She said, “I heard on the radio that softwood trees are suffering the most. Willows, birches, silver maples, Manitoba maples.”
“Manitoba maples,” coughed Dinah. “The bane of Bill’s existence. His radio was on, did I tell you? When Fiona and I went into his house on Thursday morning. The radio in his bedroom.”
Fiona, hearing her name, opened her eyes, and Dinah reached over and touched her arm. “Bill was such a man for facts and connections and history, wasn’t he?” And Fiona, nodding her head, fiddling with her hearing aid, wondered aloud what would happen to all of his filing cabinets and to the book he’d been working on for so long.
“Should we go into his house and get it?” Dinah asked her. “Rescue it, before it gets lost?”
“If it’s even there,” Leah said acidly. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“It’s there.” Dinah stared down Leah. “He showed me the filing cabinet crammed with everything he’d written so far. Should we rescue it?” she said again to Fiona.
Fiona shook her head. “His son Jeffrey came to see me. He needed a key to get into the house, and? I gave him mine. I don’t have a way of getting in any more.” Then, like the dormouse in
Alice
, she went back to sleep. Since Bill’s death she looked tinier than ever, and she was exhausted.
Ida was in the loveseat, the picture of health, her face supple and full, her eyes bright and amused. This is how Dinah will look in her seventies, thought Harriet, if she lives until then. Ida said, “That Bill Bender had a heart of gold. He used to make bread and bring it to Dinah when she was so sick. Can you believe that?”
“Ida,” Harriet said later on, after they had plates of food in their laps and glasses of wine within reach, and she and Ida were side by side on the loveseat, “tell me how to run a movie house.” Her request made them an island of movie talk amid the other conversations in the large living room.
“Movies used to be wonderful,” Ida said expansively. “People would go into a movie at any time, in the middle or partway through. You know when that changed? In 1960, with
Psycho
. Hitchcock wouldn’t let anybody in after it started.” In the early days, she told Harriet, movies changed twice a week, “and there were all these shorts and double features and animated cartoons and half-hour featurettes like
Blondie and Dagwood
. That dog was wonderful. Daisy.” She chuckled with affection, and even remembered the names of the actors who played Blondie and Dagwood. “Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake,” she said. “And there was
The Real Benchley:
Robert Benchley, doing his comic-essay films.” You could go in whenever you wanted to, she said, starting at noon on Saturday. It cost a quarter or a dime, depending on the theatre, and you stayed right through.
Children’s pictures in the afternoon, adult pictures in the evening. “But lots of kids hid in the bathroom for half an hour and stayed on for the evening shows.” She leaned back into the corner of the loveseat. “Going to the movies was a ritual. Larger than life. But now! You watch at home with the lights on and answer the phone when it rings.”
“What kind of movie house would make a go of it now?” Harriet had shifted her position, sitting sideways so that she could look at Ida without straining her neck. Her arm in its sling had started to throb.
“You can’t make a go of it now.”
“One that showed old classics?”
“I don’t know,” Ida said thoughtfully. “You’d have to find your audience.”
“How did
you
find your audience?”
“They found us,” said Ida, explaining that she and her David got into the movie business through the back door, after her uncle died and the family needed somebody to run the Rialto. “We ran it on the side. We still had the hat store on Sparks Street,” she said. “But the money we made off Gene Autry and John Wayne!”
“What about Joel McCrea?”
“Yes. Joel McCrea too. Good for you.”
The other conversations in the room had died away and everyone was listening to Ida now; even Kenny had put down his book. In its day, said Ida, the Rialto was known for the ten cent matinée, and you would get a newsreel, a cartoon, a first feature, a serial like
The Perils of Pauline
, and then the second feature. Cowboy movies, that’s what the Rialto was known for. Up the street was the Somerset, with a higher class
of movie, and farther up was the Capitol. “It was grand. A crime that they demolished it. It was like a palace,” she said. “You had to see it. The chandeliers!” But business began to go slack, she said, and they gave up the Rialto in 1960. The next owners dropped the price from thirty cents to twenty-five cents and showed triple bills instead of double bills, and they did better. “But you see what I’m saying? They offered something you couldn’t get anywhere else, a triple bill, and that brought in the audience.”
