About midafternoon it dawned on us that we were starving, so we toiled up the various little hills to the canteen and ate hot dogs at a little table in the shade, then toiled downhill again to finish our walking tour. We were slowing by this time and tending to lean against guard rails whenever the opportunity arose, and finally sat down to rest in the shade of a minute oak sapling planted beside the American Bison’s enclosure—only we couldn’t locate any American Bison, merely a long-legged crane standing on one foot taking a siesta.
“Oh, well, you can’t expect everything in life to be logical,” Sherry said after we’d peered around in vain for the bison.
“I don’t see why not,” I remarked.
“Well, it wouldn’t have any charm. It’d be out of character.”
I was reflecting that I’d been out of character myself, all afternoon. I’d only bothered to be Georgetta in snatches, when I happened to think of it, the rest of the time just being any old person who happened along. It seemed not to matter, not today. I didn’t even argue with Sherry about life’s being logical, which I usually think it should be; I just nodded lazily and sat listening to some assorted bird twitterings from a row of cages on the next rise, and looking out over the canyon and the treetops just beyond us, and feeling the breeze on my face, and hearing the shrill voices of children in the middle distance and the murmur of their parents. I knew quite well I ought to be back on College Street asking Mrs. Hockins and Dr. Edmonds my question. I knew I ought to be worrying about Brick Mulvaney. But I wasn’t worrying about anything at all.
Sherry said, “I don’t want this day to end.”
“Me, either.”
“Why don’t we stretch it out a little? We could find some nice quiet place and have a long, slow dinner.”
“Don’t you have to go to work?”
“I worked last night. I only clean once on weekends.”
“Oh. But I’d have to go home and change.”
“What for? I don’t care how you look.”
I gave him a Speaking Glance and remarked, “Now that’s what I call a really thrilling thing to say to a girl.”
I thought he’d laugh, but he looked discomfited instead and turned to frown out over the canyon. In a minute he said, “Sorry. I guess I’m not a very thrilling type.”
This discomfited me, and I couldn’t think what to say except that I hadn’t meant it like that. I added, with some feeling, that I didn’t think I cared for thrilling types anyhow—which made him turn back and study me carefully a moment. He reached for my hand on the bench between us and gave it a preoccupied squeeze, then rose and pulled me up by it. “Come on, we’ve rested enough—let’s go find that bison.”
The bison turned out to be in the next cage south, which said it was the Sarus Crane’s, so either they’d swapped, or the bison had flown over the fence in search of company. A second crane was at home entertaining him, and a third was visiting in the cage of the Agile Wallaby next door, along with two or three of those odd-looking chickens who always turn up in other animals’ bailiwicks in zoos. All this illogical charm cheered Sherry enormously, and when he casually repeated his invitation to dinner, I just casually accepted it without mentioning changing clothes. I don’t know why I’d been resisting, anyhow—maybe I didn’t believe our mood would hold, once we left the zoo.
It did, though. We folded ourselves back into the Volkswagen and percolated out Sunset Highway while the sun sank and a bank of clouds arose. After they’d collided in a Hollywood technicolor production of reds and golds, we turned around and headed back toward Portland. Somewhere along the way we found Sherry’s nice quiet place, which was also so nice and dimly lighted that nobody would have noticed if I’d come in my bathing suit. And it was still a wonderful day, and I still wasn’t worrying, and Sherry was as perfect a companion facing me across a red-checkered tablecloth as he was strolling around a zoo. We had veal scallopini and salad and crusty bread, which was an exhilarating change from Mr. Ansley’s shrimp, chicken, or steak at the Rainbow. We ate slowly and luxuriously, holding our forks poised while we talked—about animals and people and electric toothbrushes and Oxford and muscles and fossils and dill pickles and Oxford and folk music and postgraduate courses and Oxford and harpsichords and Oxford . . .
“You’d really like to go to Oxford, wouldn’t you?” I remarked.
