Barbara Greer

by Stephen Birmingham

  They had given a party. It was their turn. They had been entertained by the Hodgsons, the Sages, the Williamsons, the Brysons and the Bishops—the neighbours and company friends—and, Carson reminded her, the time had come to repay the party debts. So Barbara had telephoned Muriel Hodgson, Betty Lou Sage, Prudie Williamson, Kate Bryson and Sue Bishop and invited them for cocktails on Saturday night.

  She had worked on the party all day. She had made hot hors d’œuvres and a lobster casserole which she planned to serve, buffet-style, at eight o’clock. In addition to Flora, she had hired another girl to help in the kitchen. She filled vases with tall gladioli from the garden and placed fresh pink tapers in the dining room candelabrum, thinking that she would serve the supper by candlelight.

  The party began all right and it was difficult to tell, exactly at just what point it had begun to go wrong. Looking back on it later, she could see it had begun when Muriel Hodgson had mentioned a restaurant in Locustville called Pete’s.

  Barbara had been sitting beside her on the sofa. ‘Pete’s?’ she asked. ‘I don’t believe I’ve heard of that one. Is it good?’

  ‘Oh, it’s divine!’ Muriel said, shaking her bright yellow curls enthusiastically. ‘You should try it. Pete’s Pizzeria. It’s simply divine.’

  ‘Pete’s what?’

  ‘Pizzeria. Pete’s Pizzeria. Isn’t that a cute name?’

  Barbara said, ‘Oh, I see—they make pizzas there?’

  Muriel looked at Barbara suspiciously. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you like pizzas?’

  ‘Oh, I do!’ Barbara said.

  ‘Well, try Pete’s. They’re terrific.’

  ‘They sure are,’ Bert Hodgson said. ‘They have about, oh, maybe a dozen different flavours, but the kind to order is their special de luxe combination. They make it with anchovies, ripe olives, mozzarella cheese, Italian sausage—the works.’ He turned to Carson. ‘Do you like pizzas?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Carson said.

  ‘Anybody who doesn’t like pizzas should have his head examined,’ Bert said.

  ‘And Bert’s right about their special de luxe combination. It’s simply divine,’ Muriel said.

  ‘I must try it,’ Barbara said.

  More cocktails were poured and voices rose to a new pitch and intensity. Barbara thought: At least they’re enjoying themselves. Then Flora beckoned her into the kitchen. Was the casserole ready? Barbara looked at it; it was cooking more slowly than she had expected. The strips of lobster meat were still translucent. ‘Give it another few minutes, Flora,’ she said.

  In the living room Bert Hodgson was doing his imitation of Pocahontas; Muriel was playing Captain John Smith. The room swayed with laughter, and from the phonograph, Marlene Dietrich spoke bittersweet German songs. Carson moved dutifully among the guests with his silver cocktail pitcher. Barbara listened as Kate Bryson confessed that she had always wanted to be a comedy actress. Then, suddenly, Muriel Hodgson was standing in front of her, saying something. ‘What?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘Pete’s!’ Muriel shouted. ‘That’s the name of it.’ Voices in the room swiftly fell and Muriel said, more quietly, ‘Pete’s.’

  ‘Yes, what about it?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘I could have been, too,’ Kate Bryson said. ‘I had this teacher in this drama course they gave. She said so. She said I had born acting talent.’

  ‘Pete’s Pizzeria,’ Muriel said to Barbara. ‘The place I was telling you about.’

  Muriel turned to the others. ‘So what do we all say?’ she-cried. ‘All in favour?’

  ‘Favour?’ Barbara asked. ‘In favour of what?’

  ‘I think we could eat three large ones, don’t you? Or no. No, we’d better make it four,’ Muriel said. ‘Large, four large. Bert can eat a whole one by himself!’

  ‘Sure can!’ Bert said.

  ‘Would anyone like another cocktail?’ Carson asked

  ‘No. We’re going to send out for pizzas,’ Muriel said. She turned to the others in the room. ‘Oh, that’s a wonderful idea, isn’t it, gals? Then none of us will have to bother fixing dinner! Get on the phone, Bert.’

  ‘Well—’ Carson began.

  ‘What’s the number?’ Bert asked.

