Barbara Greer (16 page)

Barbara saw Barney only once during that Friday afternoon. She came upon him unexpectedly in her grandmother's library; he was standing at the window, watching the workmen in the windy garden. She sat down with him and they lighted cigarettes together.

Because she had thought that it might amuse him, she told him about Muriel Hodgson and the pizzas—though not, of course, about the quarrel that had followed. ‘Did you ever hear of such an impolite thing?' she had asked him.

But he had seemed preoccupied, nervous, his mind on other things. His eyes kept wandering away from her, around the room to the window, to the workmen in the garden beyond. He took sharp, rapid puffs of his cigarette and murmured, ‘Yes … yes. Uh-huh.…'

Then he told her what she had not known before—that, after he and Peggy came back from their wedding trip to Bermuda, he was going to work for the Woodcock Paper Company. He looked at Barbara intently, as if eager to get her reaction to this.

‘But why?' she had asked him. ‘I thought you had so many other offers?'

‘I did,' he said. ‘I had several. A couple of them were quite interesting. But this—to me—this is really exciting, Barbara.'

‘I don't think anyone's ever called our little company
exciting
before,' she said.

He jumped up and walked to the window. He stood, tensely looking out with his hands pushed deep in his trousers pockets. ‘Well, it is,' he said in a tone that was almost belligerent. ‘When your father and your cousin Billy made me the offer, I didn't hesitate a minute.'

‘And you'd spend your life in the paper buiness?'

He turned to her sharply. ‘What's wrong with paper? Look,' he said. ‘At Harvard I was trained for management, and when you're trained for management you can manage anything. The product doesn't matter. Paper or soap, it's all the same, and besides—' he stopped.

‘Yes? What?'

‘Well,' he said slowly. ‘I am marrying into the Woodcock family. It's going to be my family too, you see. So shouldn't I do everything I can for the family? Your father never had a son. Maybe I can be—well,
like
a son.'

She smiled at him. He looked away, his face flushed, as though, by accident he had suddenly allowed one of his heart's preserves to open, and had let her peer inside. He faced the window again.

‘I love this family,' he said simply. ‘I love everything about it. The farm, the people—all of you. I'm going to be very happy here.'

‘So you'll be living in Burketown,' she said.

‘Yes. At the farm.'

‘At the
farm?
' she asked, surprised.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Temporarily.'

And then, later that afternoon, back at the farm, because her mother had asked her to do it, Barbara went into Peggy's room to talk to her. Peggy seemed remarkably composed, although her bedroom was in a disorder of packing, with open suitcases on the chairs and piles of dresses lying across the bed. They sat on the floor; it was the only place to sit. Peggy pulled the bottoms of her grey slacks up above her calves, crossed her legs and rested her chin upon her folded hands when Barbara asked her whether there was anything—any question—about marriage, anything Peggy didn't understand. ‘Don't forget, I'm a veteran of nearly four years of it,' Barbara had said.

But Peggy knew all about sex. She knew enough, anyway. When she had been—what? About nine or ten?—there had been Charlie Muir, who cared for the horses and went riding with the girls. ‘Remember Charlie Muir?' she asked Barbara. Once, riding through the woods behind the house, Charlie had offered to show Peggy something. There was no need to dismount, Charlie said. And when she said yes, she would like to see it, he had unbuttoned himself and shown it to her. Then he suggested that she hold this object in her hand as they rode, side by side, quietly under the trees. Afterwards, she had told Barbara about it. Barbara had been shocked. ‘Don't ever, ever do a thing like that with a man!' she had said, and with the wisdom five added years gave her, had added, ‘If you do, he'll want to do something else—much worse.' Nevertheless, Peggy had done it again.

And, to be sure, one day Charlie Muir had suggested a more ambitious experiment and this had frightened her. This time she had told her mother. Her mother had listened quietly, asked her one or two questions, but had not seemed to be alarmed. That afternoon, however, her father had returned from the office early, with two other men. They had gone to the stable where Charlie lived, and after that, Charlie Muir had never been seen or mentioned at the farm again.