“Well—there or somewhere. Sure I would.”
“Still just for information? To find out what things like integral calculus are all about?”
“Sure. And at Oxford you’d learn so much on the side. You’d have a course in British manners and customs built right into your life—probably one in international relations, too,” Sherry added with a grin.
“But why do you want to know all about British manners and customs?”
He shrugged. “Why do I want to know all about anything?”
“I wish you’d answer that very question,” I told him.
Sherry took a meditative bite of salad and considered while he chewed. “OK, listen,” he said finally. “Suppose you’d always lived in one room—a room about six-by-eight, bare walls, low ceiling, no windows. There’s one bed, one chair, and for entertainment a radio that plays the same tune on all the stations and a copy of Reader’s Digest for March, 1937. This is home—the only one you’ve got. You try to get out, but the front door opens onto an empty place lined with mirrors. The back door’s locked.”
“You’re ruining my appetite!” I protested.
“Well, I’ll restore it. Suppose one morning you find a key to the back door. You open it and find it leads into a big comfortable room with other doors all around the walls. One by one you open the other doors with your key. You find a huge library, with all the books you can read. Then a laboratory with all sorts of test tubes to play with, then a fully equipped art studio, then rooms full of games and musical instruments, and a concert hall with a symphony orchestra ready to play anything you choose, and a planetarium with a lecturer, and a place full of maps and globes, with windows looking out on every country in the world, and a theater where you can watch the Battle of Hastings being fought or the pyramids being built or Rome falling. You find a zoo, and a room where people are putting a rocket ship together—and in every room you find more doors, more than you’ll ever be able to open. That six-by-eight room where you’ve been living is only the front-hall closet of a mansion—and it’s all yours. All you have to do is open doors.” Sherry smiled. “Of course, I’ll never get around to all of them, or even half. But I just can’t see a keyhole without getting itchy fingers. Does that answer your question, Greensleeves?”
It did indeed. “No wonder Dr. Edmonds said you ought to have your graduate school,” I said. No wonder, either, that Mrs. Dunningham had wanted to give it to him. “Sherry, do you think you will have it?”
“There’s a chance. A sort of scholarship I might get.”
“Tell me about it.”
Sherry hesitated, then shook his head. “I’m scared even to think about it until I’m sure.”
So we didn’t talk about that, but I didn’t care, so long as we went on talking and I could go on watching Sherry’s smile come and go, and his long greenish eyes turn greener when he was especially interested, and feeling the little strings between us pulling. It wasn’t until we were on our second cups of coffee that I realized he was holding my hand across the table—and I hadn’t even noticed. No little electric charges. I hadn’t even noticed when he picked it up.
It bothered me just enough to make me lose the thread of what he was saying. I caught up in a minute, but the mood that had held all day was gone. Everything was subtly different, as if a thin bubble had burst. Sherry felt it, too; he broke off whatever he was talking about and said, “What’s wrong?”
“Do you know it’s nine o’clock?”
“What’s the difference if it’s midnight?”
“No, Sherry. It’s time to go. I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
He studied me curiously a moment, still half smiling. Then he shrugged and said, “Whatever you say,” and reached for the check.
I couldn’t get the mood back, even on the long drive home. I don’t remember what we talked about, just that I felt vaguely mournful, and I’d started worrying again—not about anything special, just things in general. Maybe just because we were headed back toward College Street. About halfway there I suddenly said, to my own surprise, “Sherry, what does your room at Mrs. Moore’s look like?”
He was surprised, too, not unnaturally. “Like a mess most of the time, I guess.”
“No, describe it.”
“Well, let’s see. It’s second floor back, fairly big, two windows, and it’s got an old dresser, and a highboy, and a bed—”
“What kind of bed?”
“I don’t know, a boardinghouse bed. Why do you want to know all this? What’s on your mind?”
