Greensleeves

  “It’d be a wonder if you hadn’t,” he remarked, making me very glad I’d decided against playing ignorant. I’d known “Greensleeves” since the days of a certain nursemaid who wore garnet earrings and used to sing me to sleep, but I thought of it as rather specially Olde Englishe, like a Morris dance, and perhaps not well known in the States. Which just shows how ignorant I was about the States. Sherry went on, “If you’ve only heard some folk singer doing it on TV, you haven’t really heard it. They murder it, most of them—pretty up the dissonances, even change the key—so they can chord it easier on a guitar, I suppose. That’s cretin, like correcting Chaucer’s spelling. The song’s just right as it was written. C minor. Kind of moves in and haunts you,” he added dreamily.

  “That where I come in? I’m some kind of spook or something?”

  He grinned. “It’s just that there’s been a rumor around since the sixteenth century that Henry the Eighth wrote that song and that the girl in it was Anne Boleyn. He just called her My Lady Greensleeves to hide her identity. See? That’s where you come in. Ambiguities and secrets.”

  I heaved a sigh and stopped to face him. “For the last time, I don’t have any secrets. I’m an open book. I’m—”

  “Oh, come on. Nobody but Helen would buy that Tobacco Road routine you were giving her.”

  It was too true. “Oh. That,” I said, and began to chew my gum in a more amiable manner as I strolled on. “I was kidding Helen a little. She’s so stuck on herself. Just because she goes to college. Why, gee, I could’ve gone to college if I’d wanted to. A beauty college in Boise, Idaho. Supposed to be the best in the state.”

  Sherry studied me a moment out of the corner of his eye. “You come from Idaho?”

  “Mm-hm, Morton Center. It’s real little—you wouldn’t have heard of it . . .” I went ahead with my Morton Center speech, and my Wawkanap Lake speech, and a new best-friend-who-went-to-beauty-college speech . . .

  “But you didn’t think you’d like it?” Sherry put in as I paused for breath.

  “Well, I didn’t think I’d like the career. Just one dirty head of hair after the other, all day long—that’s what my sister Charmeen says. Once you think about it that way, it kinda loses its glamor.”

  Sherry nodded reflectively. From his expression, he was trying to label these various tidbits true or false, and so far couldn’t—but I suspected he was beginning to believe in me. We’d reached the boardinghouse steps by now, but he made no move to go. “Do you have any other sisters besides Charmeen?”

  “Mm-hm, four others. And a brother. Say, is he spoiled!”

  “He’s the youngest?”

  “Next to Shyrle—she’s only in sixth grade. Bud’s in high school. He’s going to work in my dad’s filling station this summer, though. Do him good to get his hands greasy—that’s what I say.” I smiled blandly at Sherry, feeling that Franz—maybe even Nevin—would have been satisfied with my performance. At that instant my subconscious produced a magnificently valid explanation for my worst blunder. “Say!” I exclaimed. “I know why your name sounded familiar! One of the boarders here mentioned you yesterday—a teacher.” I was sure he’d know Dr. Edmonds because of the will; and I saw right away that my logic was a success.

  “Oh. Dr. Edmonds,” Sherry said. “I suppose he might have.”

  “You taking one of his classes or something?”

  “No, just some private work. I’ll start one in summer session, though—integral calculus.” Sherry smiled. “That’ll get my hands good and greasy.”

  “Sounds awful. You’re not going home for the holiday? Where do you live, anyway?” I added, deciding it was my turn for a bit of information now.

  “Bell Landing. Ever hear of it? Well, don’t feel bad—nobody else has either. It’s about eighty miles northwest of here, a little place kind of hiding behind some fir trees on the side of a mountain.”

  “You don’t like it?” I ventured, thinking of Mary’s Creek.

  He looked surprised. “Sure, I like it. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well—you know. Little hick town. Same old 4,741 faces day in day out—”

  “Oh, Bell Landing’s bigger than that! We’ve got 5,958 faces, and a mayor and a high school.” Sherry smiled, watched me a minute, and eased himself down on the cracked concrete steps, motioning me down beside him. “I take it you’ve got no use for little hick towns.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about any other kind,” I said hastily. “But a big city—like Portland—it’s got a little more zing. I like variety. Different kinds of people.”

