Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  Bridget’s silences drove Mother crazy. Mother did not like to be ignored. And Bridget did not like to be criticized. She might withdraw to her room and not be seen again for many hours. Nor did she like what she considered to be Mother’s insincere, larger-than-life charm. What, in fact, Mother thought of as Southern graciousness, Bridget saw as strained, fake, hypocritical.

  For instance, Mother might hurl down the telephone and exclaim, “Good gooby, what a bore Helen Dodge is. She’s on her way over here right this minute with a smoked turkey—I’m trapped! There goes my beautiful selfish morning, my nude sunbathing, and my fingernails, my toenails, my clean hair, my checks!”

  And then, when Helen Dodge rang the doorbell ten minutes later, Mother would embrace her as if they were long-lost sisters and beg her to stay for lunch. At lunch, increasingly offended by Mother’s effusive high spirits, Bridget would say less and less, barely answering poor Helen Dodge’s well-meant questions about school.

  Mother would cringe with shame, which she contrived to conceal with sparkling bravado: “Speak up, darling! You’re mumbling and you know how deaf I am.”

  Slowly, as if a shade were being drawn over a window, Bridget’s face would withdraw from the conversation as well. Move by move, she would match Mother’s act with her own. It was unsettling to witness. The more animated Mother became, the more expressionless Bridget. Her unmistakable aim was to become invisible and vanish.

  “How could you do this to me?” Mother would fume afterward. “You know perfectly well that any and every guest in my house is to be treated with respect whatever the circumstances—in the middle of an earthquake, for God’s sake! You’ve been brought up to have good manners, you’ve been set a good example by both your father and me—in this respect, at least, we concur—Where do you think you’re going? Don’t roll your eyes up to heaven and leave the room when I’m talking to you!”

  Bridget remained but, without saying a word, made it clear she was no longer present.

  It was decided that I should go to boarding school for my junior and senior years. A Swiss boarding school had long been one of Mother’s dreams: “You’re so lucky that I can afford it; oh, I would give anything to have the opportunity to ski beautifully, to speak perfect French!” But, because I was swept up in the Greenwich social whirl and couldn’t bear to leave it, I scotched that dream in favor of something closer to home. Bridget, on the other hand, suddenly professed a desire to get as far away as possible. To everyone’s surprise, she announced that she would actually prefer to go to Switzerland. Then Bill, having considered his life alone without his two sisters, decided he, too, wanted to go away to school. So, in the fall of 1953, the three of us left home.

  I was sixteen, Bridget fourteen, Bill twelve. It never occurred to me it was the last time we would live together as a family.

  For all my resistance to the idea of leaving my beloved friends, my feature-story contests, my pink-and-white room, my role as troublemaker and provocateur, my convoluted flirtations, I’d begun to look forward to the novelty of freedom. Mother—after a winter of hauling me up and down the Eastern seaboard to investigate all the blue-chip girls’ schools, and of glossing over my bothersome candor when interviewed by their eager headmistresses (“No, Miss St. John, actually I don’t want to go away to school; I’m happy where I am”)—had, on her own, entered me at the Madeira School, located in Greenway, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Madeira was reputed to be very strict and academically tough; it also satisfied certain social and geographical requisites. (“Lucky you to be in Virginia, my home state!”)

  Greenwich had come to fit me comfortably. I’d broken it in, maybe outgrown it. Crucial events had taken place under its sheltering sky. My first evening dress, properly virginal—white organdy, ruffled, off-the-shoulder—followed by many other evening dresses, graduating to a strapless tulle, nipped in above by a painful waist cincher that left its hook marks on my flesh and a bone-stiffened bra that jabbed into the tender spot between my breasts, with its skirt belled out below by a set of crinolines modishly collected like silver bracelets. It was a time when countless orchid corsages were left to shrivel in the icebox.

  Then there were my first stockings, sheer and seamed, and black suède heels—now, that had been some fight! Mother forbade them both until everyone else in the eighth grade had been sporting them for a year. She violently disapproved of all those emblems of budding eroticism. “You won’t have anything to look forward to when you grow up,” she’d remonstrate. “You’ll become hardened and blasé. I didn’t wear high heels till I was seventeen. And as for bras, it’s pointless for me to waste money on a bra if you have nothing to fill it with.” Consequently, my first bra was also the last bra to make an appearance in my class. I also had my first menstrual period, for which the fashionable euphemism at school was “falling off the roof.” In those days we had euphemisms for anything remotely sexual.

