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

behind them in the dust? Do you remember Mother? What a twist. And Bridget? Well, no surprises this time, even though this time was definitely not one that I, Brooke, would have picked as ideal—meaning that Father’s death could have been considerate enough to have scheduled itself after mine, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Father would understand best of all what I felt; except that Father, for obvious reasons, wasn’t going to be there to help me this time.

Until my early twenties, I had believed—not believed, really, blithely assumed—that I was immortal, under the brooding protection of my own private guardian angel assigned by God to watch over me day and night. I could even feel my angel’s wings brushing my face just before I fell asleep; in times of danger I imagined his shadow hovering just above my head. When I no longer knew whether or not I believed in God, my angel left his post. Then I no longer believed that I was specially blessed and immortal. Bereft of that romantic conceit, I had more respect for—and fear of—life.

Until my early twenties (when Bridget and Mother died deaths that were still as mysterious to me now as then, that people still mentioned—if the subject came up at all—with hushed questions in their voices), I had my guardian angel, and never wondered what life would be like without anyone. Life was forever. Here we go again: that terrible elevator ride in the pit of my stomach. (“Take it easy,” said my pounding head to my pounding heart; “no surprises this time. You know so much more going in.”)

The truth was these conversations with myself didn’t help at all.

The truth was this time was much worse than either of the other two, even if it was more logical.

The truth was logic was useless. The feeling of abandonment prevailed against all emollients, tranquilizers, anodynes, and razzle-dazzle philosophizing. Feeling abandoned was an insidious, incurable, cancerous feeling, and a cumulative one.

The truth was death may not be so bad, but watching Father die was awful.

He lay in that pleasant, corner hospital room, with belly distended, flesh sunken, the shipwrecked hulk of what had been a magnificent man. And still, probably thanks to my childhood reading of all those beautifully illustrated books he’d commandeered, I clearly saw him as a distinguished old general from the ancien régime, who had weathered the maelstrom of the Revolutionary Wars and was preparing himself for a brief nap on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz. He was having trouble getting his boots off. He’d already sat down ponderously on the edge of his iron Napoleonic campaign bed and, grunting, had found that he couldn’t bend over to unbuckle the polished leather straps. With a long sigh, he had leaned back into the pillows and called for his beloved aide-de-camp, Lucio (the butler). Lucio, by now, had loosened all the brass buttons on Father’s jacket—heavy as armor with the weight of its decorations—and had covered him with a warm army blanket.

“I think I’ll sleep for a little while,” murmured Father apologetically to Bill and me as we stood at the foot of his bed. (Lucio had removed the boots as gently as possible and they lay crumpled on the floor.)

“That’s good, Pop,” said Bill, walking around to the side of the bed where—to judge from the way his head followed movement—Father could still distinguish shapes with one eye, although that, too, had lost its acuity.

“Water,” croaked Father, clicking his tongue against his dry palate. Sometimes the corners of his mouth crusted up now that the tubes had been stuffed into it.

“Water.” The word was barely intelligible.

“He wants water.” I moved toward the metal pitcher by his bed.

“Not too much,” remonstrated one of the omnipresent nurses.

“Why not? He’s thirsty.”

“Bad for his stomach, Brooke,” said Bill. But Father only wet his lips on the glass anyway.

“Thank you, darling,” he said with effort, making my heart turn over. For a fellow who had grown rather crotchety (the first stroke, a few years earlier, had partially paralyzed one side, and although with intensive physical therapy Father had managed to thwart most of its physical effects, it left him irritable, something of a curmudgeon), he had now become amazingly polite. Very courtly. With people to whom he might have been very rude before—nurses, doctors—he now went out of his way to say please and thank you, like a small child. The more indignities he suffered, the more pain he endured, the closer he came—with fear—to death, the more gentlemanly he behaved. His disposition regained its former sweetness. Once Bill and I got over the initial shock of finding out that, in his head, he was living in a different time zone—the thirties, mostly—and conscious only in a more primary way, we started to enjoy talking to him. It could be kind of fun. We didn’t have to make a lot of sense or try to impress; we could trip around in pleasant conversations that didn’t relate so much to us as to another time.

“What are you thinking about, Pop?” I’d ask him idly, noticing that on these bright days he would turn his head toward the window and stare at the sky with his half-good eye.

“Pretty day,” he’d mumble. “God, it’s a good day for flying. I wish I didn’t have to stick around the goddamn office on a day like this.”

Many people came to see him before Pamela took him home. He always recognized the friends who went way back, if only by their voices. Jimmy Stewart stopped in New York on his way from Los Angeles to Boston and took a car in from the airport to pay him a visit about a week before he died.

“I’m glad I got to see him,” Jimmy said later. “It had been a long time.”

“Did he recognize you?” I asked.

“Yeah, he recognized me. First thing he said was ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said, ‘Nothing much, just passing