Haywire (32 page)

• • •

Finally, as Colonel Hayward commemorated the event in the last square of his needlepoint alphabet, arrived The Boy Named Bill.

Mother made only two movies after 1941:
Appointment with Love
, with Charles Boyer, and
Cry Havoc
. Then she retired “permanently” from the screen, because, according to one publication of the time, she said:

“I have three children. I wish to dedicate myself to them. The best service that mothers can render their country in these wartimes is to take care of their children. I am doing that.”

I sighed. We had come, practically, to the end. There was a whole book designated for
The Voice of the Turtle
, but we knew all about that.

The question of possession, of ownership, was, I mused, troublesome. To whom did Mother belong: herself, us, or her public? In any case, did it make a difference?
She
must have thought so or else she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to keep her public and her private lives separate. But how much mileage was that deception good for? Once she’d deliberately become a public figure, how could she go on being one without being one?

“She made a mistake,” I said aloud. Bridget was putting the books back so that their bindings lined up with the edge of the dust marks on the shelves.

“More than one,” replied Bridget, smiling impishly.

“No,” I said. “Seriously. She made a bad choice back when she was eighteen. She should have become an English teacher instead. Or a camp counselor.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Bridget. “If that was true, you wouldn’t be here.” Bridget’s logic could be breathtakingly righteous.

“I know,” I said. “But she should have gone back to Virginia all the same. She’ll never be happy. Just wait and see.”

“There was one very sad thing: at the time of the last play she did—the one she died in—while she was in rehearsal, she came here to dinner. We were alone and she was gay and charming; we were
having a perfectly lovely time talking about all kinds of things, and suddenly she took me into my bedroom and she said, ‘Millicent, I can’t go on and I can’t get out.’ And I had such a sense of horror—there was something in the way she said it that implied more than the play. Because then I took her by the shoulders, and I held her, and I said, ‘You must go on.’ And I didn’t mean the play. But there was that crazy confusion, that ambiguity.…”

“I’ll never forget a remark your father made. We all went to a World Series game together, September, 1949. We were sitting at the table having lunch, the five of us: you and Bridget, Leland and Slim and I. And Leland looked at me and said—now at this time you were twelve and Bridget was ten—he said: ‘You know, Johnny, these girls have reached the age when I can really enjoy them. I can take them to the theatre without having to take them to the bathroom or having to feed them; I don’t have to hold their skirts up when they go to the potty and I don’t have to tell them how or what to eat.’ It was such a funny remark to make in front of you—as if he were rejecting the first twelve years of your life.”

One sleepless night when I was thirteen or fourteen, following the exchange of some punishment or other on Mother’s part for some provocation or other on mine, I finally accepted the idea that being a parent might be worse than being a child. Maybe Mother had bitten off more than she could chew. If I reversed our positions, as she was always adjuring me to do, I had to agree that I was impossible. “What would you do if you were me?” she’d query, at the end of her patience. I had no idea. It was one thing when we were adorable three-year-olds in starched organdy pinafores; quite another when we were erupting into puberty and chaos. “I loathe having to be a policewoman all the time,” complained Mother. “Nag, nag, nag.” (Then shut up and leave me alone, I’d think. From my point of view, it was
she
who was impossible, not I. The predicament was that I had a different point of view for every occasion.) “If you think it’s fun to play God—” I didn’t think it was fun. I overflowed with sympathy for her. What folly to perpetuate the human race; I, for one, would not make the same mistake. No children for me; no blood on my hands. I didn’t want to live through this torture again.

The next morning, combing out my pin curls, I cheered up at the sight of myself in the mirror; was charming to everyone at breakfast, ate three helpings of sausages, got an A-minus on my English test, made left halfback on the field hockey team, spent
the afternoon recess learning dirty jokes in the eighth-grade coat-room, scavenged twelve cents from my friends after school for a vanilla burnt-almond Good Humor, and managed to have at least six hours of happiness. My adolescence was a total delirium.

During the nineteen-fifties, Greenwich, Connecticut, was, on the surface, an ideal place to be a teen-ager. It lay on the Long Island Sound, not quite a suburb of New York City, but an easy thirty-five-minute commute from it by either car or train. Greenwich was a wealthy community that prided itself on maintaining the appearance of a small town. An expensive version of a small town, to be sure, with spacious maple-lined streets radiating out from the core of its township—a single shopping street, Greenwich Avenue, where, in classical tradition, were located the post office, the drugstore, the five-and-ten-cent store, and any other unobtrusive businesses that did not challenge the community’s complacent air of self-preservation. As for the maple-lined streets, they eased quickly away from the typical New England houses near the center of town toward the real heart of Greenwich: its vast country estates, which grew vaster with each passing mile. All the intersections along the way were delineated by signposts set in large triangles of evenly clipped hedges. (Sometimes when Mother went out to dinner, Bill and I would encamp in the middle of the triangle where
our
road, Clapboard Ridge, joined the main artery of North Street, and would spend the evening shooting our BB guns through its protective hedges at the rear tires of passing cars, hardly able to contain our pleasure when we hit our target and the car swerved toward the ditch opposite.) That was Greenwich, with businesses small, properties large and valuable, zoning laws tough, and with enough clout from its citizens—many of them heads of giant corporate interests in New York City—to keep it that way.

