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

through, thought I’d stop and say hello.’ We talked. We had a half-hour visit, maybe three quarters of an hour.”

“And he seemed rational to you?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you talk about?”

Jimmy paused for a long time and looked away, far away.

“Flying,” he whispered at last.

Of course, I thought.

“When I came back from the war,” said Jimmy, “I’ll never forget—he was standing at the foot of the gangplank with a bunch of red roses. How he got onto the pier, I don’t know—absolute top-secret, no one was allowed—but your father could always get in anywhere. There he was, first thing I saw. I’ll never forget that.”

While Father didn’t seem to be living in the present and to have much interest in, or sure recollection of, the more recent events in his life—one evening, to Bill’s and my intense pleasure, he called Pamela “Maggie”—the farther backward in time our conversations took him, the more incredible his memory. One of those days, when Bill and I were asking him about different things he’d done in his life and were trying to piece them together chronologically, he suddenly announced that his first job had been working as a brakeman on a railroad. Bill and I looked at each other incredulously.

“Come on, Pop,” we said, amused at the preposterous image that sprang to mind, “a brakeman. Why did you never tell us that before?”

“Don’t know,” muttered Father, moving his head restlessly from side to side. “Forgotten.”

We didn’t believe him at all. We assumed it was wishful thinking, one of the tricks his mind could play. Much later, Bill would check it out with Grandsarah (who, at eighty-nine, was to outlive her only son), and she would recall vaguely that one summer when Father was sixteen or seventeen he had worked for a railroad.

We could tell that there were days when he couldn’t see us. But he always recognized our voices. In that last month, Bill and I would meet at the hospital in the morning and spend most of the day there. Pamela, who was usually the first to arrive and the last, in the evening, to leave, arranged for Father to have shifts of nurses round-the-clock; even so, she felt better knowing that some family representative was there as well. That way, if the nurse on duty wanted to go out for coffee, or if she herself had something else to attend to, Father would not be left alone. Father’s room and the hall outside, where there was a pay phone and a couch and where all the morning conferences were held out of his earshot, became as familiar as a recurring nightmare. We were now faced with the irony that as fearsome as it was to continue with the nightmare, the fear of ending it was even greater.

“Hiya, Pop. How’s it going today?”

Some days he would look straight at me and say, “Hi, darling, much better thank you.” (“He had a good night,” the nurse would whisper.) Some days he would scan the room for the source of my voice; then I would move deliberately across his line of vision.

“Oh, Pop, you didn’t sleep well last night, did you?”

“Darling little Brooke. I want to go home. Take me home.” He would struggle vainly to wrench his body from the sheets.

“Oh, Pop.”

“Home.”

“Pop. Don’t try to sit up, Pop.”

“My gut hurts.” Sometimes he swallowed again and again as if a bone had stuck in his gullet. I had to fight the instinct to pound him on the back.

To the nurse: “His stomach is bothering him again. Shouldn’t he have a pain-killer?”

The nurse would shake her head. “He’s getting Demerol intravenously.” Ah, that must be the new tube taped to his arm.

But there were afternoons where Bill and I found that we could ease into discussions with him about the past, where we could really get him going on and on, comfortably ask him intimate questions about his various love affairs and marriages that, ordinarily, we wouldn’t dare bring up.

At the suggestion of our ex-stepmother, Nan, who was following all this very closely, Bill wandered into the hospital room one day and asked Father for his list of the ten most beautiful women that he’d ever known. It was just the sort of question Father liked best. He was terrific. A trace of color appeared in his cheeks.

“ ‘Beautiful’ is the most misused word in the English language,” he stated, with near-perfect articulation, “next to ‘glamorous.’ Very hard to define. Goddamned elusive. In my book, to be beautiful a woman has to be more than beautiful—you know what I mean? She has to have this quality of glamour, which is also impossible to describe. A certain look in her eyes, a style—an awareness of her effect on people—the way she holds herself, moves, a sense of her own mystery. A blend of all those things. And then some. Damn few women are genuinely beautiful. A handful. I must have come close to knowing them all, as close as any man alive. Fell in love with half of them, married three—”

“Whoa, Pop, you’re going too fast. Three of your wives on your all-time list?”

“Ya. You’re goddamned right. Lola; I guess she was the most beautiful woman I ever knew. She taught me how to fly. Did you know that? Got me interested in planes. Married her twice, I thought she was so beautiful. Maggie—not beautiful in the classic sense, but I don’t subscribe to the classic sense. Nan, definitely. Kate [Hepburn], definitely. The best. God, yes.” He turned toward the window and seemed to drift out.

“Go on, Pop, who else?”

“Oh, well. Garbo, of course. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw. Great face, strange body. Huge feet. Size ten, something insane like that.”

“Could you ever have fallen in love with her?”

“Not possibly. She was kind of sexless. Moved clumsily. Not smart enough for my taste. But my God, that face. When I was her agent, I had to go up to her house to talk her into some deal—I was simply