Garbo Laughs (20 page)

This is where her sharpness has gone, Harriet realized. Into covert operations. Into an elaborate centrepiece, and the centrepiece is loyalty.

It was hard work. Hard work to have to be so buoyant and apparently well balanced in her widowhood. And hard work to be her niece.

The day before, in preparation for the visit, Harriet had hidden most of their movies in the basement: all of Cary Grant,
West Side Story
(bad old Jerome Robbins),
On the Waterfront
(down with Elia Kazan) – leaving out John Sayles,
Some Like it Hot
, Charlie Chaplin, and a documentary about the father of the documentary, John Grierson. She advised Kenny not to mention Frank Sinatra when Leah was around. “I don’t think she’s a fan.” She reminded him and Jane about Lionel’s history of being blacklisted. “Lew?” she said. “You explain.”

But Kenny said he knew what being blacklisted meant. Your name was put on a list and you couldn’t get work. Yes, said Lew, and the list was circulated to all employers by the
FBI
in the States or by the
RCMP
in Canada, telling people not to hire them. Not just for being communist, or friendly with communists, or being anti-fascist before the war, but for being union organizers, “which they saw as being communists,” piped up Jane. “I know about the Cold War,” she said, “but why did they call it
cold?”

Lew, who was standing at the sink wiping tomato sauce off his shirt – “Your father’s a Red,” teased Harriet – said the Cold War was the battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for world supremacy, and they called it
cold
because most of the time they weren’t killing each other, they were killing people in the countries they were trying to dominate. “One of Lionel’s books has a lot about it.”

“One of his books that went nowhere,” Harriet said. “Poor Lionel. A sad old gentleman.”

“Nobody was able to defend themselves,” said Lew, still scrubbing away at his shirt, and calmly explaining the immoderate past as he was in the habit of explaining urban travesties to his architecture students. “Right-wing politicians linked the enemy outside to the enemy inside. They claimed that union organizers were communists and communists were foreign
agents. The only ones who didn’t get blacklisted were the ones who turned in their friends.”

“And if you didn’t turn in your friends,” Harriet said, “they were indebted to you for the rest of your life.”

Leah picked up a spoon and rolled the handle between her small, capable fingers. Harriet saw her eyeing it to see if it was clean, saw her taking in the kitchen, the whole house, and judging them on their taste and income. But what Leah said was, “You’ve done a good job with your kids. I mean it, darling. You’ve got nice kids. I always know what the parents think of me by how their children treat me.” She made that squeaking, sucking sound with her teeth. “I can always tell if the parents have said nasty things about me.”

“Lew’s the wonderful parent,” said Harriet, getting up and going over to the sink.

Leah followed her with her dirty cup. She saw the baking soda beside the stove. “That’s smart,” she said. “Everybody should do that.” Then she looked around for the dishwasher, but Harriet didn’t have a dishwasher. “But everybody’s got a dishwasher,” Leah said.

“We don’t want one. We don’t need one.”

“You mean Lew doesn’t want one. It’s Lew, isn’t it? He won’t spend the money.”

Harriet’s face tightened. She returned to the table and Leah followed her and sat down too. “What
I
don’t understand,” Leah said, “is why the children of all my friends make less money than their parents.”

“Stop it,” Harriet said softly, but Leah wasn’t deaf.

“Stop what?”

Harriet didn’t answer.

“Stop what?”

She sighed. “Stop putting Lew down.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I like Lew more than you do.”

Harriet glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only ten-thirty in the morning, on the first day of a visit whose duration she was too cowardly to ascertain. As a child,
you were loud
, her mother had told her. Then some line to her tongue snapped, and for years she had almost nothing to say. Leah, she knew, still saw her as the tall, shy kitchen help in that villa full of intimidated guests. Unknown to Leah, however, was Harriet’s violent temper, which erupted only once in a while. As a girl she had smashed a plate over awful Owen’s head. At school she electrified her classmates by banging her fist on her desk in an argument about the word
oblivion
. Once, she threw a telephone across the room. Also a quart of partly skimmed milk. The milk she’d aimed at Lew.

Kenny came into the kitchen and asked if they’d heard of whist. Was it like bridge? He’d been reading Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
. Leah said it was. Before there was bridge, there was whist. Then he asked if she knew how to play, and she said no, neither game. Then Harriet said she thought bridge was a waste of time, that in her experience people who played bridge – people like Lew’s Uncle Milt and Dinah’s mother, Ida – were not too bright.

Kenny couldn’t believe his ears. He couldn’t believe his mother would say such a thing of someone who was a friend. To Harriet’s astonishment, tears filled his eyes. He went to the drawer in the kitchen counter and got out a paper napkin to wipe
them. He said, “How would you like it if I called Ida up and told her she wasn’t very bright?”

“I won’t tell her. I don’t tell people they’re not very bright. I don’t even like the word. Actually, I hate the word. But some people aren’t as bright as others. Ida isn’t as bright as Dinah.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, wiping the tears off his face. “I can’t believe this.”

“What? That I’d say someone isn’t as bright as someone else?”

“That you’d say someone isn’t very bright who thinks she’s your friend.”

“I could say I’m not bright enough to play bridge. That’s true too.”

She watched his thin, reproachful back as he headed upstairs again, then turned to her aunt, embarrassed by her bumbling, stupid self, embarrassed and worried about her infinitely sentimental son. “He gets so worked up,” she said.

“He’s perfect,” said Leah. “I want him.”

Dinah Bloom dropped by in the early afternoon when Leah was upstairs with the kids. “So is she moving to Ottawa?” asked Dinah.

“I haven’t asked.”

