Garbo Laughs (25 page)

“How do you know?” she said. “Anyway, it’s not just that.”

“What else?”

She couldn’t find the words to say what else. Couldn’t bring herself to utter the question. Couldn’t imagine what she’d do if he said, yes, Leah’s right. So she shook her head and looked away.

He said, “I’ll take her to work tomorrow and give her something to do. You’ll feel better as soon as you have some time to yourself.”

“It’s too dangerous outside. She’ll fall and break her hip. She’s killing me,” Harriet said. “She’s come here to kill me.”

“Come on, Hattie. We’re her family.”

“We’re fresh blood,” said Harriet.

Downstairs, Leah was implacable. “See what I mean?” Referring to Society Sue and Beanstalk. “Tinny acting.” And when Joe E. Brown came on the scene, “Too bad he’s not half as amusing as he thinks he is.”

She was like Mussolini watching a train arrive late. And then she was asleep. She slept through the last half of the movie and the others were able to watch it in peace.

Dinah said, “That’s the best ending in movies.”

“‘Nobody’s perfect,’” Kenny repeated with gusto.

Jack stretched and stood up. He said, “Diamond and Wilder threw in that line at the last minute. They didn’t even think it was funny. But that’s how brilliance works. You’re only brilliant when you’re not trying to be brilliant.”

“It’s so funny because it’s so simple,” said Dinah. “The movie is one complication after another, one disguise after
another, and then the final line says, I’ll take you any way you come.”

“Timing is everything,” said Jack.

“Not timing.” Dinah was irritated. Men always said timing was everything, she thought. “Surprise. The last line is a complete surprise. It’s simple and it’s surprising.”

Upstairs, Lew had made the mistake of smiling a peaceable, almost begging smile, and the gap between them widened. That smile. She was married to a kind man, but did she want to be? No. She wanted a thug who would go downstairs, grab everybody by the scruff of the neck, and throw them out into the night. Where was Humphrey Bogart when she needed him? Where was Sir Sean?

“What can I do?” asked Lew.

“You can leave me
alone.”

“All right.”

He stood up. He’d had enough.

Dear Pauline, Here is my favourite fantasy. Guests have come for dinner. We are talking in the kitchen, or on the verandah, or in the living room, depending upon the weather, and one of the guests insults me. Then evenly, without rudeness, I say, “There’s a very nice restaurant down the street. Why don’t you try it out?”

The insulter laughs. Coarsely. Like a horse
.

“I mean it.” And I am very calm. “I don’t make food for people who insult me.”

Sometimes, if it’s winter, I hand him his coat. Then he realizes that he is going to have to leave. He is going to have to go to bed without his supper
.

He leaves
.

And because my little performance, necessary but unfortunate, has ruined everybody’s appetite, they leave too. And I get an old movie
, Charade,
say, and watch it
.

She heard Lew in the hallway downstairs, getting their coats, saying goodbye. And she stayed put. Ankles crossed, hands folded across her chest, lighthouse eyes searching for more disaster. She heard Dinah’s husky laugh heading out the front door, and felt sick to think that the friendship might be over.

Then the footsteps of a meaty man ascended the stairs. There was a tentative knock on the door, and Rod Steiger poked his head into her room.

He looked at her with a certain, all-too-familiar smile. It was her older brother’s smile when he wanted to make up for having driven her in tears from the dining-room table. Almost chagrined, surprisingly tender. And she resisted her old susceptibility to these smart, hard, sardonic boy-men who, in the movies, are capable of all-out love, but in real life are infuriating, hurtful, not to be trusted.

He said, “I just wanted to say that nobody’s perfect.”

And in spite of herself, she had to laugh.

T
he second big wave of freezing rain came that night. Wednesday night. Kenny lay listening to it. He liked the cracking, sighing, bumping sounds, since they were clearly going on outside. He liked having visitors too. Leah disagreed with him about movies, but that didn’t matter; she had opinions. He could ask a question and she didn’t say, Ask me another question. Or, That’s a terrible question. Or, Kenny, when will you learn to ask questions that people want to answer? Or, Kenny, if you don’t stop asking me that question I’m going to kill myself.

