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

have suffered without it. Inflamed by her oratory, we felt a terrible collective shame at not being Jewish ourselves. “I find the only prejudice worth having,” she concluded vehemently, “is against people who are prejudiced.” Further to dramatize her point and to remedy what she saw as her personal neglect of our religious training, she thereafter, instead of sending us each Sunday morning to Sunday School, read the Old Testament to us, starting with Genesis (and ending halfway-through Ezra, when her interest in the sessions lagged as much as ours).

We were pleased that she’d backtracked about Sunday School. Unbeknownst to her, we’d been playing hooky from it for ages. All our friends went to Christ Church, with its sanctimonius stone walls and rose window. But Mother had held out for the Round Hill Community Church, because it was a Spartan Calvinist structure, not a stained-glass window in the place, and the rector, Dr. Prince, wore sensible steel-rimmed glasses. We were not inspired by it. There was no pious ceremony, no incense or cushioned prayer stools, no Eucharistic chants, no dark shivering mystery. Mother thought all of that was baloney. Every Sunday she’d drive us away from the center of town and Christ Church, where our friends prepared for their first communion in virginal white dresses, toward the country and Round Hill Community Church with its simple wooden spire. She’d drop us off with twenty-five cents apiece for the collection plate, and come back for us an hour later, little realizing that we’d spent the hour playing hopscotch on the deserted country roads with our quarters as “loggers.”

Not only were there no Jews in Greenwich, before our family there were, with one exception, no movie stars either. That exception was a miracle. The Fondas had preceded us there by a few months; Hank was starring in the huge success Mr. Roberts, produced by Father, and with a long run ahead of him, he had brought his family from California to live in Greenwich for much the same reasons as Mother. Our first day of school—into which we awkwardly arrived at midterm, feeling more than the usual trepidation because we hadn’t been to school for years—was saved by the sight of Jane and Peter Fonda. The ironic coincidence that brought us all together once again in an unlikely town on a coast three thousand miles from home, the thrilling nuances of our parents’ ongoing personal and professional relationships, the old feeling that we belonged together tribally by some predestined ordinance endowed the five of us with a permanent sense of complicity. And more: through each other’s eyes we saw and knew everything there was to see or know; we were superhuman.

On our property, at the bottom of a grassy hill, was a lake overhung by two giant willows, beautiful trees that tolerated the five of us perfectly. We would all somersault madly down the hill head over heels until we were nauseated, giggling and shrieking “Wahoo!” and grabbing handfuls of willow branches to swing ourselves way out over the lake. Frog-hunting in the rowboat was one of our major pastimes. Another was putting on plays for our own private amusement. We would spend hours rehearsing them. Nobody else ever saw a performance. Peter, who liked to cackle evilly and drape himself in blankets, always played the villain; his most treasured role was that of an old miser counting his money. Bill had a running part as Peter’s sidekick, Jane as the hero, and Bridget as the ingénue; I was the director, also in charge of production.

In the sixth grade, Jane and I were kicked out of the Brownies. It was a scandal; nothing like it had ever before occurred in that chapter of the Girl Scouts. We went on strike and refused to attend meetings with the rest of our classmates, preferring any other form of recreation, even sitting alone in our classroom. There, surrounded by empty desks and half-erased blackboards, we devised a continuing fantasy about our illustrious careers, when we attained the magical age of eighteen, as co-madames of a high-class brothel fronted by a Chinese laundry, which fastidiously laundered the shirts of our customers while they dallied in the spectacular setting we’d provided behind the squalid façade. In every princely suite would be a fountain splashing with wine, and for every patron four or five of the most singularly exquisite girls ever seen by the human eye: highly educated (often highly born) and expert in all arts including sexual; multilingual, multiracial, hand-picked by us on yearly trips to all corners of the world. They would drape themselves across the opulently cushioned beds (the only furniture) or patter across the Moorish tiles with noble step, bearing exotic drugs, ointments for massage, salvers of sublime culinary delights, ivory lutes or lyres: whatever the occasion—and it went without saying, a clientele worthy of our establishment—demanded.

We went to the Greenwich Academy, a private school for girls in an august brick building on Maple Avenue. We wore uniforms: in spring, formless green shifts; in winter, ghastly orange lisle stockings, crepe-soled oxblood shoes with flaps over the laces, green wool suits, and tan shirts sturdily tacked down with men’s green ties.

Bill and Peter went to Brunswick, a boys’ school right around the corner. The main exchange between the two schools took place in the driveway of the Greenwich Academy each afternoon at 4:10, when our last gym class or study hall was over; school buses and cars, along with a goodly portion of Brunswick’s student body, collected by the front portico where the older Academites primped and preened and fluttered in their gruesome uniforms. Also there were Saturday-night dance classes, socially mandatory, between the two schools, held in our gymnasium under the tutelage of Miss Something-or-Other, where, in respective taffeta dresses and dark suits, we learned the fox-trot, the waltz, the rhumba, and the Mexican hat dance. After several disastrous trial runs, those Saturday-night gatherings were boycotted by the Hayward-Fonda clans—until the eighth grade when