Barbara Greer

by Stephen Birmingham

  ‘I’m glad you don’t have a car like Woody’s,’ she said. ‘That little thing of his is just too rakish for me!’

  ‘There’s something to be said,’ he said, ‘for a conservative model of the lower-priced three.’

  She laughed.

  He started the car and backed it out of the driveway.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.

  He didn’t answer her, but at the corner of Prospect Avenue and High Street he turned left.

  ‘Do you remember when you first drove me around this town?’ he asked her after a moment.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

  ‘That was a pleasant summer, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was,’ she said.

  They were driving through the West Hill section of Burketown now, a section of small, identical, boxlike houses that had been built immediately after the second World War. It was not Barbara’s favourite part of town. Because it was a development, it reminded her of Sunrise Heights in Locustville. Along its winding streets, West Hill presented a panorama of brightly coloured rooftops—red, blue, white and green; its backyards were aflutter with clotheslines decked with brightly coloured wash; its front yards were a dotted pattern of sidewalks edged with round yews, square boxwoods, pyramidal spruces—foundation planting. Presently they were past West Hill, in the open country, heading toward the hilly woods that ringed the valley. Stone fences lined the road; here and there appeared a pasture, a farm house or barn. The road was narrower, and in the heat, the tarred surface seemed to swim ahead of the car in a shining haze. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘Just driving. Do you care?’

  ‘I guess not.’ She put her head back on the seat. ‘Poor Nana,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think one of the things that upset me the most was seeing her garden all gone to weeds. It used to be such a beautiful garden. Now somebody’s planted sunflowers all over the place. Everything else is dead.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘when things start dying it’s just as well to let them die.’

  She looked at him. ‘That’s cheerful!’ she said. ‘You sound like Mrs. Zaretsky. She’s ready for Nana to die at any minute.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s true, isn’t it? If she’s going to die, she’s going to die.’

  ‘What a gloomy mood you’re in!’

  ‘Ah—’ he said.

  He slowed the car now, pulled it to one side of the road and stopped. ‘Have you ever been here before?’

  She looked around. A short path led between two boulders at the road’s edge to a ravine where, between large rocks, a brook ran down.

  ‘Why, yes!’ she said. ‘I remember this place. We used to go swimming here! It was quite illegal, though. How did you discover it?’

  ‘Just driving around one day. It’s still illegal.’ He pointed to a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  ‘It was a very daring place to go when I was in school,’ she said. ‘We used to come here at night.’

  ‘Let’s look at the brook,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’d mind if we trespassed just a little.’

  ‘All right.’

  They got out of the car. They went down the path to a wide, flat rock that jutted out above the water. ‘We used to jump from here,’ Barbara said. ‘That brook’s terribly cold. It comes out of a spring somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Have you been swimming here?’

  ‘Just once.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At night one time,’ he said.

  ‘How are your swimming lessons coming?’

  He laughed shortly. ‘I haven’t had any,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come here to swim. I just rolled up my trousers and went wading—just as far up as the spring.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘It’s very pretty here at night.’ He sat down on the flat rock, made a pillow of his hands behind his head and lay back, crossing his feet. She stood above him. He looked oddly out of place, in a dark business suit and tie, stretched out there, squinting up at her against the sun. She sat down beside him.

  He lifted one arm now and with one finger he delicately touched the thin ridge of her nose. ‘You’ve got a little sunburn,’ he said. ‘You’re peeling—right there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your face always has a gleam,’ he said. ‘A kind of brown gleam, a shimmer. You look—always very fresh.’

  She turned her head away from him to discourage any further appraisal of it.

  ‘It was one of the first things I noticed about you—your gleam. The way a very little girl’s face gleams. Those first few days, when I first came to the farm, everything seemed to have a gleam like that.’ He smiled distantly. ‘Then I got to know it,’ he said.

  ‘Barney,’ she said, ‘tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘You know what’s the matter.’

  ‘No. Tell me.’

