Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  “No. Oh, no. Of course not. Would I ever go without hugging you goodbye?”

  I put up a hand to shade my eyes so that he wouldn’t see them; I was afraid they reflected his. “A bear hug?”

  “Until I squeeze you to death.” The familiar answer made us smile tentatively.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” asked Bridget.

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  “What hotel are you staying at, the Beverly Hills Hotel? Are you going to take all your clothes with you? Now? Do you have to?”

  “No, no,” said Father. “I’ll be right here for a little while and I won’t go without telling you.” He looked at us very hard and we looked back for a minute before obediently turning away.

  But what, I wondered as we walked in silence across the lawn in the direction of the playhouse, what if Mother’s not right and there is a difference from now on? What if he never comes back again? What if after two or four or six weeks—? But he had promised. And Father never broke a promise. I knew, because he had promised me he would never spank me again, that summer night in St. Malo, and he never did.

  After that, nothing ever seemed the same again.

  It was as if the first decade of my life had been roped off from the rest of it. I thought of it that way, that first decade of my life, when I thought of it at all, which I tried not to. For one thing, there was no way to approach it without crossing a barrier of pain. Sometimes I blundered across, forgetting. Then all I could do was cross my fingers and pray that next time the pain would be less.

  Once I was back inside, I felt crazy and alone, as if I were talking to myself. That was another thing. Bridget and Bill were no help: they claimed they recollected barely anything, less and less as those years receded. Bridget finally swore she could remember nothing that had happened in the first seven years of her life. That was odd, I thought; part of the disparity, because on the other side of the pain was a time when everything was radiant, when every detail had such absolute clarity, every color such vibrance, that it would be impossible ever to forget. Or to duplicate. By comparison, time afterward was fogged over. By comparison, my more recent history had, for me, the remote impact of photographs or postcards shown in the wake of a stunning event witnessed firsthand. Either I couldn’t see as clearly or some quality was missing, gone forever.

  eter Fonda:

  “I remember your mother more than I remember my mother. She would drive us around in that 1946 Chrysler Town and Country, you and Bridget and Bill and Jane and me and Maggie only. No governesses. Right down to the nitty-gritty time, to Kiddie Land or wherever it was that we’d take our ride. With her in the Town and Country with the top down. How else would I remember this car which I only rode in maybe a dozen times during my life? The color of it, the texture of it, the color of the beautiful upholstery—and your mother driving this huge Chrysler, you know, your petite mom, heading down the highway with the top down having a gas with all of us kids screaming and yelling. It was green, forest green. Great metallic paint. Beautiful hood, Chrysler hood, great chrome. The dash was wood, so beautiful, full of varnish. Your initials painted on the door, ‘bBb,’ little ‘b,’ big ‘B,’ and little ‘b’ in kind of an oval. It was our dream. It was all beautiful, varnished wood, polished metal, chrome, and flowing blond hair, all of us giggling and laughing …”

  So Red the Rose, However You Spell It

  Margaret Sullavan, Lovely Meg,

  Tell me the reason, pray,

  That you spell your name, O bewitching dame,

  Sullavan with an a.

  Do the Murphys fashion their tag with e,

  Or the Finnegans with a y?

  The way you spell could amaze John L.,

  The Sullivan with an i.

  Margaret Sullavan, star alone,

  Spell it your own sweet way;

  The fairest of sights in twinkling lights

  Is Sullavan with an a.

  OGDEN NASH

  Henry Fonda:

  “She was not an easy woman to categorize or to explain. If I’ve ever known anyone in my life, man or woman, who was unique, it was she. There was nobody like her before or since. Never will be. In every way. In talent, in looks, in character, in temperament. Everything. There sure wasn’t anybody who didn’t fall under her spell.”

  Life, however, went on normally; that was very important, Mother said.

  She said also—in another family announcement, at which Father was not present—that she and Father were, after all, getting divorced. There was no chance of a reconciliation, because he’d fallen in love with someone else.

