Barbara Greer (17 page)

Then, from the floor below, was the sound of the front door opening and her mother's clear voice saying to Peggy, ‘Darling, I'm exhausted, aren't you?' and the sound of the door being closed again and their high heels moving across the polished floor. Instantly, Barney was gone. She was left alone staring blindly at the white ceiling of the room, at the rippled crimson border above the pretty flowered wallpaper.

On Sunday, the Burketown
Evening Eagle
said:

The sun made a surprise appearance today to brighten the wedding of Miss Margaret McPartland Woodcock of Burketown to Mr. Bernard Joseph Callahan of Boston, Massachusetts. St. John's Episcopal Church, decorated for the occasion with autumn flowers and colourful fall foliage, was the scene of the three o'clock solemnisation. The Reverend Hartley L. Waterman officiated.

The bride, a member of a prominent Burketown family, wore an heirloom gown of ecru silk brocade, created for her paternal grandmother by Worth of Paris. Her shoulder-length veil, also an heirloom, was fashioned of Chantilly lace. She carried a prayerbook marked with miniature white orchids and Bouvardia.

The former Miss Woodcock is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Preston Littell Woodcock, III, of ‘Orchard Farm,' Valley Road, and the granddaughter of Mrs. Preston L. Woodcock, II, of 1945 Prospect Avenue, this city, and the late Mr. Woodcock. Her maternal grandparents were the late Professor and Mrs. Andrew B. McPartland of Providence, R.I. Prof. McPartland was formerly Chairman of the History Department of Brown University.

The bride was graduated from the Westover School, Middlebury, and Wellesley College. She was presented to society in 1952 at a dance given by her parents in their home and also at the Junior League Ball in New Haven. She is a member (Provisional) of the New Haven Junior League.

Serving as matron of honour was the bride's sister, Mrs. Carson V. Greer of Locustville, Pa. Mr. Greer served as best man. Miss Susan Robinson Woodcock, age six, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Woodcock, III, and a cousin of the bride, was flower girl. Following the ceremony a reception was held at the Prospect Avenue residence of Mrs. Preston Woodcock, II.

The groom, the son of Mr. and Mrs. James Gerald Callahan of Boston, was graduated in the class of 1950 from Boston University and from Harvard Business School. After a honeymoon in Bermuda, the couple will reside in Burketown.

‘It was a nice wedding,' Carson said.

‘Yes,' she said.

They were driving back to Locustville late Sunday night. He had to be at the office Monday morning.

‘The reception was nice, too,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It's too bad we couldn't have stayed longer.'

‘Were you enjoying it that much?'

She put her head back across the smooth leather seat of the car. ‘No,' she said, ‘but anything seems like more fun than going back to Locustville.'

He glanced at her, then looked back at the road ahead. ‘Barbara,' he said, ‘I've been thinking. I'm afraid it's pretty hopeless with you and me. I think we should go our separate ways for a while. As far as I'm concerned, Locustville is where I work and it's where I live. It has certain disadvantages, perhaps, but I'm willing to put up with them. There are people there that I like, and I like the job pretty well. You, on the other hand, can never be happy there. I see that now. You've never tried to be, but then it's possible you don't know how to try. So, this week, I'd like to have you get your things together, and next Saturday morning I'll drive you, Dobie and Michael back up to Burketown and leave you there. You can have the car. I'll take the train back. And whatever arrangements you want to work out after that—well, we'll work them out, that's all.'

In the dark front seat she had sat back, pressed hard against the leather, unable to speak, feeling only a kind of total terror. For a long time she sat motionless as Carson drove on, southward, on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Then she said softly, ‘Oh please, Carson! Please give me another chance, please! I'll try, darling. I'll try so hard! I promise you.'

She continued to sit, with the reflected lights of cars flashing past her closed eyes, waiting for him to speak, thinking only that she had just lost one of the two men who loved her, she could not lose the other now, the one, indeed, that she loved the most.

‘I love you!' she said.

And she still sat, waiting for him to answer her.

That had been the end of that summer.