“Schoolkids,” said Dinah from the sofa, taking the glass of water that Jane had brought from the kitchen to quiet her cough. “Thanks, sweetheart.” And she made room for her on the sofa. “They were always skipping classes and sneaking off to the Rialto. I’d find algebra books under the seats. Geometry sets.”
“Single gloves,” said Ida. “Cigarette lighters. Student cards. Transistor radios. Hats and scarves and mitts. Once a year we’d bundle everything up for the Salvation Army.”
Harriet, the burgeoning businesswoman, wanted to know about the Strand.
“Ah, the Strand,” said Ida. “It had a very sad life. It never got going because it was too close to the Mayfair. You have to get out of the reach of other theatres, or you won’t get the films. The Mayfair got the pictures first, then the Rialto, then the drive-ins. By the time the Strand got them there was nothing left.”
“So the only way it would work,” said Harriet, musing aloud, “would be to do something so different it wouldn’t compete with the Mayfair.”
Leah broke in. “You could do a retrospective of all the later films Lionel didn’t get credit for.”
“A retrospective of blacklisted screenwriters,” said Jack with sudden interest. “That’s not a bad idea. I’d go to that.”
“Make it the Canadian campus of the Frame Institute,” said Leah. “We could have exchanges between Italy and Canada and get the government to pay for it. You’ll need start-up money, but I’ve got that. You’ll need a business plan, but I can do that too.”
“I thought I’d go to the bank,” Harriet said weakly.
“Why go to the bank when you can turn to family?”
“Because banks are simpler.”
“See what I mean? You need a business partner.”
“That’s one thing Leah knows about,” said Jack dryly and to no one in particular. But he rubbed his fingers together and tapped his forehead.
Harriet looked around for Lew, and found him in the plaid armchair, legs stretched out, arms crossed. He smiled at her and said, “Get Pauline Kael to come to the opening.”
“I know her,” said Leah. “A real frump.” She sent out a particularly long, thin, knowing whistle of air, and Harriet stared at her in disbelief. But it could be true, she realized. Her aunt knew all sorts of people through Lionel, though not as many as she claimed, of that she was sure.
“Stockings in loops around her calves,” said Leah. “A hole in her sleeve. She had her daughter with her when she came to us. That was after Twentieth Century-Fox took her and
McCall’s
magazine to task for panning
West Side Story
, and she was fired by
McCall’s
and didn’t write about movies for a year.”
“She didn’t like
West Side Story?”
Kenny was incredulous. He’d been stretched out on the floor, one leg twisted through a stool, and now he sat up.
“It wasn’t
West Side Story,”
said Harriet. “It was
The Sound of Music.”
“She hated
West Side Story
too,” said Leah.
“Then she’s an idiot!” said Kenny.
“She’s not an idiot,” said his mother. “She didn’t like it. She’s not an idiot for not liking it, and you’re not an idiot for liking it.”
“Her nephew lives here,” said Leah. “I’ll call him.”
“Her nephew?”
“I’ll call him,” said Leah.
After that the formidable aunt was in such a grand, gloating mood that she told Harriet how to write a novel. “This is what you do,” she instructed, saying she was passing on advice given to Lionel by a blacklisted editor at Knopf. Harriet listened, thinking there were no lengths of triumphant gall to which her aunt wouldn’t go. “You write a long letter to yourself,” said Leah, “in which you set down in a figuring-out sort of way what you want to write about. Then you go through it and underline what stands out. Those become chapter headings. Then you bring in the things that most concern you, that you want to find out more about. And you don’t put anything off, you don’t save anything for some later book. You don’t kid yourself that you’re going to live so long.”
“Did Lionel follow his advice?”
“Lionel unwrote in the afternoon what he wrote in the morning,” Leah said with disgust. “You know what Anglo-Saxon men are like.”
Jim Creak knocked on the door during dessert, and Fiona woke up again. She looked around at the plates of cake and said, “I can’t make a cake any more. My hands are stupid, and? there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Jim came into the room in his woolly garb, rumpled and bashful, saying he was sorry, he just got home, or he would have come earlier. As he sat down, taking the only available chair, his eyes rested on Dinah, whose glance slid away to the younger, beefy man on the sofa beside her: that must be the one whose legs he was supposed to break.
