Garbo Laughs (39 page)

“Is Dustin Hoffman one of your top five?”

“No.”

“Did you say no?”

“I know it breaks your heart, but no. Who are
your
top five?”

“Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin.”

She sat up, put on her glasses and stared at him. “What happened to Frankie?”

Kenny looked sheepish. “They’re better actors,” he said.

“And your top five movies?” she asked, her voice quite sharp.

“The Godfather, West Side Story, Some Like It Hot, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind.”

“Kenny,” she said broken-heartedly, “you’ve been reading too many top-one hundred lists. You’ve been corrupted. Be
truthful.”

But he gave her an incorrigible smile and said, “I have to pester you about one more thing. In this list
Sunset Boulevard
beat out
All About Eve
by four places. What do you think about that?”

“I don’t. I don’t think. Not about that.”

“You’re a cinematic idiot,” he said good-humouredly, and tucked his books back under his arm and turned to leave.

“Wait,” she said, hit by an idea. “What would you ask Peter O’Toole, if you could?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Why did you get a nose job? You have three seconds to answer, you bum, you unruly alcoholic.”

“You’re hired,” she said. They would include a column called “My Favourite Questions” in the
Fern Spectator
, to be published every other week and in a bilingual edition once it really got going.

This was the summer, the long, endlessly warm summer of 1998, when she showed her kids the spot where she first saw Sean Connery. They made the trip in the dog days of July, driving across Ontario to the small town on the Bruce Peninsula where she grew up. What they found when they got there was an empty lot.

“I was twelve,” she told them, standing on the sidewalk and staring at what used to be the Berford Theatre. “Twelve when all the foolishness began.”

They lived in an old house on the hill, she said. The “ghost house,” people called it. It was set back in the woods, a big stucco
house with a wraparound verandah on which her brother with the flat feet ran laps on tiptoe. The rest of them would be eating cherries on the steps, elevenses after some sort of hard labour, and her father would order Owen to do fifty laps.

After she saw Sean Connery in
From Russia With Love
, she said, she walked home in the dark, up that steep hill over there-and she pointed to it – to Gould Street. Then she turned right on Gould, and went past the Gilberts’ on the left, one of whom was madly in love with her, and the Hyatts’ on the right, who had a brainless red setter that ran back and forth on the flat roof of their house. She passed the Hahns’ on the left, who had greenhouses, and the Germans’ on the right, who had the blue baby. She passed their own ramshackle barn on the left and turned up the flagstone walk that wended its way under the elm tree (which would die and break her mother’s heart) and through patches of thick-growing myrtle up to the three-sided verandah, and she went inside and upstairs, and put her head on her pillow and closed her eyes, and watched every second of the movie all over again.

“I consider it a form of progress,” she told Lew and the kids as they drove up the hill in search of the old stucco house, “that young Sean turned into old Sean, and that I went from enjoying the sight of young Sean forcing himself on women – two years later it was Pussy Galore, gloriously, in
Goldfinger –
to Cary Grant being seduced by Eva Marie Saint.”

They were on the hill by now, and then they were even higher, on the little hill upon which sat the old house, and it was utterly transformed. It was a white mansion in a landscaped garden. “Believe me,” Harriet said, “it was nothing like this when I was a kid.” They parked on the road and got out and
looked, and the thought Harriet had been having – that the most powerful influence in her life after childhood movies was probably repeated movies: the same scene over and over again until she moved past monotony into fine-honed harmony, a great and soothing familiarity that was both restful and exciting – that thought went out of her head. A woman came down the driveway to where they were standing and asked if she could be of any help. No, said Harriet. We’re just taking a look at the house where I grew up. Well, come in, the woman urged. Come inside. They went inside, but it was so different – walls had been taken down and all the wallpaper removed – that Harriet felt just like that crazy red setter down the street.

