Greensleeves

by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

  “Even I can see they’ll never get anywhere that way,” Sherry said. “You want to go help him out?”

  “No! Too many people around.” I did feel for the Austrian, though; his smile was growing more and more strained, and he’d begun just limply saying “yes” to everything.

  “There aren’t many now,” Sherry pointed out as several students peeled off and headed for the coffeepot. “Come on, that’s only Bob Peters—he’s the guy’s roommate—and Bob’s girl, and she’s nice.”

  I’d rather have got the Austrian alone, but of course nobody was going to leave him alone at his first American picnic—certainly not his roommate, who was already looking dutifully about for somebody else to introduce him to, and appeared happy to see us coming. The Austrian didn’t; he braced himself and eyed us fearfully, and when the complex machinery of double introductions had got around to him, he clicked his sneakers, bowed jerkily from the hips, smiled miserably, and said, “Heinrich Wenzl. I must apologize myself that I do not speak English very well.”

  I said, “You speak good enough British English; it’s American that’s giving you trouble.”

  Relief sprang into his eyes. “You are English, Fräulein?—Miss?”

  “No—only half.” I was using the broad a and the British r, though, because obviously his teachers had. I glanced quickly at Bob Peters and his girl, but found them walking away toward Mr. Fairly, and Sherry was asking Heinrich when he’d arrived in Portland.

  “The forenoon yesterday, with the airplane,” Heinrich said carefully. “And before, I have come with—on—the ship from Bremerhaven, but it was a Netherlands ship, and I have not enough possibility to speak English and make myself more practical.” His syntax suddenly collapsed in a rush of confiding. “Perhaps that is because I am so stupid now. I am not understanding almost everybody. It is a great embarrassment.”

  “Don’t let it bother you,” Sherry advised him. “I noticed the snafu was mutual.”

  “Please?” said Heinrich, beginning to look hunted again.

  I said in Franz’s Viennese German, “He means the students of German could not understand your German either.”

  “Ah, so! Ja-ja, tatsächlich! Aber ich—” He stopped and stared happily at me. “Mein Gott! Sie sprechen Wiener Deutsch!”

  “Ja-ja. Ich habe von einem Wiener gelernt,” I told him.

  I thought for a minute he was going to kiss me on both cheeks, and I understood exactly how he felt. There were a dozen mysteries worrying him—American expressions, American customs and attitudes, American college routines. He implored me to explain—in German, bitte!—and I did my best, applying to Sherry for answers I didn’t know. Then Bob Peters and his girl came back with Mr. Fairly, and presently Sherry and I drifted away.

  “There now. You talked to him,” Sherry said.

  “Oh, I can talk to Europeans.”

  “You can talk to Americans, too. Anybody who comes in the Rainbow. Students, and taxi drivers, and that dentist with the moustache, and Dr. Edmonds, and—”

  “Well—Georgetta can,” I said uncertainly.

  “Greensleeves can, too. Does it all the time.”

  “Oh, really!” I was confused enough already. The fact is, I told myself, you’ve just made up all this confusion, so you can hide behind it. “Sherry, forget all those names. They don’t change anything at all. I’m still nobody but me.”

  “Well, finally!” Sherry ejaculated, stopping in his tracks. “You have stated a simple truth—without intending to, naturally.” He grinned down at me. “Welcome to the party, Nobody But Me. Now if you’ll just start talking to these harmless students the way Nobody But You talks to people in the Rainbow, pretty soon you’ll know who I mean by Greensleeves. And so will everybody else.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said crossly.

  “Isn’t it? You know, you’ve got quite a taste for the complicated, Greensleeves. I don’t think you like things to be simple. Has this picnic really been like Mary-High so far?”

  I had to admit it hadn’t, really—except for my behavior. “I haven’t improved any, Sherry; it’s just that—that college students are easier to . . .” The rest trailed off as I realized that was exactly what everybody had been trying to convince me of all this time. That Mary-High wasn’t the U.S.A., that college might be easier, that I needn’t cram myself into unnatural molds. Clearly, I wouldn’t stick out as European with people like Heinrich around—anyway, these Americans had liked him. Hope burgeoned. Maybe if I’d just defrost a little . . . Then I remembered. “That’s not all there is to it. There’s Dad. That whole routine. And somebody’ll find out sooner or later that I’m related to Mother.”

