A Death in Canaan (3 page)

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. She 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 weighed 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.

Amid all the change, some things remained constant. The mountains still skimmed straight up, the South Canaan Congregational Church still stood small and white and proud, as it had for generations, across the street from the Kruses' house.

Fred and Helen Kruse, Barbara's landlords, had lived in the big white house since they came up from New York in 1946. Fred Kruse had bought land across the highway, too, and ran the gas station there.

For a while, after she was fired from her job in Cornwall, Barbara had worked at the gas station. When she filled out an application for the state-run Work Incentive Program (WIN) she wrote that her last regular job was “Service Station Operator.” Even after that, although the station was leased to various people, it remained a part of Barbara's life. One man who leased the place accused Barbara of stealing $50 from him, and Paul Beligni and Peter got even with him by way of an elaborate prank involving ammonia, dead fish, and an electric fan, on a 102-degree day. Barbara had the last word. “I might consider stealing fifty thousand dollars,” she told the man, “but never fifty.”

On the day Barbara died, she planned to drive into Canaan to do some shopping, although the car was in rotten shape—the transmission was almost entirely gone, and the only gear that would operate was fourth. But Barbara didn't want to trade it in. For all her shabby clothes, she liked being special, and the metallic blue Corvette that Auntie B. had paid for looked very sporty and special. Peter wanted a bigger car so he could carry around his musical equipment.