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

remembered him seated in his wheelchair—impressively upright, shoulders back, with steel-rimmed glasses and the white, freshly starched collar he’d insisted on wearing every day of his life—stitching a wondrous alphabet, which eventually hung on our wall. He started it for Bridget and me, before Bill was born, so it must have taken several years to complete; in the end it measured about six by nine feet, all squares of animals represented alphabetically (A for Antelope, B for Buffalo) and rendered in the colors of a warm desert twilight.

By the time we arrived at the Carlyle Hotel, where Father and Pamela then lived, I welcomed any distraction. Besides, I was curious about Father. How would he be affected by the death of someone to whom he’d been married for ten years and then barely seen for the next thirteen, despite the three children they shared?

He looked awful, and somehow that pleased me. It meant he must have loved her a great deal, and I’d often wondered. He looked ten years older. Maybe they had never stopped loving each other. Maybe he was the last thing she thought about.

We were in the master bedroom, gracefully filled with Pamela’s antique French furniture, which had just arrived from Paris to replace the simpler hotel stock. Everywhere was the heavy scent of Rigaud candles and warm lighting, Pamela’s trademarks; she always used pink light bulbs instead of white. In the dead of winter masses of fresh flowers were always in place on every surface. There was some discussion of Bridget and Bill. Bill had said on the telephone that he didn’t have a dark suit or any money—he was flying in from Topeka the next day and wanted to buy the suit there. I said I wanted to go to New Haven to see my stepfather. Father said that was a bum idea, he absolutely forbade it; Kenneth had been calling every half hour and had some terrible plan to cremate Mother and have us all there while a service was said during the cremation; it sounded to him as if Kenneth had really gone crazy, and as my father, he was going to insist that all three of us children stay in the apartment with Pamela and him for the next few days until the memorial service, which was obviously going to take place whether or not there was some depressing service over her body while it was in the oven. Did I have any idea how morbid it would be to go up there to witness a cremation? Absolutely nuts, as if Bridget and Bill weren’t headed enough in that direction anyway.

“But, Father,” I argued, “Kenneth has nobody, no family there with him at all. Maybe he is desperate, and after all he’s my stepfather and he’s been good to me—”

“Brooke,” interjected Pamela, “did you know there is a good possibility that your mother killed herself?”

I was very tired. “No, she didn’t, Pamela. Kenneth said on the phone that it was her heart; it had been bothering her.”

“She was very unhappy, very unhappy with the play. Sometimes these things are for the best. If she were that disturbed—”

“She couldn’t have killed herself. Of all the people in the world, she’d be the last—right, Father?”

Father was silent.

I answered myself. “It’s out of the question. Impossible. She had too many people who meant too much to her.” Me, I thought, Kenneth, Jeff, Willie, Bridget, Bill …

Pamela had an indescribably sweet tone to her voice, an understanding smile. Patiently, as to a child: “She wasn’t feeling well, Brooke, and she may have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.” Was there no end to the horror? She had never even met Mother; there was something obscene about her telling me that Mother was dead, that she had killed herself, that she was unhappy, that one should be philosophical about these things; dangerous instincts began to rouse themselves and sniff at my heels like bloodhounds and it was too late to call them off. No aspect of this was any of Pamela’s business and no rationalization could make it so. If Father was incapable of dealing with the situation, that was tough as far as he and I were concerned, but the last thing I’d asked for was the insinuation of an outsider, particularly a lady who was working too hard at becoming my next stepmother, replacing the last one, of whom I was very fond and would have given anything to have seen standing there in her stead.

The telephone rang, galvanizing Father into the kind of action in which he was most comfortable.

“Josh, hello.… Ya, ya, this is a real bitch.” (Father had his own personal affirmative, never yes or yeah but ya, which he barked instead of spoke.) “No, we don’t know yet. Hello, Nedda, darling.… No, the kids are all fine. Brooke is here and the other two arrive tomorrow.… Ya, I definitely think a memorial service, probably in Greenwich, since she lived there, makes more sense.… Oh, hell, I think Kenneth Wagg is having a nervous breakdown, for Chrissake, cried hysterically on the phone.… Ya, of course, it’s rough for all of us, but God almighty, he’s come up with the worst idea I’ve ever heard of—the kids go up to New Haven and they all stand around having some sort of macabre service while she’s being cremated. Pure crap. Christ, we don’t know yet whether it was from natural causes or sleeping pills, no note or explanation—they’ll have to do an autopsy. Morning papers will be full of it, goddamn reporters all over the place.… Right. Talk to you both in the morning.… Thanks. You’re sweet, Nedda.… Okay, okay. Here, speak to Pamela.”

Father was always energized by the telephone. He came over and sat on the bed beside me and put his arms around me. I sagged against his chest. He smelled of wonderful aftershave lotion, bay rum, one of the first scents I could remember; I played with his tie clip, the only