Haywire by Brooke Hayward Page A

three and Bridget a year old (before Bill had been born and perhaps despairing that he ever would be), she had Roger Edens and Father bring us out to the M-G-M zoo on the back lot one afternoon after our naps. We were all dressed up in our coats and very excited, especially when we caught sight of Mother at a distance in an elegant black dress with a white picture hat, and a young chimpanzee cradled in each arm. We all rushed toward one another, but when Bridget, who got to her first,reached up to hug her, the two chimps, seized by jealousy, let go of Mother’s neck and attacked Bridget with a vengeance. She had to be taken off, screaming and covered with tooth marks, to the hospital to be bandaged. This incident put a crimp in Mother’s adoption plans, much to Father’s relief. (The only animals Father could tolerate were seals, preferably seal acts at circuses observed from a safe distance, although occasionally we could wheedle him into accompanying us to the Central Park Zoo if we arranged it for feeding time.)
    We went for the first time to the Museum of Natural History, where I shivered at the sight of the huge blue whale floating over my head in the main hall and the vast rooms inhabited by dinosaur skeletons, the first fleshless bones I’d ever seen. While we were standing with noses pressed against the glass behind which lay a tawny African landscape with its appropriate spiral-horned eland and tufted gnu (shot and donated by Grandfather Hayward), a young black woman tapped Mother gently on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, Miss Sullavan, can I please have your autograph?”
    Mother mumbled something and shook her head. We clutched possessively at her coat, amazed that a stranger would know our mother’s name. The young woman repeated her question a little more plaintively.
    Mother drew herself up and regarded the intruder with a cold eye. “I beg your pardon,” she said crisply, “but I think you have the wrong person. I am not Miss Sullavan.”
    The stranger was now as confused as we. “
Margaret
Sullavan,” she said, thrusting forth a piece of paper and pencil, but Mother was already moving away.
    “Come along, children,” she said, “and we’ll have a quick look at the mummies, which you will love.”
    “But, Mother,” we exploded on the way down the marble stairs, “
aren’t
you Margaret Sullavan?”
    “Yes, that is my professional name,” she answered, but before she could say anything else, we pounced on her with glee, clamoring all together, “But then you’ve told a lie, Mother, why did you tell such a terrible lie to such a nice lady? You don’t let
us
tell lies! She looked so sad when you said that—why didn’t you want her to know who you are?”
    Mother sighed and waited for us to stop. “You see,” she saidpatiently and with slow emphasis on every word, so that she would never have to say it again, and she never did, “there are a lot of people in the world who think if they get the signature—autograph, it’s called—of someone who is famous down on a piece of paper—sometimes even
collect
these signatures in books—that that will somehow make them more important. Well, I feel sorry for them because they think they can have some part of
me
by having me write my name for them, but that doesn’t mean I approve of it, and besides, I certainly don’t want to be famous or looked at when I walk down the street or take you children to a museum.” Here she gathered us in her arms as we were about to come to the mummies and spoke with such intensity that we felt swept up and purified by some glorious hurricane: “I think people who try to intrude on other people’s privacy or personal life in any way—and you children are my personal life—I think those people are rude and silly. Now, look—look!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening with excitement and her low magical voice stretching until it seemed it might snap and carry us with it, so that we sighted down her