Barbara Greer (35 page)

‘I'm safe and sound,' Peggy said.

‘Peggy, you remember Nancy Rafferty?'

‘Sure,' Peggy said. ‘Hi, Nancy.'

She went to one of the chairs and sat on the edge of it, stretching her brown legs out in front of her, her sandalled toes sticking straight up. She leaned forward, clapped her hands on her bare knees. ‘Fix me a drink, Daddy,' she said.

‘Did you get caught in the storm, dear?'

‘No, Mother, I was safely indoors.'

‘Where
were
you, dear?'

‘Give me a drink first,' Peggy said. ‘I've had quite a day.'

‘Peggy—' Barney began.

She ignored him. When she had her drink she sipped it. ‘Ah!' she said. Then she turned to her father. ‘Yes, I've had quite a day.'

‘Where have you been, Peggy?'

With her red fingernail she stroked the side of her glass, etching a little pattern on its smooth side. She seemed to be smiling at her upturned toes; they waited, but she said nothing.

Preston cleared his throat. ‘Peg,' he said, ‘just before you came in Nancy was saying that I was the person who first introduced her to the pleasures of drink. And that reminds me of a story that my father used to tell me when I—'

‘Preston, dear,' Edith said. ‘We want to hear where Peggy's been.'

‘No, Daddy, go on—tell your story,' Peggy said.

Preston laughed softly. ‘Well, when I was a kid—fourteen or so I guess—my father used to tell me a little story. It seems there was this man who had a young son, like me, who was going off to school and college, and this man said, ‘Son, I'll make a deal with you: If you'll promise not to drink or smoke until you're twenty one, I'll give you a thousand dollars on your twenty-first birthday!' Well, naturally, the son promised his father not to drink or smoke until he was twenty-one. He went off to school and then to college and, of course, pretty soon he started drinking and smoking and having a good time with the rest of the fellows. Had a fine old time, drinking, going to wild parties, all the rest. Well, pretty soon his twenty-first birthday rolled around. His father called him into the library and said, “Son, tomorrow you'll be twenty-one. I wonder if you remember the promise you made me years ago when you promised not to smoke or drink till you were twenty-one.” Well, the son thought about this a minute—he remembered the promise all right—and he thought well, I guess perhaps I'd better tell the truth. So he said, “Dad, I cannot tell a lie. I haven't kept that promise. I've drunk and I've smoked, and as a matter of fact, I've probably done too much of both.” Well, the father rose to his feet then and placed his hand on the son's shoulder. With a tear in his voice, he said, “Son, I want to tell you I'm proud of you. You could have lied to me, but you didn't. You told the truth. You were honest. Son, you've got the markings of a man. And I want to tell you this: Son, if I had a thousand dollars I'd give it to you!”'

Everyone laughed.

Preston said, ‘Now of course in my own case, with my father—' He stopped suddenly and looked at his glass. It was a shy, puzzled look. ‘I mean—' he began.

‘Yes, Daddy?' Peggy said. ‘What about your own case?'

‘Well, I've kind of forgotten what my point was,' he said. He lifted his glass to his lips and swallowed.

After a moment, Edith said, ‘Now. Peggy. Do tell us. Where were you?'

‘Oh, I've had quite a day,' Peggy said. ‘I've been investigating a crime.'

Barney said, ‘Peggy—'

She smiled at him. ‘No,' she said. ‘I know what I'm doing, Barn-Barn. This little crime concerns all of us, and I think I should tell all I know about it while the evidence is still clear in my mind.' She looked straight at her father. ‘I've been down at the office, Daddy. Your office and Cousin Billy's office. Down at the mill. Going through things.'

Edith said quickly, ‘Well, darling, suppose you take it up with Daddy later! After all, whatever it is it can hardly concern our guest, Nancy—'

‘Nancy, you'll have to forgive me,' Peggy said. ‘Perhaps it doesn't concern you, but it concerns everyone else in his room. And I'm going to get it off my chest.'

‘Peggy, please don't,' Barney said softly.

‘Shut up, Barn-Barn,' she said.

