Garbo Laughs (32 page)

“It doesn’t have to be right now,” he said. “Any time. I’ll make you the best cup of tea you’ve ever had in your whole mouth.”

Had it been summer, Dinah’s laughter would have rippled into every house on the block. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Jack Lemmon?”

“It Should Happen to You,”
said Jim.

T
he next day the kids were back at school, though with a difference. At recess Kenny’s teacher fell on the ice and staggered back
inside with blood running down her cheek. A concussion and a broken wrist, and that was the end of her for the rest of the year.

The good news sent Kenny to his typewriter, where he banged out the following:
The name is Brackenwood. Brackett Brackenwood. On my estate in the North of England I have vineyards and a putting green. I also have a villa in the South of France. They modelled Cary Grant’s villa in
To Catch a Thief
on mine. Also an apartment in Paris and an apartment in New York. Also three dark-blue Porsches
.

Aunt Leah heard the typing and went into his room. “You sound like Lionel,” she said. “What are you writing? Read it to me.”

Kenny read it to her.

“Put
me
into your story. Can you do that?” She was looking over his shoulder and reading for herself now. “You could have an apartment in Rome too: an apartment in Paris, an apartment in New York, and an apartment in Rome.”

“Okay.” He scratched his ear.

“Wouldn’t that be
great?”
Sounding almost desperate for him to agree. Then, “Wait,” she said. She went downstairs and returned with a key ring that had a picture of the Frame Institute on its tab. “I want you to have this. I gave one to your mother but she never uses it. You’ll appreciate it more than she will.”

“Thanks,” said Kenny.

“I don’t want you to forget me,” she said.

That night she was gone, to Janice’s, and Harriet’s shoulders kicked off their high heels and dropped four inches. The next day she went to the hairdresser’s and found herself in the hands of Julie, a small woman in her twenties who said she was born to have a pair of scissors in her hand. “No matter what tragedy I’m
going through, I feel better when I’m cutting hair. I pick up a pair of scissors,” Julie said, “and it helps me get through my grief.” She was brushing Harriet’s hair as she talked, so hard that tears came to Harriet’s eyes.

Afterwards, Harriet wasn’t sure. She had done what so many women do to make themselves feel better. Now she felt the way so many women feel afterwards. Uncertain, and poorer.

That week, following the ice storm, the snow-military were out in their trucks and ploughs removing the snow-and-ice banks, and once they were finished, the street was as broad as a boulevard in Paris. A lesson in narrow and wide. Narrowed by snowbanks until cars couldn’t pass, then widened by the plough until street, curb, sidewalk were spread evenly with snow – a mother generous with butter. One night, Harriet came upon the liberation army idling on Glen Avenue. Six dump trucks and several ploughs occupied the block. High up in their glassed-in cabs, the drivers were drinking coffee in summer shirts.

She went in to say goodnight to Kenny, bending over his palisade of books to give him a kiss. “Do you like Aunt Leah?” he asked her.

“Not much.”

“Do you like Dinah?”

“Very much. What are you thinking about?”

He was wishing that she liked Leah more, even though he knew perfectly well that Leah was a lot harder to like than Dinah.

“Kenny?”

He looked up at her. “Is
Jane Eyre
your favourite novel of all time?”

“It’s among them.”

“All right. Give me your top three.”

“No.”

“Your top five.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

His mother turned on her heel and left, and he stretched out farther in his bed. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.

By the end of the week the formidable aunt had taken her revenge, and it happened this way. Thursday morning, while Harriet was reading about old movie houses, the phone rang. Leah was calling her from Janice’s house. She said, “I’ve talked to Pauline Kael’s nephew, and you’re in luck.”

“How do you mean?”

“She’s in Ottawa.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fine. I’m a liar.”

“But she’s old and ill. I can’t imagine she travels anywhere, let alone to Ottawa.”

“Wait a minute, darling. Someone’s at the door.”

Harriet waited. Minutes went by. Her arm rested inside its sling.

Leah came back on the phone. “He’s her only nephew. They must be close. Anyway, this is the point. We’re having lunch tomorrow. Would you like to join us?”

Harriet took a deep breath, and then she said yes to the offer she couldn’t refuse.

