Haywire (5 page)

“But, Father,” I argued, “Kenneth has nobody, no family there with him at all. Maybe he
is
desperate, and after all he’s my stepfather and he’s been good to me—”

“Brooke,” interjected Pamela, “did you know there is a good possibility that your mother killed herself?”

I was very tired. “No, she didn’t, Pamela. Kenneth said on the phone that it was her heart; it had been bothering her.”

“She was very unhappy, very unhappy with the play. Sometimes these things are for the best. If she were that disturbed—”

“She couldn’t have killed herself. Of all the people in the world, she’d be the last—right, Father?”

Father was silent.

I answered myself. “It’s out of the question. Impossible. She had too many people who meant too much to her.” Me, I thought, Kenneth, Jeff, Willie, Bridget, Bill …

Pamela had an indescribably sweet tone to her voice, an understanding smile. Patiently, as to a child: “She wasn’t feeling well, Brooke, and she may have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.” Was there no end to the horror? She had never even
met
Mother; there was something obscene about
her
telling me that Mother was dead, that she had killed herself, that she was unhappy, that one should be philosophical about these things; dangerous instincts began to rouse themselves and sniff at my heels like bloodhounds and it was too late to call them off. No aspect of this was any of Pamela’s business and no rationalization could make it so. If Father was incapable of dealing with the situation, that was tough as far as he and I were concerned, but the last thing
I’d asked for was the insinuation of an outsider, particularly a lady who was working too hard at becoming my next stepmother, replacing the last one, of whom I was very fond and would have given anything to have seen standing there in her stead.

The telephone rang, galvanizing Father into the kind of action in which he was most comfortable.

“Josh, hello.… Ya, ya, this is a real bitch.” (Father had his own personal affirmative, never yes or yeah but ya, which he barked instead of spoke.) “No, we don’t know yet. Hello, Nedda, darling.… No, the kids are all fine. Brooke is here and the other two arrive tomorrow.… Ya, I definitely think a memorial service, probably in Greenwich, since she lived there, makes more sense.… Oh, hell, I think Kenneth Wagg is having a nervous breakdown, for Chrissake, cried hysterically on the phone.… Ya, of course, it’s rough for all of us, but God almighty, he’s come up with the worst idea I’ve ever heard of—the kids go up to New Haven and they all stand around having some sort of macabre service while she’s being cremated. Pure crap. Christ, we don’t know yet whether it was from natural causes or sleeping pills, no note or explanation—they’ll have to do an autopsy. Morning papers will be full of it, goddamn reporters all over the place.… Right. Talk to you both in the morning.… Thanks. You’re sweet, Nedda.… Okay, okay. Here, speak to Pamela.”

Father was always energized by the telephone. He came over and sat on the bed beside me and put his arms around me. I sagged against his chest. He smelled of wonderful aftershave lotion, bay rum, one of the first scents I could remember; I played with his tie clip, the only one he’d ever worn, a gold facsimile of an airplane propeller with a sapphire at the center. He was so fond of it he had had Cartier’s make him twenty or so over the years, all identical, just in case one got lost. His stomach rumbled and he sighed. “Goddamn gut of mine.” Then he got up and paced the room with his hands in his pockets and came back and stood in front of me and sighed again.

“Brooke,” he said, “little Brooke. You were the most beautiful baby I ever saw.” He began to blink his eyes very fast; I could feel tears start at the corners of mine and concentrated on squinting at him. Pamela was still talking on the phone in low serious tones, and we seemed to be alone, years ago. We stared at each other and remembered the beginning. I saw his face stripped of all the time that had accumulated there, its structure fine and strong,
his pale blue deep-set eyes filled with certainty instead of anguish. We grieved for ourselves, aching both for my lost childhood and his youth, when our lives, as they affected each other, had been simple.

“You see”—he frowned, desperately trying to find the momentum to lift us out of our time warp—“we really aren’t sure yet how Maggie died.” Come on, Pop, I cheered him on mentally, you can do it. He thrust his hands down very deep in his pockets and hunched forward, bowing his head. One hand came up with a gold cigarette lighter, which he flicked on and off, on and off. His voice crunched as if he had laryngitis. “She was miserable about the play, as you know, and herself in it. She wasn’t sleeping at night—terrible insomnia. They got a doctor to come to the hotel yesterday and this afternoon to give her a sedative, a shot of some damn thing or other so that maybe she could nap before the performance tonight. Around five, after she finally fell asleep, Kenneth went across the street to Kaysey’s to talk to Gabel and Margolis about the possibility of buying her out of the goddamn play. When he got back a couple of hours later, the door to her room was locked and chained on the inside and apparently she wouldn’t answer his knocking. So—he went downstairs and called up; no answer. He got worried, got the hotel management to break the door in, and there she was.”