  ‘Why do you think I brought you here?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘Do you realise, it’s been at least fourteen years since I’ve been to this place? It makes me realise I’m not a little girl any more. So—so, I think we ought both to try to be more mature, more sensible.’ She looked at him; he was staring straight up at the sky. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she asked.

  He reached in his pocket for cigarettes, found them, and offered the pack to her. He rolled over on his side and gave her a light. He tossed the match toward the water. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘So let’s forget about that other—that crazy summer,’ she said. ‘In fact, I—’

  ‘In fact what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘In fact you’ve forgotten?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Have you, Barbara?’

  When she still did not answer, he turned on his stomach and lay with his face burried in his folded arms. He said something that she couldn’t hear.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I said, so we’ll just go on and let everything die around us.’

  ‘Let what die?’

  ‘Your marriage and mine.’

  She laughed. ‘Nothing’s dying. I’m very happy, really. And so are you. Or you ought to be.’

  ‘Everything is dying,’ he said, his voice coming from far away in the cavern between his folded arms.

  ‘Oh, Barney!’ she said gaily. ‘Don’t be silly!’

  ‘Listen,’ he said intensely, turning his head to look at her again, ‘Everyone used to shine—your mother, your father, Peggy—everybody—when I first came here, just as though they’d been freshly painted. In two years, the paint’s chipped off.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘When I say things are dying, I mean it—literally. It’s not just your grandmother and her flower garden, and it’s not just Peggy and me. I was only half kidding about old Mr. Lerner’s ghost. There is some kind of ghost haunting this whole family! The paper company is dying—did you know that? At best, I give it ten more years unless something radical is done. Your father’s dying—committing suicide with drink! it’s not that I understand it—I don’t. And I don’t know what to do about it, to stop it. Perhaps it can’t be stopped. The only thing I know is that I was alive—or thought I was—when I first came here. But I don’t seem to be any more. And you seemed alive, too, at first. Are you still? Or have we both caught the disease—?’

  ‘There’s no disease,’ she said. ‘How could there be? Please don’t talk this way—’

  ‘Listen, listen to me!’ he repeated. ‘Want to hear my symptoms? Want to know what’s happened to me? I’ll tell you what I did today. I lied to you. I didn’t have anything to pick up at the office this morning. I went to church. To Saint Mary’s. I went to Mass—but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go in. I got up the steps, to the door, but I couldn’t go in. I saw that that wasn’t the answer. It was no good trying to pray my way out of
whatever I’m in. I couldn’t. I stood on the steps of the church and heard the Mass begin and knew I was a hypocrite. Then I remembered your mother said this morning that you’d gone to your grandmother’s house. So I went there, looking for you.’

  Her hand trembled as she lifted her cigarette to her lips. ‘Is it true what you said about Daddy?’ she asked.

  ‘What? That he’s drinking himself to death? He drinks a quart of gin a day—sometimes more. How can you help seeing that it’s true?’

  She held her hand across her eyes, shielding them from the sun, and wondered if she was going to cry. ‘Please, Barney—’ she said.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I am crazy. I think Peggy thinks so sometimes. But I’ve seen it—your family, here, this company, and everything—they’re all hopeless. They’re walking, happily, hand in hand, swinging along toward the grave. And Peggy is—’

  ‘What’s the matter with Peggy?’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Never mind Peggy. The only thing I know is that you and I—perhaps—can get away from it. Because we love each other.’

  She stood up abruptly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not true. Let’s go back.’

  ‘Because we love each other,’ he repeated.

  ‘Please take me back.’

  He stood up now and faced her. She closed her eyes, pressing back tears. ‘Please,’ she said again.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  They stood there and she thought he seemed remarkably resolute, standing very still, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. She could feel, again, the thickness of air between them, thick as glass, thick because the distance between them was too wide to cross. She thought: I must say something, not stand here like a schoolgirl on a rock, where he has taken me because it has a pretty, romantic view. It was an innocent place for him to have brought her, full of memories of summer vacation nights, boys boldly changing into their trunks behind the shadows of bushes, girls, daringly wriggling into their suits in the car—a place of flashlights, damp hair and towels, slips and screams in the icy water. It was hard to translate this place into the present, to the two of them, this summer Sunday morning. She said quietly, ‘All right, Barney. Suppose you do. Suppose we love each other. What are we going to do next?’

