Garbo Laughs (24 page)

Lew looked down at her, his eyes too serious, and she was about to say so, when a tree limb came down. It landed fifteen feet away, on the hydro wire, which gave under it but didn’t break. They stepped to the edge of her porch and watched: nobody’s lights went out.

Only recently she’d heard the most appalling story about a dying woman’s selfishness. It had been on her mind ever since, this case of a relatively young woman with terminal cancer who decided to get pregnant because she wanted to experience childbirth before she died: the woman found a sperm donor, got pregnant, gave birth, and two months later she was dead; now her sister was looking after the baby, and would be picking up pieces for the next twenty years.

She touched Lew’s shoulder and said she was going in, and so should he. He nodded. Then brought her towards him and gave her forehead a kiss.

She remained where she was after he left, watching his progress down the icy street, until she saw that he was safely home. Then she went inside herself, only to learn from Ida that Jack Frame had called.

That night Kenny was reading his bible as they waited for dinner. “What’s
Fantasia
about?” he asked Jane, who answered, “It’s a bore. It’s incredibly boring. And it’s made for children, right? But all children I know think it’s a bore.” She was having cocoa, hold the milk: chocolate paste eaten out of a bowl, despite what her mother said about spoiling her dinner.

Lew was filling a tray with dishes, Harriet was getting out the utensils.

“And
Bambi
is disgusting,” said Jane. “All that cuteness makes me want to hurl.”

Then they moved into the living room, joining the others who were around the smoking fireplace. From the loveseat Dinah offered Campfire Jack bantering advice.

Leah said, “When I was a girl we played a game we called movie stars. I was always Norma Shearer, I don’t know why, and my friend Effie was Jean Harlow.”

“Effie Wineburg?” asked Jack.

“Effie Stone. I haven’t heard from either of them in years. But I know why.” And she reached for the reason as automatically as you reach for sunglasses on a bright day. “I was held up as a model, and they were jealous.”

“A model for what?” asked Dinah.

They balanced bowls and plates in their laps, an awkward business, but the fire was coming to life now that Lew had taken over, and it would be soothing if not especially warm in the old-fashioned hearth that Lew wouldn’t change: his dad had watched
his
dad set the stones in place. In a room little different, then, from the way it had always been, Leah was in the rocker, Jack settled himself on the loveseat beside Dinah, Kenny was on the floor and Jane on the sofa, and Harriet sat apart in the plaid armchair. Jack Frame had a way of claiming a woman, thought Harriet, watching him put his arm around the back of the loveseat, grazing Dinah’s shoulder with his hand.

“A model for what?” Dinah repeated.

“Loyalty,” Leah said from the rocker. “That’s what I have to offer, all my friends tell me. Since I was five years old I’ve judged
people by their capacity for loyalty. Well, people who share the same moral attitudes. With them you should be loyal.”

Everyone chewed on this in silence. Later, in her study, Harriet would write,
What she really has to offer you is
your
loyalty. Your reward for putting up with her is a sense of your own loyalty
. And she remembered a night of Scrabble in that complicated garden-detesting a game that made her feel stupid, and listening to Leah illustrate her everlasting point by telling the story of Reva, whose brother in England offered to send money to Germany in 1939, enough so their mother could escape, but not their stepfather, whom he hated. The mother wouldn’t leave her husband behind, and so they both perished in Auschwitz. “Now that’s loyalty,” Leah had said.

Dinah was saying, “People with a taste for power are always singing the praises of loyalty. Politicians. School principals. They’re crazy about loyalty.”

“Are you saying I’m power-hungry?”

“Of course you’re power-hungry.”

“Harriet, did you hear that? Did you hear what she said?” The formidable aunt was outraged and amused, released, somehow, from her ill humour by Dinah’s bluntness. She lit a cigarette and went to stand by the fireplace. In the silence they heard the crack of a tree limb, and more rain, and Harriet was able to concentrate on looking at Dinah and Lew. She saw Dinah taken up with Jack, and Lew still attending to the fire. Nothing of note. But then Jack looked at
her
. That is, he caught her staring at him. And confused, she looked away.