No wrong side of the tracks, no slums, robberies, rapes, or murders—although I can vaguely recall one fatal car accident after a big private débutante party that sobered everyone up enough to question, for a while, the advisability of serving alcoholic beverages at those ritual summer galas. For where its social life was concerned, Greenwich was no small town at all; it was tremendous.

We moved there in the fall of 1948. Mother had decided to civilize us. The time had come to give priority to the serious matters of education, culture, and social structure, none of which was provided by Brookfield or California. But Greenwich had a slew of excellent private schools (Greenwich Academy, Brunswick,
Greenwich Country Day, Rosemary Hall, et cetera), a slew of churches (Christ Church, Round Hill Community Church, et cetera), and access to all the cultural advantages of New York City. It also had a multitude of exclusive clubs (the Greenwich Country Club, the Round Hill Club, the Field Club, the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, the Belle Haven Beach Club), which was one aspect of life there that Mother found reprehensible. Despite our eventual importunings for her to join one (like the parents of all our friends), she drew the line and steadfastly refused. “I’m not a joiner,” she’d say, “and anyway, I don’t believe in that kind of
nouveau-riche
snobbism.”

She also had grave misgivings about the bigotry in Greenwich; there were no Jews. I’d never heard the word “Jew” until we moved to Greenwich. One afternoon we were all drinking iced tea on the flagstone terrace when a friend of mine idly quoted
her
mother as being greatly relieved that the owners of such-and-such a house had held out against the irresistible bid of a rich New York Jewish couple who’d driven out
three
times to look at it—supposedly
very
prominent, too, but you know how that is: let one in, then another, and suddenly property values—Whereupon Mother exploded. It was one of the only two times I ever saw her really lose her temper (the other was when I punched Bridget in the nose for breaking one of my china horses), and I was extremely impressed. She sprang to her feet, her face purple with emotion. “There is one thing I will
not tolerate—not
in my house, not from anyone, not ever!—and that is discrimination of any kind, particularly anti-Semitism.” She pounded one fist in the other hand for emphasis. “The finest, most brilliant people I know are Jews, my closest friends are Jews!” She paced agitatedly back and forth, superstitiously avoiding the cracks in the flagstone, delivering herself of a long impassioned lecture that not only detailed the entire history of the Jewish race, its accomplishments and persecutions, but also lamented the incalculable loss—cultural, intellectual, and scientific—that the rest of civilization would have suffered without it. Inflamed by her oratory, we felt a terrible collective shame at not being Jewish ourselves. “I find the only prejudice worth having,” she concluded vehemently, “is against people who are prejudiced.” Further to dramatize her point and to remedy what she saw as her personal neglect of our religious training, she thereafter, instead of sending us each Sunday morning to Sunday School, read the Old
Testament to us, starting with Genesis (and ending halfway-through Ezra, when her interest in the sessions lagged as much as ours).

We were pleased that she’d backtracked about Sunday School. Unbeknownst to her, we’d been playing hooky from it for ages. All our friends went to Christ Church, with its sanctimonius stone walls and rose window. But Mother had held out for the Round Hill Community Church, because it was a Spartan Calvinist structure, not a stained-glass window in the place, and the rector, Dr. Prince, wore sensible steel-rimmed glasses. We were not inspired by it. There was no pious ceremony, no incense or cushioned prayer stools, no Eucharistic chants, no dark shivering mystery. Mother thought all of that was baloney. Every Sunday she’d drive us away from the center of town and Christ Church, where our friends prepared for their first communion in virginal white dresses, toward the country and Round Hill Community Church with its simple wooden spire. She’d drop us off with twenty-five cents apiece for the collection plate, and come back for us an hour later, little realizing that we’d spent the hour playing hopscotch on the deserted country roads with our quarters as “loggers.”

Not only were there no Jews in Greenwich, before our family there were, with one exception, no movie stars either. That exception was a miracle. The Fondas had preceded us there by a few months; Hank was starring in the huge success
Mr. Roberts
, produced by Father, and with a long run ahead of him, he had brought his family from California to live in Greenwich for much the same reasons as Mother. Our first day of school—into which we awkwardly arrived at midterm, feeling more than the usual trepidation because we hadn’t been to school for years—was saved by the sight of Jane and Peter Fonda. The ironic coincidence that brought us all together once again in an unlikely town on a coast three thousand miles from home, the thrilling nuances of our parents’ ongoing personal and professional relationships, the old feeling that we belonged together tribally by some predestined ordinance endowed the five of us with a permanent sense of complicity. And more: through each other’s eyes we saw and knew everything there was to see or know; we were superhuman.