Haywire (6 page)

The next time I saw him cry he was in his old maroon silk bathrobe, and it was the evening of the day Bridget died. There were other people in the study—Josh and Nedda, George and Joan Axelrod, Bill Francisco, and Pamela—whom I had to walk past rather self-consciously in order to reach him. He was sitting in his favorite armchair, heavily, as if he never wanted to rise again. His eyes were fixed absently on the seven-o’clock news; when I came and stood between the television set and him, they glimmered like milky blue stones under shallow water. I reached down and lifted the large cut-glass tumbler of Jack Daniels from his lap, where it had sunk with both his hands clasped rigidly around it, and took a sip because my mouth was so dry.

“Come here, Brooke,” was all he said, so I sat on his lap and put my head against his, and his tears streamed down my cheeks. “Poor Bridget, poor little kid,” he murmured over and over against my face; I kept licking his tears away as they reached my lips because both my arms were tight around his neck and I didn’t want to let go. Oh, God, I thought, we used to want so badly to be grown up—all the endless games we played to evoke that miraculous state of power, Bridget and I sauntering past the hall mirror in lipstick and high heels, Bill sitting for hours in the driveway behind the steering wheel of the old Cadillac, maniacally spinning it—but given a choice of which condition was really worse, that of parent or that of child, didn’t we know, even then, that parents lost hands-down? All the time we were growing up and hating the fact that it took so long, didn’t we instinctively sense the agony that waited for us on the other side of the fence?

Monsen came in unobtrusively and announced dinner. Pamela moved over and rested her hand lightly on Father’s shoulder.

“Come, Leland, darling, we’re having your favorite—vichyssoise and chicken hash—a new recipe from the head chef at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Father blew his nose loudly. He had very dogmatic eating habits, which we children were delighted by, never touching anything remotely tinged with color: this eliminated most vegetables except potatoes from his diet, and for that matter fruit, except for strawberries (in spite of their color and his allergy to them); as for meat, he ate only chicken, lamb chops, or steak, and no more than an arbitrary two bites from the entire serving,
but he consumed with passion what we alluded to as “white food”—scrambled eggs, custard, vanilla ice cream, and the Beverly Hills Hotel chicken hash.

During the course of dinner Josh recounted, with a high degree of animation for which he was justly famous, a jumble of stories about the various enterprises in which he and Father had been jointly involved, how Father had become his agent while he, Josh, was the dialogue coach for Charles Boyer in his first English-speaking movie,
The Garden of Allah
, tales about their productions of
Mr. Roberts
and
South Pacific
, about Hank Fonda and Mary Martin; they were all familiar and gratifying and went well with the chicken hash.

In Father’s study, after dinner, there was the first general discussion of Bridget, and a tremendous number of phone calls were made. Bill was notified in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was taking paratrooper training for the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the more successful schemes he had devised, along with marriage, to escape Menninger’s. Kathleen Malley, Father’s faithful secretary of thirty-one years, was on emergency duty for the evening, and all calls to the apartment had to be siphoned through her; she also had to deal with all the newspapers, which were about to go to press. While Bill Francisco sat in a daze, Pamela, Nedda, and Joan were huddled over “arrangements,” and Josh strode purposefully up and down the small room, issuing suggestions on all fronts. At one point, he stopped in the middle of the Aubusson rug, right on a basket of flowers festooned with blue ribbons, and said to Father with great intensity, “You know, Leland, she really wasn’t of this world at all—she never seemed to belong here. Even when she was a baby, I can remember thinking she was like a creature from some strange mythical forest, another planet—always with that faraway look in her eyes.”

Father nodded. “The thing that kills me,” he said, “is that I never quite knew what was going on in her head. For instance, her insane need for privacy. I mean, she never came to me and told me
anything
. So here I sit like a complete idiot, asking myself over and over where I went wrong, for Chrissake, what I could have done to make it easier for her. I thought we loved each other. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to any of it. The thing that breaks my heart is the feeling of absolute uselessness.”

One Sunday afternoon a few months earlier, during an interlude in the conversation at a family lunch, someone had asked where Bridget was. Father looked down the table at Pamela. “I forgot to ask you, darling, isn’t she feeling well?” Pamela looked stricken. “Oh, Leland, for heaven’s sake, you said yesterday that
you
were going to call her from the office. Didn’t you get through?” Father muttered at his plate, “Oh, hell, I must have forgotten to tell Malley to ask her. Why didn’t you remind me?” “What a pity,” sighed Grandsarah, Father’s mother (named Grandsarah by Bill), who lived in California and was visiting for a few weeks. “Maybe she’ll be able to come by some other afternoon.”

“Yes,” Josh was saying now,
“yes”
kneading the lower half of his face thoughtfully. “And she was so
vulnerable
. Whenever I think of Bridget, I think of that white skin, and those lost eyes and that air of belonging in another world, so elusive, so skinny and fragile.”

