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

more than she could chew. If I reversed our positions, as she was always adjuring me to do, I had to agree that I was impossible. “What would you do if you were me?” she’d query, at the end of her patience. I had no idea. It was one thing when we were adorable three-year-olds in starched organdy pinafores; quite another when we were erupting into puberty and chaos. “I loathe having to be a policewoman all the time,” complained Mother. “Nag, nag, nag.” (Then shut up and leave me alone, I’d think. From my point of view, it was she who was impossible, not I. The predicament was that I had a different point of view for every occasion.) “If you think it’s fun to play God—” I didn’t think it was fun. I overflowed with sympathy for her. What folly to perpetuate the human race; I, for one, would not make the same mistake. No children for me; no blood on my hands. I didn’t want to live through this torture again.

The next morning, combing out my pin curls, I cheered up at the sight of myself in the mirror; was charming to everyone at breakfast, ate three helpings of sausages, got an A-minus on my English test, made left halfback on the field hockey team, spent the afternoon recess learning dirty jokes in the eighth-grade coat-room, scavenged twelve cents from my friends after school for a vanilla burnt-almond Good Humor, and managed to have at least six hours of happiness. My adolescence was a total delirium.

During the nineteen-fifties, Greenwich, Connecticut, was, on the surface, an ideal place to be a teen-ager. It lay on the Long Island Sound, not quite a suburb of New York City, but an easy thirty-five-minute commute from it by either car or train. Greenwich was a wealthy community that prided itself on maintaining the appearance of a small town. An expensive version of a small town, to be sure, with spacious maple-lined streets radiating out from the core of its township—a single shopping street, Greenwich Avenue, where, in classical tradition, were located the post office, the drugstore, the five-and-ten-cent store, and any other unobtrusive businesses that did not challenge the community’s complacent air of self-preservation. As for the maple-lined streets, they eased quickly away from the typical New England houses near the center of town toward the real heart of Greenwich: its vast country estates, which grew vaster with each passing mile. All the intersections along the way were delineated by signposts set in large triangles of evenly clipped hedges. (Sometimes when Mother went out to dinner, Bill and I would encamp in the middle of the triangle where our road, Clapboard Ridge, joined the main artery of North Street, and would spend the evening shooting our BB guns through its protective hedges at the rear tires of passing cars, hardly able to contain our pleasure when we hit our target and the car swerved toward the ditch opposite.) That was Greenwich, with businesses small, properties large and valuable, zoning laws tough, and with enough clout from its citizens—many of them heads of giant corporate interests in New York City—to keep it that way.

No wrong side of the tracks, no slums, robberies, rapes, or murders—although I can vaguely recall one fatal car accident after a big private débutante party that sobered everyone up enough to question, for a while, the advisability of serving alcoholic beverages at those ritual summer galas. For where its social life was concerned, Greenwich was no small town at all; it was tremendous.

We moved there in the fall of 1948. Mother had decided to civilize us. The time had come to give priority to the serious matters of education, culture, and social structure, none of which was provided by Brookfield or California. But Greenwich had a slew of excellent private schools (Greenwich Academy, Brunswick, Greenwich Country Day, Rosemary Hall, et cetera), a slew of churches (Christ Church, Round Hill Community Church, et cetera), and access to all the cultural advantages of New York City. It also had a multitude of exclusive clubs (the Greenwich Country Club, the Round Hill Club, the Field Club, the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, the Belle Haven Beach Club), which was one aspect of life there that Mother found reprehensible. Despite our eventual importunings for her to join one (like the parents of all our friends), she drew the line and steadfastly refused. “I’m not a joiner,” she’d say, “and anyway, I don’t believe in that kind of nouveau-riche snobbism.”

She also had grave misgivings about the bigotry in Greenwich; there were no Jews. I’d never heard the word “Jew” until we moved to Greenwich. One afternoon we were all drinking iced tea on the flagstone terrace when a friend of mine idly quoted her mother as being greatly relieved that the owners of such-and-such a house had held out against the irresistible bid of a rich New York Jewish couple who’d driven out three times to look at it—supposedly very prominent, too, but you know how that is: let one in, then another, and suddenly property values—Whereupon Mother exploded. It was one of the only two times I ever saw her really lose her temper (the other was when I punched Bridget in the nose for breaking one of my china horses), and I was extremely impressed. She sprang to her feet, her face purple with emotion. “There is one thing I will not tolerate—not in my house, not from anyone, not ever!—and that is discrimination of any kind, particularly anti-Semitism.” She pounded one fist in the other hand for emphasis. “The finest, most brilliant people I know are Jews, my closest friends are Jews!” She paced agitatedly back and forth, superstitiously avoiding the cracks in the flagstone, delivering herself of a long impassioned lecture that not only detailed the entire history of the Jewish race, its accomplishments and persecutions, but also lamented the incalculable loss—cultural, intellectual, and scientific—that the rest of civilization would