Garbo Laughs (34 page)

When Kenny came around the corner, he saw a blue car in front of his house. He came up from behind, and recognized Jack Frame through the rear window. His mom was sitting beside him and they were talking. And then – hey! They pulled away as if he wasn’t there.

He stood in the street and watched the car zoom to the end of the block, turn right and disappear.

So she forgot. She forgot it was a half-day at school. The front door better be unlocked, because he didn’t have his key.

It was locked.

He couldn’t believe it. What was the matter with her anyway?
I’ve been waiting for an hour! Where were you? I told you this morning! What’s the matter with you?
And what a sorry look she would have on her face.

After an eternity of five minutes he walked down the street to Dinah’s, and lucky for him she was home. He was mad, but all he told Dinah was that his mom wasn’t there and the door was locked. Ida and Dinah made a big fuss over him. They fed him
lunch, and kept him busy talking and eating. It was hard work being liked so much. After lunch Dinah needed to rest, so he watched
TV
with Ida, and every so often he phoned home, but there wasn’t any answer. Later, when Dinah woke up, she phoned too, but there was still no answer, so the three of them played poker for high stakes. Dinah asked him what news there was from his dad, and he didn’t have any news because his dad hadn’t called. Where is he this time? asked Ida. Chile then Mexico, he told her. That man sure gets around, said Ida. You know where I’d like to go? she said. Greece. She turned to Dinah. After your treatment’s over let’s go to Greece – the sun will put you back on your feet in no time.

“What treatment?” asked Kenny. Nobody told him anything!

“You’ll be in Havana,” Dinah said. “You lucky dog. You’ll be drinking
dulce de leches
laced with rum.”

“Bacardi,” said Kenny And mimicking Jean Simmons, “‘This would be a wonderful way to get children to drink milk!’”

Dinah laughed her rollicking, appreciative laugh, and he said, “Who was better in that movie? Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra?”

“What kind of question is that? You know the answer.”

This time Harriet picked up the phone. Dinah said to her, “Kenny’s here and we’ve been playing poker. He whipped my ass, but only because I let him.”

She handed him the phone and he said, “Where have you been?” He was blazing mad all over again. “I told you it was a half-day. Where did you
go?”

“I’m sorry. I really am. I forgot all about it. I got a movie for us,” she said.

“Which one?”

“My Fair Lady.”

“I don’t want to see
that.”
He was disgusted.

“You’ll love Rex Harrison. He was a great actor and a terrible man,” she said. “I know a reporter who kept hoping he’d hit one of his fans so he could print the headline,
SHIT HITS FAN
. Come home,” she said. “I’ve made cocoa.”

When he came through the door, she called out to him from the kitchen. Her face was sorry and the cocoa looked good. Jane had a marshmallow in hers. He looked around. “Where’s Jack?”

His mom gave him a strange look. “Jack isn’t here.”

“So where did you go?”

“How do you mean?”

“When you drove away and left me here.”

Jane intoned from
Charade
, “‘They left me there, Mrs. Lampert. They left me there. Six bullets in my legs and they left me there. They deserve to die!’”

His mom sat down. “Go easy on me, Kenny. I’ve had a bad afternoon.”

After she’d sat back in the car, Jack said, “I want to show you something. It won’t take long.”

“Where are we going?”

But he didn’t answer. After they turned the corner, he reached for her hand again. His hand was bigger than Lew’s, and she didn’t bat it away.

“Don’t look so worried,” he said with a smile.

He drove to his place on First Avenue, the first floor of a side-by-side in a block near Bank Street. His living room had an armchair and a large table covered with piles of paper. In pride of place was what he wanted to show her.

“Where did it come from?”
Having opened the old album and discovered, one after another, the most beautiful pressed ferns, mounted carefully and identified with a flowing script:
Asplenium flaccidum, Polypodium rugulosum, Asplenium lucidum, Cynthia dealbata
.

Someone who knew Lionel, he said, another screenwriter. Her great-aunt had put it together as a young woman in New Zealand.

Pasted between and beside the pressed ferns – this was what took her breath away – were pictures of old movie stars cut out of magazines.

“I thought you’d be interested,” he said.

She was more than interested. He pulled up two chairs, and she sat down and he sat beside her.

