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

deal with its aftermath. But she’d lapsed into one of her silences. Bill had had to organize the resistance and to carry her along as well. Matters had got even worse once they were under way. Throughout their travels from Boston to Halifax to St. John to Gander to Biarritz, he’d had to take care of her. Just as if, he noted sourly, they were married. In the cramped proximity of hotel rooms, their relationship had disintegrated rapidly. To add to his other woes, he said, Bridget had a tendency to be light-fingered. She stole things, irrational things like his favorite pocketknife. She wouldn’t use these things, or trade them, or do with them whatever you did with stolen goods. She just hid them. Maybe they had a symbolic value to her. She took a ten-dollar gold piece Grandfather had given Bill when he was born. Earlier that summer, she’d stolen a couple of hundred dollars out of Mother’s purse, for which, Bill said indignantly, Mother had launched a big investigation and blamed him. Bridget was a fink. She always let him take the blame for her crimes until the day—the very day, in fact, that the final knockdown fight between Mother and Bridget had occurred!—that Mother had gone through Bridget’s drawers and found a stash of items that had long been missing: odds and ends of Father’s and Mother’s and Nan’s and Bill’s and mine. Then Mother had finally pieced things together. And then Bridget had written that letter to her friend and left it on the hall table.

But, Bill concluded pensively, when Bridget and he had made the move to leave, he’d thought I would be extremely proud and pleased. He was stunned when I’d elected to stay, because he’d remembered several times Mother had threatened to send me to live with Father, and somehow he’d thought this time I would go right along with them.…

Then I did hug him. It was useless to do anything more. If we could have all been closeted together in one room and, at knife point, forced to speak until we were empty, it would have taken us as many years to undo the misunderstandings as it had taken to create them.

We held each other and promised to write, knowing that we wouldn’t.

I went to the theatre and Bill went to a record store. That was the last time we saw each other for two years.

Although it took the next twelve months to come to a head, Mother’s breakdown had begun that afternoon. I dated it from the moment Bill declined her peace offering. For Mother to swallow her pride, to offer blanket concessions by way of reconciliation, and then to meet with rejection, must have been more than she could bear. When I arrived home that night, our doctor’s car was in the driveway and she was in bed under heavy sedation. Around dinnertime she’d disappeared. Kenneth had searched for hours, then taken the car and searched some more. He’d found her curled up pitifully in a ditch by the side of the road. She told him that she’d gone for a walk and fallen asleep looking for her lipstick. When he got her back to the house, she’d locked herself in her bathroom and refused to come out. That was when he’d called the doctor. All pill bottles had been removed from the medicine cabinets.

The next day she slept. The house was kept quiet and the doctor made several visits. Her powers of recovery were, as always, remarkable. The following day, Sunday, she came down to breakfast looking slightly wan and unsteady but determined. Monday was to be my first day at Vassar; though we tried to dissuade her, she insisted on driving me up to Poughkeepsie.

She had signed to star in a new play, Janus, and was now in no condition to do it. Kenneth and Delly, who was to produce it, met several times with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, an eminent New York psychiatrist. They discussed whether or not the distraction of hard work might overcome the hazard of an emotional breakdown. Mother herself was more apprehensive about the possibility of a physical breakdown. She maintained she was in a state of exhaustion and not strong enough to do the play. On the other hand, to withdraw from it once the machinery was set in motion would be a very serious and costly step. Even though she complained that she’d been deserted by everyone around her, including Kenneth and me, and that nobody was helping her to make a decision, typically she refused to let us. In the end, she made up her mind to go ahead.

The New York notices were good; under the circumstances, I thought they were amazing. But, even so, the strain became too great, and after Christmas Mother told Delly she would have to leave the play. At Easter time she was replaced by Claudette Colbert.

Slowly she seemed to be recovering from the terrible anxiety that she had failed as a mother. Then, in September, she decided to undertake a television show. She didn’t like television, she didn’t need the money, and there was no way to account for why she agreed to do it.

The show was based on the true life story of a nun, Sister Aquinas, who had not only a special talent for teaching mechanics and aerodynamics but also a pilot’s license. Her ability was so singular that she was sent to Washington during the war to instruct in the assembling of planes and how to fly them.

Mother, always scrupulous about details, asked C.B.S. for the services of a Catholic priest to coach her in the subtleties of Catholic liturgy: how to genuflect credibly, how to make the sign of the cross, whether to pronounce “Amen” with a broad “A” or not. C.B.S. stalled. Finally, after much bullying from Kenneth on Mother’s behalf, the network obtained a Methodist parson. Disorganization prevailed on all fronts. According to union rules, no actual props