That night in their motel she dreamt about Sean Connery. It went on for a long time. She called him Mr. Garbo, fully believing that that was his name. Mr. Garbo, she called to him, as he entered the room. He was about sixty-five in the dream, and he was writing books. On the last page of one of his books he wrote a line towards the bottom that said he wasn’t going to make love, he was going to save himself for his books.
We went for a drive together after dark. I don’t think I was driving. I don’t think he was driving either. He had a wife. He seemed to want to stay with his wife. There were children. In the dream I thought it prudent to pretend I like children a whole lot more than I do, since he seemed to expect that of women. These children – there were several – were small, blond, smiling. I guess they were his. I was certainly in the running for him and he knew it and responded in a charming, gruff, noncommittal way. Towards the end of the dream, when he was deciding to save himself for his books, I put my hands on his bare back, and he was old-it was a sixty-five-year-old back, though not as old as Sean is in reality, a fact I was aware of even in the dream
.

The next day they drove home, across country scoured by glaciers – pressed under ice a mile deep, and pressed repeatedly, until the ice melted for good and the land made a scarred rebound into the marvellous light. Like my childhood, she thought. It too had been a kind of ice age from which the parental glacier had finally retreated, and then what a lot of work it had been to get anything to grow on the boulder-filled, back-breaking personality that remained.

Looking out the window as the land went by, she began to think about all the things she would never know. She would never know, to remember, the names of more than a few trees and flowers. She would never know how to play chess. She would never read the Bible from cover to cover. She would never know the true story of Cary Grant’s sex life. She would never know what she really thought about Jack Frame. She would never know, to meet, Pauline Kael.

I wonder if you watch movies at all any more, or if, like Don Quixote and his books, you’ve thrown them over I watched
Camille
the other day and got tired of Garbo’s neck. The way she arched it back – her signature gesture – to show sexual surrender, and her half-laughing way of speaking when attracted to a man – that became a little tiresome too. You say she did her best acting in
Camille.
And yes, she’s good, and Robert Taylor not quite as bad as I thought he would be – the man who broke Barbara Stanwyck’s heart – but that’s because Garbo helps him along, amused to discover that she finds him attractive
.

She’s very good at near collapse. Her body in sickness is very expressive, her face moving between hope and despair
.

At a roadside picnic table, Kenny glanced over his mother’s shoulder as she jotted things down in her notebook. “You’re writing about me,” he said.

She didn’t bother to dispute it.

“If you’re going to write about me, at least call me something else. I’m Jean-Claude,” he said. And he beat his chest with his hand. “Jean-Claude de Frontenac.”

Jane looked up from her tomato-and-cheese sandwich, hold the bread. “Are you writing about me too?”

“What should I call you? Carlotta?”

Kenny said, “No wonder your book didn’t sell. Who wants to read about people called Kenny and Jane? I mean, where’s your imagination? Kenny and Jane. That’s so bad it’s pathetic.”

“I like simple names,” said Harriet. “Maybe I’ll call you Mutt.”

“Natalie?” pondered Jane. “Melissa? Nicole?”

Kenny said, “I like Nicole.”

“Okay,” said their mom. “Nicole and Jean-Claude. Pardon me. Jean-Claude de Frontenac.”

“De Front-nac,” he said. “Not Fron-te-nac. Front-nac.” He was pretending to be Kevin Kline in
French Kiss
. “Not Luke.
Luc.”

While they were at the picnic table, the wind picked up. It brought windy heat, which would follow them home and last for twenty-four hours, then turn into deep humidity, then rain. The air after the rain would be soft and smoky. But when they pulled into their driveway all was well. They were glad to be home again among the clotheslines and lilac bushes. In the distance they heard the pipes of the Ceremonial Guard practising on the fields at Carleton University, and Harriet remembered quite vividly seeing the preview to
Brigadoon
at the Berford Theatre-Gene Kelly and Van Johnson lost in the mist, Cyd Charisse in her apron and dancing shoes.

That night a house burned down at the end of the block. Three days later, a raven flew down into Harriet’s garden and
walked among the marigolds. A few hours after that, what sounded like a cuckoo called loudly, oddly, and she looked up to see on the curving trunk of a neighbour’s tree a pileated woodpecker. It took off with great sweeping wingbeats, landed on a telephone pole on Sunnyside Avenue, and called again. Visitors come in threes, she thought. Where was the third visitor? It must be the terrible stranger.

That year was a bountiful fruit year, 1998. Trees were laden with apples, pears, plums. Bushes were heavy with berries. The gooseberries in Harriet’s garden had never been so fine. The blueberries at her parents’ cottage were larger and more numerous than ever.

