Haywire by Brooke Hayward Read Free Book Online

over and rested her hand lightly on Father’s shoulder.
    “Come, Leland, darling, we’re having your favorite—vichyssoise and chicken hash—a new recipe from the head chef at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Father blew his nose loudly. He had very dogmatic eating habits, which we children were delighted by, never touching anything remotely tinged with color: this eliminated most vegetables except potatoes from his diet, and for that matter fruit, except for strawberries (in spite of their color and his allergy to them); as for meat, he ate only chicken, lamb chops, or steak, and no more than an arbitrary two bites from the entire serving,but he consumed with passion what we alluded to as “white food”—scrambled eggs, custard, vanilla ice cream, and the Beverly Hills Hotel chicken hash.
    During the course of dinner Josh recounted, with a high degree of animation for which he was justly famous, a jumble of stories about the various enterprises in which he and Father had been jointly involved, how Father had become his agent while he, Josh, was the dialogue coach for Charles Boyer in his first English-speaking movie,
The Garden of Allah
, tales about their productions of
Mr. Roberts
and
South Pacific
, about Hank Fonda and Mary Martin; they were all familiar and gratifying and went well with the chicken hash.
    In Father’s study, after dinner, there was the first general discussion of Bridget, and a tremendous number of phone calls were made. Bill was notified in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was taking paratrooper training for the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the more successful schemes he had devised, along with marriage, to escape Menninger’s. Kathleen Malley, Father’s faithful secretary of thirty-one years, was on emergency duty for the evening, and all calls to the apartment had to be siphoned through her; she also had to deal with all the newspapers, which were about to go to press. While Bill Francisco sat in a daze, Pamela, Nedda, and Joan were huddled over “arrangements,” and Josh strode purposefully up and down the small room, issuing suggestions on all fronts. At one point, he stopped in the middle of the Aubusson rug, right on a basket of flowers festooned with blue ribbons, and said to Father with great intensity, “You know, Leland, she really wasn’t of this world at all—she never seemed to belong here. Even when she was a baby, I can remember thinking she was like a creature from some strange mythical forest, another planet—always with that faraway look in her eyes.”
    Father nodded. “The thing that kills me,” he said, “is that I never quite knew what was going on in her head. For instance, her insane need for privacy. I mean, she never came to me and told me
anything
. So here I sit like a complete idiot, asking myself over and over where I went wrong, for Chrissake, what I could have done to make it easier for her. I thought we loved each other. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to any of it. The thing that breaks my heart is the feeling of absolute uselessness.”
    One Sunday afternoon a few months earlier, during an interlude in the conversation at a family lunch, someone had asked where Bridget was. Father looked down the table at Pamela. “I forgot to ask you, darling, isn’t she feeling well?” Pamela looked stricken. “Oh, Leland, for heaven’s sake, you said yesterday that
you
were going to call her from the office. Didn’t you get through?” Father muttered at his plate, “Oh, hell, I must have forgotten to tell Malley to ask her. Why didn’t you remind me?” “What a pity,” sighed Grandsarah, Father’s mother (named Grandsarah by Bill), who lived in California and was visiting for a few weeks. “Maybe she’ll be able to come by some other afternoon.”
    “Yes,” Josh was saying now,
“yes”
kneading the lower half of his face thoughtfully. “And she was so
vulnerable
. Whenever I think of Bridget, I think of that white skin, and those