Haywire (50 page)

“What are you thinking about, Pop?” I’d ask him idly, noticing that on these bright days he would turn his head toward the window and stare at the sky with his half-good eye.

“Pretty day,” he’d mumble. “God, it’s a good day for flying. I wish I didn’t have to stick around the goddamn office on a day like this.”

Many people came to see him before Pamela took him home. He always recognized the friends who went way back, if only by their voices. Jimmy Stewart stopped in New York on his way from Los Angeles to Boston and took a car in from the airport to pay him a visit about a week before he died.

“I’m glad I got to see him,” Jimmy said later. “It had been a long time.”

“Did he recognize you?” I asked.

“Yeah, he recognized me. First thing he said was ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said, ‘Nothing much, just passing through, thought I’d stop and say hello.’ We talked. We had a half-hour visit, maybe three quarters of an hour.”

“And he seemed rational to you?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you talk about?”

Jimmy paused for a long time and looked away, far away.

“Flying,” he whispered at last.

Of course, I thought.

“When I came back from the war,” said Jimmy, “I’ll never forget—he was standing at the foot of the gangplank with a bunch of red roses. How he got onto the pier, I don’t know—absolute top-secret, no one was allowed—but your father could always get in anywhere. There he was, first thing I saw. I’ll never forget that.”

While Father didn’t seem to be living in the present and to have much interest in, or sure recollection of, the more recent events in his life—one evening, to Bill’s and my intense pleasure, he called Pamela “Maggie”—the farther backward in time our conversations took him, the more incredible his memory. One of those days, when Bill and I were asking him about different things he’d done in his life and were trying to piece them together chronologically, he suddenly announced that his first job had been working as a brakeman on a railroad. Bill and I looked at each other incredulously.

“Come on, Pop,” we said, amused at the preposterous image that sprang to mind, “a
brakeman
. Why did you never tell us that before?”

“Don’t know,” muttered Father, moving his head restlessly from side to side. “Forgotten.”

We didn’t believe him at all. We assumed it was wishful thinking, one of the tricks his mind could play. Much later, Bill would check it out with Grandsarah (who, at eighty-nine, was to outlive her only son), and she would recall vaguely that one summer when Father was sixteen or seventeen he
had
worked for a railroad.

We could tell that there were days when he couldn’t
see
us. But he always recognized our voices. In that last month, Bill and I would meet at the hospital in the morning and spend most of the day there. Pamela, who was usually the first to arrive and the last, in the evening, to leave, arranged for Father to have shifts of nurses round-the-clock; even so, she felt better knowing that some family representative was there as well. That way, if the nurse on duty wanted to go out for coffee, or if she herself had something else to attend to, Father would not be left alone. Father’s room and the hall outside, where there was a pay phone and a couch and where all the morning conferences were held out of his earshot, became as familiar as a recurring nightmare. We were now faced with the irony that as fearsome as it was to continue with the nightmare, the fear of ending it was even greater.

“Hiya, Pop. How’s it going today?”

Some days he would look straight at me and say, “Hi, darling, much better thank you.” (“He had a good night,” the nurse would whisper.) Some days he would scan the room for the source of my voice; then I would move deliberately across his line of vision.

“Oh, Pop, you didn’t sleep well last night, did you?”

“Darling little Brooke. I want to go home. Take me home.” He would struggle vainly to wrench his body from the sheets.

“Oh, Pop.”

“Home.”

“Pop. Don’t try to sit up, Pop.”

“My gut hurts.” Sometimes he swallowed again and again as if a bone had stuck in his gullet. I had to fight the instinct to pound him on the back.

To the nurse: “His stomach is bothering him again. Shouldn’t he have a pain-killer?”

The nurse would shake her head. “He’s getting Demerol intravenously.” Ah, that must be the new tube taped to his arm.

But there were afternoons where Bill and I found that we could ease into discussions with him about the past, where we could really get him going on and on, comfortably ask him intimate questions about his various love affairs and marriages that, ordinarily, we wouldn’t dare bring up.

