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

phonograph blared La Bohème. Tom was conducting with his eyes closed. They were engulfed in layouts and gallon containers of special glue, discards, parings of paper, scissors of every size, wastebaskets, and a lethal-looking photo-clipper. Bridget loved to entertain and always had delicious odds and ends around. While she plied us with banana cake, I noticed, over the new sofa against the wall, two narrow panels each about six feet high. They were just as spectacular as I’d remembered them from years ago: two scenes of Paris by night and day, one black, the other bright yellow, painted by Ludwig Bemelmans for Father and Nan to hang in an apartment they’d once had overlooking the East River.

“Bridget Hayward, where’d you get those Bemelmans?” I exclaimed covetously.

“Father took them out of storage and loaned them to me,” she replied, coyly fluttering her long eyelashes.

“What will you trade them for?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer. She knew me too well.

“Nothing,” she replied, amused but emphatic. I bargained for half an hour, offering her everything I owned in exchange, but it was no use. Once she’d set her jaw in a certain way, she was as obdurate as Mother. Tom was riveted by the scene. He even lowered the sound level of La Bohème.

Bridget polished off the last of her tea, and while she was playing with the cake crumbs on her plate she said to me, “Brooke, there’s only one way you will ever get these paintings. I’ll leave them to you when I die.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Bridget,” I said, thoroughly exasperated.

“Now, now,” she said. “It may be sooner than you think.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, really irritated.

“Nothing,” she said, and she was suddenly very serious. “It doesn’t mean anything except what I said. It may be sooner than you think.”

We left shortly after that. As we were going out the door, I looked back at her, perched among the photos in the middle of the floor.

She laughed at me and said, “Don’t forget, there’s a paper-goods sale at Bloomingdale’s.”

“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” I called, starting down the hall after Tom.

“Don’t forget,” she called back. A few minutes later, as Tom and I were walking up Lexington, we turned to each other at the same moment and remarked how strange Bridget could be sometimes.

For the next few weeks I was busy shooting Mad Dog Coll and Tom was back at Yale:

“While I was drinking in George & Harry’s Bar one night, my roommate called and said, ‘Listen, you’d better come back—your dad just phoned.’ When I got back to my room, there was a message from my father, a message from your father, a message from my cousin Josie, and a message from you. I looked at the four messages and I knew Bridget was dead. There could be no other way that I would get four messages from those four people in the space of an hour. I called Josie and said, ‘Hello, Josie?’ And she said, ‘Bridget’s dead, kid.’ Those were her first three words. And I said, ‘I know, I know.’ And hung up. I must have cried all night.”

Bill Francisco:

“I found the body. I’d been calling her all day, and thought I might drop by to see her. When I got there, the morning newspaper was still outside the door. I had a key; I went in, and there she was dead. I knew it instantly. Leland came right over. I couldn’t go back in the bedroom. He went alone. Then he called this doctor and while the doctor was examining her, I went over to the desk; she kept a folder—I don’t know what made me look there, but if ever I was coming to pick up something, that’s where it would be—and there was the suicide note. It was so unbelievably weird. You remember her handwriting, how neat it was? Well, most of the note was like a very drunken scrawl. ‘Dear Bill’—there was something like ‘Be brilliant,’ and an intimation of her wanting to go while things were good, before they got any worse. And then it was signed, absolutely meticulously, McFidgett, which was a name Leland called her, and I never did. She may have been so far gone she was writing the letter to both of us. Later it occurred to me she could have written it at another time in her life and just put it away in that dumb folder. Anyway, I found the note and Leland took it. By this time we were both deeply into Jack Daniels. I remember the doctor calling somebody, and people coming in to take the body away, and Leland making sure I was way down at the end of the room by the window, and not looking as the body was going out, and pouring more Jack Daniels, and Leland saying, ‘You’re coming home with us tonight.’ ”

The next morning I was confronted with a myriad of details about the pending services. Although Frank E. Campbell was to be the funeral director, the problem was where to bury Bridget. Her will stated that she wished to be buried in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but apparently one had to be a resident of Stockbridge to qualify for that privilege. Pamela and Harry Kurnitz (the playwright and screenwriter) drove out to Fern Cliffs in Hartsdale, New York, and came back with a glowing description that called up images of a country graveyard shaded by spreading trees. I didn’t want to know too much about this aspect of the affair; I had no idea where Mother was buried and no intention of ever visiting either site. I preferred Father’s only partially facetious directive that, when he met his Maker, we were to see to it that he was cremated and his ashes installed in a vase on the mantelpiece so that he could observe our every move, and rattle the vase back and forth whenever he was displeased.

Pamela asked me to go