Haywire (4 page)

“Brooke,” said Pamela, skipping over this information in a brisk businesslike tone I admired for its British sense of mission, “you are distraught, which is understandable, but I have an enormous favor to ask of you: under no circumstances must you allow yourself to become emotional now, because your father—I am deeply concerned about him—is heartbroken, as you can imagine, and you know as well as I that if too much pressure is put on him, if there’s too much stress, he could possibly have one of his bleeding attacks—and then he might die as well. That’s what I’m really terrified of.” Her blue eyes were urgently imploring. “What is essential at this moment is that I take you back to him—I think Josh and Nedda Logan are on their way over now—and you
must
be strong and brave, Brooke, absolutely no tears,
really
, because I cannot have him made any more upset than he already is.” Right: I am a potential hysteric, who can be transformed on order into a paradigm of stoicism. “Besides, you are supposed to be an actress; be a good one tonight, please.”

Only nine months earlier, Pamela had stood before me on the same kind of agonizing mission, this time on Second Avenue outside of the Gate Theatre. It was a very cold night, the first night of the year, January 1st, and I had just come out of the Astor Place subway stop and was approaching the theatre where Kevin McCarthy and I were appearing in an off-Broadway production of
Marching Song
. It was my first play and we’d opened the week before. I was shivering from the snow blown down my neck by the bitter wind and also from spasms of fear, the first palpable fear I’d ever known. Twenty minutes earlier, I’d called my stepfather from a phone booth in Grand Central Station, clumsily pouring change into all three slots because he was in New Haven and I didn’t want him to think I was so cheap as to call collect. I wanted to talk to him and, with luck, to Mother, or at least send her my love if she couldn’t come to the phone; she was starring in a play that was trying out there before its New York engagement. He told me that she’d just died.

Mother dead. Impossible. I had called to say Happy New Year just in time to learn she was dead.

The vast dome of Grand Central Station closed down over me in the glass telephone booth like one of the jars in which we’d caught fireflies as children, only without any holes punched out in the lid, so that I seemed to go deaf. There was absolute silence: the beating of my heart, the static on the telephone, my stepfather asking me between sobs to take the next train to New Haven, and me saying no, I had to be at the theatre in a few minutes and would come up by late train that evening—all silent—and even when I pushed open the door for air, no sound anywhere in the entire huge space of the station with its magazine stands and hot-dog stands and shoe-polishing stands and waiting rooms and information booths and entrances and exits filled as before with people, but people moving noiselessly, without echoes. I moved with them, my own footsteps on the worn marble floor and even the subway totally muffled as it lurched its way downtown. My mother, my very own mother, beautiful, warm, always more alive than anyone else in the world—alive in ways that nobody else dared to be—my mother, with her special gift for living and for giving that life to all the people who knew her and many who didn’t, dead.

There was only one other person in my subway car, a drunk swinging like a monkey from pull to pull. He stopped right in front of me and leaned down, suspended by both arms. “Why,” he asked in a slur, puncturing the dense membrane of silence with such ease that I looked up at him as if he were a wizard, “why would you be looking so sad, little lady? It’s New Year’s Day.” He peered more closely. “Drink up your cup fer auld lang syne. Here’s to you—”

“Are we the only two people on this whole subway tonight?” I asked him as if it were the most profound question in the whole world, desperately wanting him to go on, to tell me everything about his life before we got to my stop.

“Everyone’s home with friends,” he said. “Celebrating.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Well, you see, I’ll ride to the end of the line. They let me sleep here.”

“My mother died tonight,” I informed him because he was a stranger. Water began to rise in his crusty red eyes, and then he sat down quietly next to me, shaking his head. I was grateful he was there. We both waited until my stop came, and he stood up with me as I got off.

