Haywire (8 page)

In the second, he enclosed a torn piece of yellow legal paper penciled in Mother’s familiar scribble, which he’d rescued from the wastebasket:

The writing stopped there. Bridget did not respond, and was still at Riggs when Mother died two weeks later on New Year’s Day, 1960.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“I saw more and more of Bridget. She’d come to New Haven, stay at the Taft for three or four days during final rehearsals; the week of the play she would be there every day. Everybody liked her—all the people in The Dramat who would normally hate the director’s girl friend
.

“We got to be really close. We knew a lot of people in common; we hadn’t seen each other in a while and it was like catching
up on our lives. It was during that time that I saw the chinks in her armor which made me love her more; naturally, when you’re eighteen, you think you’re on top of the world and can take care of anybody. I had no idea there was any kind of mental disease, if you could call it that, or withdrawal, or whatever. She didn’t talk about it at all. I would say: gee, I’m sorry that you seem to be upset about this or that or so on, and she would talk about herself and her life, always, in the beginning, skirting the fact that she had been in Riggs. She didn’t trust people a great deal and she was not an extrovert. If she thought she liked you, you could talk to her night after night, but it would only be after a certain number of nights that she would really start to tell you something about herself. She would test you, telling you the way she thought about things that perhaps frightened her; but she never opened herself up until she was really sure of you, and that took a long time. I found her an immensely private person who could count on the fingers of one hand the people that she would open up to. There were so damn few she was willing to let in, for whatever reason. You could sit and scream and beg Bridget to tell you what the matter was, and no matter how much she loved you, she wouldn’t tell you unless she felt like telling you, and that was that.”

When Mother died, I only saw Bridget cry once—right after the memorial service in Greenwich when Kenneth decided to read Mother’s will to the three of us. It was the first time since Bridget had reinstated herself at Riggs that she had seen him. He took us to a small bedroom in the house while friends gathered in the living room and drank coffee. We sat in a row on the bed, Bridget, as stiff as tightly strung wire, between Bill and me. Suddenly tears were streaming down her cheeks but she did not move or make a sound. Bill and I edged closer to her and pressed our shoulders against hers. Kenneth obliviously went on reading the will.

Bill Francisco:

“What I remember most was her humor. She had a wonderful sense of humor. That’s what began the relationship and that’s what was always the best part of it
.

“She was a very two-sided girl. There was this wonderful childlike side which was legitimate, and there was also that of a woman
.
And I think one of the things that was wrong with the family relationship was a refusal to see the woman’s side. I mean she was a capable, bright lady, and when we first began dating, I didn’t feel I was dating a waif. Occasionally I would be aware of this other side—more after her death—how Logan and all those people felt about her, as if she was some sort of star child, strange little creature, fairy child. Which was great, but there was this other side. When your mother died—the late news came on: ‘Margaret Sullavan died’—I thought, oh, my God, so I called Leland and said ‘How is Bridget?’ And we were both worried that she was going to fall apart, that we shouldn’t leave her alone, so I came down to New York the next morning. She was shaken, obviously, but what she wanted to do was go to church and say a prayer for her mother. I convinced Leland it was all right. We left his place at the Carlyle and went back to her apartment so she could get some clothes. There was a little church across the street, and she said, ‘I have to go there, do you mind?’ So I stayed in the apartment; she put on a black kerchief, went off to the church, was back in fifteen minutes, no scene. She just wanted to have her moment. It was that side of her that I remember best.”

In the spring of that year, 1960, my brother and Marilla got married shortly on the heels of Father and Pamela, who had been in Nevada for six weeks awaiting his final divorce papers from Nancy Hayward. Nan and Father had been married for ten years. We children were sorry to see her go.

It was damp and chilly in Topeka. Bridget and I met Father and Pamela, fresh from Nevada, at the airport and we set up headquarters in the Holiday Inn. After a rehearsal of the wedding ceremony in a drafty Methodist church paneled in dark plywood with a crucifix suspended overhead, Father took everyone to dinner at a nearby steakhouse. All the women except Pamela, Bridget, and me wore their hair in sprayed beehives. Bill was in uniform, having just enlisted. Dinner was an uneasy success.

