Garbo Laughs (22 page)

“What’s number one? Not
Citizen Kane.”

“Yeah.”

“God.”

By now Lew was in the kitchen too. “But
Citizen Kane
stinks,” he said, which gave Kenny his Jack Frame foothold.

Standing in the middle of the floor, waving his long hands in the air, he declared, “It was something new. It paved the way for everything else with camera angles and direction. Even if it isn’t the best movie ever made, it deserves something. Personally, I would have given it one hundredth place.”

Leah said, “They’re wrong about
Casablanca. The Godfather
is the better movie.”

“You see? Thank you. Now, do you think it’s fair that my mother won’t let me watch it?”

“I’ll rent it.” Leah stood up from the table, a dumpy figure wrapped in silk. “We’ll watch it together.”

Harriet yelped in protest, and Leah said, “Darling, do you mind? I’m out of cigarettes.”

The errand runners, dressed in coats and boots, stepped outside at ten in the morning and opened their black umbrellas. Harriet took a scoop of salt from the bag on the porch and scattered it as she
and Jane headed down the steps. They were Hansel and Gretel in reverse, since going forward was the challenge, not finding their way home. “Why is frozen rain slippier than ice?” Harriet asked into the air. “I suppose it’s wetter.” They could barely stand up. “Listen to it. It doesn’t sound like rain. It sounds like church.” She meant heavy, meaningful, dank, on their umbrellas.

They stood in the street and looked around at something being made in slow motion – a slow-motion disaster. Nothing could have been simpler.

Or, indeed, more complicated. Twigs were undergoing warm-wax therapy, except it wasn’t warm and it wasn’t wax. Dipped repeatedly, they were thickly gloved, fatly swollen, mittened with ice. At the same time drops of frozen water hung suspended off their tips – “An old game I liked to play when I was little,” Harriet said to Jane, reaching for a twig and pulling it low, “to lift my hand out of the bathwater and watch the water form long glamorous nails on my fingertips.” She was struck by the twig’s beauty, just as she’d been struck by the beauty of the spear-tip fern. Inside the casing of ice, inside the glass coffin, you could see the dark slender lines of the twig, and almost forget about the ominous weight.

They inched forward, not lifting their feet off the ground, past street signs fringed with foot-long icicles and a stop sign that wore a buckskin jacket of ice. Fine rain was coming down. They stepped over a tree limb and heard road crews in the distance, but here it was quiet, not a car, not another soul in sight. Harriet stopped again and looked around, so relieved to be outside, so glad for the respite from her aunt, that in sudden high spirits she began to hum, and then to sing “Waltzing
Matilda.” At Seneca Street they saw a woman out with her dog. The woman was standing beside her dog and then she was flat on her back, without having taken a step, and looking around fast to see if anyone had seen her. Harriet inched over to help her up: she was pretty and dark-haired, with a space between her front teeth, red-faced and laughing about having been caught out in her embarrassment.

Then they continued across the street to Mike’s Barber Shop with its ice-bloated swirly pole, and Harriet thought of Garbo at fourteen, lathering men’s faces and writing in a letter,
I feel as though I’ve been alive for an eternity
. That thought led to another, less welcome: the horrible story she had read only a couple of nights ago. It was about Garbo, and by some strange coincidence it involved a shawl. Harriet had set the book to one side, thinking,
later
. “A Spanish Shawl for Miss Garbo” the story was called, and it was written in 1938 by one of
The New Yorker’s
footloose correspondents, and reprinted in a biography of the actress.

