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

can remember thinking she was like a creature from some strange mythical forest, another planet—always with that faraway look in her eyes.”

Father nodded. “The thing that kills me,” he said, “is that I never quite knew what was going on in her head. For instance, her insane need for privacy. I mean, she never came to me and told me anything. So here I sit like a complete idiot, asking myself over and over where I went wrong, for Chrissake, what I could have done to make it easier for her. I thought we loved each other. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to any of it. The thing that breaks my heart is the feeling of absolute uselessness.”

One Sunday afternoon a few months earlier, during an interlude in the conversation at a family lunch, someone had asked where Bridget was. Father looked down the table at Pamela. “I forgot to ask you, darling, isn’t she feeling well?” Pamela looked stricken. “Oh, Leland, for heaven’s sake, you said yesterday that you were going to call her from the office. Didn’t you get through?” Father muttered at his plate, “Oh, hell, I must have forgotten to tell Malley to ask her. Why didn’t you remind me?” “What a pity,” sighed Grandsarah, Father’s mother (named Grandsarah by Bill), who lived in California and was visiting for a few weeks. “Maybe she’ll be able to come by some other afternoon.”

“Yes,” Josh was saying now, “yes” kneading the lower half of his face thoughtfully. “And she was so vulnerable. Whenever I think of Bridget, I think of that white skin, and those lost eyes and that air of belonging in another world, so elusive, so skinny and fragile.”

It flashed through my mind that I would never see Bridget again. The worst part was unraveling the word never. I would never be able to touch her, hug her, laugh with her in front of the objects of our evil coded gossip, use her hairbrush (first pulling out strands of her long blond hair), sometimes spend days before her birthday searching through the city for the only nightgowns she would wear (flannel, with long sleeves and small flowers), never see her again as she was the last time, just a few days ago—sitting cross-legged on a scrapbook to make the freshly glued photographs inside stick, her long arms and legs jutting out everywhere and her pale hair spilling over her face, which looked up at me quizzically as she rested it on one hand, as if she intended to stay in that position forever. “There’s a sale on Kleenex and toilet paper at Bloomingdale’s in a few days.” She grinned at me knowingly; we would be into a lot more than paper goods. “Don’t forget”—as I closed the door behind me—“to call.”

I had found out that the coroner had roughly estimated the time of her death at around noon that day. Or perhaps a little later. So that meant, all things being equal, that I probably had heard a sound in her bedroom at ten o’clock that morning as I stood impatiently tapping my foot in the hall outside the door. And that, in turn, meant—this was suddenly startlingly apparent—that if I’d had a duplicate key to her apartment, or at least pursued my instinct to get one from the superintendent (Why hadn’t I? Was it haste or irritation or inane hypersensitivity about intrusion? I couldn’t remember any more), I, Brooke—I would never be able to forget this—almost literally would have held in the palm of my hand the singular and now irretrievable opportunity to save my sister’s life.

ancy (“Slim” Hayward) Keith:

“She was quite different from anybody I’ve ever known. She really was a beauty, almost transparent, both physically and spiritually. There was an aura about her, a glisten and glow to her look and to her manner. I used to say to her, ‘When you’ve grown up and when you have mascara on, you know, those big long eyelashes black instead of white, and when you grow into yourself, you’re going to be the most beautiful human being anyone’s ever seen. So just bide your time. You’re going to be the swan of all time.’ ”

Jane Fonda:

“I remember vividly the last thing she said to me. I was coming back with her on a train from New Haven; I hadn’t seen her for quite a long time, because I’d been away to school and she’d been institutionalized, but this was within a year of her death. I was then studying with Lee [Strasberg] and she was living in the apartment where she eventually died.

“I was asking her questions about Biggs, and she said to me, ‘The hardest part of all is coming out and having to deal with other people’s problems; it’s all I can do, it absorbs all of my energy just to keep myself together—and when I’m out in the world, it’s slightly more than I can bear.’ She was like someone who’d had shock treatment. Talking to her was like talking to someone through gauze, through heavy filters. There was the same attempt to reveal only the minimum that has to be revealed at a particular time: don’t open those floodgates; don’t let very much out; be as calm as you can; don’t rock the boat. What that says is you must do away with anything unique or unusual about yourself or you won’t survive.

“And then we went to her apartment, which absolutely shocked me because it was so conventional. I had an enormous sadness when I was there with her, because it was as if somehow she’d sold out. I couldn’t believe that Bridget collected antiques. She had become terribly concerned about porcelain or the right kind of glass; it was reflected in her apartment and the way she decorated it. Somewhere along the way, Bridget was trying to fit into a mold that had nothing to do with her. Her spirit