Read Garbo Laughs Online

Authors: Elizabeth Hay

Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #General, #Humorous

Garbo Laughs (7 page)

BOOK: Garbo Laughs
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“Okay.”

“Bull Durham
, of course. Ask me the best line in a movie.”

“What’s the best line?”

“‘Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy night.’”

“Put that on the list,” she said. “We should watch it with Dinah.”

And Kenny added
All About Eve
to the movie list on the fridge.

8
A Green Globe

T
he fern brought a feeling of peacefulness and possibility into the house, if only briefly. It sat on the corner of her desk, looking more and more like an ancient artifact as it faded from green to parchment brown.
I think of you in your rambling house in Massachusetts, and of a sentence I read in a book about Chekhov: “The doors of the Russian house are wide open.” I’m tired of pretending to
like things more than I do. Like Ottawa more than I do. Like Lew more than I often do. I’m tired of having to work up an attachment to things. Tired of life being so much less vivid than it could be
.

It was three in the morning. In the sky a half moon shone above the mighty oak in loud Ray’s backyard, a tree that used to shade four yards, including her own, but now half of it was dead and the rest was dying, branch by branch. Lew had his own idea why. Last summer he’d said thoughtfully, “I think it’s tired of listening to all the traffic on Bronson Avenue.” But Lew had a sensitive ear and a fine voice, unlike herself, who took two days to recognize “Auld Lang Syne” when the Ceremonial Guard was practising it day after day on the open fields at Carleton University nearby. Once she even failed to recognize “Happy Birthday” on the radio. She thought it was “God Save the Queen.”

Hanukkah is coming in a few weeks. Then Christmas. Maybe you have what we have, a menorah for eight days followed by turkey …

Fiona Chester’s light came on; it was half-hidden by spreading lilac bushes in the summer but quite visible now. Fiona, she knew, was waiting for the morning man “whose voice just has that effect,” she said one day. “What’s the word?”

“Soporific?”

“I beg your pardon? I’m sorry.” Shaking her aged head, and smiling. “My hearing is too awful.”

Harriet wrote the word on a piece of paper.

“That’s it,” said Fiona. “Nobody can sleep, haven’t you noticed, and?” – with her little lilt – “it doesn’t matter.”

Age had put its heavy hand on Fiona’s head and pushed her half over. She was Groucho Marx as a leaf in the wind, lifted along on her daily trek to Bank Street, a plucky Scot from the
Isle of Lewis who arrived in Canada on a Saturday, started work on the Monday, and two months later, on October 29, woke up to the stock market crash of 1929. “The girl at the next desk said, ‘Did you know that so-and-so, some big shot, kicked the bucket?’ Where? ‘On the bridge over there,’ she said. And? I looked out the window and pictured a man on the bridge kicking a wooden bucket.”

And?
was the link that joined each of her utterances to the next, making her unstoppable in conversation no matter how deaf she might be. “I am reading Chekhov, and? I manage several paragraphs at a time.”

Now that’s pure love, thought Harriet, to go to the trouble of learning Russian in order to read Chekhov in the original, and to do so at such an advanced age and off the back of the public education available in Scotland in the 1920s. That’s what oatcakes will do for you. Harriet had gone to Fiona’s house for tea (Fiona always invited neighbourhood newcomers to tea, taking her job as Sybil Rump’s successor very much to heart), and eaten five oatcakes. “To the future Sir Sean,” she said, raising her teacup.

Fiona nodded and smiled and nodded again, as deaf as a post, having mislaid both of her hearing aids earlier in the day.

Harriet has since looked up the marvellous name Sybil Rump in a biography of Mackenzie King, but Sybil, who probably kept King and therefore Canada afloat, didn’t warrant a mention. Now there was a man who tilted at windmills, at least by night. Harriet looked northeast, in what she thought was the general direction of King’s house on Laurier Avenue, where fifty years ago he held the late-night séances that put him in touch with his dead mother and his dead dog Pat. Then she found her thoughts drifting back to the fly in the neighbourhood ointment:
loud Ray, who planned to cut the mighty oak tree down. Come spring, he said. He was going to put in a pool. If that tree weren’t there, he told everyone, he could drop a swimming pool into his backyard and have room left over. As if to accustom his appalled neighbours to the prospect, he spent hours outside with his snow blower, ruining their peace of mind.