  My first kiss prompted another skirmish with Mother, when, after a Saturday-night party at Jackie Hekma’s that started innocently with Ping-Pong and ended in the dark with a lot of rubbery, fumbling, spin-the-bottle-group embraces, I charged into the living room where Mother and Kenneth were playing bridge with friends to give them the good news of it. “I guess the time has come to explain promiscuity to you,” said Mother ominously, squelching my enthusiasm.

  Another problem was leaving all my romances behind. I fell in love every other week with someone new. And, of course, I liked to keep the discards hanging around. Ken Towe was my first older man. He drove a blue Ford convertible, and after I caught his eye, he used to speed up and down Clapboard Ridge Road, buzzing our house. One afternoon, I repaid his attentions by lining up Bridget, Bill, Susan Terbell, and myself on the side of the road with glasses of water snatched from the swimming pool. As he turned the car around and came toward us for the third time at fifty miles an hour, I gave a signal and we all threw our water at him. Mine hit his windshield and the blue Ford crashed into the traffic island at the bottom of our hill. Ken was furious; he had a broken nose and the steering wheel looked like an accordion. He yanked it off and threw it in the back seat. Mother came storming down the hill and, to my great mortification, Johnny Gladstone strolled toward the wreckage with a pipe between his teeth. Just out of college, and recently returned from a six-month research project in the Brazilian jungles (on a more fortunate occasion, he’d shown me his brace of pistols), Johnny was truly an older man, and this incident seemed to place him unequivocally beyond my reach. He calmly wiped the blood off Ken’s face while Mother raced back for our car; then we hustled Ken off to the hospital emergency room. For some reason, Ken’s ardor was in no way diminished, and he appeared at our house a few hours later, nose heavily bandaged, to escort me to a party. He was as smitten with Mother as with me—as were all my beaus, not surprisingly, since Mother could charm anyone, male or female, when she chose to—and long after he and I went our separate ways, he would come by to pay her a visit (and to sample Elizabeth’s cooking).

  Bridget regarded my romantic adventures with disdain. She claimed that my flirtatiousness was a bad habit and that it lacked finesse. Mother’s, she admitted, at least had finesse. Bridget stayed away from boys, yet it was Bridget who had the courage to buck Mother’s ban on leg-shaving. I found her in the bathroom scraping off blond fuzz with soap and a razor. “It’s my body,” she said airily, dotting her blood-specked shins with pieces of toilet paper. “I’ll bet she doesn’t even notice.” But she did. Mother was outraged.

  “Bridget Hayward,” she began, building to hurricane force, “come here. Let me see your legs. My God, you’ve done it, you’ve disobeyed me and ruined your legs! How many times have I told you—from now on until you die, you will have coarse black hair sprouting all over your shins! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!” But Bridget never blanched. It was a landmark victory.

  The fear of pregnancy was enough to effectively back up the code of sexual behavior our mothers prescribed
for us. Heavy petting at the local drive-in theatre, or “passion pit” (another of Mother’s bans), was considered racy. A far greater peril to our health and welfare was alcohol. I was beginning to run around with an older crowd, and Mother was justifiably concerned. More than once she reprimanded one or another of my suitors for carrying a bottle in his car. Once, spotting from her upstairs bathroom window young Scot Pierson transferring a case of gin from his car to another, she notified him at the top of her voice that he was never again to set foot on her property. Her dictums were not only stricter but more purposefully enforced than those of other parents, which was always a source of embarrassment to me. “Now, look,” she’d say consolingly, “I understand how awkward it is to make explanations about being a nonconformist, I really do. But you have a perfectly legitimate excuse: blame me. Tell your friends that I’m eccentric, old-fashioned, whatever you wish.…” Of course, that was a specious argument since my identity was totally wrapped up in hers, but I couldn’t articulate that. Besides, I was awed by her code of ethics, her skill at defending it, and her contempt for external opinion. I admired her even at my own expense. Once she took a position, she never yielded it. We found that the best way to get around her was deviously. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the biggest best-seller of its time, was forbidden to me because, Mother maintained, it was so convincing, so contemporary a piece of writing it would seduce me. Into what I couldn’t determine without reading it, so I filched a copy from Father, who was desperately trying to buy the movie rights. It remained hidden in my underwear drawer for years.