Monday came, then Tuesday. And then the rules were established—the first few anyway; others came as they were needed. They were rules of consideration, politeness, tact. Quarrels were to be extinguished by the quickest means. Complaints were to be silenced. Locustville was to be tolerated.

It had seemed a shame that they needed to have rules for how to get along together. But it had seemed to them then that the rules would help, and, of course, the rules had helped. They helped even when they were broken because—as they reminded each other—each act of breaking the rules reaffirmed the fact that the rules were there. The rules were only for the time they lived in Locustville. But, of course, if one lives by rules one can live anywhere, and for any time.

On Wednesday she had Muriel Hodgson over for tea. On Thursday she bought two tickets for the Locustville Symphony Orchestra's first concert of the fall season. And, on Friday night, she and Carson went to it. ‘I'm trying,' she said to him.

‘I know you are,' he said.

‘It's fun to try.'

It was fun to try, but not easy. It made the days and weeks and months that followed seem to form ranks, then battalions, that arrayed themselves in front of her and marched slowly forward, toward her, over her. They came—October, November, December, January—and then obliterated, with their steady pace, all the careless summer scenes behind.

Now, alone in her room, the lighted face of her little clock said half past two.

She was alone, in the darkness, with its electric purring. On the table beside her bed, her mother's note containing Carson's cabled message lay folded.

She remembered him this morning. ‘If a letter comes from Ted Sloane, open it and see what he says … Call Clyde Adams and tell him … And you'd better call what's-his-name, DeLuca, and have him come and clean out the oil burner. It should have been done last month, actually. Ask him if the chimney needs to be cleaned. Don't forget to send my mother something on her birthday.

She remembered the instructions he had given her, this departing passenger. And it was queer that she should remember them so clearly now. This morning, after he had left, she had forgotten them. She had forgotten to call DeLuca. If a letter had come from Ted Sloane, she had not noticed it in her careless glance at the mail. She had forgotten the date of Carson's mother's birthday.

She tried to console herself by thinking that none of the things she had forgotten were important. They could wait until she got back. Still, in the dark bedroom, forgotten duties, broken promises, rose and haunted her, swarmed like wasps in the attic of her mind. She saw vital letters buried in her desk. Oil burners exploded and she saw chimney fires (‘Harry Walsh had a fire in his chimney the other day, and his house is the same age as ours.') Though she knew that these infernos were all created out of darkness and sleeplessness and loneliness, it was no use trying to extinguish them. So, when the clock said three, she gave up the struggle. She got up, went into the bathroom, swallowed one of her yellow sleeping pills and crept humbly back to bed.

Barney had said he could not sleep either.

The darkness was blue. She closed her eyes and wondered sadly if she had been lying awake, waiting for him.

And then, in a brief and vivid dream, she was a child again and struggling in the grass somewhere with him, in the dark and steaming grass near the secret island where the doll's grave was.

She awoke with tears in her eyes and tried to sleep again.

8

In London it was nine o'clock, a clear and cool Sunday morning. And thank goodness it was quiet. He was at the back of the hotel away from the street, and his window overlooked a narrow passageway that ran between two buildings. He was up and half dressed, in his socks, shorts and shirt, and he had stopped dressing midway, after fastening his garters, when he had remembered a request made the night before, that had not been attended to. He decided to wait, to make a little test, and so he got back into bed, pulled the bedspread up over his bare knees, lighted a cigarette and waited for the phone to ring. Ten minutes later, gauged by the time it took to smoke the cigarette, he picked up the phone. When the clerk at the desk answered, he asked, ‘What time is it, please?'

There was a pause. Then, ‘Nine-thirteen, sir.'

‘I thought I asked to be called at nine,' Carson said.

‘Sorry, sir.'

Carson hung up the phone, letting it drop with a bang. He was in that sort of mood. It was not that he expected de luxe service—far from it; certainly not in a hotel like this one. But even at the incredibly low rate of a guinea a day he expected a few minimal things, like being called in the morning when he had asked to be called. He raised his knees, making two mountains under the bedspread, lifted the ashtray from the night stand, floated it in the valley between the mountains, and lighted another cigarette. The sunshine and the quiet of the room did little to rid him of his disgruntlement; the faded yellow wallpaper and chipped and bubbled plaster ceiling were the features that annoyed him most, that cancelled out any cheeriness the day itself offered. He smoked, enjoying feeling martyred and enjoying the thought that he had got out on the wrong side of the bed, a singularly lumpy bed.