She knew she ought to lie down for a while, even if she couldn’t sleep, but Bill Bender’s kitchen light came on next, and something about the play of light and shadow took her back to the day last summer when she came upon him lying flat on his back, his head and shoulders hidden under a clump of tall ferns, his long legs stretched out across the grass, his feet in red sneakers.

She had knelt down, rested her head at the base of the ferns, and glimpsed what he was looking at: deep, navigable shade. How beautiful it was. And to think she had never looked before. It was like an emerald forest – primeval, peaceful, huge – and only visible from this boyish, unembarrassed angle. Bill Bender was looking up the skirts of the world when it was young.

Some half-remembered words came back to her. “A green globe,” she murmured, “in a green shade.”

The old man sat up, then. “‘A green
thought
in a green shade,’ you numbskull. ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.’”

“Marvell?”

“Andrew Marvell. Member of Parliament for Hull and secretary to Milton.”

“I thought so,” she said.

She was impressed with herself, even if he wasn’t. Afterwards, she looked up the poem in the library.

The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

A complicated garden, she thought. Not unlike Leah’s with its olive trees and butterflies. And she saw the two of them, Leah and famous Lionel, sitting in the shade, cosseted and embittered by their warm and pleasant exile. Lionel withdrawing into drink, retiring to his study to write his memoirs, and dying without a word of them written down. Then Leah sitting on alone in the garden, nursing her grievances, cherishing her anger.

The spear-tip fern could have come from such a place. And turning her gaze from the frost ferns on the window to the fern on her desk, she felt for a second time that subtle nudge, as if things might be leading somewhere.

9
The Phone Call

O
n Saturday morning Harriet made trays of Christmas shortbread, even though her cholesterol was so high it could have been the stairway to paradise. The doctor who broke the news was astonished that a woman so thin would have such high cholesterol. What do you eat? he wanted to know. No-name
digestive biscuits, said Harriet. How many a day? he asked. Eight? said Harriet. That’s too many, said the doctor.

Dinah said, “I couldn’t stand doing what you do. Sitting at your desk all day long, trying to invent stuff out of thin air. I have to get out and sniff around the city every day.” Her voice was even huskier than usual from a cold she hadn’t been able to shake.

“That’s because you’re a newshound.”

“A newshound,” repeated Kenny with relish.

“We could be a scriptwriting team,” Harriet said. “Browning and Bloom as the new Comden and Greene. Or a vaudeville act. What were Fred and Judy in
Easter Parade?”

“Hannah and Hewes,” said Kenny, who had a mind like a steel trap.

“Gene Kelly was supposed to have that role,” said Harriet. She was clocking the shortbread in the oven. “But he broke his ankle playing volleyball, so Fred Astaire came out of retirement and stayed on for another decade. Lucky for us.”

“Your mother’s been reading Pauline Kael again.”

“I didn’t learn that from Pauline.”

“Pauline Who?” asked Jane the late riser, wandering into the kitchen in sunglasses and a Guatemalan hat because she felt like summer.

Her mother, deep in her own thoughts, didn’t reply, and so Dinah murmured, “the movie critic,” and Jane sighed, “oh,” while Harriet rolled on. “Was she ever wrong about
Easter Parade
. Sometimes she was just too harsh, too sweeping, she missed the joy of certain movies. But I love her. I really do.”

Kenny had a goofy grin on his face, as he always did when Dinah came over. He strode back and forth with his hands in
his pockets. The night before, during
Pal Joey
, he had nodded his head to the music much too vigorously he was so excited, so anxious that everybody like Frankie as much as he and Dinah did. His mother noticed and understood. She herself had never recovered from the shock of hearing, at fifteen, someone malign Rudolf Nureyev. “Nureyev,” the brutal someone said, “is so full of himself that Margot Fonteyn can’t stand him.” Her world, she remembers well, was rocked to its foundations. She had enough sense to know that this addiction to purity, which her son shared, was neither good for her nor good for him. Therefore, she said, “Shouldn’t my son have a different role model than Frank Sinatra? I mean, not to do Frank an injustice,” as three pairs of frosty-alarmed eyes turned in her direction, “but what’s wrong with Nelson Mandela? Or even Sean Connery?”

