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

An engagement party was arranged by Marilla’s sister in Topeka, and Mother made plans to fly to it just before she went into rehearsals for Sweet Love Remember’d.

Bridget, who hadn’t seen Bill for two and a half years, suddenly professed a desire to go, too. At this point her relationship with Mother was going through one of its cycles of severe stress. She had refused to come out to the house to see Bill and Marilla, basically because she was angry at Mother and her anger at Mother inevitably manifested itself in periods of withdrawal. Nobody knew better than Mother how extremely effective this punishment was, she by her own example having instructed all of us in its subtleties for years. Bridget’s was a classic case of the pupil outdistancing the master. By now her acquired skills far surpassed Mother’s and, more than skills, had become involuntary and chronic, even pathological, reflex actions. As the oldest of the three of us, I had, upon reaching adolescence, taken great pride in also being the most rebellious. I saw myself as a pioneer, a pathfinder repeatedly beating my head against the barrier of Mother’s authority. I, too, had become well versed in the art of psychological warfare as she taught it, but to me it had never seemed more than one of her numerous idiosyncrasies, a dreadful game whose rules I knew even when I was being too stubborn to play. The first rule was that Mother, in a state of wrath, almost never raised her voice: she lowered it drastically until it was a distant murmur. Second: the more I attempted to make contact, to explain, to argue, the more remote her voice and demeanor became. Third: I would be sent to my room with instructions not to reappear except for meals until I could apologize. (It was a challenge to see how long I could go without breaking, particularly after I saw Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper suffering the torture of lighted bamboo sticks under his fingernails. Once I proudly lasted a week, but it was excruciating.) Fourth: when I joined the rest of the family at dinner, Mother would behave as if I were invisible, never once looking at me or addressing me. And so on. After dinner, if I tried to kiss her good night, she would turn her cheek away, and since she was a fine actress, she knew how to make her silences as eloquent as words. Bridget and Bill watched with demure interest; much later I was to wonder if these scenes didn’t have more effect on them than on me. Usually after a few days I would crack and make my way downstairs for the apology scene. Mother expected a proper apology with real conviction; otherwise I was sent back and we would continue the ordeal until she was satisfied. I became adept at bursting, melodramatically, into tears at the right moment; then she would hug me and miraculously turn back into my familiar cheerful mother. Bridget and Bill would observe this ritual with angelic expressions on their faces, Bridget with a beatific smile (“You little bitch,” I would mutter at her under my breath so Mother couldn’t hear; Bridget would lower her eyes and smile even more mysteriously, incandescently), but I don’t remember their ever having to go through this experience themselves, so they must have learned the lesson by observing me. Perhaps by not having actually to act out these psychodramas, they absorbed their impact in a more serious way than I. In any case, Bridget, in her own adolescence, would become irritatingly silent for days on end rather than face a good fight.

Now Mother and Kenneth grew concerned about the possibility that if Bridget attended Bill’s engagement party the festivity of the occasion might be marred by a further incident in the current internecine strife between Bridget and Mother. Kenneth hastily sent Bridget a letter. It said that he forbade her to go to the party because her behavior to Mother, of late, had been outrageous and inhuman, and what was barely excusable when she was sixteen was now intolerable at twenty; that he would subordinate his own feelings if Bill might be unhappy at her not being there, but that since she hadn’t gone a step out of her way to see her own brother on his visit, it was dubious that he would be disappointed if she postponed hers. It said that any arguments she might muster to defend herself would be hogwash and that she would have to learn someday that she could not continue to pursue a course of selfishly taking more and more without giving anything back. It said that she had forfeited all the deep love and respect he, Kenneth, had for her, that although one of the happiest features of his marriage to Mother nine years earlier had been the advent into his life of two entrancing little girls, Bridget had gone to great lengths to ruin that pleasure. It concluded with the information that he was sending the letter behind Mother’s back and would only tell her after it had been mailed.

I was changing my clothes in Bridget’s apartment when the mail came that day. She read the letter, handed it to me wordlessly, went to the closet, and packed a suitcase. I went downstairs with her and followed her along the street for a while but she refused to speak to me. I went on to a class at Lee Strasberg’s; she checked back into Austen Riggs in a severe depression.

Kenneth was a kind Englishman of considerable equanimity. He seldom lost his temper. When he did, he recovered quickly. Bridget did not. In December, while Mother was in rehearsals, Kenneth sent several letters to Bridget at Riggs.

In the first one he apologized for the prolonged unhappiness caused by his previous letter, and begged her to take his tantrum in her stride, as she must know how