Barbara Greer (6 page)

Woody had been practically her only playmate at the farm. Woody lived several miles away but his mother brought him over frequently, especially during the summer. The farm had a swimming pool and Woody's house, which was closer to town, did not. Barbara and Woody had been taught to swim together by a Yale boy named Danny, who was also a lifeguard and who came to the Woodcocks' pool two afternoons a week to earn extra summer money. ‘Keep your faces down … keep your shoulders even with the water …' she could remember clearly Danny's somewhat flat voice saying. She had carried on, over the course of several summers, a fantasy love affair with Danny in which he courted her elaborately with flowers and boxes of candy. Woody, too, had worshipped Danny and they planned, together once, to adopt Danny and take him with them wherever they went for the rest of their lives. He would be very happy with them, they were sure, because they would treat him only with the utmost deference and respect, always. Once, when he had not seemed to return their admiration for him, Barbara and Woody had even attempted to kidnap him.

Barbara and Woody had systematically excluded Peggy, Barbara's sister, who was five years younger, from all their play and secrets. The girls had had a governess then, Fraulein Ungewitter, and try as the Fraulein might, there was no way that she could get all three children to play together. That was how it happened that Barbara and Woody had been alone in the nursery with Fraulein Ungewitter the day Fraulein Ungewitter suddenly died, and Peggy had been in another part of the house. Fraulein Ungewitter was very tall and thin, with a face that always looked bright and polished and oiled; her hair was a clear, metallic grey and she kept it always in a black hair net. That afternoon Barbara and Woody had been playing in the nursery and Fraulein Ungewitter had come in from the bathroom, holding the black hair net in her hand, the long grey hair loose around her shoulders. ‘My hair!' she had said, and her face had been pale. ‘What's happened to it? It's turned grey!' It was apparently the first time she had noticed the change, though it had been grey for longer than Barbara could remember, and Fraulein held up the black hair net wordlessly as if to show that the fibres no longer matched. Then—whether from the shock of the discovery or not they never knew—she pitched forward on her hands, cried out, and was dead. Barbara and Woody stood silently looking at her fallen body for several minutes, then they both began to scream.

They were hurried out of the house. At first they were only awed and frightened. Then, convinced that what they had seen was real, they began to feel somewhat joyous—mischievous and evil, lucky to have witnessed some spectacular human event. The new mood crept over them and seized them completely. (How many twelve-year-old children have had a person go through the swift steps of dying right before their eyes?) Excited, feeling wise, knowing now all there was to know about death, having seen it happen, they discussed it in whispers behind the house. Woody had seen a cat, once, going through some sort of mouth-foaming fit, then dying, which he told about.

They wandered away from the house that was by this time too busy and distraught to wonder where the children were, and walked across the wide back lawn to where the bridle path began, down the hill, under the slim iron-wood and maple branches, past the skeletons of the two tall, blighted chestnut trees, and into the woods, where immediately a swarm of mosquitoes rose to meet them. They raced from the mosquitoes, clambered across the rocks and trunks of fallen trees, under the rusted tangle of barbed wire that had enclosed some long-ago pasture, to the brook that held, clasped between two slim arms, a tiny island. It was their secret island. On it, in beds made of leaves and grass, they kept their collection of dolls, sheltered from the weather by a piece of old canvas. They raised the canvas and looked at the sleeping dolls; then they made their selection. Among the muddy green of cowslips, adder's-tongue and wild arbutus that grew on the island, they dug a grave in which they placed with solemn ceremony, an imaginary Fraulein. Woody spoke a few words … Ashes to ashes.