  ‘Go somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘Where? Where will we go?’

  His eyes wavered, just slightly. ‘We’ll get our divorces first. Then get married.’

  ‘And live where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Just anywhere?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We could never come back here, to this town.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want to live here.’

  ‘You wanted to once.’

  ‘I was wrong,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You see? You haven’t thought it out at all! You’re the one who’s impractical! You’re the one who’s the dreamer. It’s impossible. And you’ll be happier when you admit it. There’s nothing you or I can do about it—ever. Now, take me back to Nana’s house.’ She turned quickly and her heel slipped on the rock’s smooth surface. He reched out and gripped her arm, steadying her.

  ‘Barbara,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, pulling free.

  ‘All right,’ he said, releasing her.

  She started up the path toward the car and he followed her.

  At 1045 Prospect Avenue the telephone rang. Mrs. Zaretsky got out of her chair and went into the hall to answer it.

  ‘Oh, hello there, Mrs. Woodcock!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Yes, she was here. Oh, we had a nice long visit and she left—oh, I’d say about half an hour ago. Her car’s still here, though. What happened was, just as she was about to drive out, your son-in-law, Mr. Callahan, drove in. They talked a minute in the driveway, I happened to see, and then they got into his car and went somewhere. But I suppose she’ll be back pretty quick, to pick up her car and all. If I see her when she comes back, want me to ask her to call you? All right, Mrs. Woodcock, then I won’t try to be on the lookout for her. I know she’ll be back soon because she said she had to get back out to the farm. That’s all right, Mrs. Woodcock yes, We’re all fine. ’Bye now.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t for you,’ Mrs. Zaretsky said as she came back into the room.

  Sundays at the farm were relaxed affairs. Because none of the Woodcocks were regular churchgoers, Sunday breakfasts were served most of the morning, whenever people got up. And, by twelve o’clock—in summer especially—the cocktail hour started, because it was Sunday. And, because it was Sunday, there was none of the ritual of the weekday evening cocktail hours. It was informal, easy, as the day progressed slowly toward lunchtime.

  Everyone was at the pool. Barbara sat with her mother on a folding canvas chair, holding a gin-and-tonic that someone had given her; they watched the crowd in the water. Barbara’s cousin Jeffrey, just out of Yale, was there with his pretty fiancée, Marcia Symington. Jeffrey’s older brother, Talcott, and his wife, Monique, were also there. Sally deWinter Pratt, who was Woody’s older sister, had dropped by for a swim with a bearded man who, much to the family’s displeasure, seemed to be Sally’s present choice for a second husband. Peggy and Barney were both in the pool, too. Barney stood at the shallow end and Barbara watched as Peggy nimbly climed the ladder to the high board, stepped forward, and performed a neat jacknife into the water.

  Her mother was telling her about her morning. She had gone, after breakfast, to see her ‘family’ on the hill, the Millers. Mrs. Miller, a widow, had seven children. They lived in great poverty, and caring for the Millers, supplying the smaller ones in winter with warm coats and boots, bringing them baskets of food, and generally seeing to their well-being, was Edith Woodcock’s particular personal charity in Burketown. She grieved for the Miller children as she might for her own.

