Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

ladder fell on my head. I was bruised and bleeding from every pore; I made no sense for a whole day. That was the day I read the play. And I knew I would do it; I wanted to do it. After I got over my wounds, I was afraid to read it again. I don’t know whether I was afraid because I felt I would like it just as much the second time and feel compelled to do it, or because I feared I might not like it as much. But I did read it and I knew I would have to say yes. This is a play about good people—I mean people you have respect for. And it is a very affirmative play. It proves that marriage can be a very good thing, building up each person, not that terrible possessive business. And with this play, every time I read it, it makes me want to do something nice, loving, for my husband. I think it will have that effect on others.”

The morning Kenneth went to England, she called me.

“Brooke,” she said urgently, “please come over right now. Can you? Your father’s coming to lunch and I’ve just driven Kenneth to the airport; I’m all alone in the house.”

“Father?” I asked, amazed.

“Yes,” she said, out of breath. “He’s stopping by on his way up to Stockbridge. Thank God he’s finally agreed to have a look at Riggs and also to sit down and discuss Bridget’s finances.”

She hesitated. Then, “I need a chaperone.”

I drove over. How could I resist? I’d been waiting twelve years to see them together again. Her house was perched almost on top of the Byram River. A long brick terrace ran the length; one could sit on its stone wall and watch the two swans drift by.

Father’s car pulled into the driveway just as mine did. Mother was standing in her oldest pair of shorts—her uniform, she called it—way down at the far end of the terrace. Father and I walked toward her. Father shielded his eyes.

“My God, Maggie,” he said. Mother didn’t budge. She just stared. I began to blush.

“My God,” he said again. “My God, Maggie, you look good.”

She laughed, and the years fell away.

My cheeks burned. I couldn’t look any more; I felt as if I were intruding on the most intimate conversation. I leaned on the wall overlooking the river. She still loves him, I thought; she’s loved him all this time. Behind me I heard them moving toward each other, talking about this and that. The sun beat down on my hair. All this time, I thought. Chairs scraped; they were sitting down. Mother laughed again, a low throaty laugh. The river swirled by, bearing leaves, swans, water bugs.

I thought of the summer I was eight, the first summer in Brookfield. One day Bridget, Bill, and I, inspired by Mother’s nightly installments of Huckleberry Finn, had tried to run away.

While Emily made us some hard-boiled eggs, Mother got six bottles of chocolate milk out of the icebox and divided them up into three of Father’s handkerchiefs. “I know you’ll have a wonderful time,” she told us. “But if you get bored, please come home, ’cause I’ll miss you terribly.”

The road was too hot to walk on barefoot, so with no prearranged destination in mind, we crossed into the alfalfa and corn fields on the other side. Warm green cornstalks swished over our heads like a dense thicket of bamboo. At the far end of the meadow was the pine forest. After looking back to make sure the house was still visible, we plunged into its cool Gothic shadows and remained there for the rest of the afternoon. When there were no eggs left to peel or milk to swig, we fanned out on the dead pine needles and took a nap.

Although we had no intention of ever going home, toward dusk we were seduced by the sound of Emily ringing the dinner gong. In order not to appear too anxious, however, we took the long way home, along the crest of the hill past Andrew Tomashek’s unkempt farmhouse where the pigs were being fed, past a bramble of ripe raspberries, over the fence and down through the meadow, ignoring Bridget’s squeals about nettles and poison ivy; then back across the road—cool now—and up onto the stone wall that bordered our property. Already we could tell it was going to be a perfect evening for a firefly hunt. The air was thick with the hum of tree toads and mosquitoes, the rustle of squirrels in the maples, the flutter of bats. In the home stretch now, we moved more and more deliberately, creeping from stone to stone over the vines of shriveled morning-glories, snatching at the overhanging branches for unripe apples, testing them, spitting them out at each other.

“Get the hell over here,” bellowed Father. “What in God’s name do you think I drove out here for, peace and quiet?”

Mother, Father, and Emily were waiting under the maple trees on the front lawn. All around us the earth was dissolving into sky, cobalt blue shot with opalescent fire, and just where the pinks and greens and yellows evaporated into night hung the new moon.

I climbed onto Father’s gleaming shoes with my bare feet, and we swayed clumsily across the grass, circling faster and faster until my legs flew out from under me and I howled at him, between convulsions of laughter, to stop or I’d wet my pants.

The screen door banged; everyone else was going in to dinner. Father gradually lowered me to the grass.

“Now make a wish,” he said, pointing my head toward the moon.

“What’s yours?” I asked, rapidly discarding one idea after another.

“I’ve narrowed it down,” said Father. “We stay here, right here in this very spot—here and now—for the rest of our lives. What do you think? When you were born I was thirty-four times as old as you, when you’re thirty-four I’ll be twice as old as