Far, then, from her native Bavaria—farther still than Bavaria in distances measured by the wandering heart—Barbara Woodcock and Woody deWinter laid Fraulein Ungewitter's effigy to rest. Here, where black snakes sometimes slithered and, in early spring, where tiny polliwogs no bigger than Fraulein's shoebuttons darted on the sandy brook bottom; where once the children had set free the goldfish to find their way to the sea and where innumerable toy boats had been christened and launched; where they had grown luxurious and fanciful gardens, created citadels and fortresses of mud and pebbled, lofty palladia that lifted their spires to the tallest reaches of the mind—here, in this wild and bosky place, they said farewell to Fraulein Ungewitter. And then in a transport, apparently of excitement—with a kind of furious longing that seemed to spring directly from the ritual they had just performed—they became more hushed and conspiratorial. They looked at each other. And in the quiet leaves; they undressed and lay down, kissing each other with—perhaps—a passion and a violence and (if it could be called that) a love which, for its unsuccess, was deeper and more meaningful than anything they would ever experience again.

Years afterwards, it had become a private joke between them. ‘Remember,' one of them would ask, ‘the day we buried Fraulein Ungewitter?' And they would exchange a little secret smile, knowing that it is always the most vivid things in childhood that become the funniest jokes when you grow up.

The farm.

She had been married at the farm, a summer wedding in her mother's garden. (‘Two Prominent Eastern Families Unite,' the Burketown
Eagle
had said.) She had been at the farm, too, several years later when she had first met Barney Callahan.

It had been one of her lonely summers. Carson had been away on his sales trip to South America. She had persuaded Flora, who ordinarily worked for her five days a week, to stay for a weekend with Dobie and Michael. She had arrived at the farm in the early twilight, and after changing her clothes, she had come downstairs and joined her mother on the terrace. She remembered John, her mother's houseman, bringing them mint juleps in silver cups with silver straws. It had been exactly two summers ago. She remembered the terrace candles, lighted, and beyond their glow, fireflies performing hesitantly in the dusk.

Her mother held her julep cup in her hand and smiled quietly at Barbara for a moment. Then she lifted the cup to her lips, sipped from the straw, and looked away. ‘There's some news, darling,' she said. ‘Peggy's brought a young man down with her.' She paused. ‘From Boston. She wants to marry him, or so she says. They're down at the pool now, having a swim before dinner. His name is Barney Callahan. He seems perfectly nice. The auspices of course are absolutely wrong. They could not be worse. For one thing, he's' a Catholic, or
was
one until recently. Of course, with a name like Callahan! I know nothing about his family except that they're poor Boston Irish. His father, Peggy says, runs a candy store or grocery store or some such thing. I'm fairly distressed about the whole thing, but what can I do? I discussed it at some length with your father this morning and we both agree that there is nothing to do except say absolutely nothing. You know how Peggy is. Anything we say will make her only more determined. She told me his history and expected me to be shocked. I was shocked, of course, but wise enough not to show it and that, of course, disappointed Peggy! She wanted a scene, a screaming scene. I refused to give her one. So now she's being merely sullen. I'm hoping it will blow over. Let's all hope it will blow over! So, Barbara, just don't say anything to her—please. Just act perfectly, normally pleased about it and pray that it blows over. On the plus side, he has some education. He worked his way through Boston University peddling—I think Peggy said it was—milk.' Mrs. Woodcock suddenly laughed. ‘Imagine,' she said, ‘my daughter marrying a milkman! However. Be that as it may. He was in the Army, in Korea, and now he's finishing up at Harvard Business School on that G.I. Bill or whatever it is. I thought I ought to fill you in quickly on all this, Barbara, because you'll be meeting him very soon, at dinner. In fact, here he comes now.'

The young man came up the series of wide flagstone steps that led, between rhododendron bushes, from the pool, which was at the farthest end of the garden, to the terrace. He was very tall, very dark and slender. He wore swimming trunks and a white bathtowel hung around his neck. He came toward them.

‘Barney,' Edith Woodcock said, ‘this is my other daughter, Peggy's sister, Barbara Greer. Barbara, this is Barney Callahan.'

He shook hands with her; his hand was wet and water dripped from his hair. ‘How do you do?' he said.

‘Hello, Barney,' Barbara said.

Mrs Woodcock stood up, smoothing the front of her grey dress. ‘Excuse me a moment,' she said. ‘I'm going to run in and get a sweater. It's getting a little chilly this evening, but thank goodness the bugs seem to have left us.' She turned and walked toward the house.

