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

It was very important to her because she was, as everybody is, competitive. If you had been a little uglier and less successful, I think she would have run to you.

“She knew that your father wanted what was best for her, but also felt that he was a little frustrated and bored with her. She couldn’t talk to him easily. She didn’t feel that comfortable with your father at all. She never knew what to think about Pamela. Bridget circled Pamela; she sniffed around Pamela a lot and every now and then thought Pamela was very nice and every now and then thought Pamela wasn’t very nice. The only thing that I remember about your brother, Bill, is that she loved him very much. She felt a kindred spirit with Bill when things went wrong with him. She talked about your mother. Bridget felt deeply that, looking back on everything, she had been unreasonably antagonistic to your mother and that she had hated her for a lot of things that weren’t her fault, that there had been a time, very close to your mother’s death, when your mother had wanted very, very desperately to get back together with Bridget, to talk to Bridget, to have some kind of rapprochement and that Bridget fought it, fought it hard, and tried to hurt her by fighting it at all. Then your mother died and she never had another chance.

“She was very aware that people were saying, ‘Hello, Bridget, how are you?’ like ‘Oh, my God. I hope you’re fine.’ As if they were all whispering behind their fans about her, since she was the only one in the room that had been to a mental institution. She was terribly bright, Bridget, very sensitive to the attitudes other people had toward her, and she could identify a patronizing smile like ‘My dear, how are you?’ at a hundred yards.

“Your father, as a result of that episode in Williamstown, said, ‘Get her back to New York right now.’ She adamantly refused to go. There was a week left to the season and she insisted on staying out the week. The greatest thrill of my life was driving her to the airport and flying back with her.”

When Bridget got back into the city after Labor Day, she changed apartments. She and I spent a lot of afternoons at the florist buying huge flowering bushes for the new space or visiting the food department at Bloomingdale’s to browse through the imported delicacies. She had a passion for crystallized ginger and crème fraîche, which was hard to find anywhere else, and we both had a nostalgia for smoked turkey and Smithfield ham, which Mother, a Virginian, had seen to it were staples of our childhood.

We never talked a great deal about Mother. I was cautiously rebuilding my relationship with Bridget; if I pressed her about certain subjects, her shaky confidence in me might have regressed perhaps irreparably. I sensed she was putting me to her own private test, and just barely beginning to trust me. Any questions I might have asked her about the long bitterness with Mother were verboten. It was acceptable, even curiously reassuring to Bridget, if I mentioned Mother as a matter of course; not, however, if I overtly mourned for her. So we played by Bridget’s rules; there was no alternative. Together we revisited all the art galleries and museums to which Mother had dragged us when we were thirteen and fifteen, the same shops and restaurants, the familiar concerts and ballets, without ever discussing why.

Sometimes she would wear one of Mother’s dresses or coats, or a particular antique necklace Kenneth had bought Mother in London one year. Mother had said its delicacy would suit only Bridget. And so on her twenty-first birthday, a month after Mother died, Kenneth had presented it to her.

I tried to push Bridget into modeling or editorial work at a fashion magazine like Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. I thought she’d be very good at either, and fashion was a field in which I had connections. But she was suspicious of any interference, particularly mine.

Bill Francisco:

“Just before her death we finally began to argue, which was great. Everything had been very lovey-dovey and kind of romantic; finally legitimate arguments could be had, really screaming fights—usually about money. ‘Let’s go to such-and-such a place.’ ‘Can’t, no dough.’ ‘I’ll treat.’ ‘No way.’ Dutch from time to time, but no way I’d let her pay for both of us. I was making about seventy-five dollars a week, so it was very tight. And later, after the fact, I wondered if the pressure about getting married came out of the feeling ‘Let’s do it now, before …’

“All that crap that came out about the possibility that she killed herself because of her mother’s death—I don’t think anyone knew her better than I did at that time and I swear it was out of the question. She was in good shape, I was in good shape, and the relationship was working. We were both very busy setting up Broadway productions, planning this whole attack on New York City. She was interviewing writers, typing stuff, getting it organized. She wanted to be actively involved, which was wonderful. I think it was the first time she was doing something because she wanted to do it, not because she felt she had to compete. She was helping me to produce, which was great because it channeled a lot of energy that had been misdirected. That month before she died was a very active period.”

The last time I saw her, a few days before she died, she had embarked on an ambitious project for Father: assembling and editing the hundreds of sixteen-by-twenty color photos of Imspond he’d taken all summer. Tom Mankiewicz was coming into the city that weekend from Yale, and we’d arranged to meet at Bridget’s on Saturday afternoon.

When I arrived, she was squatting on the floor of the living room while the