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

she was warning us, we would have to be spanked. Heady and reckless with excitement, we sang a chorus of “Frère Jacques” loudly in unison. Mother stormed back, yanked the Dutch door open, and switched on the light. “Leland!” she called across the darkened patio. “Come here this instant!” We had never seen her so angry; it was thrilling. Father came and stood sheepishly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “All right, Leland, you take Brooke and I’ll take Bridget,” she announced, marching over to Bridget’s bed. “Maggie,” Father murmured, “couldn’t we give them one more chance?” Mother was pulling down Bridget’s pajamas. “Nope,” she said firmly, and started to spank Bridget. I began to giggle; by the time Father had me across his lap, I was laughing uproariously. It was my first spanking. As his hand smacked my behind for the third or fourth time, inflicting actual pain, I felt first a sensation of surprise, then of fury, both of which turned my laughter into uncontrollable sobs. I was vaguely aware of Bridget crying in the bed next to me, and then Father picking me up and carrying me outside where he leaned against a post entwined with bougainvillaea. He held me tightly against his chest, so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Brooke,” he whispered to me, beginning to cry himself; unable to see his face clearly in the filtered light, I reached up and touched his eyes in wonder—his tears soaked my hair and mine his polo shirt. “Brooke,” he said, weeping, “I promise you something—do you know what a promise is?—I shall never spank you again as long as I live.” He kept his word.

The next time I saw him cry he was in his old maroon silk bathrobe, and it was the evening of the day Bridget died. There were other people in the study—Josh and Nedda, George and Joan Axelrod, Bill Francisco, and Pamela—whom I had to walk past rather self-consciously in order to reach him. He was sitting in his favorite armchair, heavily, as if he never wanted to rise again. His eyes were fixed absently on the seven-o’clock news; when I came and stood between the television set and him, they glimmered like milky blue stones under shallow water. I reached down and lifted the large cut-glass tumbler of Jack Daniels from his lap, where it had sunk with both his hands clasped rigidly around it, and took a sip because my mouth was so dry.

“Come here, Brooke,” was all he said, so I sat on his lap and put my head against his, and his tears streamed down my cheeks. “Poor Bridget, poor little kid,” he murmured over and over against my face; I kept licking his tears away as they reached my lips because both my arms were tight around his neck and I didn’t want to let go. Oh, God, I thought, we used to want so badly to be grown up—all the endless games we played to evoke that miraculous state of power, Bridget and I sauntering past the hall mirror in lipstick and high heels, Bill sitting for hours in the driveway behind the steering wheel of the old Cadillac, maniacally spinning it—but given a choice of which condition was really worse, that of parent or that of child, didn’t we know, even then, that parents lost hands-down? All the time we were growing up and hating the fact that it took so long, didn’t we instinctively sense the agony that waited for us on the other side of the fence?

Monsen came in unobtrusively and announced dinner. Pamela moved over and rested her hand lightly on Father’s shoulder.

“Come, Leland, darling, we’re having your favorite—vichyssoise and chicken hash—a new recipe from the head chef at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Father blew his nose loudly. He had very dogmatic eating habits, which we children were delighted by, never touching anything remotely tinged with color: this eliminated most vegetables except potatoes from his diet, and for that matter fruit, except for strawberries (in spite of their color and his allergy to them); as for meat, he ate only chicken, lamb chops, or steak, and no more than an arbitrary two bites from the entire serving, but he consumed with passion what we alluded to as “white food”—scrambled eggs, custard, vanilla ice cream, and the Beverly Hills Hotel chicken hash.

During the course of dinner Josh recounted, with a high degree of animation for which he was justly famous, a jumble of stories about the various enterprises in which he and Father had been jointly involved, how Father had become his agent while he, Josh, was the dialogue coach for Charles Boyer in his first English-speaking movie, The Garden of Allah, tales about their productions of Mr. Roberts and South Pacific, about Hank Fonda and Mary Martin; they were all familiar and gratifying and went well with the chicken hash.

In Father’s study, after dinner, there was the first general discussion of Bridget, and a tremendous number of phone calls were made. Bill was notified in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was taking paratrooper training for the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the more successful schemes he had devised, along with marriage, to escape Menninger’s. Kathleen Malley, Father’s faithful secretary of thirty-one years, was on emergency duty for the evening, and all calls to the apartment had to be siphoned through her; she also had to deal with all the newspapers, which were about to go to press. While Bill Francisco sat in a daze, Pamela, Nedda, and Joan were huddled over “arrangements,” and Josh strode purposefully up and down the small room, issuing suggestions on all fronts. At one point, he stopped in the middle of the Aubusson rug, right on a basket of flowers festooned with blue ribbons, and said to Father with great intensity, “You know, Leland, she really wasn’t of this world at all—she never seemed to belong here. Even when she was a baby, I