Garbo Laughs (19 page)

“I feel like a polio victim,” she rasped into his ear.

“Your legs feel fine to me.”

At her house he sank backwards onto the steps and she slid off. He disentangled his arms, then helped her stand up and that was when they stumbled. His knees gave way, and they caught each other. “Oh, Lew,” she said. And that was it. That’s what did it.

I
t began raining six days later on Monday, January 5. The holidays were over, Kenny and Jane were back in school finally, but what a ruination. The rain meant the death of skiing, skating, going for walks. After supper, when Harriet remembered that they needed milk, she went out into the wet, slippery night and made her cautious way, under an umbrella, to the corner store. An umbrella in January!

The next morning they woke to a wet glass world. Rain was falling on frozen rain and freezing too, coating everything it touched and being coated in turn.

Fiona Chester, looking out her window, thought of the banished poet in the frozen town. And what was Akhmatova’s apt and moving phrase? “The ice like a paperweight.” Her spiked cane was in the closet, as were spiked overshoes made in Germany with studs from racing-car wheels embedded in rubber sole and heel. She tugged on trenchcoat,
footgear, plastic bonnet, took her cane, and stepped outside.

Every stem, twig, branch, pole, car was swollen by the frozen rain. It came from the southwest and the west-facing sides of houses were slick with ice. At the end of her street she turned right (to avoid the sloping alley) and on the next block heard a commotion at the Golds’. A door slammed and Lew Gold, the most patient of men, burst impatiently, dangerously, down his front steps, losing his balance then regaining it, while Harriet followed in her dressing gown, saying what? “I meant it all / in fun. Don’t leave me, or I’ll die of pain”? So went another of the great Russian’s poems.

Lew turned around and spoke to his wife. Perhaps he, too, like the husband in the poem, smiled calmly, terribly, and said, “Why don’t you get out of the rain?”

An old woman’s premonitions. Several days ago, on her way past this same stretch of houses, she saw Dinah Bloom stumble into Lew’s arms. Saw his face afterwards as he turned out of Dinah’s walk right into her path, quite unaware of himself or of her. And thought, Now he knows, and felt such a pang of sadness.

Harriet caught sight of Fiona Chester and waved, and hoped her hearing aids weren’t in. Lew was in the car, backing out of the driveway.

Later it dawned on Harriet that she should have offered to do Fiona’s errands for her. But she was in a state of despair. The school buses were cancelled and she had lost, after only a day, the solitude she had finally regained. The kids would be underfoot again, the radio said the freezing rain would continue, and Lew was on his way to the airport to pick up Leah.

The day before the rain began, Harriet and Lew saw, without knowing what it was, a signal from the sky. They were in the woods, cross-country skiing near Mackenzie King’s country estate, where the prime minister, half crazy for love of his mother and all dead things, had brought and reassembled pieces of demolished old buildings, fashioning them into something Italianate and temple-like. What a kook, thought Harriet, standing on her skis inside the phony ruins and thinking of the man his friends called Rex. She pictured him with Mary Pickford on his arm, and Shirley Temple, since the latter had also made his day by visiting Ottawa. A man who loved movies, but called them “plays.” A man who loved power and held on to it for all he was worth. Not unlike Leah, she thought. Not unlike her short, square, obstreperous aunt who ran a restaurant, and ran it well, until she became the last wife of a famous man, the controller of his papers, booster of his reputation, presenter, defender, champion, to say nothing of critic.

Harriet looked up at the winter sky, then out through an empty Gothic window at a handsome day of white-toothed snow and whiskery trees. Rabbits were about. She saw their tracks on either side of the path as she skied down to join Lew: sizable indentations that put her in mind of Richard Burton’s pockmarked face. Then dainty traces made by a chipmunk: Elizabeth Taylor before she put on weight.

A tree had fallen across the path, making lines in the snow and leaving a second imprint, hovering above the first, of twiggy shadows. The tree was too heavy to move. They went around it on their skis.

After a while they stopped to eat oranges. Harriet was for burying the peels under the snow, but Lew wouldn’t have it. He
took them from her and stuffed them into his pocket. The day before he had learned that a colleague of his had a tumour at the back of his tongue. For two months Duncan had had a sore throat and now they knew why.

