Barbara Greer by Stephen Birmingham Page B

coming of change. When Barbara was seven years old and Peggy was two, he had heard about a farm that was for sale in the country, ten miles outside Burketown. He bought it—it had been vacant for several years and was being sold for taxes—and moved the family there.
    Barbara could hardly remember living on Prospect Avenue. If she happened to drive by the Halcyon Rest on her way to see her grandmother, it was hard for her to believe that this curiously shabby house had once been her home. Still, she had driven Barney there—that summer two years ago, a few days after she had first met him on the terrace, that summer during Carson’s South American trip when she had come to the farm for a weekend and stayed somewhat longer. She had slowed the car in front of the Halcyon Rest, ‘That’s the house where Peggy and I were born,’ she said.
    â€˜Stop the car,’ he said.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I want to walk around, I want to see it,’ he said.
    â€˜What on earth for?’ she asked.
    â€˜Let’s get out and walk,’ he said.
    â€˜There’s no place to walk. We can’t go in. All we can do is walk up and down the sidewalk.’
    â€˜That’s all right,’ he said, ‘that’s all I want to do.’
    So she made a U-turn in Prospect Avenue and started back toward the Halcyon Rest. She stopped in front of it and they got out. They walked slowly along the sidewalk, looking at the house.
    â€˜I don’t see why you want to look at this old place,’ she said. ‘It’s depressing, actually. Let’s go.’
    â€˜No,’ he said, ‘It’s interesting. Interesting. Wherever we live is part of our lives. This is part of yours and your family’s. Do you blame me for wanting to understand it?’
    â€˜But it’s depressing, Barney!’ she said. ‘Please, let’s go.’
    â€˜Not yet, not yet,’ he said. He stood, arms folded, gazing at the old house with a shingled turret that rose above the crowded shrubbery. It was a long time before she could persuade him to get into the car again and drive back to the farm.
    The main house at the farm had been built in the early nineteen twenties by a millionaire from New Haven as a summer place. He had evidently been a man of whims, for part of the house was built of stone, in a style that was close to, if not exactly, Tudor. Another part of it was built of white frame, in a Georgian style. The house had a complex of chimneys, most of which were not functional but ornamental, although the house did have seven working fireplaces. All the windows were large and many-mullioned and several of these, too, were false—imposed upon certain sections of exterior wall for decorative effect. The house had been written up once in an architectural magazine that had called it, ‘A conversation-piece house, sprawling and capricious, full of surprises—corners, cubbyholes, passageways and nooks.’ The description was accurate. Rooms appeared unexpectedly off narrow galleries; doors opened upon flights of steps that led to odd little rooms that because of their whimsical sizes and shapes, were of no use to anyone except to children playing hide-and-seek. It was a house that seemed to ask to be explored, that was built for rainy afternoons.
    The house had four living rooms strung together in a row. A vase of flowers, placed before the mirror in the farthest room, could be seen through a series of four identical archways from the front hall. In one of these rooms, according to one story, the New Haven millionaire had shot himself after the Crash in ’29; a long, jagged crack in the black marble mantel marked, supposedly, the spot where his first bullet had gone astray. But there were at least three other theories that were equally well supported. One, that he had shot himself in his office in New Haven; another, that he had done it in the garden behind the house and had