Garbo Laughs (40 page)

In October the house was quiet. Jane stopped picking on him. Lew stopped playing piano. He himself used the soft pedal whenever he practised. His mom nursed her sore belly. She couldn’t even read, she said; she had time on her hands, but no brain power.

Then one day in late October, when it was raining outside, Kenny said to her, “Just look at this.” He made her come into the living room, made her lie on the sofa, put a pillow behind her head and a blanket over her knees. “Just watch for twenty minutes.”

He slipped a movie into the
VCR
and on it came: the strains of “Moon River”; Fifth Avenue at dawn; the yellow cab pulling
up to the curb and Audrey getting out and the cab pulling away. His mom sat up and he sat beside her. Jane joined them, and they watched the whole thing, from beginning to end.

They saw their mother’s face soften and her shoulders relax.

“It’s still wonderful,” she breathed when it came to an end. “And so is Audrey. She’s so beautiful.”

“You liked it?” asked Kenny, eager to hear her say it again and at length.

“I feel one hundred per cent better,” she said. “I feel like I’ve had a blood transfusion.”

The next day he said to her, “Just watch the beginning of
The Russia House.”

And on it came: the clouds in the end-of-the-Soviet sky, the gilded domes, the painted spires, the black umbrella, Michelle Pfeiffer’s lovely face and Sean Connery’s bewitching voice, and once again Harriet sighed with satisfaction. “You know, I knew him when he didn’t have that accent.”

“Shhh,” said Kenny.

“In
Goldfinger
. He doesn’t have that accent, except when he says ‘Pussy.’”

Nothing so relaxing for her as watching these old movies, and watching them with Kenny and Jane, her two comrades-in-arms from the very beginning. Old movies had been mother’s milk to them, and an escape from motherhood for her.

Kenny would say to her, “Just watch for half an hour.” And on would come
North by Northwest, The Grass Is Greener, Notorious
.

One day it was
Ninotchka
. She said, “I
like
that scene,” when Melvyn Douglas kept telling one joke after another to get Garbo to laugh.
Here goes
. A man comes into a restaurant. He sits down at a table and he says, Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without
cream! Five minutes later the waiter comes back and says, I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?
Oh, you have no sense of humour!
And he told her there wasn’t a laugh in her. Not a grain of humour. None whatsoever. Everybody else laughed.
But not you!

“That’s a good scene,” said Harriet.

“He’s good,” said Kenny.

“He
is
good,” she said. “And that’s a good situation: getting somebody serious to laugh. You should work that into one of your stories.”

That was the fall when Kenny began to ask everyone what kind of lawyer he should be. Criminal? Corporate? Environmental?

“Divorce,” Dinah told him. “And this is what you do.”

Dinah’s hair had grown back, thick, bristly, multidirectional, and her laugh was as wild and crumpled-sounding as ever. She said, “You accept only the richest clients – the richest! And on your desk you’ve got a special red telephone – that’s a direct line to me – and every day at four o’clock you call me with the hottest gossip.”

“I’ll have my office in New York,” he said with satisfaction.

They were on the back porch. Lew had moved an old sofa out there, and another table, where he worked while Harriet lay resting in the hammock. Now he looked up. “I thought you were going to be a sportswriter.”

“No,” Kenny said. “Newspapers will soon be a thing of the past and I don’t want to do Internet journalism.”

“It’s still writing,” said Lew.

“No. I don’t want to do it.”

Then it was November again, but this time there wasn’t any snow. A warm November followed upon a warm October, a warm September, a warm summer, a warm spring. The warmth had become endless. It was 1998, the warmest year in Ottawa’s history. On the back porch the hanging plants were still hanging, the folding chairs were unfolded, the hammock was still up. On this particular day, so memorable it was photographed, his mom lay in the hammock, wrapped in a quilt. Dinah had finished packing up her house. Jack had gone to Chicago to ship his belongings east. And at Kenny’s instigation they decided to have a final meeting of the Fern foursome, and at Dinah’s suggestion they dressed up. But first they had to decide which movie it was going to be.

Harriet said she had a hankering to see
Summer Stock
again. “That was a wonderful sequence of scenes: Gene and Judy on stage in the empty barn singing – what were they singing?”

“‘You Wonderful You,’” said Jane.

