Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  Thunderbird was built from the ground up in ninety days. Father, with his indomitable sense of the aesthetic, lined up Millard Sheets, a well-known Western artist, to design it. It was dazzling. Sheets laid out the entire training field in the stylized shape of a gigantic thunderbird, the Indian god of thunder, lightning, and rain, so that viewed from the air, the observation tower formed the head, the administration building the body, the barracks the wings, and the gardens the tail feathers. He eschewed traditional drab Army colors for those of the Southwest desert, the green of sage and cactus, the cream of yucca in bloom, the streaked gray browns of sand, the terra cotta of adobe, and everywhere the tomato-red insignia, a thunderbird with lightning bolts as plumage.

  The organization was soon turning out Army pilots at the rate of ten thousand a year, but to handle the Army’s stepped-up program, Father moved into high gear and built Thunderbird II, which trained air cadets from mainland China through an arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek, who sent over a select group of officers from the Chinese Army. They arrived in lots of fifty by a circuitous route through Chungking and Kunming and then over the Burma Pass to evade the Japanese blockade. Father made frequent trips to Washington to pitch his cause with General Hap Arnold, and finally got not only a contract but a loan of $200,000 from the government. He put John Swope in charge of Thunderbird II, and then moved swiftly to build Falcon Field, forty miles east of Thunderbird, near Mesa, Arizona, for the training of young British pilots. By the time the novices had completed their twenty weeks of training, they were able to swoop out of a pitch-black sky and make a blackout landing in their big North American AT-6’s on a field lit only by a couple of small flare pots. John Swope said the Chinese were the smartest and most disciplined of all, and that although language was their greatest barrier, they understood instruction easily and took to the air as if it were second nature.

  Although this De Mille-like enterprise lost money at the start and Father and Jack were deeply in debt by 1941 (“Over a million dollars,” said Father nonchalantly; “don’t tell your mother or she’ll shoot me”), they next augmented the operation with a large repair depot to overhaul engines and training planes. Then, looking to the future, Father maneuvered an Army contract to haul high-priority military cargo over a censored Pacific Coast route, a scheme that resulted in the expansion of Southwest Airways, Inc., into Pacific Airlines, eventually bought by Howard Hughes.

  Mother entered into the spirit of the whole venture with characteristic gusto by taking flying lessons and getting her solo license. In 1940, Father was spending so much time in Arizona that she went on a vigorous house-hunting expedition in New Mexico. Always having hated pretentiousness of any kind, with a singular revulsion for life in Hollywood, she passed up all available grand haciendas (sprawling behind their high walls from Taos to Santa Fe) for a spare adobe bungalow on Rio Grande Boulevard in the little country town of Albuquerque, because it had a view of the Sandia Mountains through the cottonwoods in the back yard.

  Before Bill was born, Bridget and I were flown there many times with our nurse, Miss Mullens; in those days, commercial airplanes had berths, and we would take off from Los Angeles in the middle of the night, lulled to sleep by the roar of the engines. William Wyler, the film director, who had been briefly married to Mother in 1934 (and was also another of Father’s clients), happened to be on one of these flights with us, and persuaded Miss Mullens to let him borrow Bridget and me for the landing; he emerged from the plane and descended the staircase with one of us on each shoulder, while Mother and Father stood gaping at the bottom.

  The first thing Bridget ever said was “Father’s in Albu-quer-que,” and the first movie she and I saw, at ages one and three, was in Albuquerque’s single movie theatre on a warm desert evening while we were waiting with Mother and Father for the train to Santa Fe. The movie was King Kong, which Mother thought we’d enjoy because of the gorilla element. However, Bridget began to scream halfway through the underwater chase sequence, not having yet recovered from her recent chimpanzee trauma, so that Mother and Father, white-faced, rushed us out of the theatre and over to the train station platform. We all sat on a bench under the stars while Father pointed out the constellations he flew by at night and Mother, who claimed to be tone deaf, sang us the only two songs she knew until the train came: “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” (and smile! smile! smile!) and our all-time favorite:

  Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,

  Going in the garden to eat worms;

  Great big squishy ones, little tiny wriggly ones,

  Oh, how the big ones squirm.

