Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  Bill and Peter went to Brunswick, a boys’ school right around the corner. The main exchange between the two schools took place in the driveway of the Greenwich Academy each afternoon at 4:10, when our last gym class or study hall was over; school buses and cars, along with a goodly portion of Brunswick’s student body, collected by the front portico where the older Academites primped and preened and fluttered in their gruesome uniforms. Also there were Saturday-night dance classes, socially mandatory, between the two schools, held in our gymnasium under the tutelage of Miss Something-or-Other, where, in respective taffeta dresses and dark suits, we learned the fox-trot, the waltz, the rhumba, and the Mexican hat dance. After several disastrous trial runs, those Saturday-night gatherings were boycotted by the Hayward-Fonda clans—until the eighth grade when Jane and I shifted our focus slightly from horses to the opposite sex, and were graciously able to overlook the fact that we were a full head taller than all the boys our own age.

  In the seventh grade, Jane and I threw spitballs. We became expert. Pages of wadded-up semi-masticated notebook paper went into our daily stockpile of spitballs, which, at a prearranged signal, were fired off with devastating accuracy at any target. (Only our Latin and French teachers, burly and dangerous, were exempt.) We spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. The principal, Miss Campbell, informed us that we were unruly, reckless, wanton, anarchistic, and natural ringleaders. We were responsible for the ruined health (heart attack) of our kindly homeroom teacher who’d taught upper-school English there for thirty years; for the dismissal (nervous breakdown), a few months later, of her unfortunate replacement; and for the last-ditch hiring of our first male teacher (to straighten out the rapidly disintegrating morale of our class). We came, said Miss Campbell, from fine families who had given us fine upbringings, and she knew she could depend on us, as we stood on the brink of disgracing both our parents and the Greenwich Academy, to rally.

  The main reason we rallied was the male teacher. Centering our scattered competitive drives on him, Jane and I geared up to a creative frenzy. In the last semester of the seventh grade, we co-authored a short story laced with what we glibly assumed was authentic patois (inspired by my copious reading of Donn Byrne): an old Irishman’s account to his grandson of the time his decrepit mare won the Grand National. We diligently spent three nights writing it, and entered it in the school feature-story contest. To everyone’s amazement, it won. We repeated our victory a year later with “Khangua” (“I remember that sweet Irish spring. Oh, the fresh green fields of daisies …”), a variation of the previous tried-and-true theme, this time with a gypsy as the protagonist. After that, until I went away to boarding school two years later, I never let the story contest go by without winning it. There was nothing in the world as pleasant as the long walk to the front of Assembly while I arranged my countenance into a haggard artistic expression.

  I had made up my mind to be a writer. Unable to engage Jane’s attention for such a prolonged venture, I persuaded another friend, Susan Terbell, to collaborate with me on a book. It was an ambitious undertaking, but I smelled money. My scheme was to write a book for and about twelve-year-olds by twelve-year-olds. During weekends for the rest of the seventh grade and over the next six months, Susan and I battered away on legal pads until the project was complete. It was entitled The Riders of Red Devil; the main action took place on a plantation and its climactic sequence was the upset winning of the Kentucky Derby by a pair of black twins (their combined weight that of a single jockey) improbably aboard the plantation owner’s prize three-year-old (trained from colthood by the boys’ father). I also executed a series of illustrations in watercolor. After reading it, nobody in either of our families took this enterprise seriously, but, out of kindness, Kenneth Wagg sent the finished manuscript to a friend at Simon & Schuster, where it created quite a stir. (“As to Brooke Hayward’s manuscript, everyone agrees that it’s wild, wooly, and quite wonderful.…”) Mother, however, alarmed by the idea of the ensuing publicity, which, she felt, would capitalize on her name and have a negative influence on my budding career, vetoed the book’s publication. I was furious, mentally having banked my first million.

  But along the line I had become a good student. Bridget already was one. While I was out testing my new environment and rebelling against its restrictions, she had settled in. Methodical and industrious by nature, she always got excellent grades in every subject except gym. The only physical activity she enjoyed was modern dance, and she was good at it, with her agile, bony, double-jointed limbs, and saber-shaped legs, as Mother called them.

