I added the address of Uncle Frosty’s office, then sealed the envelope, put Sherry’s name on it, and went quickly down the street to Mrs. Moore’s. Nobody was there, but they had a mail table, too, and I left my letter where Sherry would see it the minute he came back. Then I walked quickly home, trying not to think about how he’d look when he opened it, or what he’d think of me, or how he’d feel.
When I reached my room, I found that in my absence something had been slipped under my door—a rather grubby manila envelope that looked as if it had spent weeks knocking about behind a radiator or somewhere. Completely baffled, I opened it, and from between two pieces of laundry-box cardboard extracted one of Dave’s drawings.
It was a beauty—a tall, spiky sort of weed vigorously captured in pen and ink over a wash of watercolor. On the margin were several quick, exquisite sketches of details: the curling tip of the leaf, a section of branching stem done once, then again, minutely altered; three gradually improving studies of a seed cluster. Obviously, this was one of those work-in-progress versions of something not yet perfected for the etching press and the outsider’s eye—perhaps one I’d seen tacked to the attic wall. It was like a glimpse into the center of Dave’s mind—a snapshot of his furiously patient hand at work. Across the bottom, in a bold, half-printed script, he’d scrawled, “Something else to remember me by.”
I’d stood for some minutes, admiring the crisp, tense grace of stalk and leaf, before it dawned on me that it was pigweed.
Feeling as though I were packing my Dior hair shirt, I eased the drawing in flat on the bottom of the camel-bag—on top of Sherry’s wavery-line sketch of Georgetta—and buckled the bag shut.
I caught a bus to town, checked in at the Heathman, and went to bed at eight-thirty. By eight-thirty the next morning, I was airborne, staring at a bald man’s head in front of me, wondering what Sherry was doing right this minute, and clinging hard to the hope that what I was doing wasn’t something I’d regret for the rest of my life.
Nine days later—August 30—Uncle Frosty was sitting in my room at the Hotel Del Prado, looking around him in a dazed manner at the paper-strewn room, the desk buried under a drift of manuscript, the two short stories he’d just moved in order to sit down—and I was saying nervously, “My inner girl, I think,” and wondering how on earth to begin my account of the last three weeks.
He nodded, and his eyes returned to me. “Shan, stop pacing and start explaining. What’s happened?”
“A lot. So much that—” I gave up trying to find a place to start. “Oh, Uncle Frosty—I’m in love, and I wanted so terribly badly to get married that I just ran away.”
Uncle Frosty drew a long breath and settled back slowly in his chair. Presently, he began to smile a little. “That’s your kind of logic, all right. I’d recognize it anywhere.”
“Well, it is logical. I’ve just skipped some bits.”
“Old dear, please go back and put them in.”
So I dropped into the other chair and started on the story—reserving some bits that belonged to my new private life, but telling all I could about the picnic, my conversation with Mr. Bruce, my final decision, and my flight. And about Sherry. “Uncle Frosty, he’s somebody you’d like, you’d like him enormously . . .” I began pouring out words to demonstrate this truth, and though I never came close to an adequate description of Sherry, I had Uncle Frosty’s absolute attention. I think he was listening to much more than words, and his eyes had a peaceful expression when I finished.
“And does Sherry concur in this—this postponement of the whole matter? He agreed you ought to come down here?”
“Oh, he doesn’t know where I am. Or even that I was going. I just went—while he was in Bell Landing.” I saw Uncle Frosty’s face and suddenly felt hollow. “What’s the matter?”
“Matter? Holy smoke, Shan! Unless he has exceptionally steady nerves—”
“I left him a note. I tried to explain—oh, was it so treacherous? I gave him your office address . . . But he mustn’t have any other—don’t you see? He—”
“He has the note by now? He’s back in Portland?”
“Oh, yes. He got back last Monday.”
Uncle Frosty looked at me helplessly a moment. “That’s rather left Miss Jensen with a handful, hasn’t it?”
“What? Sherry wouldn’t go to the office! Whatever for?”
“To wrest your real address out of my embattled secretary—if I’ve still got one. It’s what I’d do.”
This had never occurred to me. “But she doesn’t know where I am either,” I confessed. I was beginning to feel appalled—and I knew I mustn’t feel anything but resolute. “I had to do it this way, Uncle Frosty. You ought to understand that—it’s nothing but your own idea, extended a bit.”
“I’m responsible?”
“You and Mrs. Dunningham. Didn’t I go to that boardinghouse in the first place—incommunicado—so I could clear my mind about college? Well, now I’m going to college, to clear my mind about Sherry. It’s got to work. It will.”
“I see,” Uncle Frosty said slowly. He fell silent, his eyes again moving about the room. They came to rest on Sherry’s cartoon of Georgetta, pinned above the desk. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Who drew that?”
“Sherry. Isn’t it—odd and wonderful? That’s what he’s like.” We both sat gazing at the sketch a moment.
Uncle Frosty said, “I think I’m going to be very interested to meet that young man. And I’ll bet I won’t have long to wait, either.”
“Do you really think he’ll have gone to your office? That he’ll—be all upset and everything?”
