Haywire Read online

  “Are we the only two people on this whole subway tonight?” I asked him as if it were the most profound question in the whole world, desperately wanting him to go on, to tell me everything about his life before we got to my stop.

  “Everyone’s home with friends,” he said. “Celebrating.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Well, you see, I’ll ride to the end of the line. They let me sleep here.”

  “My mother died tonight,” I informed him because he was a stranger. Water began to rise in his crusty red eyes, and then he sat down quietly next to me, shaking his head. I was grateful he was there. We both waited until my stop came, and he stood up with me as I got off.

  Then I climbed swiftly up to the street, my mind beginning to burn like a newspaper. First there was the energizing reassurance that I was on my way somewhere specific and solid and important. I was already wound up to play my role before the phone call, and after the shock that followed, my instincts were sharpened by the freezing air; I was supposed to give a performance, and it would have to be an excellent performance. I kept sucking in air until my lungs hurt and then coughing it out like a steam engine; it reminded me that I was alive. It was much too soon for anyone involved with the play to have heard about her death, and I wouldn’t have to say anything until afterward, if then. So I concentrated as Lee Strasberg had taught us, whispering over and over in a litany, “I must use this, I must use this,” and finally arrived at the Gate Theatre, rather proud of myself, knowing, as seldom if ever one does, that I was going to do a fine job. Standing at the entrance of the theatre were the producer, the director, and the stage manager of the play, an unusual but not unreasonable place for them to be. Before I could say hello, Peter Kass, the director, blurted out something to the effect that Father had just called the theatre to tell them what had happened, and to have them cancel tonight’s performance.

  “What?” I remember asking, waves of anger striking me. “What? He’s got no right to do that, he’s not the producer; it’s your play.”

  But they appeared not to have heard my voice at all; as if in a bad dream, they were looking fixedly through me and beyond me, and suddenly I was grasped from behind by something dark and furry. I started to struggle violently, and then I smelled a familiar perfume. It was Pamela, her face a phantasmagoria of white against a background of black sable, and beyond her an enormous black limousine, hovering curbside like a sleek bird of prey, one wing outstretched to encompass me.

  “Brooke, darling,” she asked anxiously, “you know about your mother?”

  “Yes,” I answered tersely.

  “Darling, your father has sent me down here to collect you immediately. He said you’d understand he couldn’t come himself, but he’s all tied up with phone calls to Bridget and Bill—come on, darling, he wants you at once. He needs you.”

  “Pamela,” I said, stepping backward, “I have to give a performance tonight. Then I shall take a taxi up to the apartment.”

  Pamela looked totally shocked. “You don’t understand, darling; your father has canceled tonight’s performance.”

  By this time we had been joined somewhat tentatively by the three at the door plus Kevin McCarthy straight from his subway: they were all making various explanations or gesticulating concern for me. Over this poorly orchestrated ensemble, I continued defiantly, “What right did Father have to cancel any performance of a play he didn’t produce? Mother would have wanted me to go on, she would be furious if she knew about all this, she would expect me to go on—this is completely unprofessional, and what about all these people”—I gestured toward the management and cast assembling on the dark sidewalk—“what about them, and what about me; why couldn’t Father have come and told me in person—”

  “Brooke”—there was a shrill edge to Pamela’s voice, not quite a scream—“your father thinks it would be unseemly for a performance to go on as usual tonight. Out of respect for your mother, he decided to do what he did—”

  “Kevin!” I shouted, abandoning all pretense of propriety. “Tell me—is this what happens under these circumstances in the theatre?”

  There was a shudder of silence, then everyone started talking at once, and somehow Pamela maneuvered me toward the waiting car; once again I had the sense that I was flailing my way through my worst nightmare, in which the more I struggle for life against some nameless master strategy, the more I become trapped in its ruthless machinations. For many years as a child, the nightmare was recurrent and the strategy had a name: it materialized in vivid technicolor as a giant carnivorous dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus rex, with hideous red eyes and furrows of sharp teeth that glistened hungrily in the sun. He would ring our front doorbell and settle back on his huge scaly haunches waiting for me to answer; invariably I would slip past him and, with a sudden rush of adrenalin, spread my wings and fly, soar to freedom right over his head, catch the wind and glide with it like a falcon across the desert next to our house, while just below he stalked me through the yucca and cactus, erect on his powerful rear limbs, snapping at me with salivating jaws as the wind bore me up and down and up and then, finally, down. It must have been preordained that the Honourable Pamela Digby Churchill, not yet even my stepmother, would swoop down as an emissary from my father, not only to tell me about my mother’s death in the absence of his ability to do it himself, but also to collect me efficiently for a ritual gathering of the clan, in this case my brother and sister, who were separated by half the country in mental institutions—Menninger’s, in Topeka, Kansas; Austen Riggs, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

