Haywire (21 page)

As for the third rule, it was expected that all conversation be entertaining, lively, all-encompassing, and, insofar as possible, conducted with decorum. No interruptions were permitted—no newspapers at breakfast (a sore point with Father), except on Sunday mornings the
New York Times
crossword puzzle to sharpen our wits—and no subject was exempt if it could be introduced with a modicum of style; furthermore, anything of any interest that had occurred between one meal and the next, even if it was an embarrassing misdeed on the part of one of us, was brought up for required general discussion. Presided over by Mother, the dinner table was like a mirror in which all our behavior was reflected, a family tribunal, a microcosm of our total lives. Whoever missed a meal because of sickness, or was excused from the table for misbehavior, lost track of things and had to be filled in later.

• • •

That fall, the fall of 1945, Bridget and I went on the school bus to the public school in Brookfield. After years at the gentle hands of Miss Brown, school came as something of a shock. Moreover, we were extremely conspicuous for several reasons. The fact that we were the children of a celebrity who had mysteriously settled in that distant territory set us apart from the first day of school; it seemed the entire community knew about us, and were both suspicious of and flattered by our presence, although we couldn’t figure out why. Mother had successfully isolated us from the remotest idea of what a movie star was; the only movies we’d ever seen were
King Kong, Dumbo, Bambi
, and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. As if we didn’t feel foreign enough, we looked it. There was the matter of our hair. Mother, who disliked beauty parlors, always cut not only her own hair but ours. One sweltering day in August, she experimented on Bridget and me: waving her professional shears around, she clipped off first our long braids, and then, unable to resist the temptation, continued snipping away bit by bit, until, like Father’s table, there was almost nothing left. Our hair was shorter than Bill’s. “Oh it’s so becoming! You both look so wonderful and cool! And aren’t you lucky, to
look
just like boys without having to
be
them!” We believed her until we got to school.

That first day was a catastrophe. It was bad enough being stared at like aliens, but to be ridiculed by our peers, taunted, pointed at, left alone at recess and lunch with only each other to talk to—we were outcasts in a monstrous country. And by far and away the worst part was the sense of confusion and betrayal we felt. It was one thing to be different from everybody else, but to find it out like that? Why hadn’t Mother told us? “Mother,” we shouted, charging through the vestibule, the kitchen, the dining and living rooms, to find her at last, supervising the hanging of a side of beef in the cold-storage room. “Why didn’t you tell us how terrible it is to be a movie star? What
is
a movie star? Why can’t you be like other parents? And why did you tell us our hair looks adorable when everyone else thinks it just looks funny? And why can’t we take our lunch in paper bags?” (Mother had made a project out of decorating our new lunch pails with her fingernail polish.)

“Oh, my darlings, what an awful day you’ve had!” Mother appeased us breathlessly. “Now listen to me. Sometimes people are
cruel just because they’re jealous and insecure and they don’t know how else to get attention. You must learn not to pay the
slightest bit
of attention—that’s just what they want, and if you act hurt they’re one up on you—you must just ignore them—but be polite! And say to yourselves, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ And never be afraid to be different—you don’t want to be exactly like everyone else. How boring that would be!”

And so we went back to school and never quite fit in. We were way ahead of our grades in every subject, which made us self-conscious, and our clothes and shoes were unlike anyone else’s, as were our sandwiches—cut in triangles, with the crusts neatly trimmed off, and stuffed with exotic fillings like cream cheese and olives or deviled ham, while the other children brought hunks of salami and cheese and gooey chocolate-covered marshmallows, which were forbidden us because they were bad for our teeth.

Bill was excluded from the nightmare of school because he was too young. Up to this point, Bridget and I had thought of him as a younger extension of ourselves, with a few savory, even enviable physical characteristics thrown in (one of Bridget’s first paintings, for which Mother was hurriedly called to a conference at nursery school, was entitled “Bill with a Beetle Crawling up His Pants”; in the painting, the infant Bill stood facing front with his arms outstretched and his blue suspender shorts raised to display, in scrupulous detail, what could only be a black beetle securely affixed to the tip of his penis), whom we could mold and pattern as we wished. Either he was beginning to change or we were; it was hard to tell. He even
smelled
subtly different from us, and as he instinctively moved away from the center of our control, we were only too happy to let him go—just as long as we could yank him back if we felt like it.