“I’m meeting them at the art gallery first – she likes art apparently – and I’ll call you when we get to the restaurant. Okay, darling?”

“Which restaurant?”

“We haven’t decided. We’ll decide tomorrow, and I’ll call you when we get there. Are you excited?”

“I’m thrilled.”

“I knew you’d be thrilled. Bye, darling.”

Harriet returned to her research on the Capitol Theatre, the old movie palace (originally known as Loew’s Ottawa, then B.F. Keith’s) built in 1920 at the corner of Bank and Queen for vaudeville acts and silent movies, wired for sound in the spring of 1929 (just as Fiona Chester was finishing her schooling on the Isle of Lewis), and demolished in July 1970. It had been Ottawa’s biggest and most luxurious theatre, replete with marble staircase, sweeping balustrade, chandeliered domes, and a spacious stage that for years was home not just to movies but to the Tremblay concert series, which brought to town the likes of Lily Pons, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, the Peking Opera, Ezio Pinza, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Lois Marshall, Joan Sutherland, Teresa Stratas, Leontyne Price. In reading about this lost past, Harriet’s own ideas began to take shape. She would have another series – an ongoing neighbourhood series that would be lively, informative, and sexy: Leading Men from Grant to Gere; Leading Women from Garbo to Binoche; The History of the Movie Kiss; The Cowboy as Lover; The Rise and Fall of Joel McCrea; The Best Bedroom Scenes in the Movies. Why not have a month of Preston Sturges? A month of Cary Grant? A month of Buster Keaton? Why not have Screwball Heroines from the Dirty Thirties; Cross-Dressers in Screen History; Jane Austen Unbuttoned; Kurosawa Till You Drop. If book clubs could be all the rage, then why not movie clubs? Why not cater to the appetite for movie talk with
book-and-movie groups, guest speakers, debates? Why not start a non-profit cultural institute that would bring back the winter matinée, the double feature, the documentary?

She would be the new Grierson.

In time there would be a plaque on the side of the Strand (renamed, though what that name would be she hadn’t yet decided) lauding her indefatigable energy and keen business sense. Harriet Browning: Purveyor of cheap movies. Rescuer of talent. Cultural adventurer.

Though
venture
not
adventure
was what she stressed to puzzled lenders, since ads were to be banned, along with
Dr. Zhivago
and
The Sound of Music
.

“Tell me,” Dinah had asked her recently, “what have you got against
Dr. Zhivago
anyway?”

“It’s romantic in the worst sense of the word. Wait! Maybe that could be another series. Romantic in the Worst Sense of the Word. Rock Hudson and Lana Turner Revisited. People would come to that.”

Buttonholing Kenny, Dinah said, “Do I understand that you and your sister have never seen
The Sound of Music?”

“She
won’t let it in the house.”

“They’ve seen the
anti-Sound of Music,”
said Harriet.

“Don’t tell me.”

“The Commitments
. And they loved it.”

Since her deep sleep she felt capable of anything. Unlike Samson, shorn as he slept, she had acquired confidence. It sprang from her head like a big wig.

One morning she dropped in on the song detective, who was looking dejected, until she described her ideas for the
movie institute, though
institute
wasn’t the word and nor was
cultural centre
.

He replied thoughtfully, “There used to be something called the ‘Radio Theatre from Hollywood’ introduced by Cecil B. DeMille. Movies were adapted for radio, and movie stars came on as guests. Maybe we could do a sort of ‘Saturday Afternoon from the Strand’ like the Saturday-afternoon opera broadcasts from the Met in New York, complete with a quiz. We could play clips from old movies and interviews from the archives.”

“You could be the quizmaster,” she said. “You could be Milton Cross.”

“A lowbrow Milton Cross,” he said. “Not which sharp was Joan Sutherland able to reach, but what cup size did Jayne Mansfield wear?”

“‘Movies Without Pictures,’” said Harriet. “‘For Movie-Lovers Everywhere.’”