  “My dad says you can find out more about human nature from knowing 5,958 people as individuals than you can by knowing five million as just a crowd on a subway. Of course, he spent ten years in New York, so maybe he’s just embittered.”

  I reflected that maybe I was just embittered, too—only for the opposite reasons—and decided it might be best to change the subject. “It’s too bad you’ve got to take that math this summer, instead of going home,” I remarked.

  “Oh, I don’t have to take it. I just want to.”

  “Want to?”

  “Sure. I’m signed up for a couple of other courses, too. You find that eccentric or something?”

  “Well, I can think of more relaxing things to do in summer than study integral calculus.”

  “But I couldn’t fit it into my schedule last winter. And I sure can’t next winter—I’ll be a senior.”

  This didn’t clear up why he wanted to take it in the first place, but I just asked why he couldn’t fit it in.

  “Because it’s got nothing to do with my major. That’s the heck of wanting a degree. After your first two years, you’ve got to cut out darn near everything except just what you’re majoring in. Lousy system. It’s like being led into a candy store and then told to eat your spinach.”

  And integral calculus was the chocolate creams? I gave it up and said, “What’s your spinach? I mean major?”

  “Commercial art. Advertising, packaging, and so on.” He glanced at me and smiled. “Yes, I ought to be in an art school instead of Fremont. But that’d be too logical, Greensleeves. Besides, I wouldn’t have got any candy at a place like that—just spinach and more spinach, and rutabaga on top of it.”

  “Well, my w—goodness, if you don’t like this sort of thing, how come you’re majoring in it?”

  “Because I can do it.” With one of his lazy motions, he reached for a sheet of paper he’d been using as a book mark, plucked a pencil from his shirt pocket, and in a few seconds blocked out a box design for Pot O’ Gold Oatmeal, complete with jolly, fey little leprechauns and Gaelic lettering. He handed it to me and said, “People pay you a living wage for that sort of thing. Eventually.”

  “My!” I said in my most impressed voice. In fact, I was rather impressed and couldn’t think why I was also vaguely disappointed. The box would catch one’s eye on a grocer’s shelf, and both sketch and lettering were slickly professional. Obviously, a certain offhand skill with a pencil came as naturally to Sherry as curly hair. “How come you don’t like to draw?” I asked. “Seems like it would be fun.”

  “I do like to—but not that way.”

  “What way, then?”

  “Oh, just a way I’ve always drawn. Before they taught me how.” Sherry smiled, produced the pencil again, and worked carefully for a few moments on the other side of the paper. “Cartooning, I suppose you’d call it. Sort of.”

  He finished, studied what he’d done, added a very small, precise touch somewhere, and handed me another leprechaun—an utterly different one. This one was drawn with a thin, wavering line that possessed a sort of questioning quality all by itself. It traced the figure of a leprechaun who was neither fey nor jolly, but merely rather scrubby, with patched shoes and a resigned expression. The style was odd, unlike anything I’d ever seen. The whole sketch was as
intensely individual as a signature.

  “Now, that’s good,” I muttered, before I remembered that Georgetta’s tastes weren’t mine. Still, there was something at once funny and bleak about this little figure that would appeal to almost anybody.

  Sherry remarked, “I’d never sell oatmeal with it, though.”

  I thought he might sell opinions with it—being my dad’s daughter, I’d immediately thought of political cartoons—but I didn’t mention that of course, just handed the sketch back.

  Sherry tucked it into his book with a shrug. “Anyway, cereal-box art as a lifework . . . well. As your sister Charmeen would say, just one dirty head of hair after the other.”

  “Must it always be cereal boxes?”

  “No, it can be pictures of refrigerators for the Sunday papers.”

  There was something very odd about his attitude. He seemed to have written off his whole career as wasted motion before he even got started on it—yet he sounded neither resentful nor bitter, only mildly bored. There must be better reasons than he’d told me. “Is your father a commercial artist?” I asked him, probing.

