Free Haywire by Brooke Hayward Page B

came up to Williamstown once that summer, and she was terribly nervous and uptight about it because she felt very much that Williamstown was her own little province. It didn’t go off badly at all, but I knew she was apprehensive about the fact that you were coming up. You represented the glamorous New York Vogue influence that she was frightened to death of. She was, to herself, the girl who was crazy, and you weren’t. And in fact something happened that summer that convinced her that she was crazy
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    “It was the next to last week of the season. Bill wasn’t there. I had gotten the gardenias and taken her to some restaurant. Afterward Nikos threw a big party at one of the fraternity houses because it was the last show of the season
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    “I was sitting with Bridget on a staircase, and Nikos was about two stairs below us. Although Bridget didn’t usually drink—her doctor had told her not to—that night she had a couple of glasses of wine. She was feeling terrific. We were talking to Nikos and sort of laughing; suddenly she pitched forward into Nikos’s lap. Her eyes were open but they weren’t. I was just absolutely panicked. People were crowding around her. Nikos told everyone to get out. We carried her into the next room. She started to scream, and the screams came from her bowels. We called the hospital; it was about one o’clock in the morning; no doctor. They had to wake one up. We must have stayed with her forty-five minutes until that doctor got there. She was talking to your mother the whole time. What she was saying was ‘Mother. I’ve got to speak to my mother!’ And we said, ‘Your mother’s dead.’ She got very quiet, but her body was like a taut rubber band. Then she said, ‘I know she’s dead.’ Tears were
coming down her cheeks and she said, over and over, ‘I never got a chance to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry.’
    “Finally a doctor arrived. He gave her a shot, and she was terrified of the needle, just terrified; we had to really hold her down. We carried her back to the fraternity house where she was staying. The doctor ordered a nurse to stay in the room
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    “I walked around crying for a couple of hours. I couldn’t sleep and I went back up to the room to look at her. I would just so willingly have laid down my life for her then. If there was anything I wanted, it was to be thirty-four, my age now. I wanted so badly to be somebody who could take charge. But a fast eighteen was the best you could have said about me
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    “Bridget really knew that she was sick. She knew that she wasn’t in Riggs by accident and that what happened to her on the staircase in Williamstown was serious. The big suspense with Bridget was: was she getting better, or was she getting worse? She was keenly aware, when she was at family functions, that she was being observed like an exhibit. Does she look better now than a year ago? Is she in good shape or bad shape? Not because she was somebody who was subject to great highs and lows, but because she was genuinely ill
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    “Bridget felt very much the pariah of the family. She had been put away somewhere—under the nicest of circumstances, the best of places; she kept saying that all the time, how much freedom she’d had there—but she felt that she had, deservedly, been put away. As far as you, her sister, were concerned, that could never happen to you. You were peaking and cresting; you were married at the time, or just divorced, but even a divorce was better to Bridget than what she was doing. You had kids; you were bopping around New York getting your apartment on Central Park West, modeling and who knows, you were going to be acting, and so on. It was very important to her because she was, as everybody is, competitive. If you had been a little uglier and less successful, I think she would have run to you
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    “She knew that your father wanted what was best for her, but also felt that he was a little frustrated and bored with