“Gee, you really made her day,” I commented, buttering a roll.
Sherry merely said, “Helen better watch out around you. You bite. Go on about Wynola.”
Instead, I went on about Mrs. Dunningham, so that I could ask, presently, if he’d ever heard how she happened to come to College Street in the first place. “A taxi driver just brought her. Wasn’t that lucky for Wynola? Brick Mulvaney, she said his name was. Said he lives around here.”
“Next house to mine,” Sherry informed me around a drumstick.
“Oh, do you know him?”
“Sure, everybody does. Big red-haired fellow. I’m surprised you haven’t run into him. But then he works all day and half the night. Got to, with his setup.”
“What setup is that?”
Sherry shrugged commiseratingly. “His wife’s an invalid, he’s got three children under twelve, and there’s this no-good brother-in-law who’s been camping on him for years. It’s his wife’s favorite brother. Pure parasite—but what can you do when your wife has a relapse every time you mention that maybe old Stanley could find himself a job?”
“But does this Mr. Mulvaney support the whole lot?”
“Yes, and it means a lot of taxi driving. He takes exactly three days off every year. Provided he can get free long enough to take them. Goes fishing, usually.”
“He does,” I breathed, trying busily to fit various pieces of jigsaw together. I must have sounded a bit too enthralled with what was, after all, a quite ordinary statement, because Sherry glanced at me in surprise. “I mean, just three days a year and he only goes fishing?” I explained quickly, if a bit lamely. “You’d think he’d want a little excitement.”
“He wants a little peace. I guess his home life is exciting enough, what with old Stanley having an attack of the-world’s-against-me every time he has to empty the garbage, and then Mrs. Mulvaney having an attack of hysterics for fear old Stanley’s going round the bend, and the kids bickering or getting themselves lost or making Mama’s headache worse—”
“Sounds to me like Mama ought to get lost. Poor man! Why doesn’t he just walk out?”
“He’s not the sort. Besides, I suppose he loves them all—except for old Stanley. He’s a mighty patient guy.” Sherry paused, fork halfway to his mouth, and looked as if he were remembering something interesting, so I said, “What?” and he said, “Oh, I was just thinking. Mrs. Dunningham told me once that everybody ought to get lost at some time in their lives—that it was the only way to find yourself.”
I could almost have guessed who’d said that without being told. I was beginning to recognize the style of Mrs. Dunningham’s pithy little utterances. “That reminds me! I hear you went all the way to England with her last summer. You might have told me.”
“Well, it never came up, Greensleeves. What about it?”
“Well, gee, what was it like?”
“England? Oh, terrific. I really fell for the place, especially the south. And London, naturally. Who was it said that the man who is tired of London is tired of life? Dr. Johnson or somebody. We had a great time in our rented Volkswagen, Mrs. Dunningham and I—she was wonderful to travel with. She liked the south best, too.”
“What’s in the south?” I asked ignorantly, remembering Wynola’s talk about Stonehenge.
Sherry told me Stonehenge was, and Bath, and Wells Cathedral, and Salisbury Plain. “Dartmoor, too—we both like moors. Mrs. Dunningham said every well-organized life ought to have a moor in it somewhere, just for breathing space. More moors and less people, then anybody could get free anytime, just by walking straight ahead.”
“Free? I always thought Dartmoor was a prison,” I remarked, pretending great interest in my salad.
“It is. That is, there is a Dartmoor Prison, a big one, right out in the middle of the moor. But you don’t see anything of it from the road except a couple of radio towers and some distant roofs. They don’t look like much out there. The moor’s a vast place, Greensleeves. The very top of the world—at least, it feels that way—nothing but sky and clouds, closer than usual, and a lot of wild rolling hills with nothing taller than broom growing on them, and sheep and shaggy little ponies wandering around free. Even in the villages, when you happen onto one, the animals graze where they please. No fences. There’s signs warning motorists to beware. One of those big black-faced sheep could be a nasty surprise for a Volkswagen, all right.”
