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

bughouse is costing me a staggering sum of money—thirty thousand dollars a year after taxes; that’s really, let’s say, a hundred thousand bucks—and the little son of a bitch spends all his time there breaking out. I just finished telling him that in all fairness to his two sisters, I’m going to have to compensate by rearranging my will.”

“Father,” I said, thinking it was much easier to stand up to him long distance, “we both know you don’t care about money and never have.”

“That’s almost true,” he half shouted, “but not quite.”

“What you mean is you care about Bill and he’s hurt you.”

“You’re goddamned right,” agreed Father. “Look at it from my point of view. I ought to kill him.”

Perhaps there was even a redeeming quality to his cruelty, once one got used to the idea that it camouflaged his deepest feelings. The epitome of sophistication, he was also wonderfully naïve. I’d come to think of him as a castle. He’d built a wall around himself, a superb wall. He’d built it to keep people out. Although he seemed to have a marvelously outgoing personality, he’d built it to protect something very vulnerable, the most secret part of himself. It was quite a fortress. Walls work both ways; sometimes he couldn’t get out himself. There were bottomless moats around the castle and forests of thorny brier. His drawbridge to the outer world was the telephone, and to that world he presented the image of a fast-talking, generous, charming, debonair entrepreneur.

“The Toscanini of the telephone,” George Axelrod called him.

One of my favorite stories about him came from Josh Logan:

“There was a time when—before we did Mr. Roberts—I was in Cuba. I decided to take Jo Mielziner [the set designer] to a town on the south coast, Trinidad, an eighteenth-century coffee town that had died when sugar cane took over. It was very hard to get to. We drove up, and then couldn’t even reach the town by car, because we had to park on the opposite side of the river. We took off our shoes and waded across, put our shoes back on, and then started into the town, this magic town; looked like a forgotten place. There were palm trees and little, wonderful, colonial buildings painted light blue and yellow and chalky red. We were enchanted and began taking pictures. All of a sudden, a man came up to me and said in españal, said, ‘You Logan?’ I said, ‘Sí, sí.’ He said, ‘Hayward want talk—telephone.’ It was absolutely impossible. How we had been able to get there, how that phone could be there, how Leland could ever have located both it and us, I still don’t know.”

To me, that was more than a story, it was Father. Whatever else happened in my life, I was confident that he could and would find me. I knew that if I was lost in the darkest part of Africa, a telephone would materialize, with Father at the other end, instructing me how to get home.

That summer, the summer of my twenty-second birthday, was important to me for many reasons. (I tended to measure my life by its summers, perhaps because I was born in one.) I felt, for the first time in four years, a sense of resolution not only about my future but about my family. Although Bridget and Bill were still hospitalized, I was hopeful about them, too. I couldn’t help wanting to believe that the fever which seemed to have gripped us all had broken. It had been such a long time; we were at our weariest.

I was living in Greenwich not far from Mother and Kenneth. I had two children, Jeff and Willie, who were two and one. Nothing in her life gave Mother more pleasure. She adored them and they adored her. She, who had always been wonderful with small children, who had even, in the last few years, given serious consideration to the idea of adopting a baby—who still dreamed of someday raising a chimpanzee—now had two grandsons at her permanent disposal. It was a fresh start.

Early in July, Kenneth left for England to see his children. He was gone for six weeks. That was when the mighty elm tree at the edge of the river inexplicably uprooted itself and toppled into the water. The property was daily overrun by municipal engineers who couldn’t determine how to remove it. Mother went into mourning. She said she was reminded of the death of a family patriarch. In the middle of this confusion, she read a play—Sweet Love Remember’d—and decided to do it. In the last interview she ever gave, to John Keating of Theatre Arts, she gave as good a reason why as any:

“I loathe acting,” she said, when the subject of her erratic commitment to her trade came up. “I loathe what it does to my life. It cancels it out; you cannot live while you are working. You are a person completely surrounded by unbreachable walls.”

KEATING: “But isn’t that just during the rehearsal period and the hellish weeks of tryouts when you are trying to live your way into a part? Doesn’t life resume again after you have settled down for a run?”

“No.” The answer was definite. “Being in a long run is the hardest work in the world. I loathe it. When you have been playing the same role for months, saying the same words and repeating the same actions on the same cues, night after night, you find yourself replying to a speech almost before its over, putting the glass on the table a step before you should. There is nothing more difficult than keeping a performance fresh. In The Voice of the Turtle, which was the most perfect little play about nothing, I found myself hating it after we had been running a while. I was appalled when I recognized what I was feeling. Here is this enchanting thing, I said to myself, and I loathe it. Terrible.

“One day a