Garbo Laughs (27 page)

They were a ragged band next morning.

Gathered in the freezing kitchen around the gas stove, and Lew so proud of himself for having insisted upon it. That was what they talked about, the virtues of a gas stove, the foresight, the good luck. Dinah admired his long hands – Kenny’s hands – and thought of other fathers and sons she had fallen in love with. Some women fell for movie stars, some for twin brothers (her cousin Ruby), some for bankers or hairdressers, but her weakness had always been for attentive fathers with weedy, young sons. She noticed a long scar on Lew’s right forefinger, and drew his attention to it. Cheap glass, he explained, long arms; he’d been careful around windows ever since, not to be so flamboyant in his gestures.

His smile said all. He was happy in the memory of last night and in the presence of people he loved.

It was peaceful with Leah out of the house, and not unpeaceful – eerie, but not unpeaceful – to be in the presence of sudden
death. Everything slowed down. The ice storm had suspended life in so many ways, and now Bill Bender’s death had shocked them into a different sort of stillness.

They wore hats and coats as if they were winter camping, and Harriet – regarding their wintry selves – thought of Keaton’s and Chaplin’s ability to see in any disaster the rudiments of a bed and table, the makings of a home. An awning became a roof, a drainpipe a coat rack, a table a bed. And some great longing in her was satisfied by this – by the sight of shelves built into a tree, pots hanging in an old jalopy, makeshift rooms folding into the out-of-doors.

The espresso pot had worked its miracle. She held a hot cup between her cold hands, and into her mind came the image of Audrey stepping out of the cab onto Fifth Avenue, her back to the camera – the Pablo Casals of backbones – in her long black dress and ropes of pearls, so alone and so content, looking in the window of Tiffany’s with her roll in a bag and her coffee to go. She was elegance-out-camping. Self-sufficient and in such a mood of her own.

Do you remember the brass mailbox equipped with mirror, lipstick, and perfume? She opens it like Buster Keaton opening a suitcase and pulling out kettle, teapot, cup and saucer Light grooming in the middle of anywhere, so that anywhere contains the basics of beauty and romance
.

Audrey really had something. I could watch her forever, and stolid, handsome George Peppard had something too. In fact, he had what Lew has – that great wish to look after someone. The sexiness of the nurturing male
.

Harriet turned to look at Lew. He was bending down, scooping flour into a bowl from the big bag in the lower cupboard, and she saw the top of his head. He set down the bowl for
a moment and knelt on one knee – his shoelace had come untied – and then she could really see what she hadn’t been aware of. He was losing his hair. He was going bald. The sight filled her with such tenderness that she had to wonder why. He stood up, set the bowl on the counter, and went to the fridge for eggs.

Mortality made her tender. Mortality touched her heart, this woman who didn’t care for the weaknesses of men; the cinematic sufferings, yes, but not the real weaknesses. Life couldn’t compete with the movies, but death could.

Using his hip he held the door open, fished two eggs out of the egg carton, then shut the door firmly, and it was at this point that Kenny, who had just come downstairs, grabbed his father’s arm to ask him a question and one of the eggs slipped from Lew’s grasp. Then Dinah sprang forward to catch the egg, and what followed was a slapstick dance of hands arms chests to keep the egg from hitting the floor (well, thought Harriet later, it was straight out of
Charade:
Dinah and Lew were Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant using their bodies to keep the orange in play). They succeeded. They saved the egg.

I
t occurred to Harriet, who was seriously under slept, that the world was especially wakeful too. There was the tissue of freezing
rain outside, the membrane of queer sounds in the walls as all warmth leaked away, the rustle of dryness in their sleepless skulls, their bone houses. They were held by it all. By their sleeplessness, by the tracings of rain and ice on the windows, by the intricacies of light and shadow at play in the world.

In her winter coat she went upstairs to tell Jane that breakfast was ready, and found her lying awake and remembering a dream. A nightmare, she said, where she was told that she would be dead in two hours, and she was terrified.

Harriet sat down on the edge of her bed, but Jane didn’t move her legs to make room for her mother. Harriet had to give them a nudge.

“My past is gone forever,” said Jane. “I’ll never go back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I miss the way I was,” she said, in the same broken-hearted tones.

