Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 27: The Final Letter

I had expected a phone call or at least a letter as soon as Harriet returned to the apartment to discover that I had been there.

But nothing. She did not call, nor did she write. And by now — I am ashamed to confess — I was sufficiently cross with her to leave it up to her. If she didn’t want to hear from me, well fine, she wouldn’t.

And with some effort (rejection fueled it) I managed to push her first out of my mind, and then out of my life to a large extent. Thanks again to my work and to my books, Harriet grew more and more shadow that only now and then would flit across my heart, only to then hide again.

It was almost a year later, in the late summer of 1963, that she danced back into my heart a little more tangibly. The Empire Theatre in London, I read, was screening a series of her films to sold-out houses. Harriet’s West End comeback, said the papers, was so successful that even MGM’s expectations had been surpassed. It created quite a stir. Even Hawkes was talking about it in the office. He had been to a couple of the shows and said more than once that she was a wonder of a woman.

This was as good an excuse as any to write her again, and I unresolved my resolve to wait for her to contact me, and I wrote:

London

August 18, 1963

Dear Harriet,

I have heard nothing from you for well over a year now and I sometimes wonder if you still remember me. Or those things we did. Our adventures.

I am writing to tell you that you’ve made quite a comeback here in London. People are filling the Empire Theatre every week to watch your movies. Nothing but praise in the press, nothing but astonishment at your screen presence and your acting, even twenty years after you took leave of that part of your life.

Also, I’m writing you to confess that I haven’t written because I am not a little cross with you for not calling, or writing, even after I flew all the way to New York to see you. Surely you know that I did. I find your silence hard to understand and impossible to reconcile.

Nonetheless, I hope you live a happy life, and that you can steal perhaps a few minutes from somewhere to answer this letter.

Despite your silence, I love you still,

Nachiketa

Although it took nearly three months, a reply did finally arrive. A strange letter in a way. Strange in that it did not acknowledge the year-long silence, and in that it did not even refer to my letter.

Wit’s End

12 November, 1963

Dear Nachiketa,

I’ve finally returned from a long summer which I spent in Europe and on Barbados. It has been a busy time, thank God, for I don’t like being not busy — too much time to think and brood.

I met Ingrid Bergman on the island (Barbados) and I’m afraid I made a mess of it. She’s a very nice woman, if a little naïve, and she didn’t take kindly to me pointing out that she should be wary of buying land and building a house in that place. They steal everything there. If you leave your handbag for a moment, it’s gone. If you leave a tip for a waiter on the table, rather than giving it to him directly, he’ll never see it for someone else will steal it first.

I was just trying to be friendly with her, just trying to caution her. “I understand you’re in love with Barbados,” I said, “and that you’re going to buy a piece of land here?” And she answered, “Yes, we just love the beach farther up from here, and we’ve plans for a little house.”

I was only concerned that she and her husband didn’t understand the risks. “Here they steal everything,” I told her. “They’ll steal your clothes.” She said that this didn’t worry her, clothes were easily replaced. “If someone needs my clothes badly enough to steal them,” she said, “they can have them.”

I was just trying to help her, but she didn’t take it that way. I didn’t know what to answer her so I left her in the garden, and I didn’t see her again, except for briefly when we left Claudette’s house (we were invited to dinner at Claudette Colbert’s place).

I’ve heard from others that she’s mad at me and thinks that all I care about is not being stolen from. She doesn’t like me and tells people so. I guess she has a right to her opinions, but she doesn’t have a right to spread them around, I don’t think.

George has not been feeling well, not at all, and I am worried about him. Some days I don’t feel too well myself, but he’s worse for the wear. I think Valentina (that’s his wife) poisons him against me. He cares about me and I think she is very jealous about that. She doesn’t speak to me, and I think she is making him sick.

Now I have to stop.

How are things with you? Write and tell. Please.

Kisses,

Harriet

I read her letter several times, looking for I wasn’t quite sure what. Life, I think. For there was no life in it. What we had shared, our adventures. That was the thing I could not understand, that absence. The letter, though friendly enough, struck me as superficial, as a surface recording of her day-to-day somewhat paltry existence. Shallow is the word. It was as if I had lost a friend and gained an American mother, too busy and too worried about her own doings to care.

I answered her a few days later, and I must admit that I tried to make it hurt a little.

London

November 22, 1963

Dear Harriet,

It was nice to receive your letter, and I am glad to hear that your summer was busy. At times I wish my schedule was as full and varied as yours: I am afraid that I do occasionally find the time to brood on things, and then, quite often, I brood on why we have, indeed, fallen out of touch, again.

I know that you have your own life to live and that “officially” I don’t fit in, don’t exist. In fact, as Jiddu once told me: “No one knows, or must know. You have no mother, Nachiketa. Officially. You know that, of course. You cannot tell anyone.” Well, once the news of you had sunk in I could understand, see why, things had to be that way.

But I have since hoped that perhaps, perhaps through the time we’ve spent together, and through what we have experienced together — our adventures, as you, or was it Mr. Schlee, called them — that this might have changed.

It is now clear to me that it has not. I still have no mother, officially, of course.

It is as you yourself told me the first time we met (I remember it so clearly, standing in the bright cabin aboard that big ship): “You know that I can never be your mother,” you said, or words to that effect. And I remember answering, “But you are.”

That is an answer I still cling to, though you now seem determined, despite all we have been through, to stand by your original declaration.

I suspect that I have now become a problem for you, especially should the news get out. Have you told anyone? I mean, besides Mr. Schlee. I have, of course, told no one. The secret is safe with me. I have no mother, officially.

You ask how things are with me. Well, mostly I’m just fine. My work, as always, and as I’ve told you before, is my saving grace. I love what I do and I am good at it, competent. They’re even dangling a future partnership in front of me, the old rascals. But I love them (Hawkes and Rand — the owners). They taught me the craft and I owe them much. My sanity, for one, I think, sometimes.

Of course I would like to see you again, and talk to you again, but I feel that you have perhaps made some sort of choice, and this choice prevents us from meeting. Is that true? If it is I wish it could be unchosen. But, also, I do understand — sometimes. Other times I ask myself, does it really matter to her, what others think, what the world would think about her son, at this point in her life, at this time? Does it?

I look out the window and see that it is raining cats and dogs out there (or as Hawkes says, pigs and turkeys — not sure where he got that from, it doesn’t even make sense, but as much sense as cats and dogs I guess). I hear the steady pounding on the roof and the gurgle as it plunges down the drainpipe. In a sense I like the rain, makes the flat cozy and my desk a sanctuary.

I do read a lot. I just finished an amazing book by a countryman of mine, G. V. Desani, called All About H. Hatterr. It is a crazy ride through even crazier language and which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m also reading some of the American writers (I prefer them to the English, although I am a little partial to Dickens); John Steinbeck is impressive, I just finished East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath. He is a “strong” writer, by which I mean, he comes through with force in his books. A strong presence.

Do you still read nowadays?

By the way, Harriet, I just read an interview with Federico Fellini in one of our papers, in which he flattered you very much. You were the only movie star, he said, to achieve the status of a religious icon. You had, he said, “the austere looks of a cloistered empress.” And then went on to say, “She was always an unreachable living myth whom I would describe as the founder of a religious order called the cinema. She gave the cinema the sacredness of Mass.”

How do you like that? Perhaps you have seen it? If you have not, let me know and I can send you a copy. I bought one extra. A living myth, he said.

I will leave you alone now, but please call me or at least send me your current phone number so I can call you.

Loving you always,

Nachiketa

© Wolfstuff