Garbo Laughs (37 page)

She had to get up – her nose was so blocked she had to snort to breathe – and she was crying afresh, though less now, at the story: the kindness of the mother to the boy, the boy’s long dilemma and longer shame. She had known Lew for many years and never heard this story, though he was fond of telling stories from his childhood, and so, for that matter, was his mother.

Under the chandelier that caught light and shed light and hung lightly suspended in the morning air – assembled in Cuba, she had been told, before the revolution, from cut glass made in Bohemia – she lay down beside Lew again as the day gathered strength and the warmth began to pour in.

They would go later that day to the famous ice cream garden known as Coppelia. It wasn’t their first visit, but it was the first time they approached from this direction, and on foot. A block away, and across the street from the ice cream garden, they came upon Don Quixote in a tiny park. He was riding Rocinante, who was rearing up, all skin and bones, and they made a wild and
skeletal pair, bronze horse and man, very endearing and sad. The sharp ribs of the noble horse were so like blades that Harriet, back in Ottawa and putting away her skates for another year, would dub them Rocinante. At Coppelia they ate their ice cream at a small table, surrounded by tall royal palms whose grey trunks, long and tapered, were like the Plasticine worms she used to roll out on her desk in kindergarten. From somewhere nearby came the sound of sweeping, and from near and far came the sound of cars.

“You liked
Don Quixote
, didn’t you?” she asked Kenny. He had read a children’s version that was very good.

“I loved it,” he said. “But it had such a sad ending.”

“But funny too,” she said gently. “Right?”

“The book was funny, it was a great story,” he said, “but he died at the end! And before he died, he got defeated by trickery!”

“What did Sancho Panza say at the end? Something about love.”

“‘He was a man in love. No one knows why.’ He said that at the funeral.”

“Yes.”

She had read the book in high school. Her father used to give her a ride to school early in the morning, on his way to his office, and she would sit in the library reading until the bell rang. What a surprise to discover how rollicking and readable the old classic was. Well, to be accurate, she read parts of it. It was a very long book.

“The adult version has a different ending,” she said. “He realizes that all his dreams were figments of his imagination, and he turns his face to the wall and dies from the truth. Like Emma Bovary. That’s a wonderful book too. But her death was terrible.”

“Where do you suppose we’ll die?” asked Lew thoughtfully. “Will we die in Ottawa, do you think?”

Kenny said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

Jane said, “It’s not thinking about what happens after death that’s interesting. It’s realizing that one day you’ll know.”

Harriet said, “I think I’ll die in Sean Connery’s arms.”

“W
hy Jack?” asked Harriet.

“You think I’m making a mistake.” Dinah was at home, resting between bouts of chemotherapy that were intended to stop anything further in its tracks. Just to be sure, her doctors said.

“I’m just asking why.”

“He’s been wonderful, dealing with doctors and nurses. I need someone like that. Someone aggressive. Besides, he’s terrific at crossword puzzles.”

“I’m not saying he’s not aggressive.” Harriet wasn’t about to be drawn out of her pensiveness. “Has he told you about his mother?”

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

“I can’t believe that I never knew about it.” She had hoped Dinah might have some doubts about the story too.

“Well, it’s not something you’d want to talk about, is it?”

Harriet went to the window and looked down at Jim Creak’s house. He happened to be outside in his sweatshirt and black pyjama bottoms and black Chinese shoes, spreading a brightly patterned cloth over his picnic table. A warm March had stretched into a warmer April.

Dinah said, “I know what you’re thinking, but Bill thought he had a screw loose, and I’ve wondered myself.”

“You haven’t watched
Vanya on 42nd Street
, have you? Even though I told you to. Have you read the play? You should read the play.” Harriet turned her lightly tanned face away from the window and looked at Dinah. “They were too much alike, Jim and Bill; they were bound to clash. You don’t like Fred Astaire either. You’re hopeless.”

“How were they alike?”

“Devoted. Honest. What you see is what you get. Eccentric, of course, and very independent, but not up to no good.”

“Jack’s up to no good? I’ll tell him that.” She let out a long, amused chortle.

It was childish to want Dinah to agree with her, and pitiful to feel displaced. She sank into the chair beside Dinah’s bed, stretched out her legs, and let her hands fall into her lap.