I didn’t answer because what was on my mind, vividly, was Dave Kulka’s narrow, monkish little camp bed with the army blankets, and the battered chest and row of hooks—all crowded into a small, unimportant corner to make way for that one burning interest that occupied all the rest of the attic and all but a small, unimportant corner of his life. He was building his mansion himself, brick on brick, with a kind of furious patience, and it was going to be just one vast room. It would be a beautiful one, though, and one was all he wanted.
It dawned on me that I was comparing Dave and Sherry—which was idiotic, because you simply couldn’t do it. Yet I’d been doing it all day—at the penguins’ pool, while we were looking at the bears, especially when Sherry was holding my hand in the restaurant. I’d been odiously, if unconsciously, measuring one against the other.
Well, then stop it, I ordered myself, aghast. They’re utterly different, and isn’t that fortunate! Two of Dave Kulka would be a lot too many, and, in fact, who wants two of anybody?
I can’t tell you how this little monologue relieved me.
“Greensleeves?” Sherry said presently. “Anything wrong?”
“Not a thing!” I said, and meant it.
He peered at me a moment in the light of a passing streetlamp, then settled back with a patient-sounding sigh. “I wonder what it would be like to be a mind reader?” he said reflectively.
There was certainly only one of him.
“Sherry, I’ve had a wonderful time today,” I said. I had. And all the rest of the way home the little strings had never pulled harder.
3
The next morning I turned into Georgetta again, took a firm resolve to put Dave Kulka and his monkish life and his very unmonkish effect on me right out of my mind, and turned my whole attention to my sleuthing. From the grocer’s phone I rang Miss Jensen to say I’d come in Thursday, August 1; then I rang the Poudre Puff to make a hair appointment for Thursday afternoon. Then I went back to the boardinghouse and straight through it to the rose garden and Mrs. Hockins, and with absolutely miraculous adroitness managed to start out talking about fungicides and end up talking about Mrs. Dunningham, and asked my all-important question. Before noon I’d cornered Dr. Edmonds and asked him, too. Both of them gave me the same old answer, practically word for word.
That left Brick Mulvaney the only piece of the jigsaw not in place. And for two whole days Brick Mulvaney didn’t set foot in the Rainbow. It left me plenty of time to gnaw my fingernails and wonder how I was going to pop my question when—if ever—he did come in.
About four Wednesday afternoon, at the very end of the slack hour and my hope, in he walked. By then I was under far too much pressure to fool around with nonessentials like adroitness. I nearly knocked Rose down getting to him first and ignored two students and a hungry van driver while I started a conversation. Within three minutes it was clear that I’d get no results with any old pussy-footing, roundabout tactics. So all at once I just came right out and asked him how he happened to bring Mrs. Dunningham to the boardinghouse that day four years before.
And he just came right out and told me.
4
Thursday morning I washed my hair completely free of Georgetta’s glue, toweled it dry, and piled it all on top of my head with a scarf to hide it, pulling out bangs and cheek curls to re-create the Georgetta look and adding the earrings and blue eyelids. Then I assembled eye shadow and journal, my white pumps and my yellow linen, which I’d never worn on College Street because it rather spells out Paris, and packed the lot in a roomy basket affair I’d got recently to double as a handbag. Then I put on my forgettable gray and took a bus to town. I walked into the nearest ladies’ room as Georgetta, emerged as Shannon Lightley, and went on to Uncle Frosty’s office.
I hadn’t set eyes on him since June, and he did look jolly good to me—comfortable and unproblematic and known and tried and true. Evidently, I looked good to him, too, because he got up quickly from his desk when I came in and hugged me hard.
“Well, Shan. I must say I’m glad to see you.” He held me off and looked me over carefully. “Everything OK?”
“You mean about the case?”
“I mean with you.”
“Oh. Well, yes. As OK as can be expected.”
He peered at me a moment longer, then said, “As can be expected by whom under what circumstances?”
