Barbara Greer (8 page)

‘Operator?' she said. ‘I want to call Burketown, Connecticut, Buccaneer 3-7090.' She gave the operator her own number and waited.

After a minute or two, she heard a man's voice answer, ‘Woodcock residence.'

‘Hello? John?'

‘No,' the voice said, ‘who is this?'

‘This is Barbara. Who's this? Is this—?'

‘Oh, hi,' he said, ‘this is Barney.'

She began to laugh. ‘Do you
always
answer the phone that way? Woodcock residence?'

‘Well, I happened to be standing beside it when it rang and I thought—'

‘I'm sorry. It sounded funny, that's all. How are you? How's Peggy?'

‘Fine, fine,' he said. ‘Everybody's fine.'

‘Good. Is Mother there?'

‘She and Peggy went to New Haven. Shopping.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘Well, I—'

‘Your Dad's still in bed. Want me to call him?'

‘No, no, don't bother him. I was just calling to—well, to see how everybody was. Carson left today, this morning, for England, and I was just wondering how everybody was.'

‘We're all fine,' he said. ‘When are you coming up?'

‘Well—' she said.

‘Are you going to?'

‘Well, I was thinking that perhaps—'

‘Am I ever going to get those swimming lessons?' he asked her.

She laughed again. ‘Am I the only one who can give them to you?'

‘You're the one I want to give them to me,' he said.

‘Well—'

‘Seriously,' his soft voice said, ‘will you come? There are a lot of things I want to tell you.'

She hesitated. Then she said, ‘Please, Barney, don't talk like that. I thought we agreed—'

‘Please come, Barbara,' he said quietly. ‘Please come.'

She stood, a little stiffly, holding the telephone against her ear. ‘I'll have to see if Flora can stay with the boys …'

‘That's right,' he said. ‘See if Flora can stay with the boys.'

‘All right. I'll call back when I've talked to her.'

‘Come tonight.' he said.

‘I'll call back. Good-bye.'

She replaced the receiver in its cradle and for a while stood looking absently out the window, across the five rooftops.

A little later when Flora returned with Michael, Barbara went into the kitchen and perched on the high stool. ‘Flora?' she asked. ‘I've been thinking that I might run up to Connecticut for a few days—to the farm, my family's place. Do you think you could come and stay for a few days?'

Flora gazed at the linoleum for a moment. I've raised my rates for overnight, Mrs. Greer,' she said at last. I'm sorry, but I had to. I'm fourteen dollars now instead of twelve. It's what my sister gets. It's what they all get, Mrs. Greer.'

‘Well, I think that will be all right, Flora,' Barbara said.

‘When were you planning on going, Mrs. Greer?'

‘If you can stay, I'll go this afternoon.'

Flora considered this. ‘Yes,' she said finally. ‘Sure. I'll stay, Mrs. Greer if you'll drive me home first so I can pick up some things.'

‘Oh, that's wonderful, Flora.'

‘How long do you plan to be gone, Mrs. Greer?'

‘Just for the weekend, I think.'

‘You get up there, you'll want to stay longer. You know that.'

‘I'll be back Monday. I'll be back Monday—or else I'll call you.'

‘You love that farm, don't you, Mrs. Greer? You love it because it's home. I know how you feel because my home is in Ohio. But I
live
in Pennsylvania. Your home is in Connecticut, but you live in Pennsylvania! Funny, isn't it? But did you know—here's an interesting thing: Pennsylvania and Connecticut have the same state flower! Did you know that? Did you?' Flora asked. ‘I'm a student of the state flowers,' she said.

