Haywire (9 page)

“By that time I was so in love with Bridget I just couldn’t see straight. She was to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She always used to wear gardenia perfume. About two days before the first opening night up there, I found a place over the mountain
,
about an hour’s drive, that had gardenias but they couldn’t send them. I borrowed Peter Hunt’s car, a little red M.G., and I went over the mountain; it took me two hours to get there and back. I got the gardenias and she never knew where they came from. Every week when a play opened, I would borrow Hunt’s M.G. and go get them. I guess I must have logged sixteen hours or more getting her gardenias. About twice a year, I run into somebody or some place that smells of gardenias and even now, sixteen years later, I think of Bridget, instantly.”

One night in mid-August, when New York was at the height of a heat wave, I hopped in my little convertible for a cooling drive.

By the time I got to Greenwich, I knew where I was going. I stopped at my house there long enough to throw some clothes in a bag and to call Bridget in Williamstown. Although it was an ungodly hour, I told her I was about to pay her that visit she’d been suggesting for weeks. She sounded sleepy but pleased, and gave me explicit directions on how to get there. As I reached the Berkshires, the dawn came up; the land became more and more beautiful. Suddenly I understood why Bridget had often said she wanted to live in Stockbridge for the rest of her life. When I got to Williamstown, I went straight to the theatre as she’d instructed me, and there she was with Tom and a welcoming committee standing on the green.

She immediately enlisted my services as a coffinmaker; the company was in rehearsal for the second to the last show of the season,
The Visit
, which starred E. G. Marshall, and his coffin was a vital prop. I worked all morning under Bridget’s careful supervision and we ended up with a very impressive black-and-gold casket.

Then she dispatched me somewhere in somebody’s truck to pick up some sort of special fabric for the costumes. For me to be bossed around by my younger sister was a complete reversal of roles, and not at all unpleasant. In the afternoon she allowed me time off to watch a dress rehearsal for
The Visit
. Nikos was the director; Bill Francisco wasn’t there. Tom had a walk-on as a town policeman in an absurd helmet. Bridget amazed me; she was all over the place running most of the backstage action like an old-time production manager. Everyone came to her for advice on the props, the costumes, the lighting, the scenery. I was proud of her.
She had metamorphosed into a figure of authority, the last thing anyone would ever have expected of her. As I was leaving the next morning, I told her that she should ask Father for a job on his next show. Bridget confessed that she had a secret ambition to become a producer and that it was behind-the-scenes action she really liked.

She blew me a kiss as I started back to New York, and I couldn’t help thinking how pleased Mother, whose career had begun in summer stock with the famed University Players, would have been to see her so happy.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“You came up to Williamstown once that summer, and she was terribly nervous and uptight about it because she felt very much that Williamstown was her own little province. It didn’t go off badly at all, but I knew she was apprehensive about the fact that you were coming up. You represented the glamorous New York Vogue influence that she was frightened to death of. She was, to herself, the girl who was crazy, and you weren’t. And in fact something happened that summer that convinced her that she was crazy
.

“It was the next to last week of the season. Bill wasn’t there. I had gotten the gardenias and taken her to some restaurant. Afterward Nikos threw a big party at one of the fraternity houses because it was the last show of the season
.

“I was sitting with Bridget on a staircase, and Nikos was about two stairs below us. Although Bridget didn’t usually drink—her doctor had told her not to—that night she had a couple of glasses of wine. She was feeling terrific. We were talking to Nikos and sort of laughing; suddenly she pitched forward into Nikos’s lap. Her eyes were open but they weren’t. I was just absolutely panicked. People were crowding around her. Nikos told everyone to get out. We carried her into the next room. She started to scream, and the screams came from her bowels. We called the hospital; it was about one o’clock in the morning; no doctor. They had to wake one up. We must have stayed with her forty-five minutes until that doctor got there. She was talking to your mother the whole time. What she was saying was ‘Mother. I’ve got to speak to my mother!’ And we said, ‘Your mother’s dead.’ She got very quiet, but her body was like a taut rubber band. Then she said, ‘I know she’s dead.’ Tears were
coming down her cheeks and she said, over and over, ‘I never got a chance to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry.’

