‘It’s incredible!’ Nancy said.
‘About a year ago, the Brysons, down the street, had a huge, horrible Collie named Lady. Everybody hated that dog—not only me. It used to come and yank Flora’s sheets off the line and do its business all over our lawn. You couldn’t go out the door without stepping into a pile of—well, anyway, somebody poisoned Lady. Helen Bryson claimed Lady was poisoned, anyway. Lady died, and Helen Bryson had the nerve to come over here and ask me if I’d done it! She said, “I won’t be able to sleep nights until I know whether it was you who killed my Lady”!’
‘Incredible!’ Nancy said again.
‘Oh, we have a lovely, lovely group of neighbours.’
‘How do you stand it, Barb?’
Barbara said nothing, She stood by the fireplace for a moment, gazing at the scraps of paper among the ashes. Then she returned to her chair. Dobie came running into the room. He was wearing a cowboy hat and a brace of pistols swung from his belt. ‘Can I go over to Jimmy’s house?’ he asked. ‘Can I, can I, can I?’
‘Did Jimmy’s mummy say you could?’ Barbara asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding solemnly, he turned suddenly and pointed at Nancy. ‘Aunt Nancy let us put her lipstick all over our faces, like Indians!’ he said. ‘Flora made us wash it all off. It hurt.’
‘It’s naughty to play with lipstick,’ Barbara said.
‘Aunt Nancy let us!’
‘Well, run along to Jimmy’s house,’ she said.
He raced out of the room.
‘He’s such a sweet little guy,’ Nancy said. ‘I couldn’t resist letting them play with the lipstick. I’m sorry.’
‘Wait till you have children of your own,’ Barbara said. Then she bit her lip, remembering that Nancy could not have children of her own. ‘I mean—’ she began.
Nancy laughed. ‘Well,’ she said. She picked up her coffee cup, took a sip, and set it down again. She stood up. ‘Well, I’ve got to be going,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a career to get back to—a wonderful, exciting career.’ She walked toward the door. She stopped. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘sometimes I don’t think I want to be a nurse at all. Sometimes I think—I wonder what in the world I’m doing!’ She went down the hall toward the guest room.
When she came out she was dressed as she had been the night before, her purse in her hand. ‘I made the bed,’ she said.
Barbara stood up. ‘Thank you, Nancy.’
‘Thank you. Oh Barb, it was a wonderful evening. Thank you for letting me stay. I hope I wasn’t too—you know, idiotic. You’re so wonderful for my morale.’
They walked toward the front door. ‘Goodbye, Flora!’ Nancy called toward the kitchen door. ‘And thank you.’
‘Goodbye, Miss Rafferty.’
‘She’s a jewel,’ she whispered to Barbara. ‘You’re lucky to have her.’
At the front stairs they said goodbye.
‘Come up again soon,’ Barbara said. ‘You can boost my morale.’
‘I will,’ Nancy said. ‘And if you should happen to—to see or talk to Woody … well, there would be nothing to lose, would there?’
Barbara smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.
Nancy went down the steps to the driveway where her car was parked. Barbara waved goodbye to her again and watched as Nancy started the car, backed out of the driveway, turned into Bayberry Lane and drove away.
Barbara went back into the house. Flora said, ‘Imagine that woman letting the boys paint themselves with her lipstick! What’s she thinking of?’
‘She has no children of her own,’ Barbara said.
‘I’m going to take Michael with me to the market, in the stroller,’ Flora said. ‘We need a few things—butter, eggs, something for the boys’ lunch …’
‘Do you want me to take you in the car?’ Barbara asked.
‘Oh, it’s a lovely day. Michael and me, we’ll enjoy the walk,’ Flora said. ‘Walking’s good exercise. The best you can do. My father walked two miles every day and he lived to be eighty-eight.’
‘My grandfather lived to be eighty-eight, too,’ Barbara said.
‘Quite a walker, was he?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Barbara said. ‘At least not that I can remember.’
After Flora left, she was all alone. In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of coffee and carried it into the living room. She sat down on the sofa. Sun streamed through the window, lighting dust motes that swirled in the air. From the kitchen the dishwasher groaned and entered the final phase of its automatic cycle. Then the house was silent. Barbara kicked off her shoes and brought her feet up beneath her on the sofa. She sat nestled comfortably against the pillows, sipping her coffee. When she had finished, she put the cup down and reached for a cigarette from the glass box on the coffee table. The silver lighter, after several tries, appeared to be out of fluid and she fished for matches in the pocket of her skirt. She found a pack and lighted her cigarette. On the coffee table there was a copy of House & Garden; she picked it up.
She smoked and read, and for a long time there was no sound at all in the room except the slow turning of her pages; no movement except for the smoke that rose, floated, and hung in the air. She read an article on how to turn an old foundation into a sunken garden, and then an article called ‘Colour Magic,’ during which she imagined her own bedroom in a deep Chinese red with pure white raw silk drapes and flounces about the bed, more Chinese red in a slipper chair and a tufted toss pillow. It would look, she concluded, hideous; when they moved, when they had the kind of house she ultimately wanted, there would be nothing like this in it, nothing that looked phony or decorator-ish. She would select each colour, each fabric, each piece of furniture with great care, but there would be no swags of raw silk, no lacquered chests, no Chinese red chairs or walls or pillows. Everything, she decided, would be very simple, very comfortable, very homey and warm. The square of sunlight from the window advanced across the room and a warm patch fell precisely where she would have asked it to—upon her stockinged feet. She moved into it until sunlight lay all along her leg. She heard, in the distance, a succession of automobile horns—a wedding, she decided. She let her magazine drop and closed her eyes. She dozed off.
She was wakened by the sound of the postman dropping letters into the slot beside the front door. She rubbed her eyes and stood up. She walked to the door without bothering to put on her shoes, picked up the letters that lay on the floor inside the door, and carried them back into the living room. She always looked forward to the morning mail, but today she could see at a glance that there was nothing of importance—nothing that was even worth opening; a letter from an insurance company, a seed catalogue, three bills from department stores, a free trial offer from a publisher of children’s encyclopedias, a few business letters addressed to Carson. And looking through the letters she was reminded again of the letter Flora had found on the garbage can. How had it been put there? She pictured one of her neighbours—a woman, probably—tiptoeing stealthily across the back yards at night, ducking like a thief around the shadows of the low hedges that separated the houses. She went to the back window and looked out across the terrace. There were indeed five rooftops visible; she counted them. She felt angry and ashamed. She turned away from the window and went to the desk, the letters still in her hand. She placed the bills in the cubbyhole where they belonged and tossed the rest of the mail in a drawer. She thought: I’ve got to get away from here for a few days! I simply do. She picked up the telephone and dialled.
‘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 yo
u 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. Goodbye.’
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.
Barbara Greer Page 6