Greensleeves

by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

  18th June . . . Sherry is certainly a fixture in that café. I’ve got so used to seeing him up there at the far end of the counter, always buried in one of those intellectual-looking paperbacks, or doodling his wavering, baffled-looking little cartoon creatures, that the place wouldn’t quite seem furnished without him . . . Must remember that I told him Georgetta’s room at home (she shares it with sister Charmeen) is done in pink and purple. I can’t think why I had to invent that revolting detail. I’m getting a bit tired of inventing things—or, anyway, of trying to remember them all. I’ve been avoiding Dr. Edmonds, rather, so as not to be drawn out. I seem maddeningly unable to draw him out, at least about Mrs. Dunningham. Nobody seems to want to talk about Mrs. Dunningham—for some not so strange reason! But I’ve got to get some kind of information soon, or I’ll have nothing to tell Uncle Frosty at the end of my three weeks.

  19th June . . . Mr. David Kulka does not like sugared doughnuts, so he informed me today in his least endearing manner. Really, the man is impossible! I don’t see why Helen can’t wait on him once in a while. Scared of him, I daresay. Well, I’m not. Exactly. I’ve written him off as a source of information, though—I don’t even want to talk to him. He doesn’t come in often anyhow, just for lunch sometimes, or with Dr. Edmonds for coffee. Actually, I don’t see much of any of the legatees, except Sherry, and he is an eel for avoiding certain subjects. Mr. Bruce is around all day, but I never saw a man so hard to detect anything about. He’s always the same—courteous, grave, even-tempered, unapproachable, and unreadable. The more I see of him, the less I know of him, the “him” who’s underneath that whatever you call it—cover-up—he wears. Domino, that’s the word. That kind of dark, long medieval-friar cloak that characters in Regency novels are always wearing to masquerade balls. Handy things. You could put one on right over your clothes, pull the hood up, and go to the ball looking so anonymously like all the other people in dominoes that nobody would ever guess you were a duke. Or a pickpocket.

  That’s what Mr. Bruce reminds me of, a man in a domino. Only who’s underneath?

  Only twice so far have I heard him say anything unexpected. Once was that first day at work, when he surprised me with the little speech about Mr. Ansley and the human race. The other time was yesterday. The noon rush and personality kid Milton were both going off duty, having combined in a really special effort to drive me mad. I’d just stepped on my own toe to avoid Milton’s parting towel flip and was standing on one foot, rubbing the other and longing to choke him, when somebody—Rose, I thought—came up behind me. I said, “Who does that cove think he is, anyhow, a human being or something?” Instead of Rose, Mr. Bruce answered, in an apologetic sort of voice. “I don’t believe he does—not yet. He still needs to pretend he’s several inches taller. But his father’s tall. And Milton’s still growing. Be about a year more before we can tell.” Before I could think of anything to say, he added, “I know he’s a trial,” smiled dimly, and wandered on into the kitchen.

  Today I asked Sherry if he knew Mr. Bruce very well. He said, “Not very, why?” I said I just wondered, and that Mr. Bruce sure was reserved, wasn’t he, and that I couldn’t figure him out. “Never mind, he’s probably got you figured out by now,” Sherry said. I don’t think he meant anything in particular by it, but at the time it made me drop the subject fast and start casually wiping my way down the counter away from him—still without having found out a thing about Mr. Bruce. Sherry merely lowered his nose into one of his formidable paperbacks and went on reading. And that got me wondering which of us had dropped the subject after all.

  20th June . . . Thursday—my second day off. Naturally, it rained, though not very seriously. Didn’t know quite what to do with myself. Took a walk around the college, came back in time for the mail (nothing for me), took a bus to town and renewed my hairdo and my acquaintance with Opyl—whom I found entirely different from the Georgetta I’ve been creating, but I guess it doesn’t matter—and wound up dining in lonely spendor at an American version of a Lyons’ Corner House, then seeing a film. I think the film might have been good if I’d had somebody to laugh with; as it was, I left in the middle and came home and poked around in Mrs. Dunningham’s bookshelves for something to read. Not much choice except things I’ve read half a dozen times already, or things I was in no mood for, or that Guide to the British Isles, which is redundant to say the least. I did find out one thing—the books are no secondhand lot of leftovers, they were hers. Her name’s on the flyleaf of most of them, in a little spidery old-lady script.