I decided I’d better go back and have another look at Dartmoor. There was a lot I’d missed. Maybe because I’d never crossed it in a Volkswagen.
“Still,” Sherry said reminiscently, “the prison is there.”
“And what did Mrs. Dunningham say about that?” I knew quite well she’d said something.
Sherry smiled. “That it was just like human beings to try to point out that freedom is an illusion. She didn’t believe it was, though. She told me once she’d proved it was real—but you did have to reach out and take it.”
You have to jolly well do more than that, I reflected, thinking of Mary’s Creek and my erstwhile trap. I wasn’t really free of it yet, only on holiday from it. I wondered what Mrs. Dunningham had meant, exactly. I pushed back my plate and said, “How come she took you, anyway?”
“Oh—she was getting on, you know. Her eyes had begun to fail her pretty badly. She needed a Boy Scout to help her across streets and so on.”
“But why you? Hadn’t she any children of her own? Or any grandchildren?”
Sherry looked faintly surprised. “I guess I don’t know. She never mentioned any. Or maybe they weren’t Elephant’s Children.”
Of course I got the allusion, but I said, “Weren’t what?” and let Sherry lecture me about Kipling’s Just-So Stories and especially the Elephant’s Child who was so full of ’satiable curtiosity. “You ought to read more,” he said sternly. “Anyway—that’s why Mrs. Dunningham said she took me, because we were both pure Elephant’s Child and ought to get along fine together. We did, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had me beat for curiosity. She even used to hire Brick Mulvaney to drive her around Portland—all day, just to explore, and find out where all the side streets went. Now, my curiosity stops short of Portland’s side streets.”
I thought College Street quite a fertile field but didn’t say so. Instead, I followed the direction of Sherry’s gaze, found my pushed-aside plate at the end of it, and said, “Help yourself.” He grinned and started on my untouched drumstick, glancing at his watch at the same time. “You in a hurry or something?” I asked.
“Oh, no—I have to go to work sooner or later, but I’ve got all night to do that.”
“Studying, you mean?”
“No, no. I’ve got a job. Such as it is.”
This was news to me. I asked what kind, and he said purely lower-class menial. He swept out, scrubbed floors, and so on, at Herndon’s Bookstore, a place downtown that sold only paperback books. He went to work any time after the store closed for the night and got off whenever he’d finished. “I’m slow,” he admitted. “I keep leaning on my mop looking through the books. They’ve got about a million I want to read, and I can’t buy them all, not if I want to get through college. As it is, Herndon’s might as well pay my tuition and then give me the rest in books—that’s the way it works out. I even go back and hang around there in the daytime and buy some more—when I’m not hanging around here.” He grinned, tossed the cleaned bone back on my plate, and signaled Helen to bring coffee.
I don’t know why it surprised me to find Sherry had a job. I was glad to know it, though. It explained a lot more than those intellectual-looking paperbacks he was always reading—it explained, for instance, why he never asked me out. But imagine. Scrubbing floors half the night, as well as studying more than half the day. “You sure must want to get through college,” I remarked.
“Well, naturally.” Sherry glanced at me, then added ligh
tly, “Might as well finish, now that I’ve started.”
He didn’t feel lightly about it, though; having seen our attitudes differed, he’d simply turned his own aside. Maybe it was his tact, but he had me suddenly wondering if I were the one out of step. What if there were something in college for me after all—only I just didn’t know what it was yet? What if I never found out what it was until too late to get it? On the other hand, why go to college to get it until I found out what it was? . . . About then I decided my questions were becoming remarkably silly and so complicated that even I couldn’t quite follow what I meant.
“Well, it takes all kinds,” I said cheerfully, to dismiss the subject. But I didn’t feel cheerful, or even triumphant about all the information I’d extracted in the last hour or so. By the time Sherry and I left the Rainbow and started slowly home, I was feeling restless and dislocated and irritable and as if there weren’t much point in anything anyhow.
