Barbara Greer by Stephen Birmingham Page A

northward on the New Jersey Turnpike in the open car that afternoon—a pretty girl in a convertible speeding along a superhighway, heading from one of her two worlds toward the other.
    Burketown, Connecticut was twenty-seven miles northwest of New Haven. Its Chamber of Commerce had named it ‘The City of Village Charm.’ It was a town that was smaller, actually, than Locustville. Its population was just under twenty-five thousand and it was a town that, until recent years, had been supported by a single industry—paper manufacturing. There were three paper mills—Valley Paper, owned by the Harcourt family, Woodcock Paper, owned by the Woodcocks, and a third, smaller company called Burketown Paper Products Company. Burketown, as the name indicated, had been founded by a family named Burke. And though there were no longer any Burkes in Burketown, both the Woodcock and Harcourt family trees were liberally sprinkled with them. Although the Woodcocks were somewhat later comers to Burketown than the Harcourts (the first Preston Woodcock had migrated from Scotland as recently as 1830), they had managed to make their presence there more deeply felt; in the paper business the Woodcocks, it was generally agreed, had been more successful. Monuments to the family were in evidence everywhere. There was a street called Woodcock Avenue, and on Main Street the largest office building, where all the doctors’ and dentists’ offices were, was called the Woodcock Building. There was the Dobie C. Woodcock Memorial Library, named after Barbara’s great-grandfather, and the Elizabeth Burke Woodcock Memorial High School, named after Barbara’s great-aunt, Mrs. William Dobie Woodcock.
    On a hill on the west side of town, overlooking the valley of the Wampanauck River that originally had powered the mills, was a wide street called Prospect Avenue. Once it had been a street of lawns, canopied by elms—a street of gateways, flanked by rhododendrons and laurels, that opened to manicured driveways that led to porte-cochèvres of houses with sharply peaked gables, turrets, tall chimneys and stained-glass windows. It was here, in the old days, that the best families of Burketown had lived, and it was in one of these gaunt old houses, at 700 Prospect Avenue, that Barbara Woodcock had been born. Even then, however, Burketown had begun its relentless commercial march westward; just two blocks to the east, a movie theatre went up, then next to it a drugstore, and next to that a dry-cleaning company. Now 700 Prospect Avenue was the Halcyon Rest Home and the house, one block north, that had belonged to Barbara’s Great-Uncle William, had been razed to make room for an apartment building. Only one Woodcock remained on the street now, Barbara’s grandmother, who still lived at the corner of Prospect Avenue and High Street, once the most fashionable corner in town, in the house to which her husband had brought her as a bride in 1890. She was ninety-three now, nearly blind, pushed to the high parlour windows in a wheelchair by her nurse or housekeeper once a day to get the sun. From these windows now there was a view of a Wayside Furniture store; at night, from the parlour windows that had once looked across most of the valley past the smoking chimneys of the Woodcock mills to the distant church steeple of Hanscomb Corners nine miles away, the old lady had a view that was, in its own way, cruelly ironic—a rocking chair drawn in neon tubing that rocked, mechanically, back and forth above a legend that read, YOU CAN’T BEAT WAYSIDE PRICES . It was a blessing, the family often said, that Grandfather Woodcock had not lived to see it, and that, for his widow, whose clouded eyes dreamed from her wheelchair by the window, the neon sign took on other, more comforting shapes—summer lightning, perhaps, or northern lights.
    Earlier than most Prospect Avenue residents, Barbara’s father had seen the inexorable