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

a suitcase and catch the next plane. For God’s sake, don’t think any more, just come along. I love you.…

But Mother was inconsolable. She thanked me for trying to distract her, but claimed she was in no shape to travel. So Kenneth and I flew home.

She met us at the airport. I expected the worst, but I wasn’t prepared for how bad the worst would be. Her face was ravaged. Her clothes drooped on her. Her voice shook. As we stood in the warm sunlight outside the parking lot, the air pleasantly whirring with the sounds of planes taking off and landing like giant overhead fans, she held on to us as if she were a child. The look in her eyes was one I had never seen and I thought I’d seen them all. It was a look of defeat. I knew then that the worst was yet to come.

Jane Fonda:

“Here were two women, your mother and your sister, who had infinite spirit—a certain kind of brilliance, a crazy brilliance, erratic, difficult, neurotic, but still unique. I don’t think society offers solutions to people like that, especially women. They were never provided with a constructive way of harnessing that kind of energy and brilliance. It turned inward and destroyed them.”

Bridget:

“I sometimes think there is only one way for me to resolve my struggle with Mother and that is to go down to Greenwich, push her in the river and then jump in after her to drown”

I didn’t see Bridget again for another year. She came out to the house about a month later, but I was away that weekend. She stayed for a few hours, long enough to pack all her clothes and, to my fury, some of mine. Mother and Kenneth reported that she was civil but remote. Father’s limousine brought her and waited in the driveway while she collected her books and trinkets for shipment to California.

I saw Bill once. He, too, came to gather his possessions. The fall term at Eaglebrook was about to begin. Apparently, while he was packing, Mother came into his room. Without any warning, she asked him to reconsider his decision to live with Father. She said it was a decision made in haste and anger and that it was all her fault. She had not intended to “drive him out.” She asked him to forgive her. He said he had. She asked him to go away with her somewhere quiet for a week, Cape Cod, just the two of them, to straighten things out. She promised him that she would give in to him on whatever routine points distressed him; he could do this and wouldn’t have to do that—anything if he would stay. Gently, Bill said no. He said he loved her but that for a little while at least he was committed to another kind of life; that for him to come back now would be difficult and strange. Mother began to cry. I had never known her to cry except for the time, before Mother and Father were divorced, when the ambulance had come for Father.

This time she couldn’t stop. Even from my room the sound was so painful I went into my bathroom and put my hands over my ears. That evening I was supposed to go into New York to the theatre; it had been prearranged that Father’s car would give me a lift in with Bill. Kenneth, white-faced, told Bill and me that we should go right away; he would calm Mother down.

On the way into town, Bill put up the glass partition between us and the driver, and we talked.

I was still unnerved by the scene earlier with Mother. It had been heart-rending to overhear a self-possessed forty-six-year-old woman pleading with her fourteen-year-old son, apologizing, bargaining, desperately trying to regain his favor. The balance of power had shifted. The fact that the woman happened to be my mother, and the boy my brother, was incidental. I had begun to have the disquieting concept of myself as a spectator, not a participant, in my own life. I saw myself as the audience, leaning back to watch my future unfold like a Greek tragedy. I already had presentiments of the ending. That, after all, was the classic form; it was not the surprise dénouement that one came to see, but the quality of the drama and performances.

Bridget, Bill was saying, had turned out to be a real pain in the ass. She’d started this upheaval and then refused (as usual) to do all the talking or to work out the logistics. And now everything had come down on his head. It was all blamed on him. One fine day he’d walked into an altercation between Mother and Bridget and the next thing—It was evident to him from the beginning that Mother didn’t seriously mean she thought they should go live with Father. Certainly not as a permanent arrangement. But he was taking advantage of her moment of anger for purely selfish reasons. There was an enormous appeal to Father’s life-style—the travel, the gadgets, the glamour, the fun. Mother refused to act like a rich person, always driving those Ramblers around. She was difficult, inconsistent. Yes, he’d proceeded out of basically selfish motives. He was aware of how incredibly stubborn he was, and he knew he’d hurt Mother deeply. But now he thought of himself as living with Father; the estrangement was complete. It would be hard to turn everything around again.

I looked at him carefully. His voice was beginning to change and down was sprouting on his chin. He looked underfed. I resisted the impulse to enfold him in a bear hug.

Bridget was absolutely no help in all this, Bill repeated, rattling on with his feet up on the jump seat; she was actually a hindrance. Since I, the traditional groundbreaker in most family arguments, hadn’t been around to give orders, Bridget had initiated the debacle, and should have been able to