Dinah gave her a look of amused pity. “Then I’ll ask.”

Outside, the weather was turning every house into an icy ship on an icy sea. Branches were coming down, more and more people were without power. Dinah said that she’d gone out to use her car and found it completely encased in ice with the ice
scraper inside. She’d had to borrow loud Ray’s, and he was wearing an eyepatch because a splinter of ice had flown into his eye when he scraped off his van. Her mood was jaunty, even excited, while Harriet could only think that if she took Leah anywhere at all, her aunt would fall and break a hip, and then they would never be rid of her.

Dinah had been on the phone to Fiona Chester, and Fiona had told her about a bad ice storm during the war when soldiers had to break up the ice on Bank Street with picks. She had called an editor at the
Citizen
too, offering to write some articles for them. “I love a disaster, I can’t help it. It’s in my blood.”

Leah came downstairs with the kids, and ever afterwards she would refer to Dinah as “that reporter” and Dinah would refer to her as “the formidable aunt.” The only two women Harriet knew who called people “darling” and they had no time for each other. From the first moment – when the kids lit up at the sight of Dinah, who took them into her wide embrace, the three of them on the sofa and Leah displaced, Leah sidelined to the black rocker where she pointedly ignored Dinah’s greeting – from that moment they had no time for each other.

“How long are you planning to stay in Ottawa?” asked Dinah.

Leah’s reply was stiff, cool. “I can’t tell you. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“The weather might make up your mind for you,” said Dinah.

There was an awkward silence. Harriet, in her discomfort, felt the tug of loyalty and the pall of disappointment. She had hoped, somehow, that Dinah and Leah would hit it off. It was the Kenny in her, the wishful matchmaker.

Dinah asked, “Where’s Lew?”

“I’m here,” he said, and Dinah turned around. He was in the living-room doorway, gazing at her. Their eyes met and it was like fingers in a socket.

Leah’s narrowed eyes went back and forth between them. But Harriet was distracted by a descending spider. She held out her hand to it. A little one, colourless. It landed and raced across her palm and over the side. She turned her hand to keep it in play. “Look.” To Kenny, whose fear of bugs she wanted to allay. “It means no harm.”

It travelled the length of her hand, pausing on one knuckle while everybody watched, and she began to tell the story of how she murdered a spider in cold blood. She was visiting an Irish friend one Christmas, and when she put on her coat to leave, she saw a spider race across the hallway floor and instinctively reached out with her foot and stomped on it. Her friend was horrified.
Don’t you know they’re good luck? And now it’s going to rain
. “I’ve never stepped on a spider since, but somebody must have.”

The spider, so tiny and alert, sat quite still, and she saw that it wasn’t really colourless at all: its body greeny white and its legs like the pale eyelashes on a redhead. What interesting, silent, creaturely company it was.

Then it bolted, and though she rolled her arm around she lost it to the floor. The conversation resumed, but more musingly. She said, “Last night when I couldn’t sleep I watched part of
Nashville
again.”

Dinah drew in her breath approvingly, and Harriet said to her, “So. Did Keith Carradine really care about Lily Tomlin or not?”

“Well,” Dinah said with a knowing smile, “not very much.”

“But remember after they make love?” persisted Harriet. “When she says she has to go home and she’s moving around getting dressed? He phones another girlfriend? But as soon as the door closes behind her, he hangs up. Remember the look on his face?”

“I think he cares about her more than he knows.” Amused by the interrogation.

“Exactly,” said Harriet, glad to have pried loose an answer closer to the one she wanted to hear. “More than he knows, and more than
she
knows.”

What a marvellous scene that was, she thought, the way the movie led up to it, then concentrated upon it so fully: in the bar when he sang to her and we get the change, the surrender in her face, the sexual letting-down, as of milk in a woman’s breasts. And then the scene in bed when, for the first time, he actually shows interest in a woman. Asking her a question. Pleading with her to stay.
I like the way you put it. You say we see him “with one bed partner after another – with Geraldine Chaplin, whom he’ll barely remember the next day, and with Lily Tomlin, whom he’ll remember forever.” Not diminishing what you call his moody narcissism, yet not leaving it at that
.

Dinah spoke again, a little flushed. “I dropped in on a friend of my mother’s. Dottie Greenburg. She’s been without power since last night and she looks ten years older.”

“You look ten years younger,” Harriet said. “Really. You look remarkably well.”

Lew said he’d been downstairs listening to the radio list school closures and cancellations of plays and evening classes. “I phoned Duncan,” he said, “and he’s sitting in candlelight in the hospital. It’s going to keep raining.”

“Yes, it’s getting worse,” said Dinah.

Now Leah joined in. “You could get a book out of this,” she said to Harriet. “I’m serious. You should be taking notes for a novel. You might win a prize and get somewhere.”

“Delacroix never won a prize.” Harriet meant it as a little joke.

“Delacroix?” Kenny’s ears perked up. “Robert Mitchum was Charles Delacroix in
The Grass Is Greener.”

“I didn’t like him at all,” Jane said. “I liked Cary Grant.”

“Actually,” Harriet said, “he was very good. Cary Grant shouldn’t have agreed to do a movie with a man’s man like Robert Mitchum. Mitchum was sexier.”

Leah said to the room, “I give up.”

“Leah,
you
write a novel if you think it’s so easy.”

“I’m too old. So are you. Lionel used to say if you haven’t written a novel by the time you’re forty, you never will.”

“But he’s not read any more, is he?” observed Dinah in that amused and husky voice of hers that allowed her to get away with saying anything. “Don’t write Harriet off. It’s unkind.”

“Unkind? Unkind?
I’m the kindest person I know.”