“Oh, really.” I gave up and laughed at him, and he joined me rather half-heartedly.
“Well, anyway, sit down. What’ve you got in your basket, bread for Grandma?”
“Georgetta,” I told him. “I’ll add the hairdo when I leave here.”
“How did she work out?” Uncle Frosty asked with real curiosity.
“Just fine,” I told him firmly. I never think it’s really good for a person to be told he was quite right in the beginning and you were quite wrong. Anyway, I hadn’t been all wrong.
“Well.” Uncle Frosty sat down, poked the intercom to tell Miss Jensen we weren’t to be disturbed, then settled back. “I can’t wait. Begin.”
I began by informing him stiffly that he probably wouldn’t like anything I had to tell him. Then I got my journal from Grandma’s basket and started talking—using the entries just to remind me in three or four words of things I wanted to say three or four hundred about. Such as how wonderful Mrs. Dunningham had been to Wynola. And how entirely likely it was that Sherry had originated the scholarship idea without the slightest conscious intention of doing any such thing. And how tragic Mrs. Hockins seemed to me now, out in the rain with her roses—and how pathetic Miss Heater, still paying for her friend’s treachery after ten long years. And how important it was for Dr. Edmonds to see Delphi, and for Sherry to go to Oxford, and for Dave Kulka to push on with his work—maybe as important as it had been for Audubon to. How did anybody know? “Because in spite of the fact that he has the manners of a barracuda and all the lovable charm of a sore-headed grizzly bear, plus more arrogance than the whole House of Lords”—I took a deep breath and restrained myself—“he is a real artist, possibly a great one.”
I caught Uncle Frosty’s startled and curious eye on me and, to my intense annoyance, felt my cheeks heat up.
“You seem to feel rather strongly about Mr. Kulka,” he observed.
I looked carelessly out of the window and said, “Oh, no,” and found my mind full of detailed pictures of Dave’s dim attic room, and his lower lip with the cleft in it, and his brown, strong throat.
“How old is this man?” Uncle Frosty asked with dawning suspicion.
“No idea,” I said, then suddenly met his eyes and the issue. “Too old for me, and I can’t bear him, and he’s interested in nothing whatever but drawing weeds. So relax.”
“I doubt if I relax about you until you’re ninety-nine,” Uncle Frosty muttered. “However, go on. What about Mulvaney? Henry Bruce?”
“Mr.
Henry Bruce,” I announced oratorically, “is the most impenetrable man I have ever come across. I don’t know a beastly thing about him. I like him, though. Don’t ask why, I just do—and Rose said once she’d never work for anybody else if she could help it. And he can just smile a bit at Milton in passing, and Milton stops being obnoxious and turns into a fairly nice youngster—and Sherry once said he probably had me figured out. I don’t know whether it’s true or not.” I consulted my notes and added glumly, “And his feet hurt.” Then I brightened because I had real news about Brick Mulvaney.
Here’s what Mr. Mulvaney had told me the afternoon before and what I started telling Uncle Frosty right then. On a June morning four years back, a little old lady had come out of the Heathman Hotel carrying a folded section of a newspaper, walked straight to the first taxi in the rank—Mr. Mulvaney’s—and asked if she could hire it for the day. Mr. Mulvaney said yes, helped her in, and stood studying her while she explained what she wanted to do. He described her as “a spunky little lady” with ideas “all her own.” She’d arrived in Portland the day before, she told him; she knew nobody and was unfamiliar with the city—but she’d come here to live. She wanted him to drive her around so she could look Portland over and decide where to settle. She had studied the classified sections of the papers and had them with her, but she doubted if she’d find what she wanted the very first day. It must be furnished, but the landlord must let her gradually refurnish it with pieces she’d choose herself; it must be quiet and a bit old-fashioned—“because I am,” she explained firmly—it must have pleasant people around and roses somewhere. Now he could start the tour, please, and would he tell her about everything they passed.
Greensleeves Page 18
