Read Garbo Laughs Online

Authors: Elizabeth Hay

Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #General, #Humorous

Garbo Laughs (26 page)

BOOK: Garbo Laughs
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“I didn’t either. But somebody else did and she put her finger to her lips.”

“There’s an awful story about her mouth,” Harriet said. “Ingmar Bergman was very mean about her mouth.”

“Ingrid Bergman?” Fiona Chester was fiddling with her hearing aids.

“Ingmar.”

“Ingrid Bergman had a beautiful mouth,” said Fiona.

“Did you follow her home?” Harriet asked Bill Bender.

“To 450 East 52nd Street. The very end of a dead-end street, so there was nothing to block her view of the East River. Her building wasn’t like any of the others on the block. It was tall, narrow, secluded-looking. Like a stone-and-brick chateau, but simpler. The perfect spot for her, I thought. She lived on the fifth floor.”

“Is that all?” asked Jane.

“That’s all. Except that before she went into her building, she took off her hat and gave it a good shake.” His voice turned
wistful. “She was such a loner. I’ve always had a special feeling for her.”

Harriet had intended to tell the story about Garbo’s mouth, but got sidetracked by the pudding, which had to be flamed. This involved three simple steps. She poured brandy into a saucepan and heated it up, added a spoonful of sugar and let it dissolve in the hot liquor, then poured the liquor over the pudding while Lew struck a match and set it alight. The same lovely running blue as a pilot light. “I read a memoir,” she said as she served the pudding, “in which the author recalled asking his mother on his tenth birthday to make his cake out of nothing but frosting. And you know something?” She was spooning hard sauce minus pudding onto Kenny’s plate. “She did.”

“Now that’s something I wish,” said Bill Bender. “I wish I’d been less rigid with my sons.”

“I didn’t know you had sons.”

“I’m the father of two boys. Men.” He spread his hands beside his plate.

“What else do you wish?” Harriet had addressed the table at large, and these were the answers that came back. Jane said she wished she was living in New York City, though any big city would be better than Ottawa. Kenny said he wished he could see
The Godfather
and
The Godfather, Part II
, one after the other. Lew said he wished he was living in the tropics and eating papaya every morning for breakfast. Fiona Chester said she had no wish, none whatsoever, to be alive for the millennium. Ida asked if these wishes had to be about the future or if they could be forsaken dreams from the past, and when she was told forsaken dreams were also allowed, she said she wished she had gone to
medical school, but there wasn’t the money. Dinah said she wished she had never moved back to Ottawa, and having moved back she wished she had never bought a house, and having bought a house she wished she had sold it before the market went down. Her cigarette-roughened laugh filled the room, and then the fit of coughing that drove her to the sofa. Harriet had joined her, lying on the carpet, her breast still tender from the biopsy, her thoughts clouded with worry. She said to Dinah, “If I’ve made a mistake in my life, it’s holding back. Not flinging myself headlong into things. I wish I’d been less timid.”

Dinah had said, a foot or two above Harriet’s head, “If you ask me, recklessness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Upstairs, old Martin had lain with his eyes closed. Harriet went up to him with a cup of tea. “What’s it doing outside?” he’d wanted to know.

“Snowing again, I’m afraid.”

He turned to the window for a second, like Scott of the Antarctic opening the tent flaps on a blizzard: utter disgust and self-pity. “How in blazes am I going to get home?”

“Weather changes fast,” she said. “More to the point,” helping him sit up and handing him his tea, “what am I going to do about Leah when she comes?”

His face had softened then, and, uncharacteristically, he had taken her hand, her fingertips really, with his fingertips, which were very warm. “You’ll survive,” he’d said with a sigh. “I survived her and so will you.”

“At least give me another pillow,” Leah had commanded the Tuesday night she arrived. Harriet located another pillow, and
the next morning she found it on the floor, where she would find it every morning.