Look at this orange, she said, holding the peels nearly reassembled in her hands before he took them from her. The colour was brilliant, cupped in her hands above the pure snow and below the astonishing sky.

Lew said, “They paint them, you know.”

She smiled. But here was a change: Lew did not.

With sudden feeling, he said, “We should do what we most want to do, right now.”

“While we have the money,” she agreed, “and the health.” Running her hand lightly over her chest. Her lump had turned out to be benign, just as she thought it would. And Dinah had some of her old energy back, at least for now. She said, “Dinah’s looking so much better, have you noticed?”

She didn’t ask him what he wanted to do, thinking she knew already and not wanting to encourage him: a move to Latin America (she was far too set in her ways) or Montreal (she’d end up humming “O Canada” under her breath).

He said, “When Duncan told us he had cancer, his breath was so bad it was hard to be in the same room. You never know your breath smells bad.”

“I do.”

“It’s impossible. Physically impossible. A person with bad breath never knows it.”

“Of course you do. You exhale into your palm.” She demonstrated. “And the smell of your breath comes back in through your nostrils.”

“A medical miracle,” he said, testy and unconvinced, since he had heard the opposite stated as fact on the radio.

Neither of them remarked upon the colour of the horizon, or the colour of the snow.

Today our skis slid over fallen beech leaves bleached to near-ivory by winter, and fallen maple keys
, she wrote when she got back to her desk.
We skied alone, the two of us, over a pattern of delicate shadows thrown by twigs that made the fresh snow look like a Japanese screen. We stopped to peel an orange and it was then I noticed how strange the light was on the horizon. Greenish, almost emerald, in colour. The snow too had a greenish tint by then, and there weren’t any birds in the sky
.

You become aware of the surfaces of things because every surface provides an opportunity for ice. The weight builds and builds.

On his way to the airport Lew drove slowly and saw several cars slipping, skidding, going slowly into the ditch, and birch trees starting to bend like women in the first stages of washing their hair. By week’s end their heads would be pinned to the ground.

A most beautiful catastrophe. Photographs wouldn’t do it justice, any more than they do justice to many faces, failing to capture the expressiveness, the tone, the quality of the stillness.

Waiting for Lew to return, throwing salt on the icy steps, thinking of the bad luck of being chosen not for dislike but for love, for a certain kind of hostile love, Harriet’s nervousness was fuelled, stoked, whipped up by thoughts of Leah and her difficult ways. The way she settled on you, for instance, as her favourite. The way she adopted you and referred to you as one of her “kids,” the way she wanted to have a following of young people who would admire and amuse her, the way she played one favourite off
another out of some bedrock conviction – where on earth did it come from? – that nothing less was owed to her.

And what Harriet wanted for herself, she thought, was the very opposite. What she really wanted was to be left alone.

She stood on the porch and looked out at the awful world.
How do you deal with bullies? How did Garbo deal with Louis B
.
Mayer? She went home to Sweden; she let him wait
.

But Harriet had nowhere to go. She was about to be trapped inside with one of Chekhov’s nasty women who take over your life and abuse everything, even the spoons.

The car pulled slowly into the icy driveway, and because Leah was the last person on earth she wanted to see, Harriet couldn’t have been more welcoming. She embraced her aunt, took her coat, helped her with her boots, led her by the arm into the kitchen. She hid her true feelings under an excess of cordiality, managing to convince even herself that she liked Leah far more than she did.

“Here she is,” she said to Kenny and Jane, who were reading the sports pages and the comics at the kitchen table. “Do you remember your Great-Aunt Leah? It’s been a long time.”

They looked up and saw nearly at eye level a very short, brisk-looking old lady with beautiful deep-set eyes, an extraordinary blue. A thick neck, soft veined cheeks, and grey hair that was shorter than Kenny’s. They didn’t remember her at all.

Well, she would fix that. She began to sing “Kennies from Heaven,” causing both children to light up and laugh, and their mother to laugh too. Harriet hadn’t seen her aunt in this new manifestation: as the widow of Lionel, who had died two years
ago, a very old man. Leah, at seventy-six, was on her own; she would have to be nicer to people, and so far she was succeeding.

