said, “I think I want to tell you about it—if you want to listen.”

  “I’d be interested.”

  I think he was, too—but not in quite the way I’d expected. He wasn’t at all indignant at being spied on, or being thought the mastermind, and he hardly seemed regretful enough at the way it had all turned out. I made up for it. By the time I’d recounted—and relived—the whole frustrating, sorry outcome again, telling him how I’d tried to find him and been just too late, I was feeling as bitter and futile about everything as I had that day.

  “I just don’t understand Mrs. Dunningham,” I finished unhappily. “She wasn’t crazy, so why did she make the will sound crazy? If she hadn’t, it might never have been questioned. If she’d just listed sums of money for certain people, never mind what for—”

  “Ah, but ‘what for’ was the point. She wanted to open people’s cages for them. That’s what she was trying to do with those bequests.”

  I looked up, feeling as if I’d heard an echo. Mr. Bruce smiled and went on quite gently, “It was a fine thought, but foolish of her. That sort of thing never works. People have to open their own cages before they’re actually free. She really should have known that. She got out of hers by herself—that’s what made her aware of other people’s. But she couldn’t have done it for anybody else even if the will had been allowed.” He sighed and creaked back in the swivel chair. “I never approved of that will,” he added thoughtfully.

  I was too astonished to be anything but blunt. “Then why did she make you executor?”

  “Same reason she made the bequests. She was trying to open my cage.”

  “Yours? Is the Rainbow a cage to you, Mr. Bruce?”

  “It’s a nice little business.” He paused; the patient, perceptive eyes considered me a moment; then he seemed to reach a decision. He leaned forward and folded his arms on his desk. “But the business I like—and was trained for—is banking. I started out in that business, started well. I was a teller by the time I was twenty-four. Then I took some money.” He said this quite calmly and without emphasis and went right on. “I took a lot. Later I gave it back, gave myself up, paid my debt to society with several years of my life. I was supposed to be square with the world when I came out. But I have never since dared to put myself in a position that required handling someone else’s money. You see, I don’t know whether I can be trusted or not.”

  I swallowed. “Mrs. Dunningham thought you could?” I asked.

  “Yes—she was trying to force open the cage. It wouldn’t have worked. Oh, I would have handled her funds honestly. But in other circumstances—not a test situation with someone’s eye on me to see if I passed or failed—well, I don’t know. I never will know. I’m never going to take the chance. This is a nice little business.”

  We sat in silence while I mulled this over. “What is Dr. Edmonds’ trap?” I asked at last, quite humbly. I had a notion he was trying to teach me something—and I had a notion I was learning it.

  “His is fear, too—a little like mine. Well, not really. It’s his reluctance, his unexamined reluctance, to let go of the one task—that physics textbook of his—which seems to him worth the time he puts in on it. It fills a hole in his life that he doesn’t want to know is there. If he ever finished that book, he’d have to face the possibility that his years of teaching have netted nobody anything.”

  “But they have! That’s not true!”

  “Oh, no, it’s not true. But he won’t look to see, for fear it might be—because if it were, he’s not sure whether he could face it. He clings to his busywork to put off the evil day. Forever, if he can.”

  “But Mr. Bruce, he’s looked—peeked, anyhow. He told me once he sometimes wondered if he’d ever taught one person anything of value.”

  “Then he’s beginning to pry away at the cage door.”

  “So is Wynola,” I said after a moment.

  “Oh, yes—the diet,” Mr. Bruce said, smiling.

  “And she wants a job. Oh—and I thought—if you’ve no objections—she could have mine. At least until you found someone else.”

  “I’ve no objection—tell her to come and see me.”

  So my solution had worked out fine. That was good—I supposed. I said unhappily, “Then I can quit today?”

  “Right now, if you like.”

  Reluctantly, I stood up. Mr. Bruce remained seated, watching me. He seemed not at all surprised when I didn’t go. I said, “Is everybody in some trap or other?”

  He said, “I think it likely. W
e move from one cage to the next one, don’t we?”

  “But people don’t always cling to them—they don’t always make them themselves! Look at Mr. Mulvaney.”

  Mr. Bruce didn’t answer. I sat down again and had a look at Mr. Mulvaney myself. Surely his trap was imposed on him by other people? But on second thought . . . he did cling to it a bit, didn’t he? He refused to get rid of old Stanley. Yet wouldn’t that be an obvious first step in relieving his financial situation?—and a firm hand might get his wife’s tyranny under control, too. But he wouldn’t take those steps. Maybe, like Dave, he needed to drag the heaviest possible burden—to reassure himself incessantly that he was a good man, that his life was worth something, that he was needed, that he was creditor and not debtor to the human race.