“Dear Bill,” Bridget coaxed him in her best handwriting on her best notepaper, “would you be so kind as to get in bed with me? It will be very kind if you do. Love, Bridget.”

Or, if he fell from disfavor, a harsh denunciation in blue crayon, written October 21, 1945:

(relenting, as usual, at the last moment).

Although we went on assuming that Bill was our property, we also began to be aware that there were more than anatomical dissimilarities between him and us. His personality was toughening up. Of the three of us, his disposition had always been the best—that is to say, the least moody or mercurial—but he was starting to get into the kind of bold trouble that would never have occurred to either Bridget or me to think up.

One night after we’d gone to bed, Mother was making the rounds of the house. She noticed, feeling absurd, that all the classic ingredients of a conventional horror story were present: she was all alone, a little nervous; it was Emily’s day off and the cook and butler slept in another wing; Father was in New York City rehearsing his new play,
State of the Union;
there was a storm raging outside, thunder and lightning, windows banging, floors creaking, and branches scraping the side of the house. On her way up to bed, she turned on the light in Bill’s room for a minute to make sure he was all right. He was lying in Grandfather’s big mahogany bed, sound asleep and covered with blood. Mother thought he was dead, murdered. In a second she had him in her arms. The pillow and sheets were blood-soaked, his scalp was scored with gashes, and there were tufts of hair all over the place; she looked around wildly and suddenly noticed, under a glass ashtray on the bed table, a bloody razor blade. She shook him awake. “Bill!” she shrieked. “What have you done to yourself? Why?” Bill looked at her with total calm. “Oh,” he answered, yawning, “I fell out of bed.” If there was anything that made Mother see red—like waving a flag in front of a bull, as she said—it was a lie. “I’ll give you one more chance to tell me the truth,” she’d say, “while I count to ten. Ready? Now think carefully. One, two, three, four …” In this instance Bill was as obstinate as she. He stood his ground, hoping that she would go away so he could go back to sleep, and wondering what would happen if she didn’t. She went to the bathroom and got his hairbrush. “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you,” she remonstrated, a line of dialogue that accompanied
our spankings as inevitably as “Think of the poor starving children in China” went with dinner. Bill was resolute. He got his first spanking. Then he and Mother fell into each other’s arms and they both cried and he promised that he would never never tell another lie, and she said, “Now tell me the truth; what really happened?” And after thinking for a minute, he answered, “It was just an accident—I banged my head on the headboard.” She spanked him again. By this time, Bridget and I were sitting bolt upright in our beds across the hall, speculating in excited whispers about what crime our four-year-old brother—the treasure, the apple of his mother’s eye—could possibly have committed to produce such an uproar. The sounds coming from his room coupled with the sounds of the storm outside were horrendous. They went on for a long time. He held out for thirteen different stories and thirteen spankings. Bridget and I didn’t know that until the next morning at the breakfast table, when we also found out why he had lied. It was very simple. Buck Crouse and Howard Lindsay, the authors of
State of the Union
, had spent the previous weekend at our house. Bill, after watching one of them shave Sunday morning, had salvaged the used razor blade from the guest-room wastebasket for some useful future occasion, which came along sooner than he expected: Mother made the unpleasant announcement that he needed a haircut and she was going to give it to him. Bill, who had seen the damage that Mother’s scissors could do, waited until the night before the scheduled event, got out his secret razor blade, and hacked away at his locks in the total darkness, occasionally missing his hair and nicking his scalp. (“My big mistake,” he told us later, “was to hide the razor blade under the ashtray afterwards—I forgot it was glass and she could see through it the whole time.”) But what he then did to cap off the morning, that morning after thirteen spankings—an endurance record that left Bridget and me baffled, yet extremely proud of him—seemed so exquisitely perverse to us that he passed heroically into some eternal hall of fame. When Mother came into his room to say good morning as if nothing had happened the night before, she found the walls of his bathroom decorated with freshly squeezed toothpaste, tubes and tubes of it. “Bill,” she said, shocked, “why on earth did you make this mess?” “I didn’t mean to,” he responded, innocently widening his eyes; “it just happened. The toothpaste slipped out of my hand,” and Mother froze. “I’ll give you one more
chance to tell the truth,” she began. “Here I go—one, two …” Bill had his fourteenth spanking before breakfast. He was unable to sit down for a week.

