Haywire (24 page)

As soon as the Haywards were allowed to return after that episode, Jane and I plotted a sneak attack on the old doctor who lived at the top of a sinister brush-covered hill adjacent to the Fonda property. We had been observing him—or the lack of him, since he seldom showed himself—for some months, patiently biding our time and waiting for the perfect opportunity to catch him in one of his evil scientific experiments. The ideal moment to strike turned out to be Halloween. Gladly followed by the others, we inched our way up the hill on our bellies, maneuvering toward our objective with supreme stoicism through the burrs and brush and cactus. We had almost made it, when suddenly, down in the Fonda driveway, we heard the loud clanging of the dinner bell: it was our
governesses
imperiously recalling us to the house. We stumbled all the way down the side of the hill, crashing into trees, scraping our knees, tearing our clothes, total wrecks when we arrived at the bottom, where we were lectured very heavily about rattlesnakes, tetanus, polio, how thoughtless, how could we have—? Peter, who had an unpredictable temper, was so infuriated by having the thrust of our insurrection deflected that a few minutes later, when the two governesses lined us up on the embankment in front of some oak trees for a group snapshot, he lunged forward and bit ours (a relief nurse who was substituting on Emily’s day off) on the leg, sinking his teeth in and drawing blood. She squealed and almost fell into the gulch behind her.

While the rest of us engineered these pranks with a heady life-or-death spirit, merrily devoting all our creative—and what we thought of as brilliant—energy to them, Bridget remained on the outside, hovering, bemused. Jane Fonda remembers her as being “slightly on the edge of things. Just sort of never in the center of the action. I’ve known several children who have leukemia, young, eleven- or twelve-year-olds, and know they’re dying—there’s something very different about them. First of all, they look different.
There is a kind of pale, translucent quality about them but they seem extremely mature. They’re not silly and they don’t rough-house the way other kids do, and Bridget was something like that.”

To me, at that time, Bridget was becoming very irritating. Since I was older and usually the only one of us able to do it, it was my responsibility to talk her into being a part of any group activity; in my more dispassionate moments I was capable of understanding her reticence, but in the heat of the fray it made me impatient, and if she became stubborn, flatly refusing to enter a game that we couldn’t play without another person—or, worse, threatening to tell on the rest of us if she was apprehensive about one of our daredevil schemes—I couldn’t stand it. What exasperated me most was trying to figure out why, if she put up so much resistance that we would finally decide to go ahead without her, she would then stick out her lower lip, scrunch up her face, and burst into tears. Everything would come to a standstill when one of us—generally me—went to find a referee like Mother or Emily. Bridget would refuse to budge, sobbing that it was nobody else’s business and besides she didn’t want to be singled out to a grownup as not fitting in. “But, Bridget,” Mother would comfort her, trying to make her laugh by rubbing their noses together, “you must
always
come to me if you’re unhappy—at least that way I can
help
you, silly.” And Bridget would whimper that that would make her feel like a tattletale and it wasn’t our fault and she couldn’t explain what the matter was, anyway. “Now, children, surely you can
all
play nicely together, there’s room for everyone,” Mother would admonish us. “But,
Mother
, that’s the whole point, she doesn’t want to play—do you, Bridget?” Bridget would remain silent and for Mother’s sake sulkily rejoin us, occasionally getting caught up in whatever we were doing enough to enjoy herself. As time went on and she took Mother’s advice, however, her behavior grew more frustrating; she would burst into tears and scuttle off at the drop of a hat to inform Mother we were being mean to her. “Crybaby, crybaby,” we would run back and forth shouting harder and harder. Mother would storm after us to lecture us about being bullies, we would defend our side of the situation to Mother, and Mother would soothe Bridget. “If you were really smart, my darling Brie, you would just ignore them, go your own way and not give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can make you cry. If you
behave as if they’re not upsetting you—I’ll tell you a secret—they won’t try to bother you any more. That’s human nature.” And Bridget would stalk around humming to herself, pretending we were invisible so that we would have to proceed without her anyway.