Before dawn, Harriet stole downstairs like a Huron avoiding the Iroquois and turned on the gas under the espresso pot made ready the night before.
Did you know that as she neared fifty, and for some years afterwards, Garbo would hide the lower part of her face from photographers, using a newspaper or purse to cover her wrinkled upper lip? The upper lip, more than any other place, she considered to be the site of aging. In this she was perfectly right, as the following incident bears out. On one of her visits to Sweden she met Ingmar Bergman. She sat down in his half-lit office, removed her sunglasses, and said, “This is what I look like, Mr. Bergman.” He was astonished to see how beautiful she still was, going so far as to write later that her beauty was “imperishable.” For a while they walked together around his studio, talking, meeting people. She was relaxed and happy, encouraged to think that she might work again in film. But when they returned to his office and she leaned forward into the light thrown by his desk lamp, he saw her mouth. In his autobiography he would describe it as “ugly, a pale slit surrounded by transverse wrinkles” that no plastic surgeon or makeup man could ever conjure away. He wrote that she read his thoughts at once, and “grew silent, bored.” Moments later she left. She would have been fifty-seven
.

I have no patience with him. Disguising his cruelty as honesty, using the word “bored” instead of “hurt,” stripping everyone bare, except himself
.

Like a Huron, she carried her coffee through the sleeping house and up to her room on the second floor, where she stood looking out at the southeastern sky as it began to lighten. It was Thursday and she hadn’t slept, not really, not well, since Sunday. It felt – going without sleep for so long – like standing on a dark
highway and being side-swiped by cars. She and time were being reconstructed. Night and day no longer governed her, because new pockets of time were being hollowed out of her, as if she were a Henry Moore sculpture – beautiful and horrible.

Two great branches torn off the maple lay below, one on either side of the fence on the left. She waited for signs of life. But not a bird, a cat, a squirrel – not a thing moved.

Then she went to the northwest window and the world dropped away, and so did her heart. She was staring out at black, gaping space. The old oak, the dead and dying oak, lay on the flattened garage and in the broken arms of smaller cedars and spruce, and on the lawn.

Then she saw something else. Sticking out from beneath the mattress of crazy branches was something sizable and red. She went downstairs to get the binoculars, and returned.

Ammil
was the word she found for freezing rain in a book about the atmosphere, from the old English for
enamel
. Fine rain that turns to ice as it falls and collects so gradually that an ordinary tree might carry five tons of the stuff before it snaps. A twig might bear a weight 130 times itself. How much weight must have accumulated, then, for the branches to come down on Bill Bender’s head. He was standing and then he wasn’t. And now his lower legs were visible but the upper part of him was not.

She went downstairs and outside, and not quickly either. Moved by horror and a kind of tickling curiosity as she put on her coat and found her hands were clumsy, then her boots, and went out the front door and up his walk – scattering salt ahead of her-and around to the back, drawn by the sight of those red sneakers.

How pitiful his legs were. How thoughtful of the tree to hide his face. Not a sound issued from the rack of branches that sprouted from his torso. Or trunk, she thought.

The oldest oak tree in Ottawa.

He must have come outside in the middle of the night to check on the trees.

Back inside, she picked up the phone and dialled 911. Her hands were trembling. A man, she said. A man has been killed by a tree. Then she had to remember his address. She closed her eyes. After two tries, she was able to give her street and the nearest cross street, and finally the number of his house.

Then she went upstairs and shook Lew awake.

“Who was he, anyway?” asked Leah.

“You met him,” said Harriet.

“I know that. But who
was
he?”

“An old newspaperman,” answered Harriet. “There was nothing he didn’t know. He saw Greta Garbo walking in the rain. He loved baths.”

Leah huffed. “Everybody saw Garbo. She dressed up to be recognized. Here comes Garbo pretending not to be Garbo.”

That night it was utterly still. She went outside at nine-thirty while Lew read a few more pages of
Angela’s Ashes
to the kids, and in the new-fallen snow the streets were beautiful in a way that was different from their previous beauty. All the ice, all the glass trees and bushes and vines, now under a little new snow, seemed less dangerous, though owing to the extra weight they
were more so. It was so quiet that she thought,
Benediction
. Once again it was like winter (rather than this strange new season of freezing rain). Once again it was possible to walk. A group of kids were out sliding on the small hummock of a hill between Downing Street and Colonel By. She heard cries of delight, and every so often the sound of ice in the trees, like unearthly wind chimes, different from any she had ever heard before.

