Haywire (39 page)

My passing concern for young William was well founded. He had run into academic trouble at Lawrenceville and had been shifted to Eaglebrook, a smaller, less posh institution. Except for his skiing, he wasn’t doing particularly well there, either. However, our school production of
The Glass Menagerie
was my major preoccupation; hobbling around the stage as Laura convinced me I should become an actress. Mother could not have agreed less.

“I forbid it,” she said sternly when I called her to rave about myself. “Until you’ve finished college. What happened to your writing?”

Her allegiance to my writing seemed hypocritical; I pointed out that it was she who’d prohibited the publication of my book.

“That was probably a mistake,” she admitted, “but I would be making a far graver one if I let you go to acting school instead of college. If you’re still interested four years from now—so be it. I’ll give you my blessing.”

Also she was not pleased with the deal Father and I had made for my graduation present.

“Now I want to talk to you about another problem.” (I scrunched up my face in the phone booth). “Leland called yesterday. It seems a year and a half ago he promised you a car for your birthday if you got good grades. You, of course, did not tell him I’d promised you a car if you didn’t smoke. I’ve recently noticed cigarettes appearing for the first time. This, darling, is what I call playing one parent against the other. In other words, if Leland and I were not divorced, this situation could not have occurred.” (I made a minute examination of my fingernails; it would have been foolhardy to interrupt her once she started.)

“You didn’t tell Leland that I’d said you could have a car
if
you didn’t smoke. This is being dishonest by omission.” (Mother’s voice sounded as if I were strangling her.) “Now
he’s
in a quandary;
he certainly doesn’t want to break his promise. I’m in a quandary; I certainly don’t want to be the policewoman you call on me too often to play. But also I’ve overextended myself on your various pleasures this year—skiing at Christmas, Florida at Easter, graduation, début, and, finally, a trip to Europe this summer. This, if you remember, was to have been my year for travel and leisure—instead of which, your expenses are so great I haven’t budged from home. It’s given me vast pleasure to do these things for you, but now I have to draw the line. A car’s upkeep is not negligible; aside from the very costly insurance and running expenses—gas, oil, et cetera—we figure that each car averages around twenty-five dollars a month in repairs and extras. I cannot afford to keep a car for you now. I have arranged to give you a clothes allowance next year, and I feel it’s a hardship to add a car—not only that, but I have to clear out the garage for a third occupant, which will sit out there all winter unused—your father and I are agreed you shouldn’t take it to college. And all this for a girl who can’t resist smoking!” (Oh, God, I thought, I can’t stand these lectures—why did I call her?) “So we go to more expense and build a house to protect the furniture which the garage now holds. If Leland is willing to pay for the upkeep of your car, then I have nothing more to say. It’s like that horse he offered you several years ago—the initial cost is small compared to the upkeep.”

She paused momentarily; I didn’t know what to say. “And one other thing.” (Oh,
no!
I banged my fist on the walls of the phone booth.) “Leland says what you want, above all else, is an M.G. This I
cannot
allow. At least when, God forbid, you have that accident, you must have a fifty-fifty chance of survival. I don’t have time now to explain to you why. Please grow up soon and stop creating these situations.”

As usual, it was pointless to argue with her. Besides, there were more pressing things to think about. Events were rushing by, and, if possible, gathering momentum. I was pretty, bright, talented, confident, happy. I felt as if I’d come through a long dark tunnel into a sunlit meadow. Beyond that stretched the summer, two whole months of traveling in France and Italy and Scotland. Then Vassar. My whole life lay before me.

Although I had seen little of them in the last few years, the two people I loved most in the world were my sister and brother. It was
an odd kind of love, one that did not demand much of my time or of theirs. I was not dependent on them, nor they on me. We expected nothing of each other, nothing at all. Perhaps we had deduced from the way matters had ended with Mother and Father that even the most committed relationships were not to be counted on. We couldn’t damage each other if we wanted nothing from each other, not even rudimentary loyalty. The quantum “nothing” had its own value. Unhindered by what brothers and sisters ordinarily expected of each other, we were free to love without ordinary rules. We were free to come and go as we pleased. We were free to feel without demonstrating what we felt. By the same token, we were exempted from the need to regret what we didn’t feel. Outsiders were often surprised that we didn’t keep better track of each other. What they dismissed as cold or flippant or imperious behavior was devised by us as an intricately expressive sign language. All this is a long way of saying that however deeply we cared about each other, our care had a rogue quality. And occasionally, when it mattered most, our signals could get crossed.

In August of that year, 1955, Kenneth, three of his sons, and I were grouse-shooting in Scotland. We stayed at Yester, a beautiful Adam house with vast grounds, which belonged to the Marquess of Tweeddale, who was Kenneth’s brother-in-law. I was deliriously happy. When we weren’t shooting, we were mackerel-fishing. Marjorie, Kenneth’s sister, presided over a breakfast table that never numbered less than twenty. At noon, there were elaborate picnics on the moors with hampers of food transported to the blinds by station wagon. In the late afternoon, there were seven-course high teas, and at night black-tie dinners at which we consumed a previous day’s bag. Afterward, the men drank port with their savory, and the ladies, in their long dresses, retired to the drawing room to await the setting up of the roulette table. I had the feeling I was walking through a reel of Jean Renoir’s
Rules of the Game
.