  I wonder what Sherry does with his evenings? He often walks home from work with me, sits on the steps and talks, but never suggests doing anything later.

  24th June . . . Here it is Monday of my third week and I still haven’t found out one useful thing about that dotty, elusive old lady, though I know her cuckoo clock’s character like the palm of my hand. It’s not that I don’t try. In fact, this afternoon I abandoned all subtlety and asked Sherry straight out if he’d known the lady who used to live in my room. Here’s how the dialogue went:

  SHERRY (placidly stirring his coffee): Mrs. Dunningham? Yeah, I knew her. Why?

  ME: Oh—well, nothing. I mean, can’t a person ask a simple question? (Merry laugh, business of twisting my side curl.) I just got to wondering what she was like, that’s all.

  SHERRY: Oh, what she was like. But that’s not a simple question.

  ME: I don’t see why not.

  SHERRY: Well, she was a very complicated person. You can’t ask a simple question about a complicated subject, Greensleeves. Now you take electronics. If I asked—

  ME: If it’s all the same to you, I don’t want to take electronics. All I said was—

  SHERRY (quickly): OK, we’ll approach the whole thing from another angle. Now if I asked you what time a certain Pan-Am flight gets into London airport, that would be a very complicated question, because right off you’d have to know whether I meant what time was it here when the plane got there, or what time was it there when the plane got there—and that would bring up a lot of allied matters such as daylight saving time and the Greenwich Observatory, and it might take you half an hour to give me a real answer. But if I merely asked, “What time is it?” you could merely tell me, see? That’s a simple question. Let’s try it once. What time is it, Greensleeves?

  ME (resigned sigh, glance at my watch): Five after two. Why?

  SHERRY: Now, I’m glad you asked that. It— (Grabs my wrist to look at my watch himself.) Holy smoke, is it really that late? Well, whaddya know, I’ve got a class five minutes ago. (On his feet, swallowing coffee.) To be continued in our next. So long. (Slaps dime down on counter, scoops up books, launches self toward door, then stops in mid-launch and turns slowly back. Picks up my wrist again, then releases it and gives me extremely odd look.) Mighty nice watch you have there, Greensleeves.

  Well, he was gone before I’d got through staring at my wrist myself, in a perfect panic. It certainly is a nice watch; I don’t think they even have this sort outside of Switzerland. And Georgetta’s dad, who as I remember runs a petrol station, would not by the maddest chance have just dashed impulsively over to Zurich to buy it there—a point Sherry has no doubt been pondering all afternoon. So now what kind of story do I invent? Or should I just ignore the whole thing, pretend it’s a brand they sell at the five-and-dime, and hope he’ll forget it?

  And I still haven’t learned anything about Mrs. Dunningham.

  25th June . . . Sherry never even glanced at my watch today or behaved as if anything had happened. Tempest in a teapot. Thank heaven.

  26th June . . . A drizzly day. Very much like England, this climate, but rain doesn’t seem to depress me here as it used to there. Anyway, it cleared off about sundown, and now the garden is shining in that pale summer-evening light. Our Mr. Kulka does a superb job on the garden. I’ll give him that—he and the tall, elderly lady from the house on the next street, the one I saw from t
he window my first day here. Mrs. Greenthumb, I call her—don’t know her name. Every day, rain or no, she’s out there snipping and grubbing and pruning. Even this morning when it was wettest, there she was in raincoat and boots, mucking about the rosebushes with a pair of clippers or something. She’s a real gardening buff—or else as dotty as Mrs. D.

  This afternoon I was laughing at some remark of Sherry’s when without warning he leaned forward, peered at me interestedly, and said, “Well, what do you know! I didn’t think girls had dimples any more—haven’t seen one in years.”!!! Sticky few minutes. He was nice afterwards, though . . .