He stood up and walked to the window and stood there, looking out, his knuckles resting on the sill. In the attitude of his shoulders, the shape of his back, Barbara saw the same defiance, the haughtiness, that she had noticed watching him standing against the lip of the pool. Helplessness again swept through her and choked her.

‘It happens to be a crime,' Peggy said, ‘that carries a prison sentence. It's robbery. Grand larceny. And it's been perpetrated against us.'

‘Peggy, dear, can't it wait? Really, I think you should take it up with Daddy in private if it concerns the office,' Edith said.

‘No, it can't wait. You should be interested in this, too, Mother. We've been robbed, little by little, over a number of years, of a large sum of money. And some of that money is money you ought to have an interest in.'

‘Peggy, what on earth are you talking about?'

‘I'm talking about our dear Cousin Billy. Our dear, loyal, devoted Cousin Billy who's worked so damned
hard
for all of us, and whom we all love and respect, and who's cheated and robbed us of damned near every red cent we own!'

‘Peggy!' Edith cried.

‘It's true. I've been at the office. Bill Adkins let me in. I had a lot of time there, undisturbed, checking and rechecking, looking over things. There were a number of things that Billy would have been smarter to have locked in a safe. But there they were, right in his desk and in the files. I guess he thought our dear Daddy was too dumb and too honest to snoop around! I looked through everything, and at first I was confused. I couldn't understand. How come Billy owned so much stock, I wondered? There must be some mistake. I looked, and pretty soon I began to see a pattern—it began to be clearer, how he's done it. It was simple, really—like taking candy from a baby. Little by little, he's been taking Nana's money! Getting her to give him money, then a little stock, then more money and more stock! He's got all of her stock now, and he's also got her house—every bit of property she owns. Nana! A poor, senile old lady—he's robbed her of every last cent, and so now, very generously, he pays her taxes and her light bill! He's robbed his own aunt, but she's Daddy's mother! That money and that stock were supposed to go to Daddy when she dies! That money is supposed to be ours. But Billy's got it all, he's got it all!'

In the silence that followed, Preston did not move but stared at his glass. At last, he said, ‘Peggy, what is it you want? Is it money? Because if it is, I'll try to work it out—to give you and Barney whatever you want, whatever you need—'

Peggy rose to her feet and strode toward him. She stood, leaning over him. Her voice was shrill.
‘Don't you see?'
she screamed. ‘Don't you see what's been done to you? You've been robbed! Your mother's money! Your inheritance and mine—'

‘Do you want money?' he repeated slowly. ‘Do you need money?'

‘No! I don't want money! Don't you see, you idiot! All I've ever wanted is justice—justice, for what's been done to you by Grandfather and Billy! I want to get even! I've got a right to get even! I want revenge—that's what I want. I want to report this to the police. I want to have Billy put in prison!'

Preston shook his head slowly back and forth. ‘No, no, no,' he said. ‘No, no—'

She seized his shoulders. ‘Don't sit there! Don't keep saying, “No, no, no” to me—'

‘No, Peggy, you don't understand,' he said. ‘I know all about this. I've known all along. Billy told me what he was doing. He had my permission. He had to do it to keep things going.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘To keep things going. The company, everything. My money is all in trust—so when the company needed funds, I couldn't help. Other things take a lot of money. He's paid for them. Somebody had to. It was either that or sell the company. He's loaned me money, too, Peggy, when the trust income wasn't enough. You musn't talk about getting even with Billy, Peggy, because if it hadn't been for him and what he's done, we might not be here in this room …'

She stepped back. ‘That isn't true,' she whispered.

‘It is.'

Then she advanced upon him. She struck him once, then again, then a third time with the flat of her palm and he rocked in his chair from side to side. His neatly combed and neatly parted grey hair fell awry and waved across his eyes and she screamed, ‘Oh! You drunken fool! Oh, you drunken bastard! Oh, you drunken dirty fool!' Then she fell to her knees. It was an awkward motion, graceless and unpleasant. Sobbing, screaming—as everyone ran toward her—she pounded her balled fists upon the floor. A cocktail glass overturned and shattered; its pieces, in the suddenly harshly lit living room, lay all around them in hard blue splinters as John and Emily, hearing the commotion, came running from the kitchen, crying, ‘Oh, sir! Oh, madam! Oh, sir!'

