Barbara Greer by Stephen Birmingham

shoes? Who is taught to ride a horse the way Barbara had been, by first learning the precarious Italian seat? Who nowadays gives their child tennis lessons every summer, swimming lessons and French lessons? How many families gather on their lawns on summer evenings for croquet? Who has a room that is truly a ‘nursery,’ or has a governess to dress the little girls in their white frilly dresses, brush their hair and bring them downstairs to join their mother and her friends for tea? Even Edith Woodcock, perhaps, was an anachronism. Born in 1904 in a brick house on a hill in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of a college professor, she carried with her to Burketown, Connecticut, relics of the Victorianism which she had inherited from her own mother. In the nineteen twenties when other girls her age had been talking boldly of Freud and sex, experimenting with lipstick, cigarettes and whisky, Edith had continued in a world of Thursday afternoons and calling cards in little envelopes placed on silver salvers. When she married Preston Woodcock, in 1925, she brought to him her excellent manners, her cultured speaking voice, her ability to handle servants, and a grand piano that had belonged to her mother, who had studied abroad under Paderewski. She brought with her other traits that her husband loved, such as her ability, always, to carry a fragrance about her, a smell of powders, colognes and sachets that established itself for ever in her closets, her bathroom, and in her dresser drawers, where she kept such vestiges of an older time as rose petals tied in a linen handkerchief and an orange pomander pierced with hundreds of cloves.
    It was in this—possibly old-fashioned, certainly mannered—atmosphere that Barbara Woodcock had grown up. She had been educated, as little girls in Providence had been, first by a private tutor and later at a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. She made her debut, as little girls in Providence had done, at a tea dance under a marquee set up in the garden. She had broken with tradition somewhat by going to college (her mother saw no need for it), but when she married Carson Greer she had worn her mother’s wedding dress with a train that ran exactly twenty feet behind her and she had carried a nosegay of pink rosebuds. To prepare her for marriage, Edith had given Barbara the same little book printed by the Episcopalian Church that her own mother had given to her. In it the responsibilities of a married woman were sketched in quaintly unspecific language. But this, to Barbara, did not present a problem because, while her parents remained somewhat fortressed within the past, she herself—away at school and college—had been able to observe the twentieth century as it matured around her.
    Still, Barbara liked to think that she contained within herself fragments of each world. She could enjoy the brashness and noisiness of the ‘modern’ life in which she moved, and yet she could respect the somewhat stately, ordered existence that her mother’s world imposed. It was certainly not typical, she knew, of girls her age to harbour the feelings for her childhood home which she did; the farm, to her, evoked a true nostalgia—memories of ease and happiness and comfort. In this day and age, what girl longed as Barbara so often did, to go home again and let the waves of the past lap gently all about her? What other girl her age still grew moist-eyed reading Black Beauty or Sentimental Tommy ? In an age of synthetics, she still loved silk velvets and brocades; in an age when elaboration was in disrepute, she still loved the carved plaster ceilings of the farm and the crystal prisms that hung from the chandeliers. Her tastes were unfashionable, she knew, but she was proud of them. To her, it seemed important that these loves be kept intact. They were a heritage which, one day, she would pass to her children. She thought about these things as she sped