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

solid the foundation of his love for her really was. He explained that, in the past, Mother had always stopped him from expressing his flashes of temper but this time, to his present regret, he had eluded her. He implored Bridget to surmount the wall that had arisen between herself and Mother, and assured her there were many doors in it that Mother would crawl through if she knew Bridget would be waiting on the other side.

In the second, he enclosed a torn piece of yellow legal paper penciled in Mother’s familiar scribble, which he’d rescued from the wastebasket:

My darling Bridget

I want you to know about my love for you. It is the most completely unselfish emotion I have ever known. It is forever, and needs nothing in return. I know, after these five years, that if you never write me or see me again, my love will continue just as strong and constant. So please, my darling, stop worrying about what you have or haven’t done to me—the snag, of course, is that my judgment falls far short of my love—and I

The writing stopped there. Bridget did not respond, and was still at Riggs when Mother died two weeks later on New Year’s Day, 1960.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“I saw more and more of Bridget. She’d come to New Haven, stay at the Taft for three or four days during final rehearsals; the week of the play she would be there every day. Everybody liked her—all the people in The Dramat who would normally hate the director’s girl friend.

“We got to be really close. We knew a lot of people in common; we hadn’t seen each other in a while and it was like catching up on our lives. It was during that time that I saw the chinks in her armor which made me love her more; naturally, when you’re eighteen, you think you’re on top of the world and can take care of anybody. I had no idea there was any kind of mental disease, if you could call it that, or withdrawal, or whatever. She didn’t talk about it at all. I would say: gee, I’m sorry that you seem to be upset about this or that or so on, and she would talk about herself and her life, always, in the beginning, skirting the fact that she had been in Riggs. She didn’t trust people a great deal and she was not an extrovert. If she thought she liked you, you could talk to her night after night, but it would only be after a certain number of nights that she would really start to tell you something about herself. She would test you, telling you the way she thought about things that perhaps frightened her; but she never opened herself up until she was really sure of you, and that took a long time. I found her an immensely private person who could count on the fingers of one hand the people that she would open up to. There were so damn few she was willing to let in, for whatever reason. You could sit and scream and beg Bridget to tell you what the matter was, and no matter how much she loved you, she wouldn’t tell you unless she felt like telling you, and that was that.”

When Mother died, I only saw Bridget cry once—right after the memorial service in Greenwich when Kenneth decided to read Mother’s will to the three of us. It was the first time since Bridget had reinstated herself at Riggs that she had seen him. He took us to a small bedroom in the house while friends gathered in the living room and drank coffee. We sat in a row on the bed, Bridget, as stiff as tightly strung wire, between Bill and me. Suddenly tears were streaming down her cheeks but she did not move or make a sound. Bill and I edged closer to her and pressed our shoulders against hers. Kenneth obliviously went on reading the will.

Bill Francisco:

“What I remember most was her humor. She had a wonderful sense of humor. That’s what began the relationship and that’s what was always the best part of it.

“She was a very two-sided girl. There was this wonderful childlike side which was legitimate, and there was also that of a woman. And I think one of the things that was wrong with the family relationship was a refusal to see the woman’s side. I mean she was a capable, bright lady, and when we first began dating, I didn’t feel I was dating a waif. Occasionally I would be aware of this other side—more after her death—how Logan and all those people felt about her, as if she was some sort of star child, strange little creature, fairy child. Which was great, but there was this other side. When your mother died—the late news came on: ‘Margaret Sullavan died’—I thought, oh, my God, so I called Leland and said ‘How is Bridget?’ And we were both worried that she was going to fall apart, that we shouldn’t leave her alone, so I came down to New York the next morning. She was shaken, obviously, but what she wanted to do was go to church and say a prayer for her mother. I convinced Leland it was all right. We left his place at the Carlyle and went back to her apartment so she could get some clothes. There was a little church across the street, and she said, ‘I have to go there, do you mind?’ So I stayed in the apartment; she put on a black kerchief, went off to the church, was back in fifteen minutes, no scene. She just wanted to have her moment. It was that side of her that I remember best.”

In the spring of that year, 1960, my brother and Marilla got married shortly on the heels of Father and Pamela, who had been in Nevada for six weeks awaiting