  Wrapping them behind her head like a contortionist, she would, on request, manipulate herself hideously across the floor upside down on her hands and knees. She was well liked by her classmates and adored by her teachers, but kept very much to herself. She liked to be alone, preferred solitary amusements: painting, sketching, writing, sculpting, needlepoint—and was talented but very shy about it. “I have an inferiority complex,” she used to say. Yet she could be gay, witty, charming. And at thirteen, with her fastidiously typed daily news bulletin, still the family chronicler:

  Bridget and I were alternately best friends and archenemies. She was both repelled by and envious of my recklessness. I thought she was pallid and craven. The more flamboyantly I sprawled in every direction, the more righteously she pursed her lips and withdrew into herself. She became secretive. Her room was sacrosanct. Nobody was allowed to enter without her permission. This filled me with disgust, a disgust tinged with satisfaction; her behavior conceded my superiority. As we grew further apart, I was able to look back and recognize her ambivalence about me. For if, in the grand scheme of things, my chief combat was with Mother, Bridget had two dragons to slay: Mother and me. I didn’t envy her that. Every so often I took Bridget’s part against us (confusing, as I was apt to do in those days, myself with Mother or Mother with me). On Bridget’s fourteenth birthday, Mother gave her another doll. Bridget may have loved it, but I was incensed. I thought she was too old for dolls even if she didn’t look it. To add insult to injury, her first evening dress, which accompanied the doll, had polka dots and little sleeves. The temptation to treat Bridget as a baby was hard enough for me to resist without Mother making matters worse.

  There was no longer any way to describe our feelings about Mother, not even among ourselves. Sometimes in Bridget’s room after dinner—or at dinner, if Mother and Kenneth went out—we tried, but it was useless. We didn’t have the vocabulary. Our feelings had lost all logic; conflict had rendered them blotchy, convoluted, and impressionistic, and without any training in any method of expressing anger or frustration—except not to—we were stumped. We certainly couldn’t express them to Mother. “I’m your best friend,” she would say, “and if you have any problem, you should come to me first.” But that was a trap, because whenever we presented her with a disagreeable fact, or argued with her, or crossed her, or chafed at a policy we thought unfair, she would do one of two things. Either she would override our dissent with a twenty-minute sermon or lapse into wounded silence, a silence that was anything but passive. We knew, subconsciously, that it was a form of repressed anger, but it didn’t make our own anger any easier to blurt out. There was no way to win. Once I said that to her, and she was quite taken aback. When it came down to it, I was more argumentative than Bridget and Bill; they were cleverer, although no less resentful. I fought a lot of battles, theirs as well as mine, and spent a lot of time in my room, working off the punishment for my insubordination.

  Sometimes, however, in that suspended time before all was forgiven, Mother would visit my solitary confinement, and push things along. “Perhaps,” she would muse, “you would be happier living with your father.” Although she made that sound like a punishment, too, I sensed that she was just momentarily anxious about her inability to be a perfect parent. As usual, she was overzealous. Her standards were too high. “No,” I would answer, “I don’t want to go and live with Father.” Even though it wa
s a very appealing idea. “Why not? Clearly he can offer you a lot that I can’t.…” That was true, too. But I wouldn’t have betrayed her for anything. “I want to stay here. I have all my friends, I’m doing well in school, this is my family, I’d miss Bridget and Bill.” Mollified, she would leave my room and wait. For my apology.