The evening had come really warm, with not a breeze stirring anywhere, and it was that exact time when you can’t tell whether it’s day or night—it’s just an even mixture of the two, with the whole air colored a sort of smudged blue-gray. All down the street were little balls of golden light, and golden figure eights, and zigzags, where little children were waving their Fourth of July sparklers frenziedly around. You could hear the sputtering when another one was lighted, and the high voices of the children, and their dads and mothers telling them to be careful and not poke Jackie in the eye, and so on—the evening was that still.
Sherry and I walked along in silence, then sat on the cracked concrete steps in front of the boardinghouse and watched the infrequent lorries and cars go by, and the children with their sparklers.
“So what do you want out of college?” I asked. “Your dad said you had to want something.”
“Information,” Sherry said.
“No, come on—tell me.”
“I did tell you. I want to find out things I might never find out otherwise. Reading books is all very well, but I could read twenty books about integral calculus, for instance, and still not learn much. Somebody’s got to pound that sort of thing into me. I’m stupid about math.”
“Then why do you take integral calculus?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Sherry said patiently. “Because I couldn’t imagine what it was all about. Think of going all through life not even knowing what people mean when they say ‘integral calculus.’”
I thought of it, and it didn’t faze me at all, but it seemed to appall Sherry. Apparently, everything he didn’t know appalled him until he’d got a few scraps of it for his own. He’d even taken a whole year of private work in Greek—the ancient kind—just to find out how people in those days sounded when they talked.
“Who’d you ever find to teach you Greek?” I asked moodily.
“Dr. Edmonds. He’s good—a real teacher. Best I’ve had since I left my dad’s English-grammar class. I wish he knew Sanskrit. I’d sure like to find out what Sanskrit sounds like. But nobody teaches that here. Or Anglo-Saxon, either.”
“Would Russian be hard enough?” I asked. “But then, you could find out what that sounds like just by moving to Russia, couldn’t you?”
“Yeah, I could,” Sherry said in an interested tone. I just looked at him, and he grinned. “Well, anyway, I can’t take it here, because of my major. Nuisance, but you’ve got to have a major if you want a degree, and you’ve got to have a degree if you want any postgrad work, and—”
“You mean to take postgrad work on top of all this?”
“Oh, that’s where you can really browse around, in some good graduate school, like Columbia. They’ve got courses in everything you can imagine. Besides, I’d like to see what it’s like to live in New York for a while. Or Oxford! I’d sure like to know what it’s like to go to Oxford.”
It sounded as if he meant to go to school all his life. “Are you really going to study at all those places?” I demanded.
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Probably not. Don’t see how I can, unless I starve while I’m doing it.” He thought a minute. “Oh, well—”
“I know. You’d like to find out how it feels to starve.”
He smiled, turned in his lazy way, and studied me. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you, Greensleeves?”
“Well—what use is all this going to be to you when you’re—you know, out in the world and all?”
“Out in the world working on that cereal-box art? Oh, no use. No practical use. It’s just that I don’t want to limit my life to cereal boxes.”
“But—” I said, and stopped. No practical use. Where had I heard something like that before, as if I didn’t know? Sherry went on talking, but I’d quit listening; I was too busy adding twos and twos into nasty little fours and discovering with unpleasant ease where Mrs. Dunningham had got the idea for her dotty scholarship fund—and just how she’d happened to choose the first beneficiary of it—and how very convenient it was going to be for Sherry if the scheme went through—and a lot of other things I didn’t want to discover. He was very persuasive, too—he’d even got me wondering if his kind of college-going might not be fun.
I stood up with a jerk and didn’t even know I’d done it until Sherry stood up, too, saying, “What’s the matter?”
The strange thing was that he looked just the same—just gentle and quizzical and nice, not mean and conniving at all. “Nothing,” I snapped. “I’ve got to go in.”
“OK, OK,” he said mildly.
