A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Usually Peter rode the school bus, but on the day Barbara died, he got a ride with two of his good friends, Geoffrey Madow and Paul Beligni. They rode home together, too. The three boys had been friends since the first day of their freshman year at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. When Barbara died, they were beginning their senior year together. They all had pretty much the same classes including Contemporary Problems. This year they were scheduled to study “Crime in Society.”

  Barbara was fifty-one when she died, but she always got along far better with Peter’s teen-aged friends than with her own contemporaries, their parents. Paul Beligni often stayed overnight, and the summer before she died he stayed practically every night, sleeping on a piece of foam in the living room that he rolled up during the day and stuck into a corner. Paul used to shoot woodchucks in the backyard, using a twelve-gauge shotgun. Once he and Peter were fooling around with the gun in the living room and it went off, blasting away the top of a tall clock. Barbara just shrugged and said they were lucky it hadn’t hit the red bowl.

  One of her favorite pranks was to spot a car passing on the road, get the license number, then call the police and sob out a story, in a lisping, childish voice: “Oh a car has just run over my cat, and my cat fwew up in the air and it hit the tewephone pole and it came down again and now it’s all smushed and dead—sob, sob—but I got the wicensepwate number. Oh, can’t you pweath find the mean man who hit my cat?” She’d recite the number she’d written down, then stand in the doorway and, when the police car came by in screaming chase, she’d roar with laughter and pour herself another drink.

  “I don’t know that Barbara ever hurt anybody, but she could aggravate the devil out of a person,” said Jean Beligni, Paul’s mother, who was in Barbara’s house only once, to bring back some laundry Jean had done as a favor for Peter. Doing the laundry was not one of Barbara’s strengths. The night she died, the bedroom floor was strewn with dirty clothes.

  When she felt like being aggravating, Barbara would sit outdoors and shout at passing cars. She liked to read outdoors, too; in the coldest weather she sat in the yard wrapped in a fur coat. She even read at night, under the floodlights that the landlord, Mr. Kruse, had put up for her. She was spontaneous, boisterous, and sometimes just silly, and the teen-agers loved it. Beyond the prankishness, they may have recognized and identified with an uncertainty in her, an indirection, that they sometimes felt themselves. What the boys may not have recognized was that in themselves this was a fact of adolescence, while in Barbara it was a permanent condition.

  Barbara’s most ambitious and successful prank involved an imaginary truffle hunt to be held on an estate in Sharon. She wrote a story about it and sent it to the Lakeville Journal just before presstime, so they wouldn’t have time to check it out. On the day of the supposed hunt, Peter recalled gleefully, “everybody you could think of was climbing Sharon Mountain, looking for that estate.”

  “If she’d been rich, you’d call her eccentric,” said Father Paul Halovatch, curate of St. Joseph’s in Canaan. “Around here, she was just an oddball.”

  Along with the very silly things, Barbara did some very serious things, as a woman adrift is apt to do. For a while, she had a black man living with her. Some teen-agers, peeking in the window one day, saw Barbara and the man naked, and the mother of one of Peter’s classmates, who lived down the road, had to warn her son about going to Peter’s. “Make yourself scarce,” she told him.

  Still, in her own way, Barbara looked out for Peter. In fact, her landlord’s wife thought Barbara spoiled the boy. Once she drove out at night in a thick snowstorm to buy him some porkchops, because he’d had frankfurters for dinner the night before and didn’t want them again.

  And Peter looked out for Barbara. The week before she died he insisted on driving her to Sharon Hospital two days in a row for some tests she needed, because their car was in bad shape and he was afraid for her to drive it alone.

  Peter was all Barbara had. Barbara was all Peter had. Perhaps that was why they yelled at one another. “They swore like truck drivers,” a neighbor reminisced. “But they cared.” At Christmastime 1971, Peter gave Barbara an electric portable typewriter that he bought with money he earned from playing guitar in a band. “She wanted a typewriter like I wanted a guitar,” he explained. That spring, she’d given him an expensive amplifier. His birthday card said: Did You Know I Was Put on This Earth to Bring Joy and Sunshine into Your Life? Love, Mom.