Garbo was in Italy, staying in a villa with Leopold Stokowski, and every day, the story said, fifty or more letters arrived for her. She ordered all of them to be tossed into the furnace without being opened. Sometimes packages arrived. One contained a new brassiere, with the request that she wear it, sign it, and return it to the sender. Then “a package too large to be burned unopened came and was unwrapped for destruction. It contained two Spanish shawls: one in colors – this was rather fine – and a handsome white one.” Garbo kept the colourful shawl, the story said, and gave the white one to the housekeeper in lieu of a tip when her visit ended. After she drove away, the housekeeper unfolded the shawl to try it on, and a letter fell out. It was from a
Sicilian baronessa who had fallen on hard times, who wrote that her family dated from the fourteenth century, “that they were impoverished but had been able to go see Miss Garbo in a film in which she had exhibited much pity for those in trouble, that she was
una grande artista
and so must also be as compassionate as she was talented,” and they asked Miss Garbo to be the purchaser, at such price as her generous soul saw fit, of these two valuable shawls, the last of their worldly possessions. The housekeeper, “thin-lipped, put the white shawl in a new package and in the folds put a note, saying she was returning the white shawl but that Miss Garbo had taken the colored shawl and gone off with it, no one knew where on earth to.”

The story stopped me in my tracks when I read it. The baronessa’s desperation, the housekeeper’s hostility, the whole terrible misunderstanding, if true. If the story was true
.

I was reminded of the movie
Shoeshine,
in which life conspired to turn two friends against each other, to corrupt them and destroy their friendship, and each other. It was a movie I watched by myself one morning years ago in New York. I started to watch it and could see the external circumstances being set in place – two boys who were best friends unwittingly entered a trap: they were set up, caught, and thrown into a reform school where they eventually betrayed each other. I finished watching it at midday – noon, but dark in the living room, and cool. I was wearing a jacket and felt colder at the end. The ruined friendship and the ruined punishment, and the knowledge that there would be no leniency. Pasquale held the dead Giuseppe, where he had fallen on the rocks, and the future held only more grief, more fruitless punishment
.

I remember that I stopped watching it when I first put it on. Stopped, because I knew that it was only going to get worse, and because
I thought the whole thing too predictably sad. It was predictably sad, but the events were far from predictable
.

And now this real-life story about Garbo, which was also far from predictable.

When they achieved the corner store, they discovered Dinah, buying all the papers. At their cry of
Dinah, what luck!
, she looked up, and they embraced each other. “So how is the formidable aunt?” she asked them.

“Out of cigarettes,” said the errand runners, and Dinah’s face relaxed into knowing amusement.

Then they stood to one side and talked for a while. Dinah wanted to know if Leah had always been like that, and Harriet said she used to be worse. People would come to see Lionel and if she didn’t want to see them she’d say,
Not you!
, and slam the door in their face.

“And they put up with that?”

“For Lionel. Everybody loved him. I never knew a man so loved – by men and women both. I think Leah couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have landed him. But then he got sick and she ended up being a full-time nurse, which is what happens if you marry a guy more than twenty years older than you are. Don’t ever do that,” she said to Jane.

More customers came in, all of them wanting bags of salt, but none was left, as Dinah could have told them. She had parked in her driveway last night only to discover when she got out of her car that she couldn’t stand up, it was so slippery underfoot, and so she drove over here to buy a bag of salt, but all the salt was gone. She ended up scattering cat litter ahead of her as she inched her way up the front walk.

Harriet asked Dinah, “How do
you
deal with difficult people?”

“Directly.”

“Directly,” replied Harriet, thinking about it.

“I say no a lot.”

“You’re so much better with people than I am. You’re better at love too. You’re the one who should be married.”

Dinah winced, and Harriet saw how wrong-footed her so-called compliment was. “I’m sorry.” She touched Dinah’s arm. “I have a big mouth.”

“It’s all right,” said Dinah, summoning up a raspy laugh. “I like your mouth.”

She paid for her newspapers, and Harriet for two packs of Craven A Light. “Jack’s coming for dinner tonight,” Harriet said. “Please come. Bring Ida. Saying no is not allowed.”

“Then yes,” said Dinah. “I can’t speak for mother. She’s afraid to go outside. But I’ll come.”

And it was yes to the next question, too. She felt surprisingly well. Better than she had in months. I know it hasn’t gone into remission, she said, but I feel so much better.