Then, when Peggy was a little older and understood things more fully, she had had another, and possibly ruder, shock. Peggy was fourteen, Barbara was in college, and Peggy had developed the habit—whenever Barbara was not at home—of sneaking into her sister's room to read the letters that were tucked into the bottom of Barbara's dresser drawer, and—whenever its little flap was left unlocked—to read Barbara's diary. She liked the letters better than the diary, though. And one day—it was after Barbara had started going with Carson Greer and had invited him to the farm a few times—Peggy discovered a new letter in the drawer from Carson, which, when she read it—and she read it and reread it several times—made it quite clear the Barbara and Carson, in the expression Peggy and her friends used, had ‘gone the limit.' It had happened in the little guesthouse across the lake, but at precisely what time the incident or incidents had occurred was not clear from the letter. What was clear—and what startled Peggy the most—was that neither Carson nor Barbara, apparently, were the least bit remorseful for what they had done. In Carson's view, it was something beautiful, secret, and holy that they had shared. And Carson's language of thanks, to Barbara, for her part in this sharing was oddly flowery, even prayerful, quite unlike any language she had ever heard before from a man, and different from what she had always supposed would be used to describe an act of illicit love. In her mind, at fourteen, she had sometimes imagined such letters; in them, the guilty man—for it was the man always who was guilty—accused himself of veniality, lack of courage, compared himself to a rough-booted soldier who had marched through and muddied a beautiful garden. Yet in Carson's letter, the details were quite explicit. And it appeared not to have been Carson alone who was guilty, who was the aggressor.

Peggy's first reaction had been horror and fury with her sister. How could she! How could she have subjected herself to such a thing? Every shred of respect she had once had for Barbara vanished instantly, as though one of the soft and comforting lights that bathed her existence had been suddenly switched off. She went to her own room. On her dressing table, a photograph of Barbara stood in a pink leather frame. She picked up the picture, spat at the face, and threw the picture to the floor, smashing the glass. She bent, and from the sharp splinters she ripped the photograph into tiny shreds. Then she threw herself across her bed and cried for a long time, pounding the bedclothes with her angry fists. Never, never, never, she promised herself, would she speak to or look at Barbara again.

But this presented a problem. She could not stop speaking to or looking at Barbara without telling Barbara why. And she could not tell Barbara why without admitting her own guilt. Reading another person's mail was, as Barbara had often grimly reminded her, a federal offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both: So, though Peggy continued to be disturbed by her knowledge for several weeks afterwards, she had never mentioned it to Barbara. And, gradually, she began to forgive her. But since the revelation of that afternoon, her attitude toward Barbara was never again precisely the same. The golden face she had worshipped as a child was tarnished.

All this she told Barbara now as she sat cross-legged on the floor in her grey slacks, a little smile on her round, snub face.

Then it was time for the ritual of cocktails—somewhat earlier that evening because there was a busy night ahead—and dinner. Then, at eight-thirty, it was time for the men to leave for the bachelor party Cousin Billy was giving for Barney. Carson, Barney, Preston Woodcock and Woody—who had come for dinner that Friday night—departed in various cars for Cousin Billy's house on Hillside Road. Edith and Peggy, along with Edith's servants, were to take the station wagon back to Grandmother Woodcock's house on Prospect Avenue to finish the decorations, begun that afternoon, so that everything would be in order for the photographers who, most of Saturday morning, would be taking pictures there. Barbara was welcome to come along, they said—they could use as many hands as they could get—but Barbara, who was tired and who had developed a throbbing headache during the day, asked to be excused, and suddenly, at nine o'clock, she found herself absolutely alone in the house.

She had gone to her room, undressed, and put on her blue quilted robe. She propped pillows against the headboard of her bed, swallowed an aspirin tablet, and lay down against the pillows with a book. She alternately read and dozed, experiencing the curious sensation of having—when her eyelids closed—the book that she was reading continue with an improbable new plot, new characters, in her dreams. At last she put the book aside, sat up straighter, and began idly chipping the lacquer from her fingernails. When she had created a tiny crimson snowstorm of chips about her on the sheet, she decided to do the job properly. She got out of bed, went to her dressing table, and, with a bottle of remover, cotton balls, nail file, orange stick and polish, began seriously to do her nails. Her door into the hall was open and suddenly, in the middle of her concentration, she heard a sound and turned and saw Barney standing there. He looked weary, leaning with one hand against the doorjamb.

Startled, she asked, ‘Is the party over?'

‘No,' he said. ‘It's still going on.'

‘What happened? Why did you leave?'