She was still small and skinny—“the runt of the family,” Mother teased her affectionately—and everything about her coloring was so pale, her skin, her hair, her eyelashes and brows, that once she asked Mother if she might be an albino, and Mother said of course not, if that were so her eyes would have been pink instead of blue. Still, she gave the impression of being frail and sickly, so that whenever we went to the doctor for a checkup, Mother had her tested for anemia, but it always turned out that, except for her sensitive skin, she was healthier than Bill and I, who were in bed a lot with bronchitis and ear infections. “You see?” Mother assured her. “Appearances mean nothing. Don’t let them boss you around any more; you’re really much stronger than either of them.”

As long as Bridget was alone with Bill and me, she seemed happiest, as if, making all allowances for daily warfare, we were the underpinnings of her security. At least with us, she thought she knew exactly where she was: sandwiched halfway between us in age and size and able to predict, more or less, what effect her behavior would have on us emotionally. It wasn’t a case of her being dependent on us, because although she was, she was also very much her own person, but the one thing about her that nobody—not even she—could measure or value was the extent of her originality. She looked different, she was different, she
knew
she was different, and that meant different from Bill and me, a comparison heightened by the knowledge that to begin with, the three of us were all different from other children. And no matter what Mother said, we weren’t at all sure that different meant better when events seemed to contradict that concept—as, in fact, did Mother herself at times when she would expound at length on the importance of our leading “normal everyday lives” like other people. It was confusing. Bridget constantly forced herself—or was forced by our example—to contend with the idea of conformity, and it was more painful for her than for Bill and me: she was softer and had a longer way to go. It was also more difficult for her to cope with that curious ambiguity in our upbringing: on the one hand, we were wildly encouraged to have the spunk to be totally nonconformist and to take pride in
expressing ourselves uniquely; on the other, we were forbidden to deviate from a strict set of rules that perpetually disciplined us to have consideration for other people and faultless manners with which to deal gracefully and tactfully with any conceivable social situation. “Children should be seen and not heard” was the doctrine around our house, “but if they are heard, it better be good and interesting.”

Insofar as rules can provide a margin of safety for children, Bridget was secure with them and wrote and illustrated an extensive “Book of Rules” when she was seven; however, even though it appeared that she was more comfortable with them than Bill and I, who were always chafing with disobedient inspirations, they had a more inhibiting effect on her, one that was reinforced by witnessing the punishments that were meted out to Bill and me. This seemed to endow her with a pious quality, which really got on our nerves. Even more aggravating, sometimes, was the assumption on her part that as one of us, she owned the other two; we were her possessions and it followed, of course, that our possessions were her possessions.

I wrote her sternly, when I was nine and she was seven, to set the record straight:

Notice!
(To Brie)

1. Do not touch anything here while I am gone. If you want your dolls, take them and leave my horses alone.
   
2. If anything is touched by you (I can tell whether they are or not) you will have some fittable punishment.
   
3. Don’t play game until I come home from Club. Leave baskets alone. I have everything arranged nicely, just the way I want.
   
4. If you do not heed these warnings I will have to speak to Emily.
   
5. Will play with you when I get home. (Brooke)
   

Bill continued, in isolated grandeur, to invent trouble of a magnitude that left Bridget and me awed. There was a reckless, abandoned, spur-of-the-moment aspect to his nature that we found foreign but admirable. There was no telling what the morning might bring. He reminded us of a cat depositing some dreadful new species of prey on the doorstep. Since both his looks and his disposition were angelic, Mother and Father decided to pass off this rebellious streak as a momentary phase of development.

Bill had his own room adjoining Bridget’s and mine, with French doors that led out to the front of the house. A few days after Mother had it redecorated and painted deep blue—a nice masculine color, she said—we all came down with chicken pox. On her way into Beverly Hills, Mother stopped by our respective beds to see what we would like from the toy store to cheer us up. “A jar of Vaseline,” said Bill. “Whatever for?” asked Mother. “Just to have,” answered Bill. “No books or crayons?” asked Mother. “No, thank you,” replied Bill, “just Vaseline, please. My very own jar. To keep under my bed.” Mother thought it was an adorable request. In the middle of the night a car crashed into a eucalyptus tree on the dirt road, and over the earsplitting wail of police and ambulance sirens came even more earsplitting wails and thumps from the direction of Bill’s room. The house was suddenly lit up and, in mass confusion, everyone—Mother, Father, Emily, Bridget, and I—converged on Bill’s room at the same moment, where we crashed into each other and slid the length of the blue linoleum floor, which had been heavily greased with Vaseline. Bill, just before going to sleep, had been inexplicably seized by a compulsion to smear his entire jar of Vaseline over every inch not only of the floor but also of the freshly painted walls. Later he was awakened by the commotion outside and, having forgotten all about his slippery art work, jumped out of bed in the darkness to see what was going on only to land loudly and painfully against the bureau on the other side of the room.