Before they parted company, Dinah asked Jane if she and Kenny would come with her to see
Titanic
in the afternoon, a movie of the moment so apt that she was writing about it for the paper. Then, having made Jane’s day, Dinah offered them a ride home (she was on her way downtown). But they declined, embarking instead on the treacherous adventure of going home by foot. They were merry, inching forward down the ice-palace laneway, Harriet falling, then Jane, but neither one getting hurt. But at the halfway mark Harriet went silent and morose, and Jane asked, “Why are you afraid of Leah?”

Harriet stopped and looked her daughter in the face.

“You get to this line,” Jane gestured with her hand, “and suddenly you’re serious.”

“You think I’m afraid?”

“I understand you
can
be frightened of her, I just don’t understand why you are.”

Harriet would have liked to ask Lionel about the story of Garbo and the shawls. He had written his own article about Garbo, one so appreciative and thoughtful that she let him on the set of
Queen Christina
, a particular favour since normally everyone-journalists, screenwriters, producers – all of them were banned. She let him stay for an hour, and when he had a chance to thank her he apologized for the pestering ways of reporters. Laughing, referring to them, she said, “I don’t like little birds.” He loved to imitate her accent and tone of disdain.
Leetle
birts. Reminiscing late at night in the large, spotless, Italian kitchen, to Harriet and anyone else who was around. With Harriet he talked about writing, candid about his sense of failure. He knew his best screenplays and books were written as a young man, and nothing he’d written later was nearly as good. He knew more about writing, he said, so they should have been better, but they weren’t. He also talked politics. The
FBI
began their file on him in 1943, “when Russia was our ally, don’t forget. Strange,” he would say, “how hysterical even the most sensible people can get about communism. In its basics it’s no different from Christianity.”

“Then why not simplify things,” Harriet asked him the last time she saw him, “and just be a Christian?”

She didn’t expect an answer. She was just trying to point out that communism and Christianity were different kettles of fish and it was silly to pretend otherwise. Lionel took her point. He was always at his most affable with young women who kept Leah company. In his small study, the smallest room in the house, he had a long desk that ran the length of the room. A chair-spin away was an extensive set of shelves full of cubbyholes that Harriet coveted – they came from a post office dismantled long ago. He worked at his desk every morning, joining Leah and the students of all ages for dinner at two, then lecturing about politics and film from four to five, then taking his late-afternoon swim in the pool, where son Jack learned to swim, and others (like Janice Bird, at work on a screenplay about garment workers) sunbathed. After that he settled down to one glass of wine after another. Harriet remembers his amused and gratified smile when Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House. “Who would have guessed that our first fascist president would come out of Hollywood?” In those days he was writing a book about the diaspora of exiles created by all the dictatorships in the Americas: Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, the United States. He was tracing the pattern of migration to Cuba and Mexico, Canada, Spain, and Italy. That book and his memoirs were what Leah expected to find after his death, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper, not a pencil mark, not even a leetle note.

Leah, looking out the living-room window after lunch, said, “Most disasters are ugly. I’ll give it that much.”

“Nuclear explosions are beautiful,” Harriet said. “At a distance.”

“This isn’t at a distance.”

“Thank God we’re not in a tent.” Coming to her side. “Thank God we’re not birds.”

In the quiet house, Leah eyed the plaid armchair in one corner of the room, and said, “Wrong fabric.”

“It’s the same plaid as Lew’s father’s dressing gown. He says he sits in that chair and it’s like sitting in his daddy’s lap.”

“You need a solid colour.”

“I need a good haircut.”

“One thing I have, everybody tells me, is good taste.” Leah studied her niece. “Get bangs. They’d soften your face.”

She had been thinking of getting bangs. Like Meryl Streep. “You think so?”

“It’s a shame your hair is so thin.”

“It’s not thin. It’s fine. But there’s a lot of it. Every hairdresser says so.”

“It’s thin.”

Harriet kept herself from saying
It’s not thin! You want thin? Look in the mirror!
But from now on she would find herself running her hand through her hair and saying that hairdressers said there was a lot of it. They were surprised, but they
all
said the same thing.

“That friend of yours has wonderful hair,” Leah said. “You want to be beautiful, you have to have thick hair.”

“She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Always an eager champion of Dinah’s good looks.

Leah shrugged. “Lew thinks so.”