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

its privacy and location—total wilderness with Beverly Hills five minutes away. The inside of the house, when she finished, was arresting: this was a period in which she and Father avidly collected paintings by Miró, Soutine, Picasso, Dufy, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Mondrian, and Mother thought it would be a good idea to complement them with a bold modern background. The living room had a cathedral ceiling, which slanted up to a peak; one side was painted pale chartreuse and the other lavender, to give the illusion, said Mother, that half the ceiling was perpetually shadowing the other half. Over the fireplace hung a rather somber monochromatic Grant Wood, my favorite painting, in which wheat-covered hills rolled to the horizon like waves, accentuated by the path of an unseen reaper exactly following the contour of the land. The fireplace underneath was Mother’s pièce de résistance, a cavernous slash of color that immediately caught the eye; its entire inside was painted a fiery reddish orange, as if it were incessantly ablaze. The dining-room walls were irregularly striped with tumbling pink watermelon slices, a motif carried through to its ultimate conclusion with the dining table: a twelve-foot-long rectangle of thick plate glass supported by two huge, green, egg-shaped pedestals, custom-designed to resemble upended watermelons from which slices had been carved vertically—big pink slices, sprinkled with black seeds—that reappeared horizontally as bases under the pedestals.

While we were still in Connecticut and Father was in California readying the house for our arrival, he wrote me,

Darling Brooke:

I am writing you a special, all by yourself letter because the poem you sent me was wonderful.

Our new cook seems very good. I told her that she had to cook wonderful food for my family so they would stay out here with me.

I am doing all kinds of things to the house to get it nice for you. The curtains are being cleaned, the rugs are being cleaned, and tell your mother I just got her fifty pounds of sugar and soap.

Do you remember the plants in the dining room? Well, they have all grown so much that you can’t see out of the dining-room window. Pretty soon, they’ll climb all over the room. Your mother likes everything to look like a jungle, but nevertheless, this morning I got hold of Kay, the Japanese gardener, and told him he had to clean it out enough so we could see through the window. Do you remember the book of Ludwig Bemelmans’ about the old lady in Africa with the airplane? Well, the dining room looks a good deal like that.

You don’t miss me half as much as I miss you, so hurry up home.

Much love,

     Your Father

Typically, the feature of the house that Mother most loved, its rugged isolation, was the very one that Father found most disagreeable. Given an opportunity to purchase, for a minimal sum of money, all the acres and acres of surrounding land known as the Doheny Estate, he turned it down without hesitation, not wanting to believe that such rough terrain would ever be worth anything; fifteen years later he cursed himself for not having the foresight to know that, owing to sheer greed and the improved land development techniques that kept pace with it—Beverly Hills real estate being in particular demand—the Doheny Estate mountains would be hacked into ziggurats, graded and filled and studded with expensive houses on view lots, and promoted into the most valuable real estate in Los Angeles.

In those days the sky belonged to patrols of turkey buzzards circling it leisurely, the hills swarmed with jackrabbits and deer, and at night packs of coyotes gathered on our lawn to howl at the moon. To Father’s horror, the ground was infested with snakes, both rattlesnakes and their natural enemies, kingsnakes, a differentiation in species that interested him not at all. Since no fewer than two rattlesnakes a week were seen around the house, Bridget, Bill, and I weren’t allowed to wander out alone until we were given lessons in how to kill them if necessary and how, if we were bitten, to use the emergency anti-venom kit stashed in a kitchen cupboard. Father, for all his alleged queasiness, devised his own method of dispatching rattlesnakes, one that at least allowed him to preserve some distance from his victims both alive and dead: observing that the dirt road, which acted as a powerful conductor for solar heat, was the most likely spot for snakes to congregate, he would, regularly, hop in the car and pick them off with it, grimly bouncing in and out of gullies, slamming the car into reverse to back over any he’d missed, and sometimes, as they scattered before him, chasing them up and down the dirt road for hours.

For Bridget, Bill, and me, the years 1946 and 1947 were spent in a mishmash of educational systems, depending on whichever appealed to Mother’s mood of the moment. Bridget and I went to Westlake, a private school for girls in Beverly Hills, until Mother concluded that it was too snobbish—we had been singled out by several older students as being the children of a movie star, and that distinction was somehow more insidious in Beverly Hills than in Connecticut. Then, for a period, we went back to public school, joined by Bill, who was at last old enough and delighted not to be left behind every morning: the Warner Avenue School had a reputation for being “progressive,” and Mother had an unlimited capacity to be enchanted by anything new. Her love affair with progressive education ended as soon as she discovered that the beautiful handwriting Miss Brown had laboriously tried to inculcate in us for years wasn’t taught at the Warner Avenue School until fourth-grade level, and that not only were our classmates still back in the dark ages printing their names at a snail’s pace, but also they had yet to find out what long division meant.

After that, it was back to the good old days of Miss Brown,