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

to overlook both the radio—one of her pet peeves—on the tile counter, blaring forth Bing Crosby or the “Jack Benny Show,” and the New York Daily News, to which Elizabeth subscribed, with its tabloid sensationalism spread across the kitchen table. Bridget, Bill, and I could be found any night of the week down in the sanctity of the kitchen, watching Elizabeth make dinner. We learned to cook, not by lifting a finger—she was too proud and possessive for that—but by years of hungry vigilance while she (pretending not to notice us) prepared one spectacular Southern dish after another. We loved her radio and her Daily News. “Elizabeth,” I’d say, daydreaming, “someday I’m going to marry Marlon Brando.” (It was unbearably distressing to me when Marlon married Anna Kashfi instead. But I forgave him and temporized. After all, we’d never met.) “You’re not taking this seriously, Elizabeth. Wait till I’m eighteen. He’ll divorce her, you’ll see.” Elizabeth would glance at me across the egg whites she was beating for meringue; her nod was worth pure gold. “Hmm,” she’d capitulate, swayed by the ferocity of my determination. “Maybe.” When she was in a good mood, she was a wonderful audience.

Shortly after we moved to Greenwich, a heavy crate was delivered to our house with a lot of hoopla. In it was a gift from Father: one of the first television sets on the market. From the moment of its arrival, Mother treated it like an unwelcome intruder and strictly curtailed our watching to no more than three programs a week, one for each of us. We began to look forward to the evenings when she went out to dinner; the minute she left the house we’d disobediently race for the set and, feeling giddy and light-headed, stay up way past bedtime watching the black-and-white cowboy movies that were heavily featured in the pioneer days of TV. As time went by, programming became more sophisticated and Elizabeth joined our clandestine nocturnal huddle. Occasionally, thinking she heard car wheels on the gravel driveway, she’d spring up and look out the window. “Just another five minutes,” she’d say brusquely, and settle down for another hour. Best of all were the two weeks every spring when Mother went down to the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands to get some sun. She never understood why we didn’t mind her being away. “My darlings,” she’d apologize, “I hate leaving you like this—like a rat deserting a sinking ship. Will you be able to manage without me?” We’d extend her our sweetest long-suffering smiles and assure her that we’d make do somehow; off she’d go, down to the balmy coral-flecked beaches where she loved to sunbathe nude, and we, left behind, would blithely plump up our pillows in front of the television set. One night, Elizabeth, Bridget, and I stayed up until two o’clock watching The Dead Don’t Die, a vampire movie that so profoundly terrified all of us that we went to bed in my room with crucifixes around our necks, our arms crossed over our chests as we lay rigidly staring up at the ceiling.

For all its shortcomings, television did link us to the rest of the world. When it came to covering events of consequence (Current Events, as the biweekly mandatory course at the Academy was called), television became a kind of animated newspaper. Although Mother herself was not a devotee of baseball, she tolerated—from a distance—our annual involvement with the World Series, then dominated by the New York Yankees and the great Joe DiMaggio. And even she had to admit, when it came to the first televised presidential campaign—Dwight D. Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson—that television wasn’t all bad. I never thought I’d see Mother firmly entrenched in front of Father’s “folly,” as it was referred to, but all during the McCarthy hearings, she ordered lunch and dinner served in the playroom, to which she’d banned the accursed television set. That was quite a time. We children were treated to the privilege of observing Mother’s rage, at its most imaginatively expressed, directed not at us but at the flickering images of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Vice-President Richard Nixon, and counsel Roy Cohn.

Meanwhile, Father was busying himself with a truly Machiavellian scheme. He’d determined to acquire a large fortune one way or another. So it was that Maisie Plant Hayward, the Colonel’s widow, re-entered our lives. Father, as her stepson, was her most logical heir. After all, she had no other living family. Once or twice a year, we children, innocent and fresh-faced (so Father convinced himself for this purpose), were called on to remind Maisie of his existence. And at her signal we would collect for afternoon tea at the Fifth Avenue mansion.

Maisie had reduced her living quarters to a section of the top floor: an incredible domed conservatory where the elevator arrived, a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, which I remember chiefly for its black onyx bathtub standing on four solid-gold claw feet, and Agnes’s room. (Agnes was Maisie’s faithful personal maid.)

More interesting by far than the obligatory visit and tea (vanilla ice cream for Father and us) was the rest of the house. The servants’ quarters in the basement particularly caught my fancy; the servants’ dining-room table was always set for twelve, with twelve half-grapefruits topped by maraschino cherries.

“Twelve!” I would invariably gasp. “Twelve people to take care of one!”

“Goddamn barmaid,” was Father’s stock reply.

A ballroom took up one of the six floors. It stretched clear from Fifth Avenue on one side to Madison Avenue on the other. We found it incomprehensible that Maisie had holed herself up in three or four of the least amusing rooms of her domain—along with an odd assortment of card tables on which to display an even odder assortment of pillboxes and jigsaw puzzles.

“Father,” I’d whisper after a while, placing one hand delicately over my favorite ruby-studded box when Maisie wasn’t looking, “do you really think she’d notice if this disappeared?”

“Yes I do. She probably counts them every morning.”

I never