‘I couldn't take it any longer,' he said.

‘What was wrong with it?'

He sighed. ‘Nothing, I guess. During the movie, I decided to take a walk. Nobody seemed to notice when I left, so I decided to come home. Is Peggy back yet?'

‘Not yet,' she said. ‘What do you mean—during the movie?'

‘The dirty movie,' he said. ‘Doesn't every bachelor party have a dirty movie? This one was different, though. There were four—four that I saw, anyway. Maybe there are more.'

‘Really?' she asked. ‘That doesn't sound like Cousin Billy!'

He laughed shortly. ‘Doesn't it? I gathered it was typical—' Then he broke off. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I don't know, really. Mind if I sit down?'

‘No,' she said. ‘No—please do.'

He came into the room and sat on the upholstered bench at the foot of her bed.

Then, it seemed, a deep and terrifying silence fell between them. She raised her hand, still damp with nail polish and waved it absently in the air. Then she lowered it.

Finally she said, ‘What's the matter?'

‘Something very simple,' he said.

‘What?' Her voice was barely above a whisper.

‘I'm marrying the wrong Woodcock girl,' he said.

It was difficult to remember what she had felt—what, exactly, her emotions were then. They had seemed to change with breathless speed. The thought, the idea, the idle, dreaming, half-conscious thought—put into words just that one time by her mother—had been only an aimless and impractical wondering. It had not been a specific thought; it had not involved any specific plan of action. It had been only a daydream up to then and the realisation, so swift, that she had walked to the end of the daydream into a specific place where specific words and specific actions were required stunned her, blurred her thoughts, dizzied her. Up to then, the fanciful thought that had begun that summer had involved the word ‘affair.' Her friends, married and unmarried—Nancy Rafferty, all the rest—talked of affairs they had had or would like to have. In this vernacular, there was nothing—other than the one obvious thing—wrong with having an affair. It was modern, everyone did it—or seemed to do it. As long as an affair was all that it was—because
affair
meant something brief, handled sensibly. It meant something temporary, quickly over, quickly forgotten and forgiven.

But now, with him sitting there, his deep eyes looking inexpressibly sad, having just said what he had said with the meaning that could not be misunderstood, it was too late to think of it in terms of the word
affair
. He, or perhaps she herself, had somehow pushed everything far beyond the word affair into an area that was complicated, treacherous, deep—not temporary, but for ever. And so everything changed; the old thoughts, quaintly mixed with self-flattery, idle curiosity, a perfect selfish longing for excitement, a smug feeling of I'll-go-into-it-with-my-eyes-open—all that vanished. She was sitting face to face, soberly, with the victory her dreaming mind had been devising, but the victory had betrayed her because she was looking now at the face of a man with whom an affair was no longer possible. Since what he had just said had meant that he was in love with her, how else could she answer him except by saying that she loved him, too? Methodically, now, appeared in her mind, the steps ahead: Divorcing Carson, taking the children, leaving—at last—Locustville, waiting for a little while, then marrying Barney. Peggy would be heartbroken, of course, but after all these were the cruel demands of love. She could no longer have two men in love with her at once.

She did not remember, exactly, what she had said to him. She remembered asking him to repeat what he had just said, and when he had, saying that he must not say such a thing unless he meant it truly and always and when he had said yes, he had, that it had been growing with him all through the summer, she remembered that she had begun to cry—not sob, but to sit, swaying slightly with unexpected tears streaming down her face. At some point then he had stood up, come to her and brushed the tears from her face with his fingertips and out of all the jumble and confusion of thoughts running wild in her head, old thoughts racing with new, she had one overwhelming thought: the house was empty, they were all alone there. She remembered asking him if the things she herself had felt all summer long—the curious wish, desire, longing and the little furtive thoughts—had, could have been, love? Could they? She herself did not know. She hardly remembered what his answer was because suddenly from the turmoil of feelings there came a great, smooth calm and she thought:
All is well; it is as it should be
. She felt blissful and serene, as if she were about to perform some ancient and noble rite, moving toward the bed; he knelt, she remembered, on the rug beside the bed and she reached for him to lift him to her. He kissed her. He said—she remembered the jarring sound of his words—‘I was taught that adultery is a mortal sin. If it is, we'll both be punished for it,' and she remembered her own equally jarring words—‘I don't care.'