Letters to Jenny, Page 2

  Jenny’s art reflected her strong love of fantasy and nature (which from my point of view are by no means mutually exclusive), her main subjects being princesses and unicorns. Now I’ve heard all the psychological arguments surrounding girl-children and their equine interests, but be that as it may, Jennifer’s art bespoke of a love of magic and sweetness and nature that belies any psychobabble. Just as you paint a picture with words, Jennifer authored entire stories with one drawing.

  As for Jennifer’s physical characteristics, she’s slightly chubby (as her mother I tend to think of it as “cherubic” rather than “Chubby”!), with a turned up nose, a few freckles spattered across her cheeks, and chestnut brown hair that streaks almost butter blond with the coming of the summer sun. Her hands are deft, her fingers long and slender; strong enough to pull a recalcitrant weed from her rose garden, gentle enough to quiet a trembling rabbit ousted from his hutch while his straw is changed. Her brown eyes, though quite myopic without her spectacles, are quick enough to pick up a change in the gait of one of our eleven cats (”Mother, I think Smokey’s got his old kidney problem again—see, he’s walking with a bit more waddle than usual …”).

  She has a magnificent ear for music, and, when she believes herself to be alone, sings her little heart out, sometimes one of the medieval ballads we all know, occasionally something she’s heard on the radio, but more often than not, she makes up her melody and lyrics as she goes along, singing to her rabbit, her roses, one of the cats, a stray dog, or just to herself as she does her chores or draws a picture. Her songs, though simple, are strangely beautiful, being comprised of what she’s feeling at the moment, or things she sees that strike her fancy. She’s exceedingly bashful about her singing, though, and while we’ve countless times tried to coax her into singing with us during a musical session, she’s always been more comfortable beating the drum or filling in on the keyboard than giving voice to the music within her while in the presence of any but herself, her flowers, or the animals.

  If there is any such thing as magic in this world, I believe that it would be found in Jenny’s singing and her artwork. When she sings, sketches, works in the garden, or keeps company with the animals, she’s transported to a world of her own making, one in which magic is the essence of life, people are good, elves inhabit the nooks and crannies (you need only look a bit further than the end of your nose to find them), all animals are friendly, and monsters just need to be shown a little kindness and love to enable them to comport themselves with some modicum of decency. And sometimes, when I listen to my daughter sing, or watch her draw, I’m transported with her, and often I find myself quite reticent to drag myself back to the real world of deadlines, dirty dishes, crashed computers and skinned knees.

  I am unable to adequately express my gratitude, Mr. Anthony. Your letter means so much to Jennifer, and it means just as much to me. To see my daughter smile after three months of non-responsiveness is to me the greatest gift in the world. I agree wholeheartedly with your words, “… to my mind there is nothing more precious than a little girl….” But to me, it’s MY little girl who is the most precious in the world (as I’m certain yours are to you), and the gift you gave her of your time and the thoughtfulness you exhibited in the writing of your letter to her is helping to bring my Little Gift back to me again.

  I will write and keep you informed of Jenny’s progress, and will keep you up to date on anything she communicates to me regarding her, “… say in the matter …” of preference in characterization.

  Again let me express a resounding “Thank You” for having written to my daughter.

  * * *

  * AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  ON OCCASION THERE ARE REFERENCES THAT NEED TO BE CLARIFIED, SO I WILL DO SO BY MEANS OF ASTERISK FOOTNOTES LIKE THIS. THOUGH JENNY’S MOTHER HAD TOLD ME MUCH ABOUT JENNY, I KNEW THERE WAS MUCH I DID NOT KNOW, SO I WAS CAREFUL. I ADDRESSED MY COMMENTS TO WHAT I ASSUMED WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO ANY TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN JENNY’S SITUATION, AND WHEN IN DOUBT, I MADE SURE TO EXPLAIN THINGS CAREFULLY. AS TIME PASSED, AND I GOT TO KNOW JENNY BETTER, AND AS SHE GOT OLDER, I SPOKE MORE SPECIFICALLY, AND SOMETIMES MORE INTIMATELY. BUT AT THIS STAGE I DID NOT KNOW THAT JENNY WAS TO BECOME MY MAJOR CORRESPONDENT, WITH HUNDREDS OF LETTERS.

