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

fear, the first palpable fear I’d ever known. Twenty minutes earlier, I’d called my stepfather from a phone booth in Grand Central Station, clumsily pouring change into all three slots because he was in New Haven and I didn’t want him to think I was so cheap as to call collect. I wanted to talk to him and, with luck, to Mother, or at least send her my love if she couldn’t come to the phone; she was starring in a play that was trying out there before its New York engagement. He told me that she’d just died.

Mother dead. Impossible. I had called to say Happy New Year just in time to learn she was dead.

The vast dome of Grand Central Station closed down over me in the glass telephone booth like one of the jars in which we’d caught fireflies as children, only without any holes punched out in the lid, so that I seemed to go deaf. There was absolute silence: the beating of my heart, the static on the telephone, my stepfather asking me between sobs to take the next train to New Haven, and me saying no, I had to be at the theatre in a few minutes and would come up by late train that evening—all silent—and even when I pushed open the door for air, no sound anywhere in the entire huge space of the station with its magazine stands and hot-dog stands and shoe-polishing stands and waiting rooms and information booths and entrances and exits filled as before with people, but people moving noiselessly, without echoes. I moved with them, my own footsteps on the worn marble floor and even the subway totally muffled as it lurched its way downtown. My mother, my very own mother, beautiful, warm, always more alive than anyone else in the world—alive in ways that nobody else dared to be—my mother, with her special gift for living and for giving that life to all the people who knew her and many who didn’t, dead.

There was only one other person in my subway car, a drunk swinging like a monkey from pull to pull. He stopped right in front of me and leaned down, suspended by both arms. “Why,” he asked in a slur, puncturing the dense membrane of silence with such ease that I looked up at him as if he were a wizard, “why would you be looking so sad, little lady? It’s New Year’s Day.” He peered more closely. “Drink up your cup fer auld lang syne. Here’s to you—”

“Are we the only two people on this whole subway tonight?” I asked him as if it were the most profound question in the whole world, desperately wanting him to go on, to tell me everything about his life before we got to my stop.

“Everyone’s home with friends,” he said. “Celebrating.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Well, you see, I’ll ride to the end of the line. They let me sleep here.”

“My mother died tonight,” I informed him because he was a stranger. Water began to rise in his crusty red eyes, and then he sat down quietly next to me, shaking his head. I was grateful he was there. We both waited until my stop came, and he stood up with me as I got off.

Then I climbed swiftly up to the street, my mind beginning to burn like a newspaper. First there was the energizing reassurance that I was on my way somewhere specific and solid and important. I was already wound up to play my role before the phone call, and after the shock that followed, my instincts were sharpened by the freezing air; I was supposed to give a performance, and it would have to be an excellent performance. I kept sucking in air until my lungs hurt and then coughing it out like a steam engine; it reminded me that I was alive. It was much too soon for anyone involved with the play to have heard about her death, and I wouldn’t have to say anything until afterward, if then. So I concentrated as Lee Strasberg had taught us, whispering over and over in a litany, “I must use this, I must use this,” and finally arrived at the Gate Theatre, rather proud of myself, knowing, as seldom if ever one does, that I was going to do a fine job. Standing at the entrance of the theatre were the producer, the director, and the stage manager of the play, an unusual but not unreasonable place for them to be. Before I could say hello, Peter Kass, the director, blurted out something to the effect that Father had just called the theatre to tell them what had happened, and to have them cancel tonight’s performance.

“What?” I remember asking, waves of anger striking me. “What? He’s got no right to do that, he’s not the producer; it’s your play.”

But they appeared not to have heard my voice at all; as if in a bad dream, they were looking fixedly through me and beyond me, and suddenly I was grasped from behind by something dark and furry. I started to struggle violently, and then I smelled a familiar perfume. It was Pamela, her face a phantasmagoria of white against a background of black sable, and beyond her an enormous black limousine, hovering curbside like a sleek bird of prey, one wing outstretched to encompass me.

“Brooke, darling,” she asked anxiously, “you know about your mother?”

“Yes,” I answered tersely.

“Darling, your father has sent me down here to collect you immediately. He said you’d understand he couldn’t come himself, but he’s all tied up with phone calls to Bridget and Bill—come on, darling, he wants you at once. He needs you.”

“Pamela,” I said, stepping backward, “I have to give a performance tonight. Then I shall take a taxi up to the apartment.”

Pamela looked totally shocked. “You don’t understand, darling; your father has canceled tonight’s performance.”

By this time we had been joined somewhat tentatively by the three at the door