The other day, when he dropped by, saying he’d come to rescue her, she listened as he and Leah talked at the kitchen
table, tussling over the book, each of them explaining what they had done so far, what they would do next. And something she’d read about Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani came back to her, something that Sophia Loren had said. “It will be a battle,” said Sophia. “And Marlon will win. Because he’ll stay relaxed.”

Unquestionably, Jack was successful with women. Wooing with roses and grapefruits and a kind of protective presence that seemed to defy the world and to thrive on a certain kind of woman. She thought of Lew’s Uncle Milt, the bridge player, who said, “Show me a woman in need, and I’m lost.”

Her eyes moved to Dinah now, and, as she looked, Dinah’s glance shifted to Lew, who was wrestling two logs into a better position and unaware that he was being watched, unaware that Dinah’s face softened when she looked at him, visibly softened.
And Pauline, do you know how I felt? This came as a great surprise. Less jealous than proud. Wifely. Possessive. Not a feeling I’ve had very often, not a feeling I approve of. But I’ve noticed before how suggestible I am in real life. Only with movie stars do I go my own way, adamant and loyal to the end
.

She turned to Leah, “The potato worked.”

“Onion.”

“You said potato.”

“I said onion.”

“
I
say onion,” said Lew. Grimacing, he held up his burned fingers. A slice of onion was the best thing to put on a burn, he’d learned that in Peru. And he went into the kitchen to tend to his hand.

Not Harriet, not Dinah, but Jane followed him, offering to help. Jane, who had once joined a conversation Dinah and
Harriet were having about handsome men by saying that her father was the handsomest man she knew. Dinah had touched her arm. “Good for you.” Then Jane had added, “I knew before I was born that my father was handsome.” Her mother had looked at her earnestly, overwhelmed by her daughter’s intuitive ease about matters of the heart, and said, “You’re way ahead of me. In every respect.”

It was Kenny who suggested they watch a movie, and Jack Frame who said it would have to be something that everybody would want to see, and Leah who interjected, “Not Charlie Chaplin then. Harriet hates Charlie Chaplin.”

Kenny swung on his mom. “But you said
Modern Times
was great. You said
The Gold Rush
was one of the best movies ever made.”

“I like Buster Keaton more, that’s all,” came the dogged answer.

“But Mommy, you can’t say Charlie Chaplin was no good. You can’t say that.”

She reached out and took his hand. Kenny was standing beside her armchair, and she took his hand and held it. “All right. I won’t say it.”

“How about
Some Like it Hot?”
suggested Dinah, and a thrilled Kenny was halfway across the room when the formidable aunt said she couldn’t understand why everybody thought that film was so funny.

“Don’t you like Jack Lemmon?” Kenny asked her, standing in the middle of the room and trying to hold back the waves of criticism. But Leah made a face and rolled her eyes.

Dinah came to Kenny’s rescue. “Jack Lemmon was brilliant,” she said, and Kenny revived.

“He was a much better woman than a man,” he stated confidently. And Dinah agreed. “So let’s watch it,” he said, springing towards the
VCR
.

Leah sucked air through her teeth, making that window-cleaning squeak of dismissive contempt. “It’s all right with me. I’m just saying it’s supposed to be roll-in-the-aisles funny, and it’s not.”

“My negative stepmother,” said Jack, with a half-smile for the room in general and Dinah in particular.

“I’m honest. There’s a difference. I mean Marilyn Monroe isn’t exactly Meryl Streep.”

And that’s when Jack said with quiet passion, “I hate Meryl Streep.”

A patient man, thought Harriet. He had set up this punchline three weeks ago. She stared at him. She wouldn’t ask why. But Kenny was there. Kenny asked why.

“Because she never looks you in the eye,” he said, gazing steadily at Harriet. “She always looks off to the side or down at the ground. She never looks you in the eye.”

What jolly arrows, these little zings of hostility that go through the air. She felt a small, foolish smile form on her face. Too stricken by the sudden attack, too skewered to respond. She turned away, but was aware of Jack reaching for a magazine on the coffee table and thumbing through it.

“Is Jack Lemmon still alive?” Jane wanted to know. She had come back into the living room.

“Just barely,” said Harriet.

“He’s more alive than Tony Curtis,” said Kenny. “What happened to him, anyway. He got a huge belly, he lost all his hair, and he marries twenty-year-olds. It’s disgusting.”