  “Greensleeves, you don’t have to live up to them. Just be you! It’s a long time since you were anybody else, with me.”

  Or with Dave, either. With a sinking in the pit of my stomach, I reflected that nothing was as simple as Sherry thought.

  Still, the day began to change. Maybe Sherry’s simple truth got through to me; maybe lesser bugaboos dwindled once I’d thought of Dave. Maybe Ginny was responsible; she emerged from the house just then, dressed now in slacks and pullover, toweling her hair, and stopped by the bottom step, where we were sitting, to ask if we’d seen Betty.

  “Not since she left us—with Bill in pursuit,” Sherry said.

  “Um-hmm. Well, I wasn’t a bit worried anyhow. If ever I saw a girl less likely to be lonesome, it’s my little cousin.” The frank gray eye came to rest on me. “You know, you’ve got the prettiest hair I ever saw. Is it naturally curly, too?”

  I lost my breath for a minute—but in an extremely pleasurable way—and stammered, “My word—thanks! Yes, it is, just a bit.”

  “Just about the way a nasty old fifty-dollar permanent would curl it. Oh, well, my character’s lovely, and someday I’ll buy a wig.”

  Sherry smiled down at me and started to say something, then stopped, an odd expression coming over his face. He turned to Ginny. “Shan’s dad has red hair, too,” he said. “You’ve probably seen him, if you watch the six o’clock news. Or seen his byline on AP stories. Gregory Lightley—he’s one of those far-flung reporters.” He met my stricken look with a calm one and went on, “Her mother is Rosaleen O’Leary, the British actress. Can you believe that?”

  “Ye gods,” Ginny said in startled tones. “What a pair. It must be—very exciting.” I turned, feeling absolutely numb, to meet a penetrating gray glance. “Or is it gruesome?” she added baldly.

  Our eyes held; I heard myself saying, “Gruesome.”

  Then I heard Sherry saying, incredibly, “Excuse me a minute, will you?” and saw him bounding up the steps to the house. Appalled, I stared after him, but Ginny calmly sat down in the place he’d vacated and asked if I were entering Fremont in the fall.

  “I don’t—know,” I said, paralyzed by Sherry’s abrupt desertion—by his apparent temporary insanity.

  “You don’t? How come?” Ginny asked.

  “Well, I—” I turned and looked at her. And all at once I told myself to come off it—she was no more frightening than Rose. I said, “I may not go to college. I’ve been trying to make up my mind all summer. I think I’d like to. Well, I know I would. But the stupid fact is, I’m scared.”

  “What of?”

  “Americans,” I said bluntly.

  Ginny regarded me with interest but without surprise. “I suppose you’ve lived abroad a lot . . . Say, by any chance are you well acquainted with London?”

  “Yes, I—yes.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake tell me what Mayfair is! I’ve never been able to pin it down. Is it a place, or an accent, or just a state of mind, or what?”

  I blinked, laughed, then got to thinking about it. “All three, actually. It is an area of London—roughly West 1, though it’d end at about Oxford Street. But you’re right. It’s mainly just a s
hort way of saying very swish or smart.”

  “Where’d the name come from, then?”

  “Oh, they used to hold a real fair there, ages ago. Every May, I suppose. I think Shepherd’s Market was about the dead center of it. But it got so scandalous they shut it down, way back in the eighteenth century or sometime.”

  “Scandalous? A fair? What did they do to be scandalous?”

  “No idea. Cheated the customers, maybe?”

  “Oh, it must have been worse than that.”

  We began to hazard guesses about it, which grew increasingly original and struck us as increasingly humorous. Then Ginny started telling me about a term paper she’d done on the Common Market, and presently, to my disappointment, some people came to collect her for a tennis match. When she was gone, I sat musing a moment, rather happily, then looked at my watch and found that a whole half hour had evaporated, and Sherry still hadn’t come back.

