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

mesmerized by her face, I wanted to fall into it. Your mother was insanely jealous, or pretended to be.” He chuckled to himself.

“Let’s see, that’s only five, Pop.”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses. Fay Wray.”

“Fay Wray?” Hmm, that was unexpected. When David O. Selznick died, his son, Danny, had given me some old photographs he’d found of Father as a young agent; there was one with Fay Wray standing in the background, laughing.

“Ya, ya, gorgeous. Marlene [Dietrich], gorgeous. Isak Dinesen. You know, Out of Africa. Fabulous. An old woman when I met her. How many is that?”

“Eight,” replied Bill and I together.

“Not so sure there are ten,” he mused. “I guess Justine Johnson and—Esmé O’Brian.”

He was pensive now; his hands plucked at the sheet involuntarily. (Who were Justine Johnson and Esmé O’Brian? We didn’t know, and Bill had to take the list to Nan to find out.) “God, I love women. Much more intelligent, much stronger, much braver. Nicer than men, not as mean. And so much more beautiful. There’s not a single inch of the female body that is not beautiful. Think of that. They’re luckier, too. I have a theory about women.…”

We leaned closer; his energy was fading and so was the color from his face.

“What, Pop?” asked Bill. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thanks, son.” Father’s voice caught, as sometimes it did, on one syllable or word. What made that terrible was his subsequent struggle to rip the word from his larynx, to hawk up something more than a throttled exhalation. His entire body would heave spasmodically with the effort. There was no way to help. We would wait, panicked, for him to exhaust himself. Slowly the glottal sounds would subside into a wheeze. He would lie still, looking over in our direction with a confused expression on his face, as if he hoped he was imagining such a lapse of control.

“Women,” he choked finally. “You know what it is about them that men envy most?”

“The fact that they shall inherit the earth?” said Bill.

“You bet,” Father closed his eyes. “They’ll outlive us all. Aristophanes was no fool.”

Diana Vreeland:

“I always, during those last ten years, kept thinking: This man is so terribly brave. But, you see, he was built as a gentleman. Consequently, even illness—and pancreatitis is supposed to be the worst, isn’t it, because it affects the emotions so much; everything to do with that department, gall bladder, bile tract, affects the emotions. I would go up to Mount Kisco quite a lot and sit with Leland and talk to him, and God, he was so—Every time I’d leave and go home I’d think, That’s the brightest man I’ve ever known. I mean what’s he carrying on on? No man could have been a more charming gentleman in anyone’s life than he was in mine. He really was a courtly gentleman. It’s an effective phrase because it makes you think of the Civil War or something. But that’s what he was. Even the deep illness of his late life couldn’t take that away from him. Even when he was telling you the craziest story that ever was about his stepmother, Maisie Hayward, and his father, the Colonel—even if he was making a bit of a nut out of somebody, it was never done with malice, never. It was always done with great courtliness and richness of spirit.”

It had taken me such a long time, my entire life, to learn how to interpret him. The knack was to unlearn everything except my most primal love. He was so ingenuous he was hard to figure out. One attributed to him layers of deviousness, subterfuges that would never have occurred to him. And because, to me, he’d always been not only a grownup but my father, I’d spent my adolescence and early adulthood trying to communicate with him on that level. A mistake. His parenthood was a conditioned idea that had been wasted on both of us. Worse—with time, it had separated us. As I’d grown older and bigger, he’d grown proportionally farther away.

“Brooke, darling, is that you?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“That’s good. Where’s Bill?” His eyelids twitched open.

“He’ll be right back. He’s just gone down the hall.”

“Don’t go away.”

“I won’t, Pop.”

And if all children see their fathers as personifying power—a notion that is usually dispelled by a little time under the belt—I had perceived my father as being even more powerful than anyone else’s. In fact, he was.

How do you live up to that? With your heart in your mouth, that’s how. How close can you come to the sun before it melts your wings? And why, as I stripped back the years and memories, did I have the feeling that the younger I’d been the closer I’d come? Later, I would say to myself, “Nobody this powerful can also be this simple.” But Father was that simple. Deep down he was a child, too, and that’s where he won.

“Do you love me?” He looked toward me blindly.

“More than anything in the world.” I felt the tears beginning. Oh, no, I thought.

“That’s good,” he said. “I hate this, though.”

“Yeah, it stinks,” I agreed, sputtering slightly with nervous laughter.

“Don’t cry, for God’s sake; are you crying?” His eyes were closed and he couldn’t possibly see me anyway.

“No,” I choked, tears streaming down my face.

“I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t, Pop. Why?”

“I broke my promise.” He stirred restlessly under the sheet. “To take you to the bullfight movie. I promised …”

What on earth had made him think of that? “Pop, do you realize how many years ago that was?”

Even after I’d grown up, the implicit threat of his authority was able to scare me. It was only now, as I sat musing at his deathbed, that he became again what he’d once been; when there were no demands on either of us and I was very young; when I was just a child and he was just my father, and sometimes those two states of being seemed almost the same.

“A helluva