One day in August, when they were at the cottage, and had picked until they were tired and thirsty, they stopped, and old Martin said to his daughter, “We had no psychology in those days, thank God.”

He was speaking of his youth. They had left their berry buckets on the porch and come down to the water, and from there they looked back up the slope at the ice-damaged woods over which he and Leah had quarrelled nearly thirty years ago, Leah wanting to sell her share to him, but for a price he refused to pay.

“I know as much about my past as I want to know,” he said. “I know more than my sister, who thinks she knows everything.”

“I don’t think Leah’s speaking to me any more,” said Harriet.

“You’ll be able to live with that,” he said.

Then something happened to his eyes. Those eyes like Harriet’s – like José Ferrer’s. He took his hand and whacked the
side of his head to keep the tears in place. A family ambushed by its eyes. Harriet had told him her news.

They went to sit on the bench beside the water, and looked out at the lake without speaking. They sat comfortably in their discomfort, without speaking.

Then her mother came down the path and joined them. Gladys, whose idea of entertainment was watching
Nails
.

“She’s thirteen now,” Harriet said to her mother of Jane, who was on the raft. “That’s a relief.”

“She’s growing up,” said Gladys, entirely missing Harriet’s point.

“I mean your second sight didn’t pan out. She’s thirteen, and Lew is alive and well. Remember?”

“Oh, I know what that was,” her mother said, and her voice was as self-dismissive as when she’d once talked about her girlish infatuation with Jean Harlow, as if indulging herself in such pap should have been beneath her. “It was my own reflection in the glass doors at the end of the hallway. I wonder how many so-called ghosts can be explained in the same way?”

“Maybe it was me you saw.”

“You?”

“My glasses. My skinniness. Had you thought of that?”

Her poor mother had to put her hand on the bench and sit down.

In September Harriet stopped coming downstairs for breakfast. She changed in less physical ways too. She turned against videos, and became obsessed with the damage they were doing.
Movies,
like letters, used to require geography. You went out to them and returned from them. You wrote a letter and went out to mail it; it travelled a distance and you could visualize the distance; it was delivered to a mailbox and you could visualize the mailbox. Your correspondent took out something made of paper and ink, something handled by you and all the people in between, and now by him or by her. But videos, like e-mails, have killed geography and time – the time it takes to mail the letter and for the letter to arrive, the time it takes to go to the movie and watch it and return home in a musing frame of mind. There is, of course, the time it takes to go to a video store and mill around in perplexity. But that turns movie watching into another form of shopping, which I hate
.

The truth is, I’ve lost my taste for movies. I haven’t the slightest desire to see a movie any more
.

It was so sad, thought Kenny. It was like what happened to Robin Williams. He didn’t want to be funny any more. His mom didn’t want to watch movies any more. “I’m sick to death of them,” she said. “I’d advise you to read the classics. You can start with
Jane Eyre.”
And often now, when he looked in on her in the morning, her reading light was on and she had fallen asleep over a pile of books. She had never really given Dostoevsky a chance, she said. To say nothing of
Moby-Dick
.

Kenny read alone at the kitchen table, elbows spread wide, hands wrapped around his ears: one fantasy book after another. To hell
with Jane Eyre
.

His mother lay outside in the hammock. This had become the new bedside. Every few days Dinah came over, though
sometimes she brought the wrong thing.
People
, which his mother said made her feel more dead than alive. He and Jane spirited the magazines away to their rooms. Dinah also came with new snapshots of her place in Nova Scotia: she and Jack would be moving there in early December, she said, but she would keep her house in Ottawa, renting it to some people she knew, “since you should never put all your eggs in one basket,” she told Kenny. Fiona dropped by too, and of those conversations he heard every word, since everything had to be repeated at least twice. Fiona was in the habit of bringing cashews, and again, he and Jane were the beneficiaries. Jim Creak came by, not just to check on Harriet but to take Lew out for a beer. And even Jack’s weighty footstep came through the house from time to time. Kenny overheard his mother ask how the book about Lionel was progressing, and Jack replied that it was done; he even had a publisher. After he left, his mom said, “Kenny, if there’s anything worse than an envious writer, I can’t think what it is.” You mean Jack? “I mean me,” she said.