  I stood up, feeling panicky, and was wondering whether to stay where I was so he’d be sure to find me, or start searching the house for him, when I heard music start up from somewhere in the distance—recorders, I thought, maybe a trio of them, their reedy, flutelike harmonies almost lost in the bigness of the outdoors. People were drifting toward the sound, but I paid scant attention until it dawned on me that the tune was “Greensleeves.” Then I moved free of the angle of the house and spotted the players—not such a distance away after all—grouped around the end of one of the picnic tables, sharing a music book lying flat between them. The one half sitting on the edge of the table was Sherry.

  Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight . . . . A likely story. Why, I thought indignantly, he must have sneaked out the back door. He’s just ditched me, that’s what he’s done, he’s—

  Right then Sherry, still playing, spotted me and took the recorder away from his lips—then grinned, replaced it, and serenely turned back to his music book. I was in the process of swelling with wrath when a diffident bass voice at my side said, “Looks like Sherry sort of got shanghaied for a while. Must be the only alto player who showed up today.”

  I looked around, then up—way up—into the engaging, homely face of one of the skyscraping Millers. The taller one. His name eluded me.

  “Steve,” he supplied helpfully. “That alto recorder’s unpopular, you know. Tuned to G instead of C like the others. So alto players get kind of in demand at times.” He eyed me hopefully. “Now, I’m perfectly free. I don’t play any musical instrument.”

  I told him I didn’t either, and added in astringent tones that I hadn’t known before that Sherry did.

  “Well, I don’t think he intended to today. That’s not even his own instrument—it’s a spare Jack Lincoln had along. You’d better forgive him. I heard him sort of arguing about it—in the house a while back—and then the sounds of a body being dragged away. I thought it might be just the time to come out and hunt you up.”

  Steve smiled happily and with perfect candor. I considered him in silence a moment. Circling back around, that’s what he was doing. And Sherry, having looked up from his music and seen his prediction coming true, had blandly abandoned me to this—this giant.

  “How tall are you, anyway?” I was surprised to hear myself saying.

  “Six-five in my stocking feet,” Steve said, giving me another choir-boy’s smile. In a voice to match, he added, “Want to walk up to the waterfall and make Sherry feel real bad?”

  So that’s how I spent a second quite painless thirty or forty or fifty minutes without Sherry even in sight. Steve and I headed for the woods without a glance at the recorder trio, who were now piping “Sumer is icumen in, Merrie sing cuccu—” and started up the little sloping path that ran along the edge of the stream.

  That path must be one of the prettiest places in the world. What with the creek bubbling away as background music, and Steve’s shy bass rumbling genially at my side, and occasionally his huge hand diffident as a butterfly’s wing on my elbow to help me over a tangle of roots, it was impossible to find him hard to talk to. We kept encountering other people on their way up or down, and when we reached the top—a big fir-fringed pool with the waterfall plunging noisily into it—we stood about quite a while shouting companionably over the racket to some other nature lovers. I was forced to conclude that I could do this sort of thing as well as I’d any need to. And I began to form a tentative picture of this Greensleeves person Sherry said was me. She was part Georgetta—minus the bogus accent—and part the same old Shan I’d known all my life, and part somebody new that I was just beginning to get a grip on.

  Just which part was responsible for last Monday’s episode with Dave I didn’t know, and it did occur to me—dimly, in the back of my mind—that maybe I’d better find out. I’d discovered myself to be far from impervious to Steve’s wide-eyed and purportedly ingenuous charm—in fact, I enjoyed it thoroughly—and something was telling me (though not very loudly) that if I kept on with this sort of thing, reacting more or less combustibly to every male in sight, I was a long mile from having a reliable answer to Sherry’s question or any of my own.