Mother was in Greenwich with Bridget and Bill. I felt sorry for all three of them. They had to be getting on each other’s nerves. Greenwich had never been much fun in the sultry heat of August when everybody had left town. And, at best, Mother could be difficult. The one reliable soothing agent, Kenneth, was off with
the one sure-fire distraction, me. Mother’s letters sounded slightly oppressed. I could just imagine the general claustrophobia.

Although I hadn’t yet seen her, Bridget had just come back from her two years in Switzerland. All her letters had begged Mother’s permission to remain in Switzerland for her senior year, with the idea that eventually she might go to the Sorbonne or the University of Geneva. Her arguments were so persuasive that I’d taken her side. I realized that one of the factors in her reasoning was me. Several times, long ago, she’d confessed to Kenneth in the heat of emotion that she felt inferior. In Switzerland, with rivalry at a manageable distance, she seemed to be thriving. Her French was fluent and she had many friends. Amazingly, for one who had always been physically cautious, she had taken up skiing with a passion; her picture, with blond hair streaming over her red Alpine team sweater, graced the cover of a Gstaad travel folder. That spring she had written:

Mother, however, had chosen to disregard Bridget’s plea. Against the advice of both Kenneth and me, she had insisted that Bridget return for her senior year. Her reasons were abstruse.
Bridget, she claimed, ran the risk of becoming a rootless expatriate. One year had been enough, two extravagant. Since it had been Mother’s wish to send us both in the first place, I found this logic specious, and said so. I also pointed out that she should seize the opportunity to encourage Bridget’s new-found independence. Mother, I think, found that the most subversive argument of all. In any case, she had recalled Bridget. Secretly, I was relieved to be as far away as possible from that homecoming.

Bridget and Bill were, under protest, both attending summer school at Brunswick. This, in their opinion, was a last-ditch recreation gratuitously contrived by Mother when she couldn’t find something more productive for them to do. Mother did not like idle hands. It was a good opportunity for Bridget to catch up on certain credits, and for Bill to improve his poor grades at Eaglebrook. Mother was furious with him. He had a recent history of lackadaisical study habits. His motivation had been sluggish ever since the time, when he was nine, he had gone briefly to boarding school in England. That was the fall Mother and Kenneth had got married. Mother had felt that Bill would benefit from the same educational experience his four stepbrothers were having. He’d had a marvelous time in England but, after several months of the penetrating winter damp, had come down with severe bronchitis. In addition, Father had returned from London with horror tales about the lack of food and central heating. (Father’s idea of minimum sustenance was a New York steak for lunch every day.) Mother had had visions of another mastoid operation like the one that had almost killed Bill in infancy, and had him sent home at once. After the rigorous curriculum at Sunningdale (algebra and Latin in the fourth grade), Brunswick must have seemed pallid. Bill had loved Sunningdale; now he lost all interest in school, and never regained it.

Mother wrote Father frostily in the spring of 1955. For her to have written him at all indicated an emergency.

Bill’s freshman year at Eaglebrook had followed a familiar pattern: he was off to a good start and then slowly lost ground. The one thing all his masters agreed on was that he was an interesting conversationalist. The reports to which Mother referred were summed up by the headmaster:

Bill is quiet but genial. His mediocre effort and indifference to achievement, however, detract considerably from his having a full school life. The results of his spring testing program rank him in the upper quarter of the independent school population, and in English, arithmetic, and spelling his work is on the public school eleventh grade level. It is odd that with these very good figures his actual school grades remain low, and in his class ranking he is in the lower quarter of all his classes. However we see that the high quality is there.…

It was hard for me to ascertain what Bill was up to, since his letters home, though affectionate, were few and spare. He was then fourteen. I thought he was adorable. When we’d seen each other during vacations, we had been mutually protective: I defended him to Mother and he, in a misguided effort to defend my honor, ambushed my beaus. One night he sicced our German shepherd on an admirer I’d spent three years trying to seduce; the poor fellow’s pants were shredded to bits. Just before my graduation, Bill had sent me a note. I kept it in my jewelry box as the single piece of correspondence that I ever received from him:

One afternoon in August, I was sitting alone at the grand piano in the ballroom at Yester. The ballroom, though long unused
for the purpose for which it had been built, was still the most compelling room in the house. It was on the second story with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the estate, the village of Tweeddale, and, finally, the moors. I came there every afternoon to contemplate what it must have been like just before a dance; the now deserted parquet floor waxed and reflecting the room’s lovely proportions in the candlelight that shimmered from wall sconces and the great chandeliers; I could hear the ghostly sound of bagpipes as a breeze ruffled the pages of my sheet music. The only sheet music around was Noel Coward. I had already memorized “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and “Bittersweet,” which I bellowed into the echoing space while accompanying myself
molto espressivo
on the piano.

Kenneth came into the room and sat down beside me on the piano bench.

“Be quiet for a minute, darling,” he said. He was very agitated. The letter in his hands was as thick as a pad of paper, and at a glance I could tell by the broad-nibbed scrawl that it was from Mother. “Something terrible has happened in Greenwich,” he said. His voice was thick with emotion. “Your brother and sister have broken your mother’s heart.”