“Finally a doctor arrived. He gave her a shot, and she was terrified of the needle, just terrified; we had to really hold her down. We carried her back to the fraternity house where she was staying. The doctor ordered a nurse to stay in the room
.

“I walked around crying for a couple of hours. I couldn’t sleep and I went back up to the room to look at her. I would just so willingly have laid down my life for her then. If there was anything I wanted, it was to be thirty-four, my age now. I wanted so badly to be somebody who could take charge. But a fast eighteen was the best you could have said about me
.

“Bridget really knew that she was sick. She knew that she wasn’t in Riggs by accident and that what happened to her on the staircase in Williamstown was serious. The big suspense with Bridget was: was she getting better, or was she getting worse? She was keenly aware, when she was at family functions, that she was being observed like an exhibit. Does she look better now than a year ago? Is she in good shape or bad shape? Not because she was somebody who was subject to great highs and lows, but because she was genuinely ill
.

“Bridget felt very much the pariah of the family. She had been put away somewhere—under the nicest of circumstances, the best of places; she kept saying that all the time, how much freedom she’d had there—but she felt that she had, deservedly, been put away. As far as you, her sister, were concerned, that could never happen to you. You were peaking and cresting; you were married at the time, or just divorced, but even a divorce was better to Bridget than what she was doing. You had kids; you were bopping around New York getting your apartment on Central Park West, modeling and who knows, you were going to be acting, and so on. It was very important to her because she was, as everybody is, competitive. If you had been a little uglier and less successful, I think she would have run to you
.

“She knew that your father wanted what was best for her, but also felt that he was a little frustrated and bored with her. She couldn’t talk to him easily. She didn’t feel that comfortable with your father at all. She never knew what to think about Pamela. Bridget circled Pamela; she sniffed around Pamela a lot and every now and then thought Pamela was very nice and every now and then thought Pamela wasn’t very nice. The only thing that I remember about your brother, Bill, is that she loved him very much
.
She felt a kindred spirit with Bill when things went wrong with him. She talked about your mother. Bridget felt deeply that, looking back on everything, she had been unreasonably antagonistic to your mother and that she had hated her for a lot of things that weren’t her fault, that there had been a time, very close to your mother’s death, when your mother had wanted very, very desperately to get back together with Bridget, to talk to Bridget, to have some kind of rapprochement and that Bridget fought it, fought it hard, and tried to hurt her by fighting it at all. Then your mother died and she never had another chance
.

“She was very aware that people were saying, ‘Hello, Bridget, how are you?’ like ‘Oh, my God. I hope you’re fine.’ As if they were all whispering behind their fans about her, since she was the only one in the room that had been to a mental institution. She was terribly bright, Bridget, very sensitive to the attitudes other people had toward her, and she could identify a patronizing smile like ‘My dear, how are you?’ at a hundred yards
.

“Your father, as a result of that episode in Williamstown, said, ‘Get her back to New York right now.’ She adamantly refused to go. There was a week left to the season and she insisted on staying out the week. The greatest thrill of my life was driving her to the airport and flying back with her.”

When Bridget got back into the city after Labor Day, she changed apartments. She and I spent a lot of afternoons at the florist buying huge flowering bushes for the new space or visiting the food department at Bloomingdale’s to browse through the imported delicacies. She had a passion for crystallized ginger and crème fraîche, which was hard to find anywhere else, and we both had a nostalgia for smoked turkey and Smithfield ham, which Mother, a Virginian, had seen to it were staples of our childhood.

