Haywire (25 page)

Dec. 5, 1946

One afternoon when the Tocaloma Club station wagon pulled up to our garage to let us off, an ambulance was waiting. While everyone watched, aghast, two attendants in white came down the steps carrying a stretcher with Father on it. Before we could move, the stretcher vanished into the back of the ambulance, doors closed, red lights began to flash, and, with an ominous sound, the ambulance was gone.

We had never seen Mother cry before. It was very serious,
she said: Father had hemorrhaged again from the strain of working too hard. He needed lots of rest and blood transfusions and would be in the hospital for a long time, and we couldn’t go with her to visit him in the hospital until he was out of danger, because it wasn’t allowed, but we could help a great deal by being very brave—that would help her to be brave, too—and by saying prayers for him every night and every day as well. We were heartbroken. It was terrible to see Mother cry and terrifying to remember what Father had said to me that day when he and I had walked away together from the chicken coop; if, as he’d said then, the sight of a drop of blood made him afraid to death, suddenly I knew how much more afraid he would be at the idea of bleeding, literally, to death.

He didn’t bleed to death, although he was in the hospital for a long time; everyone was very relieved, Mother reported to us, that he didn’t have to be opened up again, but we felt, during that time, as though somehow somebody had died anyway. The air inside the house changed color and became dark gray as if all light were filtered through drawn shades, reminding me of the heavy gray velvet on the walls of my grandfather’s room—the room in Maisie’s house where we visited him once just before he died—even the windows and fourposter bed draped in gray velvet with gold tassels, impressive and hushed, until Grandfather, alone, without the nurse’s help, went into his bathroom. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said courteously, closing the door behind him, and we could hear him coughing and coughing, viscerally, as if he would never stop, while Father, agonized, stood at the window’s gray light, playing with a gold tassel and looking down at the traffic on Fifth Avenue.

Also the house was quiet because around this time Mother, too, became ill. An old back injury was acting up, and she was confined to her bed under heavy sedation, while a stream of doctors came and went. Mother had never gone to bed sick before then, although we knew she had a bad back, because she’d often made fun of herself for having to keep a thick magazine like
Vogue
on hand to slip under her right buttock whenever she sat down. This unorthodox procedure, prescribed years earlier by an osteopath who thought she needed to support her right hip a little, was, she claimed, the only remedy that kept her from having chronic backaches.

Emily made us walk instead of run through the house, and, to
our further consternation, forbade us to go anywhere near Mother’s room. “No, I’m not trying to be mean,” she said when we demanded querulously to see for ourselves how Mother was coming along, “and yes, I realize that when
you’re
sick in bed you like to have company. But it’s a funny thing. Everything’s the opposite when you get to be our age—and Mrs. Hayward is a spring chicken compared to me—you find out there’s nothing to make you sicker quicker than the combination of noise and pain.”

Shortly after both she and Father recovered, Mother—surprisingly—decided to go back to work. John Van Druten and Alfred de Liagre were taking
The Voice of the Turtle
to England and she agreed to go with it. She had fallen in love with England ten years before and to do
“The Turtle”
there was an irresistible temptation, she told us, but she would only be gone for six months at the most—and less, if English audiences didn’t like the play. In May, 1947, we put her on the train for New York with the warning to eat more and smoke less. The concept of six months as a stretch of time had very little meaning to us at all. “It’s not forever, I promise you,” Mother said sadly, hugging us goodbye.

From England she wrote us letters, long monologues, that vividly described its postwar ravages: the bomb damage in London, the queues for heavily rationed food, the pervasive feeling of envy and bitterness toward Americans, which, although she realized was impersonal, hurt her, and the guts and spirit of the English people for having lived through such devastation.