  Peter and Barbara. This is what it was all about. “You had to understand my mother,” Peter would say, but hardly anybody did. “She was an enigma,” said the Falls Village librarian, who saw her often. “She had a very keen mind, a lovely voice and enunciation, and a charming manner. But she looked like the dickens most of the time, and she was none too clean.”

  Barbara and Peter. Their last photograph was taken in the spring, a few months before Barbara died. The two of them are standing against the shed, near the house, where the landlord kept tools and barbed wire, and Peter kept parts for his car. Both Barbara and Peter are wearing dungarees and matching sweat shirts with striped sleeves. Barbara is rubbing the little finger and thumb of her left hand together, as she had a habit of doing. Peter is looking toward the house, and Barbara is looking at him. She is smiling.

  Peter’s friends called Barbara by her first name, or, sometimes, “Barbs.” She didn’t like the nickname “Babs”; her mother had called her that. She was born in Berlin on November 20, 1921, the only child of Hilda and Louis Gibbons. Her father was in the import-export business, and his work took him around the world. He and Hilda kept a house in England, and they were living there when Barbara started school at the Lady Bon House School in Manchester. Those were years of grace: a sweet-faced Barbara, with a pageboy cut and shiny bangs, wearing a white dancing dress and dancing shoes. A wide-eyed Barbara, chubby and adorable, playing shuffleboard on the S.S. Baltic. Barbara flanked by two Irish setters, Fifi and Wapsi, on the lawn of a house in Anglesey. Barbara on the boardwalk at West Beach in Bournemouth.

  When Louis’s company went out of business, the family came to the United States to live. Barbara told Peter that she brought with her a teddy bear bigger than she was. It was a remnant of affluence; in those Depression years, Hilda worked as a switchboard operator in a Manhattan office, and by 1940 the family had moved from a house in New Jersey to an apartment. Later they moved to the Bronx.

  In her early teens, Barbara began showing signs of the naughty streak she never outgrew. At her school, which had Anne Morrow Lindbergh on its board, she was suspended for selling pictures of nudes. She was exhibiting her athletic streak, too—skiing at Big Bromley, playing tennis, swimming, and riding motor cycles. In the summer of 1940 she held Hilda on her shoulders for a snapshot at poolside, and then held a man—blond, grinning—on her shoulders too.

  After high school, Barbara enrolled at New York University on Washington Square as a premed student. She had grown into a genuine beauty, with deep, dark eyes, thick black hair, full red lips, and an oval face. “She was very quiet, very beautiful,” her cousin Vicky recalled. “She had thick eyelashes that made you sick with envy and naturally curly hair. She attracted lots of men—and women, too.”

  She didn’t finish college. She left after two years, according to a form she once filled out for her welfare worker, because of financial problems and got a job at the Home Insurance Company in New York City. For several years Barbara edited the house paper and had a good time doing it. For a joke, she once proposed a “Strictly Personal” column with unusual entries—mentioning two employees, for example, “who have named their son, born November 1, ‘Woody,’ in memory of our annual outing at Bear Mountain.” At the garden show, she wrote, there would be one special event: ALL CLASSES, ESPECIALLY PANSIES.

  In 1950, Hilda and Louie bought a little red house on Johnson Road in Falls Village, Connecticut, an escape from New York’s summer miseries. Later they lived there year round. Barbara stayed in the city. Sh
e had many friends there, most of them from the insurance company where she worked. Sometimes, when she went up to Connecticut to spend a weekend with her parents, she would take one of her closest friends, a lovely blonde woman whom Peter would come to know as his godmother, “Auntie B.” Auntie B. worked at the insurance company too. She was the daughter of a rich family and probably was working only because she wanted to.

  Peter was born in New York on March 2, 1955. Within the year, Barbara resigned her job and came to Falls Village to stay. The postmistress recalled very clearly when Barbara brought Peter to Connecticut. “She stepped off the train, held out a baby wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, and said, ‘This is Peter Reilly.’ And that was about as much as she ever said.”

  As Peter grew up, he came to love the house on Johnson Road. It was a wonderful place for people who liked the outdoors, as Barbara always had. When she died, and people all over town were talking about her, hardly anyone ever mentioned that—perhaps because her life was so unusual, so many of its details draped in mystery, that a simple, understandable quality such as liking the outdoors didn’t seem worth noting. But it was important to Barbara, and so it became important to Peter and had something to do with the kind of person he was.