What he was doing was playing the system. His official hotel for the trip, the one stated on his itinerary, was the Dorchester. This hotel—and this morning he couldn't even remember the name of it—had been one he'd found last night running through the list of hotels in the telephone directory at the airport. It was in Paddington, near the station, some distance from the Dorchester. This morning, after breakfast, he would wander over to the Dorchester, leave his name at the desk, ask that messages and mail be held for him, tip the message clerk ten shillings and that would be that. That was the way the system worked. The difference between the Dorchester and the place where he was staying was four pounds, or about eleven dollars, a day. This was the difference between what the company paid him for a hotel room, and what he paid. It was differences like this that had bought Clyde Adams his Rolleiflex camera, his slide projector and screen. It was what had paid for Muriel Hodgson's Schiaparelli cocktail dress from Paris and it bought countless leather handbags, bottles of perfume, French gloves, English shoes for other salesmen and their wives. In the fraternity of salesmen for the Locustville Chemical Company there was no secret made of it. It was the system.

It was a little too simple to say that he disapproved of it; it was too late for disapproval. He had been participating in it for too long. He knew it was dishonest, and looking back, perhaps, if he had wanted to be a crusader, he might have made an issue of it. At one time, he could have. But not now. He had let himself be pulled into it by the others and by now the system had worked to his advantage too many times. It would be even more dishonest if now he should suddenly, indignantly, protest the system, and expose it. If he wanted an excuse for playing the system, one had been given him, plainly enough, by Jesse Talbot, head of the Export Division.

It had come as a result of something that happened during his first foreign trip.

Carson had arrived in Paris, where he had been scheduled to meet Bert Hodgson, who was flying in from Geneva. Both men were to be staying at the Georges Cinq, and when Carson got to the hotel, he asked whether Bert had arrived. Bert had not. Carson registered, went to his room, and unpacked his suitcase. A little later, after phoning several times to see whether Bert had checked in, Carson decided to go down to the bar for a drink.

He was crossing the lobby when he saw Bert Hodgson come through the door from the street, wearing his hat and coat but carrying no brief-case, accompanied by no luggage. Bert greeted him warmly.

‘Hey,' Bert said, ‘I got a real swell place—over near the University. It works out to about a buck-eighty a day.'

‘Aren't you staying here?' Carson asked.

‘Hell, no,' Bert said. ‘Are you?'

‘Yes.'

‘What the hell for?'

‘It's on the itinerary,' Carson said. And then he said. ‘Besides, it's one of the nicest hotels in Paris.'

Bert's eyes had clouded. ‘Is that so?' he asked. ‘Well. Pretty fancy, aren't you, Greer?'

When he got back to Locustville, Jesse Talbot had said, ‘By the way, Bert Hodgson says you two did fine in Paris.'

‘It went pretty well.'

‘You like to treat yourself in style, Bert says. You like the finer things of life.'

‘I don't know what Bert means by that.'

‘Says you were staying at the Georges Cinq.'

‘That's right.'

‘What were you doing there?' Talbot asked.

‘That was my hotel,' Carson said. ‘On my itinerary.'

Jesse Talbot paused and scrutinised him for a moment. ‘Are you kidding?' he asked finally. ‘You really stayed at the Georges Cinq?' Then, cheerfully, he had said, ‘Well, you're new here. You've got a lot to learn. Yes, you've really got a lot to learn.'

Jesse Talbot was a division head, and a vice-president. So, if he wanted, Carson could rationalise that the company actually expected him to cheat it. Looking around the room of his third-class hotel now, he thought: yes, they're giving me the glorious opportunity to cheat them out of eleven dollars a day, and I, by accepting it, am expected to give them my labour and devotion, some of my youth and, I suppose, part of my pride. He snuffed out his cigarette in the ash tray and, doing so, tipped over the ash tray, scattering black ashes across the top of the bedspread. He brushed at them angrily with his hand.