At the suggestion of our ex-stepmother, Nan, who was following all this very closely, Bill wandered into the hospital room one day and asked Father for his list of the ten most beautiful women that he’d ever known. It was just the sort of question Father liked best. He was terrific. A trace of color appeared in his cheeks.

“ ‘Beautiful’ is the most misused word in the English language,” he stated, with near-perfect articulation, “next to ‘glamorous.’ Very hard to define. Goddamned elusive. In my book, to be beautiful a woman has to be more than beautiful—you know what I mean? She has to have this quality of glamour, which is also impossible to describe. A certain look in her eyes, a style—an awareness of her effect on people—the way she holds herself, moves, a sense of her own mystery. A blend of all those things. And then some. Damn few women are genuinely beautiful. A handful. I must have come close to knowing them all, as close as any man alive. Fell in love with half of them, married three—”

“Whoa, Pop, you’re going too fast. Three of your
wives
on your all-time list?”

“Ya. You’re goddamned right. Lola; I guess she was the most beautiful woman I ever knew. She taught me how to fly. Did you know that? Got me interested in planes. Married her twice, I thought she was so beautiful. Maggie—not beautiful in the classic sense, but I don’t subscribe to the classic sense. Nan, definitely. Kate [Hepburn], definitely. The best. God, yes.” He turned toward the window and seemed to drift out.

“Go on, Pop, who else?”

“Oh, well. Garbo, of course. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw. Great face, strange body. Huge feet. Size ten, something insane like that.”

“Could you ever have fallen in love with her?”

“Not possibly. She was kind of sexless. Moved clumsily. Not smart enough for my taste. But my God, that face. When I was her agent, I had to go up to her house to talk her into some deal—I was simply mesmerized by her face, I wanted to fall into it. Your mother was insanely jealous, or pretended to be.” He chuckled to himself.

“Let’s see, that’s only five, Pop.”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses. Fay Wray.”

“Fay Wray?” Hmm, that was unexpected. When David O. Selznick died, his son, Danny, had given me some old photographs he’d found of Father as a young agent; there was one with Fay Wray standing in the background, laughing.

“Ya, ya, gorgeous. Marlene [Dietrich], gorgeous. Isak Dinesen. You know,
Out of Africa
. Fabulous. An old woman when I met her. How many is that?”

“Eight,” replied Bill and I together.

“Not so sure there are ten,” he mused. “I guess Justine Johnson and—Esmé O’Brian.”

He was pensive now; his hands plucked at the sheet involuntarily. (Who were Justine Johnson and Esmé O’Brian? We didn’t know, and Bill had to take the list to Nan to find out.) “God, I love women. Much more intelligent, much stronger, much braver. Nicer than men, not as mean. And so much more beautiful. There’s not a single inch of the female body that is not beautiful. Think of that. They’re luckier, too. I have a theory about women.…”

We leaned closer; his energy was fading and so was the color from his face.

“What, Pop?” asked Bill. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thanks, son.” Father’s voice caught, as sometimes it did, on one syllable or word. What made that terrible was his subsequent struggle to rip the word from his larynx, to hawk up something more than a throttled exhalation. His entire body would heave spasmodically with the effort. There was no way to help. We would wait, panicked, for him to exhaust himself. Slowly the glottal sounds would subside into a wheeze. He would lie still, looking over in our direction with a confused expression on his face, as if he hoped he was imagining such a lapse of control.

“Women,” he choked finally. “You know what it is about them that men envy most?”

“The fact that they shall inherit the earth?” said Bill.

“You bet,” Father closed his eyes. “They’ll outlive us all. Aristophanes was no fool.”

Diana Vreeland:

“I always, during those last ten years, kept thinking: This man is so terribly brave. But, you see, he was built as a gentleman. Consequently, even illness—and pancreatitis is supposed to be the worst, isn’t it, because it affects the emotions so much; everything to do with that department, gall bladder, bile tract, affects the emotions. I would go up to Mount Kisco quite a lot and sit with Leland and talk to him, and God, he was so—Every time I’d leave and go home I’d think, That’s the brightest man I’ve ever known. I mean what’s he carrying on on? No man could have been a more charming gentleman in anyone’s life than he was in mine. He really was a courtly gentleman. It’s an effective phrase because it makes you think of the Civil War or something. But that’s what he was. Even the deep illness of his late life couldn’t take that away from him. Even when he was telling you the craziest story that ever was about his stepmother, Maisie Hayward, and his father, the Colonel—even if he was making a bit of a nut out of somebody, it was never done with malice, never. It was always done with great courtliness and richness of spirit.”

