Haywire (41 page)

I looked at him carefully. His voice was beginning to change and down was sprouting on his chin. He looked underfed. I resisted the impulse to enfold him in a bear hug.

Bridget was absolutely no help in all this, Bill repeated, rattling on with his feet up on the jump seat; she was actually a hindrance. Since I, the traditional groundbreaker in most family arguments, hadn’t been around to give orders, Bridget had initiated the debacle, and should have been able to deal with its aftermath. But she’d lapsed into one of her silences. Bill had had to organize the resistance and to carry her along as well. Matters had got even worse once they were under way. Throughout their travels from
Boston to Halifax to St. John to Gander to Biarritz, he’d had to take care of her. Just as if, he noted sourly, they were married. In the cramped proximity of hotel rooms, their relationship had disintegrated rapidly. To add to his other woes, he said, Bridget had a tendency to be light-fingered. She stole things, irrational things like his favorite pocketknife. She wouldn’t use these things, or trade them, or do with them whatever you did with stolen goods. She just hid them. Maybe they had a symbolic value to her. She took a ten-dollar gold piece Grandfather had given Bill when he was born. Earlier that summer, she’d stolen a couple of hundred dollars out of Mother’s purse, for which, Bill said indignantly, Mother had launched a big investigation and blamed him. Bridget was a fink. She always let him take the blame for her crimes until the day—the very day, in fact, that the final knockdown fight between Mother and Bridget had occurred!—that Mother had gone through Bridget’s drawers and found a stash of items that had long been missing: odds and ends of Father’s and Mother’s and Nan’s and Bill’s and mine. Then Mother had finally pieced things together. And then Bridget had written that letter to her friend and left it on the hall table.

But, Bill concluded pensively, when Bridget and he had made the move to leave, he’d thought I would be extremely proud and pleased. He was stunned when I’d elected to stay, because he’d remembered several times Mother had threatened to send
me
to live with Father, and somehow he’d thought this time I would go right along with them.…

Then I did hug him. It was useless to do anything more. If we could have all been closeted together in one room and, at knife point, forced to speak until we were empty, it would have taken us as many years to undo the misunderstandings as it had taken to create them.

We held each other and promised to write, knowing that we wouldn’t.

I went to the theatre and Bill went to a record store. That was the last time we saw each other for two years.

Although it took the next twelve months to come to a head, Mother’s breakdown had begun that afternoon. I dated it from the moment Bill declined her peace offering. For Mother to swallow
her pride, to offer blanket concessions by way of reconciliation, and then to meet with rejection, must have been more than she could bear. When I arrived home that night, our doctor’s car was in the driveway and she was in bed under heavy sedation. Around dinnertime she’d disappeared. Kenneth had searched for hours, then taken the car and searched some more. He’d found her curled up pitifully in a ditch by the side of the road. She told him that she’d gone for a walk and fallen asleep looking for her lipstick. When he got her back to the house, she’d locked herself in her bathroom and refused to come out. That was when he’d called the doctor. All pill bottles had been removed from the medicine cabinets.

The next day she slept. The house was kept quiet and the doctor made several visits. Her powers of recovery were, as always, remarkable. The following day, Sunday, she came down to breakfast looking slightly wan and unsteady but determined. Monday was to be my first day at Vassar; though we tried to dissuade her, she insisted on driving me up to Poughkeepsie.

She had signed to star in a new play,
Janus
, and was now in no condition to do it. Kenneth and Delly, who was to produce it, met several times with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, an eminent New York psychiatrist. They discussed whether or not the distraction of hard work might overcome the hazard of an emotional breakdown. Mother herself was more apprehensive about the possibility of a physical breakdown. She maintained she was in a state of exhaustion and not strong enough to do the play. On the other hand, to withdraw from it once the machinery was set in motion would be a very serious and costly step. Even though she complained that she’d been deserted by everyone around her, including Kenneth and me, and that nobody was helping her to make a decision, typically she refused to let us. In the end, she made up her mind to go ahead.

