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

wheel, Josie Mankiewicz, Jane Fonda, and Jill Schary spent the better part of July and August zooming around Los Angeles on the trail of Marlon Brando. Although my optimism never flagged, the closest we came to him was the night I took everyone downtown on the half-finished freeway to see Viva Zapata! in a flea-bitten movie house. I was in such a rush to get us there that I drove, whenever traffic was bad, along the sidewalks. The others wouldn’t get back in the car with me for a week.

Whenever I saw the Fondas, I was reminded of Mother, although she was nowhere around. Hank, it pleased me to observe, was as strict with Jane as Mother was with me. The quality of that strictness was identical: fervent, almost puritanical. Jane and I were given to speculation about their past romance and marriage. We liked to suppose that beneath their rectitude smoldered a still unbridled passion for each other. The idea of a renewed love affair—unconsummated, of course, on our account—did not seem as far-fetched as all that. In Greenwich, sometimes, after Hank had come to pick up Jane and Peter, he and Mother would demonstrate headstands together for what seemed to be longer than necessary. We children would eye each other reflectively: they were still madly in love! (Whether or not they were, we preferred to believe it.)

However, I never did get to Hawaii with Jane.

Hank, about to start Mr. Roberts for Father, was staying with his family down in Santa Monica at the old Ocean House. We were in town with Father, Nan, Kitty, and nurse, at the Bel Air Hotel. One evening, Father offered to take me to Matador, a documentary about bullfighting. I was obsessed with bullfighting, having read all of Hemingway; my ardor was in no way diminished by a recent introduction to Luis Miguel Dominguín, whose entire body, I was fascinated to note—when he appeared in a brief bathing suit at the hotel pool—was covered with scars. That night, Nan was up in Monterey visiting her family. While Father finished off a business meeting in his room, Bill and I, elated at the opportunity to order Châteaubriand for two at $22.95, ate an early dinner alone in the hotel dining room. Afterward we waited for Father on the path by the lobby. It was still daylight, though about seven o’clock; people were arriving for cocktails. Father came toward us in a dark suit with a business associate on either side. Just as the three of them came abreast of us, he fell to his knees, and then slowly, like a mortally wounded elephant that didn’t belong there at all, sank to the pavement. There was pandemonium. A bellboy appeared with a huge bowl of ice; the desk clerk, the manager, guests gathered around him.

“Brooke,” he said desperately, regaining consciousness when I splashed ice water on his face, “I’m bleeding to death.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, equally desperately. I sat down on the pavement and put his head on my lap.

“Yes,” he insisted. “There’s blood on my pants. Call the doctor, not the goddamned hotel doctor—I want Dana Atchley. My telephone book—look under New York City—”

“That’s not blood, Leland,” said somebody else. “It’s just ice water.”

“I’m hemorrhaging, goddamnit,” said Father. We carried him back to his hotel suite. By the time we got there, it was evident he was right. There was more blood than I had ever seen, more blood than I thought the human body contained. The heavy sweet smell of it was everywhere; the white carpet was strewn with dark clots. Later, we burned his pants. The living room quickly filled with people; word got around fast. When I heard the ambulance siren, I went back into his room and shut the door behind me.

“Come here, Brooke,” he said, without opening his eyes. I sat on the edge of his bed, wondering how he’d known it was me. His skin was a terrible color, the same pale green as Christ’s on the cross in the middle panel of the Grünewald Altarpiece.

“Do you love me?” asked Father, still without opening his eyes.

“Yes, Father.” When I was six or seven, I’d come across the Grünewald Altarpiece in an art book, and it had scared me to think about ever since.

“That’s good,” said Father. “I love you, too. Poor little Brooke. Are you afraid I’m going to die?”

I certainly was. I didn’t see how anyone could lose that much blood that fast and live. There was no way to stop the bleeding, no way to plug him up.

“You’re not going to die, Father, I promise you. The ambulance is here. Besides, I won’t let you.” I was still invincible in those days, strong enough for both of us. The big question was whether I was strong enough not to cry. I rolled my eyes around furiously to disperse the tears, clenching my teeth with effort.

“Attagirl,” said Father. Only his lips moved, and his voice seemed to come from far away. “Well, I am. I’m afraid as hell. You must forgive me, darling.”

“What for, Father?” I asked, panicked, thinking I was about to hear his last confession. He couldn’t die. He wasn’t mortal like the rest of us: he was my father.

“For getting sick tonight, not taking you to that movie. The bullfight movie. What a terrible evening. I’m so sorry, darling, I know I promised you.…”

Father did almost die. He received massive transfusions every day for weeks, gallons and gallons of blood, according to Nan, who moved into the hospital with him. Then, after he began to recover, the doctors recommended that he take it easy for a while and retire. It was the work, it seemed, the pressure that made him hemorrhage. But Father got so cranky with enforced leisure, and it became so apparent that retirement would be, for him, a form of death anyway, that he was slowly allowed to resume Mr. Roberts. When the danger was over, Bill and I were