  To celebrate the graduation of the first Thunderbird cadets, Mother and Father gave a tremendous party at our home in Brentwood. Brentwood was then mostly fields of avocado trees. We lived at 12928 Evanston Street, a block down from Jimmy Stewart and Johnny Swope, resolute bachelors who shared a rented house, and half a block away from the Fondas. Across the street lived the screenwriter Bill Wright, his wife, Greta—blond hair wrapped in braids around her head, Bavarian peasant dresses nipped in by laces at the waist, and a fascinating, deep German-accented voice—and their two majestic German shepherds, Sergeant and Major, for whom we had great respect.

  Number 12928 was a simple white colonial, set well back from the street; its most luxurious features, which persuaded Mother to buy the house, were the splendid drooping pepper and acacia trees that lined the driveway and spilled their red berries and white blossoms on the gravel. Towering over everything along the street were giant deodora pines, under which Bridget and I once found a hummingbird caught in a carpet of needles, its iridescent blue-green feathers reflecting the sun in such a way that we thought it was a rare creature from the sea miraculously beached on the shores of our garden.

  Just before Bill was born in 1941, Mother and Father decided to build an addition onto the original house to accommodate the new arrival. We called it The Barn, and that’s just what it was: a red barn, attached to the main house by an open breezeway, into which we children were moved with our nurse. It was a two-story building, designed with single-minded practicality. The downstairs, left as one great room roughly sixty by eighty feet, boasted a floor that was parqueted in redwood blocks to withstand our tricycles and roller skates, and a long trestle table with benches at which we ate and had our morning lessons with Miss Brown. Two overstuffed denim-covered sofas flanked, at one end of the room, an enormous fireplace and mantelpiece that held my doll collection. The phonograph and a small rocking chair (in which Bill would sit and rock for hours at a time while recovering from a serious mastoid operation when he was barely a year old, one side of his head shorn of its golden curls, to Mother’s sorrow) were at the other. An upstairs balcony ran around three sides of the house, so that we could lean against its pine railings and look down on the entire room below us, or out at the play yard and the Victory garden beyond through the panes of the vast picture window along the fourth side. There were four bedrooms and a sewing room that opened onto the balcony, each with checked gingham curtains and bedspreads individually colored (mine had green, Bridget’s yellow, Bill’s red, the nurse’s blue) and doors painted to match. The upstairs bathroom was about twenty feet long and had three sinks and toilets of gradated heights and a tub big enough to hold all three of us comfortably at the same time. Our meals were prepared downstairs in a kitchen with an oilcloth-covered table, in the center of which stood a detestable bottle of cod-liver oil. By the front door was a coat closet in which Bridget and I periodically locked Bill, with the threat that he would be devoured by a wolf concealed in the dark behind the coats and galoshes. Bridget and I, discovering that Bill was much more fun to dress up than our dolls, secretly renamed him Mary and trained him, under duress, to curtsy. (Curtsying was an enviable social grace outlawed by Mother, who brought us up to shake hands in a forthright way in spite of the fact that all her friends’ daughters with whom we played curtsied gracefully in their plumped-up organdies and shiny black Mary Jan
es.) One day, she brought Ginger Rogers (exhausted, Mother said, with the soles of her feet raw and bleeding from rehearsing some dance routine with Fred Astaire) over to The Barn to meet us. Bridget and I proudly produced Bill, his glorious curls restored, in a white challis dress sprigged with roses, outgrown by me and then Bridget. “How do you do,” he lisped to Ginger, curtsying faultlessly as he had been rehearsed under dreadful threats about the hall closet; “my name is Mary.” Mother let out a squawk of horror. Bridget and I were forbidden ever to dress him up again and the wolf was banished from the hall closet.

