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

with her to Bridget’s apartment for a wardrobe consultation. I clenched my teeth and picked out a blue silk dress and earrings of small turquoise forget-me-nots. Rummaging through her jewelry box, I came upon two necklaces Mother had assembled, pearl by pearl, over the years of our childhood. In weekly games of hearts, played for legendarily high stakes with a cutthroat cast of regulars—Sam Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Herman Mankiewicz, and Father—Mother had always won. The night’s winnings would be translated into the acquisition of another matching pearl. When the strands were finally completed, diamond clasps and all, they were banished to her safe-deposit box. She said they were too valuable to wear. From time to time, when she felt a mild financial squeeze, she would contemplate selling them. Sentimentality, however, prevailed. In keeping with her original intention, they were turned over to Bridget and me when we became twenty-one. Neither of us had ever had the nerve to put them around our necks. Bridget acted as caretaker, since I was notoriously lackadaisical. When Pamela saw them that day, she pointed out that they would be much safer with her (and besides, there was also a huge emerald ring of Mother’s to consider). Pamela had a priceless jewelry collection that reposed in her custom-built safe—a series of drawers, each with an individual combination—which rose grandly from the floor to the ceiling of her closet. I was in no mood to defend my irresponsibility, so away went the pearls and the emerald. Ten years later, when I asked to have them back for my own daughter, they had vanished.

Pamela asked me what I wanted to do with Bridget’s personal effects, all of which had been left to me. The apartment was still so filled with Bridget I could smell her perfume in the air. At my suggestion that we send all the furniture to Bill and Marilla in their dreary little house at Fort Bragg, Pamela said it was hardly worth the shipping cost, much too expensive a proposition, so what about donating it to some needy charity? “Anything,” I mumbled to get out of there, “anything,” and we finally left with the clothes and jewelry.

Going down in the elevator, Pamela said, “Did you know that Bridget left your father her entire trust fund? It was dear of her—she was so concerned about his financial status, she told him that since he’d supported her for so many years, she was going to do the same for him in his old age. Of course he didn’t pay any attention to her, but there it is in the will. And it certainly will come in handy at this particular time.”

“Yes, it was dear of her,” I answered, wondering if Bridget had known that her trust fund had been set up entirely by Mother, as part of her percentage of The Voice of the Turtle, seventeen years earlier.

“And not only that,” continued Pamela as the elevator let us out into the lobby, “but she left him her entire savings account, which seems to have about twenty-five thousand dollars in it. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, indeed,” I dutifully answered again, and couldn’t help adding, “but of course that was Mother’s life insurance. The policy came through just a few months ago.” My God, I thought. Is this what happens whenever somebody dies? These grisly discussions about personal effects and money? Gloating about this and that? All the way to Campbell’s funeral parlor, I couldn’t keep myself from remembering a night that we’d been having dinner at 1020 Fifth Avenue: Father, Pamela, Bridget, Grandsarah, myself, and Jones Harris, with Monsen serving. The table conversation had never once veered from conjecture about the fabulous sums of money that might befall Grandsarah (and thus Father, who was already ruminating about how he’d spend it) if and when Standard Oil decided to dig along some desolate stretches of railroad tracks to which, in an ancient agreement with the oil company, Grandsarah had retained all mineral rights.

“I thought I’d married into an artistic family,” Pamela had suddenly interrupted, “and all anybody ever does is talk about money.”

“People in steel vaults shouldn’t throw—” Jones fired rapidly, and then effectively elected to stop. Bridget had been delighted.

“Your friend Jones is marvelous,” she told me after dinner. “His father [Jed Harris] is like a caricature of him instead of the other way around.”

Her funeral was in the late afternoon. There was a slight drizzle as we emerged from a caravan of black limousines at the entrance of St. Peter’s Church on Lexington and Fifty-fourth Street. Although St. Peter’s was Catholic, Bridget had often gone to services there; she’d had a friend at school in Switzerland who was Catholic. We ran in to avoid the reporters straggling at the entrance.

The inside of the church was faced with stone. A somber daylight muted its stained-glass windows. The altar was banked with white and yellow flowers. Bridget’s coffin, the color of moss, lay among them. Father, my brother, Bill, and I sat alone in the second pew. Father and Bill both held themselves with the same military bearing as Colonel Hayward in his wheelchair. Our shoulders were pressed, one against another, throughout the service. I was only half aware of people sitting behind us, of friends of the family tiptoeing down the aisles.

The service was very short. There was no eulogy. Very softly the organ began to play Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Infanta,” which Bridget had learned to play on the piano when she was twelve. As the sound echoed through the church, Father’s shoulders began to shake. Bill and I edged in closer, as we had with Bridget between us nine months before. I knew I would never be able to listen to that particular music again. Then Josh Logan stood up and moved to the middle of the aisle just in front of the coffin. The candles on either side were beginning to flicker as he quietly, almost inaudibly, recited the Twenty-third Psalm. “The