Dinners in New England are ceremonious occasions, conducted without ceremony; that is, there is ritual but little formality. Even when there are servants in attendance, it is not surprising to have the plates served family-style. Edith Woodcock's dinners were always served this way. The roast, the turkey, the leg of lamb—Emily was a substantial cook but not an inspired one and was happiest working with large cuts of meat—was placed in front of Preston on the silver carving platter with a tree design and a well to catch the juices, and Preston carved, standing. Each plate was passed along the table by the intervening guests to Edith, who waited, with a serving dish on each side of her, to serve the buttered peas and mashed potato. Sometimes the plates were returned to Preston to have him shape a crater in the mashed potatoes with a spoon and fill it with pan gravy. Edith, a New England woman, disliked showy menus. She preferred simple dishes, she detested sauces; her most ambitious dessert, one which she used often, was vanilla ice cream with green
crème de menthe
poured over it. The dining room was large, done in pale blue, with pale blue satin drapes at the tall windows, pale blue walls, chairs upholstered in a pale blue and white brocade; over the buffet, lighted, in identical frames, were pastel portraits of her daughters, and the artist had obligingly created a pale blue dress for each girl to match the colour of the surrounding room. At the far end of the room was a portrait of Edith, painted when she was a girl in 1918; it was a sentimentalised version of her, her auburn hair caught in a crimson ribbon and a matching crimson rose resting on her lap. At the centre of the table, suspended from the ceiling, was an antique chandelier of French crystal that was almost never lighted; its teardrop prisms caught the candlelight. Though the room would certainly have been called ‘formal,' though Edith owned several sets of fine bone china and a quantity of excellent silver, it was commonest, on evenings when there was no one but the family at the table, for meals to be served on the inexpensive ‘rosebud' dishes—a set she had bought at Penrose's in Burketown—with the plated silver, with paper napkins. This Edith considered merely sensible. Tonight, of course, since there were guests, the good china was used, and the good silver, and the linen. The good crystal water goblets were on the table, along with wine glasses because, since there were guests, John had brought up a bottle of St. Emilion. Edith was very good at making dinner table conversation, at creating a little subject for discussion and drawing, one by one, all her guests into it. It was an art she had been taught by her mother in Providence.

Only the lightest subjects were considered fit for conversation at the dinner table: the weather; people they knew; a book Edith had read, or was thinking of reading; an amusing anecdote, perhaps, involving the whole family. Tonight, Edith talked about the strange and, she thought, quite ugly designs of the new automobiles, vulgar and fat and chromey, with their enormous protruding fish-tails and their gaudy colours; she was grateful for their station wagon, which, though it was six years old, still looked the way an automobile ought to look. Did everyone agree with her, or was she being hopelessly old-fashioned? She was reminded of this because just this afternoon Tom Moriarty, who owned the Chrysler agency in Burketown, had telephoned asking if he could bring one of his new cars around to show her. Only once, that Barbara could remember, had there been a quarrel at the dinner table. She had been a little girl and she could not remember now what the quarrel had been about, but she remembered her mother suddenly bursting into tears and dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her napkin. She had never seen her parents quarrel before; if they quarrelled, they managed to keep it from the children. It frightened her, seeing her mother cry, looking at her father's face which was flushed and angry; frightened, she had looked at first one, then the other of her parents, wondering what to do. Desperate, thinking that she must do something, that something was required of her, that somehow only she could stop the quarrel and reunite them, she had stood up from the table, stepped a few paces away, and begun performing for them a little song she had learned in school.

Oats, peas, beans and barley grow!

Oats, peas, beans and barley grow!

Do you or I or anyone know

How oats, peas, beans and barley grow!

It had become, in fact, one of the amusing family anecdotes that her mother sometimes told at dinner.

17

After dinner she went to her room and closed the door. A corner of her bed had been turned down in a neat triangle and she sat on one corner of it, impressed suddenly by the silence. From where she sat she caught by accident her reflection in the long mirror on her closet door. Her face, she thought, looked already old. She reached for the telephone and dialled ‘0.'