  March 1989

  * * *

  An alphabet board spells its first word, “CAT,” and begins its second, “XAN….” Some letters arrive addressed to an elf named Jenny c/o the Monster Under the Bed in A Cute Care Section of a Cumbersome Hospital. Eleven cats vie for a maiden’s favor. And a little girl laughs again for the first time.

  * * *

  Marsh 10, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Remember me? I’m the author of the Xanth novels. I wrote to you in FeBlueberry, the day I received your mother’s letter. I said I was going to put a Jenny in my next Xanth novel, Isle of View. You don’t remember? I thought maybe I’d make her an ogre girl, and—oh, you do remember! You were just teasing me. And you say you want her to be an elf girl. Okay, elf she is. It’s been a long time since there’s been a lady elf as a character in Xanth, about 400 years, when Bluebell Elf had something to do with Jordan the Barbarian. Never mind what; the Adult Conspiracy forbids me from discussing anything like that with you. Today Rapunzel is their distant descendent. So it’s about time that a full elf made the scene again. I will be starting to work on that novel about the time this letter reaches you, but it will be the end of Mayhem by the time it is finished, because even with magic these things take time. Then it will be late 1990 before it is published, because there isn’t much magic in Mundania, and things take much longer there.

  Your mother says that Fracto, the evil cloud, tried to stop her from bringing my letter to you at the hospital; he blew up a real blizzard and spread ice on the roads. Yes, he does that. But she finally did get through. She says when you heard the letter, you smiled, for the first time in the three centuries since you had the accident. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that long, but it seemed like it, didn’t it? Thank you; I’m glad you were listening. She says you managed to wiggle a toe and squeeze her fingers and move your eyes around, and that you could indicate Yes or No. Just now, while typing this letter, I called the hospital and asked the nurse at the Acute Care Section how you were doing, and she said you are improving. That’s the way! I guess it’s no secret that you have a long way to go. It’s like falling into a deep pit, and having to climb your way out inch by inch, and it’s hard, and your folks are sort of peeking over the edge, far above, and calling to you, but they can’t climb for you. You have to do it yourself, and maybe you get very tired, and maybe you slide back down sometimes, and that’s very frustrating. But you’re in a good place, the Acute section; you should see the ones at the A-ugly section! The point is to make a bit of progress when you can, no matter how slow it seems. Remember what I said: things take time, in Mundania, because there is hardly any magic there.

  The nurse said you hadn’t regained consciousness yet. That’s all she knows! She must think that if you don’t sit up and scream, you’re not awake. Actually, your mind is going at a mile a minute, but your body is stuck in slowsand and doesn’t respond. Nerves take a long time to heal; you just have to be maddeningly patient. Maybe that’s why they call the folk in hospitals “patients.” They’re really “impatients” because they want to get out of there fast.

  Well, you’re stuck there for a while. At least they can’t stop you from dreaming. You can dream about being in Xanth. I haven’t figured out yet what Jenny is doing in Xanth; I think she’s lost, at first. So is Che, the winged centaur foal. I think she has one of her cats with her, which is odd, because there aren’t many elf-cats in Xanth. Well, we’ll see.

  Remember, don’t let any night mares in. Only Mare Imbri, the day mare, with her sweet dreams. And smile for your mother; it makes her so happy. She wrote me a four page letter, when you smiled.