  Even as a small boy, Peter would take his fishing line and wander off by himself to the lake. He could spend all the summer days in the shade of a pine, alone, his line idling in the water, the hot sun streaking the surface of the water with blurring light. There was a detachment about him even then, a fragile dreamy quality that may have had its source in those early days by the lake, in the house in the pine woods.

  Barbara’s father, Louie, was an outdoor person too, and Peter idolized him. He seemed the ideal father figure for a boy who had none. They hiked together, built feeders for the grosbeaks, and went canoeing, with Louie’s hound splashing in the water. Peter went barefoot most of the time, and the pictures that survive these years show a regular Huck Finn, skinny and grinning, his hair cut short and his ears sticking out. He learned to swim when he was four. Barbara hadn’t learned till she was fourteen and always regretted the time she lost. When she learned, though, she must have learned well, for she told Peter that when she was sixteen, she swam across the Hudson River, from New York to New Jersey, on a bet.

  Most of the photographs dating back to the years on Johnson Road are marvelously serene: Hilda asleep in the sun, a Saturday Evening Post open on the grass beside her; Hilda and Louie laughing together, Louie holding a squirrel; Barbara seen from the back, walking down a country lane, disappearing into a leafy distance. Even though the reality of those years was far less idyllic, and although these lives eventually shattered, some of them past mending, the years on Johnson Road were good for Peter. At least, that is how he remembered them. Barbara liked to hike, and she cared about birds, so Peter did too. Even Hilda, who didn’t get along with her daughter at all, was pleased by her fondness for nature. Hilda gave her a book of wild game birds inscribed: To Barbara from Mother, Christmas 1956.

  “I can’t give you much,” Barbara once told Peter, “but I can always arrange things for you.” His baby and toddler clothes came from New York, with labels from Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. When he started school, he was enrolled at Town Hill, a private school.

  Barbara and her father drank a lot, and Hilda continually cursed them for it. “You had to feel sorry for Barbara,” a neighbor pointed out. “Hilda had a vile temper, and it was hard to please her. She gave Barbara a bad time.” When Peter was ten, Barbara and Peter moved out.

  They lived for a while on Music Mountain, in a barn that was only partly renovated and usually cold, but Peter remembered only the good times there, too. He was going to school in Falls Village, and Barbara was working for the insurance agency in Cornwall. She kept in touch with people in New York, though, especially with Auntie B. For years the two women had exchanged notes and letters whenever they were apart. Barbara kept the letters. In the beginning, their tone was affectionate, but later the tone was curt. Whatever the women’s relationship had once been, it had cooled.

  When Barbara brought Peter to the World’s Fair, they stayed with Auntie B. Peter liked to sit in her chair at the dining table, stretching his foot to press the buzzer under the carpet. Auntie B.’s cook sent Peter cookies in the mail, and Auntie B. sent checks. At first these were mostly gifts at Christmas, and on birthdays, or checks for something special—but after Barbara was fired from her job and went on welfare, Auntie B.’s checks came regularly. They paid for some of the basics, and all of the extras: wine for Barbara, better food and shoes and shirts for Peter than welfare could provide. Sometimes Barbara bought things for herself, especially food—she liked pastrami, liverwurst on rye with mustard and onion, sliced pizza with everything on it, and beefsteak, sliced thin, which she ate raw with lots of oregano and pepper. But mostly Auntie B.’s money seemed to be spent for Peter.

  Louie Gibbons never stopped drinking. One rainy night he skidded off the road, Route 126, and crashed into a telephone pole. Peter took his death hard, and insisted that either Louie had swerved to avoid hitting a deer or he’d just been very tired and had fallen asleep at the wheel. In the spring of 1967 Hilda went to a doctor in Lakeville, got a vaccination, and flew off to Switzerland. She never came back to Connecticut. She sent Peter a postcard from Basel, but she didn’t write to Barbara. In fact, in the passport space for “In case of accident, notify:” she hadn’t written her daughter’s name at all. She’d written the name and address of Auntie B.

