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

his final divorce papers from Nancy Hayward. Nan and Father had been married for ten years. We children were sorry to see her go.

It was damp and chilly in Topeka. Bridget and I met Father and Pamela, fresh from Nevada, at the airport and we set up headquarters in the Holiday Inn. After a rehearsal of the wedding ceremony in a drafty Methodist church paneled in dark plywood with a crucifix suspended overhead, Father took everyone to dinner at a nearby steakhouse. All the women except Pamela, Bridget, and me wore their hair in sprayed beehives. Bill was in uniform, having just enlisted. Dinner was an uneasy success.

The next day, Bridget and I, who were sharing a room, were bored to distraction. It was gray and cold outside and all we had brought were summer dresses. Besides, the Holiday Inn was in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly the door to our room burst open and there stood Peter Fonda, whom we hadn’t seen in five or six years. Not only were we startled by his precipitous reappearance in our lives but also by the evidence that he was no longer fourteen years old. He notified us excitedly that he had been sitting in his aunt’s house in Omaha, Nebraska, a few hours earlier, minding his own business and reading the newspaper, when his eyes lit upon an article posting Bill’s wedding banns, so to speak, giving details and whereabouts of the imminent ceremony in Topeka. He’d hopped on the first plane without saying goodbye to his aunt, in order to give the groom away, being one of Bill’s childhood friends.

Bridget and I were delighted. The three of us sat and talked and talked. Bill got married and we went back to talking. Peter fell in love with Bridget, so he announced, and he pocketed the white gloves she wore to the wedding.

The next morning, eating pancakes at the Holiday Inn, we found out that Francis Gary Powers had been shot down the day before, and Peter became even more excited. He said he felt like a comet traveling between two great solar systems—that of our family and that of his—only appearing when great events were taking place.

It was that spring Bridget found out she had epilepsy. Our guesswork about the origin of her bizarre fainting spells was over. Although she didn’t tell me that for weeks afterward, she made a typically succinct, understated entry in her diary:

March 17, 1960: 10:30 a.m., New Haven—Saw Dr. Rogowski. Cried and cried all day.

Bill Francisco:

“Long before she went to the doctor in New Haven she knew—or believed—whatever she had was terminal. Or, at the least, debilitating enough to frighten her into that view. I had a very unsophisticated attitude. I always had this feeling she would get better, while all the time she knew she was going to get progressively worse. That much she did say. What had started with little spells was, by the time I knew her, escalating into monstrous ones that lasted for a day or two or three. She had one of these once in New Haven. I came back from a rehearsal and she was out cold on the sofa for like two days. I was panic-stricken. I thought she was dead, that she’d been drinking. I knew she wasn’t supposed to drink. Every once in a while she would come to and say, ‘Don’t tell Father, don’t call Father.’ Finally, when she was better, I wanted to drive her back to New York because she was in no condition to drive. She said, ‘Oh, no, I’m absolutely fine.’ That steel will of hers. Well, it later turned out that she saw a doctor on the way back to New York, and he told her what she had. But she never told me or your father. Six or seven months after she died, Leland and Pamela had me to supper and all of this came up: the business about the doctor in New Haven, which I knew nothing about, and the fact that eventually—say, by the time she was twenty-four or twenty-five—she wouldn’t be able to move at all. By this time, they’d been told that at the rate things were going, it would have been risky for Bridget to lead any kind of independent life. Ultimately she would have had to be contained by force. Which, of course, would have been unthinkable.”

In June, she called me one Friday evening to say she was going out of town for the weekend but would I like to have breakfast with her on Monday? I was always flattered by her invitations. On Monday morning when I rang her doorbell, she came to the door looking strange and disheveled.

“You won’t believe me when I tell you this,” she mumbled as I followed her wobbly progress into the room. There was broken glass everywhere, overturned furniture, smashed china.

“What the hell went on in here while you were away?” I asked, aghast at the destruction. “It looks like a hurricane hit. Were you robbed?”

She pointed toward the kitchenette. “I didn’t go away after all. Look.” All the cupboards were open and totally empty. Half-eaten cans of tuna fish and soup, clumsily pried open, lay all over the counters and floor. The stench was awful.

“I must have done it myself.” She was shivering. “It had to be me. Nobody else was here and the door was locked.”

I put my arms around her. She began to cry pitifully.

“I never left,” she repeated. “I must have passed out right after I talked to you on the phone, and come to just a little while ago.”

It took a minute for me to grasp what she meant.

“This is what happens when I have a seizure. Sometimes I hurl stuff around, get very violent. Look at this unholy mess. I think I’ve broken all of my good wineglasses. I don’t know what I’m doing until afterwards, when I start to come out—and then I sort of remember sort