“Dead.”

“Ya. Brooke, hand me a cigarette, would you—over there by the lamp.” Pamela was hanging up the phone.

“Leland, darling, Josh and Nedda wondered—”

“Just a second, just a second. Before he left, the doctor gave her a bottle of sleeping pills, in case she needed them later. Kenneth says they were right by the bed, and when he looked in the bottle—afterwards—there were only
two
missing. That’s the hell of it—doesn’t make any sense. I mean you’d think if she
wanted
to kill herself she’d dump the whole bottle down her throat.” He put the cigarette in his mouth, letting it dangle while he rubbed his eyes ferociously as if to erase them. “It’s possible she woke up for a second, grabbed the bottle, took a couple of pills thinking she wouldn’t go back to sleep—but then why the chained door? God only knows. Maybe it was an accidental overdose like Bob Walker. It’s a real bitch, though, because apparently now the hotel is crawling with reporters and every first edition in the country will be headlining suicide. Bum rap.” He fell silent again. She couldn’t
have killed herself deliberately, not over insomnia, nor some lousy play, not when she had so many people whom she loved and was loved by—like me. I had no doubt that my strength would have been more than enough for both of us in this instance, as hers had been in the past; she would have called me—

“She would have called me, Pop, and said something. She loved me. She would have said
something.
”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know—like
Help
, come here, I need you, things are rough.”

Pamela went over and put her hands on Father’s shoulders. “Leland, the Logans thought it might be nice for all of us to come out to the country for lunch the day after tomorrow? It would be a lovely drive—and they do agree that there
must
be some form of memorial service, so we’ll talk to Kenneth again in the morning and explain to him how everyone feels about it. After all, Josh was one of her oldest friends and he
is
the children’s godfather, so that may have some influence.”

Everything was settled, organized. Life was so easy, if one could learn how to compartmentalize it. Or be lucky enough to have somebody else to do it for you. The British certainly could teach us a lesson or two about survival. Survival of the fittest? Nothing seemed to apply; maybe that was the point.

Now, months later, in the early evening of October 18, 1960, as Pamela and I sat in the back of Father’s new limousine, heading east through the Park, the sun setting behind us, recollections of our previous journey together pecked at the new skin that had taken all these months to grow. As vulnerable as this protective layer was, it sufficed temporarily, I noted apathetically; not one distinctive emotion either penetrated or emerged, except curiosity, which circled lazily like a hawk in the distance. Pamela had been somehow incorporated into the cellular architecture of this skin; I was actually not at all surprised to be sitting where I was, neither resentful of nor grateful for her presence. It was a way of life, this way of death; I wondered idly how many more times it could happen; there was my father left, and my brother. All my initial rage had subsided into inactive charcoal embers; the mechanism was easy, once you got the knack of it, nothing to do with religion or God or hope or resolution. It was much more animal, just as I had suspected the last time. The trick definitely was to stop thinking altogether. At least for the time being. Focus on simple immediate
pleasures like the sunset, or the superb whiskey sour that Monsen, my father’s white-haired English butler, would soon be serving, although I didn’t drink; but nothing too far into the future.

Indenting myself against the gray plush seat, I saw the three of us, my sister, brother, and I, tiger cubs, tumbling in a heap on the mossy floor of some exotic jungle, surrounded by huge fronds of foliage from a Rousseau painting …

“Poor Bill Francisco,” Pamela was saying. “Such a sweet young man.”

“Yes,” I replied, yawning, “yes, I think she wanted to marry him.”

Pamela pressed the button that raised the glass partition between us and the chauffeur. I much preferred it down.

“Darling, before we get home, I think I should tell you about her note to him—to spare your father going through it again.”

“Okay,” I agreed, wondering if Rousseau really had, as alleged, used a palette of a hundred and some-odd different greens in one painting.

