Garbo Laughs (30 page)

Harriet shifted in her chair. “I always thought so.”

“I never did. But she was
beautiful
. Her skin. Her eyes. And she was elegant too. I thought she was just a second-string player, but she had quite a sense of herself.”

“High Society.”
Harriet rose from her bed of nails to the movie occasion. “She was more beautiful than Grace Kelly. Frank Sinatra was nuts not to appreciate her more. She had the same sort of braininess as Betty what’s-her-name in
On the Town
. The taxi driver. Who wanted Sinatra to sit in her lap.”

“Betty Hutton.”

“Not Betty Hutton.”

“Betty Grable.”

“Not Betty Grable.” Betty used to be a sexy name, now there was just Apple Brown Betty. “The one who was blacklisted because her husband was a leftie. Betty Garrett. She was beautiful too.” She took a sip of coffee. “This isn’t hot,” she muttered.

Dinah took it out of her hands and put it in the microwave, then returned it to her saying, “Harriet, what is it? What’s wrong?”

And Harriet would have told her, since one word of sympathy was enough to break the spell, but just then Kenny burst through the door, and they were lifted up on a wave of noise that didn’t deposit them for some time.

“Doña,” cried Lew as he came into the kitchen, and his heartiness was like an Indian rub on her singed flesh. “I got your message last night. Are you cured?”

She turned her head and trained her white Buster Keaton face on the peasant-duchess, who was looking for her kimono.
But she didn’t explain that either, since one explanation would require another.

There was a big bowl of purple grapes on the table, draped with a thick towel (no longer necessary) to keep them from freezing. Harriet stood up and removed the towel. Then, with her left arm held gingerly at her side, she got the grape scissors from the kitchen drawer. What a hope. Leah swept down on the handsome grapes and yanked them off their stems one at a time.

“Leah?” Harriet was standing with her left hand raised and cradled in her right – much as Garbo might have cradled a bag of ripe persimmons. “You’ve never told us how long you were planning to stay.” She heard the edge in her own voice.

“My ticket is open.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Harriet, a comment for which she would pay later, no doubt, but she didn’t care.

Leah’s small, blunt, grape-sticky fingers stopped their gluttonous pursuit, and Lew’s eyes travelled to the pale strain on Harriet’s face. Well, it was a miracle it had taken so long. “I have a colleague who’s going out of town for a few weeks,” he said. “I’ll see if she’d mind a guest while she’s gone.”

“Or Jack,” said Dinah, also coming to the rescue. “Would he have room for you for a bit?”

“Why not Janice?” Harriet challenged her aunt. “You said you wanted to see her.”

“I suppose you want to get back to your writing.” Leah’s voice was mild, but Harriet wasn’t fooled, and she wasn’t deterred.

“No. I’ve given up writing. I’m going to open a movie house.”

“A what?” said Lew.

“I’m going to take over the Strand, and I want you to do the renovation.”

He laughed. “I can see it!” he said. “You’ll have movie nights. Harriet’s choice one night, Kenny’s the next, Jane’s the next.”

“Second-run movies for two dollars,” said Harriet.

“Depression prices,” observed Leah dryly. “Harriet Browning: Purveyor of cheap movies.”

“I like that,” said Harriet. “I’ll put that on my business card.”

“Where will you get the money?” asked Dinah.

Leah yanked off another grape. “I’ll put up the money,” she said.

And the cat was among the pigeons.

Harriet went to the window, and what she saw on that familiar slope littered with tree limbs and twigs made her turn around and gaze at Dinah. She said to her, “I’m hoping you and Jim Creak will write the program notes.”

The song detective was making his way up the slope with the help of a stout walking stick. He came in the back door without knocking, and Harriet went forward to take his coat.

He said, “You forgot to take the book.” Handing her
Deeper Into Movies
. Then he said, “What’s the matter with your arm?”

You can’t do better than an observant man with dry, freckled lips who makes excellent coffee, even if he doesn’t know how to drive.

“I had an accident,” she said. “Stupidly.”

Then she had to sit down and show her arm to a bunch of onlookers who failed to understand why she hadn’t told them
immediately, and she couldn’t explain. “I’m sorry, Leah. I ruined your kimono.”

“You’re in shock,” said the song detective.

Lew shook his head and moaned, “Hattie.”