Harriet looked at her daughter, who was still twelve. An emotional, economical, romantic child, who alternated between dreams of being a movie star and being a pioneer settling the West, travelling by ox-drawn cart to a land where she wouldn’t have to go to school. A child who walked on the soft earth next to the sidewalk to avoid wearing out her favourite shoes. Who turned down invitations to go shopping. Who ate after school the cold porridge she hadn’t finished at breakfast.

“What way was that?” Harriet asked gently, more intrigued than worried.

“The way I looked, for one thing. My face is longer.” Jane squeezed her face and twisted it with both hands. “My hair is straighter and darker. I used to be fatter. I’m so skinny now.”

“You’re more beautiful than ever.”

But tears were oozing out of her eyes.

“You’re inside a physical storm,” her mother said. “That’s what puberty is. You don’t have any control over it, but everyone goes through it. You’re not alone.”

“I know I’m not
alone,”
said Jane.

Harriet helped her daughter get dressed in a freezing house that did nothing to raise Jane’s spirits. Only Dinah, downstairs in the kitchen, was able to bring a smile to her face. “You and Kenny can go over to my house,” she said, “and watch movies. I’ll tell Ida to get out the popcorn maker.”

It was only one day since Bill Bender’s death, but it seemed much longer. Dinah would take the kids over to her mother and Leah, who were getting along surprisingly well. Then she would join Harriet at Fiona Chester’s; they were helping to arrange the funeral.

They found Fiona searching for a passage to read at the service. She had Chekhov open on the table to his story “About Love,” and she’d located Akhmatova’s poem about the town “locked in ice: a paperweight of trees, walls, snow” to which Mandelstam had been banished in 1934. It was a poem about a silenced poet. “The word
paperweight,”
said Fiona. “You see its terrible meaning.”

Fiona was having one white night after another, she confessed, but so it goes. There was nothing she could do about it. “All night long things fly into my head, things I don’t want to remember, especially about myself. And? I ask myself how I could have been so stupid, or naive, or blind, and they all have to do with hurting people.”

“Yes,” said Dinah, who met Fiona’s eyes. Fiona took her hand and gave it a gentle pat.

Harriet nodded too as her mind filled up with hurtful things she had written and said, and in this mood of shared, expansive, almost pleasant regret they sat for a while. Then Dinah pinned down details of the funeral: it would be on Sunday, the regular silent meeting for worship at the Society of Friends – Bill Bender was a Quaker, as she’d known. Out of curiosity, Dinah had gone with him once or twice, she said, and discovered that silent worship brought her close to her
least
spiritual aspects: every physical twitch, every stomach grumble and urge to pass gas mushroomed in magnitude, until she was locked in an agony of self-consciousness. “Bill told me I needed more patience, which was rich, coming from him.”

Fiona’s hearing aid let out a shriek and she cupped her ear. “I’m sorry. I should get it replaced, but? I don’t want to hear
everything.”

She went in search of fresh batteries and was gone for quite a while, leaving Dinah and Harriet alone in the living room. They heard her moving about upstairs. It was noon by this time, on Friday of that unforgettable week. In the summer to come – in the endless heat – they would spread their snapshots of the ice storm on the picnic table, and Kenny would say, “It was worse than that.” What it really looked like, he remembered, was a hockey rink after the vicious game was over: trees snapped in half like hockey sticks and the weight of violence in the air.

Dinah reassured Harriet that it was perfectly fine, having Leah at her house. She said, “My mother talks and Leah interrupts, then she talks and my mother interrupts.”

“What do they talk about?”

“People they can’t stand.”

“She talks to me about love. I wish she wouldn’t.”

Outside, it was incredibly beautiful and birds were dying. Dinah had spoken the day before to a man who had spent the previous day trying to bury his dog: he had to call vet after vet before finding one who was open, then go on an endless drive in search of his street, where, for twenty dollars, the vet had agreed to dispose of the dog.

“What does your formidable aunt say about love?”

“She says Lew is in love with you.”

To anyone who knew her, this was perhaps the most alarming aspect of Harriet’s personality, her ability to take the wind out of your sails as if she were passing the time of day. It was never planned. When it happened, it surprised her too.

