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

the land became more and more beautiful. Suddenly I understood why Bridget had often said she wanted to live in Stockbridge for the rest of her life. When I got to Williamstown, I went straight to the theatre as she’d instructed me, and there she was with Tom and a welcoming committee standing on the green.

She immediately enlisted my services as a coffinmaker; the company was in rehearsal for the second to the last show of the season, The Visit, which starred E. G. Marshall, and his coffin was a vital prop. I worked all morning under Bridget’s careful supervision and we ended up with a very impressive black-and-gold casket.

Then she dispatched me somewhere in somebody’s truck to pick up some sort of special fabric for the costumes. For me to be bossed around by my younger sister was a complete reversal of roles, and not at all unpleasant. In the afternoon she allowed me time off to watch a dress rehearsal for The Visit. Nikos was the director; Bill Francisco wasn’t there. Tom had a walk-on as a town policeman in an absurd helmet. Bridget amazed me; she was all over the place running most of the backstage action like an old-time production manager. Everyone came to her for advice on the props, the costumes, the lighting, the scenery. I was proud of her. She had metamorphosed into a figure of authority, the last thing anyone would ever have expected of her. As I was leaving the next morning, I told her that she should ask Father for a job on his next show. Bridget confessed that she had a secret ambition to become a producer and that it was behind-the-scenes action she really liked.

She blew me a kiss as I started back to New York, and I couldn’t help thinking how pleased Mother, whose career had begun in summer stock with the famed University Players, would have been to see her so happy.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“You came up to Williamstown once that summer, and she was terribly nervous and uptight about it because she felt very much that Williamstown was her own little province. It didn’t go off badly at all, but I knew she was apprehensive about the fact that you were coming up. You represented the glamorous New York Vogue influence that she was frightened to death of. She was, to herself, the girl who was crazy, and you weren’t. And in fact something happened that summer that convinced her that she was crazy.

“It was the next to last week of the season. Bill wasn’t there. I had gotten the gardenias and taken her to some restaurant. Afterward Nikos threw a big party at one of the fraternity houses because it was the last show of the season.

“I was sitting with Bridget on a staircase, and Nikos was about two stairs below us. Although Bridget didn’t usually drink—her doctor had told her not to—that night she had a couple of glasses of wine. She was feeling terrific. We were talking to Nikos and sort of laughing; suddenly she pitched forward into Nikos’s lap. Her eyes were open but they weren’t. I was just absolutely panicked. People were crowding around her. Nikos told everyone to get out. We carried her into the next room. She started to scream, and the screams came from her bowels. We called the hospital; it was about one o’clock in the morning; no doctor. They had to wake one up. We must have stayed with her forty-five minutes until that doctor got there. She was talking to your mother the whole time. What she was saying was ‘Mother. I’ve got to speak to my mother!’ And we said, ‘Your mother’s dead.’ She got very quiet, but her body was like a taut rubber band. Then she said, ‘I know she’s dead.’ Tears were coming down her cheeks and she said, over and over, ‘I never got a chance to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry.’

“Finally a doctor arrived. He gave her a shot, and she was terrified of the needle, just terrified; we had to really hold her down. We carried her back to the fraternity house where she was staying. The doctor ordered a nurse to stay in the room.

“I walked around crying for a couple of hours. I couldn’t sleep and I went back up to the room to look at her. I would just so willingly have laid down my life for her then. If there was anything I wanted, it was to be thirty-four, my age now. I wanted so badly to be somebody who could take charge. But a fast eighteen was the best you could have said about me.

“Bridget really knew that she was sick. She knew that she wasn’t in Riggs by accident and that what happened to her on the staircase in Williamstown was serious. The big suspense with Bridget was: was she getting better, or was she getting worse? She was keenly aware, when she was at family functions, that she was being observed like an exhibit. Does she look better now than a year ago? Is she in good shape or bad shape? Not because she was somebody who was subject to great highs and lows, but because she was genuinely ill.

“Bridget felt very much the pariah of the family. She had been put away somewhere—under the nicest of circumstances, the best of places; she kept saying that all the time, how much freedom she’d had there—but she felt that she had, deservedly, been put away. As far as you, her sister, were concerned, that could never happen to you. You were peaking and cresting; you were married at the time, or just divorced, but even a divorce was better to Bridget than what she was doing. You had kids; you were bopping around New York getting your apartment on Central Park West, modeling and who knows, you were going to be acting, and so on.