Greensleeves
Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Also by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Moccasin Trail
A Really Weird Summer
Joel and the Great Merlini
Tangled Webb
Hideaway
Sawdust in His Shoes
The Seventeenth Swap
The Trouble with Jacob
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
The Golden Goblet
The Striped Ships
Merry-Go-Round in Oz (coauthor Lauren Lynn Wagner)
The Moorchild
Master Cornhill
The Rundelstone of Oz
The Forbidden Fountain of Oz (coauthor Lauren Lynn Wagner)
The Money Room
Crown Fire
Pharaoh (adult novel)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Original copyright © 1968 by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Skyscape copyright © 2015 Eloise Jarvis McGraw
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
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ISBN-13: 9781477829165
ISBN-10: 1477829164
Cover design by Regina Wamba
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014956298
Contents
Introduction
Dedication
1 The Beginning of June
1
2
3
4
2 Shannon
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
3 Georgetta
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
4 Greensleeves
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
5 The End of August
1
2
3
4
5
About the Author
Discussion Questions for Greensleeves
Further Reading: Realistic Teen Fiction
Introduction
ELOISE JARVIS MCGRAW—who was born in 1915 and died just before her 85th birthday, in 2000—published Greensleeves in 1968, in the middle of her long, productive, and very successful career as a writer of books for children and teens. She’s best known, though, for the fiction she wrote for middle grade readers. In fact, quite remarkably, three of her books—Moccasin Trail, which was published in 1952, 1961’s The Golden Goblet, and The Moorchild, which came out in 1996—were Newbery Honor Books. Multifaceted as a writer, in 1978 McGraw’s A Really Weird Summer won an Edgar Award for the best juvenile mystery of the year.
But the novel of McGraw’s that I’ve always been fondest of is Greensleeves, which explores issues that teenagers—especially teen girls—can and do identify with. Actually, given my own experience of reading Greensleeves, maybe you don’t have to be a teenage girl to enjoy it. I first became acquainted with Shannon Kathleen Lightley, the main character and narrator, when I was in my twenties. I loved the novel then, and, having just reread it for the third time in two years, I love it still.
McGraw’s greatest strength as a writer is her ability to develop plots that keep readers turning the pages to find out what happens next; but even more important, she creates three-dimensional characters whom we come to care about as we would a member of our own family. And with the creation of Shannon Kathleen Lightley, she hit the jackpot.
Here’s how Shannon describes her life before we meet her in the opening pages of the novel:
When you’ve spent your tothood in London, your six grade-school years in Mary’s Creek, Oregon (pop. 4,741), and that gruesome period between ages eleven and seventeen playing hopscotch all over the map of Europe, swapping parents and personalities with every change of headquarters, it results in fairly total confusion on all fronts.
After graduating from high school in small-town Mary’s Creek—where she was, disappointingly and against all her expectations, greatly unhappy—Shannon, with a world-famous actress for a mother and a theater producer stepfather, and with a globe-trotting writer for a father, seems to have lost herself. Shannon has no idea what sort of person she is, or wants to be, or what she wants to do in the next few years (college, or not?), let alone with the rest of her life.
And then Shannon gets the opportunity to leave that old life, with all its expectations, behind. She changes her hairstyle, the way she talks, and how she dresses; moves into a rooming house; and gets a job as a waitress in Portland, Oregon. For a whole summer, she can invent a new way of being, leaving Shannon Kathleen Lightley behind and becoming Georgetta Einszweiler Smith from Morton Center, Idaho. The most important question Shannon grapples with over the summer is whether altering all the externals about herself has any effect on the person inside—her real self.
Despite the fact that few if any of the original readers of Greensleeves in the 1970s—or even the contemporary readers who are just discovering the novel in this new edition—have a background similar to Shannon’s, I know from talking to teens, including my two daughters, that Shannon Kathleen Lightley’s dilemma of who and what she wants to be and do with her life is something with which they can totally identify.
That’s the beauty of a novel like Greensleeves: it might have been written almost half a century ago, but its heroine, and the choices she faces, are totally modern.
These days, the number of fantasy novels being published for teen readers far outweighs what can be called “realistic” fiction for the same age group. This is a sea change from the situation found in the latter part of the last century. Then, publishers generally offered only a few fantasy or science fiction novels aimed specifically at teens (especially teen boys, who were seen as the target market for authors like Robert A. Heinlein and his works such as Red Planet [1949] and Space Cadet [1948]). Certainly these titles didn’t constitute a large part of any major publisher’s business plan. In fact, when I look back at the books I read as a teen myself, or suggested to my teenage daughters or those teens I helped at libraries or bookstores, off the top of my head I can think of only three fantasy titles whose authors seemed to have young female readers in mind: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Sylvia Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars (1970), and Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Sherwood Ring (1958). I still recommend these novels to teen readers who want fantasy novels without werewolves, vampires, and the like.
