Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 32: “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths”

When I awoke the following morning, the necklace lay on my nightstand, glittering. As I am in the habit of locking hotel room doors behind me, I knew exactly how the necklace had got there, and I knew that Harriet would be distraught, frantic even, to find the fault, the flaw within her that drove the necklace away.

She did not answer her telephone, nor, initially, my knocks on her door.

“It’s me, Harriet,” I said. “It’s me.”

She finally opened the door to a room with all curtains drawn, dark and desperate. She had not slept in her bed, nor had she changed clothes from the day before. The room smelled musty, of age and of grief.

“It left my hands,” she said. “I held it and then it became air, just so much space.”

“I have it,” I said.

“I thought so,” she said. “Or that it had gone back to Madhuri.”

Then, and only then, did I realize that I had not told her about Madhuri. “No,” I said. “It would not have gone back to Madhuri.” And then, as if my emotions had to travel the non-Athansor way to catch up with me, I began to cry. Which, looking back at it now, was probably the best thing that could have happened to Harriet.

“Oh, dear,” she said, and embraced me with arms suddenly strong again. “Nachiketa, what’s the matter?”

“Madhuri…,” I began.

“Gone,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And she,” said Harriet with complete matter-of-factness, “was the mother I should have been.”

And I, simply responding to truth when I heard it, said, “Yes.”

“Well,” said Harriet, all business now, determined, “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Have you had breakfast?”

“No,” I said.

Next she was on the phone to room service, and ten minutes later there arrived a breakfast fit for a king and a queen, after which Harriet, as if drugged, promptly fell asleep and did not wake up until early the following morning.

She was at my door, her necklace, which I had left on her nightstand the day before, in plain view around her neck. “It stayed,” she said.

I was still trying to rouse myself all the way awake, gradually making out my mother in the doorway, dressed for mountaineering it seemed.

“What time is it?”

“Time for a morning walk,” she said. “I have a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches here,” and patted a large brown shoulder bag.

I looked at my watch, which said a quarter to six. “Give me five minutes,” I said.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be outside. It’s a wonderful day.”

Sleep had done good things for her. Color had returned to her cheeks, patted by the morning chill. “Do you want me to take that?” I asked, indicating the shoulder bag.

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.” And handed it to me, quite heavy with breakfast-to-go, courtesy, no doubt, of Ms. Graessli.

“What did you do yesterday?” she asked. And added, “Sorry to abandon you like that.”

“Walked around a bit,” I said. “Read some. Waited for you to wake up. In vain.”

“I needed that,” she said. Then, again, “Sorry.”

The morning air was fresh with the smell of dew and almost frost. You could not help but wake up. The sun had already climbed above the hills and dew was rising into long sheets of mist in the valley below. I buttoned my jacket against the cold, and took in the vibrant day.

Harriet was waiting for me to finish, not quite impatient, but ready to get going.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Nowhere special,” she said, and began walking. “Along the trail. I just want you to smell the morning.”

I arranged the shoulder bag for comfort and followed her.

I caught up with her, and again, as if we were an old married couple, her hand found my arm and took it.

“It stayed,” she said after a while.

I looked at her, and at the top of the necklace. “I can see.”

“I don’t know what I did differently.”

“You slept,” I suggested with a smile. I meant it as a joke.

“I’ve been up for a while,” she said, taking me seriously. “It seemed quite happy to stay.”

Then she said, “You really believe that you don’t die, when you die, don’t you? That you continue.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You know that, you said.”

“Yes.”

“How? How can you know? Do you remember dying?”

“No,” I said. “I wish I could, but I don’t.”

“How, then?”

“Attra,” I said. “After he died, and left you in New York, he stopped by in London on his way back to India.”

“Stopped by?” She said, then drew a quick breath as she remembered something. “You told me in a letter, a long time ago.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I didn’t really understand. I thought you were trying to cheer me up.”

“Well, I was.”

“No, I mean, I thought you were making it up to cheer me up.”

“No, I wasn’t making it up.”

“Talking to you out of thin air?”

“That’s what he did.”

“The bigger sloughing?”

“He died in New York, but didn’t. Just changed skins. The bigger sloughing.” I looked over at her and now she understood.

“He really did come to me in London. Not, of course, as a body, but as a being, as a soul, a spirit, and very unmistakably Attra. I’ve known him all my life and there was no mistaking him. It was Attra.”

“And you spoke?”

“That is not the right word. First, somehow, he invited me out. Out of my body. Into a not quite light. And there we not talked, but communicated nonetheless. And there was — is — no doubt in my mind about it: I was spirit, free of my body, communing with another spirit, free of his. And in that half-light there was no death, Harriet. Only life. No time, only being. And, so wonderful.”