Dinah snorted.
“Seen
Connery was a truck driver and not too bright, but Frankie had all the right instincts, no matter what you say.”

“Sean improved with age,” said Harriet. “Frank looks like a sausage in a silver wig.”

“I’m leaving,” Dinah said.

“Forgive me. I won’t say another word. Except that somebody was afraid to go bald and somebody wasn’t. And do you know why? Because somebody is a real man.”

“I hate to say this,” Dinah said to Kenny and Jane, “but somebody in this room is talking too much.”

“Yeah,”
said Kenny.

“Yeah,”
said Jane.

Lew spoke to the newspaper: “I don’t believe that for a minute.” Then he tossed it aside. He didn’t understand why
Harriet was making shortbread when he was allergic to butter.

The phone began to ring, but Harriet made a policy of never answering the phone if she could help it. “You know the movie I want to see? I’ve never seen it.”

Dinah’s eyes followed Lew as he headed to the phone in his study.

“Ninotchka,”
said Harriet.

And Dinah returned to the interesting unreality of Harriet’s mind. “When Garbo laughed,” she said thoughtfully. “Except no sound came out. Did you know that? They had to dub in her laughter.”

“Was Greta Garbo’s real name Greta Garbo?” asked Jane, wide awake now.

“Gustafsson, I think. She was Swedish. Gustafsson,” Dinah said.

“Greta Garbo has a nicer ring to it than Jane Gold.”

“Vanity, vanity,” said the mother of the prospective movie star.

“Well, I like my name but they won’t let me keep it. They’ll make me change it. It doesn’t have a ring to it. Greta Garbo. What’s that called?”

“Alliteration,” said her mother.

“Alliteration. I should be Janey Jersinksi.”

The call was for Harriet. She squared her shoulders and picked up the phone in the study. Her mother said, “First, I want to know how Lew is.” And Harriet felt the hair prickle on the back of her neck.

“Lew is fine. Why?”

“Because something happened. And I just wanted to make sure.”

It would be better not to ask. But she asked. “Tell me what happened.”

And her mother told her. She and Martin were just back from a dental conference in Trieste: they had stayed on for an extra week, renting a room in a house similar to a bed and breakfast and preparing their own meals in a small kitchen. One night, at midnight, she got up to use the bathroom across the hall. Stepping out into the hallway, she saw a strange man at the end of the corridor and stopped, suddenly aware that she was only in her nightgown. The man was tall and skinny with short hair and glasses. The light glinted off his glasses. He stood outside the doorway to his room, she stood in the doorway to hers, and they looked at each other. Then he turned and appeared to go into his room.

Those were her words.
He appeared to go into his room
.

Over the next few days she befriended the woman who owned the house, and her daughter. Their English was limited but she questioned them carefully, and learned that no one else was staying in the house. The daughter was married, yes, here’s my husband’s picture in the photo album. Yes, she had a brother. His picture is here too. Neither man looked anything like the man in the hallway. The man in the hallway looked exactly like Lew.

Harriet listened to her mother’s low, clear voice telling her that she had seen Lew’s ghost and she felt herself enter the grip of something inevitable and shapely. Her mother had been
twelve when her father died. Jane was twelve. Jane adored Lew as much as Gladys had adored her father.

Harriet sat beside the phone after she hung up. She would keep this to herself, she decided, as she wished her mother had done. But she felt touched. Touched by the future.

Harriet ate a shortbread thoughtfully. “Of course, you’re right. I do need to get out more.”

“Exactly.” Dinah shook her head. “It’s no wonder you’re nuts.”

“You think I’m nuts?”

“Certifiable.”

Harriet cracked up and her face was transformed. It’s notable, thought Dinah, what laughter does for the woman. A different haircut would also help. To say nothing of an adventure.

“I haven’t told you,” Harriet said.

“What?”

“You won’t believe this. I don’t believe it. I’ve been asked to teach a course on comic writing.”

“You?”

“I know.” And she spoke with despair. “It’s like asking Hitler to teach a course in the humanities.” She pulled out a chair and dropped into it. “Henry said you don’t have to be able to
do
something to teach it. Very kind of him,” she said, “and crazy.”

“Who’s Henry?” asked Jane.

BOOK: Garbo Laughs
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