Lew had been observing, from his armchair in the corner, Dinah’s apparent coziness with Jack, which he understood, or thought he understood. She needed someone to lean on, and Jack had broad shoulders. But Jack also had the kind of cruel, sarcastic mouth that women seemed to fall for, and he didn’t know why. Dinah looked over at him every so often, her glance never less than tender and never more than philosophical. A realist about love, he thought. Unlike Harriet.
The arrival of Jim Creak sparked Lew’s interest. Here was the man who wasn’t afraid to champion love in public.
But Dinah, he noticed, was looking the other way.
It was Fiona Chester who put her hand out to Jim and thanked him for the song he had played on the radio, “And? I couldn’t agree more with what you said about love.”
“Nor could I,” said Harriet.
Leah’s sniff was so audible that Harriet said, “All right. What would you have said?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have made such a fuss.”
And Jack Frame started to laugh. “You made a fuss at Lionel’s funeral. I’ll never forget the way you gave him hell for not doing enough. Not writing the books he should have written, or pursuing the contacts he should have pursued. Then afterwards you shut yourself in your room and wouldn’t come out.”
“That’s not a crime. I wanted to be alone.”
“Garbo,” said Dinah into the silence. “The woman who had everything and threw it away with both hands. But that’s why she was so interesting.”
Harriet said, “That’s not why.”
Leah said, “She’s not even interesting.”
“She was so public,” Harriet said slowly, dissatisfied with her answer even as she formulated it, “and then so antisocial. That’s what made her so interesting. The contradiction in her personality. And her beauty, of course.”
“She wasted her life,” said the aunt. “She could have spoken out. She could have made a difference. But there was nothing to her. No politics.”
Jack began to yawn.
Lew buried his nose
in Jewish Currents
.
Dinah exchanged going-home glances with her mother, and Jim Creak noticed and stood up when they did and offered to walk them home. “‘I’m with you now,’” he said, an amused, self-mocking smile playing around his lips as he ignored Jack’s glare.
Kenny’s ears perked up. “Al Pacino!” he cried. “When he was in the hospital with Marlon Brando. Give me another one,” he begged.
“He’s good,” Jim said to Harriet. They had moved into the hallway. He was helping Ida with her coat, and he said, “‘I need him like an axe needs a turkey.’”
“Humphrey Bogart!”
“Nope.”
“It’s a woman,” said the helpful mother. “Barbara Stanwyck, to be precise.”
“Lady Eve,”
yelled Kenny, and Ida said, “She’s my favourite,” and Jim said, “Mine too.” They were ready to leave, but Kenny hung on. “Give me another one.”
“‘All I know about you is you stole my car and I’m insane about you.’”
“I know!” cried Jane, who had pushed her way into the hallway and was standing beside Dinah. “I know! Gary Cooper!”
“And what’s-her-name!” Kenny pounded his fist on his leg. “Marlene-”
“Marlene Dietrich,” yelled Jane.
“Shut up!”
“Don’t say ‘shut up,’” said Harriet. “Say ‘be quiet.’”
“But which movie?”
“I know,” yelled Jane.
“Shut up!”
“Kenny!”
“Desire!”
he yelled triumphantly. “Give me another one!”
“No.” His mom took him by the shoulders and moved him back a few feet, but he still wouldn’t give up. “Have you seen
The Usual Suspects?”
he asked Jim.
“Good movie. I liked it a lot.”
“She
won’t let me see it. Can you believe that? She’s always so mean.”
“No, she’s not. She’s really nice to you.”
At these words, Lew lifted his head from the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and stared thoughtfully through the doorway at the jumble of bodies in the front hall. He knew how easily Harriet was drawn in. Putting down his magazine, he went over to say goodnight, kissing Dinah on the cheek, and then her mother. Shaking Jim Creak’s hand and assessing him
anew. Behind him, in the living room, Jack took down Leah’s new address and Fiona let out a low snore.
Dinah Bloom had known other men like Jim Creak, overfond, overattentive, and wanting too much in return. She was a practised dodger, prepared, when he accompanied her and Ida back to her house, for him to put his hand on her arm and say, “Come home with me and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“No, Jim. Not tonight.”
Having known Stella, she knew too much about him.
He wants to do everything together He even wants to shower together
Stella of the many men, and boozy Jim Creak.