It flashed through my mind that I would never see Bridget again. The worst part was unraveling the word
never
. I would never be able to touch her, hug her, laugh with her in front of the objects of our evil coded gossip, use her hairbrush (first pulling out strands of her long blond hair), sometimes spend days before her birthday searching through the city for the only nightgowns she would wear (flannel, with long sleeves and small flowers), never see her again as she was the last time, just a few days ago—sitting cross-legged on a scrapbook to make the freshly glued photographs inside stick, her long arms and legs jutting out everywhere and her pale hair spilling over her face, which looked up at me quizzically as she rested it on one hand, as if she intended to stay in that position forever. “There’s a sale on Kleenex and toilet paper at Bloomingdale’s in a few days.” She grinned at me knowingly; we would be into a lot more than paper goods. “Don’t forget”—as I closed the door behind me—“to call.”

I had found out that the coroner had roughly estimated the time of her death at around noon that day. Or perhaps a little later. So that meant, all things being equal, that I probably
had
heard a sound in her bedroom at ten o’clock that morning as I stood impatiently tapping my foot in the hall outside the door. And that, in turn, meant—this was suddenly startlingly apparent—that if I’d had a duplicate key to her apartment, or at least pursued my instinct to get one from the superintendent (Why hadn’t I?
Was it haste or irritation or inane hypersensitivity about intrusion? I couldn’t remember any more), I, Brooke—I would never be able to forget this—almost literally would have held in the palm of my hand the singular and now irretrievable opportunity to save my sister’s life.

ancy (“Slim” Hayward) Keith:

“She was quite different from anybody I’ve ever known. She really was a beauty, almost transparent, both physically and spiritually. There was an aura about her, a glisten and glow to her look and to her manner. I used to say to her
, ‘
When you’ve grown up and when you have mascara on, you know, those big long eyelashes black instead of white, and when you grow into yourself, you’re going to be the most beautiful human being anyone’s ever seen. So just bide your time. You’re going to be the swan of all time.’ ”

Jane Fonda:

“I remember vividly the last thing she said to me. I was coming back with her on a train from New Haven; I hadn’t seen her for quite a long time, because I’d been away to school and she’d been institutionalized, but this was within a year of her death. I was then studying with Lee [Strasberg] and she was living in the apartment where she eventually died
.

“I was asking her questions about Biggs
, and
she said to me, ‘The hardest part of all is coming out and having to deal with other people’s problems; it’s all I can do, it absorbs all of my energy just to keep myself together—and when I’m out in the world, it’s slightly more than I can bear.’ She was like someone who’d had shock treatment. Talking to her was like talking to someone through gauze, through heavy filters. There was the same attempt to reveal only the minimum that has to be revealed at a particular time: don’t open those floodgates; don’t let very much out; be as calm as you can; don’t rock the boat. What that says is you must do away with anything unique or unusual about yourself or you won’t survive
.

“And then we went to her apartment, which absolutely shocked me because it was so conventional. I had an enormous sadness when I was there with her, because it was as if somehow she’d sold out. I couldn’t believe that Bridget collected antiques. She had become terribly concerned about porcelain or the right kind of glass; it was reflected in her apartment and the way she decorated it. Somewhere along the way, Bridget was trying to fit into a mold that had nothing to do with her. Her spirit had nowhere else to go.”

• • •

I didn’t know it was going to be her last summer.

She spent it in Williamstown, Massachusetts, working as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre.

I spent it commuting frenetically between Greenwich and New York, where I then had a tiny room on the third floor of an old brownstone. Every day, I would race from fashion modeling to voice lessons to auditions for the fall theatre season to apartment hunting. Although New York City in the heat was practically unbearable, the more manic my schedule the better I liked it, particularly on Sundays when the whole city seemed to migrate to the country and I was left alone to read the newspapers lazily. Irene Selznick had given Father and Pamela, newly wed, her house in Bedford Village for the summer. It was about an hour from the city or twenty minutes from my house in Greenwich. I had a new car, my first convertible; driving it anywhere with the top down and a scarf around my hair was the most exhilarating experience I could think of.

Irene’s house sat on roughly fifteen acres of beautifully landscaped property; it was called Imspond to honor the combination of her initials, I.M.S. (Irene Mayer Selznick), and an enormous pond with a rowboat. I loved going to that house; it was a one-story rambling cottage, filled with fireplaces and antique country furniture, bright handwoven rugs, wonderful quilts, and deep chintz-covered sofas, always cool inside even on the hottest day, but with a warm sense of light floating through all the rooms.

Father was deeply, instinctively suspicious of country life. His abhorrence of insects—mosquitoes, in particular—and any kind of snake amounted to a phobia, which had been a source of amusement to us as children when we lived for three years in rugged rattlesnake and coyote terrain—then the wild mountains of the Doheny Estate, now the cultivated steppes of Trousdale in Beverly Hills. To my chagrin I discovered, when I was eleven or twelve and fixated on Hemingway and Africa, that although Hemingway was a close friend and client of Father’s who had many times invited him to go along on safari, Father had always declined because of the “goddamn bugs all over the place.” Also he distrusted the country because poison ivy and sumac lurked there, lying in wait for the innocent wayfarer, and houses were not generally air-conditioned like apartments in the city.