He slept with his blue plastic flashlight under his pillow, in case the power went out.

Harriet and Lew were lying side by side. “Is self-righteousness one of the seven deadlies?” she asked into the darkness.

“The seven deadlies?”

“It’s come to this,” she muttered. “A Puritan in bed with a Jew. Gluttony, lust, envy, anger, avarice, pride. Maybe that’s what they call self-righteousness. Pride. What is the other one?”

Lew fell asleep.

Sloth, she thought. Then she was teaching in her head, a much better teacher there than in front of a class. “I can only write in the first person,” she confessed to her students. “It’s like putting on a pair of old slippers. They’re comfortable, but you can’t go anywhere in them.”

A big hurt was pushing against her, and had been for hours. She gave herself up to it now. She allowed the hurt to fill her to the brim, then felt herself sink heavily until she hit bottom, and stayed there. Then after a time – and it was like a miracle-something moved off her heart and she felt herself rise, not into the arms of Jesus but into a joke. In her mind she was phoning Dinah. “Hi, this is Tony Curtis’s mother. This is the president of the Tony Curtis Fan Club.” A new tide came in and lifted the barnacled weight off her chest; a tide of humour – of splashy comediennes – washed over her.

She didn’t want to be left alone at all, she wanted to be funny. To tear open her chest with both hands and let her funniness pour out. She would do anything, she realized, to make things all right again with Dinah, and Lew, and herself.

So much of the time, she thought, we’re either at our best or at our worst, either concerned or vicious, funny or humourless. Unjoined somehow.
Then come moments when the parts of one’s personality connect, when you hold them all in your mind at the same time. When instead of going from room to room in your personality, you’re a summer house full of screen doors. You remember the range and array of your feelings and don’t censor them, either from self-interest or shame
.

She lay there, saying these thoughts tó Pauline, awash with the fullness of life, and she expected that she would slide easily into sleep. But she didn’t.

At one in the morning she was shaking the formidable aunt awake. She had figured out something else, and Leah – who had tried to destroy her peace of mind – was going to have to listen. “You’re wrong,” she said. It was cold in the house – they always
turned down the heat for sleeping – and she was in her dressing gown. Leah, sitting up, was in a thin nightie. “It’s snobbery and I hate it,” said Harriet. “Snobbery that keeps people from appreciating a genius just because he isn’t ingratiating.”

“Can’t you save this till morning?” Leah’s reaction was surprisingly mild, all things considered, but she wasn’t used to Harriet on the attack.

“I can’t.” And Harriet, having turned on the light, was fully visible as possessed.

She handed Leah her kimono, led her into the living room, put
Limelight
into the
VCR
, and made her aunt watch. “Chaplin cut out Keaton,” she said. “Jerry Lewis did the same thing to Dean Martin. He couldn’t forgive him for being funnier than he was.”

Leah said, “These old movies are like Latin. Dead.”

Harriet pressed fast-forward. “Chaplin played the Tramp, that’s why he was the darling of the left. Keaton played rich saps. But Keaton died poor and Chaplin died rich.”

“So?”

“Chaplin knew how to suck up to an audience, he was always trying to ingratiate himself, always begging for admiration.”

“You said that.”

“It can’t be said enough. Look.” She had found the brilliant few seconds when Keaton as the nearsighted professor spills sheets of music onto the floor. Then the camera cuts to Chaplin and stays for an eternity on his outrageous, egotistical mugging. “See?” She stopped the tape and pressed rewind, returning to the spot where the two of them are in the dressing room, then played the scene again. “It’s a tragedy – the waste of Keaton’s talent. They wouldn’t let him make his own movies full of all
those ingenious mishaps and escapes because crummy movies made more money. So he became an alcoholic, and Chaplin could have rescued him, he could have helped him stage a comeback, but he hogged the camera instead. It breaks my heart.”

“Don’t take it so hard, for Pete’s sake.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I take it so hard?”

“Go to bed, Hattie.”

She went to bed. And there, thinking about the master of switches and turns who couldn’t make the switch to talkies, she recalled reading something in the paper years ago, something that held her, something she’d never forgotten: an actress who couldn’t make the transition from silent screen to talkies fell into a depression that coincided with the country’s, and died of a drug overdose. Jeanne Eagels. Somebody was writing a play about her, the paper said. But a play had never materialized, so far as she knew.