  ‘Lambert 9-0790,’ Muriel said.

  Barbara said, ‘I don’t think we’ll need pizzas. I’ve got—’

  ‘Of course we do. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like pizzas?’ Muriel turned suddenly to Sue Bishop and said, ‘By the way. You can eat pizzas, can’t you?’ Her voice was full of solicitude for Sue, who, before she had married Ed Bishop, had been Sue Goldman, and was Jewish. ‘I mean—it’s all right for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sue replied.

  ‘Good. I didn’t know.’

  ‘I love pizzas,’ Prudie Williamson, who had not said much, said. ‘Do you know what I do, Muriel?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I buy them by the dozen and keep them in the deepfreeze. They’re wonderful that way. Just run them under the broiler for a few minutes to thaw them out. You can keep them that way for months. They don’t get soggy at all.’

  ‘I’ll have to try that,’ Muriel said. ‘Bert—make that call!’

  ‘I save a lot of money shopping in quantity,’ Prudie Williamson said.

  ‘Oh, so do I,’ Muriel said. ‘Bert, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you call Pete’s? I’m getting hungry just sitting here thinking about pizzas!’ She rubbed her stomach.

  ‘I’m waiting for a little quiet,’ Bert said. ‘Hey! Everybody! Keep it down, will ya? Keep it down to a dull roar. I’m trying to make a phone call.’

  ‘Bert,’ Barbara began, ‘I’ve actually got a—’

  ‘As long as Hank and I both eat them, I don’t mind,’ Prudie Wiliamson said. ‘If he eats them by himself. I can’t stand to have him get close to me with his breath.’ She laughed and then blushed violently, as she realised that she might have said something vulgar.

  ‘Oh, hurry, Bert!’ Muriel said. ‘Hurry! All you have to say is four large special de luxe combination pizzas and tell them you’ll be down in fifteen minutes to pick them up.’ She turned to Barbara. ‘The nice thing about Pete’s is they’re very prompt. If Bert phones now, they’ll be ready by the time he gets there.’ She turned to Bert, looking at him levelly. ‘If Bert phones now,’ she said.

  ‘Quiet!’ Bert said. He had begun to dial.

  ‘Have them make one without onions,’ Betty Lou Sage said.

  ‘No, Bert,’ said Muriel. ‘Just tell them to leave the onions off half of one. That’s all. The rest of us want onions for goodness’ sake!’ She looked at Betty Lou. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said ‘They’ll leave the onions off half of one.’

  Barbara stood in the centre of the room, holding her cocktail glass.

  ‘Hello?’ Bert said. ‘Is this Pete’s? Look. This is Bert Hodgson. Out on Bayberry Lane. That’s right. Look—can we have four large special de luxe combinations? That’s right …’

  ‘Bert—’ Barbara said.

  Carson turned to Muriel Hodgson. ‘Barbara’s got something fixed already,’ he said. ‘She’s got a—’

  ‘Oh, we don’t want you to go to any trouble!’ Muriel said, turning to Barbara. ‘No kidding, honey. That’s the wonderful thing about pizzas. They’re so simple! No dirty dishes. We can eat them right out of the box.’

  ‘I’ve got a lobster dish in the kitchen,’ Barbara said. ‘And I—’

  Oh, don’t bother with that,’ Prudie Williamson said. ‘I’m allergic to seafood anyway.’

  ‘Four … large … special de luxe combinations,’ Bert was saying. ‘And look. Leave off the—’

  Barbara turned to Carson, who shrugged his shoulders, gave her a brief despairing look. She turned to Bert. ‘Bert!’ she said.

  ‘What? Wait a minute.’ He covered the telephone mouthpiece with his hand.

  Suddenly everyone in the room was silent, looking at Barbara.

  ‘Bert
, don’t order pizzas,’ she said quietly

  ‘Why not, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Because I don’t want them.’

  ‘What the—’

  ‘You heard me!’ she said. And though she hadn’t meant it to, her voice rose shrilly. ‘I don’t want pizzas! If I’d wanted pizzas I’d have ordered them myself! It’s my party, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ She sobbed, suddenly, turned and ran out of the room, her cocktail splashing from her glass as she ran.