We never talked a great deal about Mother. I was cautiously rebuilding my relationship with Bridget; if I pressed her about certain subjects, her shaky confidence in me might have regressed perhaps irreparably. I sensed she was putting me to her own private test, and just barely beginning to trust me. Any questions I might have asked her about the long bitterness with Mother were
verboten
. It was acceptable, even curiously reassuring to Bridget, if I mentioned Mother as a matter of course; not, however, if I overtly mourned for her. So we played by Bridget’s rules; there was no alternative. Together we revisited all the art galleries and museums
to which Mother had dragged us when we were thirteen and fifteen, the same shops and restaurants, the familiar concerts and ballets, without ever discussing why.

Sometimes she would wear one of Mother’s dresses or coats, or a particular antique necklace Kenneth had bought Mother in London one year. Mother had said its delicacy would suit only Bridget. And so on her twenty-first birthday, a month after Mother died, Kenneth had presented it to her.

I tried to push Bridget into modeling or editorial work at a fashion magazine like
Vogue
or
Harper’s Bazaar
. I thought she’d be very good at either, and fashion was a field in which I had connections. But she was suspicious of any interference, particularly mine.

Bill Francisco:

“Just before her death we finally began to argue, which was great. Everything had been very lovey-dovey and kind of romantic; finally legitimate arguments could be had, really screaming fights—usually about money. ‘Let’s go to such-and-such a place.’ ‘Can’t, no dough.’ ‘I’ll treat.’ ‘No way.’ Dutch from time to time, but no way I’d let her pay for both of us. I was making about seventy-five dollars a week, so it was very tight. And later, after the fact, I wondered if the pressure about getting married came out of the feeling ‘Let’s do it now, before …’

“All that crap that came out about the possibility that she killed herself because of her mother’s death—I don’t think anyone knew her better than I did at that time and I swear it was out of the question. She was in good shape, I was in good shape, and the relationship was working. We were both very busy setting up Broadway productions, planning this whole attack on New York City. She was interviewing writers, typing stuff, getting it organized. She wanted to be actively involved, which was wonderful. I think it was the first time she was doing something because she wanted to do it, not because she felt she had to compete. She was helping me to produce, which was great because it channeled a lot of energy that had been misdirected. That month before she died was a very active period.”

The last time I saw her, a few days before she died, she had embarked on an ambitious project for Father: assembling and editing the hundreds of sixteen-by-twenty color photos of Imspond
he’d taken all summer. Tom Mankiewicz was coming into the city that weekend from Yale, and we’d arranged to meet at Bridget’s on Saturday afternoon.

When I arrived, she was squatting on the floor of the living room while the phonograph blared
La Bohème
. Tom was conducting with his eyes closed. They were engulfed in layouts and gallon containers of special glue, discards, parings of paper, scissors of every size, wastebaskets, and a lethal-looking photo-clipper. Bridget loved to entertain and always had delicious odds and ends around. While she plied us with banana cake, I noticed, over the new sofa against the wall, two narrow panels each about six feet high. They were just as spectacular as I’d remembered them from years ago: two scenes of Paris by night and day, one black, the other bright yellow, painted by Ludwig Bemelmans for Father and Nan to hang in an apartment they’d once had overlooking the East River.

“Bridget Hayward, where’d you get those Bemelmans?” I exclaimed covetously.

“Father took them out of storage and loaned them to me,” she replied, coyly fluttering her long eyelashes.

“What will you trade them for?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer. She knew me too well.

“Nothing,” she replied, amused but emphatic. I bargained for half an hour, offering her everything I owned in exchange, but it was no use. Once she’d set her jaw in a certain way, she was as obdurate as Mother. Tom was riveted by the scene. He even lowered the sound level of
La Bohème
.

Bridget polished off the last of her tea, and while she was playing with the cake crumbs on her plate she said to me, “Brooke, there’s only one way you will ever get these paintings. I’ll leave them to you when I die.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Bridget,” I said, thoroughly exasperated.

“Now, now,” she said. “It may be sooner than you think.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, really irritated.

“Nothing,” she said, and she was suddenly very serious. “It doesn’t mean anything except what I said. It may be sooner than you think.”