Then I climbed swiftly up to the street, my mind beginning to burn like a newspaper. First there was the energizing reassurance that I was on my way somewhere specific and solid and important. I was already wound up to play my role before the phone call, and after the shock that followed, my instincts were sharpened by the freezing air; I was supposed to give a performance, and it would have to be an excellent performance. I kept sucking in air until my lungs hurt and then coughing it out like a steam engine; it reminded me that I was alive. It was much too soon for anyone involved with the play to have heard about her death, and I wouldn’t have to say anything until afterward, if then. So I concentrated as Lee Strasberg had taught us, whispering over and over in a litany, “I must
use
this, I must
use
this,” and finally arrived at the Gate Theatre, rather proud of myself, knowing, as seldom if ever one does, that I was going to do a fine job. Standing at the entrance of the theatre were the producer, the director, and the stage manager of the play, an unusual but not unreasonable place for them to be. Before I could say hello, Peter Kass, the director, blurted out something to the effect that Father had just called the theatre to tell them what had happened, and to have them cancel tonight’s performance.

“What?” I remember asking, waves of anger striking me. “What? He’s got no right to do that, he’s not the producer; it’s
your
play.”

But they appeared not to have heard my voice at all; as if in a bad dream, they were looking fixedly through me and beyond me, and suddenly I was grasped from behind by something dark and furry. I started to struggle violently, and then I smelled a familiar perfume. It was Pamela, her face a phantasmagoria of white against a background of black sable, and beyond her an enormous black limousine, hovering curbside like a sleek bird of prey, one wing outstretched to encompass me.

“Brooke, darling,” she asked anxiously, “you know about your mother?”

“Yes,” I answered tersely.

“Darling, your father has sent me down here to collect you immediately. He said you’d understand he couldn’t come himself, but he’s all tied up with phone calls to Bridget and Bill—come on, darling, he wants you at once. He
needs
you.”

“Pamela,” I said, stepping backward, “I have to give a performance tonight. Then I shall take a taxi up to the apartment.”

Pamela looked totally shocked. “You don’t understand, darling; your father has canceled tonight’s performance.”

By this time we had been joined somewhat tentatively by the three at the door plus Kevin McCarthy straight from his subway: they were all making various explanations or gesticulating concern for me. Over this poorly orchestrated ensemble, I continued defiantly, “What right did Father have to cancel
any
performance of a play he didn’t produce? Mother would have wanted me to go on, she would be
furious
if she knew about all this, she would
expect
me to go on—this is completely unprofessional, and what about all these people”—I gestured toward the management and cast assembling on the dark sidewalk—“what about them, and what about
me;
why couldn’t Father have come and told me in person—”

“Brooke”—there was a shrill edge to Pamela’s voice, not quite a scream—“your father thinks it would be
unseemly
for a performance to go on as usual tonight. Out of
respect
for your mother, he decided to do what he did—”

“Kevin!” I shouted, abandoning all pretense of propriety. “Tell me—is this what happens under these circumstances in the theatre?”

There was a shudder of silence, then everyone started talking at once, and somehow Pamela maneuvered me toward the waiting car; once again I had the sense that I was flailing my way through my worst nightmare, in which the more I struggle for life against some nameless master strategy, the more I become trapped in its ruthless machinations. For many years as a child, the nightmare was recurrent and the strategy had a name: it materialized in vivid technicolor as a giant carnivorous dinosaur, a
Tyrannosaurus rex
, with hideous red eyes and furrows of sharp teeth that glistened hungrily in the sun. He would ring our front doorbell and settle back on his huge scaly haunches waiting for me to answer; invariably I would slip past him and, with a sudden rush of adrenalin, spread my wings and fly, soar to freedom right over his head, catch the wind and glide with it like a falcon across the desert next to our house, while just below he stalked me through the yucca and cactus, erect on his powerful rear limbs, snapping at me with salivating jaws as the wind bore me up and down and up and then, finally, down. It must have been preordained that the Honourable Pamela Digby Churchill, not yet even my stepmother, would
swoop down as an emissary from my father, not only to tell me about my mother’s death in the absence of his ability to do it himself, but also to collect me efficiently for a ritual gathering of the clan, in this case my brother and sister, who were separated by half the country in mental institutions—Menninger’s, in Topeka, Kansas; Austen Riggs, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