Here was Garbo. Sharing a page with
Diplazium proliferum
.

She said with wonder, “Do you recognize it?” It seemed to her it was the same one – the same fern that Lew brought back from Cuba, the same spear-tip fern that he’d put in her lap.

“Which?”

“I showed you this fern.”

“I remember you showed me a fern—”

“It was this one.”

She dipped down to the purse at her feet, pulled out her notebook, and wrote down the name. Then she went back to the beginning of the album – it was bound in green leather and quite
thick – and found an inscription:
Mounted and Botanically named by Miss Hattie Partridge, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 6, 1884.

A bluish white light of recognition flashed in her mind.

“Look.” She pointed with her finger at
Hattie
.

“You were her in a previous life,” he said.

No, she thought, that’s not it. It’s not that simple. You can’t pin down these floating coincidences that way. And yet she liked him for saying it.

Below that inscription was another:
Diana Mills from H.L. Partridge, September
15, 1925. She wrote both inscriptions in her notebook, pausing before she wrote down
September
15,
1925.
Then she went through the album, discovering Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Ina Claire, John Gilbert, and thinking, as she turned the pages, about the almost physical nudge that sets a story in motion, or makes you aware that you’re part of a story that’s already in motion, and has been for a long time. Garbo arrived in Hollywood on September 15, 1925.

Jack sat close to her. When she turned to him to express her amazed delight, he reached up and took off her glasses. His mouth, when he kissed her, tasted of peanuts.

She felt her heart quicken and go heavy. Such a mixture of arousal and dismay. And now she remembered whose hand it was that hovered around the inside handle of the pickup door.
You’ll like it
, he’d said.
She reminds me of you
. Was he setting her up again? Was all this part of a long payback by the man who hated Meryl Streep?

She pulled away. Then, putting her glasses back on, resuming her study of the album, she pitched into an embarrassed fever of talk about ancient ferns, the likely age of Garbo, what period this was, which movie; she turned again to the picture of Gloria
Swanson and bending to look at it more closely, as if she were a little scientist, said that when Grierson visited her movie set she ordered him off.
There’s a man here whose eyes are hurting me. Throw him out
. He had the fiercest eyes.

“What happened to her?” she asked suddenly of the screenwriter who inherited the album and pasted in the pictures of the movie stars. She checked the name at the front. “Diana Mills. Is she still alive?”

“Her son is.”

“What happened to him?”

He was watching her intently, and then he smiled, and she realized that he was the son. Jack. And Diana Mills, “a screenwriter who knew Lionel,” was his mother. Why hadn’t she known this before?

“What became of her?” she asked him.

“She committed suicide.”

Harriet stared at him. His eyes didn’t leave her face. It was as if he were dangling the information in front of her. And then he let it drop.

“She swallowed arsenic,” he said.

“No.”

“Like Emma Bovary.”

If there was a correct response to this, Harriet couldn’t think what it was. She sat stunned. No wonder his novels are full of suicide, she thought. Jack took on another dimension in her eyes as she sat there staring at him. But when she looked down at the album, ran her hand across a page, she wondered why Leah had never mentioned Diana Mills, why no one had. And her old wariness returned, not just about what he’d told her, but about
the creepy, manipulative way he’d told it. Jack and his mother, she thought.
Jack and his women
.

She stood up. No, she didn’t want a ride home, she had a few errands to do downtown, she would do the errands and take the bus home. She got herself to the door – Jack looked less surprised than amused, privately amused – and then she fled. She fled on foot and was halfway home before she stopped in her tracks. Her groceries!

Now what were they going to have for supper?

Pasta. They had pasta for supper.

Lew called that night, just before ten. Kenny and Jane came down the stairs as if it were Christmas. Thumping feet and pure excitement.

Afterwards, after he said he had found the perfect place for them on the southern coast of Chile, and she’d said, Marvellous, we’ll live like Neruda; after they’d laughed together and she’d pictured the ocean waves and smooth, black, volcanic rock and felt a great and welcome surge of love so that she was able to say with genuine warmth, I was worried, I know it’s hard to get to a phone, but I was worried; after the kids were back in bed, then she walked up to Bank Street to return the movie, and the air smelled wonderful. It smelled like fragrant dust. Young and old were out walking or sitting on porches. There was a light wash of green on the trees, and crocuses were ankle-high. Ottawa wasn’t so bad, after all, she thought, and really Lew was a peach. He had a beautiful voice. Always she noticed it on the telephone, a voice as flexible as a dancer’s spine, as flexible and relaxed as he was
himself, despite the failings he had that he wouldn’t admit to.