4

We live, as we all know, in a civilisation where certain Christian names of women enjoy certain periods of vogue, then fall into disuse. Barbara Woodcock had been born in the age of Barbaras, Sandras, Patricias, Nancys and Lucys. There were—she had once counted them—twenty-three other Barbaras in her class at Vassar. Somewhat later came the age of Dianas and Carolyns and Susans, Lindas and Bettys and now, when a girl child is born, she is apt to be named Pamela or Deborah or Amanda or Rebecca. Who, nowadays, names a child Shirley or Ruth or Helen—or Barbara, or even Mary? Barbara's mother, on the other hand—Edith Woodcock—was born with other Ediths, Ruths, Marys, Loises and Louises. Who names a child Edith any more, or Gertrude or Mildred or Charlotte or Marian? Everything passes, including mastoid operations, of which Barbara had had three when she was a little girl, from which she still bore thin scars behind her ears. Who dresses their little girls as Barbara had been dressed, in white starched dresses imported from France, petticoats with Swiss embroidery, Mary Jane shoes? Who is taught to ride a horse the way Barbara had been, by first learning the precarious Italian seat? Who nowadays gives their child tennis lessons every summer, swimming lessons and French lessons? How many families gather on their lawns on summer evenings for croquet? Who has a room that is truly a ‘nursery,' or has a governess to dress the little girls in their white frilly dresses, brush their hair and bring them downstairs to join their mother and her friends for tea? Even Edith Woodcock, perhaps, was an anachronism. Born in 1904 in a brick house on a hill in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of a college professor, she carried with her to Burketown, Connecticut, relics of the Victorianism which she had inherited from her own mother. In the nineteen twenties when other girls her age had been talking boldly of Freud and sex, experimenting with lipstick, cigarettes and whisky, Edith had continued in a world of Thursday afternoons and calling cards in little envelopes placed on silver salvers. When she married Preston Woodcock, in 1925, she brought to him her excellent manners, her cultured speaking voice, her ability to handle servants, and a grand piano that had belonged to her mother, who had studied abroad under Paderewski. She brought with her other traits that her husband loved, such as her ability, always, to carry a fragrance about her, a smell of powders, colognes and sachets that established itself for ever in her closets, her bathroom, and in her dresser drawers, where she kept such vestiges of an older time as rose petals tied in a linen handkerchief and an orange pomander pierced with hundreds of cloves.

It was in this—possibly old-fashioned, certainly mannered—atmosphere that Barbara Woodcock had grown up. She had been educated, as little girls in Providence had been, first by a private tutor and later at a girls' boarding school in Massachusetts. She made her debut, as little girls in Providence had done, at a tea dance under a marquee set up in the garden. She had broken with tradition somewhat by going to college (her mother saw no need for it), but when she married Carson Greer she had worn her mother's wedding dress with a train that ran exactly twenty feet behind her and she had carried a nosegay of pink rosebuds. To prepare her for marriage, Edith had given Barbara the same little book printed by the Episcopalian Church that her own mother had given to her. In it the responsibilities of a married woman were sketched in quaintly unspecific language. But this, to Barbara, did not present a problem because, while her parents remained somewhat fortressed within the past, she herself—away at school and college—had been able to observe the twentieth century as it matured around her.

Still, Barbara liked to think that she contained within herself fragments of each world. She could enjoy the brashness and noisiness of the ‘modern' life in which she moved, and yet she could respect the somewhat stately, ordered existence that her mother's world imposed. It was certainly not typical, she knew, of girls her age to harbour the feelings for her childhood home which she did; the farm, to her, evoked a true nostalgia—memories of ease and happiness and comfort. In this day and age, what girl longed as Barbara so often did, to go home again and let the waves of the past lap gently all about her? What other girl her age still grew moist-eyed reading
Black Beauty
or
Sentimental Tommy
? In an age of synthetics, she still loved silk velvets and brocades; in an age when elaboration was in disrepute, she still loved the carved plaster ceilings of the farm and the crystal prisms that hung from the chandeliers. Her tastes were unfashionable, she knew, but she was proud of them. To her, it seemed important that these loves be kept intact. They were a heritage which, one day, she would pass to her children. She thought about these things as she sped northward on the New Jersey Turnpike in the open car that afternoon—a pretty girl in a convertible speeding along a superhighway, heading from one of her two worlds toward the other.