Barney sat down in the iron chair Mrs. Woodcock had just left. He sat back, stretching his bare legs out in front of him. He put his elbows on the arms on the chair and brought his hands together, making a steeple of his fingers. ‘You live in Locustville, Pennsylvania, don't you?' he asked.

‘Yes,' she said.

It was growing dark and it was hard to see his features distinctly. He was not looking at her, but straight ahead, through the steepled fingers, and his eyes seemed very dark and deeply set. They seemed, also, heavy-lidded, with a quality of sleepiness, of gazing dreamily at something in the middle distance, not the shadow of the horizon where the sun had set, nor at his hands, but at something somewhere between. His chin was dark and there was something curious and surprising in the sight of those dreaming eyes above the heavy beard.

‘Did you have a nice swim?' she asked him.

‘Do you want to know a secret?' he asked her.

‘What?' she asked.

He looked at her and smiled; a rather shy and nervous smile. ‘I can't swim a stroke. I pretended, though, just now. I doused myself in the shallow end and splashed around.'

‘Really?' she said.

‘Not a stroke.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘We'll have to teach you! That's all there is to it. Everybody in this family swims.'

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Good,' he said. ‘Fine, I'll be waiting for my first lesson.'

Abruptly he stood up, turned and walked away from her, leaving her alone on the terrace. Puzzled, she watched him, walking somewhat gingerly on his bare feet across the hard stones of the terrace. He started back down the stone steps toward the pool. Little by little, as he went slowly down, the shadows and the heavy branches of the bordering shrubbery cut him off; the flash of white towel about his shoulders disappeared and he was gone as though the darkness and rhododendrons had swallowed him, enveloped him, shrouded him in layers of blackness like soft veils, one upon another, of sleep.

3

It was fifteen miles to the Locustville Airport. They drove in the chilly early morning light, Carson behind the wheel, Barbara beside him. His suitcase was on the back seat. After five years in the International Sales Division, which involved frequent trips like this one, Carson had got packing down to an exact science; even on the longest journeys he was never encumbered with more than one piece of luggage. As they drove, he went over a little list of last-minute instructions for her.

‘If a letter comes from Ted Sloane, from South America, open it and see what he says,' he said. ‘It may be he's planning to come up. I forgot to tell him I'd be away. Of course if he writes to the office, they'll take care of it there, but if he writes to the house—and he may—call Clyde Adams and tell him whatever the letter says. Clyde will take care of entertaining him when he gets here. Oh, and Barb, 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 he thinks the chimney should be cleaned. My God, Harry Walsh had a fire in his chimney the other day and his house is the same age as ours! Don't forget to send my mother some flowers or something on her birthday, July nineteenth. I'll pick her up something wherever I am, but if the old girl doesn't get something right
on
her birthday she'll be on the phone saying nobody loves her any more. Let's see, what else?'

‘I think I'll have the rug cleaners come,' Barbara said. ‘It's only forty dollars and the rugs could use it, don't you think?'

‘Sure,' he said. ‘Fine. Go ahead.' He frowned. ‘I keep thinking there's something I've forgotten to tell you,' he said.

She moved closer to him and rested her head on his shoulders. ‘You haven't asked me if I'm going to miss you?' she asked.

‘Are you?'

‘Terribly of course.'

‘I'm sorry I blew up last night,' he said, ‘at Nancy. But ye gods! I do think sometimes she's on the verge of going off her rocker. But I didn't know about—you know the abortion thing. That is too bad. So I understand why you asked her to spend the night.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I shouldn't have. It ruined our evening.'

‘You couldn't help it. It wasn't your fault.'

‘Yes,' she insisted. ‘It was my fault.'

‘Well, let's not argue about whose fault it was.'

‘You're right. I'm sorry.'

‘It's over and done with. Let's forget it.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Let's forget it and always remember the rules,'

‘I'll try to be more tolerant of Nancy in the future,' he said.

‘I had to keep reminding myself to be—well, tolerant of her last night,' she said. ‘I know she was saying some pretty silly things.'