  The Barn was pre-empted for the Thunderbird graduation party, and Bridget, Bill, and I had to spend that night in The Other House, as it was referred to. The preparations went on for days, with specially made homespun tablecloths and napkins and pillows, and pots of red geraniums and pink petunias all over the place. The festivities started in the afternoon and went on until dawn the next morning. Father allowed me to pick out what he was going to wear. His closets were as wonderful to me as the Arabian Nights; he had overseen their construction along an entire wall of his upstairs study, with particular attention to shoe racks and drawers for shirts and handkerchiefs. Father was a born collector. He had at least three hundred pairs of shoes, which rose in neat rows to the ceiling out of my sight. Of all these, he wore only six or seven pairs in rotation, he told me once when I begged him to dress for dinner in a pair of dapper white-and-tan saddle shoes that had caught my fancy. He also had a spectacular collection of shirts, and would never travel anywhere even for a week without thirty or forty of them. But it was his handkerchief collection that was really wondrous, housed in three huge drawers according to size and color. Bridget and I used to throw off our bathrobes whenever Father was dressing to go out to dinner, and wind each other up in our favorite handkerchiefs like saris, then dance madly around the study while Father shaved and splashed bay rum all over himself and us.

  For the party, Father reluctantly agreed to wear the saddle shoes as well as an odd assortment of apparel that I laid out on the bed, including a white handkerchief with a Christmas tree Miss Mullens had helped me embroider.

  Mother’s taste was Spartan in comparison to Father’s. She was always happiest in baggy old pants or shorts, barefoot or in sandals, but that day she exchanged her beloved gabardine shorts (“my uniform” she called them, and was still wearing the same pair sixteen years later) for a long dress of gay patchwork squares, designed by Adrian, in which she dashed about testing various seating arrangements. Bridget and I were speechless with admiration. Never had two people been more beautiful than Mother and Father. From time to time Mother would exclaim that she would never give another big party; then she would grab Father and whirl in his arms across the grass, her dress and his saddle shoes flashing among the tables on the lawn, to a waltz that only they could hear.

  Suddenly, there was a small “combo” playing real music and hundreds of people strolling in the late-afternoon sun. Bridget and I flitted from one person to another in our pajamas and pink-eyed rabbit slippers, drunk with people and music. Every grownup we knew was there, our entire world; even Jimmy Stewart came home on leave, in his strange uniform. People clustered around him, congratulating him on having just been made a lieutenant; he had got an early draft number, the first or second pulled out of the hat, and gone into the Air Corps as an instructor up at Mather Field. He said everybody up there was leery of him, didn’t know what to do with him, and wanted to make him a morale officer, which made him sick to his stomach. He kept on bitching about it to Father and Father bitched to Ken McNaughton, an Air Force general who had been instrumental in helping him establish Thunderbird. From then on, Jimmy was on his way: first he went to Albuquerque and flew bombers, then to four-engine school and up to Boise, Idaho, where he ended up with his own combat crew. Once he got into flying, he said, it was all right, and once we got into the war and he was sent overseas to England, everybody was in the same boat and nobody paid any more attention to him. There were lots of Air Force officers, like Ken McNaughton and Hap Arnold at the party, in a tight group around Jimmy. Bridget and I wriggled our way through their legs so that we could try on his hat and listen to what they were saying: what a wonderful soldier he was, and a great patriot and a great aviator and a great Air Corps man. Hoagy Carmichael had our upright piano carried up the stairs of The Barn to the balcony, where he sang and pounded away while everyone danced; when he got tired, Hank Potter took over on the piano and Dinah Shore sang for three hours. All night we lay in The Other House and listened to the music and wished we were grown up, too.

  We lived at 12928 Evanston Street for the first seven years of my life. Although I was able to recall in detail what Mother wore on my first birthday, Bridget’s arrival, in 1939, when I was one and a half, always drew a blank. Father and Mother used to tell us that when they brought her home from the hospital and up to the nursery for my inspection, I gathered my forces for a long instant, reached murderously into the bassinet, and pinched her with all my strength, then, for the next six months, did not speak to either Mother or Father or allow them to touch me. Father said pensively he would follow me through the garden and try to take my hand, but I would snatch it away without saying a word. After a lot of sulking, I rejoined the family.