It had taken me such a long time, my entire life, to learn how to interpret him. The knack was to unlearn everything except
my most primal love. He was so ingenuous he was hard to figure out. One attributed to him layers of deviousness, subterfuges that would never have occurred to him. And because, to me, he’d always been not only a grownup but my
father
, I’d spent my adolescence and early adulthood trying to communicate with him on that level. A mistake. His parenthood was a conditioned idea that had been wasted on both of us. Worse—with time, it had separated us. As I’d grown older and bigger, he’d grown proportionally farther away.

“Brooke, darling, is that you?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“That’s good. Where’s Bill?” His eyelids twitched open.

“He’ll be right back. He’s just gone down the hall.”

“Don’t go away.”

“I won’t, Pop.”

And if all children see their fathers as personifying power—a notion that is usually dispelled by a little time under the belt—I had perceived my father as being even more powerful than anyone else’s. In fact, he was.

How do you live up to that? With your heart in your mouth, that’s how. How close can you come to the sun before it melts your wings? And why, as I stripped back the years and memories, did I have the feeling that the younger I’d been the closer I’d come? Later, I would say to myself, “Nobody this powerful can also be this simple.” But Father was that simple. Deep down he was a child, too, and that’s where he won.

“Do you love me?” He looked toward me blindly.

“More than anything in the world.” I felt the tears beginning. Oh, no, I thought.

“That’s good,” he said. “I hate this, though.”

“Yeah, it stinks,” I agreed, sputtering slightly with nervous laughter.

“Don’t cry, for God’s sake; are you crying?” His eyes were closed and he couldn’t possibly see me anyway.

“No,” I choked, tears streaming down my face.

“I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t, Pop. Why?”

“I broke my promise.” He stirred restlessly under the sheet. “To take you to the bullfight movie. I promised …”

What on earth had made him think of that? “Pop, do you realize how many years ago that was?”

Even after I’d grown up, the implicit threat of his authority was able to scare me. It was only now, as I sat musing at his deathbed, that he became again what he’d once been; when there were no demands on either of us and I was very young; when I was just a child and he was just my father, and sometimes those two states of being seemed almost the same.

“A helluva long time ago.” He roused himself to glare at me.

“What?”

“All my promises.” His voice softened. “I did keep one, though. The time your mother made me spank you. Promised I’d never do it again.”

“Yes,” I whispered. For a moment I’d almost asked him for his handkerchief.

“I never did, either.”

There was a telephone in the hospital room, but Father wasn’t allowed to use it. He wasn’t even supposed to know it was there. Accordingly, it never rang. Out of respect for him, we made all our calls in the phone booth down the hall. To use a telephone in his presence, when he himself didn’t have that privilege, seemed heartless. He was the master; it was one of his glories. Our most crucial communications had taken place on the telephone, and our most comfortable. For me, his disembodied voice—whether spanning thousands of miles or just a few blocks—had more immediacy and meaning than his voice in person.

One day I stared at the telephone in Father’s room, contemplating ways to kill it, indulging myself in fantasies of hurling it against the wall, extinguishing it with a pillow.

I even picked up the receiver to see if it could save me the trouble by going dead on its own.

“Let’s yank it out, Bill. I’m serious. What the hell’s it
for
?”

Bill shrugged. “Emergency.”

After that, I couldn’t glance at it without wincing. It had become more than an ugly black little reminder of everything that lay outside the hospital, of Father’s past.

It had become a symbol of his impotence and ours.

And finally I knew that he would never call me on the telephone again, that that part of our lives was already over.

• • •

“I miss Emily,” I said out loud, without opening my eyes.