  I said in a rather subdued tone, “Miss Heater?”

  “Hers is purely financial. She’ll get out. All she needs is time—and to be allowed to do it by herself, so she can have her pride back. Now Dave’s a different proposition altogether. He needs his trap, and he’s careful to preserve it. He’s right. It brings out the best in him.”

  And the worst in other people, I thought. I already knew all I wanted to about Dave. I said, almost pleadingly, “Surely Mrs. Hockins could have used the money?”

  “It would have been irrelevant,” Mr. Bruce said gently. “She refuses to live anywhere but the past—she clings to her grief. A plastic canopy wouldn’t have done a thing about that.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “She and I won’t get out of our traps. She’s too old, and I find I’m—comfortable enough.”

  “Mr. Bruce, are you telling me—that people can’t ever help each other?”

  “I expect I am.”

  It’s not true, I thought. Sherry helped me yesterday—he opened at least one cage door and shoved me right through. Or did I walk through? Or am I still inside and just don’t know it? In other circumstances, with nobody’s eye on me to see if I passed or failed . . .

  Clairvoyantly, as usual, Mr. Bruce added, “Often, with the best of intentions, people just get in each other’s way.”

  “I suppose so,” I mumbled. I felt a great disinclination to ask any more questions. Abruptly, I stood up. “Well—I’d better go.”

  He stood up, too, this time, and held out his hand to me. “You’ve been a valuable employee, Miss Lightley,” he said gravely.

  “Thank you. I’ve—liked it.”

  “Will you be back in this neighborhood at some time?” he asked in a casual tone that didn’t fool me at all. “Or is this more or less permanent?”

  “It’s beginning to look more or less permanent, isn’t it?” I muttered. I dropped his hand and stood looking him in the eye for a moment. “How do you know so much about people?” I asked bitterly.

  He only smiled. “I pay a lot of attention to them. I’m very fond of people . . . By the way, I owe you for a week, don’t I? We’ll stop by the cash register.”

  We stopped by the cash register, and he gave me some money and another smile, and I went home and rang up Western Airlines, then found Mrs. Jackson and told her I’d be leaving before night, and took an astounded Wynola aside for a little farewell talk that sent her flying toward the Rainbow to start my job.

  Then I went into my room and slammed the door and sat and held my head a few minutes, thinking over all Mr. Bruce had said. I hadn’t dared mention Sherry—not that I needed to. I wondered what Mrs. Dunningham had thought his trap was. His plans to draw refrigerators and design cereal boxes instead of finding out where those little wavery lines might lead him? An omniverous mind caught in a spinachy world? . . . Well, probably that’s what his trap had been—then. I knew what it was now. Me.

  So my vanishing act couldn’t be for just a fortnight after all; it had to be for a lot longer. More or less permanent. But did it really have to start today? . . . I was still sitting there, trying to persuade myself that I could stay just long enough to see Sherry again, that I ought at least to talk it over with him (so he could talk me right out of it) when the cuckoo slammed out to tell me twelve shrill times exactly what he thought of me.

  I found my handbag and left the house to catch a bus to town.

  I was just starting down the long concrete steps when I saw Dave starting up them, hands in his pockets and a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. We met in the middle of the flight. He stopped me—unceremoniously—by thrusting an elbow in my way and saying, “Wait a minute.”

  I waited. For a moment he just studied me—my hair, especially—with the sort of impersonal, careful attention he might bring to a new sort of weed. “So that’s what you look like,” he remarked.

  “Yes. Whether you approve artistically or not.”

  Lazily, but for once with no mockery in his eyes, which remained heavy-lidded and somber, he focused on me personally. “Oh, I approve, Greensleeves.” A slight pause. “I ran into Wynola over at the café. She says you’re leaving.”

  “Yes.”

  “How soon?”

  “Today. As soon as I finish a couple of errands and pack.”

  He acknowledged this with a raised eyebrow. After a minute he said quietly, “Did I scare you that bad?”

  I hesitated, then let my guard down, and said, “Yes. You did.”

  There was an odd silence, during which we came so near to making real contact—I thought—that it rather rattled me. I said, “But don’t apologize—it’d be out of character.”

  He looked faintly surprised—very much in character—and said, “I wasn’t going to apologize. Why should I?”