She turned on the bedside lamp, and Lew opened his eyes. “I’m just going to read for a bit,” she said. He stroked her arm and turned over, and was asleep again.

She read about a white lilac so heavy with blossom it snapped under the weight of a sudden snowfall, and about a child who ate an orange and drank a glass of milk before going to bed, and died in the night. Innocence and experience, she thought sleepily. Innocence and the terrible shock of experience.

At that moment there was a great
CRACK
, followed by the sound of a drawer being opened. That would be how she would describe it in the morning.
It sounded like a big drawer being opened in the next room
. Then a thud and more cracking. She went to the window but couldn’t see past the darkness.

Lew was sound asleep, but Leah was moving about downstairs, so she must have heard it too. Then it was quiet again, outside and inside.

Leah’s bed was the pull-out sofa in Lew’s study, even though she had made it plain to Harriet that she should have been given their room upstairs. “Strangers are kinder than relatives,” she had said as Harriet made up the bed the first night. “My seat-mate on the plane offered me a room in her house any time I needed it, and I’d never met her before!”

That’s why, thought Harriet.

“When your parents visit,” Leah demanded to know, “where do they sleep?”

“Here.”

“You should give them your bed.”

“At Christmas I gave Dad our bed because he had the flu.” An observation she knew would rankle – the despised brother, sick abed and being catered to by his daughter, since Gladys had gone to Owen’s for the week. She didn’t say it was a blessing to have her father out of the way, especially when she pulled the turkey out of the oven: her father was a master carver, but to carve well you need a turkey that offers some resistance, and this one had been so overcooked she could have reached in and pulled out the rib cage, slick as a whistle. She’d let the bird rest on the counter and had taken her father a bowl of broth. While he spooned it down she studied the fringe of dead skin on his dry upper lip. Davy Crockett lips, she thought.

“Dad,” she said, “you’ve got to drink water.”

“No damn water,” he said.

Downstairs, they were eight around the Christmas table: the four of them plus Dinah and her mother, Ida, and Fiona Chester
and Bill Bender. A reasonable number. Plenty of turkey for everyone, and no competition for the pope’s nose. Harriet put it on her plate and said to her cholesterol, This is for you.

She could remember the shade of Dinah’s red lipstick and its rapid shift to her wineglass as she had regaled them with stories about elopements and early deaths. In 1938, Dinah said, Stan Laurel eloped with a Russian dancer named Ivanova Shuvalovna, but his wife discovered where they were hiding and stood in the corridor and pounded on the hotel-room door.

“Ivanova Shuvalovna,” crowed Kenny. “Ivanova Shuvalovna!” And his head nearly hit the table he laughed so hard.

Dinah said she had also read – “And this is serious, don’t laugh” – that Jeanette MacDonald sang “The Indian Love Call” at Jean Harlow’s funeral. “She was only twenty-six.”

“Jeanette MacDonald?”

“Jean Harlow when she died. She was the daughter of a dentist.”

“I’m the daughter of a dentist!”

All eyes turned to Harriet. She looked up at the ceiling. “Up there,” she said. “In bed. A dentist.”

It was during the headiness of Christmas dinner (the kind of overexcited atmosphere that would have prompted her father to say, There are going to be tears) that Bill Bender had confessed to his boyhood crush on Joan Crawford. He had been crazy about her, he said. “Her mouth was so sexy.”

“She was good in
Grand Hotel,”
piped up Kenny. “She was better than Garbo. Garbo was terrible.”

“Garbo was splendid. I told your mother I saw her once in New York, walking in the rain.”

“Yes. But tell me again.”

And so he’d told her again. It happened on a day in October, when the rain was light but steady, and didn’t let up till evening. This was in 1965, a month before the great blackout. She was in Central Park, he said, and you could tell she was a walker, the way she strode along in flat shoes. “I followed her out of the park at 59th Street and over to Second Avenue and 53rd, where she went into a greengrocer’s on the corner, and I went in too.”

Dinah said, “But that was where I saw her. At 53rd and Second.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“I wish I had.”