Haywire (51 page)

“Emily Buck? Our old nurse?”

“Yes.” I’d dozed off in my chair. It was a bad way to wake up. “Remember how she used to sit on our beds when we were sick? I miss the way she smelled—Clorox, tobacco, coffee, toast. If she were here now, I’d sit on her lap and she’d rock me …”

I peered at Bill through my lashes, not wanting to let in too much light. But the room was already dark. “What time is it? How’s Father?”

“Still asleep. I wish I could sleep that soundly.”

“Me, too. I’m afraid.”

“Of what?” Bill’s chair scraped close to mine.

“Right this minute? Everything. You name it.” I closed my eyes again, longing for Emily. But Emily had died painfully of stomach cancer a few years earlier. “Of letting go. Of dying. Of living. Of going nuts. That’s the most prevalent one. And you?”

“I suppress most of that stuff.” Bill whistled a tune silently through his teeth. “Programmed myself a long time ago not to think about the shit that the future might be handing down to me.”

“Don’t you ever feel rage now?”

“You mean specifically at Mother or Father?” Bill swiveled his gaze to the hospital bed where Father lay. “I couldn’t live long enough to discharge it. We were trained
not
to express anger. I got so good at that it landed me in Menninger’s.”

The room was steeped in twilight. I felt as if we were detached from the rest of the hospital, adrift.

“Extraordinary,” murmured Bill, wandering back and forth in semicircles around Father’s bed. “Insane what you go through—sixteen years old, being locked up—not because you’ve committed a crime, but because your parents think you should be. Absolutely one of the most impotent, frustrating, disastrous kinds of feelings, because there’s no voluntary trip about it at all. Even though you know it might be doing you some good, and in the long run you might benefit from it. Never got over it.”

Listen, I wanted to answer, what makes you think I got off scot-free? The marvelous act I put on to give that impression? The truth was I felt like a veteran of the wars. It was still inexplicable to me that Bridget and Bill had wound up in Menninger’s and Austen Riggs and I hadn’t. My guilt for
not
having gone through their ordeal was as great as my relief at having been spared it. Whatever
had happened to my brother and sister had happened, in some way, to all of us.

Bill came to a halt in front of me.

“But, on the whole, I’m glad I went.”

“Why?” He really was crazy.

“Well, it’s weird. It’s like—if you think you’re neurotic or possibly insane, the idea is always lurking in the back of your head that the punishment for going crazy is being locked up in the loony bin. And it must be very frightening. But if you’ve already gone through it, it’s not so bad. Besides”—he held out his hands to pull me up—“you can always bullshit your way out.… Here comes the sun.” He flicked on the light.

“Ugh.”

“Reveille,” he went on cheerfully. “What do you want for breakfast tonight? My flight plan features Szechwan Tang Tang noodles smothered with those heavy-duty little black peppers that blow your head off.”

When we leaned over Father to kiss him good night, he awakened instantly as if he were afraid to miss anything.

“What’s up?” he croaked.

“Thought we’d nail down a little dinner, Pop,” said Bill.

“Good idea.” Father nodded weakly. “Let’s go to the Colony.”

“Of course—where else?”

I looked away from the tube of glucose fastened to his arm.

“No.” Father struggled to lift his head. “Let’s go home instead. Where’s Bridget?”

“She—” I hadn’t heard him mention her name in many years. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Please tell her to hurry up.” He sighed and turned away from our voices. “I’m tired of waiting.” Then he spoke very softly and as if he were miles away. “There’s a clock in my head. It never stops ticking, but the hands don’t move. Why does it take so long to die?”

A few days later, he went home.

The night of March 18th, I drove out to Haywire House. After Pamela’s phone call, it took me about an hour to rent a car and get
there; by the time I stood at the front door, I felt as if I’d been driving all night. Lucio, father’s young Italian butler, opened the door immediately and grasped my hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he stammered.

“Lucio. How is he?” Although I already knew the answer from the expression on his face.

Lucio gripped my hand tighter.

“Is he still alive, Lucio?” I wanted words, not touch.

“Ten minutes ago …” he began.

The familiar hallway melted around me, pulling me in. I fought numbly against its perfume, its plush burgundy carpet, its diffused light—as carefully regulated as a greenhouse thermostat—illuminating the colors of a painting here or a bowl of flowers there, and playfully flickering across the scintillant feathers of the two silver fighting cocks as they sparred in mortal combat on their tablecloth of rich rose velvet; a hum of conversation in the living room beyond, the phone ringing; was I really too late?

Pamela, in a coral silk caftan shot with gold, came toward me with a fresh whiskey sour in her hand.

“Would you like to see your father?” she asked cordially, as if nothing had happened. I nodded uncertainly and followed her down the hall.

Father’s bedroom was located at the far end of the house, so I had plenty of time to hypnotize myself, by riveting my eyes on Pamela’s robe floating from side to side a few feet in front of me. Nevertheless, when we entered the room, I managed, without looking, to see everything in it at once. The room was octagonal in shape; it had been designed by Father and was his pride and joy. Now its contents were suffused with the light I associated with small chapels. Otherwise everything seemed normal, except that on my right, along the side of the octagon where Father’s bamboo bed had always been situated, was the intrusion of a hospital bed. Its covers formed an unbroken line over the body in it. I stared straight ahead. Okay, I told myself, this is it; on your mark, get set. Pamela was delivering me into the outstretched hands of Brother Paul. Brother Paul, she said, was a member of the Franciscan order and also a male nurse, who, luckily for us, had been taking care of Father since she’d brought him back. Brother Paul told me what a wonderful man Father was.