The New York notices were good; under the circumstances, I thought they were amazing. But, even so, the strain became too great, and after Christmas Mother told Delly she would have to leave the play. At Easter time she was replaced by Claudette Colbert.

Slowly she seemed to be recovering from the terrible anxiety that she had failed as a mother. Then, in September, she decided to undertake a television show. She didn’t like television, she didn’t need the money, and there was no way to account for why she agreed to do it.

The show was based on the true life story of a nun, Sister Aquinas, who had not only a special talent for teaching mechanics and aerodynamics but also a pilot’s license. Her ability was so singular that she was sent to Washington during the war to instruct in the assembling of planes and how to fly them.

Mother, always scrupulous about details, asked C.B.S. for the services of a Catholic priest to coach her in the subtleties of Catholic liturgy: how to genuflect credibly, how to make the sign of the cross, whether to pronounce “Amen” with a broad “A” or not. C.B.S. stalled. Finally, after much bullying from Kenneth on Mother’s behalf, the network obtained a Methodist parson. Disorganization prevailed on all fronts. According to union rules, no actual props could be used until dress rehearsal, and Mother had to handle seventy-two props. The dress rehearsal was a shambles.

Mother informed the producer, Felix Jackson, that it was out of the question for the show to go on the air twenty-four hours later in such scandalous condition. He agreed diplomatically, but assured her everything would be straightened out by the next day. Mother said this would be impossible. She said she definitely would not do the show. She changed quickly into her street clothes, said goodbye to her theatre maid, and told her not to come tomorrow. As she left, she shook hands with Felix Jackson and told him the same thing.

Nobody, least of all Kenneth, took her seriously. Over dinner, he chided her for being sadistic and ruining Felix Jackson’s sleep. Mother replied that she was being deadly serious. Kenneth pointed out that C.B.S. or Westinghouse would sue her if she walked out: they could hardly allow her to set such a precedent. She was, after all, not the best arbiter of either her own performance or the show as a whole, and what about the rest of the cast? Mother’s answer was that
AFTRA
(the union) would see to it the other members of the cast were paid; she herself didn’t care if she was sued, since actresses shouldn’t be treated so shabbily. As a matter of fact, C.B.S. wouldn’t
dare
sue her; they knew they were in the wrong.

The next morning Kenneth went to work without waking her. He assumed a night’s sleep would restore her good humor.

He was mistaken. The final run-through had been called for 3:00 p.m. She did not show up at the studio. By 3:30, he was back in their apartment. He found a note telling him she anticipated that he’d return to convince her to change her mind. She was
taking the car and driving off somewhere, she wasn’t sure where exactly, but not to worry, she’d call him the next day; by the way, she was borrowing his book.

It was impossible to track her down. There was chaos. By 7:30 that night, the story was out and the press started calling. Mother, meanwhile, spent the night in a country motel. She was having breakfast at a counter the next morning when she heard a radio announcement that the missing actress, Margaret Sullavan, had still not been located. Disguising her voice and brushing back her bangs, she fled the coffee shop. She drove deep into the country, along the most inconspicuous back roads, until she reached the Osborns’ house near Brookfield. Finding the house locked, she broke a pane of glass in the French doors and let herself in. Then she called her apartment on Riverside Drive. Paul Osborn answered the phone.

“Paul?” she asked.

“Maggie, where the hell are you?” he said.

“In your study,” she answered.

“What are you talking about? You can’t be,” he replied.

“I am,” she said.

“Hold on!” he exclaimed, and took a cab over to his apartment on Ninetieth and Park Avenue, but she wasn’t there so he raced back across town and picked up the receiver where he’d left it.

“In the study?” he asked.

“In the country,” she answered.

“Oh,” he said lamely, and put Millicent on. Millicent asked if they could drive out to see her. Mother said they could on one condition: that they promise not to discuss the matter with her. They promised.

