Garbo’s Faces
a Novel — Part 16: Forgetting
Christmas 1959 was a lonely affair. I had known my mother a full year now, and I wished I were back in New York with her. Although she had told me about her holiday plans, I had still hoped that somehow she would change them, that she would invite me back. But she did not. She was busy, whether by design or not, surrounded by friends and on an impossible schedule, and though she returned my calls, they were rushed, and a little strained, as if I were imposing. My feeling — and it’s perhaps the wrong word, it was more like a wind, a distant wind, stirring five time zones away — was that she was trying to forget, or had already — despite finding the necklace again — forgotten.
The forgetting I’m talking about is not the complete forgetting that blots out and renders the past entirely unhappened. No, it’s the forgetting that even though events do leave a trace, robs these traces of emotion, of life, and once so neutered can be doubted, can be labeled delusion, dream, what have you. Can be labeled anything that does not challenge or conflict with the real world — the one which does look kindly upon competition.
I am familiar with this forgetting, for as winter rolled into spring, it began to catch up with me too, and had it not been for my tiger’s-eye, which I still always carried, I reached a point late in the spring of 1960 where I could have said, with near certainty, that the whole thing was fantasy, that I had imagined the lot. Well, not my mother of course, but all that business with the white horse and Pearly Soames and Oskar Lindberg and the trolls. But there was always the tiger’s-eye to wink me back, and seeing it change both in size and intensity as it nestled in my hand: I knew.
And I had the record of the song. Playing it helped too.
Then, how come on the way home from work, jostling with polite and not so polite co-commuters on the tube, I could forget all about it? How come I didn’t smell the summer morning and see the troll jugglers again? How come the weight of the tiger’s-eye did not sing to me constantly: I am real, I am real?
To be honest, I don’t know. It is something the world does to us, I’m sure of it, jealous of competition. Thou shalt have no other worlds before me. Only I am real.
But I did know snake talk, and I had my tiger’s-eye, and so I found it possible to breathe under water, to remain fish, albeit with effort at times.
Not so, apparently, for Harriet. And it got worse.
Her letters grew short and mundane. Then more infrequent. Then none.
By late spring she did not return my calls and by early June her phone number had changed. She may even have moved, I could not tell.
I read in the papers that she was back in the Mediterranean, on some yacht or other with Mr. George Schlee. Marriage on the horizon for the mysterious one? one paper asked. No, said another, Mr. Schlee was married and they had it on good authority that his wife would never agree to a divorce, estranged or not.
Jiddu stopped by twice that spring: his customary short visits. Almost like he was fulfilling some sort of father and son interaction quota. Nonetheless, I thought of telling him everything — perhaps he could shed some light on Harriet’s withdrawal — but each time we met he was so damn teachy, and the one thing I did not want him to analyze or pick apart or otherwise try to invalidate was my journeys with Harriet. So my conversations with Jiddu steered a formal and quotidian course, always. Unfortunately.
Then, late June by now, Madhuri called. She had never called before — I didn’t even know that she had my telephone number. But one Sunday morning the phone rang, I picked it up, and there she was.
“Nachiketa,” over an amazingly clear line. She could have been in London.
“Yes,” I said, then recognizing the voice: “Madhuri!”
“You don’t call me,” she informed me.
“Been so very busy,” I tried.
“No letters,” she accused. Which was true, my last missive to her had been a Christmas card with a brief letter to go along with it, promising, again, that I would tell Harriet that Madhuri wanted to see her, which, I now realized, I had forgotten all about.
“And when are you coming? With her?” And then she switched to snake talk: “You have invited her?”
“No.”
A sharp silence said she was upset with me. Disappointed. Her silences spoke well. Carried messages just fine.
“She does not call back,” I said, truthfully.
“So, she knows I want to see her,” she said. “Perhaps she’s hiding.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, mimicking Lana, our secretary, who would implore anyone who said anything out of the ordinary to not be silly, always with a smile.
“I may be many things,” Madhuri answered, quite coldly, “but I have never counted silly among them.”
“Sorry,” I said, getting hold of my tongue again. “I mean, how could she possibly know?”
“How could you possibly ride a white horse into six years earlier?” she replied.
“Point well taken,” I said.
“She does not want to see me,” she declared.
“Why ever not?” I asked.
“How should I know? She is your mother.”
“She does not even know you,” I said.
“I think, dear Nachiketa, that this simply is not true. I think she knows me very well. Well enough to stay away,” she added.
She was getting on in years, and I was tempted to ascribe her strange certainty to this fact, when she intercepted me: “And these are not the ramblings of an old woman,” she explained, which made much blood rush to my face, only to gather what was already there and leave with it. I had to sit down. No chair. I slid down onto the floor, back to the wall. She had eyes somewhere in this room. Good ones.
“No,” I managed. “No. Of course not.”
“You must tell her,” she said again.
When I didn’t answer, “Did you hear me? You must tell her.”
“Yes, Madhuri, I heard.”
“Good. So you will ask her then?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she echoed. And hung up. Not so happy with her grandson.
Much easier said than done.
I could not get hold of her. I did, however, manage to speak to Mr. Beaton, who was very hard to reach as well — he too had changed his number — and I only managed to find him through a friend of a friend of Mr. Hawkes, my boss, who, while she did not have his new telephone number, knew where he lived. I simply parked myself there one Saturday until he came out.
To no avail. Mr. Beaton and Harriet were no longer on talking terms, and he did not know how to reach her either. He had also been the victim of her number change.
In effect: I had lost my mother again. She was not calling, nor writing me. And I could not reconcile why.
By December, Madhuri had called four more times, each time wondering where she was and why I would not tell her. She can be very unreasonable sometimes, and would not understand that I had no way of reaching Harriet. Again, and again, I promised: Yes, I will tell her, yes, yes.
By that Christmas, 1961, I knew something was terribly wrong when I read in a weekly magazine that Harriet had been in London the previous month to visit Sydney Guilaroff while he worked as the hair stylist for Elizabeth Taylor on the Cleopatra set. Harriet had slipped in and out under everybody’s radar and the magazine, which prides itself on its stable of sleuths, did not find out until after she had left. She had apparently slipped up from Switzerland, before heading back home to New York.
But the real point was that she had been in London and had not called me.
Nothing.
© Wolfstuff