Of course, there are wonderful examples of realistic fiction being written and read today. Four excellent writers come immediately to mind—John Green, Rainbow Rowell, Laurie Halse Anderson, and E. Lockhart—but there are many others. If, after reading Greensleeves, you want to try some other realistic novels, take a look at the “Further Reading” section at the back of this book for a list of some great suggestions.
But in the last half of the twentieth century, when Greensleeves was published, it was one among many, many
examples of its type. Writers such as Betty Cavanna, Rosamond du Jardin, and Adele de Leeuw were all writing realistic fiction. I wish we could bring back into print all of these authors’ titles, and I am so grateful that a new generation of readers will now be able to experience the great pleasures of Greensleeves.
Nancy Pearl
For Lynn
who taught me much I needed to know
1
The Beginning of June
1
Last night, about the middle of the night, which is the time I do a lot of my worrying, the idea struck me to write the whole thing down, just as it happened—that whole summer. My theory is that if I really explain everything, as if I were talking to somebody else, it might begin to make more sense to me. Of course, it might make less sense; one never knows. Still, I’ll have a go at it. And though that summer’s nearly two years back, there’ll be no glossing over any little awkward bits I’d as soon forget about—because I’ve that old journal now, and I’ll use it, word for word if necessary, to pin me down to facts.
I came across that journal again only yesterday. What happened was this: before I changed for dinner, I went downstairs to the luggage storeroom to track down my last passport. It’s expired, and I’ll need a new one if I join Dad and Jeanne this summer, and to get a new one, you have to let them borrow your old one for a while. I had a feeling I’d put mine in my biggest suitcase somewhere, so I dragged the case down and started going through the pockets. Well, I found a whole little treasure trove—an assortment of lint and bobby pins, of course, and three Austrian Groschen, and half a bar of Dutch chocolate that looked about thirty years old, and a British airmail stamp, and two passports—the one I wanted and an even older one. With them was a red leatherette-bound notebook I recognized instantly. The very sight of it gave me an indescribable little jolt. I put it on the floor beside me—gingerly, as if it contained explosives—while I dealt with the other things.
The chocolate I consigned to the trash basket without a pang, but when I started to send the earlier passport after it, I found myself hesitating, riffling through it. Every page was crammed with stamps and scrawls and turista visums—even I find it hard to believe anybody could have crossed the Swiss border that many times from that many different directions in only five years. On the first page was a picture of me, Shannon Kathleen Lightley, at age eleven—product of Ed’s Foto Shop in Mary’s Creek, Oregon, as I well remember. Aunt Doris got me out of school that morning to go have it taken. A revolting vision, all tooth bands and that unpulled-together look one has at eleven, but grinning ecstatically because I was about to go back to Europe to live with Dad and Jeanne—they’d just got married a month before.
The photograph in the other passport, taken in Switzerland when I was sixteen, caught the rigid, no-comment expression I wore like armor through my entire six years at Madame Fourchet’s Academy in Lausanne.
Well, that later one was the passport I wanted; I stowed it in a pocket to take upstairs. I threw the earlier one in the trash—then after a moment I fished it out again and slipped it back in the suitcase pocket. One doesn’t just chuck away the story of one’s life, however much one wishes it had read differently. I must say mine’s been remarkably disjointed, with never a permanent address or a rationally organized family, in fact, nothing but passports—and parents advancing and retreating in relays, two by two. Dad and Mother, Aunt Doris and Uncle Syd; then Dad and Jeanne, Mother and Nevin—and Uncle Frosty, thank heaven, always popping in and out of the wings. When you’ve spent your tothood in London, your six grade-school years in Mary’s Creek, Oregon (pop. 4,741), and that gruesome period between ages eleven and seventeen playing hopscotch all over the map of Europe, swapping parents and personalities with every change of headquarters, it results in fairly total confusion on all fronts. Take for example the fact that I speak French with a Swiss accent and German with a noticeable Viennese one. Even my English is schizophrenic—half British Isles, half U.S.A. People never can place me. I’ve never really placed myself. This sort of thing, plus some others I’ve had to complicate my life, can get to one rather badly after so long a time.