It was Friday, the day she was to meet Pauline Kael, and she opened her notebook and wrote,
Dear Pauline, Leah claims to know you, but then she claims to know everyone. I hardly expect to see you today, but I can’t help thinking about what I’ll ask, if by some miracle you’re actually here. Cary Grant, first and foremost. We’ll talk about him. Then why you’re impervious to the charms of
Casablanca
but susceptible to the dubious appeal of
Tequila Sunrise.
Then how you maintained a friendship with Jean Renoir after his work went downhill, and you said so. And whether you’ve ever met Sean Connery. And how you ran your repertory house in Berkeley, and what advice you would give me for running the Strand
.

One o’clock came and no call from Leah. Two o’clock, and still no call. At two-forty-five the phone rang and Harriet picked it up.

“Darling, we’re at the Château Laurier, in the restaurant, with the piano. We’re about to have coffee and dessert. Would you like to join us?”

Harriet took a moment to control her temper, and succeeded. And then she called a cab.

By the time she got to the hotel, and to the restaurant inside the hotel, it was nearly three-thirty. Her aunt was at a table near the grand piano, alone except for a potted plant trembling at her side. “Darling,” she said.

“Leah.” Harriet looked from her aunt to the used coffee cups and saucers, the used cloth napkins.

Leah signalled to the waiter. “Would you bring coffee? My niece is here.”

Harriet, with help from the waiter, removed the coat draped over her shoulders, and sat down.

“You didn’t miss much, darling. She’s on her last legs and her nephew is an idiot.”

“I’ve always liked it here,” said Harriet, looking around and pretending not to be bothered, or taken in, or affected in any way at all by having walked straight into the trap she’d known was here. It was an old railway hotel, the main lobby not so different from the day when her mother brought her here for tea on her thirteenth birthday, though much else was gone: the old registration counter of black marble and brass, the barbershop frequented by Mackenzie King, the Canadian Grill, where so much politicking got done. Gone too was the Jasper Lounge, formerly the Jasper Tea Room, that her mother had described as
having a double row of totem poles. Also the famous Peacock Alley, furnished with writing tables and easy chairs, which Gladys called the prettiest place in Ottawa. Even the moose and caribou heads in the main lobby had been spirited away to England by a previous general manager, who wanted them for the walls of his own inn, or so said Dinah, who got her information from a reliable bellman.

After Harriet’s coffee arrived, Leah said, “That’s the same waiter we had the night we came for dinner.”

“Is he? I wasn’t here.”

“That’s right. You didn’t come. Lew took a turn that night. Did he tell you?”

“Dinah told me.”

“Yes. Dinah looked after him. I think she looked after him very well.”

Leah’s insinuation was so grim of purpose that Harriet reached in her mind for something sane, something peaceful-and remembered the time when Lew came home from a fractious meeting of a local heritage committee that was bent on saving a building on Laurier Avenue, but divided about its methods. He had stood in the bedroom doorway – it was late – and told her that at the start of the meeting everyone was suspicious and hostile, darting looks around the table, all set to lock horns, until an older man reminded them of what had brought them there in the first place – their common desire to save a gracious old house – and once they were reminded of that, Lew said, all of their ill will fell away. She had lain in bed listening to him, a book in her hands, and as he talked she too had felt released from her own and everyone else’s ill will.

“Leah,” she said. “Why this charade about Pauline Kael? Let’s stop needling each other. Let’s stop.” She reached across and put her hand on Leah’s. “You’re my aunt,” she said.

But Leah didn’t need to be reminded of that. “Then you should treat me better.” Leah picked up her coffee spoon, dislodging Harriet’s hand, and said, “I worshiped the ground my aunt walked on, and she worshiped me. She took me into her home. She opened up her arms to me.”

So this was at the bottom of it all: Leah had been waiting for them to offer her a home.

But Harriet wasn’t about to take her aunt in.

Cornered by her own ungenerosity, she fell silent. She took off her glasses, she rubbed her eyes. “What did you and Pauline Kael talk about?” she asked finally, and not without a trace of sarcasm.

“I didn’t say much. She and Jack did most of the talking.”

“Jack was here?” Harriet put her glasses back on.

“They talked about Lionel.”

Harriet stared at her aunt.

Leah said, “You hate it when I’m right.”

“What else are you right about?”

“You.”

Her coffee was getting cold. She took a sip, and wished she hadn’t.

“You can’t resist smooth talkers,” Leah went on. “Your face lights up when Jack comes in the room. You don’t even look at Lew.”