Haywire (18 page)

MAGGIE DARLING AM CALLING YOU LATER BUT WANTED YOU TO GET THIS FIRST. I HAVENT GOT THE ASTAIRE CONTRACTS YET AND WONT HAVE THEM BEFORE THE MORNING. I WANT TO MAKE A DEAL WITH YOU AND I GIVE YOU MY SACRED WORD OF HONOR I WILL KEEP IT ON BROOKE AND BRIDGETS HEAD OR ANYTHING YOU WANT. I WANT YOU TO LEAVE TOMORROW AFTERNOON AND COME HOME, STAY HERE AND WE CAN GO AWAY FOR THE WEEKEND ANYWHERE YOU LIKE AND LEAVE HERE MONDAY OR TUESDAY AFTERNOON FOR NEW YORK AND SAIL NEXT SATURDAY, LEAVING YOUR TRUNK AND MINE IN NEW YORK. AM BUYING THE TICKETS FOR NEXT SATURDAY NOW SO HAVE TO GO. I KNOW THIS IS UNREASONABLE AND AWFUL BUT IF I WERE TO LEAVE TOMORROW NIGHT IT WOULD BE REALLY CATASTROPHIC. I JUST CANT TELL YOU HOW AWFUL IT WOULD BE AND WHAT IT WOULD DO. I COULD LEAVE HERE BY THE END OF THE WEEK AND BY THE END OF THE WEEK I MEAN FRIDAY OR SATURDAY BUT I HATE BEING HERE ALL ALONE AND AM GOING CRAZY BEING HERE ALL ALONE. BESIDES THAT I THINK YOU OUGHT TO SEE YOUR CHILDREN AS BROOKE IS REALLY GETTING OUT OF HAND ABOUT YOU. IF YOU WANTED ME TO AND DIDNT WANT TO COME ALL THE WAY BACK HERE I WOULD BRING BROOKE ON TO NEW YORK BUT WHAT I WOULD REALLY LIKE MOST OF ALL WOULD BE TO HAVE YOU COME BACK TOMORROW AND I GIVE YOU MY SACRED WORD OF HONOR AGAIN THAT WE CAN LEAVE HERE MONDAY OR TUESDAY AFTERNOON AND SAIL NEXT SATURDAY. IF YOU WILL DO THIS FOR ME I GIVE YOU ANOTHER SACRED WORD OF HONOR, I WILL DO ANYTHING YOU ASK OF ME ANY TIME NO MATTER HOW UNREASONABLE. IF YOU WONT, I WILL BE ON IN TIME TO SAIL THIS SATURDAY BUT IT WILL BE REALLY AWFUL THE THINGS IT WILL DO. ALL MY LOVE LELAND
.

(Father often wired people to warn them he was about to call or called them to warn them he was about to wire them. He liked to spend his dinner at Chasen’s or “21,” depending on which city he was in, calling or wiring people from his special table with a telephone at hand. One night he put in a call to his client Dashiell Hammett, who was three thousand miles away. “Dash,” he said tersely, “I sent you a letter this morning. You’ll get it sometime tomorrow.” “Is that all?” asked Hammett. “That’s all. It explains itself,” answered Father and went back to his lamb chops.)

Mother sent us back long letters, almost conversations. To Bridget, on her fifth birthday, she wrote, “My darling Bridget, It’s
Sunday and I’m sitting all by myself in my new apartment trying to guess what you and Brooke and Bill and Father are doing. And feeling very sad because in four days it will be February 10, a very important day for you and me—and I won’t be there to share it with you. Five years ago I was getting pretty tired of waiting for you to make your appearance into this world—you were very late in coming—and of course Father and I were terribly excited and curious—would you be a boy? What would you look like? And what should we name you? My darling Bridget, I hope you have a wonderful birthday—and I hope we don’t ever have to spend another one apart. Get right up this minute and give Brooke and Bill and Father kisses for me—I love you all so—If I were there I could give you five smacks on the fanny and one to grow on. I love you, Mother.”

In the fall of that year, three momentous events took place almost simultaneously: Father left us to go East for rehearsals of
A Bell for Adano
, Grandfather died of cancer, and Mother, unilaterally deciding the time had come to leave California, bought a farm in Connecticut.

She wrote us, “Darlings, I’m so excited about your teeth coming in, Brooke, and about yours going out, Bridget! Do you think I’ll be able to recognize you when I come home in
two months now?
Bill, don’t knock any of yours out.

