Haywire (26 page)

The more frantically my thoughts darted around, the stiller I seemed to stand. Father, I thought, hanging on to his arm in my mind, what is she talking about? Divorce. Explain to her about the night with all the stars, the night you told us, remember?

One night just a month or so earlier, while Mother was still in England, Father and Bridget and Bill and I had all lain together under a blanket on the big chaise longue on the terrace, and while we gazed fixedly at the shimmering black sky and waited for flying saucers and falling stars, Father had told us stories about when he was a little boy. Then he had said, “But the worst thing that ever happened to me—ruined my whole life, really, at least what was left of my childhood—was when my mother divorced my father. Terrible. Terrible. I was only ten, and I never forgave Mother for it, never understood it. So capricious. Ten years old. It cut me in half. Divorce, it’s the most awful thing in the world. I ought to know. You three are very lucky, you’ll never know how lucky you are. That’s one thing you’ll never have to go through, no matter what, I promise you on my sacred word of honor.” Ten years old; that’s exactly what I was. “Ten years old, and I love you a great deal—Father,” he wrote in his very own handwriting on the round gold locket he gave me for my tenth birthday. We had never heard about divorce before, except from Grandsarah, who had skipped those details, and we were overwhelmed by pity and love for Father, cut in half when he was a little boy ten years old. Father, what about the promise, I reminded him, trying, in my mind, to
shake his arm harder, but I could tell just by the way he was standing, that he already knew.…

“Furthermore,” Mother was saying, “you will see that this won’t really be as painful or make as much difference as it sounds. Although Leland won’t be staying here—he’ll be at a hotel—you will see him just as much as ever, probably more. He’ll come and have dinner with you when he can, just as he does now. You see, one of the biggest problems of his kind of business is that, even more than now, he will find it increasingly necessary to travel, to spend so much time away from home—in New York, for instance—that we will hardly ever be able to see him anyway.”

“But, Mother,” said Bill. Bridget and I looked at him, astonished at the interruption. Father half turned away from the ocean toward us.

“Yes, my darling,” said Mother, kneeling down and kissing the top of his head.

“But we are in California to be with Father,” blurted Bill. “Isn’t that why?”

“Yes, my darling,” said Mother. She paused for a long time, then stood up and looked over at her gold cigarette case on the table. Nobody moved.

“Now it’s silly of me to make this all sound too serious,” she said, changing the matter-of-fact inflection in her voice to one of levity. “You all look stricken and there’s no need to be. Everything will be practically the same, you’ll see.” She smiled at us in a secret way, knowing how to make us giggle. “Only you must treat this just like going to the bathroom; it’s not something you talk to other people about. Even if they’re nosy and ask. All right? This must be just between the five of us. And Emily.”

We were tongue-tied. Father walked over slowly with his eyes down. He didn’t say a word either. Oh, please, I thought with all my strength, the way I did whenever he said he wished he could put me in his pocket and take me with him. He raised his eyes, and in that moment I knew from the look in them why he wasn’t able to say anything at all.

“Don’t worry, darlings.” Mother smiled. “We both love you, each of you, more than you will ever know. Now go on and play with what’s left of this beautiful afternoon.” And she turned toward Father.

“Father.” I said his name involuntarily. He looked at me
again, blindly, and that made me want to cry. I forgot what I wanted to ask, there was so much. “Are you going right now?” That was just a fragment of what I wanted to know, but I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes.

“No. Oh, no. Of course not. Would I ever go without hugging you goodbye?”

I put up a hand to shade my eyes so that he wouldn’t see them; I was afraid they reflected his. “A bear hug?”

“Until I squeeze you to death.” The familiar answer made us smile tentatively.

“Are you staying for dinner?” asked Bridget.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“What hotel are you staying at, the Beverly Hills Hotel? Are you going to take all your clothes with you? Now? Do you have to?”

“No, no,” said Father. “I’ll be right here for a little while and I won’t go without telling you.” He looked at us very hard and we looked back for a minute before obediently turning away.

But what, I wondered as we walked in silence across the lawn in the direction of the playhouse, what if Mother’s not right and there is a difference from now on? What if he never comes back again? What if after two or four or six weeks—? But he had promised. And Father never broke a promise. I knew, because he had promised me he would never spank me again, that summer night in St. Malo, and he never did.

After that, nothing ever seemed the same again.

It was as if the first decade of my life had been roped off from the rest of it. I thought of it that way, that first decade of my life, when I thought of it at all, which I tried not to. For one thing, there was no way to approach it without crossing a barrier of pain. Sometimes I blundered across, forgetting. Then all I could do was cross my fingers and pray that next time the pain would be less.