  Bridget, Bill, and I darted sidelong glances at each other. We had learned that the best camouflage was to keep very still and not call attention to ourselves. I knew it all the time, I told myself—not the part about falling in love with someone else, but the divorce part, and what difference would the reason make now? Actually, it did make a difference, the more I pondered it in the silence that followed that revelation, and maybe it was ruder not to ask questions out loud. For instance, if Father had fallen in love with another woman, did that mean he had fallen out of love with Mother? That didn’t make sense unless he had been pretending all this time. Did love just stop? Run out? If so, where did that leave Bridget, Bill, and me? Didn’t he belong to us any more? Had he ever loved any of us at all? How could anyone stop loving Mother? She was perfect. Obviously if it was possible to stop loving her, it was more possible to stop loving us.

  Mother was sitting in her bedroom on a settee, the one Bridget had crayoned orange when she was a year old, eliciting the first spanking in our family. That reminded me of Father’s promises: he’d kept the one about never spanking me again, broken the one about divorce. Fifty-fifty. Maybe that wasn’t a bad score; I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure I’d ever trust him again. Mother’s hands clenched in her lap, her knuckles as white as her fingernails were red. Her head was bowed. I was dizzy with emotions, proprietary about Father, protective of Mother. My eyes began to sting.

  “Stop frowning, Brooke,” said Mother, cocking her head.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m thinking.”

  “I know, but one of these days you’re going to look in the mirror and see two big creases permanently stuck in your forehead. What then?”

  I’ll stop thinking, I thought, and cleared my throat again.

  “Come over here,” she beckoned me teasingly, “and let me wipe them off. Just a little spit—”

  I dug in my heels. “Is she pretty? Is she as pretty as you?”

  “Good gooby, yes! Prettier. You’re just used to me.”

  “Nobody could be prettier—”

  “Now I can just tell from your expressions you’re dying to know her name and you don’t dare ask.”

  We nodded.

  “My poor darlings. Don’t worry, I’m all right. I’m not going to cry or do anything embarrassing. Her name is Nancy Hawks. Some people call her ‘Slim,’ because she’s wonderfully tall and thin. She’s nice and funny and beautifully dressed—”

  “You know her? You’ve met her? Where?”

  “Uh-huh. Many times. Here and there. She was married to Howard Hawks for a year or so—he’s a well-known movie director—and they’ve recently divorced. Maybe she was lonely when Leland was alone and lonely.… That can happen.”

  “Are they going to be married?”

  “Probably. I don’t really know. Maybe after our divorce is final. It takes some time. Oh, dear—that’s still to come, the messy part, dividing everything up. Everything but you. I want you all to know, and so does your father, that whatever happens, he will go right on loving you all in exactly the same way, just as much, always. His feelings for you will never change. Of that you may be absolutely sure. Those feelings, the feelings parents have for their children, aren’t the same kinds of feelings that they have for each other. Parents don’t always love each other wisely or forever, although we all suppose we’re going to. Being grown up is no guarantee agains
t making mistakes. Lots of them.” She shivered and wrapped herself in a sweater she had worn for as long as I could remember, a white sweater with the black initials “MS” knitted all over it. “Pugh. Now I’m preaching. I’ll bet you can’t wait to get as far away as possible from this boring tirade. I don’t blame you.”

  We shook our heads, flattered that she was confiding in us, feeling very close to her.

  “Are you jealous?” Bridget inquired, curling up beside her. “Ooh, your legs and feet are cold. Do you want some socks? You need Emily to take care of you.”