State of the Union
, which opened in November, was a success. Father was away more and more, attending to business in New York and on the Coast. He would drive out to see us on weekends, trying, with as much good humor as he could muster, to disregard the menace of wild goldenrod, which bloomed crazily all over the place during the autumn months and which he felt was somehow deliberately bringing his hay fever to a peak. By staying indoors and never venturing out, he thought he could lick not only that problem but a new and even more fearful one that had unexpectedly presented itself: snakes. Copperheads had been seen sunning themselves near the house; Andrew had taught Mother how to pin them down with a pitchfork and deftly sever their heads. Once Father knew of their existence, he was in a state of panic. “God help us all,” he’d groan if the word “snake” was mentioned. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the lions don’t get us the pythons must.”

The best thing about living on a farm, said Mother, was being able to observe firsthand all the miracles of nature. She was disappointed for us that we would have to wait until spring to witness Agnes the cow giving birth to a calf; there was no more thrilling and beautiful experience in life than watching the first moment of it take place. “Crap,” said Father. “There are a helluva lot more beautiful and thrilling moments to watch that I can think of—almost any moment you could name, as a matter of fact, except the moment of death, which might possibly give it a run for its money.”

“Now, Leland,” said Mother, “have you ever seen an actual birth? You know damn well you haven’t, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maggie, darling,” said Father, “guess what? For once you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I don’t know what I’m talking about, and what’s more, I don’t want to know what I’m talking about, nor will I go on talking about it if it’s what I think it is. I have deliberately spent my whole life, all forty-odd years of it, avoiding contact with pain, and that includes the
sight
of it, and when Agnes the cow gives birth to her damn calf I want more than anything to be as far away as possible. Hear that, children? I have
no one to count on except you. Notify me wherever I am, day or night, the instant Agnes or any other animal around here goes into labor, so that I can take the next plane to California.”

That did it. Although she knew he was only half serious, Mother disapproved of what she called his fastidious attitude and worried that its influence on us would be stronger than hers. A few days earlier, our dog, Stewart, had been run over in a dreadful accident right in front of the house. Stewart was a young pointer given us by Jimmy Stewart to replace Mr. Duchin. He’d rushed to the edge of the driveway to bark at a motorcycle roaring past on Long Meadow Hill Road, a seldom-traveled byway, and the driver had swerved deliberately onto the gravel to run him down. Bridget, Bill, and I were squatting in the middle of the driveway; it was midday, the best time of day to hunt for tiny pieces of glinting mica mixed in with the gravel. The motorcycle hit Stewart so hard it knocked him twenty feet out onto the road, where he lay whimpering, totally disemboweled, with two legs severed. Steaming lumps of blackish-red blood, almost indistinguishable from the shiny hot tar itself, lay all around him. We screamed for Mother and he died in her arms a few minutes later while the three of us stood on the side of the road sobbing.

This incident had a disturbing effect on us and Mother verbalized her concern. While she didn’t want us going through life totally desensitized to violence, neither did she want us to be delicate hothouse flowers; it was important to instill in us an overall sense of balance and continuity. As to the matter of what to protect us from and how, she was ambivalent. There was, on her part, a hunger for simplicity, a great romantic notion of living a simple life, as opposed to what other people thought of as romantic, which was living in Hollywood. She felt it was imperative to shield us from the consequences of her career as an actress, because to her they represented life at its most dangerous—that is unreal, illusory. It was equally imperative to expose us to the simple facts of nature, because they didn’t just represent life, they actually
were
life; they had substance, whether or not that substance was pleasant. To dramatize what she meant, and at the same time counteract in us what she suspected were the unhealthy beginnings of squeamishness, she came up with an unusual idea.