  “Dad? Oh, no. He’s a professional failure.”

  My eyes widened of their own accord. “Well! That’s a pretty impolite way to talk about him.”

  “I’m only quoting him. He says people who practice one difficult skill for upwards of twenty years are known as professionals—and people who never get promoted are known as failures. Well, for upwards of twenty years, he’s been very skillfully not getting promoted, though it’s been very difficult. Ergo, he’s a professional failure.”

  I couldn’t help grinning at that. “What is this work that he’s so dead set against promotion?”

  “He teaches English at Bell Landing High School. Promotion would boost him right out of teaching and into administration. He doesn’t want to administrate; he just wants to teach English.” Sherry smiled comfortably and rested his elbows on the step behind him. “They outmaneuvered him last year and made him head of the English department, and he darn near quit. He says it’s a blot on his otherwise unsmirched record of getting absolutely nowhere.”

  I was beginning to like Sherry’s dad. And Sherry, too. “He sounds very sure of himself,” I said, feeling envious.

  “He is. He was designed by God specifically to teach English, and he knows it. He believes in people doing what they’re fitted for. He says it’s the whole trick to living.” Sherry hesitated, then added, “So I’m majoring in commercial art.”

  “It’s not quite the same, is it? He likes what he’s fitted for, and you don’t.”

  “Oh, I only dislike part of it. He didn’t like all his training, either. He says get your tools, then build something you do like with them. It’s not clear yet what I’m going to build.” Sherry smiled a bit grimly. “Still, there’s a good chance Dad’s central theory is all right. It’s worked for him.”

  It had worked for everybody I knew—all three sets of parents, Uncle Frosty, even people like Auguste at Pension Algère, who must certainly have been designed by God to be a Paris concierge. I stared absently at the old car across the street with its straggling “Butch is a goo”—and considered my inner girl. “What if you don’t know what you’re fitted for?” I muttered.

  After a reflective moment, Sherry said, “That’s a good question, Greensleeves.”

  As he spoke, he turned and looked at me, with such complete comprehension in his eyes that I felt we’d somehow discussed the subject exhaustively. In fact, for just a second I was irrationally convinced that in some previous conversation I couldn’t quite remember we’d talked about everything on earth, including our autobiographies and what we liked for breakfast. It was a queer sensation—a kind of flash of recognition—and gone in an instant, leaving me feeling idiotic and slightly rattled. I decided it was time this tête-à-tête came to an end. I couldn’t even remember if I’d been flattening my vowels this last few minutes or saying “Gee” and “OK.”

  “Gee, I better go in now,” I said, standing up abruptly. “I’ll see you tomorrow or sometime, OK?”

  “OK, Greensleeves.” Sherry stood up, too, lazily scooped up his books, and stood watching me with that quizzical half-smile as I ran up the steps. When I glanced back again from the porch, he was drifting on down the sidewalk toward the house next door.

  An odd sort, I reflected as I went into the dark, cabbage-haunted hall. Un type, as Madame Fourchet would say—but all the same, très sympathique.

  Since I’d spent ten months in America without finding a single person of my age très sympathique, or even talkable-to for as long as I’d sat out there talking to Sherry, this reaction of mine was worth a bit of surprised mulling over, which I gave it as I shucked off my green uniform and waited for that enormous tub to fill. Then I stepped into the bath and quit thinking about anything except how good hot water feels to weary feet.

  Before bedtime, though, I spent half an hour with my journal, noting down all I knew so far about George Maynard Sherrill—who was after all a suspect—and all the various new bits I’d invented about Georgetta Smith.

  3

  Georgetta

  1

  It’s an odd document, that old journal. I started it one year at Madame Fourchet’s, but after some meandering accounts of skiing and ballet lessons, mingled with bitter complaints about German declensions, I’d abandoned it in disgust because nothing diary-worthy ever seemed to happen to me. Next come the College Street entries, but halfway through that summer they break off, too—for the opposite reason. My life got so eventful that I couldn’t keep up with it. At first the entries were pedestrian enough. I was just scrawling memoranda about Georgetta’s family or about the legatees, or talking to myself. Here are some excerpts, beginning the evening of my second footsore day as a waitress and covering roughly the next three weeks.