Burketown, Connecticut was twenty-seven miles northwest of New Haven. Its Chamber of Commerce had named it ‘The City of Village Charm.' It was a town that was smaller, actually, than Locustville. Its population was just under twenty-five thousand and it was a town that, until recent years, had been supported by a single industry—paper manufacturing. There were three paper mills—Valley Paper, owned by the Harcourt family, Woodcock Paper, owned by the Woodcocks, and a third, smaller company called Burketown Paper Products Company. Burketown, as the name indicated, had been founded by a family named Burke. And though there were no longer any Burkes in Burketown, both the Woodcock and Harcourt family trees were liberally sprinkled with them. Although the Woodcocks were somewhat later comers to Burketown than the Harcourts (the first Preston Woodcock had migrated from Scotland as recently as 1830), they had managed to make their presence there more deeply felt; in the paper business the Woodcocks, it was generally agreed, had been more successful. Monuments to the family were in evidence everywhere. There was a street called Woodcock Avenue, and on Main Street the largest office building, where all the doctors' and dentists' offices were, was called the Woodcock Building. There was the Dobie C. Woodcock Memorial Library, named after Barbara's great-grandfather, and the Elizabeth Burke Woodcock Memorial High School, named after Barbara's great-aunt, Mrs. William Dobie Woodcock.

On a hill on the west side of town, overlooking the valley of the Wampanauck River that originally had powered the mills, was a wide street called Prospect Avenue. Once it had been a street of lawns, canopied by elms—a street of gateways, flanked by rhododendrons and laurels, that opened to manicured driveways that led to porte-cochèvres of houses with sharply peaked gables, turrets, tall chimneys and stained-glass windows. It was here, in the old days, that the best families of Burketown had lived, and it was in one of these gaunt old houses, at 700 Prospect Avenue, that Barbara Woodcock had been born. Even then, however, Burketown had begun its relentless commercial march westward; just two blocks to the east, a movie theatre went up, then next to it a drugstore, and next to that a dry-cleaning company. Now 700 Prospect Avenue was the Halcyon Rest Home and the house, one block north, that had belonged to Barbara's Great-Uncle William, had been razed to make room for an apartment building. Only one Woodcock remained on the street now, Barbara's grandmother, who still lived at the corner of Prospect Avenue and High Street, once the most fashionable corner in town, in the house to which her husband had brought her as a bride in 1890. She was ninety-three now, nearly blind, pushed to the high parlour windows in a wheelchair by her nurse or housekeeper once a day to get the sun. From these windows now there was a view of a Wayside Furniture store; at night, from the parlour windows that had once looked across most of the valley past the smoking chimneys of the Woodcock mills to the distant church steeple of Hanscomb Corners nine miles away, the old lady had a view that was, in its own way, cruelly ironic—a rocking chair drawn in neon tubing that rocked, mechanically, back and forth above a legend that read,
YOU CAN'T BEAT WAYSIDE PRICES
. It was a blessing, the family often said, that Grandfather Woodcock had not lived to see it, and that, for his widow, whose clouded eyes dreamed from her wheelchair by the window, the neon sign took on other, more comforting shapes—summer lightning, perhaps, or northern lights.

Earlier than most Prospect Avenue residents, Barbara's father had seen the inexorable coming of change. When Barbara was seven years old and Peggy was two, he had heard about a farm that was for sale in the country, ten miles outside Burketown. He bought it—it had been vacant for several years and was being sold for taxes—and moved the family there.

Barbara could hardly remember living on Prospect Avenue. If she happened to drive by the Halcyon Rest on her way to see her grandmother, it was hard for her to believe that this curiously shabby house had once been her home. Still, she had driven Barney there—that summer two years ago, a few days after she had first met him on the terrace, that summer during Carson's South American trip when she had come to the farm for a weekend and stayed somewhat longer. She had slowed the car in front of the Halcyon Rest, ‘That's the house where Peggy and I were born,' she said.

‘Stop the car,' he said.

‘Why?'

‘I want to walk around, I want to see it,' he said.

‘What on earth for?' she asked.

‘Let's get out and walk,' he said.

‘There's no place to walk. We can't go in. All we can do is walk up and down the sidewalk.'

‘That's all right,' he said, ‘that's all I want to do.'

So she made a U-turn in Prospect Avenue and started back toward the Halcyon Rest. She stopped in front of it and they got out. They walked slowly along the sidewalk, looking at the house.

‘I don't see why you want to look at this old place,' she said. ‘It's depressing, actually. Let's go.'

‘No,' he said, ‘It's interesting. Interesting. Wherever we live is part of our lives. This is part of yours and your family's. Do you blame me for wanting to understand it?'