Haywire (42 page)

“There’s nothing to
say
,” said Bill. “I’ve already
said
it. Listen, I’m not being paranoid—I’m
here
. This is actually happening to me. I mean, they’ve taken my clothes, my money, my wallet, all my goodies—very underhanded of them. The night I arrived, they gave me a whopping dose of Tuinol—”

“What’s that?”

“Half Seconal, half Amytal. Deadly. I was naïve enough to think I could power my way through, but it dropped me like a tree. Now they’ve got me on a steady diet of sleeping pills because my time thing is all turned around. There’s a nurse on guard twenty-four hours a day; I have no privacy.”

“Why the nurse, seriously?”

“In case I might try to break out—how do I know why? The place isn’t equipped for this stuff—Father came here once with his stomach thing.”

“Why are you in bed? Why are you just lying there?”

“Where else am I supposed to be? They won’t let me leave the room. Haven’t been out of it in two weeks.”

“But, Bill, why were you running away?”

Bill crunched on another piece of ice. It was a very hot day and I could feel rivulets of perspiration running down my sides.

“Well,” he said, “during spring vacation, I met this girl from Tulsa. Father took Bridget and me to Sarasota, Florida—he’s got buddies there who run the circus, Harry and Johnny North. Strange place to go for a vacation, Sarasota.”

He looked off into space.

“And?” Sometimes Bill’s digressions were so convoluted he told the beginning of a story at the end.

“Oh, well,” he said, sighing. “I fell madly in love with this girl. When I got back to Lawrenceville after Easter, I figured school was a waste of my time, better to get a job in some oil field driving a truck, so I bought a New York-to-Oklahoma airplane ticket with the cash I’ve been saving up for about a year. My best friend finked on me. The housemaster, a very nice fellow, called me in and asked me if it was true that I was leaving school. I said yes, it was. And he said he felt obligated to call my father and notify him. This was on a Friday night and I was planning to split on Saturday morning. I knew Father was premiering
The Spirit of St. Louis
in San Francisco that night, and that it would be totally impossible for the housemaster to get through to him. He had no idea Father was, first of all, in San Francisco and, second, in the middle of a theatre. Like a fool, I agreed to spend that night at the dean’s house—so as not to be a bad influence on the other kids—before making my exit in the morning. The next morning, I was having breakfast with the dean’s wife when Father walked in the door, which startled me enormously. The rest is history.”

My heart ached for him. Oklahoma oil fields would have been much better than this.

“I mean, I would have been happier,” Bill was saying, “they never asked me—going to a public school, living at home. This is my fourth consecutive year in boarding school. There’s something creepy about all these Eastern prep schools anyway. But I’ve always envied the kids who go to public school and drive their own cars and go on dates and live at home, and I never have seen why I couldn’t do that.”

“Didn’t you ever ask?”

“No. I guess not. We’re programmed to the idea that boarding school is the only way to get into a good college, and that’s what you have to do to survive.” He smiled at me ruefully.

“When are they going to let you out of here? What do you want me to say to Father? Tell me what to do.” Terrible, I thought; this place was enough to drive anyone crazy. Even if the idea of running away had never occurred to Bill before, this experience would take care of that. Run! I wanted to yell.

“Tell him—” Bill looked away. “Tell him to set me free. Tell him to call off Kubie. Tell him I’d understand it if I’d tried to kill someone or—No, it’s useless. Don’t tell him anything.”

When I left Regent Hospital, I called Father and told him that I was very angry. I said that whatever Bill’s problem was, it didn’t warrant the extremes that were being taken to correct it, that just because he was going through his own brand of nonconformity didn’t mean he should be locked up like a lunatic.

“He’s acting like one,” replied Father. “He’s got a behavior problem neither Nan nor I is equipped to deal with. He’s broken every rule at Lawrenceville: drinking, smoking, television sets under the sheets at night, Christ knows what else. They can’t keep him. What am I supposed to do with him? He won’t speak to your mother, he refuses to speak to me. His attitude is just awful.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling ill equipped myself to deal with the situation. “He thinks you’re displeased with him—at the very least, unfriendly. He’s discovered the most effective way to return hostility is by ignoring you.”

“What do you mean?” snapped Father. “That just makes me angrier.”