Her observations, as always, were intermingled with elements of both gaiety and depression. In one sentence, feeling rejected and lonely, she would complain about the rude and inhospitable attitude of English country inns; in the next, cross at herself for feeling rejected and lonely, she would extoll their charm and the extraordinary beauty of the English countryside. Whenever possible, everyone went sightseeing, which she loved, but typically, no matter how lonely she claimed to be, after just a few days with a group—even of close friends—she felt a compulsion to get away from it, to be alone. She was dissatisfied with the rehearsals of the play and the incompetence of the backstage crews and, when
“The Turtle”
opened in Manchester, with its reception (“Oh, dear,” she wailed to Delly, “is this what we came to England for? Where, oh, where is our slick little play?”), although, in fact, it got good reviews.

Every week, as we had promised, we wrote to her, since she
assured us that our letters meant more to her than anything, even a steak in rationed postwar England.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Bill Hayward

By the time Mother came back, we really couldn’t remember what she looked like. Father went to pick her up and then suddenly there she was, just exactly the same as always, breathless from running up all the steps, not scrawny and dried up like a prune as she had written us, but beautiful, all familiar golden, with shiny golden hair parted in the middle and bangs across her forehead. We couldn’t let go of her; there wasn’t enough of her to go around, nor enough of us either, scrambling and scrabbling and scratching to be the first, nor enough time to tell her every single thing that had happened since she had left: weekly dinners with Grandsarah and kickball games with Martha Edens; inches grown, weight gained; the great snail invasion when we stuck snails down each other’s shirt and Father paid us to collect them in jars with salt at the bottom, which made them ooze bubbly green slime and shrivel up; the five-foot rattler coiled right under Father’s window
one morning that so shocked him when he looked out that he got sick to his stomach all over it, and we kept the rattles to show her as proof of its size; Emily’s new false teeth; Bill’s new real tooth, on and on.

Then she told us every single thing that had happened to her since she left, which made us want to go to England immediately, and after that she said, “My darlings, there’s one more thing I have to tell you—or really Leland and I have to tell you—and I guess I’ve put it off until the very last because …”

Father stood with his hands in his pockets, looking toward the ocean. It was a very clear afternoon, one of those when you could see all the way to Catalina. By the subtle change in her voice, we knew that we should pay attention and stop trying to walk in single file along the narrow brick wall at the edge of the terrace.

“Now stop wiggling around for a minute and come over here. Please. So I can look at you. Just for a minute, then you can go right back.”

We came and stood before her, somewhat gravely, in keeping with her voice.

“I suppose this is a kind of family conference that concerns just the five of us.”

We looked over at Father, who hadn’t shifted his position.

Mother spoke rapidly and earnestly in the tone of voice that she used when she was explaining something new: “What I have to tell you is a little sad and unpleasant but certainly not the end of the world.” She paused and we tried to stand still politely. “You know how much, how very very much your father and I love each other, have always loved each other—and that’s one of the reasons you came to be—and of course we shall always love each other. But you see, sometimes grownups have disagreements, just like children, and get on each other’s nerves, and when that happens, it’s really best, rather than argue and argue, to separate for a little while—maybe a week or two or four—just a trial period, however long it may take to think things over from a more objective vantage point. You yourselves know how hard it is to come to an agreement when you’re right in the middle of a squabble. But that doesn’t mean at all that you stop caring about each other, does it?”

We listened very carefully. It occurred to me that Father had not moved since the beginning of this explanation, and really not at all for about fifteen minutes before it began, as if he were
watching for turkey buzzards or flying saucers; it was the time of the flying-saucer scare and we all used to stare up at the skies, imagining.…

“Also it is imperative that you understand that I’m not talking about divorce. This is not the same thing at all.”

I glanced at Father’s back and longed to be standing over there beside him. Divorce. Now there was a word. Where had that come from, sailing out of the clear blue-and-gold sky like the shiny pebble that Bill had once thrown at me, and that I, innocently mistaking it for a piece of mica, hadn’t bothered to duck, so that it hit me squarely on the forehead between the eyes, making them sting. Father had removed himself from all this, probably because it was infinitely worse than watching Mother chop the heads off chickens, although this time I wasn’t lucky enough to be outside the coop with him.