  ‘I brought them six little roasting chickens this morning,’ Edith said. ‘I had Mr. Kaplan pack them in dry ice for me. Poor Mrs. Miller! I don’t know what she’s going to do, poor thing. Lottie, the oldest daughter, is pregnant! She’s fifteen. What could I say? Mrs. Miller’s upset enough about it. Always afraid, she said, that Lottie’d “turn out bad.” Turn out bad! If she was afraid she’d turn out bad, why didn’t she do something at the time? Talk to Lottie. Or something! Now it’s a little too late. And Lottie! Barbara, you should see her. Fifteen years old, four months pregnant, and pleased as punch about it! Just delighted! She told me she hopes it’ll be a little girl. Honestly, those people. I think I shall have to call the state social worker and have her talk to Lottie. I can’t think of anything else to do. It makes me so sad, though, to think how poor Mrs. Miller’s tried—so hard—to bring those children up. And now, to have this, which will set an example for all the younger ones, you can be sure of that. Mrs. Miller asked me what I thought she should have done, when she first suspected Lottie was misbehaving, as she put it, with this man. Who’s married, by the way—of course! I was tempted to tell her—though of course I didn’t—that her family’s moral welfare was really not up to me.’

  Barbara sipped her drink. She nodded sympathetically. She had heard so many of the Millers’ problems before. ‘Where’s Daddy?’ she asked.

  ‘Resting. He’ll be out in a minute.’

  The crowd in the pool was very gay. There was laughter, splashing. The blue water foamed and glittered in the sun about dark shoulders, white bathing caps. Sally’s beau was showing himself to be something of a diver; he walked on his hands toward the end of the diving board, his feet pointing straight up in the air and his black beard pointing straight at the water. He waited, poised, then gave a powerful spring with his arms, arched in the air, curled into a miraculous high somersault, then dived straight as an arrow. There were cheers and applause.

  She looked at Barney. It hurt her to see him there, standing at the shallow end of the pool, leaning back, resting his elbows on the coping, the line of water just below the top of his trunks. He looked so p
roud and defiant, as though anyone who touched him or made him move either forward or backward would set off an angry trigger instantly within him. He stood, tall, slim and arrogant, creating inadvertently an illusion of hauteur while actually, she thought, the illusion he was trying to create was something quite different. She wanted to get up, to go to him and speak to him, but it was too painful. She couldn’t move. From the chair, holding the drink in her hand, she could only watch him helplessly.

  Then Edith said quietly, ‘Barbara, you were with him this morning, weren’t you. You went for a drive. Barbara, I’ve warned you before and I’ll warn you again. Don’t. Don’t do this. If you must have someone, pick someone else—not him.’ Then Edith stood up. ‘I’m going to get my suit,’ she said. ‘It’s just too hot a day to watch other people cooling off.’

  A little later, Barbara watched Barney come up the steps out of the pool and start toward the house. He went slowly, stepping gingerly in his bare feet across the hard, hot stones.

  Presently Peggy came out of the pool dripping wet and sat down beside her.

  10

  Peggy said, ‘There’s been so much going on this weekend, we’ve hardly had a chance to talk at all!’ She tugged at the strap of her bathing cap, pulled the cap off and fluffed her damp hair with her fingers. She smiled, reached for a towel that lay folded beside her chair and began blotting the water from her face and arms.

  Peggy was an extremely neat girl. She was meticulous and efficient and an excellent housekeeper, which Barbara was not. Unlike Barbara, who had a habit of stepping out of her clothes and leaving them where they fell, Peggy’s closets and dresser drawers were always immaculate and perfectly organised. She catalogued things. The quilted boxes in her closet bore little tags on which were lettered their contents in Peggy’s neat, round handwriting: ‘Sweater: periwinkle blue pullover; Sweater: lavender cardigan; Sweater: white cardigan with appliqué floral front … Shoes: beige silk pumps, medium heel; Sandals: black velvet.…” and so on. She was efficient in her gestures, too. Every motion of her hands was gracious and controlled. In one of her gracious and controlled movements now, she refolded her towel, placed it beside the chair, then reached for a cigarette and tapped it slowly and deliberately on the back of her now-dry wrist. Then she placed the cigarette between her lips and lighted it, blowing out the match with a stream of smoke. ‘Isn’t it a shame that Carson had to go on this trip,’ she said. ‘When he gets back, summer will be over.’