“Shannon, use your head. I think he’s probably been battering down the walls.”
“Oh, no . . . oh, I hope he’ll understand. I think he will.”
“Well, you know him—and I don’t, yet. Though I’ve an idea I’ll have ample opportunity this coming year.”
“Well, you’ll enjoy every minute of it,” I said miserably.
Uncle Frosty smiled. “Yes. I’m looking forward to some good, satisfying, masculine discussions—about women.”
The next morning we flew back to Portland. I felt as if I’d been gone for years—and as if I’d never left. I was almost afraid to walk into Uncle Frosty’s office, but it was all right—Sherry wasn’t there. He’d been there, though. Miss Jensen told us about it right away, rolling her eyes in a reproachful way at me. I guess Sherry was beside himself. “A bit distraught,” was the way she put it. Uncle Frosty explained that I’d been a bit distraught myself and hadn’t had time to inform her of my movements, and she forgave me, said he certainly seemed a nice young man, and that she’d felt awfully sorry for him. “Oh, and a letter came yesterday,” she added. “I put it on Mr. Frost’s desk.”
I moved toward Uncle Frosty’s private office as if pulled by magnets, and they started talking business.
The letter was fat and bumpy-looking, as if something too big for the envelope had been stuffed in anyhow, after complicated foldings. Of course it was from Sherry—addressed in the same tall, thin handwriting I’d seen, upside down, a hundred times as I set a coffee cup down beside his notebook. I picked it up and stood holding it, then finally got my courage to the sticking point and opened the envelope.
It wasn’t a letter at all. It was music—two pages torn from a large songbook, maybe the very one I’d seen open on the picnic table that day. The music of “Greensleeves”—nothing else. It was quite enough. I swallowed, and in my mind the melody began to play itself—on three recorders—as I read the words through. Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously—and I have lovèd you so long, delighting in your company! Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight—Greensleeves was my heart of gold, and who but my lady Greensleeves? . . .
I blinked hard as the blurring lines ran out, blinked some more, and managed to
focus on the next verses. I have been ready at your hand to grant whatever you would crave, I have both wagered life and land, your love and good will thought to have . . . Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight . . . Well, I will pray to God on high that thou my constancy may esteem. For I am still thy lover true—come once again and love me! . . . Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight—Greensleeves was my heart of gold . . .
The page blurred again. I stood blinking out the window, seeing nothing. I can scarcely remember five minutes that hurt so bad.
At last, when I’d begun to see the window frame again, I refolded the music sheets into their crazy halves and thirds and sevenths, and put them back in the envelope. I was fairly composed when Uncle Frosty came in a few minutes later, after a tap at the door. He looked at me, and at the letter in my hand, and said, “Bad? Or reasonably OK?”
“Reasonably OK,” I told him shakily.
“Any small thing I can do for—anybody?”
“Yes—you can lock me in your guest room for the next couple of weeks, so I can’t get away and run right back to College Street.”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you to Mary’s Creek and your Aunt Doris. That’s the place for you now—and it won’t be long until the university is keeping you too busy to look back. You’ll make it, Shan.”
And of course, I did. It was in Mary’s Creek that I realized how far I’d come, got a little perspective, and began to feel I really could stick it out and not miss Sherry more than I could actually bear to. At least, after a couple of weeks there in the old house, with Aunt Doris and Uncle Syd, I gradually wore the thing down until I knew it was only a normal pain of parting that I was suffering, not downright medieval torture. And by the time I’d been at the university a month or two, I’d learned to live with it.
5
Looking back now, it seems a long time since all that happened, though as I’ve said, it’ll only be two years this coming summer. It’s May now, my second one at the university in this sea of Americans, and I’m still afloat. Actually, I’ve found college less abrasive than College Street—I suppose I’ve toughened a bit—and it’s been just as engrossing, in a totally different way. A big part of that has been the writing. Oh, I’m still at it. You’d think I’d been under a vow of silence all my life until I hit this campus. Ever since, I’ve been trying to say everything I’ve had stored up. In view of this unending stream, I’m glad to report that my plots have improved since the days of the impossibly beautiful girl and boy and the sinister Manchurian or whatever he was. In fact, I had two stories published in the college magazine last term, which filled me with such confidence that I impulsively sent them off to a national magazine. The editor impulsively sent them right back, bringing me down to earth with a fairly painful thud. It doesn’t matter—all I ask is to keep on trying.
I’ve done some theater work, too, and made some friends—though none as close as I suspect Ginny might have been—and opened enough doors to leave my front-hall closet behind forever. I haven’t found out what truth is yet, but I’ve found out it’s quite all right not to know. If I’m reading my current philosophy course correctly, nobody knows for certain—and people have been peeling away at that onion for about five thousand years now. If there’s no middle, it’s at least reassuring to realize that there are probably a lot of layers yet to go. The real trick seems to lie in asking the right questions, and never mind if the answers are slow in coming, or never come at all.