  Bridget, Bill, and I often puzzled over whether we were what had changed or Mother. We thought maybe she’d been different before the divorce; now it was hard to believe she and Father could ever have been in love, let alone involved in the kind of intimacy that might result in three children. Mother had established, in the last few years, a modus operandi that eliminated her speaking to Father at all. She would make arrangements to leave the house before his arrival, on the rare occasions he visited us there, and to return after he’d gone. The obligatory details of our visits to him were handled by Kenneth Wagg over the telephone. Mother was adamant. She said it was too difficult. We couldn’t figure out how we’d been born. We were confused and ashamed, when we did go to see Father (never often enough), about enjoying ourselves thoroughly; it seemed an act of deliberate disloyalty to Mother. For her sake, we’d misrepresent the extent of our pleasure, respond too casually to her questions. “Tell me everything!” she’d exhort us breathlessly. “Well,” we’d say, having trained ourselves to look straight at her when we lied, “it was okay.” If we raved, she was bravely crestfallen. If we’d told her how splendid Father’s house was, how beautiful and generous our stepmother Nan, how thrilling the entire weekend had been, the look on her face would have been unbearable. One of the keynotes of Mother’s personality was her ebullient curiosity, but when it extended to Father its pitch was off center. In that area, she applied her acting skills to no avail; we refused to be duped by their charm. Our answers were nonchalant or evasive. Or lies. Once, when Father called during dinner to ask if we could visit him the following weekend, I burst into tears at the table and heard myself blurting that I didn’t want to go. That couldn’t have been more untrue. We leaned over backward to protect her, and ourselves, but from what we didn’t know.

  We had not quite forgiven her for letting Emily go. We were getting old enough to look after ourselves, she’d decided; besides, it was high time for her to shoulder all the duties of an average mother. Much healthier for all of us. Otherwise we ran the risk of being pampered and she ran the risk of having her impact on us undercut by a nurse. We’d become too attached to Emily; a change was in order. And so, just before we’d moved to Greenwich, Emily had gone back to California to work for David O. Selznick as nurse to his stepsons Bobby and Michael Walker. That was as bad as losing Father. We were insanely jealous and wept for days. Once Emily was gone, there was no buffer between the three of us and Mother. We tried to substitute our black cook of several years, Elizabeth Hill, in the role of chief confidante, but Elizabeth’s capacity was limited. She rose at five o’clock every morning, did all the housework and laundry, and cooked three sensational meals a day. If we wanted to unburden ourselves of a grudge, we’d go to the kitchen and hang over the sink while Elizabeth made lemon chiffon pie or floating island. “Don’t bother me,” she’d grumble, “and keep your fingers out of my nice clean pastry.” After a while, complimented by our rapt attention, she would soften up and listen to our tales of woe. It was very soothing in the kitchen, very safe, mainly because Elizabeth snarled at anybody who entered it, including Mother. Mother was sufficiently intimidated by Elizabeth that she found it expedient to overlook both the radio—one of her pet peeves—on the tile counter, blaring forth Bing Crosby or the “Jack Benny Show,” and the New York Daily News, to which Elizabeth subscribed, with its tabloid sensationalism spread across the kitchen table. Bridget, Bill, and I could be found any night of the week down in the sanctity of the kitchen, watching Elizabeth make dinner. We learned to cook, not by lifting a finger—she was too proud and possessive for that—but by years of hungry vigilance while she (pretending not to notice us) prepared one spectacular Southern dish after another. We loved her radio and her Daily News. “Elizabeth,” I’d say, daydreaming, “someday I’m going to marry Marlon Brando.” (It was unbearably distressing to me when Marlon married Anna Kashfi instead. But I forgave him and temporized. After all, we’d never met.) “You’re not taking this seriously, Elizabeth. Wait till I’m eighteen. He’ll divorce her, you’ll see.” Elizabeth would glance at me across the egg whites she was beating for meringue; her nod was worth pure gold. “Hmm,” she’d capitulate, swayed by the ferocity of my determination. “Maybe.” When she was in a good mood, she was a wonderful audience.