“That’s the point. It’s a good attention-getter. Why don’t you just ignore him, too? If you stop trying to bend him to your own vision of what he should be doing with his life—”

“Brooke,” responded Father impatiently. “Don’t be a buttinsky. I have to tell you something. I’ve lived a lot longer than you and I’m a lot smarter. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A week later, Dr. Kubie told Bill they had finally found the perfect place for him: a clinic in Topeka, Kansas, named Menninger’s, founded in 1920 by the illustrious psychiatrist Karl Menninger. Kubie showed Bill some fancy architectural drawings of the place that made it look very posh and luxurious, and told him there were no bars on the windows, that he could leave if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t want to because it was really nice. Nan borrowed Bill Paley’s DC-3, an executive plane with comfortable seats and a bar, hired two male nurses, and flew Bill out to Topeka. That’s how my brother came to be at Menninger’s.

“I had been with Slim and Leland at the feria in Spain and we came back to Paris.…

“Bridget had come down from school to visit them. They had to leave for New York one day before she was due back, and Leland said, well, why didn’t Bridget just stay with me? And I was delighted. I thought she was so beautiful, like some extraordinary Eastern enamel I had just met her, and immediately responded to her more than I ever have to any girl that age. I loved her looks, I loved the way her mind worked, I loved her humor. She was a very straightforward person, a little shy, but not really. She had a wonderful directness once you made contact with her; then she trusted you. I did feel there was some kind of permanent sadness about her, which was curious because she was so radiant-looking. I often wondered if she knew how good-looking she was.…

“In Paris, she hadn’t really been around too much, so that first night I said, ‘I’m going to take you to Maxim’s.’ She had never been to Maxim’s, and the whole idea flattered and flustered and pleased her all at the same time. She went through all kinds of little-girl antics like ‘I haven’t anything to wear,’ and she wasn’t really a little girl, she was sixteen, but no ordinary sixteen-year-old girl by any means—not that I mean she was sophisticated—way beyond anything like that; I just think she was intelligent. We went into Maxim’s and we had a very, very grand dinner. She loved the whole thing. We talked a lot about diaries. Curiously enough, she had read
a lot of diaries. And she asked me if I had ever read any of the diaries of Anaïs Nin, which was odd because at that time nobody had heard of Anaïs Nin. She said she’d heard of these extraordinary diaries, had I read them? And I remember being quite startled, especially since they hadn’t been published. I knew Anaïs Nin, had known her for about ten years, and I said, ‘No, they haven’t any of them been published yet; how do you know about them?’ And she said, ‘Well, I read a book of hers called A Spy in the House of Love.’ I was quite startled by that, too.…

“And then, one day, I went over to Gstaad. I wrote her a note and told her I was coming. It was February, wintry, a dreary day. We had lunch at a nice little place in town near the Palace Hotel and went for a long walk. There was a school there, Le Rosay, and all these boys were out playing hockey. We stood and watched them and discussed which ones were attractive and which ones weren’t, and why. And she was very expert. ‘Oh, no, no,’ she said, ‘he looks attractive—wait until he runs; you’ll see it’s all very odd, the way he runs.’ She had a good time that day. We laughed a lot
.

“After that, I was living abroad for four or five years and when she—when that happened, I hadn’t seen her in such a long time. And I must say I really was stunned.…”

A few months later, I was told that Bridget was now at Austen Riggs. The reasons for her hospitalization were not entirely clear. She had spent that year as a freshman at Swarthmore. She’d been doing very well there and had a roommate she’d liked enormously. Father and Nan had gone to visit her several times, but on their last visit they had found her in a room by herself. When they asked her why, she said she didn’t know, she just preferred to be alone. She didn’t want anyone around her. And finally, she didn’t want to go back at all. The only place she did want to go was to Europe, although when pressed for details, she was vague. She appealed to Father and said she needed help; there was something the matter with her. She was vague about that, too.

Once again the old family retainer, Dr. Kubie, was called in to advise. Once again he advised Riggs. Mother supported him. Father did not. He contended that he couldn’t possibly afford it; Bill’s expenses at Menninger’s alone were driving him to wrack and ruin. (And what’s more, he wasn’t at all sure he was getting his
money’s worth. Bill certainly didn’t seem to be appreciative; he’d just cut his way to freedom through a steel-mesh window screen with his cuticle scissors.) Mother said she felt so strongly about the positive benefits of Riggs that she would like to finance Bridget’s stay there by selling her own securities. Father said okay; what did Bridget think? Bridget said she thought it might be a good idea.

I, too, was asked what I thought. I said I was sorry; it bore out the old domino theory, which, for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to believe in.

