Haywire (45 page)

The morning Kenneth went to England, she called me.

“Brooke,” she said urgently, “please come over right now. Can you? Your father’s coming to lunch and I’ve just driven Kenneth to the airport; I’m all alone in the house.”

“Father?” I asked, amazed.

“Yes,” she said, out of breath. “He’s stopping by on his way
up to Stockbridge. Thank God he’s finally agreed to have a look at Riggs and also to sit down and discuss Bridget’s finances.”

She hesitated. Then, “I need a chaperone.”

I drove over. How could I resist? I’d been waiting twelve years to see them together again. Her house was perched almost on top of the Byram River. A long brick terrace ran the length; one could sit on its stone wall and watch the two swans drift by.

Father’s car pulled into the driveway just as mine did. Mother was standing in her oldest pair of shorts—her uniform, she called it—way down at the far end of the terrace. Father and I walked toward her. Father shielded his eyes.

“My God, Maggie,” he said. Mother didn’t budge. She just stared. I began to blush.

“My God,” he said again. “My God, Maggie, you look good.”

She laughed, and the years fell away.

My cheeks burned. I couldn’t look any more; I felt as if I were intruding on the most intimate conversation. I leaned on the wall overlooking the river. She still loves him, I thought; she’s loved him all this time. Behind me I heard them moving toward each other, talking about this and that. The sun beat down on my hair. All this time, I thought. Chairs scraped; they were sitting down. Mother laughed again, a low throaty laugh. The river swirled by, bearing leaves, swans, water bugs.

I thought of the summer I was eight, the first summer in Brookfield. One day Bridget, Bill, and I, inspired by Mother’s nightly installments of
Huckleberry Finn
, had tried to run away.

While Emily made us some hard-boiled eggs, Mother got six bottles of chocolate milk out of the icebox and divided them up into three of Father’s handkerchiefs. “I know you’ll have a wonderful time,” she told us. “But if you get bored, please come home, ’cause I’ll miss you terribly.”

The road was too hot to walk on barefoot, so with no prearranged destination in mind, we crossed into the alfalfa and corn fields on the other side. Warm green cornstalks swished over our heads like a dense thicket of bamboo. At the far end of the meadow was the pine forest. After looking back to make sure the house was still visible, we plunged into its cool Gothic shadows and remained there for the rest of the afternoon. When there were no eggs left to peel or milk to swig, we fanned out on the dead pine needles and took a nap.

Although we had no intention of ever going home, toward
dusk we were seduced by the sound of Emily ringing the dinner gong. In order not to appear too anxious, however, we took the long way home, along the crest of the hill past Andrew Tomashek’s unkempt farmhouse where the pigs were being fed, past a bramble of ripe raspberries, over the fence and down through the meadow, ignoring Bridget’s squeals about nettles and poison ivy; then back across the road—cool now—and up onto the stone wall that bordered our property. Already we could tell it was going to be a perfect evening for a firefly hunt. The air was thick with the hum of tree toads and mosquitoes, the rustle of squirrels in the maples, the flutter of bats. In the home stretch now, we moved more and more deliberately, creeping from stone to stone over the vines of shriveled morning-glories, snatching at the overhanging branches for unripe apples, testing them, spitting them out at each other.

“Get the hell over here,” bellowed Father. “What in God’s name do you think I drove out here for, peace and quiet?”

Mother, Father, and Emily were waiting under the maple trees on the front lawn. All around us the earth was dissolving into sky, cobalt blue shot with opalescent fire, and just where the pinks and greens and yellows evaporated into night hung the new moon.

I climbed onto Father’s gleaming shoes with my bare feet, and we swayed clumsily across the grass, circling faster and faster until my legs flew out from under me and I howled at him, between convulsions of laughter, to stop or I’d wet my pants.

The screen door banged; everyone else was going in to dinner. Father gradually lowered me to the grass.

“Now make a wish,” he said, pointing my head toward the moon.

“What’s yours?” I asked, rapidly discarding one idea after another.

“I’ve narrowed it down,” said Father. “We stay here, right here in this very spot—here and now—for the rest of our lives. What do you think? When you were born I was thirty-four times as old as you, when you’re thirty-four I’ll be twice as old as you, and someday, at that rate, you may catch up. But for now, let’s just stay here the rest of our lives.”