“I don’t blame him,” continued Harriet, impressed with herself for feeling so generous and being so truthful, and forgetting that such feelings are mere will-o’-the-wisps brought on by a death, a time of year, by the tone of light in a room. “I’m not exactly a picnic to live with.”

“No,” Dinah Bloom said firmly. “He’s waiting for you.”

Fiona came back, gingerly touching her hearing aids, and there was a need to change the subject. Harriet said, “Last week Bill lent me Kurosawa’s autobiography. The Japanese director?” Fiona nodded. Yes, she knew that Bill had been a big fan. “There’s a fascinating part,” said Harriet, “about the Tokyo earthquake in 1923, which happened when Kurosawa was only thirteen. The devastation was unbelievable. Corpses everywhere. But his older brother made him walk through the city afterwards and look at it. If you
look
, he said, you’re less frightened than if you don’t look. Mind you, that brother ended up committing suicide.”

There had been times in their friendship when Dinah had seen Harriet as typical of so many married women, landing on
their feet only to complain about their shoes. But not now. “What happened?”

“The talkies came in.”

Dinah’s eyebrows shot up.

“Yes,” said Harriet. “He worked in silent films as a narrator and sound-effects man, and when the talkies arrived he knew that was the end – they were all going to lose their jobs. He led a strike, even though he knew it was a lost cause. And after it failed, he killed himself.”

They sat in the warm living room, thinking about death. Then Harriet said, “What do you mean, Lew is waiting for me?”

“I mean he’s waiting, for you,” said Dinah.

But Lew wasn’t waiting, he was coming around the corner. He called out to them as they made their way back from Fiona’s, treading gingerly on the icy street.

“I learned a new word a few days ago,” Harriet said, stooping to pick up a fat twig-cigar, enwrapped in a dozen leaves of ice, a very cold Havana.
“Japanned
. It means
varnished
or
lacquered
. All the trees are japanned with ice.”

Around them the street was full of reflections, like a lake, or a finely polished cabinet, or silver, or a painting of any of those things.

“For you,” Harriet said, and gave the twig-cigar to Lew.

They were the only ones in the street, a threesome with the sky falling around them. Off to the left another branch came down with a whoosh and a thud. Lew had news to relay, and as he did so Fiona Chester’s cautionary face –
and they all have to do
with hurting people –
came back to Dinah. The Château Laurier was renting rooms, he said, for forty dollars a night to anybody without power. He had booked a room for Leah and another for themselves, and why don’t we all have dinner there tonight? You too, Dinah. It would give us all a break.

Harriet watched Dinah’s face as she hesitated for a moment. Then she looked at Lew to see how he was looking at Dinah. But she didn’t have Kurosawa’s gaze. She had her own easily embarrassed eyes that looked down: away from losers at the Oscars, from violence in movies, from anyone she had offended, from any moment of private emotion. “My treat,” she heard Lew say. And this is what she wished: she wished that Lew hadn’t invited Dinah, that Dinah hadn’t said yes, and that she hadn’t fallen prey to jealousy, once again.

Ida was sound asleep on the sofa when Dinah let herself into her house. Buddy the protector lay on the floor beside her. Quietly, she pulled off her boots, and as she did so she heard voices in the kitchen.

Jack and Leah were at the kitchen table, which was spread with papers and a tape recorder. “Authors at work,” Dinah said, with a husky chuckle. She went to the sink for a glass of water (usually she just lowered her mouth to the faucet), and drank it while she looked at them. Jack had told her that he was going to record Leah’s memories and work from the tapes rather than from her sentimental notes. It would seem that he had convinced his stepmother to go along. Dinah was impressed. He had taken over and was doing things his own way.

Leah looked up at her and told her what she already knew.

“I saw Lew outside,” Dinah said. “I’m coming along for dinner.”

“That’s nice,” said Leah, her tone so unenthusiastic that Dinah shared a look of amusement with Jack.

There were fresh roses on the table. Dinah bent to smell them. “These are beautiful. Where on earth did you get them?”

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “But a store in the west end had some.”

He had brought strawberries too. They were washed and in a bowl beside the roses. Dinah, pulling out a chair, murmuring her appreciation, sat down and ate several. “Strawberries in January. What a luxury.”