  We finally came back to the clearing to find Sherry sitting on the nearest picnic table looking as if he’d been there for some time. He lounged to his feet when he saw us, strolled over, and gave Steve a limpid glance. Steve smiled angelically, said, “Well, so long. I guess I have an urgent appointment,” and conjured himself into a receding figure in the middle distance. At least, I never saw him go. I was savoring the lovely homecoming sensation that had filled me at sight of Sherry. I thought, Oh, maybe I’m worrying for nothing.

  “Well, that’s my last good deed for the day,” Sherry remarked with asperity.

  “Good deed? Why, you just pulled the rug out from under me and then went off and left me, to sink or swim—”

  “Entirely for your own welfare. Like the Indians used to throw their babies into the river or whatever it was.”

  “You might have let me know where you’d got to.”

  “I did. Why do you think we started off with ‘Greensleeves’ on those blasted recorders?”

  I hooked my arm into his nice, comfortable, familiar one in the old saggy white windbreak and said mildly, “Well, never mind, I didn’t sink, I swam. Dog-paddled, anyway.”

  “Looked to me mighty like you were training for the high dive,” Sherry muttered. He studied me sidewise as we walked toward the fire, though, and smiled, and presently added in a mollified tone, “You see? Now aren’t you glad you came?”

  3

  No need to go into detail about the rest of that afternoon—we listened to records a while on the big porch of the house, and watched a madly disorganized tennis game, and eventually ate quantities of food, and watched the sun drop low and the shadows gather under the fir trees. Afterward somebody built up the fire and a girl produced a guitar, and everybody sat around on the ground or tables and sang—loudly, cheerfully, and for the most part, off-key—with now and then a cozily whispering twosome drifting off beyond the edge of the firelight. It was deep, soft dusk when Sherry muttered suddenly, “All right, I’m good and tired of all these people. I want you by yourself and no argument. Come on, let’s fade out.”

  “Go home, you mean?” I inquired as we picked our way over sprawled-out legs and feet.

  “Eventually. I’ve got something to say to you first, and I don’t want to say it in a Volkswagen—or in that Grand Central of Mrs. Jackson’s, either.”

  I guess it was the sudden mental picture of the boardinghouse that woke me up—or maybe something about Sherry’s tone and the unhumorous look of his profile as we left the firelight. All I know is that by the time my eyes adjusted to the dark, my memory had joltingly adjusted to what this day was all about and what was unfailingly coming next. I walked in silence beside Sherry across the dusky lawn toward the rhododendrons, feeling those little prickles of dread again along my j
awbone. I’d never expected this drama to get as far as the last act—now, abruptly, the curtain had rung up, and I didn’t know my lines.

  The last of the sunset light still lingered on the cliff edge near our bench and dimly defined the shape of the river far below, turning it into a sweep of pewter alongside which headlights raced like tiny sparks. Sherry wasn’t looking at the view—he pulled me down onto the bench and faced me.

  “I’ve got two questions to ask you, Shannon Kathleen. Just two. They ought to be easy to answer now.”

  “Don’t count on it.” I sighed.

  “Well—all right, I won’t. But let me ask them anyway. I want to know . . . I want to know if you have any clearer idea how you feel about me, now that today’s turned out the way it has.” I opened my mouth, then hesitated, watching the little racing sparks below, and he went on quickly, “I mean—I’ve seen Shan now, and I get what you’ve been talking about all this time, and I still feel exactly the same. Anyway, you’ve started to get over all that—you are over the worst of it. You’re out of your chrysalis or whatever the word is, and all those dire problems you kept putting in our way are gone.”

  “All those are,” I mumbled. I knew of others—worse ones. I said a bit pleadingly, “I haven’t been out of my chrysalis very long, Sherry. Couldn’t I just sit right here on this leaf a few days and get my wings dry?”

  Sherry grinned briefly and relaxed a bit. “I’m not going to rush you—you’ll see. But I hope my point’s clear? I feel just the same about you—only more so.”

  “It’s clear,” I said. It was my feelings that weren’t clear; they were still roiled and muddied by Monday-night undercurrents, especially Dave’s taunting, “Do you want me to kiss you or don’t you?”—and his incontestible proof two minutes later that I emphatically did. How was I supposed to fit that in?