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

on the scene. Very underplayed to me. With Bridget—I think the line was the same; she’d probably taken two of the wrong drugs or whatever.”

He was even vaguer about the details than I. Right afterward, I had been too numb to engage in the proper detective work, and later I didn’t have the heart for it. Besides, as time went by, the explanations that we got from Father and Pamela had become increasingly elliptical.

“I didn’t even know she had epilepsy,” Bill was saying. “I’d no contact with the outside world for a couple of years. But I do remember the funeral. And the church. It was dark during the service, late afternoon and raining. Typical funeral.”

The only funeral I’d relented about going to after that was David O. Selznick’s, because he was almost like my own father. My own father—

“Oddly enough, I still flash on Mother from time to time—”

Bill struck another match and aimlessly let it burn.

“I mean the reality that you’ll never see somebody again never struck me fully. You just get a taste of it from time to time.”

“Bill, listen.” The cab was making a U-turn on Fifty-seventh Street to land us at the door of the restaurant. “Listen.”

This was the crux of the situation.

“Do you think the possibility that Mother and Bridget … killed themselves has ever affected your feelings about suicide? Your own, I mean?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Bill, scrunching the lower half of his body forward so that his hands could root for change. “It’s possibly been, on some small level, a preventive, only because I feel that it would be more of challenge not to do it. Since it seems to run in the family. It’s like trying to beat the system. There must be something inherently weird—the family drops like flies.”

The sound of his laughter, as we emerged from the cab, rang in my ears for the rest of the evening. There had been times, in the last eleven years, when I had been furious with Mother and Bridget. When I stopped to analyze my feelings, I knew it wasn’t really important to me how they died, and never had been. What made me angry, though, aside from the primary fact of their deaths, was the dark realization that whether or not they killed themselves, they had tinkered with my mind. They’d given me a double whammy. They’d planted it like a minefield with the idea, the concept of suicide—but also, by that perverse act, had disarmed the tricky little mechanisms set up to explode. Leaving it strewn with litter. Leaving me with the feeling that although the two things canceled each other out, I had been victimized, raped. Betrayed. The feeling of impotence. Yes? No? Would I ever dare? As Bill said, although it was a free country and we had a choice, we didn’t really. Suicide was a luxury we couldn’t afford. Not with that background. Not with those odds. For me, it wasn’t out of the question because of grave moral considerations but because I always resisted the predictable.

immy Stewart:

“Your father did a funny thing. He was always trying to get me married. When I got back from the service, he came to me and said, ‘Now, look, you’ve been away for five years and the movie business is all changed and God knows what, you don’t know what you’re gonna do—what you ought to do is marry a rich girl and take it easy. And I know exactly the one. Take her to dinner and the theatre and marry her and take it easy, because now you’ve had five years—and as I say, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the movie business.’ I said, ‘Well—’ He said, ‘Now do as I say, here is her number and call her.’ So I did. I went and picked her up, asked the doorman to get a taxi—this was in New York—and she said, ‘Don’t we have a car?’ That was my first mistake. Then we had dinner and we just—didn’t seem to have much to talk about, and she ordered something that she didn’t like. Then we went to the theatre and it wasn’t a very good play. After the theatre we had a terrible time getting a cab, and she said, ‘I’d like to go home,’ so we went home. She said goodbye and left me in the lobby and that was it. Your dad, the morning after, called me up and said, ‘How’d it go? How’d it go?’ ‘Well,’ I said, and I told him my story. He said, ‘How many flowers did you send her?’ I said I hadn’t sent her any flowers. He said, ‘I’ll send her the flowers.’ He sent her the flowers and I got the bill. She called me up about the flowers he sent—there must have been a thousand flowers. She said, ‘I’ve never had so many flowers, the flowers absolutely cover the whole room. I don’t know where to put any more flowers. There are more flowers than I’ve ever seen in my life. Thank you very much.’ And hung up. Your father said, ‘You can’t fool around with a thing like this. You get a thing going, send the flowers.’ And I never saw her again.…”

At least my father died with his boots off. He was sixty-eight years old. There were many things, he said, that he wished he’d done or hadn’t done but, on balance, it was hard to see how he could have packed any more into sixty-eight years than he did. He looked his age. And he looked tired. The last ten years had been rough: he’d pushed the machinery at stress capacity for so long it had begun to break down. “I thought it was guaranteed to last a lifetime,” he commented. “I smell a bum deal here. Son of a bitch, didn’t have time to read the fine print. Some lousy contract. Christ, I feel cheated.”

As he