  Marsh 18, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  I think you had a better d
ay than I did, today! This is Saturday, and I was trying to edit and print out a piece I wrote for a writer’s magazine. I mention you in that piece, though I don’t give your name; I just said that even funny fantasy can relate to serious life, and told how a twelve year old girl perked up when I wrote to her, after being pretty much out of it for months. You see, some folk think that fantasy is stupid and that writers should stick to serious things, like international politics, instead of wasting their time with puns and goblins and all. I get annoyed by that attitude, for some reason, and when I get annoyed I can become most expressive. So I wrote that article, and I suspect it will be published eventually. Anyway, everything went wrong. Do you know about computers? Not yet? Well, here is all you need to know: when you sit down at a computer, it is out to get you. It will pretend to behave, but the moment you aren’t watching, it will do something to you. You have to be paranoid to stay ahead of a computer. So when I went to print out my article, I thought things were fine. I have a nice laser printer whose print looks just like this: [tell the one who is reading this letter to you to hold it up for you]. See? Usually for letters I use the dot-matrix printer, while I save this one for my novels. So the first copy I printed had the wrong heading on it: it said ISLE OF VIEW, which is the title of the novel Jenny Elf will be in, any day now when I catch up with a pile of letters. All right, my fault; I forgot to tell it this was a separate article. So I typed in Anthony instead, and printed those 8 pages again. This time it didn’t have any page numbers. Somehow they had gotten erased when I changed the heading. So I remade it to get it right, and ran off a third copy, and this one had the “Anthony” and the page number—but it had changed it to justify on the right margin. That is, it made the words line up evenly on the right side, just as they do on the left side. Growl! I didn’t want that! So I remade the heading once more, and ran off the fourth copy, and it finally was right. My afternoon was gone, too. So you see, you were doing better than I was, because you smiled and laughed today. I wasn’t laughing, I was saying #$%&*!! [no, don’t translate that!] because of all the time and paper I wasted today. Just to top it off, I shoveled some horse manure for my wife’s bulbs she’s planting—yes, our horse Blue is the model for Mare Imbri the Night Mare, and she’s a wonderful horse, though she is 31 years old now, which is pretty old for a person, let alone a horse, as your mother will tell you—and it was full of ants and a red ant bit me. Now I don’t like to hurt other creatures, but when that red ant bit me I squished it, and I feel sort of bad about the whole thing.

  So I decided to do something nice with what remained of my day, and write to you. Your mother called me last Monday, and said your father read my second letter to you, and that you really liked it. She was very pleased. Apparently you had had nothing better to do than watch the hypnogourd—oh, in Mundania that’s called the TV set—and that my letter snapped you out of that. I’m glad to know you enjoyed the letter. So as I set up to type this letter, I phoned the Cumbersome Hospital and asked about you. But when the aide found out who I was, she freaked out and refused to tell me anything. So I called your mother, and if you think my day was bad, you should hear about hers! That ear ache, you know. She said she was in the perfect mood for a good fight. She’s another person who can get most expressive when annoyed. I guess you know that. At any rate, she called the hospital and got it straightened out. We figured out what happened: the aide thought I was someone else. But I did learn about your good day, and that’s what counted.

  So I’m sorry about boring you with all this business— oh, you’re not bored yet? Or maybe you’re just too polite to say so. Okay, stop me when you do get bored. You know, I hate to waste time. I mean I have things to do, like writing Isle of View, so I can’t afford to waste time in mundane things. But last month one of my readers asked me to come see a play his group was doing. So I went, and I happened to be in a bad place in the auditorium, and all the sound was garbled, so for two hours I was stuck not being able to hear the play. I talked with the man afterward, and he said they had a catalog, and I could order a video tape of that play. So I did that, and also ordered some music from that catalog. You know about music? I love it. Actually, I love all the arts, but I was able to get good in only one of them, writing. I had thought of being an artist, but though I did have talent, it wasn’t enough. I took a semester of piano in college, and the teacher said I could become a decent pianist if I worked at it, but I’m not a piano man. I like the recorder. You know, that’s like a wooden flute. I have a nice tenor recorder, but twenty years ago when I picked it up to play, a roach fell out of the mouthpiece and I lost my interest in playing for a decade or two. Anyway, I was never much good at it, and I don’t read music, so mostly I just listen to it. When you get older and start reading my Adept and Incarnations series you’ll see how I build music in to those novels. The right music just does something to you that can’t quite be described—yes, I see you do understand. When I was your age I used to sing folk songs to myself; I memorized about fifty of them, which was something, because I hate to memorize. But I wouldn’t sing when anybody else was around, because they didn’t understand. When I got to college I sang folk songs with other students, and took a semester of chorus. Some of those songs are really great when you have all the harmonies. But mostly music has just been my secret. Anyway, when the order arrived I looked at the cover on a record called “Heartdance,” and that picture fascinates me. I have it propped up where I can see it while I work. It shows huge old stone musical instruments—a violin, a special kind of guitar, and something called a hammered dulcimer—I mean, these things are about fifty feet tall, and cracking apart, and the grass is starting to grow over them. But at the top a young woman in a red dress is dancing, and in the background there are stone walls, and green pastures, and on a mountain way in back what may be a castle. I haven’t even listened to the record yet—I have to take time to get my record player set up—but I just keep looking at it, with the girl dancing to hidden music, and who knows what fantasy in the background. So I did what comes naturally: I’ll make that scene part of a future novel. No, not a Xanth novel; this really isn’t that kind of picture. This will be one titled Fractal Mode. By the time I write it, and you read it, you’ll be fifteen or sixteen, just about like that girl in the picture, and then you can dance to the hidden music too.

