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

with the one sure-fire distraction, me. Mother’s letters sounded slightly oppressed. I could just imagine the general claustrophobia.

Although I hadn’t yet seen her, Bridget had just come back from her two years in Switzerland. All her letters had begged Mother’s permission to remain in Switzerland for her senior year, with the idea that eventually she might go to the Sorbonne or the University of Geneva. Her arguments were so persuasive that I’d taken her side. I realized that one of the factors in her reasoning was me. Several times, long ago, she’d confessed to Kenneth in the heat of emotion that she felt inferior. In Switzerland, with rivalry at a manageable distance, she seemed to be thriving. Her French was fluent and she had many friends. Amazingly, for one who had always been physically cautious, she had taken up skiing with a passion; her picture, with blond hair streaming over her red Alpine team sweater, graced the cover of a Gstaad travel folder. That spring she had written:

Dear Mother,

About school: I understand your reasoning, but what I would really like to do—and it isn’t just a whim of the moment, because I have thought it out thoroughly—is to finish high school here. I love the school. The girls are wonderful, and for me, at this point, I would rather have contacts with girls from England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Jamaica, Singapore, Istanbul, Zanzibar, Southern Rhodesia … than Greenwich, Connecticut. Also it would be a shame to leave when my French is finally almost mastered; after all, it has taken me sixteen years to speak English as well as I do. And next year I could learn German and Italian. I still don’t see what’s wrong with the six years of European education you say I’m committing myself to; I like Europe, or what I’ve seen of it, and I think it’s more interesting than America. Here there is history—and what is there in America? Even though it must be hard for you to realize that I’m sixteen, I really have thought this out, and I honestly and truly do want it.…

Mother, however, had chosen to disregard Bridget’s plea. Against the advice of both Kenneth and me, she had insisted that Bridget return for her senior year. Her reasons were abstruse. Bridget, she claimed, ran the risk of becoming a rootless expatriate. One year had been enough, two extravagant. Since it had been Mother’s wish to send us both in the first place, I found this logic specious, and said so. I also pointed out that she should seize the opportunity to encourage Bridget’s new-found independence. Mother, I think, found that the most subversive argument of all. In any case, she had recalled Bridget. Secretly, I was relieved to be as far away as possible from that homecoming.

Bridget and Bill were, under protest, both attending summer school at Brunswick. This, in their opinion, was a last-ditch recreation gratuitously contrived by Mother when she couldn’t find something more productive for them to do. Mother did not like idle hands. It was a good opportunity for Bridget to catch up on certain credits, and for Bill to improve his poor grades at Eaglebrook. Mother was furious with him. He had a recent history of lackadaisical study habits. His motivation had been sluggish ever since the time, when he was nine, he had gone briefly to boarding school in England. That was the fall Mother and Kenneth had got married. Mother had felt that Bill would benefit from the same educational experience his four stepbrothers were having. He’d had a marvelous time in England but, after several months of the penetrating winter damp, had come down with severe bronchitis. In addition, Father had returned from London with horror tales about the lack of food and central heating. (Father’s idea of minimum sustenance was a New York steak for lunch every day.) Mother had had visions of another mastoid operation like the one that had almost killed Bill in infancy, and had him sent home at once. After the rigorous curriculum at Sunningdale (algebra and Latin in the fourth grade), Brunswick must have seemed pallid. Bill had loved Sunningdale; now he lost all interest in school, and never regained it.

Mother wrote Father frostily in the spring of 1955. For her to have written him at all indicated an emergency.

Dear Leland,

Here are Bill’s reports from Eaglebrook. He’s also behaving very badly about money. I suggest that you don’t give him, for a while anyway, vast sums. The $20 last time lasted for five minutes.

I’ve given up policing the homework. He won out—I couldn’t take the unpleasantness each day—and I saw no evidence that he was developing any self-reliance or responsibility. I’m licked.

Bill’s freshman year at Eaglebrook had followed a familiar pattern: he was off to a good start and then slowly lost ground. The one thing all his masters agreed on was that he was an interesting conversationalist. The reports to which Mother referred were summed up by the headmaster:

Bill is quiet but genial. His mediocre effort and indifference to achievement, however, detract considerably from his having a full school life. The results of his spring testing program rank him in the upper quarter of the independent school population, and in English, arithmetic, and spelling his work is on the public school eleventh grade level. It is odd that with these very good figures his actual school grades remain low, and in his class ranking he is in the lower quarter of all his classes. However we see that the high quality is there.…

It was hard for me to ascertain what Bill was up to, since his letters home, though affectionate, were few and spare. He was then fourteen. I thought he was adorable. When we’d seen each other during vacations, we had been mutually protective: I defended him to Mother and he, in a misguided effort to defend my honor, ambushed my beaus. One night he sicced our German shepherd on an admirer I’d spent three years trying