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

must hurry a bit. Anyhow, when Bill couldn’t wake her he called your father at the office, and Leland raced over after calling his doctor, who met them there. He said something extraordinary—he asked your father if she had epilepsy—it really has been such chaos ever since four, the office going crazy with phones, doctors, police, coroners, God knows what. Of course Leland said no, there was no history of epilepsy, but the doctor insisted that she appeared to be having some sort of seizure at the time of her death, and besides there were bottles of Dilantin in the medicine chest and an empty one lying on the bathroom sink. So now I gather an autopsy will be performed.” She started to reach for me again.

“But she did,” I said, pulling back. Even my teeth ached. “She had epilepsy.” I tried opening my mouth wider to make my words more audible but it felt as if lockjaw had set in.

“Brooke, darling, what on earth are you talking about?” asked Pamela, her diction slightly more ragged than usual. My body clenched like a fist. It was useless right now, too late to go back and reconstruct in meaningless detail, to communicate at all. Still, the situation had a delicate formality, and it was probably better to camouflage myself in its rituals, at least for a while longer.

“Well,” I answered, wishing I were a wild creature, not civilized, a wolf in deep silent snow, howling into the wind. “You see, she did have epilepsy. She really did. I think she sort of acquired it along the way, and when she found out definitely last spring, she didn’t want Father to know about it, so she swore me to secrecy.”

Last spring—April, maybe. “Brooke,” she’d said, squinting at me over her new electric coffeemaker, “although you are totally untrustworthy and have never been able to keep a secret, can you promise me on your sacred word of honor that if I tell you one now, you will never never repeat it, especially not to Father?” That piqued my curiosity enough to elicit a promise, so then she’d told me that she was supposed to give up cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee—we each had two or three more cups after that—because she’d just recently been tested by a neurologist in New Haven who had diagnosed her as being epileptic. The story behind that was so incredible I’d accepted it without question; it fit in perfectly with the rest of the family folklore. She told me that she’d been in New Haven for the weekend to see Bill Francisco, and that late Saturday night she’d gone back to her room at the Duncan Hotel, after making plans with Bill to pick her up for breakfast. In the morning, however, he had been unable to find her at the hotel because she’d been carted off to the morgue: a maid had mistakenly entered the room a few hours earlier, ostensibly to clean it, and had found Bridget to all intents and purposes dead on the floor, whereupon the hotel management summoned a doctor, who could not hear a heartbeat or find a pulse. So off she’d gone to the morgue, where the name of her doctor in Stockbridge was discovered on a card in her purse. It turned out that instead of being dead she was in a state of complete catatonia, and one thing led to another—eventually the neurologist and some tests. And, said Bridget, under no circumstances was Father to find out because he would just get typically hysterical and insist on her living with a roommate, a fate literally, she said, worse than death; not only did she cherish living alone more than anything else in the world, she didn’t want people thinking she was crippled or helpless or any different from before, or scrutinizing her for telltale signs of the forbidden cigarettes, liquor, or coffee. There was no purpose to her life at all, she warned me, unless she could remain free to live as she chose; she was twenty-one years old and could exercise that right at last. So we drank our extra cups of coffee with lots of cream and sugar in them; I understood her and in some basic way agreed with her.

“Brooke,” said Pamela, skipping over this information in a brisk businesslike tone I admired for its British sense of mission, “you are distraught, which is understandable, but I have an enormous favor to ask of you: under no circumstances must you allow yourself to become emotional now, because your father—I am deeply concerned about him—is heartbroken, as you can imagine, and you know as well as I that if too much pressure is put on him, if there’s too much stress, he could possibly have one of his bleeding attacks—and then he might die as well. That’s what I’m really terrified of.” Her blue eyes were urgently imploring. “What is essential at this moment is that I take you back to him—I think Josh and Nedda Logan are on their way over now—and you must be strong and brave, Brooke, absolutely no tears, really, because I cannot have him made any more upset than he already is.” Right: I am a potential hysteric, who can be transformed on order into a paradigm of stoicism. “Besides, you are supposed to be an actress; be a good one tonight, please.”

Only nine months earlier, Pamela had stood before me on the same kind of agonizing mission, this time on Second Avenue outside of the Gate Theatre. It was a very cold night, the first night of the year, January 1st, and I had just come out of the Astor Place subway stop and was approaching the theatre where Kevin McCarthy and I were appearing in an off-Broadway production of Marching Song. It was my first play and we’d opened the week before. I was shivering from the snow blown down my neck by the bitter wind and also from spasms of