“And then the kiss that takes them by surprise. Then later, on the verandah, when she sings – what was she singing?”

“‘My Friendly Star,’” said Jane.

“And she doesn’t know he’s there listening, but the camera catches his face at the end of the song, and you know that suddenly
he
knows how in love with her he is. A lovely flow to it.” She made a curving gesture with her hand, her face wistful and relaxed. “Charles Walters was the director.”

Jane said, “I loved the ‘Get Happy’ song at the end. That’s my favourite.”

“She lost weight for that. She went to a fat farm, and they shot the scene three months after the rest of the movie was done. Poor Judy. Well, she was having one of her breakdowns. But
there was something between her and Gene. Some attraction.”

Harriet’s glance moved from Lew, who was bent over the report he’d spread on the table, to Dinah. She’d been thinking a lot about what would happen to Lew and the kids after the doctors had finished with her. “What are we going to do without you?” she said to Dinah, who answered gently that Nova Scotia wasn’t so far away. She wasn’t going to the end of the world.

“It’s far away.”

Harriet turned her head and looked out over the garden. A small, purple clematis flower still bloomed, unbelievably. What was it Bill Bender had said? Something about the yellowy, balmy atmosphere that stretched through Christmas in 1918 as thousands died of the Spanish flu. Unusual weather coupled with unusual illness. One reversal leading to another.

In the end, they settled on
Guys and Dolls
. “Kenny,” said his mom, “you can wear your gangster outfit.”

Dinah said, “It’s always so easy for men. Put on your tux. Put on your gangster outfit.”

“I’m Ava,” said Jane.

“Okay,” said Dinah, “then I’ll be Adelaide. And you can be Sarah Brown,” she said to Harriet. “It’s time you sang a few hymns.”

“No, I’ll be Frankie. I’ll be Frankie on top and Ava underneath.”

Dinah looked at Jane and Kenny. “Your mother,” she said, “is out of control again.”

They dressed their mom. From the basement chest they pulled out a gold sequinned gown with narrow straps, a pair of
kid gloves, a metallic silver coiled belt. Jane took her long black Morticia Addams wig off her doorknob and put it on her mother’s head, and Harriet was Ava. Then Kenny found his grampa’s pre-tied bow ties and chose the red-and-blue polka-dot one. He also contributed his dad’s black fedora and old tweed jacket, and now Harriet was Frankie.

They made her go to the mirror and she said, “All I need is a cigarette.”

As it happened, Kenny had some. Not the Airmail cigarettes that Harriet’s brothers used to buy in the little candy store next to the Berford Theatre and smoke in the woods, but a pack of candy cigarettes, one of which she hung off her lower lip as she practised standing with her back to her kids, then turning around to give them the look Frank Sinatra gave Doris Day in
Young at Heart
.

“I missed my calling,” she said to them, her voice a mixture of wonder and conviction. “This is what I was made for.” And she meant it, heart and soul. “I should have gone on stage.”

She felt like Margot Fonteyn after she took up with Nureyev. Like Cyd Charisse after she discovered silk stockings. Like Garbo after she got the joke.

Lew snapped a picture of the Sinatra gang: Jean-Claude Sinatra in his typical outfit of gangster jacket, blue shirt, pink floral tie; Nicole Sinatra in capri pants, Cuban top (the first and only time she ever wore it), fur stole, and dangling earrings; Harriet Sinatra, as Ava/Frankie; and Dinah Sinatra in mink jacket, pink pants, high heels, and glass of champagne provided by Jim Creak, who saw the goings-on and came over.

Jim Creak had a parting gift for Dinah: the sweater he’d been knitting for her when he and Harriet were at the sleep clinic
together. “The sea air is damp,” he said, as she pulled it over her head. “Does it fit?” It fit. But convincing him of the fact required full-scale reassurance. Then he asked for her address. She told him she couldn’t remember the postal code, but would write the whole thing down for him later, and he said, “Promise?”

Dinah promised, “if it’s the last thing I do before I leave.”

D
inah Bloom moved away in early December, on a day so unseasonably warm that Kenny, coming home from his piano lesson, saw a man run into the street in stocking feet. It was Jim Creak, waving a pair of gloves and shielding his eyes from the bright sunlight. “Where are you?” he called, looking around him. And to Kenny, “She’s gone.”

