Haywire (10 page)

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 with her to Bridget’s apartment for a wardrobe consultation. I clenched my teeth and picked out a blue silk dress and earrings of small turquoise forget-me-nots. Rummaging through her jewelry box, I came upon two necklaces Mother had assembled, pearl by pearl, over the years of our childhood. In weekly games of hearts, played for legendarily high stakes with a cutthroat cast of regulars—Sam Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Herman Mankiewicz, and Father—Mother had always won. The night’s winnings would be translated into the acquisition of another matching pearl. When the strands were finally completed, diamond clasps and all, they were banished to her safe-deposit box. She said they were too valuable to wear. From time to time, when she felt a mild financial squeeze, she would contemplate selling
them. Sentimentality, however, prevailed. In keeping with her original intention, they were turned over to Bridget and me when we became twenty-one. Neither of us had ever had the nerve to put them around our necks. Bridget acted as caretaker, since I was notoriously lackadaisical. When Pamela saw them that day, she pointed out that they would be much safer with her (and besides, there was also a huge emerald ring of Mother’s to consider). Pamela had a priceless jewelry collection that reposed in her custom-built safe—a series of drawers, each with an individual combination—which rose grandly from the floor to the ceiling of her closet. I was in no mood to defend my irresponsibility, so away went the pearls and the emerald. Ten years later, when I asked to have them back for my own daughter, they had vanished.

Pamela asked me what I wanted to do with Bridget’s personal effects, all of which had been left to me. The apartment was still so filled with Bridget I could smell her perfume in the air. At my suggestion that we send all the furniture to Bill and Marilla in their dreary little house at Fort Bragg, Pamela said it was hardly worth the shipping cost, much too expensive a proposition, so what about donating it to some needy charity? “Anything,” I mumbled to get out of there, “anything,” and we finally left with the clothes and jewelry.

Going down in the elevator, Pamela said, “Did you know that Bridget left your father her entire trust fund? It was dear of her—she was so concerned about his financial status, she told him that since he’d supported her for so many years, she was going to do the same for him in his old age. Of course he didn’t pay any attention to her, but there it is in the will. And it certainly will come in handy at this particular time.”

“Yes, it was dear of her,” I answered, wondering if Bridget had known that her trust fund had been set up entirely by Mother, as part of her percentage of
The Voice of the Turtle
, seventeen years earlier.

“And not only that,” continued Pamela as the elevator let us out into the lobby, “but she left him her entire savings account, which seems to have about twenty-five thousand dollars in it. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, indeed,” I dutifully answered again, and couldn’t help adding, “but of course that was Mother’s life insurance. The policy came through just a few months ago.” My God, I thought. Is this
what happens whenever somebody dies? These grisly discussions about personal effects and money? Gloating about this and that? All the way to Campbell’s funeral parlor, I couldn’t keep myself from remembering a night that we’d been having dinner at 1020 Fifth Avenue: Father, Pamela, Bridget, Grandsarah, myself, and Jones Harris, with Monsen serving. The table conversation had never once veered from conjecture about the fabulous sums of money that might befall Grandsarah (and thus Father, who was already ruminating about how he’d spend it) if and when Standard Oil decided to dig along some desolate stretches of railroad tracks to which, in an ancient agreement with the oil company, Grandsarah had retained all mineral rights.

“I thought I’d married into an artistic family,” Pamela had suddenly interrupted, “and all anybody ever does is talk about money.”

“People in steel vaults shouldn’t throw—” Jones fired rapidly, and then effectively elected to stop. Bridget had been delighted.

“Your friend Jones is marvelous,” she told me after dinner. “His father [Jed Harris] is like a caricature of
him
instead of the other way around.”

Her funeral was in the late afternoon. There was a slight drizzle as we emerged from a caravan of black limousines at the entrance of St. Peter’s Church on Lexington and Fifty-fourth Street. Although St. Peter’s was Catholic, Bridget had often gone to services there; she’d had a friend at school in Switzerland who was Catholic. We ran in to avoid the reporters straggling at the entrance.

The inside of the church was faced with stone. A somber daylight muted its stained-glass windows. The altar was banked with white and yellow flowers. Bridget’s coffin, the color of moss, lay among them. Father, my brother, Bill, and I sat alone in the second pew. Father and Bill both held themselves with the same military bearing as Colonel Hayward in his wheelchair. Our shoulders were pressed, one against another, throughout the service. I was only half aware of people sitting behind us, of friends of the family tiptoeing down the aisles.

The service was very short. There was no eulogy. Very softly the organ began to play Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Infanta,” which Bridget had learned to play on the piano when she was twelve. As the sound echoed through the church, Father’s shoulders
began to shake. Bill and I edged in closer, as we had with Bridget between us nine months before. I knew I would never be able to listen to that particular music again. Then Josh Logan stood up and moved to the middle of the aisle just in front of the coffin. The candles on either side were beginning to flicker as he quietly, almost inaudibly, recited the Twenty-third Psalm. “The valley of the shadow of death,” I repeated after him mentally, trying to imagine what it looked like and whether I would be afraid.

Afterward, Father, Bill, and I had to go out first. As we passed, Father paused for a fraction of a second and looked at Tom Mankiewicz, who was sitting by the aisle. Tears were streaming down Tom’s face. Father put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and walked on. And we went out into the rain.

There was a reception at Father and Pamela’s apartment afterward. The dining-room table was laden with an elegant buffet. I chose a place to sit—in the hallway on a small bench, and never moved—then Josie Mankiewicz came and sat beside me for a while, and Bill Francisco, and my brother, Bill, with Manila. There were a great many people but the only person I remember talking to was Tom. The last time either of us had seen each other or Bridget, we had all been together. I told him I would never go to another funeral.

Tom:

“I remember at the reception you said to me, ‘I’m the daughter of a father who’s been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I’m twenty-three and divorced with two kids.’ I said, ‘Brooke, either you’ve got to open the window right now’—we were on the tenth floor—‘either you’ve got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, “I’m going to live,” because you’re right, it’s the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live.’ ”

ara Mankiewicz (Herman’s widow):

“She had a very romantic concept of motherhood and marriage—incurable romantic, she was—and very much involved with it. Then her career started to be an interruption to her, to her duties and home; Herman used to accuse her of lying about it—that she was just crazy for her career—and she couldn’t convince him that it didn’t matter to her a bit. She liked the money and she was glad to make it, but she really regarded it as an imposition. She would have preferred to stay home and be strictly a mother and go to the market and go on picnics
.