  8th June . . . Believe I put paid to Sherry’s suspicions yesterday. When I got to work this morning, he was already occupying his regular pew down at the end of the counter, and he stayed through lunch, but he kept his word and didn’t do any prying or staring. I think he’s convinced I’m nobody but Georgetta, though he insists on calling me “Greensleeves.” . . . Rose says my feet will harden to this job in time. I devoutly hope so.

  10th June . . . My chief daily irritant (next to Helen) is obviously going to be that dishwasher—a boy of sixteen, name of Milton, who looks twelve and acts ten . . . Autobiographical notes: Georgetta is the only redhead in the Smith family; sister Charmeen was May Queen her senior year at Morton Center High; Charmeen’s boyfriend’s name is Al. I invented all this for Sherry’s benefit today.

  11th June . . . I needn’t have worried an instant about my name. Everybody’s adopted “Greensleeves,” even the customers—except for Mr. Bruce, who goes right on calling me “Miss Smith,” and Helen, who goes right on calling me “dear,” and of course Dave Kulka and Mr. Ansley (the cook), neither of whom bother to call me anything . . . Wish I could get somebody talking about Mrs. Dunningham. It’s remarkably hard, since I’m supposed to be ignorant of her existence.

  12th June . . . Spring term at the college ended today. Hear, hear. Now maybe Helen will stop being tragic about her simply awful exams. There’ll be a week’s hiatus before the summer session begins—which means, judging from today, that the Rainbow will be jammed continuously instead of just at noon . . . Dr. Edmonds is writing a physics textbook. Says he plans to spend all his free time this summer revising it. Dreary prospect . . . My feet finally are getting a bit better.

  14th June . . . Today was gorgeous—Riviera weather, exactly like Villefranche in April. Actually it’s been remarkably fine (for June in Oregon) since before I left Mary’s Creek, only there I was in no mood to notice . . . I must remember not to ask people if they want their coffee “black or white.” They always look rather blank for a second. Maybe it’s one of those Britishisms. Sherry ove
rheard me say it today and got a sudden very interested gleam in his eye, which gave me a bad moment—but he didn’t mention it later, when he walked home with me. He must be a very good student—got A’s in every course but one, and that was a spinachy one that bores him. I told him he’d better mind what he’s about—he might end up a success and disgrace his Dad’s profession. He just said, “Dad told me to get whatever I want out of college. His sole requirement is that I want something. Reasonable enough. I’ve decided to want five cups of coffee per forenoon.” He does have a quite engaging grin.

  16th June . . . Tried to start a conversation with Miss Heater this morning when we met at the mail table, but no luck. Every time I see her, she just smiles in that mousy sort of way, and murmurs something inaudible into her little pink handkerchief, and vanishes through a door . . . Rained today—just when I was boasting about the weather.

  17th June . . . I’ve been trying to work out just what it is I like so much about that song, “Greensleeves.” It keeps running through my head lately—no wonder, with people shouting “Greensleeves!” every time they want a napkin—and Sherry’s right, it does rather move in and haunt you. I think it’s that plaintive little minor strain weaving in and out of the melody, and the rhythm—like children skipping—and those strange key changes or whatever they are, shifting about like colors in a dream, so that you keep feeling intrigued and diverted because the next chord or interval isn’t the one you’d have expected, and neither is the unresolved chord at the end. That’s it, I guess—the medieval flavor of the thing. Now that I think of it, nearly all medieval music sounds that way, happy and sad together, with that inconclusive, rather drifting end. Always brings to mind a vision of the old, small, wooden London with gates you could close at night, and mummers and minstrels and rowdy torchlit taverns, and laughter and ale and the Globe Theatre—and though you knew the plague was in Stepney and a footpad might cut your throat between here and home, that was all part of life, too, part of what you were singing about in that minor key . . . Of course, a spoil-sport musician (that BBC friend of Nevin’s) told me once it all has to do with the twelve-tone scale or some such thing—but I like my notion better.