Haywire Read online

  I galloped across the lobby toward the heavy glass doors and sunlight. Behind the streamlined reception desk, more appropriate to a luxury liner than an apartment building, was the ruddy-faced doorman.

  “Hi. Did you see my sister go out today?”

  “No, Miss,” he answered in a thick brogue, “but then I only come on at eight.”

  “Ah.” I hesitated with a charming smile. “Well. Tell me something.” (I tried Mother’s ingratiating imperative.) “Um, what time does the mail get delivered? I mean, to the people in the building?”

  “Oh, Miss, maybe just over a half hour ago.”

  “And the newspaper?”

  “Oh, somewhere around six or seven. Just a minute, Miss.” He moved to the door to let in an elderly couple with a poodle and a Gristede’s shopping bag, then bolted the door open so that all the sounds of the morning spewed in. A battle of simultaneous desires was shaping up; whether to go out or stay and satisfy my curiosity. After some consideration I followed him to the immense tropical plant at the entrance. It was embarrassing—even melodramatic—to ask for a key to apartment 403, but I did anyway.

  “No problem, Miss. I’ll ring Pete and ask him to take you up. He’s in the basement.”

  “No, no, no, thanks, that’s too much trouble.” Ridiculous. For instance, what if she had had to meet Bill Francisco, a young director at the Yale Drama School (and romantic interest), for whom she was doing some kind of production work? She had probably left a message on my service. A telephone was clearly indicated. Again, Stark’s. Besides, Bridget was so intensely ferocious about her privacy there was no telling what she’d do if she knew I’d go to such lengths to break into her sanctuary. Although Bridget was a year and a half younger, I was afraid of her. “Listen, do me a favor—when you see her, tell her I came by and rang but there was no answer and I’ll call her later. Okay?”

  He nodded and started to lift his hand, but I was already out the door, feeling infinitely better, and striding toward Lexington.

  By the time I’d downed my O.J., read the paper, checked Belles for a negative on messages, and gone to the ladies room, the grand superstructure of the day had begun to disintegrate. Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday’s big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV. (It was the first movie I’d ever been in; I had many difficult things to do, like play the violin and get raped by Vincent [Mad Dog] Coll, played by a young actor named John Chandler, who, on completion of the movie, decided to become a priest.) Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg’s; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out.

  I then ate a huge heavy lunch at Moscowitz & Lupowitz with the art director Dick Sylbert. Over coffee, he smoked his pipe and patiently tried to explain the difference between champlevé and cloisonné enamel. This meandered into a discussion of etching techniques. Having killed the afternoon to my thorough satisfaction, I took a slow bus up Madison Avenue in order to read Time magazine. It was an absolutely beautiful four o’clock, the best in months, and when the bus got as far as Fifty-fourth Street, I decided to disembark, fetch Bridget after first giving her hell, and buy a new pair of shoes.

  About a block away from her building, a strange thing happened. I was seized by what seemed to be a virulent case of the flu. My temperature rose and fell five degrees in as many seconds. Hot underground springs of scalding perspiration seeped out everywhere, and yet I was shaking with cold, frostbitten inside and out. There was nothing reassuring about the pavement under my feet; I couldn’t move forward on it. Well, I thought, by way of helpful explanation, I should be getting home anyway. Besides, after the screw-up this morning she owes me the next move; either this is repressed anger or premenstrual tension, but in any case how virtuous and rich I shall feel for not having bought a pair of shoes this afternoon.

  I hailed a cab fast, so that I wouldn’t have to waste time squatting on Fifty-fourth Street at rush hour with my head between my legs. Ah, well, I thought feverishly, “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” an ague hath my ham; marrow fatigue, not enough exercise, no tennis, badminton, swimming, fencing, volleyball, modern dance, any dance. I missed school gymnasiums, horseback riding; all I did now was tramp concrete sidewalks and wooden stages and Central Park on weekends. Middle age was phasing out into senility. I fooled the cabdriver, though, by smiling at him so he wouldn’t notice all the change I dropped as we pulled up to 15 West Eighty-first Street, across from the Hayden Planetarium. Dark and cool, its dingy Moorish fountained-and-tiled lobby always welcomed me home from the wars. I rose in the elevator, gratefully trying to snuggle against its ancient varnished paneling, and finally stood with ossified feet in the small hall outside my door. The hall was semiprivate; unfortunately it provided wizened old Mrs. Rosenbaum and myself with a common meeting ground, ours being the only two apartments opening off it. She endowed it richly with a perpetual odor of cabbage, and I with an expensive new layer of wallpaper to distract from her barbaric cuisine.

  Late-afternoon sun was streaming over the planetarium’s dome through my living-room windows; there was a bucket of huge chrysanthemums in the hall, which our Scottish housekeeper, Miss Mac, had strategically placed in my path so that while crashing into it I would at least know that her loyalties were divided between me and the sender, with whom I was engaged in a momentary dispute.