The next day, Bridget and I, who were sharing a room, were bored to distraction. It was gray and cold outside and all we had brought were summer dresses. Besides, the Holiday Inn was in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly the door to our room burst open and there stood Peter Fonda, whom we hadn’t seen in five or six years. Not only were we startled by his precipitous reappearance in our lives but also by the evidence that he was no longer fourteen years
old. He notified us excitedly that he had been sitting in his aunt’s house in Omaha, Nebraska, a few hours earlier, minding his own business and reading the newspaper, when his eyes lit upon an article posting Bill’s wedding banns, so to speak, giving details and whereabouts of the imminent ceremony in Topeka. He’d hopped on the first plane without saying goodbye to his aunt, in order to give the groom away, being one of Bill’s childhood friends.

Bridget and I were delighted. The three of us sat and talked and talked. Bill got married and we went back to talking. Peter fell in love with Bridget, so he announced, and he pocketed the white gloves she wore to the wedding.

The next morning, eating pancakes at the Holiday Inn, we found out that Francis Gary Powers had been shot down the day before, and Peter became even more excited. He said he felt like a comet traveling between two great solar systems—that of our family and that of his—only appearing when great events were taking place.

It was that spring Bridget found out she had epilepsy. Our guesswork about the origin of her bizarre fainting spells was over. Although she didn’t tell me that for weeks afterward, she made a typically succinct, understated entry in her diary:

March 17, 1960: 10:30 a.m., New Haven—Saw Dr. Rogowski. Cried and cried all day
.

Bill Francisco:

“Long before she went to the doctor in New Haven she knew—or believed—whatever she had was terminal. Or, at the least, debilitating enough to frighten her into that view. I had a very unsophisticated attitude. I always had this feeling she would get better, while all the time she knew she was going to get progressively worse. That much she did say. What had started with little spells was, by the time I knew her, escalating into monstrous ones that lasted for a day or two or three. She had one of these once in New Haven. I came back from a rehearsal and she was out cold on the sofa for like two days. I was panic-stricken. I thought she was dead, that she’d been drinking. I knew she wasn’t supposed to drink. Every once in a while she would come to and say, ‘Don’t tell Father, don’t call Father.’ Finally, when she was better, I wanted to drive her back
to New York because she was in no condition to drive. She said, ‘Oh, no, I’m absolutely fine.’ That steel will of hers. Well, it later turned out that she saw a doctor on the way back to New York, and he told her what she had. But she never told me or your father. Six or seven months after she died, Leland and Pamela had me to supper and all of this came up: the business about the doctor in New Haven, which I knew nothing about, and the fact that eventually—say, by the time she was twenty-four or twenty-five—she wouldn’t be able to move at all. By this time, they’d been told that at the rate things were going, it would have been risky for Bridget to lead any kind of independent life. Ultimately she would have had to be contained by force. Which, of course, would have been unthinkable.”

In June, she called me one Friday evening to say she was going out of town for the weekend but would I like to have breakfast with her on Monday? I was always flattered by her invitations. On Monday morning when I rang her doorbell, she came to the door looking strange and disheveled.

“You won’t believe me when I tell you this,” she mumbled as I followed her wobbly progress into the room. There was broken glass everywhere, overturned furniture, smashed china.

“What the hell went on in here while you were away?” I asked, aghast at the destruction. “It looks like a hurricane hit. Were you robbed?”

She pointed toward the kitchenette. “I didn’t go away after all. Look.” All the cupboards were open and totally empty. Half-eaten cans of tuna fish and soup, clumsily pried open, lay all over the counters and floor. The stench was awful.

“I must have done it myself.” She was shivering. “It had to be me. Nobody else was here and the door was locked.”

I put my arms around her. She began to cry pitifully.

“I never left,” she repeated. “I must have passed out right after I talked to you on the phone, and come to just a little while ago.”