“You are lucky, so lucky,” she said.

“But you see, don’t you? I am not special. Neither is Attra. We are all that way. Spirits.”

“And that includes me, I suppose is what you’re saying.”

“Without a doubt.”

“You are not trying to fool an old woman, just to cheer her up?”

“No, I am not.”

We had reached another bench. Perhaps the one where I first found her. She steered me towards it. “Coffee,” she said.

We took turns drinking out of the Thermos cap, and the black, steaming coffee tasted as good to me as coffee has ever tasted. It agreed with Harriet too, who sipped and gazed and sipped some more.

Then she handed me the emptied cap, and said, addressing me, but speaking as if she was rehearsing something she was meaning to tell me later. “What I have not told you, and what you may not understand, Nachiketa, is that I have been reduced to myth. That is all I am now in the eyes of the world. That is all I have left to define me. And I have to stay myth, I have to keep it intact. The myth is me, I am the myth. Don’t you see?”

I did — the words made sense — though not completely.

“I am my pictures,” she continued, “and I have always been as hard to touch and feel, as unattainable as any of them. I have always been beyond reach. That is the myth. I have always been secretive. That is the myth. And I cannot change that now, Nachiketa.”

She searched my face for agreement, understanding.

“I cannot own you now,” she said. “I cannot now become a mother. It would kill the myth, it would ruin my legacy.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. I’m not asking you…”

“I know you’re not. But soon you will wonder why not, and I am telling you. There is no longer a Harriet Brown, the person. She has ceased to exist. These fingers do not exist.” She flexed her hand. “These old eyes that like to hide behind dark sunglasses, do not exist either. They are all gone. All that adds up to Harriet Brown is gone, leaving nothing but legend in their place. Nothing but myth.”

Her eyes left my face, and she took in the sky. “That is all I am now.”

“I used to think about it,” I admitted. “I used to wonder. But I’ve come to accept it the way it is. And I do understand, I promise. I do not want to jeopardize your legacy. You are the greatest film star that ever lived. The most beautiful face that ever graced the screen. Your myth is one of beauty. I would never want to hurt that. Not for anything.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

Her hand found my upper arm and squeezed it. Then she leaned against my shoulder, almost like a beloved wife against a trusted husband’s, and she said nothing for a long time.

“How I wish my face had been a poem instead.”

I said nothing.

Then she recited, almost into my shoulder, quite effortlessly, one of Yeats’ most beautiful words:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet

But I, being poor, have only my dreams,

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“Yeats,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And do you know when it was written?”

“No.”

“Well, it was published in eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, which makes it eighty-six years old, six years older than I am.”

I said nothing.

“And it is still as beautiful as on the day it was born.”

My mother had just said something so true that I felt tears filling my eyes. But she did not notice, and was not done.

“But I, my art, my life, I am not a poem. I am a face, only a face. I am skin and cheekbones and eyelids ravaged by time. A face torn by conflicts, stretched by drying skin and damned by shrinking lips. And I, instead of smiling forever from behind a beautiful poem, like Yeats does, I am trapped within this prison of a skull, draped by a dying blanket of wrinkles and scars, under a wild tussock of gray hair.”

I made to protest, but she didn’t even notice.

“I’ve often thought how strange life is,” she continued. “You go along and you accept whatever is there as fact. As lasting. You put on your face and your makeup and everything and you get going.

“All of a sudden, one day, there’s a hand that comes — in my imagination, every seven or ten years or whatever — a hand that sweeps over the face and leaves behind it a different face, slightly changed, weaker. And it’s equally revolting each time.

“Still, I’ve been protecting it, caring for it, sacrificing to it, living for it. But it’s just a face, just a face, always just the face.”

“How I wish,” she added. “How I wish I could un-wish it all and become a poem instead.”

“Are you sure that you can’t?” I asked.

“How can I?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. Truthfully.

“I am a good wisher,” she said. “Esh told me. Remember?”

I nodded. “I remember.”

“I am such a damn good wisher that what I wish for comes true, and stays true. That’s the problem. That’s my curse. I’m too good at it. I remember so clearly when I was a girl in Stockholm, wishing for nothing else, nothing else. And it came true. And now I’m stuck with it.”

“Are you sure?” I said again. “Maybe you are so good that you can un-wish it.”

“No, Nachiketa, I am good but not that good. But,” she began and then fell silent, as if what she had thought of needed some more time to settle.

“But,” she said again, “perhaps I can free myself by killing the myth.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Please. Don’t do that.”

“I have things to think about now,” she said, and roused herself. She stood up and began walking up the path, back toward the village; leaving me sitting with the thermos cap in hand, where I remained, for I knew that she needed to do this thinking on her own.

© Wolfstuff