Haywire (40 page)

“How?” I asked. What had they done now? Flunked summer school? Set fire to the house? I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I recalled the time Bill had arranged a box of .22-caliber bullets in a circle in the grass, so that when the sun’s rays—

“They couldn’t have picked a better way,” said Kenneth bitterly. “They have gone to live with your father.”

I stared at him aghast. He turned the pages of the letter.

“Shall I read it to you?” he asked. “Your mother—I’m worried about her.”

I nodded. Bridget and Bill, deserters. Didn’t they realize they’d left me, too? Sitting here innocently on a piano bench in Scotland? Or care? By God, they’d really done it, the selfish little bastards. Couldn’t they have waited two more weeks until I got home to smooth things over? Idiots. Cowards. I despised them. My mouth filled with acrid fluid, my eyes burned. Craven, cruel, dumb. Didn’t they stop long enough to consider the consequences, the destruction to their lives? To Mother’s? Clearly that was intended. To Father’s, then, and Kenneth’s and, most of all, mine?

The letter had been written in the form of a diary over a
week’s time. Mother had added to it every night. Events were recounted in chronological order. Her tone was frank, anguished, but without self-pity. Both sides were represented. It was a bravura piece of reportage. Even in the confusion of my anger, I couldn’t help admiring its style. The cumulative effect of the details was shocking. By the time it ended, I was drenched in perspiration.

Mother did not blame Bridget and Bill at all. She blamed herself. This, more than anything else, made me want to cry.

The break, it seemed, had been precipitated by a note left on the hall table. The note was open and conspicuously intended, claimed Mother, to be read by anyone who passed. She did so. Bridget had written it to a school friend but it was clearly meant for Mother. (In Bridget’s later version, this so-called note was, in reality, a locked diary, which Mother had pried open.)

The note outlined Bridget’s disaffection from Greenwich. She found it provincial after the grandeur of Europe. She disliked the tedium of classes at summer school, but most of all she disliked being alone in the house with Mother. Everyone was on vacation, even Elizabeth. Bill was sweet but no help. The truth was she didn’t love Mother; she hated her. The contrast between Mother and Nan, underlined for her on trips to Sicily and Rome and Paris with Father and Nan at Christmas and Easter, was more dramatically apparent now that she was actually back in Greenwich. She felt she didn’t belong. She wanted to return to Europe immediately.

On reading this, Mother was outraged. When she picked Bridget up at Brunswick at lunchtime, she said, “You have made yourself very clear, my darling. I’m not so stupid I could fail to understand. You hate me and want to leave. Perhaps you would be happier living with your father?”

This was a test I’d encountered many times and ignored. To Mother’s horror, Bridget’s answer was, coldly, “Yes.”

Then, a few minutes later, Bill came bicycling in from Brunswick. He was informed of this turn of events and asked if he, too, would like to leave.

“What about Brooke? Is she going?” he inquired cagily, apprehensive at the idea of holding down the fort alone.

“I assume so; why not?” responded Mother, implying she expected us all to desert her. (I could hear her martyred tone of voice as if I’d been there. Mother tended to cover her injured
feelings with a first coat of icy aplomb and then, just to remind us of the courageous struggle
that
took, a second one that hinted at her unmentionable suffering.)

Bill and Bridget called Father. He was preparing to make
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Father was flattered at the notion that the two of them would like to live with him, but this was a bit sudden. Also it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The Spirit of St. Louis
was about to start shooting; there were locations all over the world. He would be traveling for the next six months: Boston, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Ireland, Paris. After that, he would be working on the editing of the film in California for a year. Nan was in Biarritz with Kitty. What was he going to do? Very inconvenient.

Discussions recommenced between Mother and Father. By now, Mother’s initial fury had abated. She regretted her hasty and ill-considered suggestion. The game had gone far enough. But Bridget and Bill were adamant. No, they couldn’t wait till Kenneth and I got home. The die was cast: they certainly didn’t want to linger in that explosive atmosphere for two weeks while the situation deteriorated day by day. It would be agony.

There were two disastrous confrontations, one between Mother and Bridget, the other between Mother and Bill. She implored them to change their minds and stay. They refused; it was too late. Whatever accusations were then made on all sides were so vitriolic and damaging that Mother could not bring herself to report them. Suffice it to say that the children made the final preparations for their departure in secrecy. That night, Bill cracked open the safe and stole their passports. The next morning they were on their way to Boston.

Mother’s letter went on to say that, circumstances being what they were, she expected me to join Bridget and Bill. Maybe it would be for the best, since events had proved her inadequacy as a parent. She hoped, however, that I would still go on to Vassar; she could arrange, if I liked, to send my trunks there. I shook my head; had she learned nothing from all this?

As Kenneth read me this, my anger did not subside. It grew. By the time he came to the last few words, in which Mother blamed herself for the whole mess, I was angry not only at Bridget and Bill, but at Mother and Father as well. It seemed to me they were all to blame; Mother for not having the sense to overlook
Bridget’s sophomoric note, Bridget for not having the generosity to overlook Mother’s behavior, Bill for not having enough gumption to overlook them both, Father for playing devil’s advocate.