At Christmas she had asked Bill Bender what history of the world she should read, and he replied, “I’m reading Parkman again. The history of the forest.” She remembered this on her way back from her walk, as she passed his darkened house.

At her own house she stood under the street lamp and looked in. From here she couldn’t see much of the living room except the tops of lamps and books and paintings. Fiona Chester was there, being comforted by Dinah and Ida. Leah, of course. And Lew. The kids were in bed. She would join them all in a minute. But it was lovely to be outside for a while, and alone.

And then the power went out.

28
Blackout

T
here were candles in each room and everyone spoke quietly; even the formidable aunt was subdued. Thursday night, still.
But they were back in an earlier time, when houses burned down, kerosene lamps tipped over, nightgowns went up in flames, trees fell on unsuspecting heads. Only half the block was dark. Dinah’s house still had power. She had checked immediately and returned with an extra flashlight and more candles. Fiona had power too. She knew just by looking out the window: her upstairs light was on. Dinah offered to walk her mother and Fiona home to their warm houses, “and Leah, why don’t you take my bedroom tonight and I’ll stay here? You’ll be warm and comfortable.” Looking to Harriet for confirmation, and getting it, and back to Leah, who said, rather formally, “That’s a kind offer.” Then she unbent a little more. “I accept.”

Dinah said to Ida, who had decided not to go back to her home west of Ottawa until the ice storm abated, “Mother? You won’t mind if Leah stays in the house with you tonight? You’ll be able to turn up the heat as high as you like, I won’t be there to complain.”

Leah gathered together her nightgown and toothbrush, her reading glasses and book, and set out with the others. They slid their feet along, save Fiona, who was confident in her superduper ice grippers. Lew took Fiona’s arm, Harriet took Leah’s, Dinah took her mother’s arm. As they passed Bill Bender’s house, Fiona stopped for a moment and gazed at the dark exterior. “I’ll give you the key,” she said to Lew at her side, “and? would you go in later and check on the furnace?” Of course he would.

Then he looked around too, from one end of the street to the other, and remarked that it was like a frozen Havana. No traffic, almost as dark, and the sidewalks just as impassable.

Dinah would spend the night in Lew’s study in a house so quiet – no hum from refrigerator or furnace or clock – that she would hear every sound.

They were on the same side of the house: Dinah on the pull-out sofa in Lew’s study directly below Harriet and Lew’s bedroom. She was lying in the light of two candles and thinking of Fiona as a widow, her mother as a widow, of herself as a widow of sorts, having buried, not a husband, but the possibility of an affair with one. There must be a phrase for that, for putting yourself out to pasture. Grass widow? The envied couple moved around above her head.
The envied couple?
Yes, she envied them, even though she knew it wasn’t all roses for them and wouldn’t be for anyone. But certainly she was tired of doing everything by herself. I would seriously get married now, came the recurring thought, just for the relief of not doing it all on my own. There was the faint clatter of glass beads as more ice fell. Then quiet. Fiona would be reading in bed, no doubt, or staring at the ceiling. In the afternoon she had gone with her over to Bill’s house to locate the phone numbers for his sons – Andrew in Kingston, Jeffrey in Hull – and walking through the book-crammed rooms, Fiona had said, “What will they do with everything? I hate to think. I hate to think what they’ll do and? there’s nothing I can say. They wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

Upstairs, it was dark except for the barest suggestion of light that came up the stairwell from Dinah’s candles. Lew got out of bed and closed the door. Then back in bed he and Harriet turned towards each other, aware of Dinah below and awake, and aroused by her presence. They made love.

They were quiet but not silent. The sense of Dinah in the house, of someone left out but within hearing, inspired a looseness, an eroticism. “Turn over,” said Lew.

Their bed took up almost the whole of their small room. There were two windows and the shades weren’t drawn. The only light came from the windows, the white sheets, the glass that covered the prints on the wall. Everything floated around, in the room and in their minds, and everything aroused them. It made Harriet wonder about the aphrodisiac effect of death, and of sorrowful third parties.

Dinah, on her pillows, picked up her book and tried to read, but the same few paragraphs over and over again wouldn’t sink in. She heard a door open upstairs, she heard someone go into the bathroom.

BOOK: Garbo Laughs
13.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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