  Shortly after we moved to Greenwich, a heavy crate was delivered to our house with a lot of hoopla. In it was a gift from Father: one of the first television sets on the market. From the moment of its arrival, Mother treated it like an unwelcome intruder and strictly curtailed our watching to no more than three programs a week, one for each of us. We began to look forward to the evenings when she went out to dinner; the minute she left the house we’d disobediently race for the set and, feeling giddy and light-headed, stay up way past bedtime watching the black-and-white cowboy movies that were heavily featured in the pioneer days of TV. As time went by, programming became more sophisticated and Elizabeth joined our clandestine nocturnal huddle. Occasionally, thinking she heard car wheels on the gravel driveway, she’d spring up and look out the window. “Just another five minutes,” she’d say brusquely, and settle down for another hour. Best of all were the two weeks every spring when Mother went down to the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands to get some sun. She never understood why we didn’t mind her being away. “My darlings,” she’d apologize, “I hate leaving you like this—like a rat deserting a sinking ship. Will you be able to manage without me?” We’d extend her our sweetest long-suffering smiles and assure her that we’d make do somehow; off she’d go, down to the balmy coral-flecked beaches where she loved to sunbathe nude, and we, left behind, would blithely plump up our pillows in front of the television set. One night, Elizabeth, Bridget, and I stayed up until two o’clock watching The Dead Don’t Die, a vampire movie that so profoundly terrified all of us that we went to bed in my room with crucifixes around our necks, our arms crossed over our chests as we lay rigidly staring up at the ceiling.

  For all its shortcomings, television did link us to the rest of the world. When it came to covering events of consequence (Current Events, as the biweekly mandatory course at the Academy was called), television became a kind of animated newspaper. Although Mother herself was not a devotee of baseball, she tolerated—from a distance—our annual involvement with the World Series, then dominated by the New York Yankees and the great Joe DiMaggio. And even she had to admit, when it came to the first televised presidential campaign—Dwight D. Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson—that television wasn’t all bad. I never thought I’d see Mother firmly entrenched in front of Father’s “folly,” as it was referred to, but all during the McCarthy hearings, she ordered lunch and dinner served in the playroom, to which she’d banned the accursed television set. That was quite a time. We children were treated to the privilege of observing Mother’s rage, at its most imaginatively expressed, directed not at us but at the flickering images of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Vice-President Richard Nixon, and counsel Roy Cohn.

  Meanwhile, Father was busying himself with a truly Machiavellian scheme. He’d determined to acquire a large fortune one way or another. So it was that Maisie Plant Hayward, the Colonel’s widow, re-entered our lives. Father, as her stepson, was her most logical heir. After all, she had no other living family. Once or twice a year, we children, innocent and fresh-faced (so Father convinced himself for this purpose), were called on to remind Maisie of his existence. And at her signal we would collect for afternoon tea at the Fifth Avenue mansion.

  Maisie had reduced her living quarters to a section of the top floor: an incredible domed conservatory where the elevator arrived, a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, which I remember chiefly for its black onyx bath
tub standing on four solid-gold claw feet, and Agnes’s room. (Agnes was Maisie’s faithful personal maid.)

  More interesting by far than the obligatory visit and tea (vanilla ice cream for Father and us) was the rest of the house. The servants’ quarters in the basement particularly caught my fancy; the servants’ dining-room table was always set for twelve, with twelve half-grapefruits topped by maraschino cherries.

  “Twelve!” I would invariably gasp. “Twelve people to take care of one!”

  “Goddamn barmaid,” was Father’s stock reply.

  A ballroom took up one of the six floors. It stretched clear from Fifth Avenue on one side to Madison Avenue on the other. We found it incomprehensible that Maisie had holed herself up in three or four of the least amusing rooms of her domain—along with an odd assortment of card tables on which to display an even odder assortment of pillboxes and jigsaw puzzles.

  “Father,” I’d whisper after a while, placing one hand delicately over my favorite ruby-studded box when Maisie wasn’t looking, “do you really think she’d notice if this disappeared?”

  “Yes I do. She probably counts them every morning.”

  I never dared ask her if she’d leave it to me when she died. She wasn’t like Grandsarah at all. Afterward in the checker cab on the way down Fifth Avenue, Father would stretch with relief.

  “Got it all sewed up this time,” he’d say. “You kids were a tremendous help. Can’t stand to go there by myself.”

  But when, several years later, Maisie did die, Father’s hope died with her. She didn’t leave him a cent. Her vast fortune went to charity and Agnes.