They looked at each other.

Dinah said, “The Duke of Windsor was a big knitter too, and his penis was tiny.”

“His penis isn’t tiny. At the sleep clinic I saw him in his briefs.”

Dinah’s lips twitched with amusement. “Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to know you.”

“Buster Keaton knew how to knit too. In
The Railrodder
he’s knitting when he goes through the Rockies on the handcar.” She
was remembering him in the Club of Fame, how old he looked, his whole face like the pouch under a sleepless eye. Not a face that ever would have made it into that strange, beautiful album that Jack had shown to her.

“Hattie?”

“I’m here.”

“We’ve decided the middle of June. We want Jane to be our best girl, and Kenny to be the ring bearer.”

Harriet’s face relaxed into a smile, and in this light Dinah saw the tan for what it was, and asked if she was sleeping. Harriet shrugged the question away.

From her study she had a view of Bill Bender’s flattened garage, whose tattered shingles used to slide all summer long into the raspberry patch. Also, the flattened raspberry patch. Ottawa was a low city, and wide. Movement was horizontal – roads, rivers, the canal – cars, cyclists, joggers, people with dogs – except for the falling snow which made everything rapidly so much taller than before, a triumph of adolescence: the very thing that Kenny and Jane knew first-hand.

Not that you could count on deep snow any more, she thought. And what had happened to all the beautiful wallpaper of her childhood? The leaves, silvery and filigreed, the satiny surfaces, the reassuring repetitions of lines and stripes and dots that coalesced into flowers? Where would Cézanne have been without wallpaper? Or Matisse? And what had happened to the minds that made those designs? Deep-sixed, that’s what, along with the stars of the silent screen.

I watched
College
last night. You call it a beautiful comedy, and I agree. All the athletic feats Keaton can’t master he suddenly does in one gliding tour de force when he has to rescue the girl at the end. It has the shape of comedy, as you say, the first half being one long humiliation, and the second half vindication – with the streamline zip of romance
.

Buster was so short. I didn’t realize. And so obviously athletic and strong. A strange sort of handsomeness when he darts a look at the girl, or whenever he registers feeling by withdrawing into himself, hurt. Then you see how well chiselled his features are, how striking the dark hair and dark eyes, the bare, beautifully shaped legs. But the handsomeness vanishes as soon as he heads back into the world, dressed in a baggy suit and walking his stiff-legged walk, wearing his too-small boater: shorter than everybody else, and stricken, made monotone, by embarrassment. Always out of place, no matter where he was. Yet in place, no matter how precarious the setting
.

Then I put on
Bells Are Ringing.
By this time it was very late, but I began to watch, then kept going to see more of Dean Martin, who is paced through the movie as sparingly and irresistibly as Rhett Butler. His loose, casual, unbuttoned ease – funny and at sea, until Judy rescues him
.

A Saturday morning. She heard Kenny get up and, knowing she’d be interrupted soon, flipped to another page and began to jot down rapidly: Repertory, Revival, Classic Cinema, Film Society, Movie Museum, Movie Guild – turning over in her mind the various possibilities.

On the way downstairs, she poked her head into Kenny’s room. He said, “I’ve decided to live it up and die in bed. Will you bring me something to eat?”

“You’ll choke.”

“I’ll sit up,” he said.

That day two goldfinches came whizzing across Bill Bender’s lawn, then
thump
. Both lay in the grass, having crashed into the side of his house. The dumb blondes of the bird world, thought Harriet sadly. When did you ever see a starling barrel into the side of a house? After an hour she climbed over Bill Bender’s fence and picked up the two birds, still warm but lifeless. She blew on their feathers and studied the infinite shades of yellow, olive, russet. Perhaps the Museum of Nature would want them. So she put them into a plastic bag, and put the bag in the freezer next to another plastic bag that contained the ice-swollen twigcigar, a souvenir from the ice storm.

On the last day of April the for-sale sign in front of Bill Bender’s house came down.

A few days after that, when she was in the garden, Harriet heard a dry clacking, as of an old typewriter, and looked up to see a swallow on the clothesline. The song detective was in his backyard. She went over to tell him that the swallow had arrived – in his tuxedo – only to waltz away. “How can we entice him back?”