  My two chocolate-coated children, Jeff and Willie, pounced on me like small M&Ms; without too much difficulty they had acquired Miss Mac’s finely honed sweet tooth. Would I like a cup of tea? (Definitely.) Biscuit? (Definitely.) Would I like to watch cartoons on TV and had I brought any comics and there was a whole bunch of telephone messages. Jeffrey coughed violently to demonstrate that the croup with which he’d been afflicted since the first day of nursery school had in no way abated. Willie told me that while he and Miss Mac had walked Jeffrey across the park to school that morning, they had seen a flock of pigeons fly up that gave him the feeling his heart was about to break. Then, while Miss Mac was showing me a mink hat that her new beau who owned a garage had presented her with the previous evening, the doorbell rang.

  It was my stepmother, Pamela.

  Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward had never rung my doorbell before. It struck me as a curious hour for her to be doing so now, but she was in good form and came in and hugged the children, who loved to be picked up once a week in Father’s limousine and driven directly across the Park to 1020 Fifth Avenue, where they would be given a splendid high tea, Pamela being English, and later returned with balloons and pockets full of candy. Father and Pamela lived across from the Metropolitan Museum and that in turn lay on a straight line across the Park to me, so that whenever we looked over at Father’s skyline, which was at least five or six times a day, I had the sense of being able to solve a difficult geometric problem.

  “Brooke, darling,” said Pamela, between ardent embraces from Jeff and Willie, “I would love to have a tour of your apartment, but do you suppose that I might have a word with you first privately?”

  It was odd that Pamela had never been here since I’d moved in, particularly since she had helped immeasurably with decorating sources of all kinds, and had even loaned me her cleaning lady twice a week after she’d been exposed to my tortured voice on the telephone the day we’d moved in from the country with four times as much solid mass as there was room to hold it, a slight miscalculation on my part. Now that she had suddenly materialized, I wanted to show her just how I had distributed that mass around, but obediently led her down the hall to my bedroom.

  “Shall I shut the door?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The children.” So I closed the door and stood with my back to it, facing her.

  “Darling,” she said, every word penetrating the three feet between us wit
h the distinct precision of her English accent, “I have something terrible to tell you.” She paused. I gazed at her, hypnotized by the inexorable chic of her pale blue suit and the long twisted rope of pearls and turquoises banded by a row of diamonds every two inches or so that hung gracefully knotted against her silk blouse. My scalp tightened. The whole day had been put together wrong.

  Bridget’s dead, I thought I said to myself, not in that room at all but back in front of her apartment, unable to go in.

  “My God, how did you know? How did you know?” Pamela was practically shouting as she grabbed at my arms, which were dangling at my sides. I was so shocked by her affirmation that I was absolutely unable to move, and yet I knew that she was as badly shaken as I by my response, so I made a tremendous effort to speak through the thick white paint that was beginning to drift down over me.

  “I didn’t know,” I said gently, so as not to scream. “It just occurred to me.” No, I said to myself carefully; no, this is definitely not happening, no. I focused on Pamela’s blue eyes and powdered face.

  “How did it happen?” I asked cautiously. It seemed a sensible question and my voice managed to dole out the words in level teaspoons without much help from me. Pamela looked at me closely with a split second of curiosity and approval; I wasn’t behaving like a rabid dog yet, although she must have sensed that I was seconds away from foaming at the mouth. Now my vision was beginning to double-cross me; the scene seemed to be speeding out of control like a runaway train about to be derailed.

  Pamela seemed to be talking to me. “We don’t know the exact details yet, darling. Bill Francisco found her about four this afternoon—he had a key to her apartment and they’d had an arrangement to meet or something—so then, when she didn’t answer, he went in to wait and found a disturbing note for him which she’d written last night, so he went into the bedroom and found her lying in bed.”

  “Wait, wait a minute.” I roused myself. “What was disturbing about the note? I mean, I talked to her at around eleven last night and she sounded great—I was supposed to meet her this—”

  Pamela put her purse and gloves on the bed. “I’ll come back to that later—the car is waiting downstairs, so we must hurry a bit. Anyhow, when Bill couldn’t wake her he called your father at the office, and Leland raced over after calling his doctor, who met them there. He said something extraordinary—he asked your father if she had epilepsy—it really has been such chaos ever since four, the office going crazy with phones, doctors, police, coroners, God knows what. Of course Leland said no, there was no history of epilepsy, but the doctor insisted that she appeared to be having some sort of seizure at the time of her death, and besides there were bottles of Dilantin in the medicine chest and an empty one lying on the bathroom sink. So now I gather an autopsy will be performed.” She started to reach for me again.

  “But she did,” I said, pulling back. Even my teeth ached. “She had epilepsy.” I tried opening my mouth wider to make my words more audible but it felt as if lockjaw had set in.

  “Brooke, darling, what on earth are you talking about?” asked Pamela, her diction slightly more ragged than usual. My body clenched like a fist. It was useless right now, too late to go back and reconstruct in meaningless detail, to communicate at all. Still, the situation had a delicate formality, and it was probably better to camouflage myself in its rituals, at least for a while longer.

  “Well,” I answered, wishing I were a wild creature, not civilized, a wolf in deep silent snow, howling into the wind. “You see, she did have epilepsy. She really did. I think she sort of acquired it along the way, and when she found out definitely last spring, she didn’t want Father to know about it, so she swore me to secrecy.”