“May she see him now?” Pamela asked him.

He hesitated. “It might upset her,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, suddenly wanting to reclaim control over what was happening to me.

“Because I’ve had to bind him up.”

“What?” Strange horrible images flitted through my mind.

“A handkerchief—” He made a wrapping motion around his head.

“Did he hemorrhage? Is there a lot of blood?” I asked, terrified.

“No, no,” Brother Paul gesticulated awkwardly. “We have to do that—it sets so quickly.”

Then I understood. And at that moment, for the first time, I truly realized that Father was dead. I took a deep breath.

“Please,” I said, letting it out. “He’s my father and I want to see him.” Not that I’m brave, I thought, because I’m not, but squeamishness aside, there’s something else: I have to see for myself. Now. No obituary tomorrow or funeral in three days can have the same meaning. Arid how dishonorable it would be if I walked away without saying goodbye. Properly, face to face.

He nodded, and Pamela left the room.

We went over to the bed.

Brother Paul folded back the sheet. The only dead body I had ever seen before was an anonymous corpse being dissected in the morgue of the Roosevelt Hospital. I hadn’t been allowed to see my mother or sister. Now I steeled myself to look down, thinking, I must be
sure;
this time I must
know
. I knelt beside the bed.

The most shocking sight, as Brother Paul had warned, was the blue handkerchief tied all the way around Father’s head to hold his jaw in place. After I got over that, I forced myself to look at his face. Amazing, I thought, trying to stall my emotions with clinical detachment, the accuracy of every description, however trite, I’d ever read. I put my arms around his head and lifted it up. Amazing the aptness of hackeyed phrases like “deathly pallor” and “dead weight.” Amazing how quickly life goes when it goes; how quickly everything empties, body temperature drops, flesh implodes into matter, skin becomes as hard and cold as a sea shell.

I looked down the length of his body: it, too, had altered. It was smaller, shrunken; his stomach, distended for so many weeks as if pregnant, was flat. He had borne his death and was free.

I imagined him traveling through space faster than the speed
of light. Grounded far behind, I envied him. I wanted to let go of his head and follow, like a speck of dust, up past the moon and the sun. Where were Bridget and Mother at that very moment, I wondered, reaching out to him over the edge of some distant star? What address should I write in my telephone book after the name “Hayward, Leland”?

His head was very heavy. I cradled it against my chest and ran my hands over the stubble of his hair. Even it felt dead. I began to weep. My tears drenched his face, glazing it like ice. They soaked through the blue handkerchief and trickled in chilly rivulets back onto my hands. I sobbed and sobbed, soundlessly so that Brother Paul couldn’t hear, holding on to Father’s head with all my strength as if it were the last thing left in the world. I wept for my family, all of us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into such extraordinary carelessness. We’d been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as if we’d taken for granted the fact that, like our talents and interests and riches, there would be more where
we
had come from, too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke or Bridget or Bill.

I laid his head gently back down on the pillow and kissed his forehead. It was time to go.

I got as far as the middle of the room before I stopped, feeling him over my left shoulder. If I look back now, I thought, I’ll never let go; maybe that’s why Brother Paul keeps his vigil tonight—to guard the living as well as the dead.

So I started for the doorway and the dark corridor beyond, knowing, as I passed through it, that my only choice was to keep moving forward.

n the thirty-odd years since
Haywire
was originally published, for me the most noteworthy personal events have been the deaths of many of my best friends, as well as my brother, Bill, who shot himself in the spring of 2008. Though I’m still alive and well, not a single day or night, not twenty-four hours, goes by since the death of my mother, my sister, my father, and my brother that I do not think of them.

Bill had remained an obsessed motorcyclist from his days as a coproducer of
Easy Rider
in 1968, and was seldom seen in anything but his black leathers and boots. Until his death he belonged to the Uglies, a motorcycle gang, and in the early years of 2000, he was badly injured in a terrible accident while riding with them. I visited him in a veterans’ hospital north of Los Angeles where he underwent treatment for six months; he barely recognized me and at that time was only partially recovered.

A few weeks after he was released, he called me in New York City where I’d been living for twenty-odd years married to Peter Duchin. Bill told me he was suicidal. Somehow I convinced him to see a doctor and go on antidepressants. Reluctantly he agreed, after arguing they would damage his sex life. “Well,” I replied, “it’s either life or sex.”

Two weeks later he called again. “Much better,” he said. “Thanks. But now I realize I can no longer live alone. I need to be looked after. I need a mother and a father. Any suggestions?”

I came up with Larry and Mai Hagman, old family friends, who had a large estate on a mountaintop in Ojai, just south of Santa Barbara near the coast. Amazingly, they agreed to let him live in their guesthouse, which he did for a few years. Then Larry generously bought him a luxurious mobile home, which Bill installed on the property of one of his Ugly cohorts.