Jane said, “He got older and he didn’t want to.”

Then they were quiet for a while. Kenny started the movie. Harriet turned off lights, and for the first time in days she felt herself relax. At least, she felt that relaxing might be possible, if all the mouths in the room would only stay shut.

But at the first close-up of Tony Curtis, Leah grouched, “See? Mr. Pretty Face.”

Then Dinah –
Dinah! –
said, “You’re right. He doesn’t have his heart in it, does he?”

And that’s when Harriet snapped.

She would have plenty of opportunity to think about why later. At the time it simply struck her as unendurable that one of her favourite movies was being ruined by her dearest friend, who wasn’t perhaps her dearest friend, after all.

“Be quiet!” she told Dinah. “I can’t hear a thing.
I can’t hear.”

In the kitchen, Lew slowly dried his hands. Then came to see what the trouble was about.

“I’m not allowed an opinion?” Dinah was saying with plaintive good humour. “I’m not allowed to say he’s just going through the motions?”

“You’re spoiling the movie!”

The big vein was throbbing in the middle of Harriet’s forehead. Lew recognized the sign. Just as small Harriet used to recognize in her father’s trembling lower lip a sure sign of danger, and would go quiet.

Jack was also gripped by Harriet’s face. There it was again: that fierce, pugilistic look.

“Whoa,” he said gently. “Take it easy.”

Harriet stood up and looked him in the eye: the man who hated Meryl Streep. “I
can’t hear. I can’t hear a fucking thing.”

“Pardon us,”
said Leah. “But you’re the one who’s talking.”

By then, however, Harriet had swept out into the hallway and around the newel post and was going
thump thump thump
up the stairs.

Leah said loudly enough for it to carry:
“Menopause.”

And Lew protested in a tired voice. “Leah, have a heart.”

“Have a heart? Have a heart?
I’m
all
heart.”

Upstairs, in the light of the bedside lamp, Harriet lay on her back, hands folded across her chest, ankles touching, soul aghast. To fall out with Dinah, not over Lew but over a movie. To lose Lew to Dinah and Dinah to a movie.

Menopause
.

There should be a fifth season, she thought, a name for the freezing rain that breaks up winter and destroys it. The
leah
. Spring, summer, winter, fall, leah. What’s it doing outside? someone would ask. And the answer would come: leah came last night, you can smell it in the air.

Then the tide in her mind went out and stayed out. The rain came down. It fell on a marooned house in a marooned city, and there wasn’t any end in sight. After a while, Lew came up to check on her.

“Hattie?” And he sat beside her and took her woeful hand.

With this gesture of affection her memory came back, and she thought gratefully of other times when her feelings had hit a dead end, only to find an exit through some gentle thing he did or said.

“I feel so bad for Buster Keaton,” she said, and she meant every word. “He ended up in those beach-blanket movies. With
Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Pajama Party
. He was Chief Rotten Eagle.” In the back of her mind she was also thinking about Garbo and the shawls, and the contradictions in the story. Why did the housekeeper write to the baronessa saying that Garbo had gone who-knows-where, when she would have known exactly where she had gone, and could have conveyed the baronessa’s letter to her? It was a story written to make Garbo look as bad as possible. A set-up, she thought. Another set-up.

She squeezed Lew’s hand, then let it go. “Why is she here?” she asked him. “Why did she come?”

He shrugged. “She wants to be loved,” he said.

Harriet gave him a deadly look. “For one second – just one-will you stop being so understanding?”

“We’re probably the last people on earth she’s still talking to.”

She groaned and closed her eyes, and remembered Leah’s wail: I
have been loved unconditionally. My aunt loved me more than anyone else in the world!
And it was only now, as the memory flooded back, that Harriet knew what response might have placated her:
Lionel loves you very much. I know that. Everybody knows it
. But what was the matter with conditional love, anyway?

“She won’t be here much longer,” said Lew.

His voice sounded weary and distant, and it struck her now that he
was
different. Not in the way he’d looked at Dinah, but in the way he
hadn’t
looked. He’d avoided her – avoided them all – the whole night, fussing with the fire, retiring to the kitchen to do the dishes.