  Last spring—April, maybe. “Brooke,” she’d said, squinting at me over her new electric coffeemaker, “although you are totally untrustworthy and have never been able to keep a secret, can you promise me on your sacred word of honor that if I tell you one now, you will never never repeat it, especially not to Father?” That piqued my curiosity enough to elicit a promise, so then she’d told me that she was supposed to give up cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee—we each had two or three more cups after that—because she’d just recently been tested by a neurologist in New Haven who had diagnosed her as being epileptic. The story behind that was so incredible I’d accepted it without question; it fit in perfectly with the rest of the family folklore. She told me that she’d been in New Haven for the weekend to see Bill Francisco, and that late Saturday night she’d gone back to her room at the Duncan Hotel, after making plans with Bill to pick her up for breakfast. In the morning, however, he had been unable to find her at the hotel because she’d been carted off to the morgue: a maid had mistakenly entered the room a few hours earlier, ostensibly to clean it, and had found Bridget to all intents and purposes dead on the floor, whereupon the hotel management summoned a doctor, who could not hear a heartbeat or find a pulse. So off she’d gone to the morgue, where the name of her doctor in Stockbridge was discovered on a card in her purse. It turned out that instead of being dead she was in a state of complete catatonia, and one thing led to another—eventually the neurologist and some tests. And, said Bridget, under no circumstances was Father to find out because he would just get typically hysterical and insist on her living with a roommate, a fate literally, she said, worse than death; not only did she cherish living alone more than anything else in the world, she didn’t want people thinking she was crippled or helpless or any different from before, or scrutinizing her for telltale signs of the forbidden cigarettes, liquor, or coffee. There was no purpose to her life at all, she warned me, unless she could remain free to live as she chose; she was twenty-one years old and could exercise that right at last. So we drank our extra cups of coffee with lots of cream and sugar in them; I understood her and in some basic way agreed with her.

  “Brooke,” said Pamela, skipping over this information in a brisk businesslike tone I admired for its British sense of mission, “you are distraught, which is understandable, but I have an enormous favor to ask of you: under no circumstances must you allow yourself to become emotional now, because your father—I am deeply concerned about him—is heartbroken, as you can imagine, and you know as well as I that if too much pressure is put on him, if there’s too much stress, he could possibly have one of his bleeding attacks—and then he might die as well. That’s what I’m really terrified of.” Her blue eyes were urgently imploring. “What is essential at this moment is that I take you back to him—I think Josh and Nedda Logan are on their way over now—and you must be strong and brave, Brooke, absolutely no tears, really, because I cannot have him made any more upset than he already is.” Right: I am a potential hysteric, who can be transformed on order into a paradigm of stoicism. “Besides, you are supposed to be an actress; be a good one tonight, please.”

  Only nine months earlier, Pamela had stood before me on the same kind of agonizing mission, this time on Second Avenue outside of the Gate Theatre. It was a very cold night, the first night of the year, January 1st, and I had just come out of the Astor Place subway stop and was approaching the theatre where Kevin McCarthy and I were appearing in an off-Broadway production of Marching Song. It was my first play and we’d opened the week before. I was shivering from the snow blown down my neck by the bitter wind and also from spasms of fear, the first palpable fear I’d ever known. Twenty minutes earlier, I’d called my stepfather from a phone booth in Grand Central Station, clumsily pouring change into all three slots because he was in New Haven and I didn’t want him to think I was so cheap as to call collect. I wanted to talk to him and, with luck, to Mother, or at least send her my love if she couldn’t come to the phone; she was starring in a play that was trying out there before its New York engagement. He told me that she’d just died.

  Mother dead. Impossible. I had called to say Happy New Year just in time to learn she was dead.

  The vast dome of Grand Central Station closed down over me in the glass teleph
one booth like one of the jars in which we’d caught fireflies as children, only without any holes punched out in the lid, so that I seemed to go deaf. There was absolute silence: the beating of my heart, the static on the telephone, my stepfather asking me between sobs to take the next train to New Haven, and me saying no, I had to be at the theatre in a few minutes and would come up by late train that evening—all silent—and even when I pushed open the door for air, no sound anywhere in the entire huge space of the station with its magazine stands and hot-dog stands and shoe-polishing stands and waiting rooms and information booths and entrances and exits filled as before with people, but people moving noiselessly, without echoes. I moved with them, my own footsteps on the worn marble floor and even the subway totally muffled as it lurched its way downtown. My mother, my very own mother, beautiful, warm, always more alive than anyone else in the world—alive in ways that nobody else dared to be—my mother, with her special gift for living and for giving that life to all the people who knew her and many who didn’t, dead.

  There was only one other person in my subway car, a drunk swinging like a monkey from pull to pull. He stopped right in front of me and leaned down, suspended by both arms. “Why,” he asked in a slur, puncturing the dense membrane of silence with such ease that I looked up at him as if he were a wizard, “why would you be looking so sad, little lady? It’s New Year’s Day.” He peered more closely. “Drink up your cup fer auld lang syne. Here’s to you—”