Once I was back inside, I felt crazy and alone, as if I were talking to myself. That was another thing. Bridget and Bill were no help: they claimed they recollected barely anything, less and less as those years receded. Bridget finally swore she could remember nothing that had happened in the first seven years of her life. That was odd, I thought; part of the disparity, because on the other side
of the pain was a time when everything was radiant, when every detail had such absolute clarity, every color such vibrance, that it would be impossible ever to forget. Or to duplicate. By comparison, time afterward was fogged over. By comparison, my more recent history had, for me, the remote impact of photographs or postcards shown in the wake of a stunning event witnessed firsthand. Either I couldn’t see as clearly or some quality was missing, gone forever.

eter Fonda:

“I remember your mother more than I remember my mother. She would drive us around in that 1946 Chrysler Town and Country, you and Bridget and Bill and Jane and me and Maggie only. No governesses. Right down to the nitty-gritty time, to Kiddie Land or wherever it was that we’d take our ride. With her in the Town and Country with the top down. How else would I remember this car which I only rode in maybe a dozen times during my life? The color of it, the texture of it, the color of the beautiful upholstery—and your mother driving this huge Chrysler, you know, your petite mom, heading down the highway with the top down having a gas with all of us kids screaming and yelling. It was green, forest green. Great metallic paint. Beautiful hood, Chrysler hood, great chrome. The dash was wood, so beautiful, full of varnish. Your initials painted on the door, ‘bBb,’ little ‘b,’ big ‘B,’ and little ‘b’ in kind of an oval. It was our dream. It was all beautiful, varnished wood, polished metal, chrome, and flowing blond hair, all of us giggling and laughing …”

“She was not an easy woman to categorize or to explain. If I’ve ever known anyone in my life, man or woman, who was unique, it was she. There was nobody like her before or since. Never will be. In
every way. In talent, in looks, in character, in temperament. Everything. There sure wasn’t anybody who didn’t fall under her spell.”

Life, however, went on normally; that was very important, Mother said.

She said also—in another family announcement, at which Father was not present—that she and Father were, after all, getting divorced. There was no chance of a reconciliation, because he’d fallen in love with someone else.

Bridget, Bill, and I darted sidelong glances at each other. We had learned that the best camouflage was to keep very still and not call attention to ourselves. I knew it all the time, I told myself—not the part about falling in love with someone else, but the divorce part, and what difference would the reason make now? Actually, it did make a difference, the more I pondered it in the silence that followed that revelation, and maybe it was ruder not to ask questions out loud. For instance, if Father had fallen in love with another woman, did that mean he had fallen out of love with Mother? That didn’t make sense unless he had been pretending all this time. Did love just stop? Run out? If so, where did that leave Bridget, Bill, and me? Didn’t he belong to us any more? Had he ever loved any of us at all? How could anyone stop loving Mother? She was perfect. Obviously if it was possible to stop loving her, it was more possible to stop loving us.

Mother was sitting in her bedroom on a settee, the one Bridget had crayoned orange when she was a year old, eliciting the first spanking in our family. That reminded me of Father’s promises: he’d kept the one about never spanking me again, broken the one about divorce. Fifty-fifty. Maybe that wasn’t a bad score; I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure I’d ever trust him again. Mother’s hands clenched in her lap, her knuckles as white as her fingernails were red. Her head was bowed. I was dizzy with emotions, proprietary about Father, protective of Mother. My eyes began to sting.

“Stop frowning, Brooke,” said Mother, cocking her head.

I cleared my throat. “I’m thinking.”

“I know, but one of these days you’re going to look in the mirror and see two big creases permanently
stuck
in your forehead. What then?”

I’ll stop thinking, I thought, and cleared my throat again.

“Come over here,” she beckoned me teasingly, “and let me wipe them off. Just a little spit—”

I dug in my heels. “Is she pretty? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Good gooby, yes! Prettier. You’re just used to me.”

“Nobody could be prettier—”

“Now I can just tell from your expressions you’re dying to know her name and you don’t dare ask.”

We nodded.

“My poor darlings. Don’t worry, I’m all right. I’m not going to cry or do anything embarrassing. Her name is Nancy Hawks. Some people call her ‘Slim,’ because she’s wonderfully tall and thin. She’s nice and funny and beautifully dressed—”

“You know her? You’ve met her? Where?”

“Uh-huh. Many times. Here and there. She was married to Howard Hawks for a year or so—he’s a well-known movie director—and they’ve recently divorced. Maybe she was lonely when Leland was alone and lonely.… That can happen.”