I didn’t go, though. I just stood staring at him, getting angrier and angrier at him for not looking sneaky or at least a bit cynical, or something I could have disliked. I burst out, “Do you talk this way to everybody? Tell them about your poor life being limited to cereal boxes and so on?”
After a minute he said, “I didn’t say my life was ‘poor.’”
“All right, you didn’t. But do you talk to people about it?”
“A few, I guess. If they’re people I like to talk to anyway. Dr. Edmonds . . .”
“And the so understanding Mr. Bruce?”
He put his hands in his pockets and looked at me. I could feel the temperature drop. “What is all this?” he said indifferently—as if he didn’t care whether he found out or not.
“Oh, nothing, nothing!” I said in a fury. “My head aches, that’s all.”
I whirled and started up the steps, fast. He started off down the sidewalk. Nobody said good-by.
I slammed into my room and threw my shoes at the wall, then stalked on into the bathroom and started a bath running. While I was soaking, I had plenty of time to calm down and ask myself what on earth that tantrum was in aid of, and why I was so excited about whether or not a boy I barely knew had helped to mulct an old lady I’d never known at all. What was it to me? Nothing whatever. I should be glad to have new information—and a deduction—for Uncle Frosty’s case.
I wasn’t glad. I climbed out of the tub, got dressed, and went out for a long walk to watch the sparklers. By the time I’d got home, I’d decided I didn’t even have a good deduction. Sherry might have done nothing more than talk to Mr. Bruce or Dr. Edmonds or Mrs. Dunningham, the same as he’d been talking to me this evening, with no notion he was putting that scholarship-fund idea in their heads. Only what would Mr. Bruce or Dr. Edmonds stand to gain from such a notion? Well—the fat-salaried job of administering the fund. And the chance to siphon off bits of the principal in the course of that “wise investing.” That was it. Sherry was merely the innocent source of an idea the other two had developed for their own benefit.
I’d got about this far when I found myself struggling to visualize Dr. Edmonds in the role of scheming financial manipulator. That nice, fast-walking, cheerful little man with the warm blue eyes? I did tell myself that scheming financial manipulators could have just as warm blue eyes as anybody else, but it didn’t convin
ce me.
Well, not Dr. Edmonds either, then. Mr. Bruce? Yes. He was the man in a domino—and there was a pickpocket underneath. Dave Kulka was in the plot with him—to a quite minor extent, evidently, since all he got out of it was a weed garden—and possibly Mrs. Jackson. But not Wynola, and surely not nice, timid little Miss Heater—
Miss Heater. My wrist shot out; my eyes flew to my watch. Five minutes of nine.
6
Right away, I began to suspect that Miss Heater had been regretting her invitation ever since she’d issued it. She opened her door rather as if she hoped I wasn’t there after all, and when it turned out I was, she smiled more nervously than usual as she asked me in. She’d changed into house slippers, and I got the strong feeling she’d love to have climbed into an old dressing gown and watched her “Glorious Fourth” program in solitary peace. However, she fluttered around making me comfortable in the better of her two chairs, offered me a sweet out of a little glass bowl, and in general tried to convince herself she was glad to see me. I tried to convince myself that I was glad to be there, too, and stuck strictly to Georgetta-type conversation, to make her forget my lapse of the afternoon. We were both relieved when the program began and we could exclaim about the fireworks. During the commercials, though, we had to struggle through some small talk.
“My, TV sure is great, isn’t it?” I said when the man began to extol razor blades instead of Independence. “Must be lots of company for you.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” Miss Heater said eagerly. “I used to sew, and—well, and do accounts, when I was in business, but my eyes are bad. I’ve had to give up my sewing. My sewing machine, too.” She looked about the room with an odd, wistful expression. “I used to have a lovely Singer sewing machine. I’ve had to part with so many of my nice things. But I won’t part with my TV, not unless matters—money matters—get a lot worse than they are.”
“What kind of business were you in?”