At the point when Bridget made the decision to go to Riggs, nobody knew there was anything physically the matter with her. Later, when they reconstructed events, Father and Nan realized that she’d had seizures they’d never known about. There had been indications. When she’d come home at Christmas vacation, she’d sent word down on Christmas morning that she didn’t feel well and couldn’t get out of bed. They’d brought her presents up to her and had had a Christmas party in her room. Afterward, she’d slept for two or three days. Looking back, it even seemed possible that her fanatic secretiveness was in some way related. Perhaps she didn’t want her illness discovered; perhaps, for a while, she thought it might go away on its own.

After several incidents at Riggs in which she passed out and remained unconscious for forty-five minutes to an hour, she was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General. Everyone was alarmed; Mass. General was a closed hospital, and we thought if she ended up there she would be scarred for life. The results of the electroencephalogram and other tests were not conclusive. Bridget returned to Riggs.

I drove there twice to see her. The first time, she was living at the center itself; the second, in Stockbridge as an outpatient. On both occasions she seemed cheerful. Our past differences were overshadowed by the present situation; we did not discuss them. She introduced me to her friends and to several doctors, showed me around, asked me to stay to lunch.

She told me that she was making progress. At first she’d refused to talk to the doctors; she would sit in silence until the scheduled hour was up. Now she had a wonderful doctor, a woman, Margaret Brenman, who was the foremost hypnotherapist in the country. Margaret Brenman, incidentally, was married to Bill Gibson, the playwright (
Two for the Seesaw
), who had written a
novel,
The Cobweb
, about a mental institution. Bridget said Dr. Brenman was the only person in the world she completely trusted. She had come to like Riggs and its routine; she was so busy she rarely had any time. She had become involved with local theatre production as a stage manager. One of her friends took me aside and praised Bridget’s efficiency; everyone was amazed that a girl with such a delicate air about her could be so immensely practical.

Bridget confided in me that the main reason she had wanted to come there was her fainting spells. They frightened her terribly, particularly now that there seemed to be no conclusive medical explanation for them. The first one had occurred while she had been at school in Switzerland. The Swiss doctors’ original diagnosis had been that she had a possible dietary deficiency; after all, as I knew (only too well), she had peculiar eating habits. She would go on hunger strikes. At one point, much to the school’s consternation, she had lived on nothing but cheese and chocolate for a month; at another, Pablum. However, the recent tests indicated that these spells might be caused by stress. But there was no way to predict them, to prevent them, or, once under way, to control them. In fact they had become more violent with time.

Because of this, she was glad to be at Riggs. She knew she had emotional problems as well, but the doctors couldn’t say which caused what. Did emotions precipitate the seizures, or did the seizures affect her mental stability? As long as she stayed at Riggs, at least, she felt protected from herself. If she collapsed and went into a comatose state, Riggs could handle it. And
privately
. She was pathological about privacy. She didn’t want people to know about her sickness, to discuss it, to witness it. She didn’t want to talk to Mother or Father about it, and she didn’t want me to, either. For the time being, she didn’t want to return to the outside world. She felt more vulnerable there, and if she should have another attack—she lived in terror of that.

Her relationship with Mother fluctuated. Mother and Kenneth had bought another, smaller house in Greenwich, overlooking the Byram River. Occasionally Bridget would drive down for a weekend. These weekends were sometimes comfortable, sometimes strained. By now, Mother had been told that Bridget’s fainting spells were more serious than she had supposed, that they were really seizures. Still, our understanding was confused. As it was explained to us, a convulsive seizure is the physical evidence of
an electrical storm within the brain. This abnormal electrical activity is a phenomenon caused by the physical and chemical make-up of the discharging nerve cells in the brain. The overactivity of these cells produces disturbances in consciousness and in muscular coordination. Therefore, the fundamental or primary cause is chemical (or really electrophysicochemical). But the chain of events leading up to the brain’s chemical reaction can be infinitely varied. That variety was what made all the doctors evasive about giving pat answers when asked what Bridget really had. They told us that about 10 percent of the population had a predisposition to seizures but would never know it unless one or more of the contributing causes were also present. Some doctors believed that the causes were hereditary, some believed that they were symptomatic or acquired—by, for instance, some injury to the brain. Bridget remembered a concussion she’d had after a skiing accident; perhaps that had triggered the seizures. In any case, at the top of the list of contributing causes was emotional stress. Most seizures occur, we were told, immediately after some unpleasant or terrifying experience. There might be an increase of seizures during periods of worry or unhappiness. In Bridget’s case, the possibilities were endless.