I went to my room and thought. Kenneth had suggested that Mother join us in Scotland. He’d gone off to send her a wire. I felt as if I were at a crossroads in my life. Certainly I realized that the rush of pure joy with which I’d entered that summer was over. Nor did I allow myself to believe it would return in the same measure again. I had to make a choice in which, no matter what, someone was going to be badly hurt. If I chose to cast my lot with Bridget and Bill—and it was tempting—it could be ruinous for Mother. I knew she took being a mother so seriously that if I failed her, she would see it as
her
failure, and that would be the last straw. Perhaps she would have a nervous breakdown, although I wasn’t too sure what constituted a nervous breakdown. Still, if I caused this, I could never live with myself again. But if I chose to stay with her, something equally terrible might happen to Bridget and Bill. They were young and susceptible, and, whatever they thought, unlikely to snap back as if nothing had happened. For all his money, Father would never be able to lavish on them the time and care that Mother had. And their guilt would only snowball with time. Which of them was most vulnerable? Bridget? Bill? Mother?

In the end, instinct told me Mother was. Bridget and Bill were younger; they were more resilient. Other children had left home before and survived. Besides, maybe I was overestimating their guilt and underestimating Father’s fatherliness. But Mother: I was afraid something truly calamitous might happen to her. Perhaps I could help stave it off for a while. Perhaps if I were around, her pride would keep her from shattering. She was a fighter, as long as she had someone to fight for.

I wrote her that I had no intention of leaving home and that I was insulted by her suggestion. Then (trying to sound as adult to her—and for her—as I could) I went on to say:

But Mother was inconsolable. She thanked me for trying to distract her, but claimed she was in no shape to travel. So Kenneth and I flew home.

She met us at the airport. I expected the worst, but I wasn’t prepared for how bad the worst would be. Her face was ravaged. Her clothes drooped on her. Her voice shook. As we stood in the warm sunlight outside the parking lot, the air pleasantly whirring with the sounds of planes taking off and landing like giant overhead fans, she held on to us as if she were a child. The look in her eyes was one I had never seen and I thought I’d seen them all. It was a look of defeat. I knew then that the worst was yet to come.

“Here were two women, your mother and your sister, who had infinite spirit—a certain kind of brilliance, a crazy brilliance, erratic, difficult, neurotic, but still unique. I don’t think society offers solutions to people like that, especially women. They were never provided
with a constructive way of harnessing that kind of energy and brilliance. It turned inward and destroyed them.”

“I sometimes think there is only one way for me to resolve my struggle with Mother and that is to go down to Greenwich, push her in the river and then jump in after her to drown”

I didn’t see Bridget again for another year. She came out to the house about a month later, but I was away that weekend. She stayed for a few hours, long enough to pack all her clothes and, to my fury, some of mine. Mother and Kenneth reported that she was civil but remote. Father’s limousine brought her and waited in the driveway while she collected her books and trinkets for shipment to California.

I saw Bill once. He, too, came to gather his possessions. The fall term at Eaglebrook was about to begin. Apparently, while he was packing, Mother came into his room. Without any warning, she asked him to reconsider his decision to live with Father. She said it was a decision made in haste and anger and that it was all her fault. She had not intended to “drive him out.” She asked him to forgive her. He said he had. She asked him to go away with her somewhere quiet for a week, Cape Cod, just the two of them, to straighten things out. She promised him that she would give in to him on whatever routine points distressed him; he could do this and wouldn’t have to do that—anything if he would stay. Gently, Bill said no. He said he loved her but that for a little while at least he was committed to another kind of life; that for him to come back now would be difficult and strange. Mother began to cry. I had never known her to cry except for the time, before Mother and Father were divorced, when the ambulance had come for Father.

This time she couldn’t stop. Even from my room the sound was so painful I went into my bathroom and put my hands over my ears. That evening I was supposed to go into New York to the theatre; it had been prearranged that Father’s car would give me a lift in with Bill. Kenneth, white-faced, told Bill and me that we should go right away; he would calm Mother down.

On the way into town, Bill put up the glass partition between us and the driver, and we talked.

I was still unnerved by the scene earlier with Mother. It had been heart-rending to overhear a self-possessed forty-six-year-old woman pleading with her fourteen-year-old son, apologizing, bargaining, desperately trying to regain his favor. The balance of power had shifted. The fact that the woman happened to be my mother, and the boy my brother, was incidental. I had begun to have the disquieting concept of myself as a spectator, not a participant, in my own life. I saw myself as the audience, leaning back to watch my future unfold like a Greek tragedy. I already had presentiments of the ending. That, after all, was the classic form; it was not the surprise dénouement that one came to see, but the quality of the drama and performances.

Bridget, Bill was saying, had turned out to be a real pain in the ass. She’d started this upheaval and then refused (as usual) to do all the talking or to work out the logistics. And now everything had come down on his head. It was all blamed on him. One fine day he’d walked into an altercation between Mother and Bridget and the next thing—It was evident to him from the beginning that Mother didn’t seriously mean she thought they should go live with Father. Certainly not as a permanent arrangement. But he was taking advantage of her moment of anger for purely selfish reasons. There was an enormous appeal to Father’s life-style—the travel, the gadgets, the glamour, the fun. Mother refused to act like a rich person, always driving those Ramblers around. She was difficult, inconsistent. Yes, he’d proceeded out of basically selfish motives. He was aware of how incredibly stubborn he was, and he knew he’d hurt Mother deeply. But now he thought of himself as living with Father; the estrangement was complete. It would be hard to turn everything around again.