He stood in his socks staring after Dinah’s car, which had turned the corner and disappeared from sight. It was December 4, 1998.

The following day, when he opened the paper, he read about the discovery of the world’s earliest flower, a 142-million-year-old spindly twig with peapod-shaped fruit and a woody stem. The flowering-plant fossil, he read, was found 250 miles northeast of Beijing in a rock formation of limestone and volcanic ash, from which fossilized insects, birds, and plants had previously
been unearthed, but never a flowering plant, until now. He clipped the article and kept it, since the longevity of flowers was something he wanted to believe in.

The article got lost among other papers on his desk, the letters that kept coming with their oddly touching requests: a woman who wanted to hear Edward Johnson’s voice because the great tenor stayed with them one night when she was a child, sleeping in the same room where the seamstress stayed twice a year when she came to sew all of their clothes; a man who wanted to hear “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else but Me,” because his mother sang it when he was a boy picking potatoes in eastern Scotland, where the wind came directly off the Russian steppes, “a lazy wind,” they called it, because it didn’t blow around you, it blew right through you. His own letter to Dinah, the one he mailed with her gloves, didn’t get a reply. It wasn’t until a full year went by and he was cleaning off his desk that his eye fell upon
world’s earliest flower
, the partial headline of an article folded in half, and since only the day before he had gone to Harriet’s funeral, he sat down to write to Dinah.

I don’t know whether you’ve heard
, he wrote.
Perhaps not. Perhaps this will come as a shock, though it won’t be a surprise
.

Dinah read the letter in her house by the sea. She knew about Harriet’s death. She had heard from Lew, but not until after the funeral: she’d been away, an impulsive trip to Paris to sort out her thoughts about Jack. Lew’s call came a few weeks after her own last phone call to Harriet, itself the briefest of conversations, during which she’d confessed that there were worse things than being alone. And Harriet had said, “I never understood that man.”

In another month Jack would move back to Chicago, leaving Dinah not sadder, but wiser, since, except for his roving eye, he had turned out to be a lazy man. Several months after that, in June, she would turn her car left on Sunnyside Avenue and enter the old, familiar network of tree-lined streets.

Which door would she knock upon first? Fiona Chester’s, she decided, knocking very loudly in order to be heard. But a nurse answered the door, then led her into the living room, where the matriarch of the neighbourhood, dressed in a skirt and blouse, was seated on the sofa eating half a boiled egg, just half; she would save the rest for later when she had more appetite. A tiny figure, bowed down, bent low over her egg. But, “I’d recognize you anywhere,” Fiona said, although there was little recognition in her face. There was pain. She was living under a low roof of pain, which is what shingles are – ripples of fire that travelled down her back, under her arms, and across her chest. Ceaseless, except when she managed to sleep.

Dinah sat beside her and took her hand.

“You’ve come to see Lew.”

“Partly.”

“It’s hard to lose a wife.” Fiona couldn’t lift her head, and so she was speaking to Dinah’s hand, as if into a microphone. “They’ll be glad to see you. Kenny takes out my garbage, Lew walks Buster, and? Jim Creak comes over and reads to me.” She gestured to a book on the table. “Not every man loves Jane Austen.”

Dinah leaned over to see what it was.
Persuasion
. The book where nearly everything to be learned isn’t spoken so much as overheard.

“How is Lew?” she asked.

“Lonely. It’s a lonely business, losing your wife. I’ve seen it before. But,” she said with an effort, still speaking into Dinah’s hand, “you haven’t told me about you.”

Half an hour later, Dinah was walking up the lane where, according to Bill Bender, kids used to hunt bees among the hollyhocks, and coming towards her was the boy who loved Frank Sinatra. Easily a foot taller, and alone, as he was the first time she saw him. In T-shirt and shorts; long arms, winter-pale knees. Knapsack on his back, book in his hand, eyes on the ground.

“Frankie,” she said.

He looked up – tall and skinny, a triumph of height and light – and he brightened and flushed, advanced and retreated, in the way of thirteen-year-old boys.

She hugged him, and it was like holding wooden scaffolding that hugs back. Then he didn’t know quite where to look or what to say, and his shoulders slumped.

“What’s your book?” she asked.