When they got to the house, they found that she’d stuffed the icebox with groceries and was treating the whole thing as a lark. Her plan was to hole up there for a week or two. Millicent persuaded her to call Kenneth. Kenneth drove out. He showed her the newspaper reports and convinced her that she should talk to her lawyer, Bill Fitelson, because there was some real question of a lawsuit. Gradually, as she realized the extent of the furor, she began to brood. While Kenneth was talking to her alone in the downstairs guest room, Millicent heard the sound of whimpering. She walked in and found Mother under the bed, huddled up in a
fetal position. Kenneth was trying to get her out. The more authoritative his tone of voice, the farther under she crawled. Millicent took him aside and urged him to speak gently, to let her stay there until she came out of her own accord.

By the weekend, she was in a serious depression. Kenneth again sought the advice of Dr. Kubie. At his suggestion, Mother agreed to spend some time at the Austen Riggs Foundation, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Austen Riggs is a private mental hospital, one of the few “open” hospitals of its kind in the country. Its patients are all in some form of therapy but, depending on the individual situation, free to leave the premises as they wish or to live away from them altogether as outpatients.

Mother remained there for two and a half months. She grew to love it. When she left, right after Christmas, she put the Clapboard Ridge Road house on the market and auctioned off all its contents—the furniture, the silver, the china, the paintings that had taken twenty-odd years to accumulate. The time had come, she said, to make a clean sweep.

I breathed a sigh of relief. The worst had come and gone.

In the spring, a month or so after Easter, Father telephoned me. Would I, he asked cryptically, come into New York City to check out my brother Bill? Like that very minute? He was in a small private hospital, Regent.…

Bill was lying in bed, all doped up. He smiled at me idiotically. Suddenly I realized how much I’d missed him.

“Listen, you jerk,” I said. “Why did the nurse frisk me at the door before she let me come into your room? Are you an armed suspect? She felt me up and down—searched my purse, held my gum wrappers up to the light—”

Bill laughed. “Razor blades,” he said. “Possibility of suicide.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yes,” said Bill. “Yes. That’s not on my agenda yet. But I’m extremely incommunicado. That makes them nervous. You know. Also my spirit of cooperation leaves something to be desired—they had to cart me over here in an ambulance when I wouldn’t come willingly.” He peered into the carafe on the bedstand. “Want some? I read somewhere that drinking hospital water is a sure way to get strep throat.”

“Bill, why are you in this place?” He seemed perfectly normal to me. “All I know is Father said you’re angry at him because
he thwarted some elaborate arrangements you’d made to run away from school. But this seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?”

Bill chuckled and tossed a cube of ice into his mouth. “That’s not why I’m pissed off,” he said. “I’m mad because I’m
here
. They got me here under false pretenses. They promised me I’d only have to come here for one night. It’s been two weeks.”

“Two weeks!” I exclaimed.

“That’s not all,” said Bill.

“Wait a minute—who’s
they?
Father and Nan?”

“This big-shot psychiatrist, Dr. Kubie. Very highly thought of amongst those who think of these things. Kind of a family retainer.” Bill chuckled again. “When Father found out about my plot to skip out on Lawrenceville [Bill had left Eaglebrook that year to return to Lawrenceville], he made a surprise appearance there and said he’d like to drive me into New York and have me talk to this old family friend named Dr. Lawrence Kubie. Part of my escape plan was to go to New York anyway, so I figured it would save me the train fare, plus Father had the biggest chauffeur I’d ever seen and I had the feeling there wasn’t much refusing. I packed my stuff and came with him to New York to Dr. Kubie’s office. We had a strange series of meetings: both Father and I, then one of us, then the other one, then both, then one, and then the other. Finally Dr. Kubie said that in his judgment, to relieve Father and Nan of the worry that I might disappear that night—I’d made it pretty clear my plans were just momentarily suspended out of inconvenience—it would be best if I spent the night in a small private hospital. And I refused to, and ended up in an ambulance, and here I am and it’s been two weeks.”

“Unbelievable,” I said. I felt the same kind of isolation as when I hadn’t read a newspaper in a very long time.

“Father and Nan come here every day,” went on Bill. “I don’t speak to them. Nan brings me books, which I must say is a boon. But I won’t talk to either of them. Won’t say a word.”

“That’s a dumb way to get revenge,” I said. “If I were you, I’d be talking a mile a minute with every last breath in my body.”