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

have liked: a beautiful, chic, smart, funny, doting mother married to, of all people, our father. By comparison we felt unlucky, and we couldn’t help making comparisons. Father’s extravagance was legendary. He lived like a prince, and loved every minute of it.

“Leland’s always had a compulsion to live beyond his means,” Mother once remarked caustically when we returned, flushed with pleasure and weighted down with gifts, from his house in Manhasset, Long Island. “If his income were a million dollars a year, he’d spend a million and a half.” That may have been somewhat exaggerated, but we thought it was glorious.

“That’s his affair,” Bridget mumbled under her breath.

“Not entirely,” retorted Mother, better able to hear some mumbles than others. “It’s my affair when he sends you home with expensive cameras that would take you weeks around here to save up for, weeks of washing the car and mowing the lawn—when Leland casually hands you a twenty-dollar bill that represents a month of hard-earned allowance. It’s really quite unfair, because—I realize he doesn’t see you very often and it’s perfectly natural for him to want to be very generous when he does, but—his generosity undermines the values that it’s my responsibility to teach you. I would like to be able to be so cavalier—much more fun, I assure you. But I don’t want you brought up with the impression that money is that simple to come by. Or that it can buy a good life. Or that it can buy—” She paused emphatically.

“What?” we answered, our hearts beginning to race with knowledge of what she was going to say next, and the fear of it.

“Love.”

“Oh, Mother,” I blurted. “He’s not trying to buy our love—he knows we already love him.”

“I’m not implying you don’t,” said Mother, a look of hurt outrage crossing her face (which reinforced my resolution never again to mention the word “love” as it applied to Father). “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that by overindulging you on the rare occasions when you see him, Leland is—unintentionally, I’m sure—inviting you to correlate money and love. Very irresponsible of him. You’re too young and impressionable to understand that love can’t be rewarded by a two-hundred-dollar camera that you admired on his bureau this morning—and of which, incidentally, he happens to have twelve more. Don’t look so guilty, darlings; it’s not your fault. You can’t help it if you come to that conclusion.”

“Here we go again,” said Bridget, her eyes fixed on the braided rug at her feet.

“I didn’t come to that conclusion; you did.” I shook my head and, ignoring Mother’s protests, stalked grandly upstairs to my room. Maybe Father was just trying to make up for lost time, for affection he didn’t know how to bestow on us any other way. If so, did it really make a difference? What counted was that he loved us, not whether he did so wisely or well.

So when Mother, at last believing we were old enough to handle the disparity in their life-styles, arranged for that prolonged visit with Father in Bermuda, ironically her fears were borne out. Bridget and I began to play one parent against the other. Father had the advantage. Not only were the novelty and glamour of the experience in his favor, but also the timing. We were just at the age where we dared to abandon our usual caution. We wanted to have an effect, even if it took the form of sabotage. Our pettiest gripes about Mother were aired. We found Father to be a sympathetic listener. We liked the feeling that he was in collusion with us, that although he could do little to remedy our problems, he understood them better than anyone. “God, I wish my hands weren’t tied,” he’d commiserate. Also Nan, with her coziness and flair, became more attractive to us than ever. The idea that we had another family to fall back on, should we alienate the old everyday one, gave us a sense of confidence. And even if I didn’t see Father as having anything but a backup position in our lives, I think Bridget did. From that moment on, her dissatisfaction with life in Greenwich was total.

For the next two years, however, the potential explosion of Bridget’s unhappiness was delayed because of the distance between Gstaad and Greenwich. Bill was safely tucked away at Lawrenceville, and I at Madeira. And that fall Mother went into rehearsals for Sabrina Fair.

In “Sabrina,” audiences were asked to believe that Mother, then forty-four years old, was a twenty-three-year-old girl. Not surprisingly, they did. Even at close range, Mother radiated the illusion that she was blessed with eternal youth. According to Bennett Cerf in his Saturday Review column:

Playwright [Samuel] Taylor describes Sabrina as a “vibrant beautiful young lady in her early twenties” and persuading Maggie Sullavan, born (according to Who’s Who) in 1909, to accept the role required a bit of doing. “I’m too old to play Sabrina,” she wailed. Director Hank Potter was inclined to agree. Taylor did not. The day of decision was a scorcher last July. Taylor and Potter journeyed up to Maggie’s Connecticut house for a final powwow. They found her at the pool in a very fetching and abbreviated bathing suit, with her two daughters aged sixteen and fourteen. Sceptic Potter looked hard at the trio and asked quite seriously, “Which of you three is Maggie?” She signed for the part of Sabrina there and then.

I, the greatest skeptic of all, came up on the train from Madeira to see for my own eyes. She was flawless in the play, and not a day over twenty. I sat in the second row defying her to betray her age by a mannerism, an inflection, and she did not. It was the most extraordinary illusion I have ever seen. Yet, strangely, her grace and charm and youth were real. Her performance was distinguished by one ingredient Mother claimed no respectable performance could ever be without: