Garbo Laughs (23 page)

“Lew?”

“I’ve seen the way he looks at her.”

And there it was – what had been waiting in the wings all this time.

“How does he look at her?”

“Open your eyes.”

Jealousy. She felt it sit down heavily in her lap.

L
eah went to her room for a nap and Harriet stayed where she was, on the rose-coloured loveseat, thinking about Lew and Dinah, the way Lew looked at Dinah. She tried to picture it, and it wasn’t hard. Dinah was the kind of sumptuous, full-bodied woman that he found attractive, she had always known that. It’s indisputable, she said to herself. And she recognized what was happening to her: the kind of calmness that occurs after the first shock of bad news. But it wasn’t to be trusted, this calmness.

She stood up and went into the kitchen, and turned on the radio. The power was still on, but parts of the city were without, and in the countryside the blackout extended for miles, from farm to farm and town to town, east and west, north and south. It’s also indisputable, she thought, that my needy aunt is a born troublemaker. As blind as she is perceptive. But then so am I.

Looking out the window, seeing things getting worse and worse, she thought: Buster Keaton would be happy. The out-of-doors was one big accident holding in its arms many small, old-fashioned accidents: chimney fires, falling trees, kitchen fires, electrocutions. Cattle, in particular, were dying in droves.
Dear Pauline, I was watching him the other night, and he was breaking my heart. I had to turn it off
. Speak Easily,
a talkie I borrowed from the library. He is Professor Post, too frightened of life to live. He saves his money, reads Aristotle, never goes anywhere because he’s never invited. Then he receives a huge inheritance and goes out into the world, where Jimmy Durante steals all of his thunder.
1932.
He was no longer in control of his pictures, already drinking too much. A talkie, as I say, and you hear his voice. A low, pleasant-lugubrious voice, an old-man voice, as befalls in with Jimmy Durante and doesn’t get the jokes. Durante grinning like a maniac and Keaton on the sidelines. And you can see what the studio is up to. They’re going to make a star of Durante – he’s their new favourite – and they’re going to ditch Buster Keaton
.

She started to run water for the dishes, remembering how Keaton was made to look stupid, slow, masochistic, out of it.
You would see what Leah is up to. You would know not to trust her. And yet what she says makes sense. If I were Lew, I’d prefer Dinah too
.

Then Harriet heard the study door open and Leah’s footsteps coming towards her, and her heart sank. She turned and said to her aunt, “That was a short nap.”

“I only ever need twenty minutes,” chirped Leah with the appalling conceit of the energetic.

They were listening to the radio in the kitchen and waiting for the return of the moviegoers. It was nearly four o’clock and it
was still Wednesday. “Did Lionel ever meet Buster Keaton?” asked Harriet.

“Buster Keaton was a nobody,” she answered.

And Harriet felt her world narrow even more. She felt so pained that she had to look away. “So that’s all there is to say about Buster Keaton?”

“Chaplin’s the one Lionel knew,” said Leah. “Chaplin was the genius.”

“I hate Charlie Chaplin.” Harriet’s voice was hot and emphatic. “Did you see
Limelight?
Keaton was a hundred times better than Chaplin and Chaplin knew it, which is why he left most of Keaton’s footage on the floor. Unforgivable. The applause-hogging little jerk.”

“Harriet Browning,” observed Leah. “The one person in the world who thinks Charlie Chaplin was a jerk. Pardon me. The second person. The other being Joe McCarthy.”

“I’m not saying he didn’t make some great silent films, or that Keaton didn’t make some terrible talkies.” She knew she was red in the face, and felt sick with growing dismay. These transitions, she thought, these terrible transitions: from silent to sound, radio to television, typewriter to computer, friendship to love.

Jack Frame, for instance. He couldn’t make the transition from talking to writing, no matter how many novels he wrote.

And soon he’d be here too.

But it was lovely Bill Bender who showed up first, and, inspired by the strange weather, he reminisced about the yellowy, balmy, very still atmosphere that stretched past Christmas in 1918 as thousands died from the Spanish flu. He was in Winnipeg then. Four years old. There was a field hospital down the street, and when the horse-drawn ambulances went by,
he and his friends covered their noses and mouths with their hands to keep from breathing in the germs.

They had moved into the living room when Bill came over, and now Leah yawned, visibly bored, in her rocking chair.

I don’t want to kill the woman, thought Harriet, I just want to dislike her to death. Make that the first line of your story, she instructed her class in her head.

“Bill’s writing a book too,” Harriet said to her aunt. But Leah was especially uninterested in him if he was writing a book.

“I began to write poetry last night,” he said. “By candlelight. Like Pasternak.” He shook his head in amusement. “I was inspired by the ice storm.”

“Leah?”

Leah rocked back and forth and ignored them both.

Awful, thought Harriet. Her aunt’s lack of curiosity was awful.

In bed last night, when she was lying awake and Lew sneezed and then lay awake too, she had murmured to him that Leah talked about people, either to let you know they were treating her the way she wanted
you
to treat her or they weren’t; it was so manipulative. And Lew had replied that it wasn’t just manipulative, it was the only thing she was interested in. His quiet remark soothed her: he not only agreed with her, he was even more stringent in his estimation of her aunt. He wasn’t incapable of being hard, she thought. She couldn’t count on that.

“Leah?” Harriet’s voice was tired. “Bill knew John Grierson when he was here setting up the National Film Board.”

“I knew Grierson,” she said. “Norman McLaren was more interesting. He came to us a few times to talk about his thing-making films without a camera, drawing directly onto film.” She shrugged. “I never could see it. What’s the point?”

“I think I’ll write a book without words,” Harriet muttered to herself.

“Well, it was cheap,” Leah said. “He was one of those Scots. Stingy.”

“Frugal,” said Harriet, stung. “Ingenious.”

“Mean.”

“I knew Grierson more in the last years of his life,” said Bill Bender. “But he was still sharp, sharp, sharp. Opinionated, opinionated, opinionated. More a talker than a listener. A splendid writer too. Like all those Scots. Well, he got cut down in the Red scare.”

“He wasn’t a Red,” said Leah.

“I’m not saying he was. I’m saying he got cut down in the Red scare.”

“What would you say he was?” asked Harriet.

But before he could speak, “A
liberal,”
said Leah with contempt. It would always be the ultimate insult.
You liberals
.

Harriet raised her spear and attacked. “They weren’t the best screenwriters in the world, you know, the ones who were blacklisted. I’ve seen some of their movies and they were pretty bad.
Woman of the Year
, for instance. It was awful.”

“Ring Lardner, Jr.,” said Bill Bender.

“Thirty Seconds Over Toy ko
was even worse.”

“Dalton Trumbo,” said Bill Bender.

Leah drew air sharply through her teeth, rubbed the fingers of her right hand against her thumb, and said levelly, “Faulkner could write any old shit for the screen, nobody held him accountable. But a radical writes a bad screenplay and he’s no good, never was, never will be. Liberals use any excuse to dismiss the Left.”

Liberals
. And she meant them. Everybody in sight. And she had a point, thought Harriet.

But Bill Bender said, “I’ve always thought Walt Disney was worse than Joe McCarthy. McCarthy ruined a few lives, but Disney destroyed good taste.”

He got up. He’d come over hoping to find Dinah, directed by her mother, who had thought she and the kids might be back from the movies by now. He had an old newspaper clipping about the ice storm of 1942, when streetcars were frozen fast for sixteen days, and he handed it to Harriet to pass on to her.

He missed Dinah by an hour. The moviegoers returned at six o’clock, just as Jack Frame came through the door and Harriet burned the soup. Leah told her to empty it into another pot and add a potato, it absorbs the burnt taste. “Don’t stir up the bottom,” Leah told her.

Then everyone else descended upon her. Jane starry-eyed and peevish, as she tended to be after seeing a movie; Kenny impressed and eager to talk about the enormous queue (they’d had to step over fallen electrical wires to get to it) and the size of the sinking ship; smart Dinah quick to point out the missed opportunity.
Titanic
should have taken a leaf from
High Noon
, she said, and been made in real time. How long did it take the ship to sink? Two hours? The perfect movie length. They could have focused on a Gary Cooper hero, some courageous man on a ship of fools. Then the suspense would have been real.

“You’re talking documentary,” said Harriet, looking up from the soup and thinking about Grierson.

Jack Frame, clean-shaven, but still padding about in bare feet, said,
“High Noon
wasn’t documentary. The crop-dusting scene in
North by Northwest
wasn’t documentary. They were real time.”

I know that, thought Harriet.

Leah’s fifty pages of memories, single-spaced, stapled together, were on the kitchen table. Jack picked them up and asked Harriet if she’d read them yet, and she said yes, last night, and she liked it best when Leah wrote about food. This comment was more or less truthful, but far from satisfying, she knew. “She’s lucky to have you to help her,” she said to him. Then, “Would you do something for me? Lew isn’t home yet, and we need a fire in the fireplace.”

Jack took in her hot, flustered face, and she saw in his glance a flicker of amused condescension. “No problem,” he said with a relaxed smile.

Her eyes followed his powerful, pudgy back as he headed into the living room, Leah trailing after him. Then she was alone with Dinah, who pointed at Leah’s pages and raised her eyebrows, and Harriet replied in a hard whisper, “It’s like fudge filled with gravel.”

“Fudge?”

“Filled with gravel. Icky-sweet and hard as nails. Gushing and venomous.”

Dinah chuckled. But Harriet’s shoulders were tense and she was getting a stiff neck. I’m not going to sleep tonight, she thought. I’m not going to sleep ever again.

Then Dinah said, “Lew is here.”

And Harriet told herself to
look
. To watch and see how Lew and Dinah greeted each other. But when he came through the
back door she couldn’t raise her eyes to his face. Only when he came over to kiss her, having hung his coat on a hook on the wall, having left his boots by the door, having put the bags of food on the counter – only then did she lift her face. He saw her distress and she saw his mildness. “The soup’s burnt,” she wailed. And he said, “Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter.” And he put his arms around her, and this time she didn’t bat him away. They stood there, a tall and bony pair framed by the blue kitchen cupboards at the end of a long and difficult day. Harriet was holding a wooden spoon. Whatever awkwardness she felt, since Dinah was only a few feet away, she made no move to step out of Lew’s arms.

Then Kenny came into the kitchen. He tapped his mom on the shoulder. “Mommy, what do you think of Sylvia Plath?”

She turned to him. “She’s good. She wrote some very good poetry.” Taking a moment from her sorrows to give a serious answer.

And Lew burst out laughing at mother and son. What a pair they were.

Dinah was laughing too, watching them. She caught Lew’s eye. Then held his gaze and saw what Harriet didn’t see: she saw his face go yearningly sad.

Dinah had trained herself not to look away from anything, not tears, stumbles, acts of love, spasms of hate. A self-described old hack, after all. If this were a map, she thought, the X in the middle would have been that marital embrace. In that moment she’d felt the force of marriage set against her: the neediness of marriage, and its roominess. And she’d caught herself thinking
rather bitterly that Harriet would always be looked after. Then Kenny had broken up the twosome with his question, and she’d had a chance to see in Lew’s face an overabundance of strong but divided feeling.

The night before (after she had sprinkled the walk with cat litter), she’d taken Buddy outside as far as the curb, her old dog no more inclined than any other sane, living creature to venture any farther. Dogs had their own way of dealing with the ice storm: they would stop eating for a few days, since they couldn’t get a grip on the ice in order to relieve themselves. It was eight o’clock. The street was empty of people and strewn with branches and twigs, and it occurred to her that it was dangerous to be standing under a tree, but she remained where she was, for here came Lew. He was on his way back from taking Buster outside so that Fiona wouldn’t have to.

Under their umbrellas, under the streetlight, they weren’t exactly fugitives, she thought, just two people who didn’t know what to do, how to proceed. Then, because Buddy was miserable, she turned to go in and Lew came with her. He took her arm and helped her get to the steps, then up to the relative safety of the porch. They stood there, even after he said he should be getting back, the kids were waiting for him to read to them. What book? she asked. And when he told her, she said,
“Angela’s Ashes!
But it’s heart-wrenching.” They love it, he said. “Do you skip the sad parts?” No. He shook his head. He read them every page.

“I’m in love with your kids,” she said. “In fact, I’m in love with all four of you.” And her raspy, throaty laugh travelled up and down the street, for all the world like a piece of sandpaper that’s found its mate. She said, “There aren’t enough Lew Golds
to go around, that’s the trouble. Don’t you have a brother you could lend me?”