  A Streetcar Named Desire, with my beloved Brando, was another example. Too provocative, she said, too overstimulating for someone my age to handle emotionally. All my friends went to the Saturday matinée at the Pickwick Theatre without me. (Ironically, Irene Selznick had offered my mother the role of Blanche du Bois in the original Broadway play, but on Father’s advice she’d turned it down, another reason for my interest; Mother, however, was not to be swayed by that rationale.)

  Had she ever been young and crazy and susceptible to ill-considered escapades? Heedless? Flighty? Had she ever been awakened in the middle of the night by pebbles thrown at her window? Rocky Fawcett used to climb up the tree by the side of the house, I’d wriggle out the casement, and we’d recline side by side on the sloping shingles of the roof until dawn, Rocky with a six-pack of beer and I with my heart in my mouth at the idea of what my punishment would be if either our German shepherd or Elizabeth heard us whispering. Had Mother ever eaten a live centipede? On a ten-dollar bet, I’d chewed and swallowed one during the intermission of the school’s annual modern-dance program at the Greek amphitheatre; crunch, crunch; the audience was riveted. “Oh, my God!” hissed Mother. “Why do you always do these things for effect?” Had she, on a dare, ever boldly courted the town prostitute, rung the doorbell of her small frame house, admired her bottle of Chanel No. 5, and talked her into buying tickets for the school production of The Pirates of Penzance? This resulted in my being called into the principal’s office again. “Brooke, dear,” said Miss Campbell, with a sigh, “I have here a check for four dollars made out to the Greenwich Academy and signed ‘Patsy Pine.’ Is this—em—a valid signature?” “Yes, Miss Campbell.” “How did you happen to obtain this—woman’s signature?” “Well, Miss Campbell, during lunch hour I thought I’d apply myself to winning the ticket contest, so—” “Brooke, dear, I’m going to ask you to return this check: we can’t have people like Miss Pine at school functions. You know what I mean.” “But, Miss Campbell, she lives all alone and has no friends.” “I’m sorry, Brooke, I can’t bend school policy because Miss Pine is lonely.”

  Had Mother ever been an intrepid shoplifter? Not likely. I, on the other hand, was celebrated among my friends for my cool savoir-faire when it came to scooping up scarves—as many as twelve at once—from the counter at Woolworth’s and exiting the store without any telltale ends peeping through my fingers. Once, finding myself penniless on Mother’s Day, I enjoyed the pleasant irony of shoplifting the biggest potted plant I could carry out Woolworth’s front entrance (not only to take home to Mother, but to satisfy my theory that, by exuding an air of complete authority, anyone could get away with anything).

  Had Mother ever lain awake half the night dreaming about how Marlon Brando would make his first appearance in a green M.G., tires grinding up the gravel (I could definitely hear them if I listened carefully); how he would charge up the front stairs, brushing aside our dog’s vicious attack, and gather me up in his arms? “Goodbye, everyone!” I would cry with glorious abandon, and out we would sweep to the M.G., never to return. Had Mother ever really been in love?

  Had she loved Father madly, impetuously? Bridget, Bill, and I wanted it to be so. We badly and unrealistically wanted to believe that if Father came to the house for a visit, there might be some reconciliation between them. On one occasion we thought we might actually see them together in the same room again.

  “Your father is driving out here Friday night,” announced Mother. “Kenneth talked to him this morning, and he said to tell you girls he’d be delighted to take you to the Father-Daughter Dance at the Academy.”

  “Ooh, goody,” we said, thinking we’d set up a foolproof encounter.

  “He’s coming early so he can spend some time with Bill, too,” went on Mother. “You know how to offer him a drink and so on; Kenneth and I have made plans to go out to dinner that night.”

  “At six o’clock in the evening?” asked Bridget.

  “Oh, come on, Mother,” I said, exasperated. “Stop running away. He won’t bite you. You act as if he’s Heathcliff.”

  “Good God!” Mother clutched her throat melodramatically. “It’s physically impossible for me to have the simplest, most prosaic conversation with Leland, but to have to be charming, here in my own house? I’m much too cowardly. Within minutes all my good intentions and control would desert me. No, Kenneth and I will go out to dinner.”

