Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

one he’d ever worn, a gold facsimile of an airplane propeller with a sapphire at the center. He was so fond of it he had had Cartier’s make him twenty or so over the years, all identical, just in case one got lost. His stomach rumbled and he sighed. “Goddamn gut of mine.” Then he got up and paced the room with his hands in his pockets and came back and stood in front of me and sighed again.

“Brooke,” he said, “little Brooke. You were the most beautiful baby I ever saw.” He began to blink his eyes very fast; I could feel tears start at the corners of mine and concentrated on squinting at him. Pamela was still talking on the phone in low serious tones, and we seemed to be alone, years ago. We stared at each other and remembered the beginning. I saw his face stripped of all the time that had accumulated there, its structure fine and strong, his pale blue deep-set eyes filled with certainty instead of anguish. We grieved for ourselves, aching both for my lost childhood and his youth, when our lives, as they affected each other, had been simple.

“You see”—he frowned, desperately trying to find the momentum to lift us out of our time warp—“we really aren’t sure yet how Maggie died.” Come on, Pop, I cheered him on mentally, you can do it. He thrust his hands down very deep in his pockets and hunched forward, bowing his head. One hand came up with a gold cigarette lighter, which he flicked on and off, on and off. His voice crunched as if he had laryngitis. “She was miserable about the play, as you know, and herself in it. She wasn’t sleeping at night—terrible insomnia. They got a doctor to come to the hotel yesterday and this afternoon to give her a sedative, a shot of some damn thing or other so that maybe she could nap before the performance tonight. Around five, after she finally fell asleep, Kenneth went across the street to Kaysey’s to talk to Gabel and Margolis about the possibility of buying her out of the goddamn play. When he got back a couple of hours later, the door to her room was locked and chained on the inside and apparently she wouldn’t answer his knocking. So—he went downstairs and called up; no answer. He got worried, got the hotel management to break the door in, and there she was.”

“Dead.”

“Ya. Brooke, hand me a cigarette, would you—over there by the lamp.” Pamela was hanging up the phone.

“Leland, darling, Josh and Nedda wondered—”

“Just a second, just a second. Before he left, the doctor gave her a bottle of sleeping pills, in case she needed them later. Kenneth says they were right by the bed, and when he looked in the bottle—afterwards—there were only two missing. That’s the hell of it—doesn’t make any sense. I mean you’d think if she wanted to kill herself she’d dump the whole bottle down her throat.” He put the cigarette in his mouth, letting it dangle while he rubbed his eyes ferociously as if to erase them. “It’s possible she woke up for a second, grabbed the bottle, took a couple of pills thinking she wouldn’t go back to sleep—but then why the chained door? God only knows. Maybe it was an accidental overdose like Bob Walker. It’s a real bitch, though, because apparently now the hotel is crawling with reporters and every first edition in the country will be headlining suicide. Bum rap.” He fell silent again. She couldn’t have killed herself deliberately, not over insomnia, nor some lousy play, not when she had so many people whom she loved and was loved by—like me. I had no doubt that my strength would have been more than enough for both of us in this instance, as hers had been in the past; she would have called me—

“She would have called me, Pop, and said something. She loved me. She would have said something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know—like Help, come here, I need you, things are rough.”

Pamela went over and put her hands on Father’s shoulders. “Leland, the Logans thought it might be nice for all of us to come out to the country for lunch the day after tomorrow? It would be a lovely drive—and they do agree that there must be some form of memorial service, so we’ll talk to Kenneth again in the morning and explain to him how everyone feels about it. After all, Josh was one of her oldest friends and he is the children’s godfather, so that may have some influence.”

Everything was settled, organized. Life was so easy, if one could learn how to compartmentalize it. Or be lucky enough to have somebody else to do it for you. The British certainly could teach us a lesson or two about survival. Survival of the fittest? Nothing seemed to apply; maybe that was the point.

Now, months later, in the early evening of October 18, 1960, as Pamela and I sat in the back of Father’s new limousine, heading east through the Park, the sun setting behind us, recollections of our previous journey together pecked at the new skin that had taken all these months to grow. As vulnerable as this protective layer was, it sufficed temporarily, I noted apathetically; not one distinctive emotion either penetrated or emerged, except curiosity, which circled lazily like a hawk in the distance. Pamela had been somehow incorporated into the cellular architecture of this skin; I was actually not at all surprised to be sitting where I was, neither resentful of nor grateful for her presence. It was a way of life, this way of death; I wondered idly how many more times it could happen; there was my father left, and my brother. All my initial rage had subsided into inactive charcoal embers; the mechanism was easy, once you got the knack of it, nothing to do with religion or God or hope or