It took a minute for me to grasp what she meant.

“This is what happens when I have a seizure. Sometimes I hurl stuff around, get very violent. Look at this unholy mess. I think I’ve broken all of my good wineglasses. I don’t know what I’m doing until afterwards, when I start to come out—and then I sort of remember sort of in a dream …”

“But, Bridget,” I said to her, my heart pounding, “you talked to me on Friday. This is Monday. Do you realize that? You can’t have been unconscious for almost three days.”

“Well, I must have been,” she said. “Sometimes it’s for a long time. The last thing I remember was leaving the apartment and putting my overnight bag down to lock the door—and then this terrible feeling.…” She collapsed onto the convertible sofa.

“What kind of a feeling?” I asked.

“It starts in the pit of my stomach. Kind of a rush of pain. Oh, the worst pain you can imagine. Then I begin to feel dizzy. Nauseated. Sort of a sensation I’m being sucked into the center of a black whirlpool, pitch black, whirling around and around towards the very center. Strange high-pitched voices in another language that I’ve never heard before, can’t recognize. Voices in a foreign language—but I understand it perfectly.
Perfectly.
” She shuddered.

“What do they say?”

She put her head in her hands.

“Bridget, for God’s sake what do they say?”

She lay back and put her arms over her face and began to cry again.

“Bridget, I can’t stand this—what do the voices say?”

“Well—there’s this strange humming sound, buzzing—hurts my ears—like a dog whistle, very high frequency. I am walking down this long corridor, tunnel, endless, with lots of arched doors on either side, but I know they’re locked, I can’t open them. They say, in this strange language—I know it sounds crazy—but they are saying something like ‘Bridget, you must open the door, one of the doors,’ sort of in a chant, very high. ‘Try harder—you mustn’t come to the end of this tunnel—past the last door there’s
nothing
, just blackness.’ And the voices get louder and louder and I can’t stand it any more, and then at last I open a door with all my strength, and the light comes in, the sun, and I begin to rise—and I know I’m alive, I wake up, I’m still alive after all.”

“Bridget,” I said gently after a while, “this is really serious. I mean two and a half days is no joke. What if you were driving a car or crossing a street or something, and you went into one of these? I promised you on my sacred word of honor that I wouldn’t tell Father, but I’m beginning to think I should.”

“No, no.” She grabbed me. “Dr. Brenman [her analyst at
Riggs] knows all about it. It’s happened before. Really. There are warnings. I know when it’s about to happen. The pain I was telling you about—if I was driving, I would have enough time to pull over to the side of the road. I promise you. Look—I was outside my apartment when I began to feel it and I had plenty of time to unlock the door and come back in to lie down on the bed here. There are my purse and suitcase. I have plenty of warning. Please, whatever you do, don’t tell Father or he’ll make me go to a closed hospital or back to Riggs.”

“But, Bridget, I don’t understand. I thought Dr. Rogowski gave you medicine to take every day so you wouldn’t have these blackouts. Aren’t you taking it?”

“Yes, yes, of course I am. Maybe he should change the dose or something.”

I made her promise me that she would go see Dr. Rogowski, and, in return, swore I wouldn’t mention it to Father. And that’s the way we left it.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“Throughout the winter we became closer. At that point in her life, she needed desperately to have somebody to hold on to. I think she very much wanted to marry Bill. But Bill was terribly unsure of himself, and to have Bridget fall in love with him was scary because her welfare was really completely in his hands
.

“Anyway, Bill had convinced Nikos Psacharopoulos that I had to be his assistant up in Williamstown that summer. Nikos was the director of the Williamstown Theatre, which was really an offishoot of the Yale Drama School
.

“Bridget wanted very much to be an apprentice and to work. And she worked her ass off. She was painting scenery and banging away with nails between her teeth. I think in many ways during that summer she was happier than she’d been in a very long time—at least she told me that and she certainly showed it. Not so much because of Bill, but because all the kids up there liked her
.