About a fortnight ago I got a letter from Wynola, who at first wrote madly every day, then tapered off to every month, and now sends me a news bulletin when she thinks of it. That’s still pretty faithful, all things considered. She says she’s lost fifteen pounds but has gained some of it back, is taking a secretarial course and likes it fine, works afternoons in the Rainbow, and still wears her hair the way I cut it. Dr. Edmonds is going to Greece next month. Rose is getting married and moving to Seattle. Dave’s already gone—he headed south, hitchhiking, just before Christmas, having evidently exhausted the Oregon weeds, and nobody’s heard from him since. Sherry has been at Oxford since late last August.
Wynola needn’t have told me that—I already knew it. For a whole year I heard nothing about Sherry and nothing from him—and Uncle Frosty never got those nice masculine discussions, either. Then one day last September I got a postcard from Devonshire, with a picture of a couple of those black-faced sheep standing on a patch of Dartmoor. There were two lines of tall, thin handwriting: “It’s been 381 days, 6 hours, and 32 minutes since I said, ‘I’ll see you in a week.’ Just shows how wrong a person can be.” No signature, but I didn’t need one. No address, either.
Months later, in mid-January, came an envelope postmarked Oxford containing three cartoons—apparently clipped from some sort of local publication. They were Sherry’s unmistakable wavery-line sort, all featuring the same puppet stage, with a highly individualized Punch and Judy exchanging comments. Punch looked a bit like Sherry; Judy had Georgetta’s hairdo. The captions sailed right over my head, since they dealt with Oxford current events; one of them was in Greek. There was a return address this time. After some painstaking thought, I sent my two published stories to it (mailed via Uncle Frosty from Portland) after trimming off the university magazine’s name.
Sometime after Easter another postcard came, from some little village in the Basque country—apparently right on top of the Pyrenees, from the quite breathtaking picture. But Sherry datelined it “Timbuktu,” adding only, “Here I am, Greensleeves, and I’ve got to admit it’s wonderful. But where are you?”
Just last Thursday came another card—I suspect the last I’ll get. It said, “I’ll be home in Bell Landing the fifth of June. Greensleeves, I’ve been awfully patient. It’s time to tell me where you are.”
But is it? I’ve wondered so often if we’d both wish later that I’d just stayed lost. Everything is so changed—Sherry in England busy unlocking doors, I here in Eugene, Oregon, up to my ears in amateur fiction. Are we the same two people? I’ve been dating a boy who reminds me of that tallest Miller skyscraper—I met him in a play I stage-managed last fall. He’s very nice. So, I suppose, is the film editor of the student news sheet here, though he spends most of our occasional evenings together talking earnestly about my mother. Oh, neither of them can touch Sherry. They’re just men—the moment I really think about it, I know that. But I’ve been training myself so long not to really think about it. And, in fact, there are times when College Street and even Sherry recede into a sort of dream memory that’s growing hard to believe.
I spent last August with Dad and Jeanne, much of it in England—I must have just left when Sherry arrived. I didn’t know, of course; so we crossed like letters in the mail. It’s just the way our lives crossed on College Street, really. Three months out of twenty years—it’s no more than a fingertip touch. I realize it’s superstitious to regard that near miss last August as an omen. Omens are medieval. But—so are masks and dominos, and a merrie singing cuckoo and a song called “Greensleeves” that may haunt me all my life. To me that whole fading summer has rather the flavor of medieval music. It had the shifting key changes, the gay, skipping rhythm and minor melody, and that unresolved, inconclusive end. I’ve kept telling myself, of course, that Sherry and I will never change, that we’ll never be strangers, that we couldn’t be. The fact is, I know we might well be already—and if so, how can we bear to find it out? Still, fair’s fair. It’s time for me to keep my part of that hard bargain I drove.
The truth is, I’ve done it, scared or not. Last night I wrote a note to Sherry. It’s still here on my desk; I mean to wait for June and then send it to Bell Landing. It doesn’t say very much about—anything. But it does tell where I am.
About the Author
Photo © Peter McGraw
Eloise Jarvis McGraw was the author of many novels for children and young adults, including M
ara, Daughter of the Nile; Moccasin Trail; The Golden Goblet; and The Moorchild. She also wrote several books in the Oz series started by L. Frank Baum, including Merry-Go-Round in Oz and The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, both of which she wrote with her daughter, Lauren Lynn McGraw. Greensleeves, first published in 1968, marked a departure from her earlier fiction, which had been largely historical. In a 1982 letter to her friend David Maxine of the International Wizard of Oz Club, she wrote: “It was the most difficult thing I ever did to shift gears, get into the present and come to the party. Greensleeves was the product of that wrench, and it took me years to write . . .” During her lifetime, her writing won numerous awards, including two for lifetime achievement. She was a longtime resident of the Portland, Oregon, area. She passed away in 2000, but her works remain popular to this day.
Discussion Questions for Greensleeves
By Nancy Pearl
Considering that both cell phones and social media are now so prevalent in the lives of teens in America, do you think Shannon could “disappear” these days?
What is the significance of the song “Greensleeves” to the plot of the novel? Why does Sherry call Shannon Greensleeves?
What examples of humor do you find in the novel? Why would the author include these?
Why do the beneficiaries of Mrs. Dunningham’s will decide not to fight to get their bequests?
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