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

your mother more than I remember my mother. She would drive us around in that 1946 Chrysler Town and Country, you and Bridget and Bill and Jane and me and Maggie only. No governesses. Right down to the nitty-gritty time, to Kiddie Land or wherever it was that we’d take our ride. With her in the Town and Country with the top down. How else would I remember this car which I only rode in maybe a dozen times during my life? The color of it, the texture of it, the color of the beautiful upholstery—and your mother driving this huge Chrysler, you know, your petite mom, heading down the highway with the top down having a gas with all of us kids screaming and yelling. It was green, forest green. Great metallic paint. Beautiful hood, Chrysler hood, great chrome. The dash was wood, so beautiful, full of varnish. Your initials painted on the door, ‘bBb,’ little ‘b,’ big ‘B,’ and little ‘b’ in kind of an oval. It was our dream. It was all beautiful, varnished wood, polished metal, chrome, and flowing blond hair, all of us giggling and laughing …”

  So Red the Rose, However You Spell It

Margaret Sullavan, Lovely Meg,

Tell me the reason, pray,

That you spell your name, O bewitching dame,

Sullavan with an a.

Do the Murphys fashion their tag with e,

Or the Finnegans with a y?

The way you spell could amaze John L.,

The Sullivan with an i.

Margaret Sullavan, star alone,

Spell it your own sweet way;

The fairest of sights in twinkling lights

Is Sullavan with an a.

OGDEN NASH

Henry Fonda:

“She was not an easy woman to categorize or to explain. If I’ve ever known anyone in my life, man or woman, who was unique, it was she. There was nobody like her before or since. Never will be. In every way. In talent, in looks, in character, in temperament. Everything. There sure wasn’t anybody who didn’t fall under her spell.”

Life, however, went on normally; that was very important, Mother said.

She said also—in another family announcement, at which Father was not present—that she and Father were, after all, getting divorced. There was no chance of a reconciliation, because he’d fallen in love with someone else.

Bridget, Bill, and I darted sidelong glances at each other. We had learned that the best camouflage was to keep very still and not call attention to ourselves. I knew it all the time, I told myself—not the part about falling in love with someone else, but the divorce part, and what difference would the reason make now? Actually, it did make a difference, the more I pondered it in the silence that followed that revelation, and maybe it was ruder not to ask questions out loud. For instance, if Father had fallen in love with another woman, did that mean he had fallen out of love with Mother? That didn’t make sense unless he had been pretending all this time. Did love just stop? Run out? If so, where did that leave Bridget, Bill, and me? Didn’t he belong to us any more? Had he ever loved any of us at all? How could anyone stop loving Mother? She was perfect. Obviously if it was possible to stop loving her, it was more possible to stop loving us.

Mother was sitting in her bedroom on a settee, the one Bridget had crayoned orange when she was a year old, eliciting the first spanking in our family. That reminded me of Father’s promises: he’d kept the one about never spanking me again, broken the one about divorce. Fifty-fifty. Maybe that wasn’t a bad score; I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure I’d ever trust him again. Mother’s hands clenched in her lap, her knuckles as white as her fingernails were red. Her head was bowed. I was dizzy with emotions, proprietary about Father, protective of Mother. My eyes began to sting.

“Stop frowning, Brooke,” said Mother, cocking her head.

I cleared my throat. “I’m thinking.”

“I know, but one of these days you’re going to look in the mirror and see two big creases permanently stuck in your forehead. What then?”

I’ll stop thinking, I thought, and cleared my throat again.

“Come over here,” she beckoned me teasingly, “and let me wipe them off. Just a little spit—”

I dug in my heels. “Is she pretty? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Good gooby, yes! Prettier. You’re just used to me.”

“Nobody could be prettier—”

“Now I can just tell from your expressions you’re dying to know her name and you don’t dare ask.”

We nodded.

“My poor darlings. Don’t worry, I’m all right. I’m not going to cry or do anything embarrassing. Her name is Nancy Hawks. Some people call her ‘Slim,’ because she’s wonderfully tall and thin. She’s nice and funny and beautifully dressed—”

“You know her? You’ve met her? Where?”

“Uh-huh. Many times. Here and there. She was married to Howard Hawks for a year or so—he’s a well-known movie director—and they’ve recently divorced. Maybe she was lonely when Leland was alone and lonely.… That can happen.”

“Are they going to be married?”

“Probably. I don’t really know. Maybe after our divorce is final. It takes some time. Oh, dear—that’s still to come, the messy part, dividing everything up. Everything but you. I want you all to know, and so does your father, that whatever happens, he will go right on loving you all in exactly the same way, just as much, always. His feelings for you will never change. Of that you may be absolutely sure. Those feelings, the feelings parents have for their children, aren’t the same kinds of feelings that they have for each other. Parents don’t always love each other wisely or forever, although we all suppose we’re going to. Being grown up is no guarantee against making mistakes. Lots of them.” She shivered and wrapped herself in a sweater she had worn for as long as I could remember, a white sweater with the black initials “MS” knitted all over it. “Pugh. Now I’m