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

turned off the lights and kissed us good night, Bill crept into Bridget’s and my room and got in bed with me.

Over the next few days, the three of us held long whispered conferences. We concluded unanimously that the best way to treat Mother (and indirectly ourselves) was to get her married off again as quickly as possible. This idea was not, we pointed out to each other, disloyal to Father. On the contrary, it would be in everyone’s best interests. Clearly we needed a man around the house; it would be terrible to have Mother moping, however bright a face she might put on for our sakes. The ideal stepfather would be clever enough not to try to replace Father, who was irreplaceable; he would be rich, rich enough to buy me a horse and stable, a doll hospital for Bridget, a miniature car with a real bona-fide engine for Bill to drive around in; he would sweep us up lock, stock, and barrel to innumerable exotic places all over the world, where, fluent in six or seven languages, he carried on his enigmatic business of a so highly dangerous but earthshaking nature that he could never reveal it, and he would make us all, particularly Mother (on whom he showered pearls and diamonds), laugh a great deal.

When we mentioned our solution to Mother, she smiled ruefully and said it was very thoughtful of us, but she didn’t think she ever wanted to get married again. It just wasn’t that easy to fall in love. “First you have to find the man.”

There were at least two possibilities.

There was Charlie Feldman, an important Hollywood agent (and, as such, a friendly rival of Father’s), whom we seeded as a front runner because the morning after he took Mother to dinner for the first time (“Oh, you really are incorrigible,” she protested to us; “I’ve known him for years!”), he lavished on her a heavy gold bracelet hung with an emerald-studded Taurus. (“Well, well, how did he know what month your birthday is?” Her reaction, we perceived hopefully, was studied nonchalance. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, he makes it his business to know everything about potential clients. Signs of the zodiac—what nonsense. It’s much too flashy, and I’ll never wear it.” But she did.) At the same time he sent gold identification bracelets for Bridget and me, already inscribed with our names correctly spelled (mine usually wasn’t), which Mother had a much more difficult time explaining away.

Also there was a tall handsome Arizonan, George Gregson, who had many things to his credit. For one, he was a widower; his wife, the lovely (to judge from a photograph we once saw) daughter of Dr. Edwin Janss (head of the Janss Corporation, which had developed all of Westwood and Holmby Hills—another plus), had been killed in a tragic automobile accident right after the second of their two children had been born. George, fortunately for us, had never married again. His daughter, Patsy, was by now a year older than I, and son, Eddie, a year younger, the ideal ages for step-siblings. Mother and George met perfectly: drinking champagne at a white-tie party, with, in the background, a ton of fresh caviar heaped in the hollow back of a huge swan magnificently carved from a block of ice. Patsy, Eddie, Bridget, Bill, and I met perfectly, too: at the Ringling Brothers Circus, when it was still held in a big tent with a terrific, steaming, smelly sideshow. We all bought chameleons on little leashes to pin on our shirts and afterward went back to the vast Janss estate, which fronted what seemed to be a mile of Sunset Boulevard (from which it was set back by another mile of driveway) in Holmby Hills; there the children lived with George and their grandparents, and there, in the splendid greenhouses latticed with a jungle of orchids, we set our chameleons free. That afternoon, I fell madly in love with Eddie, even though he was a year younger, and fantasized about a double wedding. The idea of marrying my stepbrother had an undeniable cachet. Patsy was as crazy about horses as I: not only that, the Jansses owned Conejo Ranch (which the Janss Corporation eventually developed into Thousand Oaks, a gigantic industrial park and shopping center in the San Fernando Valley), where they invited us to go riding whenever we wanted. George, who had an endearing habit of saying “Cheerio, pip-pip” with a Southwestern twang, and even looked a bit like a cowboy with his steel-blue eyes, sprouted overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk, into the towering position of top contender for Mother’s hand. It was spontaneous combustion, as far as we were concerned.

And then, one bright November day, just before Thanksgiving, off the train at Pasadena and into our lives stepped an Englishman. The mere fact of his nationality ranked him, sight unseen, as a redoubtable challenger; in addition, the scrupulousness with which Mother primed us for his arrival was so noticeably intensive that we were predisposed to scratch all the preliminaries and hand her over without even a token interview on behalf of our own self-interest. A period of probation or courtship seemed redundant: we knew enough. His name was Kenneth Wagg, and he had four sons (“with such enchanting looks and exquisite manners”), who, ranging from thirteen to four years old, flowed around us age-wise with agreeable fluidity. He had featured in Mother’s letters from England as a heroic fellow who had saved her from starving to death by keeping her supplied with two cups a day of Horlick’s Malted Milk, a putty-colored powder whose brand name made us snicker when we considered the ramifications of advertising it (“Hor-lick’s? Tch, tch, Kenneth”), whose heavy cloying taste we found more palatable disguised with chocolate anything (eventually, for consumption in this country, Kenneth was to devise Horlick’s Malted Milk Puffballs, plain or chocolate-coated—only the former in our house—a sort of highly nutritional candy, too esoteric for sale anywhere but