  “No reason at all.” I drew a long breath, thinking, Will I ever learn?

  “Still feeling put upon, are you?” The customary hard little mocking devil was creeping back into his eyes. “Well, I expect you’ll get over it.”

  “Dave,” I said wearily, “did you ever try being nice to anybody for just five minutes?”

  “Yes. I’ve tried it. I found out it didn’t pay off.”

  “Well, does this?”

  “Oh—sometimes.” He smiled slowly down at me.

  How true. I looked at him standing there, the hard bulge of his shoulder shaping the faded old shirt, his brown throat thrusting up out of it, and wondered how it could be that even right now, when I was weariest of his perversity, readiest to say good-by, while my mind was rejecting and disowning him, I knew quite well that the whole thing could very easily start all over again, any time he cared to start it. I thought, This man can play me like a trout—reel me in, throw me back, just as he chooses. It might go on forever.

  He was saying, “The fact is, I’m glad you’re leaving. I don’t have time to fool around educating infants. I lost close to two weeks’ work on you as it was.” His eyes flicked to my hair again, curiously. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked.

  That was the big question, all right, but I felt no need or desire to explain a thing to him. He didn’t really want to know, anyhow. I said, “Does it matter?”

  “No, not a bit. Well, so long, Greensleeves. It’s been interesting.”

  He smiled, hitched his loaf of bread more firmly under his arm, and climbed on up the steps and out of my life. On his way I saw him stop, lean down, and carefully uproot a small sprig of something growing in a crack between the squares of concrete. He took it with him into the house.

  I ran down the rest of the steps feeling that I couldn’t start vanishing too soon.

  I caught the next bus to town. Since a sort of gone feeling in my middle was reminding me that I’d forgotten all about breakfast, I went first to a drugstore and fortified myself with one of those flannel-and-tunafish sandwiches—it didn’t matter; I didn’t know what I was eating anyway—before going on to the bank to close out Georgetta’s account. There was quite a lot there; all my detective pay, intact. Half an hour later I’d spent a good chunk of it for space on a flight to Mexico City, le
aving at eight-thirty the next morning. Uncle Frosty and Mona weren’t in Mexico City; I knew they wouldn’t be for another ten days, when they got back from whatever ancient ruins they were poking about in; but the typed schedule he’d given me promised they’d turn up sooner or later at the Hotel Del Prado before catching their plane back home. If they didn’t, I could always fly back later by myself; meanwhile, it seemed an eminently likely place to get lost.

  I arranged for the airport limousine to collect me at the Heathman Hotel at some ungodly morning hour, then went by taxi to Uncle Frosty’s house, where I pried the spare key out of its crack under the front steps and went in to burgle my camel-bag. By midafternoon I was back in College Street packing.

  It wasn’t much of a job. About halfway through I remembered I had a skirt at the cleaner’s and had to leave things scattered while I fetched it, but that was the only delay. Within half an hour, everything I meant to take was in—except some notepaper and a pen. There remained the wastebasket full of Georgetta, and a pile of her movie magazines, which I stacked on the dresser with a scrap of paper labeled “Wynola” propped against them. Then I took the rest of my marmalade up to Miss Heater, and my new can of Earl Grey tea to Mrs. Jackson. I hesitated briefly over a folder on Greece I’d picked up at the airlines offices, then—Mr. Bruce or no Mr. Bruce—went upstairs and slipped it under Dr. Edmonds’ door. Nothing else in the room was mine to give away, though I sort of gave my silent blessing to the next person to sleep in that dark, carved bed and wake up to the sight of sunny yellow walls and the voice of the cuckoo.

  At last, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I sat down at the desk and stared at a sheet of notepaper for quite a while, and finally wrote what I had to write:

  “Sherry dear: Please forgive me. I’ve gone to get lost. We’re badly in each other’s way, and you know it. I told you the truth, I love you—now. Enough to marry you. But I’ve got to get a firmer grip on the person you’d wind up married to. I’m changing too fast—I don’t even know who I’ll be tomorrow, because today I’m not who I thought I was yesterday. In two years we could be strangers—married or not, Sherry! We’ve got to give ourselves a chance to jell a bit before we start changing each other’s lives. You too. Promise me you’ll do something with that fund. Please, Sherry. Go find out what it’s like to live in Timbuktu. Then let me know you’ve done it. Here’s an address that will always reach me, but I won’t be there. Good-by for quite a while—S.K.L.”