  I daresay that last entry needs explaining. I do have a dimple, a lone, asymmetrical one, which after years of trying I’ve learned to forget. My mother has two, and on her they’re enchanting, flashing in and out of those full cheeks of hers—but then, my mother’s the midnight-and-gardenias type on whom anything looks enchanting. I’m rather more the sunflower-at-high-noon sort, like my dad. Let somebody remind me of my dimple, and I instantly feel like a cart horse with a bow behind its ear. Sherry’s remark had the usual effect—just curled me into a tight little wad inside, like a threatened sow bug. I muttered something about getting back to work and beat a retreat down toward the ice-cream bins.

  Sherry lounged to his feet—he never appeared to be moving fast—and a second later was leaning on the counter opposite me. “I’m sorry, Greensleeves. Did I step on a toe or something?”

  “Hmp’mm. Time I got busy, that’s all.”

  “No, that’s not all,” he observed, but he didn’t pursue it, just studied me thoughtfully, then began talking about something else. A few minutes later, just before he gathered up his books and drifted out, he bent toward me confidentially and whispered, “Greensleeves, I don’t want to argue, but I like your dimple.”

  What with his hanging about the Rainbow so much, Sherry and I were getting rather well acquainted. That is, I was getting acquainted with him. He was only getting acquainted with Georgetta—a small fact that gave me some large headaches later.

  I finally did have a bit of luck with my sleuthing, later that same afternoon. I was drying coffee cups and staring idly at the six big flower prints that hung in a row over the booths across the room. They were remarkably interesting, the colors delicate and the line crisp, and the subjects weren’t the usual roses or camellias—they seemed to be some kind of wildflowers. Wondering if they might be reproductions of sketches by somebody famous, I went over to look at them more closely, and discovered they weren’t prints at all, but pen-and-ink drawings touched with watercolor. I couldn’t see any signature, craning up at them like that, and I still couldn’t identify the flowers. One was a plume-shaped affair, actually seedpods; another looked for all the world like the dog fennel Aunt Doris is always eradicating from her flower beds. Dr. Edmonds came in just then and saw me looking.

  “Like them?” he said as he slid into the booth by the front windows. I said yes, but I guessed I didn’t know much more about flowers than I knew about art, because that one kept looking like dog fennel.

  “It is dog fennel,” he announced. “And that next one’s Queen Anne’s lace. And the third one’s burdock.” (That was the plume-shaped thing.) “They’re weeds, all of them. That’s Dave Kulka’s passion—weeds.”

  Naturally, my ears came up like a terrier’s. “Dave Kulka did these?” I said.

  “Yes, indeed, He’s done hundreds—chiefly pen-and-ink like these, but lithographs too, and a lot of etchings. It’s cheaper to buy copper for etching plates than lithograph stones of the proper quality, he tells me. He’s allowed to use the presses over at the college—after class hours, of course. It’s quite an involved process . . .”

  I didn’t care about the process, because I wanted to get back to Dave Kulka and the weeds, but I heard about it anyway, in a concise, professorial little lecture.

  “Yes, Dave’s an expert in his field,” Dr. Edmonds wound up neatly, making me feel that the class bell was about to ring. “He’s probably made at least a pencil sketch of half the varieties of weed in this part of Oregon. Finds a lot of hidden beauty in them, doesn’t he?”

  “Um-hm. But where does all this fit in with his gardening? Those neat flower beds—”

  But the lecture was over. Dr. Edmonds shot out his wrist to consult his watch. “Yes, no weeds allowed there. The fact is, it doesn’t fit, just at present. Well, Miss Greensleeves, I’ve a class in eleven minutes, but I think I can work in a little nourishment first—say, coffee and a maple bar?”

  So that ended that. Of course, I cornered Dave Kulka himself the minute I got a chance, which was a day or so after. It was easy to bring the subject up—all I had to do was tell him how zingy I thought his flower pictures were; but it wasn’t easy to get an answer more informative than “thanks.” In fact, that’s all he said, “Thanks,” and the word was curt and final, accompanied by a glance that reminded me rather less of Renaissance Madonnas and rather more of Renaissance Borgias.