  Once more Barbara and Peter moved, for the last time in her life. They rented the drab little place on Route 63, for which Barbara at first paid $35 a month, in cash. When she died, she was paying $55; she died two days before the rent was due.

  For someone whose girlhood had been as careful as Barbara’s, it seemed a pitiful place to live. The heating system consisted of one kerosene heater in the corner of the living room. The blue flowered linoleum was cracking, and curling up at the edges. The house was always cold, from late fall until late spring. Barbara wrote to her welfare worker that fuel was one of her biggest expenses, and that in order to save hot water, she took very few baths. Barbara explained that the electrical bill was very high because often she had to turn on all the appliances she had, even the toaster and the iron, to warm the place. The clothing inventory Barbara submitted to welfare listed a skirt, a housedress, and a girdle, but no pajamas; because the house was so cold, she went to bed wearing her daytime clothes and slept in a sleeping bag.

  For all its flaws, this house was home for Barbara and Peter. Although there were tensions between them, and sometimes Peter mentioned to friends that he’d like to move out, he never did. He’d say his mother needed him home, and he’d go back. They had some good times. Peter liked to work on model planes, and Barbara went to Mario’s Barber Shop in Canaan and got him a straight razor with a black plastic handle, so he wouldn’t cut his fingers when he worked. While Peter crafted balsa wood, or read car manuals, or played his guitar, Barbara listened to the radio and watched TV, read, and drank.

  “She lived the way she liked livin’,” Peter said, and in this little house on Route 63 Barbara could live precisely as she pleased. She could drink, and sing arias all night, and sit outdoors in the snow, reading under the floodlights. She could do whatever sad, doomed, compulsive things she wanted to do, or needed to do, and she didn’t have to explain things that couldn’t be explained anyway, perhaps not even to herself. She could diminish herself, even destroy herself, and while there were people to notice—“I watched her go downhill steadily,” the owner of Bob’s Clothing Store said gloomily—there was no one to stop her. In this drab little house, Barbara Gibbons had only herself to confront, and when she packed for the move, she kept out Hilda’s book of wild birds and gave it to the Falls Village Library.

  Peter was too thin, Barbara always said, nagging him to eat more, and by chance the school nurse weighed and measured him the day Barbara died. Peter Reilly w
eighed 121 pounds and was five seven, a slender boy with slightly crooked teeth, a nice smile, long hair, hazel eyes with sweeping lashes.

  He skipped breakfast that day, as he always did, and dressed in blue jeans, his favorite dark brown braided leather belt, and a pair of Converse sneakers, tan with a black stripe, that he’d bought at Bob’s Clothing Store just a week or two before. He wore a brown shirt from Bob’s too. Paul Beligni, who worked there Friday nights and all day Saturdays, had one just like it.

  The shirt had long sleeves; it was autumn, with a snap in the air. The sugar maples back of the house were beginning to flare, and mists swirled in the valley some mornings, hinting at winter on the way. Many people consider this the prettiest season in the northwest corner of Connecticut, in the Litchfield hills. The leaves are reflected in the Housatonic River, which meanders through the region like a strand of silver yarn.

  The largest town in the area is North Canaan, and there is East Canaan, and South Canaan, which includes parts of Falls Village. But nearly everybody calls the area “Canaan,” the name chosen by the settlers who worked their way up from Stamford in 1740 and named their town for the biblical land of milk and honey.

  And once, the land surely prospered. The farms thrived and the valley’s limestone and marble quarries swarmed with workers—the state capitol at Hartford was constructed of Canaan marble. A spacious inn, the Lawrence Tavern, was built; George Washington slept there, and so did Ethan Allen. Forty tons of iron a day were blasted out of the hills, much of it to be made into cannonballs. Altogether, it was a busy, lusty place; the general store in Falls Village stayed open all night, thirty clerks working three shifts.

  Eventually, the trains stopped coming, and the tracks bristled with weeds. Nobody needed cannonballs anymore, and travelers to New York had to wait at Collins Diner for a bus. In Falls Village, the general store closed down, and the village seemed to lapse into rural sleep. In the twentieth century Canaan became a small-scale factory town. Two manufacturing plants moved in—Becton-Dickinson, where surgical instruments were made, and another small plant that made the little plastic packets called Wash ’n Dri.