Father and Mother, behind me, were still talking. I stretched out in the sun and gazed down at the water, letting myself lap against the stones. All this time, I thought over and over. All this time.

n the next decade
, Father became a sick man. A stroke only temporarily slowed him down; more insidious was the excruciating attack of pancreatitis that put an end, once and for all, to cigarettes and liquor. Uncomplainingly he substituted Diet Rite Cola for Wild Turkey, and photographing the night skies for flying them. But he was not so uncomplaining about the lives of his remaining two children. After Bill’s time as a paratrooper was up, he went from Germany, where he was stationed, to New York. Father and Pamela were not particularly enthusiastic. As a result of Father’s cold shoulder, Bill came out to California to see me (“and bum around,” said Father). He stayed on. I had removed myself to the comparative sanctuary of the West Coast upon my marriage to struggling actor-director Dennis Hopper; Father’s disapproval of that union was exceeded only by Pamela’s. (She was offended by the way Dennis dressed; he couldn’t be relied on to turn up in the proper raincoat for the proper occasion.) The day of our wedding Father had called me up at 6 a.m. to remind me I still had time to call it off. When, in the 1961 Bel Air fire, Dennis’s and my house burned to the ground, Father’s response, by long-distance telephone, had been, “Christ, I hate Los Angeles; why the hell didn’t God burn down the whole city while he was at it?” Although the next year Dennis and I produced a daughter, Marin, Father was not pacified. The day in 1967 that I decided to get a divorce, however, he called again. “Congratulations,” he announced to me in Los Angeles from his office in New York City—I could tell by the sound of his voice that his feet were up on the desk—“on the first smart move you’ve made in six years.” But he didn’t let his dislike of Dennis (which survived the divorce) dampen his enthusiasm for the huge success of
Easy Rider
, which my brother, Bill, and Peter Fonda co-produced and Dennis directed.

On the night of February 3, 1971, Bill was skiing in Alta, Utah (“Terrific powder,” he said wistfully), when Father was rushed to the hospital. Pamela finally caught up with Bill by telephone—no easy matter, as he put it—to report that the subsequent operation was an unqualified success. Father was already insisting that he be released at once. A good sign.

I had been easier to reach. I was walking out my front door in Los Angeles when the phone rang. Father, in rehearsal with Father Daniel Berrigan’s play
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine
, had suffered a small stroke. A warning.

His decision to produce
“Catonsville Nine”
had provoked a certain amount of controversy. It was unusual for Father to commit himself to such an unequivocal, fervent, anti-war statement. Admittedly a
WASP
of the old school, he backed away hurriedly from anything radical. And during the year since he’d first read Dan Berrigan’s adaptation of his book about the trial, Berrigan had gone on to federal prison, to serve out his term. In addition he faced co-conspiracy charges in an unlikely alleged plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

Father was also meeting with some resistance from Pamela. Pamela didn’t condone Dan Berrigan’s plan to go into hiding for those months before he finally faced his prison sentence. Not only was he a fellow Catholic but more, a Jesuit priest, and Pamela, who wasn’t sure she approved of his burning Selective Service files in the first place, was positive she approved not at all of his going underground once he’d been convicted for it. She felt it was unethical. But Father loved the material. “Very gutsy man” was his opinion. “A lot braver than I could ever be. Besides, I don’t think he’s guilty. And if I only produced plays that followed my own political beliefs—God, how limited.”
“Catonsville Nine”
was due to open on February 7th. Father’s main beef, when he entered the hospital, was that he might not be able to attend the opening night of his play. Maybe he knew it would be his last. He did know that sooner or later he was going to end up in the hospital for some extensive tests; he’d been having trouble with the circulation in his legs and was buying time until after the opening.

On the night of the third, just before leaving his apartment at the Beekman to go to one of the last previews, he suddenly stopped talking in the middle of a telephone conversation with his secretary, Kathleen Malley. Kathleen had got through to Pamela on the other line, and Pamela had run into Father’s bedroom to find him unconscious.

I called him from California right after he came out of surgery.

“How do you feel, Pop?”

His speech was still slurred from the anesthesia. “Groggy as hell,” he answered faintly. “Hurts to talk. Big bandage stuck on my neck.”

“Don’t talk, Pop. You’re not supposed to. Good luck with the play. I hear it’s terrific.”

Then he woke right up.

“Where’d you hear that?” (I could almost hear his head snapping around.) “Goddamned right, terrific. Did you ever get to meet Dan? Marvelous fellow. Play opens in two days. Don’t forget to call Kathleen; she’ll read you the reviews. I can’t stand it; they won’t let me out of here for my own opening. First one I’ve ever missed. Do you realize? Two days. What luck. Just kills me.”

The morning after the play opened, I called him back. He was in wonderful spirits.

“What about those notices!” he shouted into the phone. “Great, huh?”

Then suddenly his mood changed and he launched into a long philippic, laced with colorful language, against doctors and hospitals and operations and anybody or anything that would conspire to remove him from the main action at a time like this.

“But, Pop,” I protested. “The operation’s a success and the play’s a success. What more do you want?”

“To get the hell out of here and go straight to the theatre,” he replied at the old staccato pace. “This bedpan routine stinks. I’m going home tomorrow.”

“Well.” I hesitated, knowing that was out of the question. “Isn’t tomorrow a little soon? Shouldn’t you be taking it easy? How are you, anyway?”

“Just sensational,” he barked. “And that’s the way I want to keep it. Another day in this clip joint will be the death of me. Lousy ice cream, too. Inedible crap. If you had any style, you’d air-mail me some Will Wright’s chocolate mocha. I’ll be out of here faster than you can say Jack Robinson; it’s either that or starve, take your pick. They’d better not try to stop me or I’ll walk out in my birthday suit.”