As Pamela talked to me, the chain on her purse slipped back and forth through her fingers like a golden snake. “Bill arrived at her apartment around four, as they had arranged, and, not hearing her, assumed she was out. So then he looked in a folder on the desk where they used to leave notes for each other and found this—love letter, I suppose. It began, ‘Dearest Bill, You must know how deeply I love you’—or something like that—the tone was very intimate, in a way, and she kept repeating ‘I love you’ throughout—then something about how she didn’t hate him any more and didn’t want him to be troubled by the vagaries of her illness—her handwriting was becoming quite illegible by this time, sliding down the page—and it ended with ‘Be strong, be brilliant’—and her signature. You can imagine the panic he was in when he read it. He raced into the bedroom and found her looking as if she had prepared for bed last night and then just never got up this morning.” We were almost through the Seventy-ninth Street transverse; Pamela automatically reached into her purse for a compact and lipstick. “Of course, it is impossible to interpret the exact
intent
of the letter now.” She powdered her exquisite skin lightly; I could tell she’d been to the beauty salon that afternoon—probably Kenneth’s—because her fingernails were freshly polished, and her
auburn hair, with its natural gray streak rising perfectly from her forehead, was newly shaped.

My brother, sister, and I stretched languidly and licked each other in the late sun filtering through a hundred different greens. One time, when we were very young, Mother and Father had taken a house in St. Malo, a private beach community some thirty miles north of San Diego. I was about five, Bridget three, and Bill one. The beach was very deep as it ran down to the water, and the sand always glinted with thousands of tiny gold flecks. One evening at low tide, the shore was totally covered at the water’s edge by minuscule blue and pink shells rising mysteriously out of its slick gurgling surface; they exactly mirrored the pastel colors of the sky. The three of us screamed with joy: it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen, though no one could explain why it had happened. Every day we ran naked on the beach, until some neighbor complained about Bill’s one-year-old genitals; then Mother fashioned a primitive bikini out of elastic tape and an old handkerchief, and he resumed eating all the cigarette butts he could find in the sand. Bridget and I taught him how to lie very still in the water while it foamed around us and sometimes almost gently carried us out to sea, and how to collect only the shells with tiny holes wormed through them so that we could string them together like long leis, and how to wrap seaweed around our waists like wet hula skirts, and how to scratch pictures in the sand, quickly, between waves that would erase them the next minute. It was the summer that I learned to tie my shoes, and Father had his fortieth birthday, to his great displeasure, but that morning we were allowed to taste coffee out of his cup for the first time. Many people came and stayed—three of our four godfathers: John Swope, a photographer who was always following us around taking pictures; and Jimmy Stewart, who brought me a silver necklace that I never took off, with a turquoise-eyed thunderbird dangling from it; and Roger Edens, who arranged and produced music and was married to Martha, our
only
godmother, Mother’s closest friend. Roger and Jimmy played the piano and Johnny taught us this song:

We all went around singing it endlessly. Bridget and I shared a bedroom for the first time in our lives; it was unbelievably exhilarating to lie side by side and talk to each other before going to sleep. One night, Mother stuck her head in the door and told us to stop the racket, it was bedtime; but after a safe interlude we went right on singing and giggling. The house was built around a brick patio, which she crossed again in ten minutes to say that we were being not only extremely disobedient but foolish as well, since we could be clearly heard in the living room across the courtyard where all the grownups were sitting, and if she heard one more sound, she was warning us, we would have to be spanked. Heady and reckless with excitement, we sang a chorus of “Frère Jacques” loudly in unison. Mother stormed back, yanked the Dutch door open, and switched on the light. “Leland!” she called across the darkened patio. “Come here this
instant!
” We had never seen her so angry; it was thrilling. Father came and stood sheepishly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “All right, Leland, you take Brooke and I’ll take Bridget,” she announced, marching over to Bridget’s bed. “Maggie,” Father murmured, “couldn’t we give them one more chance?” Mother was pulling down Bridget’s pajamas. “Nope,” she said firmly, and started to spank Bridget. I began to giggle; by the time Father had me across his lap, I was laughing uproariously. It was my first spanking. As his hand smacked my behind for the third or fourth time, inflicting actual pain, I felt first a sensation of surprise, then of fury, both of which turned my laughter into uncontrollable sobs. I was vaguely aware of Bridget crying in the bed next to me, and then Father picking me up and carrying me outside where he leaned against a post entwined with bougainvillaea. He held me tightly against his chest, so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Brooke,” he whispered to me, beginning to cry himself; unable to see his face clearly in the filtered light, I reached up and touched his eyes in wonder—his tears soaked my hair and mine his polo shirt. “Brooke,” he said, weeping, “I promise you something—do you know what a promise is?—I shall never spank you again as long as I live.” He kept his word.