  Bridget was a sensational baby. She had almost white hair and double-jointed hands like Mother; she could stick her fingers out so that they would all remain straight until the last joint, which she would crook without bending the rest of the joints along the way. When she learned to play the piano, the tips of her otherwise horizontal fingers were bent at right angles to the keyboard; watching her play the piano was something like watching the Chico Marx routine with trick fingers, in which he’d point at a piano key and shoot it, touching it as he shot. As a baby, she would lie grinning from ear to ear in her crib, one foot through the bars, while our dog sat on the outside licking her toes. Her hair was so white it didn’t look quite real, nor did her complexion, which was so fair I always supposed—or wished—I could see through the transparent layers of skin and blood vessels and muscle to the center of her being. Bridget’s eyes were bluer even than Father’s, the color of irises before they’ve been open very long to the sun-cornflowers, said Mother, and called her “my little white mouse,” but I called her Brie, because I couldn’t pronounce Bridget, and that became her name to us. Nobody else in the family had ever had hair that color. “Oh, Bridget,” people would say to make conversation when she was learning to talk, “where in the world did you get that hair?” She would fix them with a long solemn look of her blue eyes; then her mouth would turn up at the corners. “God,” she would answer, “God.” She was light-boned, easy to pick up, and so delicate I used to worry that wind might blow her over; the bluish tinge just below the surface of her skin gave the illusion that she was just slightly bruised.

  “She was an original,” said Bill Wright. “There was a fey quality of Irish fairy tales about her. You were a pretty baby, Brooke, much prettier than she was, but she had a strange quality—she had Maggie squared or cubed in her.”

  We used to see Bill and Greta Wright practically every day. Either they’d come over for a swim or we’d skip across the street to see if we could tempt their dogs to bark at us. Next to their house was a vacant lot, which we turned into a communal vegetable garden; we supplied the manpower in the person of George Stearns, our cigar-smoking chauffeur, and Bill Wright supplied the water from his nearby hose. For days, Bridget and I followed George and his cigar through the rows of corn, copying every move, examining handfuls of corn silk, poking at dusty summer squashes, and squealing when he picked the first ripe watermelon, which he held dramatically above his head and dropped on a sharp rock so that red pulp splattered all over us and we licked it off each other. George lived in an apartment over our garage. Elsa and Otto, the German cook and butler, lived there, too. Father used to say that Elsa was a bum cook but he could never part with her because she could make two things be
tter than anybody else: scrambled eggs and flower arrangements. Otto’s moment of glory came every Halloween when he disappeared to engineer his gigantic pumpkin extravaganzas, meticulously decorated with contrasting faces of prunes and popcorn, corn from the garden and its silk (for hair), gourds, and sprays of asters and chrysanthemums.

  We had many nurses over the years, but the only two we ever cared about were the first and the last: Miss Mullens, who came when Bridget was born, and Emily Buck, who came when I was five and stayed for six years. Miss Mullens toilet-trained us on an antique china potty, kept under the bed. She wore a starched white uniform and white polished shoes, but Emily refused to wear anything but baggy old blue jeans (except on her day off, when she wore a plaid cotton dress that smelled of Clorox).

  Mother loved house-hunting. She would go house-hunting at the drop of a hat. Any excuse would do. On the way to the hospital in acute labor the morning I was born, she begged Father and Martha Edens (our godmother) to stop the car because she saw a “For Sale” sign somewhere along the way. Every house we lived in was bought because Mother happened to be driving past it at a fortuitous time, either when we were due for a move or when the house was too enchanting to pass up. Number 12928 was no exception. Greta Wright was looking for a house and Mother couldn’t resist going along. So they bought the houses across the street from each other. I had just been born and more space was needed anyway.