“Grandfather’s funeral was very beautiful. It looked like this.” (She drew a diagram of his coffin, draped with the American flag, with two big crosses of lilies at its head and a wreath from his soldiers at its foot.) “A large choir sang hymns, and then everyone joined in ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’ Then before the pallbearers took the casket out, about fifty of his old colored soldiers marched out ahead, some of them crying because they’d lost such a good friend. Father and I didn’t cry because we were so happy that the Colonel was peaceful and quiet now after so many long months of suffering and misery. In the last World War—27 years ago—he organized all the colored troops and took them to France to fight. They were very brave and adored your grandfather. And he would have been very touched to see how many came to say goodbye to him. He was a fine honest brave man and you can be very proud of him. He was of you.

“As far back as last Christmas we knew he had a terrible disease and would have to die. So you see even Maisie is not too
unhappy about it. She has known for a long time that the sooner it happened the better it would be for the Colonel. Maisie has a magnificent marble mausoleum in the country. Her son, Philip, is in it—and now the Colonel will be there too.” (According to Father, Maisie wheedled him into arranging all the details of the funeral—which he envisioned, according to his view of the Colonel’s character, as having a military austerity and dignity—then ordered, on her own initiative, a six-thousand-dollar bronze casket, “the most expensive casket in New York,” while he argued that all the Colonel would have wanted was a simple pine coffin. But what Father resented was that afterward, she, one of the richest women in New York City, had the bill sent to him.)

On weekends, Mother and Father sometimes stayed with Paul Osborn (the playwright who had adapted
A Bell for Adano
for the stage) and his wife, Millicent, at their house in Connecticut about two hours outside of New York City. One Sunday, they all piled into the car for a drive through the New England countryside. It was late September, just before the rolling hills ripened into mounds of gold. On a narrow road two miles outside the little town of Brookfield, Mother exclaimed, “Stop the car!” She pointed through the maple trees at an old farmhouse. “That’s exactly the house I’ve always wanted. Let’s go ask if it’s for sale.”

With typical impatience, she ignored the loud outcry of objections from the others—it was Sunday; there was no “For Sale” sign; she couldn’t just pick a house at random, for God’s sake; it would be rude, not to mention embarrassing, to barge in on the owner—and blithely strode across the grass to ring the front doorbell. A few minutes later, she returned triumphant. Not only was the owner, Mrs. Elroy Curtis, charmed by her unexpected guest but amazed at her well-timed arrival; by coincidence the house was going on the market in a week.

“Darlings!” Mother wrote us. “What do you think of this place Father and I found in the country, not far from the Osborns’? Instead of one red barn it has three! And it has a brook, and it’s not far from a river where we can fish, and apple trees, and a small swimming pool and chicken houses, and a couple of cows and a few sheep, and woods and a wonderful great attic where you can play, and a nice school not too far away.…”

Shortly after that,
A Bell for Adano
went into rehearsal. Mother was beginning to count performances until her run with
“The Turtle”
ended. “Darlings—Leland still hasn’t arrived—it’s Sunday afternoon and he was due to fly in this morning—but you know he’s like a mosquito the way he hops around. I can never get my finger on him before he’s somewhere else again. I’m very lonesome all by myself here—Forty-eight more performances—six more weeks!!! Bless your hearts—I love you, each one of you so much—and miss you much more than you can ever know—and you can’t know until you grow up and have to be separated from your children—Mother.”

During out-of-town tryouts of
“Adano”
Father, who disliked writing real letters himself and customarily dictated all his correspondence to a secretary, sent us a rare example of his penmanship. “Darling children—Mother and I are in the country today at the new house. It is cold and there is snow on the ground. Agnes the cow and the sheep want to stay inside out of the cold air. Agnes makes wonderful milk and cream so thick you can’t pour it. I have been away in a place called Boston—which is a beautiful city. In about another week I am going to another city called Baltimore which I love very much. The reason is because before Mother and I were married she was working there and I used to go there to see her all the time and we had wonderful fun together. We used to eat codfish cakes all the time. We will be leaving for home in a little over four weeks now and are both so excited we can hardly wait. I think Christmas is coming soon, too. I love you all a great deal. So does Mother and we both send you millions of kisses—Father.”

“Oh, my darlings,” scribbled Mother hastily, “
four
more performances—and I have never been so excited in my life.… I think when I see you, my three wonderful grown-up children, I shall just sit down and bawl like a baby. You’ve never seen me cry, well I have a small tear in my eye right now thinking about you. This will be my last letter; did you know Father’s produced a play and that it’s a terrific smash hit—which means that so many people want to see it that there are not enough tickets? It’s a very fine play about our soldiers who go into conquered lands and try to teach the people a good way of life. You can all go see it next spring. I love you all so much that it makes me want to cry. That’s a silly way to show how happy I am, isn’t it? Just think, we’ll all be together again—forever and ever—Ten kisses apiece on my favorite spots—God bless you! Mother.”

With
A Bell for Adano
, Father became an overnight success as a Broadway producer. But all Bridget, Bill, and I knew was that it was Christmas and Mother and Father had finally come home.