  “No, I need you. All of you. You’re much better than an old pair of socks.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Well, yes, I was. At first. You see, I’ve known for a while. It’s one of the reasons I decided it might be best for me to go away for a few months, far away to England. Leland and I talked about it. It was a calculated risk, but I thought maybe, that way, with a little distance between us, we could get some perspective. Reevaluate our feelings, perhaps bring them back to life. It seemed that here we were flogging them to death. But leaving didn’t work either.…”

  Years later, she said: “So typical of your father. As soon as I arrived in England, walked down the gangplank of the boat, there was talk: a friend greeted me with the news that Leland had gone right off to Hawaii with Slim for a lovely two-week vacation—quite openly, so that it hit all the stinking gossip columns immediately. My pride was lacerated, every corpuscle in my body hurt. I felt as if my nose had been rubbed in it. Publicity—that kind, in particular—had always been a dirty word to me. The neurotic measures I took to keep my private life out of the claws of those hyenas!—as your father knew better than anyone. So, of course—as he could have predicted, not being exactly a moron—I lost my temper, became totally discouraged with the whole thing, just plain gave up. Is that what he intended? I’ve often wondered since. Then I didn’t know, and suddenly didn’t care either. When I got back, he begged me not to leave him; I felt he’d already left me.”

  Years later, he said: “Your mother has always been the most impossible woman I’ve ever known, and I’ve known them all. That’s my business, for Chrissake. Actresses. What the hell did she expect? I implored her not to go, we had lengthy discussions about it; at her insistence we both consulted psychiatrists—and you know what bullshit I think that is—By the way, it was kind of interesting, after I’d gone in for a couple of sessions, my doctor, a woman doctor—absolutely wonderful woman, I decided as a result of this—told me: ‘Leland,’ she said, ‘there is no question that you are crazy, but you also happen to function better than anyone I’ve ever seen, and what more can you ask out of life? There’s no point in my treating you; it would be a waste of your money and would probably throw the whole mechanism out of whack. Stay the way you are.’ Well, naturally, I just thought she was the most sensational—nuts about her. Anyway. Your mother, in her usual headstrong manner, decided to go to England. Her shrink’s advice. I kept telling her how ill-advised a move it was right at that time—I told her that, told her how vulnerable I was. She knew. There was no big deal. She was nobody’s fool. I was a damned attractive man. Women adored me, I adored them, but that didn’t mean I was behaving like Don Juan, for God’s sake. Basically I’m absolutely monogamous. Basically romantic. Faithful. As long, that is, as I know I’m cared about. I’m not very demanding, and, by God, I can put up with a great deal more horseshit than most men. But there came a point—and Maggie was perfectly aware of this, since I informed her of it myself—past which not even I could continue to go out night after night by myself, alone, while she was, arbitrarily, thousands of miles away. Connecticut. After years, I started having an affair. Nothing original about that. I honestly didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do next. She decided for me. Chose exactly the wrong course of action. Six months in England. ‘Maggie, why,’ I asked her, ‘why in God’s name should I sit around twiddling my thumbs and examining my navel while you go off and do whatever you please? That just isn’t fair.’ I have never, in my life, known such a perverse woman. And you know something about your mother? She was the most enchanting, wonderful, delicious human being in the world—God, she had a marvelous sense of humor, kind of offbeat and naughty—until I slipped a wedding ring on her finger. And even that was her idea. She was the one who wanted to get married; she wanted the divorce. Called all the shots. She was adamant. I begged her for once in her goddamned life not to be so bloody pig-headed; it didn’t seem to me that I’d committed the crime of the century. And there were the three of you—‘My God, Maggie,’ I kept saying, ‘what about the children?’ No use. She’d made up her mind, she was furious, her pride was hurt, and she wouldn’t back down. Never could. Until it was too late. She always got her own way. Always …”

  Years later, Millicent Osborn (she and Paul remained close friends of both Mother’s and Father’s) said:

  “I thought a great deal of the divorce was Maggie’s fault, Maggie’s doing, realty, not Leland’s at all. It all goes back to this attitude that she had. It was really an essential arrogance, although she didn’t know it, of wanting things the way she wanted them without regard for what Leland wanted. Leland wanted to remain in California. This was his whole life. She wanted Leland to give up the movie business, to come to New York and be a producer. She was so unhappy about Leland’s working after he got home, she wanted him to give up the agency business. I thought it was unfortunate, and in a way arrogant of Maggie, that without consulting Leland, without thinking of Leland’s wishes, she went and bought a house in Connecticut when his whole life was in California. To go and buy a house because you have independent means and yank your children away from the center of their existence and the center of your husband’s existence is certainly a very destructive step.