  Behind her, Muriel Hodgson said, ‘Well! What’s eating her for God’s sake?’

  Later, Carson came into the bedroom.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know!’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know what happened! Suddenly I couldn’t stand them—any of them! I couldn’t stand looking at their stupid faces and listening to their stupid voices! I couldn’t stand them.’

  ‘Muriel was just trying to be helpful,’ he said.

  ‘Helpful!’ she said angrily. ‘Who is she! Just who is she! She’s nothing but a stupid, stupid, mediocre little tramp. And he—he’s even worse. All of them! I hate them all. I can’t stand this town. I can’t stand this street. I simply can’t stand it any more.’

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  She buried her face in the pillow, sobbing. ‘That’s the trouble! I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where I want to go. Oh, I’m so unhappy—so unhappy—’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I’ve got to go somewhere! I’ve got to get away!’

  After a while, he said, ‘Would you like me to fix you a little nightcap?’

  She sat up, fumbled under the pillow for her wadded handkerchief, found it and blew her nose. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’d love that.’

  He went into the kitchen. She heard the sound of him mixing drinks. She sat on the bed, pushing the damp hair out of her eyes.

  He returned with the two drinks, handed her one, and sat down on the bed beside her. He seemed singularly quiet. Then he said, ‘Of course Bert’s one of my supervisors. But of course you knew that.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ she said. ‘I don’t care who he is. He’s still a stupid, boorish little man.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll apologise anyway. For my sake, at least.’

  ‘I won’t!’ she said.

  ‘And apologise to Muriel, too, in the morning.’

  ‘I certainly won’t!’

  ‘You’ve never tried,’ he said. ‘You’ve never tried to get to know any of these people, that’s the only trouble. They’re all perfectly decent people. But you’ve never tried to get to know them, or understand them, at all.’

  ‘I have tried,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried very hard. You certainly can’t say that I haven’t tried.’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I wish I could see how you’ve tried. This past summer, for example—as far as I can see you spent most of it up in Burketown at the farm.’

  And then the quarrel began in earnest.

  It ended, in sobbing hysteria, early in the morning.

  But it was not ended, in the sense that anything had been settled, or even—as would have been best—forgotten, though she had done as he had asked, telephoned the Hodgsons the next day and apologised. It was still remembered two weeks later when, early on a Friday morning, they started off for Burketown in the car for Peggy’s wedding, which was to be at three o’clock that Sunday afternoon.

  An autumn wedding, in the afternoon, under bright blue late September skies was what Edith Woodcock wanted. But when Barbara and Carson arrived on Friday, it did not appear that Edith’s wish would be granted; the day was cold and windy and the sky was grey and overcast, not blue. Leaves from the elms and maples blew against the windowpanes and the wind tossed and bent the heads of chrysanthemums and the remaining roses. But Edith, as she said, was being philosophical about the weather; plans had to proceed anyway; one could only pray that Sunday would dawn with sunshine. Four hundred guests were coming. Wisely, considering the weather’s unpredictability, Edith had decided against erecting a marquee in the garden. Instead, the reception was to be held at Grandmother Woodcock’s house on Prospect Avenue, which, because it was an old house built in the grand manner of the late nineteenth century, had a ballroom. It was here, then, and not at the farm, that the most feverish preparations were taking place. It was at the old house opposite the Wayside Furniture store—the house that passing motorists often mistook to be either a convent or nursing home or a school for girls—that precious services of Limoges were being washed, French crystal and heavy English silver were being polished, satin draperies, freshly cleaned, were being rehung, floors were being waxed and buffed. Here in the garden, which, before Maple Street had been cut through behind it, had extended for four hundred feet beyond two identical iron gazebos, the bronze and verdigrised fountain that had been carried around the Horn from China was being put in working order. Delivery trucks arrived with wedding presents; florists’ trucks arrived with tubs of flowers; caterers’ trucks arrived with food and champagne. And, in the middle of it all, praying silently for a fair dawn on Sunday—and also that Grandmother Woodcock would not die from the excitement of the activity in her house—was Edith Woodcock, her white hair in disarray, in an apron and comfortable shoes, working with the servants.

  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 af
ternoon, 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.