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

was eating custard, which Bridget regarded suspiciously; he informed us that Dave Chasen, not the doctor, had saved his life by squeezing ten pounds of raw sirloin, daily, into one large glass of blood and sending it over from his restaurant (in spite of the fact that it was wartime and even Chasen’s supplies were rationed). He also announced, scornfully, that the doctor had ordered him to quit smoking, drinking, and working so hard—an impossible combination. During his stay in the hospital, Father, out of boredom, grew a dashing mustache. He came home for Halloween and after a few weeks went to New York for Mother’s opening. We were left with our nurse, Miss Mullens, and our tutor, Miss Brown.

Miss Brown was asked to take the three of us to New York for Christmas. She was a young, serious, dark-haired woman with glasses, and handwriting that we admired and tried to emulate. Miss Brown had become an honorary member of our family. She made it unnecessary for us to go to school, entirely to Mother’s satisfaction. Mother had paid a dutiful visit to my kindergarten class at Brentwood Town and Country the previous year and, sitting discreetly in the rear, had become chagrined when she discovered that the class was learning to count with lima beans and that the teacher’s control of English grammar had lapsed, unforgivably, as she had admonished us not to play tag and “those kind of games” in the classroom. Bill was still too young to go to school, but Mother, theorizing that the entire California school system was inadequate, took Bridget and me out the next day and we never returned. After that, Miss Brown came to our house every morning at nine o’clock, and sat with us at the long dining-room table where we learned to read and write and do arithmetic until noon. Miss Brown banished the standard reading primers from our education; instead, we cut our teeth on the most beautiful books she and Mother could find, such as Tanglewood Tales and Sinbad the Sailor, which were illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and on Father’s choice, Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood, which was illustrated by Maxfield Parrish and contained some of Father’s favorite poems. Father never tired of reading us “The Dinkey-Bird” (goes singing in the amfalula tree), “The Duel” (The gingham dog and the calico cat), “The Fly-Away Horse” (Oh, a wonderful horse is the Fly-Away Horse), and “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” (one night, sailed off in a wooden shoe—sailed on a river of crystal light …). My entire concept of what the world looked like and what life promised was shaped by the sensuous textures and sinuous lines of Dulac’s fantasies, the exotic blues and purples and thick-lipped heavy-lidded sentinels of slender youths that populated Maxfield Parrish’s visions. Bridget and I learned to read quickly and voraciously.

The Super Chief was a beautiful train. It had a parlor car with a huge curved sun window at the far end and lots of card tables with waiters in white jackets hovering nearby. Bridget and I appropriated the upper berths in our compartment: it was a good way to travel. We liked the nights best when the train became pure sound and motion and we lay on our berths staring out through little curtained windows at the invisible black countryside.

In Chicago we changed to the Twentieth Century Limited. During the layover in Chicago, we were whisked off by Mother’s younger brother Sonny, who had started a law practice there. He gave us our first bath in three days and lunch at the Pump Room.

We fell in love with New York City at once. It was a city of firsts for us. When we got off the train, our very first snow was falling. Mother and Father took us on their laps in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park and we stuck out our tongues, laughing, and caught snowflakes; we felt them tingle and dissolve. There was a pair of turtledoves in a huge white cage in the apartment at the Hotel Pierre, and “The Turtle’s” author-director and producer, respectively, John Van Druten and Delly (Alfred de Liagre), waiting for us with an enormous bowl of our first caviar. Mother ecstatically spooned it onto slivers of toast and then into our mouths, and we obediently reveled in it, rolling it around our mouths and popping the tiny eggs like salty little grapes against our palates, even asking for more. Mother was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin: we would willingly have followed her anywhere, and a great deal of our pleasure must have derived from hers.

She took us to the Central Park Zoo our second morning, and in the afternoon to her real passion, the Bronx Zoo, thereby setting a pattern that never varied in the cities we visited over the years: a prompt, mandatory visit with the animals. She would spend hours talking to the keepers in the monkey house of any zoo in any city of any country she happened to be in, submerging herself in all available data pertaining to chimpanzees. Mother had long schemed about adopting a baby chimpanzee into our family. With that end in mind, when I was three and Bridget a year old (before Bill had been born and perhaps despairing that he ever would be), she had Roger Edens and Father bring us out to the M-G-M zoo on the back lot one afternoon after our naps. We were all dressed up in our coats and very excited, especially when we caught sight of Mother at a distance in an elegant black dress with a white picture hat, and a young chimpanzee cradled in each arm. We all rushed toward one another, but when Bridget, who got to her first, reached up to hug her, the two chimps, seized by jealousy, let go of Mother’s neck and attacked Bridget with a vengeance. She had to be taken off, screaming and covered with tooth marks, to the hospital