“How tall are you?” Leah asked Lew when he joined them. “Six-foot-four?”

“Six-three.”

And she got up on a stool to see what the room looked like for somebody nearly a foot and a half taller than her. She even got them to snap a picture of her in that pose, admitting quite freely that she had always wanted to go on stage. Then she established herself at the kitchen table and began to give out gifts.

Like Jack she wore pants and a loose shirt that she didn’t tuck in, but her shirt was made of silk and her pants of the finest wool. Harriet had known her to stand in tears in the middle of a busy room – a party – and weep in memory of a long day of shopping when nothing but nothing would fit. I
want to look rich! I want to walk into a store and have people look at me and think:
RICH. A peasant-duchess, thought Harriet, vain about her good taste even as she sucked air through her teeth, making a sound that was somewhere between a thin whistle and a squeak. Harriet pictured a mouse sliding to a halt on a polished floor.

“In Italy today it’s
Il Giorno della Befana,”
announced Leah, “and I’m
la Befana
, the old woman who gives out gifts on the Feast of the Epiphany. You Anglo-Saxons,” she said, “you don’t know what you’re missing.”

Harriet looked at the others. “My anti-English aunt,” she said wryly. But Leah seemed to enjoy the crack.

Was it going to be easy then? Harriet wondered. Was all her alarm mere stage fright? So often it was exactly that. So often her wild trepidations gave way as soon as people arrived, and she rose to the occasion and outdid herself, urging everyone not to
leave as it got late, but to stay longer. From having been dangerously overwrought, she became oddly, dangerously disarmed.

You’re always like this, Lew would remind her, his old-school hospitality completely at odds with her various fears. But he was like the Irish king she’d read about, who was so constantly giving that his right hand grew longer than his left.

The gifts were from Florence: a box of fine writing paper for Harriet, leather gloves for Jane, leather wallet for Kenny, silk scarf for Lew. Without a doubt, they were being wooed.

And Harriet thought, Where has her sharpness gone?

Harriet had lasted only the one summer working for Leah, that summer she was nineteen and chopped onions and made beds under her aunt’s flattering, tyrannical eye. Leah went through as many servants as Harriet’s father went through dental nurses. A panther in the kitchen. Moody, unpredictable, muscular in her watchfulness. In later years, on return trips as the favoured visiting niece, Harriet had had a chance to study further her aunt’s effect on people.
Dear Pauline, This is how you have to be in Leah’s company: subservient without being servile, attentive without being spineless, opinionated without being disagreeable. You have to be interesting and insecure, and in need of love. She chooses her prey well: plucky, nervous women who want to be liked. There are plenty of them around. For instance, the Sarah she chose as her Sarah was Jack’s second wife: tall, thin, eager, kind – a funny generous woman upon whom she lavished many gifts. She had nothing but praise for her, and indeed she was a lovely woman with just the right amount of insecurity (large), deference (medium), and loyalty (total)
.

After the gift giving, after Lew and the kids drifted away, Leah began to talk expansively and at length about one thing: the way people treated her, and how she reacted. And she wove
Harriet into the picture. “You would never do this, you are not that kind of person,” she said. “They are, but you aren’t.”

First came the story of the stepdaughter with whom she had always been at odds, Lionel’s last-born and favourite, Enid, who had written to her to say,
For thirty years you have burrowed into my life in order to undermine it
. And Leah was all innocence, all amazement. She admitted that, yes, she had taken Enid’s son to one side to tell him how terrified he was of his mother when he was little, but it was Enid who was unstable and always had been; it was sad. Then she told Harriet about the nephew who avoided her, and the cousin who refused to let her stay in his house, relating these stories to show how well she coped with rejection, and how she got even.

This is how she got even: she set traps. She pretended not to have taken offence, inviting her lulled victims to meet someone they wanted to meet – Enid to meet an important movie producer whom Leah happened to know – or to have some memento of Lionel’s they couldn’t resist owning – a first edition of
The Leopard
to the nephew who avoided her. Then at the last minute, and innocently, she pulled the olive leaf out from under their feet.