Father determined that since Bill’s major passion in life was hoarding money, the most effective way of punishing him would be to dock his weekly twenty-five-cent allowance. Usually before Bill was able to pay off one punishment in full, he would, owing to a lapse, have accumulated another. He was always behind. Once he was given a tool kit, and after impulsively drilling a large ragged hole through the wall between his room and ours, he ended up owing Father thirty-seven weeks of future allowance.

The only money that Father liked to hoard was small change, and that was really because he kept it in a special bank, a large hollow glass brick—like a glass construction brick in appearance—with one narrow slit on top into which he emptied his pockets each night. The bank looked beautiful as it slowly filled up with pennies and silver and sometimes the green of folded dollar bills all mixed together, but the best part was the ceremony of
opening it, which took place when Father could no longer cram in another dime. He would tie a string around the heavy glass, tell us to stand back, light a match to the string, and with deep satisfaction watch while the glass shattered and money exploded all over the place.

For us, by far and away the most interesting place in the house to be when Father came home from work was his room. It was loaded with all kinds of gadgets and paraphernalia. We loved to follow him in there and rifle through his cuff-link and watch collections. (The only jewelry Father ever wore was a pair of simple gold cuff links initialed “LH,” his airplane-propeller tie clip, and a watch, but nevertheless he had fifty or sixty pairs of cuff links, some—the ones Bridget and I grabbed first—set with precious stones, and his passion for timepieces of any style or vintage was so comprehensive that he had amassed well over a hundred fabulous clocks and watches, of which his favorite was a thin hundred-dollar gold piece with a secret catch that could be flipped open to reveal a watch miraculously half as thin as the coin itself). Or we would scribble with innumerable pens on innumerable variations of his blue-on-blue personalized stationery, and fiddle around with anything at all that belonged to him while he made a deal or two on the telephone. Although he had sold his agency to MCA, claiming that it tied him down too much, he couldn’t resist keeping a hand in the business and just moved his offices from his own building at 9200 Wilshire Boulevard to the MCA Building on Santa Monica Boulevard. He also remained on the board of TWA and continued as chairman of Southwest Airways, which had a milk run up and down the West Coast.

Although Father was by no means paternal by nature, he was beginning, as we grew more capable of expressing ourselves and establishing a verbal rapport with adults, to take as much interest in us as we had in him.

“Your mother and I have absolutely opposite points of view about children,” he stated one evening, trying to teach us how to play chess. “She’s most fascinated by them when they’re babies, and babies categorically don’t interest me at all, little pieces of hamburger meat—and listen, no question about the fact that, as babies go, you three were sensational—but the point is, now that you’re getting older and I can see how your brains are starting to work, thank God, now
that’s
an interesting process to me, and I feel as if I’m part of it. It’s about time.”

Father was always on the move, packing his overnight case engraved with the logo
LH 10%
, flying back and forth between New York and California even more frequently than before—working much too hard, said Mother. Bridget, Bill, and I were so accustomed to his trips that we accepted them as a matter of course. However, we looked forward to his return home, even from the office, with such excitement that the minute he walked in the door we jumped all over him and wouldn’t let him out of our sight until bedtime. Then, even if he and Mother had to go out, we would cling to him and beg him and badger him and trap him in our room until he had given us the latest installment of a marvelous, labyrinthine, never-ending tale he improvised for us in what had become a nightly routine. One night when he unexpectedly couldn’t come home for dinner, we were so disappointed that we wouldn’t eat. The next morning I wrote him a letter at his office,