  As much as she liked to congratulate herself on her ability to refrain from open hostility, once after I accused her of making Father inaccessible to us, she replied, “Your father’s one of the most attractive men I’ve ever known, but that does not presuppose his talent as a father. He should never have been a father. But, to be honest, he has no pretensions about that. I do think he cares about you and loves you in some abstract way, without knowing how to show you. Besides, he’s so addicted to his work he doesn’t have the time. The brutal truth is his requests to see you are not as frequent as you’d like to think.”

  When asked about this, Father answered, “Goddamn right, all that red tape every time I want to see you kids. Why does Maggie make a goddamn Dreyfus case out of everything? Simple plans, dinner. I used to ask her where she’d like to have dinner and it would take two hours to resolve what restaurant. Must drive you kids nuts. Thank God that’s not my problem any more. It’s funny, too, you know, she could be the most sensational dame in the world when she put her mind to it. Well, if the going gets too rough, you can always knock on my front door.” It seemed we were caught between two diametrically opposed points of view. Or three or four.

  Therefore, when Mother let Bridget and me (Bill was at camp) visit Father in Bermuda for two weeks in the summer of 1953 before going off to boarding school, we were thrilled. We found him irresistible, although we hesitated at coming out and saying so. Somehow we believed a precarious balance might be disturbed if we opened our mouths. We foresaw two possible outcomes to any impulsive expression of love for Father: one, Mother would feel slighted, which would be bad enough; or two, she’d disapprove, and not let us see him any more. Either way we’d be jeopardizing the status quo, so we didn’t even let Father know how much we loved him.

  That two-week trip was the longest stretch of time we’d spent with him in seven years. He was then at the height of his career. A series of hits like Mr. Roberts, South Pacific, and Call Me Madam had followed one right after another. He’d also,
since 1948, presented Anne of the Thousand Days, The Rat Race, The Wisteria Trees, Daphne Laureola, Remains To Be Seen, and Point of No Return. The pressure of working on one of his productions, probably Wish You Were Here, had worn him out. Whenever he opened a play, Father went without sleep for days on end, and then, having pushed himself into a state of exhaustion, got on a plane to someplace quiet where he could sleep and sleep until he’d revived. In Bermuda, he’d rise about noon, putter around the bungalow kitchen making a batch of brioches or croissants, and go back to bed until dinner. Bridget and I were in heaven. We weren’t accustomed to the luxury of hotel living, of unrestricted room service, of unsupervised time, of coral beaches and green seas right outside our window. At dinner every night, we ordered daiquiris and filet mignon—no questions asked, no expense spared.

  This regime, or lack of it, was completely at odds with Mother’s stringent attempts to see that we led a relatively unspoiled existence. “Who the hell’s going to spoil you if I don’t?” asked Father, pleased at the effect our vacation was having. “Good for you to be spoiled once in a while. God, Maggie’s a tightwad—I wish to hell she’d buy you some decent clothes. Whenever you come to see me, you’re all wearing the worst-looking rags. I’m sure she sends you off like that deliberately. She knows I’ll have to outfit you from top to bottom before I can set foot on the street with you.” (This was true; we always came back from our infrequent weekends together with a new wardrobe from Bonwit Teller’s and Brooks Brothers, which Father would have devoted all Saturday to selecting.)

  Perhaps the most important factor in any of our visits was the influence of our stepmother, Nancy. Father called her Nan, and that’s what she was to us. She was wonderful to look at, very tall and angular, with legs like a giraffe, yet in spite of that, she had a surprisingly voluptuous quality. Maybe it was her lips, or laugh, or just the way her flesh was attached to her bones. Nan wore a lot of Mainbocher. Her collection of shoes rivaled Father’s. She was a connoisseur of style, however it was packaged, and had learned, long ago, to define her own. When bad permanents and nightly sessions with curlers were in vogue, she wore her hair parted in the middle and austerely pulled back into a sleek chignon, and as if that weren’t gumption enough, she sported huge horn-rimmed glasses. (“I might as well see—don’t you think?—since my plan is to be around for a while.”) So there was a startling ambiguity to her presence; the spare and the sensual. Even her jewelry, each piece of it, evoked a sense of its owner: heavy gold and diamond earrings so oversized she had to unclip them to talk on the telephone, and a pin fashioned to resemble a boutonnière, set with a stone an inch or two in diameter—as big as an actual flower—a sort of boldness that nobody else could carry off.