  “Things began to go wrong because Leland was alone so much of the time in California, and it was quite natural for him to see other people. According to Maggie, she began to have great emotional difficulty when he began to go around with Slim. But I think that all goes back to Maggie’s image of herself as a femme fatale, I know she would never have worded it that way, but the thought that she could be rejected by a man was absolutely out of the question, because it had never happened before. I remember she told me once that she was brought up in the South with the understanding that a woman has to be enchanting, that she had to charm every man she ever came across no matter what the circumstances. The enigma of Maggie. She was like a Fitzgerald creature, the Southern belle. But there was nothing substantial about her flirtatiousness; it didn’t mean anything. It was a reflex action. Now, in Maggie’s career, and as a woman, she had always been the siren, and here, suddenly, was Maggie reaching the age of forty, wasn’t she, and her husband was more interested in another woman and she heard rumors all over about it. Of course nobody in the world would be as hurt by infidelity from a husband as Maggie. Nobody in the world. To her it was a most shattering blow. Her pride was utterly devastated. I think this was the most needless divorce, because they were crazy about each other. Even when she was divorced and had given him up, she still wanted him.…”

  Years later, Sara Mankiewicz said:

  “She was always madly in love with your father. The divorce came as a most terrible shock to her. You see, she told him to leave. This was her idea in the beginning. He didn’t want the marriage to break up for anything. Then she had dreams of a reconciliation. Everything was going to be happy and wonderful, she was looking forward to it, and I think that’s when he told her, ‘Look, this is just no good. Let’s not pretend.’ And that afternoon I went up there, she told me, ‘He doesn’t really want a reconciliation. He really said he doesn’t want to be married to me.’ It was absolutely chilling. She was miserable, she was unhappy, she was disappointed, and that really, I think, was the beginning of the end.…”

  Years later, many people said many things. But a few hours later, when Mother had gone out to dinner and we were eating alone, Emily said
that she was shocked, simply shocked, she had no idea. Usually in such a close household—certainly in every other household she’d worked in—but here there was no inkling, she had never heard Mr. and Mrs. Hayward raise their voices in any bad arguments, just the ordinary everyday ones, the normal wear and tear. Not even from the deepest recesses of the house late at night when the children were asleep, when most people yell at each other if they’re going to.

  Bridget pushed her mashed potatoes around her plate, mounding them over the uneaten part of her hamburger. Using her fork as a trowel, she patted them into a castle, than squashed the castle into a crater so that melted butter slid down the sides and congealed in the fork grooves. She stuck the rest of her string beans on top like spikes.

  “Stop playing with your food,” Emily reprimanded automatically. She sighed. “That just shows you what remarkable parents you have. Both wonderful people, the most thoughtful people I’ve ever worked for. They kept their problems to themselves, didn’t want to inflict them on anyone else. That’s good breeding, good manners. Neither one of them ever complained or spoke a bad word behind the other’s back.”

  We had never heard Emily so upset, and were very impressed.

  “Maybe they were trying to set a good example,” suggested Bill.

  “Yes,” said Emily. “That’s right. Good Lord, I’ll miss Mr. Hayward. Such a gentleman. It won’t be the same, not having him to boss around just like one of you. Always sneaking cigarettes from me, bless his heart. Now I won’t have anyone to make coffee for except myself. Won’t be the same. And Mrs. Hayward, she must be heartbroken, but I’ve never seen her act sorry for herself. Not once in all the time I’ve been with you.”

  “Do I have to drink all my milk tonight?” asked Bill, batting his long curly eyelashes at Emily.

  “Shut up, Bill, you’re interrupting,” I interjected impatiently.