“With music,” he said. “I have a tape of a musician called Steve Swallow, and it’s called ‘Hello Hotel.’”

He went inside, and came back out with a tape deck that was playing jazzy strains that she’d never heard before. But Fred Astaire didn’t return.

It was the time of year, early May, when she could never find slippers or shoes, since she went in the front door and out the back, into the street or into the garden, changing her footgear accordingly: a season of shoe confusion and basketball-thumped tulips and winter-old dogshit so weathered it was white.

Then one day a big metal dumpster, painted blue and wider than a grand piano and taller than an upright, appeared in Bill Bender’s driveway. Before the end of the day it was filled, removed, and replaced with another dumpster. His sons were throwing out the contents of their father’s house.

Neighbours gathered. The front door of the house was wide open, and from inside they could hear the sons directing a crew of teenage boys in baseball caps who came and went, their arms filled with one overflowing box after another. Dinah, alerted by Harriet, headed up the front steps and intercepted the first sweaty son she came upon, a thin-haired man of fifty, built large like his father.

Papers? There was nothing in his will about papers. Manuscripts? There was nothing in his will about them either, he said. They were selling the house, that’s right, and first they had to clear it out.

“Will you let me have a look?” she asked, telling them who she was. “I know what he was working on. He showed it to me several times.”

The other son appeared, beaded with perspiration, circles under his eyes. He said to Dinah, “We don’t want his things spread around among strangers.”

“But I’m not a stranger. I’m an old friend of your father’s.” And again she said who she was.

“He never mentioned your name to me.”

“Just let me see the filing cabinet that’s got his book in it. I want to make sure it doesn’t get thrown out. It’s valuable.”

The son looked at her with complete distrust. “We’re taking whatever has value,” he said.

Then Dinah erupted. “Does Fiona know about all this? Does Fiona Chester know what you’re up to? Have you been in touch with her?”

The sons looked at each other. The heavily perspiring son, older, two inches taller, said, “The lawyer’s taking care of Fiona.”

And so Dinah and Harriet, and for a while loud Ray, stood on the sidewalk and watched filing cabinets, crates of books, crockery, kitchen implements, old tables, framed paintings, framed maps, gardening tools, and jars of every shape and size get dumped topsy-turvy into the great steel bin. After a while, Ray went home, started up his lawn mower, and blasted any remaining quiet to kingdom come.

Harriet told Dinah not to worry: We’ll come back after they’ve left and go through it all. But the sons oversaw the dumpster’s removal, and the setting-down of dumpster number two. Dinah, in fury, walked away and left them to it. It was madness, possessive madness, she raged, not to let others have what they had no use for themselves. The second dumpster was only half full at the end of the day, when the sons drove off with a sofa and a television set stuffed into the back of their van. That evening first one neighbour and then another scaled its steel sides and rescued Bill Bender’s walking stick, some of his photo albums, part of his shell collection, a couple of paintings, numerous books. But Dinah, convinced that his filing cabinet of writing was gone, stayed in her garden, tearing a leaf into tiny bits, until Lew came over. He still walked Buddy almost every evening, and Buster too, since Jack had no fondness for dogs. He and Dinah sat on the back step, and she dropped her head on his shoulder. Lew, a battle-weary heritage architect, didn’t offer false comfort, for which she was grateful.

That night the windows were open and Harriet’s winter ears, still unaccustomed to the sounds outside, were overstimulated, as if by a Cuban fan a foot away. She couldn’t sleep. The moon was full. It was warm.

Kenny woke up in the middle of the night, rolled over, and was falling back to sleep when he heard a crash, and then the sound of somebody moaning outside.

Another moan, another feeble cry, and he got up and looked out the window. The moon was bright enough for Jean Simmons to read by and Marlon Brando to tell her so. The sound came from Bill Bender’s driveway next door. He got his dad.

When Lew hoisted himself over the side of the dumpster and found Harriet spread-eagled on the detritus of Bill Bender’s life, apparently having slipped and toppled and cracked her head against the hard edge of a video box
(The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
, what moved him most was finding in her pocket, not the tissue he was hoping for, in order to wipe the blood off her head, but the fern he had given her months ago, laminated, like a library card.