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

dared ask her if she’d leave it to me when she died. She wasn’t like Grandsarah at all. Afterward in the checker cab on the way down Fifth Avenue, Father would stretch with relief.

“Got it all sewed up this time,” he’d say. “You kids were a tremendous help. Can’t stand to go there by myself.”

But when, several years later, Maisie did die, Father’s hope died with her. She didn’t leave him a cent. Her vast fortune went to charity and Agnes.

In the fall of 1950, Mother and Kenneth were married. It had been a long courtship, quite long enough, we thought, having tried every trick in the book to get Kenneth to propose in front of us. In the end, our feelings about him as a stepfather were mixed. We had reservations about his ability to keep Mother in line. The problems we expected him to solve were insoluble. “She walks all over him,” Bridget used to say, sniffing. “He’s so dotty about her he never takes our part even when she’s wrong. It’s unjust.” But he was a kind man, with a gentle sense of humor and awesome reserves of patience; sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if matters wouldn’t be much worse without him around. He gave to our lives a semblance of structure and continuity if not the excitement we longed for. And there was a bizarre side to the mild-mannered, slightly stuffy Englishman the world saw: he was a crack gambler who had once supported himself handsomely by winning at chemin de fer in casinos all over the South of France and private clubs all over London. Although he’d long since kicked the habit by stringently disciplining himself to stay away from places like Le Touquet and Biarritz, there was no card game at which Kenneth did not excel. “I’ve always held better cards than anyone I know” was his modest way of putting it. As a result, Mother, who was a natural cardsharp, took up bridge, and two or three times a week invited various of their Greenwich cronies over for dinner and a cutthroat match. On those evenings, Elizabeth would really outdo herself, and we’d start hanging around the kitchen the minute the school bus dropped us off; also, with much fanfare, we’d be offered sherry before dinner and wine instead of milk, a privilege to which Bridget and Bill held their noses but of which I took full advantage. (“I can see you’re going to turn into an alcoholic someday.” Mother’s prediction was only half joking. “All the same, my theory is it’s better for you to get drunk under parental supervision than out at some wild party. Promise me one thing: if you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in a car with an inebriated beau behind the steering wheel, hop out—even if you’re in the middle of the Merritt Parkway. And don’t hitchhike home.” “What’ll I do?” “Carry a dime and call a taxi.” “In the middle of the Parkway?” “Don’t quibble.”) Also, in spite of his pudgy physique—Bridget’s nickname for him was “Uncle Barrel”—Kenneth was a champion racquets player and belonged to the Racquets Club in New York City where he could pursue a game of backgammon between matches. Good-naturedly disregarding our merciless teasing about his potbelly, he retired gigantic silver trophy upon trophy from which we drank champagne loving cups at Christmas.

The four Wagg boys remained in England for their schooling at Sunningdale and Eton; Kenneth worked out a set of logistics that kept him in perpetual rotation between their holidays in England, his job running Horlick’s Malted Milk in Racine, Wisconsin, and his second family in Greenwich, Connecticut. This routine was not entirely to Mother’s satisfaction. She likened it to Alec Guinness’s in The Captain’s Paradise, playfully feigning jealousy about a consortium of imaginary mistresses. Eventually Kenneth gave up Horlick’s and joined a travel agency in New York City to which he commuted daily. In the summer of 1951, he fulfilled one of his fondest dreams by arranging to bring his four sons to this country for part of their holiday. The plan called for them to join us at a family camp on Squam Lake, New Hampshire. That also happened to be the summer Mother decided to build a swimming pool. Typically, she exhausted herself overseeing every inch of the construction. (“Why, when I am having a pool built, do I have to enter so fully into pool building, do I have to identify myself with every workman? Why do I have to give the whole of myself to whatever I undertake, whether it’s to you children, the house, acting, packing, reading, loving—or hating? Why, whenever someone tells me a sad story, do I suffer so much more than the sufferer? There must be a flaw in my character.”) After a few weeks of throwing herself into camp life at Squam Lake, organizing picnics, tennis matches, expeditions, games, and so on, she announced that she had to go away for a rest; she was tired of friends and children, of feeling neglected, of being cooped up without a breathing space. “All I need is a week,” she said, “of being selfish eight hours a day.” So she drove back to Greenwich alone to recuperate. A week later, fully refreshed, she was back as if nothing had happened.

Although she had never done anything like that before, we were not, at the time, remotely unsettled by her behavior. It seemed a natural extension of the ordinary. We’d become accustomed to, charmed—when not irritated—by the way her emotions rose and fell, cyclically, like the tides. And always she was so sure of herself, so positive even about the negative, so uncompromisingly opinionated, we accepted many of her eccentricities without question. She lived by them. “It’s my nature,” she warned gaily, “to go around in high spirits most of the time and then to collapse.” A few years later, I remembered that piece of self-evaluation with a chill.

Periodically, Mother would