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

a long philippic, laced with colorful language, against doctors and hospitals and operations and anybody or anything that would conspire to remove him from the main action at a time like this.

“But, Pop,” I protested. “The operation’s a success and the play’s a success. What more do you want?”

“To get the hell out of here and go straight to the theatre,” he replied at the old staccato pace. “This bedpan routine stinks. I’m going home tomorrow.”

“Well.” I hesitated, knowing that was out of the question. “Isn’t tomorrow a little soon? Shouldn’t you be taking it easy? How are you, anyway?”

“Just sensational,” he barked. “And that’s the way I want to keep it. Another day in this clip joint will be the death of me. Lousy ice cream, too. Inedible crap. If you had any style, you’d air-mail me some Will Wright’s chocolate mocha. I’ll be out of here faster than you can say Jack Robinson; it’s either that or starve, take your pick. They’d better not try to stop me or I’ll walk out in my birthday suit.”

“It’s hopeless to argue with him,” said Pamela a few days later. “Last night the poor nurse on duty couldn’t keep him in bed. He was too strong for her. He wrestled with her, ordered her to pack his bag and help him check out. What can we do?”

And so it was that Father left the hospital four days after the operation. His doctor advised him to stay a couple of days longer. Father refused. He was recovering nicely. He vowed that if he was allowed to return to his beloved country home in Mount Kisco he would behave himself and stay in bed. Mount Kisco is about forty miles from New York City; it was suggested that he make the trip in an ambulance. He refused that, too. At his insistence, his limousine and driver picked him up and drove him home—to Haywire House.

He’d named the house after his cable address, an ingenious logo he’d devised thirty years earlier and had incorporated ever since into the letterhead of his blue-on-blue stationery. It was also imprinted indelibly on my mind. “Get it?” he’d pointed it out with pride when I was a little girl. “Haywire. Hay-wire. Damn clever. Means kind of nuts. Never forget it. That way you’ll always be able to reach me day or night, wherever you may happen to be in the crazy old world.”

On his way home, he complained of terrible stomach pains. Fortunately, Pamela had arranged for a doctor to be there on his arrival. As it turned out, Father was home only a few minutes and, although he had refused to leave the hospital in an ambulance, less than two hours later he was on his way back in one.

This time the stroke was not a minor one.

He was back on the operating table, six days after the first operation, as soon as the results of his second arteriogram were known. An arteriogram, it was explained to me on the telephone, is the painful procedure that outlines obstructions in the body’s arterial system.

It took four or five hours, crucial hours in which, owing to the size of the new clot, the blood supply to Father’s brain was minimal, practically nonexistent. The damage was done. The wonder was that afterward he could speak at all.

“Shit,” said Bill through his teeth.

“What’s the matter?” I looked up sharply from the Sunday Times. We were alone with Father in the hospital room; the nurse had gone out for a few minutes. Father was asleep. His breath rattled in his throat and whistled through his lips.

“What bothers me most is his stomach. Really hurts him. He’s been complaining all day. Look how bloated it is.” Bill sagged against the window. It was starting to snow.

“What did the doctor say this morning?”

“Oh, God, which doctor? I get so confused about their different functions, who’s in charge of what, I can hardly remember their names. I think the internist—what’s-his-name—said it was gas.”

“Dr. Cox, you fool.”

“Yeah. Enough gas there to fly a balloon around the world. Fly him to the moon.”

“Forget the gas, Bill, and concentrate on his mind. Tell me what the hell we’re going to do about that?” It was a week after the second operation and our initial optimism had worn off.

Bill shook his head and rocked back and forth against the window. His body seemed to move in sections; he had the characteristic Hayward build, tall and thin. But while Father had always carried himself with military erectness, Bill, who had actually been in the military, slouched.

“It’s all so ill-defined,” he said, peering at me intently over his steel-rimmed glasses. Bill was the only person I knew capable of throwing me looks that were in no way dissipated by the space of a room between us.

“There’s no sense of reality,” he went on, “because most of the intelligence we’re getting here is filtered through Pamela, and that’s whatever they’re laying on her. Pure doctors’ rhetoric. Propaganda. As I said before, who knows who’s in charge of what around here? I mean, at some point you’re still under a surgeon’s care, and at some point the other doctor takes over, and then the head of the hospital wanders in for a look and issues a bulletin. We’re staggering around in this no man’s land in the middle of a pitched battle and our side is losing. I feel shell-shocked. No leadership, I tell you.”

Once Bill got going, he could talk for hours. Monologues.

“We could set up a counter-offensive, but—” He sighed. “I think it’s too late.”

“What do you mean by that?” But I knew what he meant.

He sighed again. “Well, you know.”

“Sort of.”

He was wearing a dark suit and tie—his hospital outfit—with cowboy boots. He usually wore cowboy boots. More comfortable, he said, with superior soles for striking matches on. As a concession to Pamela, he’d had the worn tooled leather polished.

“I guess it’s not all fair to blame doctors, really.”