Barbara Greer by Stephen Birmingham Read Free Book Online Page B

which took in a view, from the wide windows, of the town below, the sky held an aurora of light from the town and it was possible, very possible, from the dark bedroom through the silent window, to dream that the city was not Locustville, Pennsylvania—not Locustville, but—
    Naples!
    Naples, and she was a girl on a hill above it. And those swirling deeps below which were actually long yellow fields of farms and darkened houses, they were crests and waves and combers of the sea! Holding this impossible image in her mind she closed her eyes, trapping it there, pressing it like a flower between the pages of a book.
    She thought about the farm.
    Once, when she was a little girl, she had been helping her mother transplant clumps of violets from behind the house, moving them into the garden. Her mother had suddenly sat back upon her heels, dropped her trowel, and looked at the fingers of her outstretched hand. The diamond from her engagement ring, the centre diamond, had fallen from the prongs that held it.
    They had stayed there all afternoon, looking for it, going back and forth over every inch of earth, looking under every leaf, patting the earth, crumbling it in their fingers, and, when they were tired, stopping for a minute to wipe their hands on their clothes. Her mother kept closing her eyes, trying to imagine where it might be. When it was nearly dark, he mother’s face had been streaked and dirty. Then suddenly she cried, ‘I see it!’ and plunged her hand into the grass. ‘No, it’s only a drop of dew!’ she said. She sat there on her knees and began to cry, and Barbara, who always started to cry when her mother did, cried too. And her mother had pulled her into her arms and said, ‘There, there. There, there,’ over and over again. ‘It’s lost, that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to it.’
    For weeks afterwards, whenever she went out of the house alone, she searched for her mother’s diamond, careful not to let a drop of dew fool her. Finally, after she had spent most of one summer that way, looking only in tht one spot behind the house where they had been digging up violets, she began looking farther afield in places where her mother might have been. And the next summer, the place had nothing to do with it. She looked for the diamond wherever she might be, whenever she happened to think of it. She let her cousin Woody deWinter in on the secret and when they played together one of them would suddenly say, ‘Let’s look for the diamond!’ Immediately they would separate, running in different directions, shouting that they had just thought of a place where they had not looked. And when they returned, one of them might pretend that he had found it, or that they had found another diamond, a different one, and after a while they lost interest in the game and forgot about the diamond altogether. Years later, Barbara had been sitting with her mother on the terrace behind the house and suddenly thought of it again. ‘Remember the day you lost your diamond?’ she asked her. ‘Did you ever find it?’ ‘No,’ her mother said, smiling, holding up her ring finger, ‘but it was insured; I got a new one that I really think I like better.’
    Woody had been practically her only playmate at the farm. Woody lived several miles away but his mother brought him over frequently, especially during the summer. The farm had a swimming pool and Woody’s house, which was closer to town, did not. Barbara and Woody had been taught to swim together by a Yale boy named Danny, who was also a lifeguard and who came to the Woodcocks’ pool two afternoons a week to earn extra summer money. ‘Keep your faces down … keep your shoulders even with the water …’ she could remember clearly Danny’s somewhat flat voice saying. She had carried on, over the course of several summers, a fantasy love affair with Danny