  I huddled in the rear of the limousine, overcome by its dizzying warmth and sensuality. Pamela covered my lap with a fur lap robe and gave me a handkerchief, which I balled up and held very tight. I thought, I must not be melodramatic, my mother’s death is a historically tragic event, it affects many other people—but all that is inconsequential—what is essential at this particular moment, what is crucial, is to be absolutely selfish. Why, if one of my parents had to die, did it have to be my mother, when I needed her so? Why not my father? Only my mother had understood me; nobody else in the world ever had or ever would in the same way, and we had really only just begun. All of my fearful battles with her for survival and identity had been fought, and just as we had learned how to shrug off ancient rivalries, to conquer our primordial fears about each other, to throw down our weapons, cease being mother and daughter, unequal or different, now that we were two individual people who had survived together, having successfully held each other and the outside world at bay for miles and years, there was something truly senseless about life if this was the result. It was a revelation. I stared out at the dark city, feeling that we were passing under it rather than through it, and thought: You might as well think whatever you want, be as self-indulgent as you need to be. You have about ten minutes of privacy, and then the sorrow of other people to deal with, Bridget and Bill, Father. Yes, I thought, of course Father loves you, but if I, Brooke, were to die tonight, it would hardly change his life at all; he would mourn, maybe shed a few tears in passing. But ah! Mother would have known the death of someone who had actually once been a part of her; there would have been a dreadful sense of mutilation of self, blood gushing out in rivers, pain almost beyond endurance. How did she die? What was the last thing she thought about?

  Until now, the idea of death had been a hazy abstraction, although, as described in close detail with more or less poetry by great or even ordinary authors I’d read since childhood, or as presented in movies, it often made me cry; I had to be taken home at the age of three, hysterical, when Bambi’s mother was shot. Now I tabulated the number of times an actual death had profoundly affected me; if our dog Stewart, a pointer who’d been run over in a ghastly accident, was not counted, the tally was a meager three. Working backward, there was Herman Mankiewicz when I was fifteen and Frances Fonda when I was twelve, both close friends of my parents, and both parents of children who were close friends of mine, almost p
art of my own family; then there was my grandfather Colonel William Hayward, who died of cancer when I was six. The Colonel, as he was always referred to, came out from New York and stayed with us in California for a while. He knew he was dying and the idea of being an invalid confined to a wheelchair annoyed him greatly. Always an active man, he took up needlepoint, and I remembered him seated in his wheelchair—impressively upright, shoulders back, with steel-rimmed glasses and the white, freshly starched collar he’d insisted on wearing every day of his life—stitching a wondrous alphabet, which eventually hung on our wall. He started it for Bridget and me, before Bill was born, so it must have taken several years to complete; in the end it measured about six by nine feet, all squares of animals represented alphabetically (A for Antelope, B for Buffalo) and rendered in the colors of a warm desert twilight.

  By the time we arrived at the Carlyle Hotel, where Father and Pamela then lived, I welcomed any distraction. Besides, I was curious about Father. How would he be affected by the death of someone to whom he’d been married for ten years and then barely seen for the next thirteen, despite the three children they shared?

  He looked awful, and somehow that pleased me. It meant he must have loved her a great deal, and I’d often wondered. He looked ten years older. Maybe they had never stopped loving each other. Maybe he was the last thing she thought about.

  We were in the master bedroom, gracefully filled with Pamela’s antique French furniture, which had just arrived from Paris to replace the simpler hotel stock. Everywhere was the heavy scent of Rigaud candles and warm lighting, Pamela’s trademarks; she always used pink light bulbs instead of white. In the dead of winter masses of fresh flowers were always in place on every surface. There was some discussion of Bridget and Bill. Bill had said on the telephone that he didn’t have a dark suit or any money—he was flying in from Topeka the next day and wanted to buy the suit there. I said I wanted to go to New Haven to see my stepfather. Father said that was a bum idea, he absolutely forbade it; Kenneth had been calling every half hour and had some terrible plan to cremate Mother and have us all there while a service was said during the cremation; it sounded to him as if Kenneth had really gone crazy, and as my father, he was going to insist that all three of us children stay in the apartment with Pamela and him for the next few days until the memorial service, which was obviously going to take place whether or not there was some depressing service over her body while it was in the oven. Did I have any idea how morbid it would be to go up there to witness a cremation? Absolutely nuts, as if Bridget and Bill weren’t headed enough in that direction anyway.

  “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 wondere
d—”

  “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.”