She passed the old school, newly renovated on the corner, then crossed the street and went down to the video store to drop off
My Fair Lady
, one of Audrey’s lesser efforts (even Audrey failed from time to time), although Jane had loved it until the end, when Eliza told Henry goodbye. “I hate it when she talks like that,” Jane said. “I wish she’d speak normally.” But Audrey, turning her neck into a concrete giraffe’s and pursing her mouth, said, “‘Goodbye, Professor Higgins, you will never see me again,’” and then she walked off in that ridiculous pink soup of a dress, as if rigor mortis had her in its grip.

On the way back it was light enough under the streetlights to see the dead squirrel, and to stop and study it. It was dead as a doornail. A dead black squirrel on its side, like a tiny black horse, really very elegant – one dark slit in its side, and one dark slit of an eye, lying on a takeout carton with spaces for four coffees. She straightened up and walked on, thinking of elegant horses painted on the walls of caves, or worked decoratively onto the shields of warlike cultures, as if death itself had a sense of design.

At home in the kitchen the tulips she had bought five days ago were in a state of utter openness, leaning as gracefully as. Audrey’s Eliza-neck refused to do, and reminding her of the long curve of the canal, which she considered Ottawa’s loveliest attribute, along with the two rivers and the green cliff beside the locks. The tulip stems made eight long curving canals above the surface of her white kitchen table. The phone call had been a happy one, beginning with the operator’s heavily accented Santiago voice, which she answered with a quick yes. Then on he came, his words making an odd echo that disappeared after a
minute or two, so that she heard, unechoing, the curving, graceful lines of his voice.

One less squirrel to eat her tulips. Alerted the first time it happened by the movement of a single blossom, in a row of ten, bowing down, and then the little hands reaching higher and pulling lower as if for a kiss. Munch went the squirrel and stuffed the tulip into its mouth.

One less squirrel. And one more image from a day that encompassed beautiful ferns and another tricky kiss; Audrey Hepburn’s neck and Cecil Beaton’s flowers; a long-awaited phone call from a country far away; then a walk up Sunnyside and a walk back, during which a plop of rain fell on her forehead and she thought that’s why the smell is so strong, so dusty, it’s about to rain – past the dead squirrel lying on its coffee-carton bier, and inside, to her sleeping children and her wide-open tulips.

T
he morning after he got home, Lew looked closely at Harriet’s long, pale, earnest face: all bones, all structure, and thinner than ever. Since the ice storm she had peeled forward, capable and tough, while Dinah recovered from the sickness that advanced in the fall. And yet it was Harriet who was losing weight.

At her behest he had begun to make drawings for possible renovations of the Strand when, and if, they were able to purchase it. They had taken a good look inside its cavernous interior, empty of seats but with stage and hardwood floor intact. It made sense to divide it in half, and he was trying to bring her around to his view – the screens would still be ample, and she could run more than one series at a time, bringing in film students from Carleton University, conducting her movie clubs, her dinner-and-movie nights, her Oscar Night in Ottawa, her Old Cannes on the Rideau Week, her series of silent movies accompanied by local musicians, her historical nights to mark the anniversaries of old classics in what she now described, in her business plan, as a genre-breaking non-profit cinema that would be part movie house, part museum, part film school, part coffee shop. Yes, she would make the pastries; indeed, she had plans to market Harriet’s Movietime Biscotti around the city. He was going along with her, since he had never seen her more intent, and perhaps it would work. But how like his father she was, how like his melancholy, obsessive, unravelling dad, who kept for years the pottery made by his teenage sons, and even mended it. But mended it in hostile fashion: thick rivers of glue ran down the sides of every reassembled bowl. Well, his dad had hated the pottery teacher in the end. Hated him for dismantling his sons’ ambitions and encouraging them to follow his own offbeat, unillustrious path. How like his erratic dad.