They were afraid of the wind, since it was strong, from the southwest, and it would take so little to bring down even more branches on the low, sagging wires. But the sky had cleared, and for much of that day it was bright, melting. Dinah Bloom and Lew Gold, walking through the Arboretum and checking on the damage, saw many Mr. Rochester trees: split down the middle like the tree
in Jane Eyre
, the ice having acted like a meat cleaver. Dinah tried to lift up a small, horizontal cedar, but its lower boughs were pinned under ice and snow. A weeping mulberry, on the other hand, umbrella-shaped, compact, low to the ground, was unharmed. The big spruces had fared well. But three of the lovely false cypresses were split in half.

They had driven Harriet to the hospital and she insisted-ordered them – not to stay with her, but to go home. She would phone them when she was ready to be picked up.

They walked over the treacherous, littered ground and once again they found themselves talking about her. “She’s a tortured soul,” said Lew, and Dinah had to smile. “There’s always something,” he said to her, “and it’s almost nothing.”

Dinah could see it. The tiniest speck of egg yolk and the meringue fell.

“Not this time,” she said.

“Not this time,” he agreed. “The trouble is she gets over-ambitious. Overaggressive. It happened the first time I met her.
She got so mad at Jack Frame she punched him in the nose.”

“Did she?”
It was the first Dinah had heard of this, and she laughed out loud. “You’ve got to love her,” she said. Then asked, “But what did Jack do to deserve it?”

“I don’t think she was ever sure herself.”

Dinah nodded, her eyes on a large bird feeder, recently filled with seed, and drawing birds like a magnet. “I understand,” she said. “He gets under your skin.” In good ways and bad, she thought.

They came upon two huge hackberries split down the middle. Then a dotted hawthorn. More than half of it lay like Gulliver upon the ground. Lew pulled paper and pencil from his pocket and jotted down the names of the fallen trees. “Harriet will want to know,” he said.

That night Harriet said to Lew as they lay side by side in bed, “We have to find a man for Dinah. And I don’t mean you.”

He turned towards her calm, tough face soothed by painkillers and lit by the bedside lamp. Her arm was bandaged and aware of itself, lying gently beside her. He reached over and stroked her hair.

She took his hand and brought it to her cheek, and held it there.

Kenny lay awake, listening to the movements in the house. Eventually all was quiet, except for the snap of a tree limb or the clatter of ice. Without knowing it, he was listening to the loss of shade. In the spring, gardeners would puzzle over how to turn
their shade gardens into sun gardens, and his science class, on an excursion to the woods, would be stymied by the mess of branches on the ground and have to turn back. Dinah would lose her hair, and when it grew in again it would go in ten different directions, much as new branches, shooting out from the tops of snapped-off trees, would grow in wild and thick. But Dinah would still look better at the wedding than his mom.

O
n the morning of Bill Bender’s funeral, Harriet was up early, swallowing codeine and turning on the radio to catch the song detective, who said he was going to do something out of the ordinary: he was going to play his own request. “Lament for the Children,” composed in the eighteenth century by McCrimmon. A pibroch, and he thought on this morning, in particular, it was the right song for Fiona Chester.

An hour later, Harriet was helping Fiona get ready, not that she was of much use with one arm in a sling. “Did you hear the song on the radio?” she asked. “A bit lugubrious, maybe?”

But Fiona said, “I think that man has the loveliest voice I’ve ever heard and? I don’t care what Bill said about him. Now. Where are my black gloves?”

Harriet joined her on the floor as she searched, noticing at this level a dark smudge on Fiona’s ankle – shoe polish? – but at least her stockings were free of runs. Down here they continued
their conversation about what Fiona might say at the funeral. Chekhov’s stories, for all their splendour, Fiona said, didn’t lend themselves to such an occasion. Not really. She sat back on her heels and bobbed her head. “I thought of using one of my own translations of a paragraph, but Constance Garnett is so much better. No matter what some say about their inaccuracies, her translations were the best. The most – what’s the word?”

“Alive. Intimate. Natural.”

“That’s the word.”

“Open.”

“That’s the word.”

“I’m not sure that’s the word.” Harriet was thinking on her knees. What she most admired about Chekhov, she thought, was the way he didn’t make too much or too little of the changes his characters undergo, because he fit them into the ebb and flow of life. A man died, and on the day of his funeral his mourners were on the floor searching for a pair of gloves.