It was our last Christmas at Evanston Street. Not a single detail of the usual preparations escaped Mother’s unwavering sense of tradition. Out came the antique German crèche, and on the mantel knelt a flock of carved angels with gold-leaf wings and halos like Fra Angelico paintings; thousands of Christmas cards were wedged around all the books in the library, solidly covering them. In The Barn, a thirty-foot fir tree, like an apparition from the
Nutcracker Suite
, rose dramatically to the ceiling. As usual, it was so high the top branches had to be decorated precariously from the balcony, and it took everyone who passed by, working in shifts, several days to trim. Bridget and I, in angel costumes, flitted around the mountain of packages that slowly began to compete in height with the tree; whenever Emily’s back was turned, Bill, coached by us, tried to scale his way to the top where all new shipments were consigned. Most of the presents were sent, it was explained, by complete strangers, fans of Mother’s who had probably seen our names in movie magazines. “Horrifying!” exclaimed Mother. “I’ll let you open them all on Christmas Day—that part’s the most fun anyway. Then Emily will store them all away for a rainy day.” From previous experience we knew that “rainy day” was another way of saying that the entire mountain would be hauled off in a truck to a children’s hospital after the holidays. (Mother had one longstanding fan who kept track of all kinds of dates, and on Bridget’s fourth birthday sent her a diamond brooch, allegedly a valuable family heirloom; for once, Mother was at a loss.)

Christmas mornings were altogether overwhelming. We invested them with so many expectations, such conjecture and petty rivalry, that when they arrived like long-awaited guests, we were stricken by shyness. The big question was whether or not Santa Claus would come through. That year, Bridget, Bill, and I, with Emily and George Stearns in tow, had spent several days on his trail. After unsuccessfully canvassing all the Beverly Hills department stores, we pinned him down at Sears. Our desires were precise. Bill asked for a flashy red fire engine with an extension ladder, and Bridget, as she did every year, a life-size doll baby with all the attendant paraphernalia. I had never been interested in dolls; to
me they were clumsy facsimiles of life, with their artificial smiles and limbs, and I couldn’t understand how Bridget could spend hours dressing and undressing them or sticking bottles of water into their mouths to wait, fascinated, for what would come out the other end. I had spotted, in the toy store, a doll’s house, which I instantly coveted; the idea of moving furniture from one room to another made perfect sense, I confided to Santa Claus. What I remember about Christmas morning that year was coming downstairs, cautiously negotiating each stair as if it were slippery with ice, and, at the bottom, Mother and Father waiting to lead me to the center of the room and a doll’s house, surpassing in magnificence anything I had ever imagined, towering, it seemed, over the tree and everything else in The Barn. It was a marvel of craftsmanship, a Gothic confection of some twenty rooms, every one wallpapered, carpeted, hung with a tiny chandelier, and crammed, like San Simeon, with a prodigious supply of furniture. George Stearns stood beside it, beaming; he had built and decorated it entirely himself, working secretly every night for weeks—an old hobby, he said, carving and cabinet work, and a great pleasure to discover he had the skill to make some furniture for me to move around. Mother nudged me gently. I had forgotten to say thank you. My legs felt so wobbly I didn’t quite dare reach inside to see if the furniture really moved. “Brooke,” Mother whispered, “George has worked so long and so hard on this doll’s house and it’s so very special—of course you know Bill won’t be interested, with all his cars and fire engines—but do you think you’re grown up enough now and generous enough to share it with Bridget? I’ll bet you are. Think! Wouldn’t it be nice for her to be able to play with it, too?”

I thought. That question, Mother’s simple question on Christmas morning, 1944, about the doll’s house that George Stearns built was to me the most complex question anyone had ever asked. I thought for a whole minute while my heart stopped and my eyes blinked and my face flushed with fury. It was a trick question, two-sided, flipping back and forth, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, the trick of a supreme magician who could—with cunning legerdemain under a silk handkerchief—transform a few seconds of tranquility into an eternity of chaos. The truth: no, I did not, under any circumstance whatsoever, wish to share the doll’s house with Bridget (unless, uncoerced, the next day, or week, or
year, I felt like changing my mind and giving it to her outright). Or the truth: yes, of course I wanted to share the doll’s house with Bridget, because not only would that please Mother and demonstrate how generous and grown up I really was but because I knew that I loved Bridget very deeply and identified with her yearning as she tentatively touched the miniature grandfather’s clock in the miniature hallway. (Get your nasty little fingers out of there, I wanted to scream, until I give you permission.) Bridget was blissfully oblivious of my pain, my conflict. I had not, before that question, ever been
conscious
of hating her or of loving her so absolutely. I never felt, or had the ability to be unaware of feeling, the same way about my sister again. And I could never bring myself to play with the doll’s house. Eventually it had to be given away.