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

clerk to find me. You know, to be the wife or husband—I never wanted anyone to find me, it’s a bummer to be around. Notes can be very irritating, but I have always thought there should be a few instructions. I wrote the note once—I hadn’t figured out how to do myself in, but I did write the note.”

“What did it say?”

“Well, most people who commit suicide are trying to inflict some kind of pain on other people, which I’ve always felt was immoral. I think anybody’s got the right to do it, to me it’s not a mortal sin, but you ought to be kind of clean about it and not hassle too many other people. I’ve always felt you ought to check out with a little.”

“Style?”

“Yeah. But to try and blame it on somebody else is wrong, especially if you are successful. [We both grinned at that absurd bit of sophistry.] So I tried to make it clear, in my note, that there was absolutely nobody to blame, that I didn’t feel there was any way to continue on my present road and couldn’t see any way to get off it, either.”

He began to laugh again.

“Cracking yourself up, aren’t you?”

“I carried the note around for a while, figuring the precise moment hadn’t quite come, but it was right around the corner—and then finally I got embarrassed and threw it away.”

Somehow, this was all very reassuring.

“Bill, listen. I want to ask you another question.” I knew he was thinking about it anyway, even if he didn’t verbalize his thoughts without being prompted, or exhibit my kind of curiosity.

“When Mother and Bridget died, what did you think? How did you feel? I hadn’t seen you in so long. You were totally withdrawn at the time, do you remember? You never said much.”

When I asked him the right question he’d talk all night. Sometimes he would hold forth about the most astounding trivia. He was a pack rat of information on every subject known to man, the more arcane the better.

“When Mother died”—Bill cleared his throat—“I think I was shocked that I was not as moved as I felt I should be, not at that time. I don’t think I was aware of the reality for some time afterward. I’ve always buried that kind of trip. Because I remember being constantly stunned that I wasn’t more moved. I think the only time I cried was at the service. And I don’t know if that would have happened if everybody else wasn’t unhappy.”

He began to laugh.

“There you go again, you crazy galoot. I remember you flew in from Topeka in a rage because of the black-suit episode.”

“Yeah. I’d just terminated Menninger’s as an outpatient. I was engaged to Marilla and going to school, I think, and working, and about to—I recollect Mother died on the first day of 1960 and I went into the paratroopers on the fourteenth. I was visiting Manila’s apartment when the phone rang and I had one of those flashes about some impending disaster. It was Father.”

“What did he say?” All those years ago. I had never forgotten how angry I’d been at Father for not telling me himself.

“He said she’d died of natural causes but that the papers were very likely to pick it up in some other manner. And obviously for me to fly back immediately. He told me to bring a black suit and all that—he didn’t have to tell me—but I remember the dialogue. So the following day I went to a store where a charge had been set up for me to buy clothes while I was in Menninger’s. I bought a black suit, shirts, ties, all the gear for a funeral. Hadn’t been in there in several years, so when I went to charge it they said they’d have to get an okay from Father. They got off the phone and said, ‘This charge has not been authorized.’ I said, ‘Well, who said no?’ I couldn’t believe that Father would have refused it. They said, ‘Well, some lady answered the phone and she said no.’ And I remember assuming the lady must have been you. I guess I was eighteen, yeah, and extremely irritated about the whole thing. Then before I took off for New York, I spoke to you on the phone and you clued me in about Pamela. Which was the first I heard about that business. I knew that Father and Nan had had some kind of problem; he’d told me that. But I had no idea there was another woman involved. And she nixed the charge. I flew back that afternoon, but I wasn’t nearly as distraught as I should have been. And I was extremely pissed off about the clothes.”

That memorial service in Greenwich, Connecticut. The family, according to the protocol of these things, had traipsed in, in single file, to be seated in the front row after everyone else. The church was jammed. We—Bridget, Bill, and I—felt more exposed at that moment than ever before in our lives. Afterward I’d sworn to myself I’d never go to another funeral. If it hadn’t been for Bridget—

“Aha! That explains your filthy mood. You were really uncommunicative.”

If it hadn’t been for Bridget, two thousand horses couldn’t have dragged me to another one.

“And when Bridget died, it was the same thing. I was married, stationed at Fort Bragg, rented house, the phone rang, and it was Father again. ‘Natural causes,’ he said.”

Bill put his face up to the partition where change was made.

“Driver, got a match?”

“We’re almost to the Russian Tea Room.”

“Thank God. I want caviar. Golden caviar.”

“Who do you think you are, the Shah of Iran?”

“We deserve it.”

“Is that all he said?”

Bill struck the match and let it burn almost to his fingernails before blowing it out.

“I can only remember both calls minimizing any question of suicide. The—Mother’s thing—the only indication was that the press would probably pick it up because there had been a bottle of sleeping pills