Fiona discovered them – “you rascals” – gathering dust behind the umbrella stand.

In the end, Fiona elected not to speak at all. It required more poise and bravado than she could muster, to stand up during the Friends’ silent meeting and bear testimony to Bill’s life. Several colleagues from his newspaper days offered words of tribute and affection, saying that Bill Bender was in a class by himself, there wasn’t a thing he wasn’t interested in, not a person he wouldn’t talk to, not a fact he couldn’t locate. Then halfway through the meeting, a familiar voice electrified the room. It was the song detective, dressed in a sky-blue hand-knit sweater. Resting his hands on the chair in front of him, he
uttered these words,
TELL THE ONES YOU LOVE, YOU LOVE THEM; TELL THEM NOW. FOR THE DAY IS COMING, AND ALSO THE NIGHT WILL COME, WHEN YOU WILL NEITHER SAY IT, NOR HEAR IT, NOR CARE. I WILL SAY IT AGAIN: TELL THE ONES YOU LOVE, YOU LOVE THEM. TELL THEM TODAY
.

That got everybody’s attention. He had a fine, urgent voice-it was no accident he was in radio; and all the while he looked straight at Dinah, right into her riveted, brown eyes, until she turned beet-red and looked away.

Harriet found it thrilling. It reminded her of the opening scene in
Rules of the Game
when the young pilot blurts out his love on the radio for all to hear. In the afternoon she would leave a note to that effect in Jim Creak’s mailbox, congratulating him on his eloquence and inviting him for dinner, since he had disappeared so quickly after the service that she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him. Disappeared, thereby escaping the obligatory round of smiles and handshakes and smiles, which brought Harriet face to face with North of England and his mute and humourless wife. Later, over lemon loaf and date bread, her former student grabbed her good arm and asked if she ever saw Ruth. Harriet knew who he was talking about. No-neck Vanessa. She had to say no, and watch the disappointment settle on his face.

“Chekhov never went to a movie,” Harriet said thoughtfully later the same day. She liked the codeine very much.

Dinah said, “I saw
The Cherry Orchard
once.” Her voice was flat, noncommittal.

“And?”

“I fell asleep.”

“Yes.”

“It was boring.”

“It was badly produced,” Harriet said. But she too had fallen asleep during a production of
The Cherry Orchard
, a different one. “You have to see
Vanya on 42nd Street,”
she said. “Jim Creak is like what’s-his-name, the doctor who was crazy about trees.”

They were all gathered in the living room: Fiona napping in an armchair; the kids and Lew attending to the fire; Dinah and Ida still dressed in black; Leah in a bad mood. And Jack, who had shown up out of the blue.

“Where were you last night?” Leah demanded when he came through the door. “I called you twice.”

But he didn’t satisfy her curiosity, and Leah said, “Never mind. I got through to Janice. That’s where you’ll find me as of tomorrow night.”

Jack’s arrival interrupted Dinah’s reminiscences about Bill Bender, but only for a moment. Harriet suspected he had dropped by with nothing in mind except getting fed; he was content to nod hello to everyone and sit next to Dinah on the sofa. But then he put his arm around the back of the sofa, and leaned closer to Dinah, quite noticeably, and Harriet thought, Something has moved forward when I wasn’t looking.

Her eyes went to Lew, who was standing by the fire. He saw her glance and asked if she was feeling all right, then came over and knelt beside her. “Do you want to lie down for a bit?”

Only then did Jack notice her arm.

But Harriet said she was fine, and asked Lew if he would bring them all something to drink, and she steered the conversation back to Bill Bender, his collection of books and maps and
radios. His love of language, his love of trees. We’re killed by what we love, mused Dinah. I had a cat named Jenny who ran out of the woods when she heard the sound of my car, and straight under my front wheels. It was late at night, and I’d been away for two days; she was overeager, and my headlights probably blinded her.

Jack said, “She might have been chasing something. It might have had nothing to do with you. So much is out of our control,” he added, saying that on his way here he had watched a big tree slowly turn as it tore apart down the centre. It didn’t fall, he said, so much as lie down. And Harriet pictured Emma Thompson sinking to her knees in
Howards End
.