Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  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.

  “By that time I was so in love with Bridget I just couldn’t see straight. She was to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She always used to wear gardenia perfume. About two days before the first opening night up there, I found a place over the mountain, about an hour’s drive, that had gardenias but they couldn’t send them. I borrowed Peter Hunt’s car, a little red M.G., and I went over the mountain; it took me two hours to get there and back. I got the gardenias and she never knew where they came from. Every week when a play opened, I would borrow Hunt’s M.G. and go get them. I guess I must have logged sixteen hours or more getting her gardenias. About twice a year, I run into somebody or some place that smells of gardenias and even now, sixteen years later, I think of Bridget, instantly.”

  One night in mid-August, when New York was at the height of a heat wave, I hopped in my little convertible for a cooling drive.

  By the time I got to Greenwich, I knew where I was going. I stopped at my house there long enough to throw some clothes in a bag and to call Bridget in Williamstown. Although it was an ungodly hour, I told her I was about to pay her that visit she’d been suggesting for weeks. She sounded sleepy but pleased, and gave me explicit directions on how to get there. As I reached the Berkshires, the dawn came up; the land became more and more beautiful. Suddenly I understood why Bridget had often said she wanted to live in Stockbridge for the rest of her life. When I got to Williamstown, I went straight to the theatre as she’d instructed me, and there she was with Tom and a welcoming committee standing on the green.

  She immediately enlisted my services as a coffinmaker; the company was in rehearsal for the second to the last show of the season, The Visit, which starred E. G. Marshall, and his coffin was a vital prop. I worked all morning under Bridget’s careful supervision and we ended up with a very impressive black-and-gold casket.

  Then she dispatched me somewhere in somebody’s truck to pick up some sort of special fabric for the costumes. For me to be bossed around by my younger sister was a complete reversal of roles, and not at all unpleasant. In the afternoon she allowed me time off to watch a dress rehearsal for The Visit. Nikos was the director; Bill Francisco wasn’t there. Tom had a walk-on as a town policeman in an absurd helmet. Bridget amazed me; she was all over the place running most of the backstage action like an old-time production manager. Everyone came to her for advice on the props, the costumes, the lighting, the scenery. I was proud of her. She had metamorphosed into a figure of authority, the last thing anyone would ever have expected of her. As I was leaving the next morning, I told her that she should ask Father for a job on his next show. Bridget confessed that she had a secret ambition to become a producer and that it was behind-the-scenes action she really liked.

  She blew me a kiss as I started back to New York, and I couldn’t help thinking how pleased Mother, whose career had begun in summer stock with the famed University Players, would have been to see her so happy.

  Tom Mankiewicz:

  “You came up to Williamstown once that summer, and she was terribly nervous and uptight about it because she felt very much that Williamstown was her own little province. It didn’t go off badly at all, but I knew she was apprehensive about the fact that you were coming up. You represented the glamorous New York Vogue influence that she was frightened to death of. She was, to herself, the girl who was crazy, and you weren’t. And in fact something happened that summer that convinced her that she was crazy.

  “It was the next to last week of the season. Bill wasn’t there. I had gotten the gardenias and taken her to some restaurant. Afterward Nikos threw a big party at one of the fraternity houses because it was the last show of the season.

  “I was sitting with Bridget on a staircase, and Nikos was about two stairs below us. Although Bridget didn’t usually drink—her doctor had told her not to—that night she had a couple of glasses of wine. She was feeling terrific. We were talking to Nikos and sort of laughing; suddenly she pitched forward into Nikos’s lap. Her eyes were open but they weren’t. I was just absolutely panicked. People were crowding around her. Nikos told everyone to get out. We carried her into the next room. She started to scream, and the screams came from her bowels. We called the hospital; it was about one o’clock in the morning; no doctor. They had to wake one up. We must have stayed with her forty-five minutes u
ntil that doctor got there. She was talking to your mother the whole time. What she was saying was ‘Mother. I’ve got to speak to my mother!’ And we said, ‘Your mother’s dead.’ She got very quiet, but her body was like a taut rubber band. Then she said, ‘I know she’s dead.’ Tears were coming down her cheeks and she said, over and over, ‘I never got a chance to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry.’

  “Finally a doctor arrived. He gave her a shot, and she was terrified of the needle, just terrified; we had to really hold her down. We carried her back to the fraternity house where she was staying. The doctor ordered a nurse to stay in the room.

  “I walked around crying for a couple of hours. I couldn’t sleep and I went back up to the room to look at her. I would just so willingly have laid down my life for her then. If there was anything I wanted, it was to be thirty-four, my age now. I wanted so badly to be somebody who could take charge. But a fast eighteen was the best you could have said about me.

  “Bridget really knew that she was sick. She knew that she wasn’t in Riggs by accident and that what happened to her on the staircase in Williamstown was serious. The big suspense with Bridget was: was she getting better, or was she getting worse? She was keenly aware, when she was at family functions, that she was being observed like an exhibit. Does she look better now than a year ago? Is she in good shape or bad shape? Not because she was somebody who was subject to great highs and lows, but because she was genuinely ill.

  “Bridget felt very much the pariah of the family. She had been put away somewhere—under the nicest of circumstances, the best of places; she kept saying that all the time, how much freedom she’d had there—but she felt that she had, deservedly, been put away. As far as you, her sister, were concerned, that could never happen to you. You were peaking and cresting; you were married at the time, or just divorced, but even a divorce was better to Bridget than what she was doing. You had kids; you were bopping around New York getting your apartment on Central Park West, modeling and who knows, you were going to be acting, and so on. It was very important to her because she was, as everybody is, competitive. If you had been a little uglier and less successful, I think she would have run to you.