I huddled in the rear of the limousine, overcome by its dizzying warmth and sensuality. Pamela covered my lap with a fur lap robe and gave me a handkerchief, which I balled up and held very tight. I thought, I must not be melodramatic, my mother’s death is a historically tragic event, it affects many other people—but all that is inconsequential—what is essential at this particular moment, what is crucial, is to be absolutely selfish. Why, if one of my parents had to die, did it have to be my mother, when I needed her so? Why not my father? Only my mother had understood me; nobody else in the world ever had or ever would in the same way, and we had really only just begun. All of my fearful battles with her for survival and identity had been fought, and just as we had learned how to shrug off ancient rivalries, to conquer our primordial fears about each other, to throw down our weapons, cease being mother and daughter, unequal or different, now that we were two individual people who had survived together, having successfully held each other and the outside world at bay for miles and years, there was something truly senseless about life if this was the result. It was a revelation. I stared out at the dark city, feeling that we were passing under it rather than through it, and thought: You might as well think whatever you want, be as self-indulgent as you need to be. You have about ten minutes of privacy, and then the sorrow of other people to deal with, Bridget and Bill, Father. Yes, I thought, of course Father loves you, but if I, Brooke, were to die tonight, it would hardly change his life at all; he would mourn, maybe shed a few tears in passing. But ah! Mother would have known the death of someone who had actually once been a part of her; there would have been a dreadful sense of mutilation of self, blood gushing out in rivers, pain almost beyond endurance. How did she die? What was the last thing she thought about?

Until now, the idea of death had been a hazy abstraction, although, as described in close detail with more or less poetry by great or even ordinary authors I’d read since childhood, or as presented in movies, it often made me cry; I had to be taken home
at the age of three, hysterical, when Bambi’s mother was shot. Now I tabulated the number of times an actual death had profoundly affected me; if our dog Stewart, a pointer who’d been run over in a ghastly accident, was not counted, the tally was a meager three. Working backward, there was Herman Mankiewicz when I was fifteen and Frances Fonda when I was twelve, both close friends of my parents, and both parents of children who were close friends of mine, almost part of my own family; then there was my grandfather Colonel William Hayward, who died of cancer when I was six. The Colonel, as he was always referred to, came out from New York and stayed with us in California for a while. He knew he was dying and the idea of being an invalid confined to a wheelchair annoyed him greatly. Always an active man, he took up needlepoint, and I remembered him seated in his wheelchair—impressively upright, shoulders back, with steel-rimmed glasses and the white, freshly starched collar he’d insisted on wearing every day of his life—stitching a wondrous alphabet, which eventually hung on our wall. He started it for Bridget and me, before Bill was born, so it must have taken several years to complete; in the end it measured about six by nine feet, all squares of animals represented alphabetically (A for Antelope, B for Buffalo) and rendered in the colors of a warm desert twilight.

By the time we arrived at the Carlyle Hotel, where Father and Pamela then lived, I welcomed any distraction. Besides, I was curious about Father. How would he be affected by the death of someone to whom he’d been married for ten years and then barely seen for the next thirteen, despite the three children they shared?

He looked awful, and somehow that pleased me. It meant he must have loved her a great deal, and I’d often wondered. He looked ten years older. Maybe they had never stopped loving each other. Maybe he was the last thing she thought about.

We were in the master bedroom, gracefully filled with Pamela’s antique French furniture, which had just arrived from Paris to replace the simpler hotel stock. Everywhere was the heavy scent of Rigaud candles and warm lighting, Pamela’s trademarks; she always used pink light bulbs instead of white. In the dead of winter masses of fresh flowers were always in place on every surface. There was some discussion of Bridget and Bill. Bill had said on the telephone that he didn’t have a dark suit or any money—he was flying in from Topeka the next day and wanted to buy the suit
there. I said I wanted to go to New Haven to see my stepfather. Father said that was a bum idea, he absolutely forbade it; Kenneth had been calling every half hour and had some terrible plan to cremate Mother and have us all there while a service was said during the cremation; it sounded to him as if Kenneth had really gone crazy, and as my father, he was going to insist that all three of us children stay in the apartment with Pamela and him for the next few days until the memorial service, which was obviously going to take place whether or not there was some depressing service over her body while it was in the oven. Did I have any idea how morbid it would be to go up there to witness a cremation? Absolutely nuts, as if Bridget and Bill weren’t headed enough in that direction anyway.