  I said, “You’re welcome,” stared back at him with a defiant snap of my gum, and went away. Obviously, I’d never find out anything from Mr. Kulka.

  It was discouraging. It was infuriating, because my three weeks’ trial period would be up the next day. I sat thinking about it that night in Mrs. Dunningham’s big old armchair and simply lost my temper. I liked my job, I liked my room, I liked my cuckoo clock and being Georgetta Greensleeves Einszweiler Smith, and neither Dave Kulka nor anybody else was going to make me give them up. I stalked over to the desk that minute, found some notepaper, and wrote belligerently:

  Dear Uncle Frosty:

  Dr. William Edmonds is a math professor at Fremont College. George Sherrill is a student in his junior year. Wynola Jackson is the landlady’s daughter. Miss Heater is a mouse with a pink handkerchief who lives in the room above mine. David Kulka is an artist-gardener with an incomprehensible passion for weeds and the world’s surliest manners. The books in my room all have Mrs. Dunningham’s name in them. My cuckoo clock used to be hers, too. I can’t find any clues in either books or clock. I don’t yet know who Mrs. Sarah Hockins and Mr. Brick Mulvaney are, or whether they’re alive or dead or moved to Tasmania. I don’t know a thing more about Mr. Bruce than I did when I last saw you. In fact, I don’t know anything at all, but I intend to before I’m much older, and I’m staying right here, so forget about hiring a detective, because I’m It.

  Yours truly,

  G. Einszweiler Smith

  I walked down to the corner and mailed it before I went to bed.

  2

  The more I got into my stride at the Rainbow, the more I found evenings hanging on my hands. A good time to get chummy with the lodgers, I kept telling myself—only they never seemed to be around. When I got home from work, they were still finishing dinner, and by the time I’d bathed and changed, they’d vanished. They were chummy enough with one another; several times I heard conversation and laughter from Miss Heater’s room, which was just above mine. But I was never invited to these kaffeeklatsches or whatever they were. My evenings were strictly my own and the cuckoo’s, and so were my days off.

  It was on one of these, the last Thursday in June, that I found out who Mrs. Greenthumb was. Since it was pouring, I just pottered about doing my nails and catching up my journal; didn’t even get dressed until noon, and made myself another breakfast instead of going out to lunch. Then, keeping a movie magazine handy to snatch up in case anybody came in—unlikely chance—I once more combed through Mrs. Dunningham’s peculiar library. I had to read something and hadn’t dared bring in any other books, reasoning that Georgetta would be the sort who always intended to read but never had the time. I’m the sort who has to mind what I’m about, or I never have time for anything else.

  I settled down with one of the books on archaeology, reflecting that spinach was good for you, whether you were mad for it or not, and, in fact, was learning
some rather interesting bits about Stonehenge when I heard a key rattle in my door and Wynola came in with a stack of towels. Naturally, she’d thought nobody was home, and when she saw me there, reading my movie magazine—I was by then sitting rather breathlessly on the archaeology book—she stopped, as horrified as if she’d interrupted the Duchess of Windsor in her bath.

  “Come in, it’s OK,” I told her cordially. “Want me to get rid of those for you?”

  “Oh, no. Thanks. I’ll only be a minute,” she said in her little tiny voice, and scurried toward the bathroom.

  “Gee, take your time, honey. Here, I’ll move that screen.”

  I got up to conceal my kitchenette, trying to think of something to talk about so she’d linger and perhaps be coaxed to impart a bit of information. While I was there near the window, I glimpsed Mrs. Greenthumb in her raincoat, snipping away, and for lack of anything else, I said, “Our neighbor sure is a bug on gardening, isn’t she? Out in this downpour. You’d think she’d catch her death.”

  “Who?” Wynola emerged, looking flattered to be spoken to, and followed my glance out the window. “Oh, Mrs. Hockins. Yes, y’would. But I guess she never does.”

  “Mrs.—what did you say her name was?”

  “Mrs. Sarah Hockins. She’s a widow—she lives in that house back there. She was a real good friend of . . .” Sharp pause, followed by unintelligible mumble.