The journal was still lying there on the storeroom floor, daring me to look inside. I finally picked it up, then had to pick up a lot of odds and ends that promptly slithered out of it. Most were newspaper cuttings—such things as Dad’s award-winning story about the Berlin Wall, and Jeanne’s long-chance shot of an air crash that’s been reprinted in everything from Life on down, and a London Theatre Review picture of Mother as Lady Macbeth. There was a snapshot of Franz Bach, too, aged about thirteen, that I took in Paris one day when we were killing time together as usual, waiting for our fathers to get through with some press conference or other. It’s a jolly good thing Franz and I got on well; we spent half our school holidays for six years in each other’s undiluted company. Now that I think of it, he’s the reason my German sounds Viennese—and I suppose his English has turned out half American, like mine. And there was a London Times interview with Nevin Drake, who’s been married to Mother since I was five years old and produces all her plays.
My mother, I may as well say right now and get it over with, is Rosaleen O’Leary, the British actress. This is usually the first thing people find out about me, and often it’s the last, since from then on they’d rather talk about her, what she’s “really like” offstage and all that. Everybody knows already what she looks like—a sheer staggering beauty, classic black-Irish, with wide blue eyes and skin like gardenia puree, and a round high forehead adorned with those winglike dark eyebrows that have become her trademark on two continents.
Dad is a hawk-nosed, red-haired, black-eyed man, all bones and intensity. Guess which one I took after.
Well—let’s be as charitable as possible. I inherited those eyebrows, if not the face to go with them, and my nose isn’t quite as large as Dad’s—though the most charitable adjective I can think of for my profile is “striking.” Unquestionably, red hair is striking, too. And Nevin says I move well, a comment I have never found very comforting, since I never see myself move, and anyway what about all the times when one is just standing there? Especially right next to one’s mother? . . . Well, Mother is one of those other things I’ve had to complicate my life.
I put the snapshot and the cuttings in one of the suitcase pockets, wrestled the case back onto its shelf, and went upstairs to my room. I took the journal with me. After dinner I read it, all the way through. And in the middle of the night I had my idea, about writing that whole summer down.
And now I’m wondering how one starts. I guess I’ll just start—with that morning in Mary’s Creek, in early June almost two years ago, when I was trying desperately to reach Uncle Frosty by phone in Portland before I left for there myself. That was the beginning of that summer. I was back in the States, you understand. Madame Fourchet’s was a closed book, I was eighteen years old, and leaving Mary’s Creek again.
Why was I back there in the first place? Because I’d begged and nagged and argued until Dad finally gave in and sent me back, that’s why. Nobody to blame for it but me. All I’d wanted in the world, ten months before, was to be released from servitude at Madame Fourchet’s Academy and sent home to beloved Aunt Doris and Uncle Syd, and the little town and the big old house where I’d spent the best six years of my life—what seemed to me then the only good ones. I wanted to have my senior year at Mary’s Creek High with my long-lost classmates from grade school, then go on to college at the University of Oregon, to live in the States forever and turn into the American my passport said I was, instead of the mongrel expatriate I could feel myself becoming the longer I leapfrogged around Europe after Dad.
I’d never dreamed it would be hard—that it simply wouldn’t work, that it was years too late already to come back to a place like Mary’s Creek, Oregon, and expect to fit right in as a local girl. Local curiosity was more like it. Local freak. I’ve never spent a mor
e miserable ten months. And two days after I graduated from Mary-High, I was standing in Aunt Doris’s front hall with my luggage around me, trying to reach Uncle Frosty to say good-by. I’d tried ringing his home in Portland the night before, but Mona said he wouldn’t be back from San Francisco until morning. So I called his law offices at nine sharp—only to be told by Miss Jensen that his train was late. So that was that. I asked her to tell him I was leaving for London at noon from Portland airport and that I’d write. Fifteen minutes later I was on a Greyhound bus, trying to hang onto myself in the face of what seemed a complete dead end to my life—a trap I’d got myself into and saw no way out of, ever again.
It’s hard to believe, now, that on that morning I’d never even heard of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunningham and her will. And harder to believe how close I came to never hearing of them.
2
It was eleven-fifteen when I climbed out of the limousine at Portland airport, dragged the camel-bag out after me, and pointed out my two big suitcases to a porter. A red-faced man, who had been staring at my hair rather too approvingly all the way out from town, now stared at the bits of European hotel stickers on my luggage. “Well, little lady,” he said jovially. “Looks like you’ve racked up some travel time already. Where you off to now?”
I gave him a blank smile and said in Portuguese, “I have no English”—hoping he had no Portuguese—and made a hasty escape into the terminal.
I was at once drearily at home, a goldfish back in its bowl. The vast, long room was full of noise and motion; people hurried here and there carrying airline bags and children, or stood about in impermanent little clots. The usual small boy slid hilariously on the polished floor; the inevitable garbled voice issued from the loudspeaker. Back to normal, I thought as I crossed an acre of marble paving toward the Pan Am desk. No use to struggle, this is where I belong, it’s the only place I do belong—in transit.