  Are you bored yet? No? Then why are you snoring? Oh—it’s the Bed Monster snoring. Yes, he does that. He’s not interested in music or pictures, just ankles. Okay, I’m running out of time, so I’ll tell you about one more thing. It’s a secret, so don’t tell your folks, because they might get the wrong idea about Xanth. Or, worse, the right idea! One of the things in Heaven Cent is when Prince Dolph watches a mer-woman change her fishtail into legs. They can do that, you know; they make legs when they need to walk on land. Dolph is worried, because his mother Irene was very strict about boys not being allowed to see girls' panties. I mean, wouldn’t you die of embarrassment if you were walking along, and a gust of wind blew up your skirt, and some stupid boy saw your panties? But then Dolph relaxes, because he realizes he isn’t seeing any panties—because the mer-woman isn’t wearing any. He won’t be in trouble after all! That’s the part you mustn’t let your folks know about, because they might not think it is funny. But Dolph is incorrigible; he keeps trying to see someone’s panties, and he does get in trouble for it, as boys do. We tackle this issue head-on in Xanth #15, which is to be titled The Color of Her Panties. That’s the mer-woman’s panties, of course. You see in #14, Question Quest, the Good Magician Humfrey searches for the one question he can’t answer, and that question turns out to be “What is the color of the mer-woman’s panties?” He can’t answer because she doesn’t wear any. It’s a real problem. But remember, don’t tell anyone about all this; I don’t want to get in trouble. Anyway, I still have to write #13 and figure out what Jenny Elf is doing there.

  Keep getting better, Jenny; you’re making everyone very happy. Except maybe King Fracto Cum
ulo Nimbus, the evil cloud, who hates to see anyone being happy.

  Marsh 26, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  I have a whole lot of news this time, so you won’t have to sleep through this letter. I wrote you a three page letter a week ago, and it probably bored you, but this one will be more interesting.

  You see, I have just finished writing the first draft of the first chapter of Isle of View, and have just introduced Jenny Elf—and the second chapter will be all about her. But before I tell you about that, I have to tell you some other things. Yes, I know I promised this wouldn’t be boring, but such a promise is almost impossible for an adult to keep. I was delayed for several days because I had to proofread the galleys for another one of my novels, And Eternity, which will be published early next year. If I don’t read the galleys carefully—they are an early printout of the novel—and catch the errors, it will be published all wrong. But at least I had figured out the chapters for View. They are all alliterative—that is, the first letters match—and they sort of hint at what’s going on. Here, I have printed out a copy for you. The first chapter is “Chex’s Challenge.” Do you remember Chex from Vale of the Vole? The winged centaur filly? She got married in the next novel, and now she has a foal, Che, and someone has kidnapped him. So her challenge is to find him before anything bad happens to him. She’s pretty desperate, the way mothers are. At the end of the chapter she encounters an elf girl with a cat.