Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 4: The Christina

I receive an unexpected phone call in the summer of 1955.

I have just moved from Cambridge to London, where the endlessly well-connected Jiddu has found me a simply wonderful flat. The weather is warm and sunny and I’m looking for work as an apprentice architect, though not too hard, not yet anyway.

Truth be told, Jiddu has already found me a position with the well-respected, if rather stuffy, architectural firm of Grason and Hewitt, but I have already had second (and third) thoughts about that firm. To Jiddu’s credit he seems to understand why and has given me time to look elsewhere for something more to my taste, as he put it, before a final decision. I’m not looking too hard, though — Jiddu is very generous that way, and he’s given me until the fall to find something else. Meanwhile he’s paying my bills, so I am not starving.

This is the summer that the papers confirm that Harriet is no longer making pictures but lives in an apartment in New York and does not see anyone; and it is the summer when, as I said, I receive this telephone call.

The call is from a man who introduces himself as Mr. Beaton, and who, with little preamble, then proceeds to not so much invite as to order me to accompany him to Greece: We’re leaving in two days, he informs me, he has already purchased the tickets. Someone there wants to see me. This he says with a mixture of confidence and significance, as if letting me in on a vital secret.

Naturally, never having heard of the man, I decline and protest that some mistake has been made, so he finally gets around to explaining that the someone who wants to see me is Harriet, and that he is a friend of hers.

We left two days later. It was a Friday.

I had never been to Greece — only to India and England, and to America if you count the first two eventful weeks of this curious life of mine, which I don’t. Neither had I ever set foot on a boat quite as beautiful as the Christina. I say boat. That’s the wrong word. She was a ship. She must have been over a hundred meters long. The only boat I had seen up close before this was the Andromeda, the passenger freighter which brought me from India to England and King’s College. They were both seagoing vessels by definition, the Christina and the Andromeda, but that’s pretty much where their likeness ends.

White, sleek, and, well, dangerous is the word that came to mind, she lay quite still, although testing her mooring lines — which protested by creaking — as if impatient to get away, as if insulted by being tied to the dock. All I could do was gawk at her, a child again before a wonder of the world.

Mr. Beaton, so English that the moon falling down in his back yard would not have ruffled a single one of his feathers, was not quite as impressed, apparently, and left me to my gawking for a while to see about getting aboard, as he put it.

In my experience, there’s wealth, and then there’s wealth. And then there’s the Christina. What I had trouble reconciling, as I stood gawking on the dock, was how any one man — for Beaton had briefed me that the ship belonged to Mr. Onassis, one of the richest men in the world — could possess, privately, what surely should belong to nations. He owned many boats, Beaton had explained, the Christina just one of them. How does any one man amass such a fortune? And in one lifetime? There was no getting my wits around this, and I was still grappling with it as Mr. Beaton returned, trailing a short man who turned out to be Mr. Onassis himself, and who — much to my surprise — came at me with arms outstretched in welcome. Then he embraced me, and patted me on my back several times, fatherly: Welcome, welcome, welcome, kissed me quite wetly on both cheeks (to my continued amazement), then turned and led the way up the long gangway. Mr. Beaton fell in behind him and I, still stunned — the assault of welcome more like an unexpected whirlwind than anything else — brought up the rear.

Once aboard, we were guided by Mr. Onassis through a maze of dark, oak paneled passageways to finally arrive at a light brown, highly polished door marked: Lesvos.

He knocked, then again, then entered, closing the door behind him. After a short while he returned and signaled for me to go in. I hesitated, as if for confirmation, and he nodded, yes, you can, then stood aside and again gestured for me to enter. I finally did, alone, and I heard the door shut softly behind me.

I found myself in a large cabin — a stateroom is what they call it — with several large, rectangular portholes facing the sunlit sea. The cabin was very light, and smelled faintly of lemon. She was sitting in a low armchair, her face at first hard to perceive, an outline against the bright light of the sea behind her, but as my eyes adjusted, her features materialized, one by one.

She sat very still, looking in my direction, and did not rise to greet me.

Once I could see all of her properly, she struck me as an unfriendly woman with largish feet — I tend to notice feet, foundations.

Then, as her eyes met mine, she struck me as a very lonely woman.

Then, as she briefly looked away — although age had made some inroads — she struck me as the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

This was my mother.

Still, she did not greet me. Nor rise.

Instead, she said, “Let me look at you, Nachiketa.”

I said nothing.

“Turn around,” she said. “Turn around.” And she signaled with her hand the little swirl she wanted me to perform.

I performed it.

“Again,” she said.

And again.

“Who picked your clothes?” she asked.

I wore a brown suit with a blue shirt, open at the neck. Jiddu had bought them for me during my second year at Cambridge. I thought they suited me rather nicely. “Jiddu,” I said.

“Your father.” Perhaps it was a question.

So I answered, just in case, “Yes.”

“I thought he had better taste than that,” she said.

I did not know what to say to that.

“You know who I am, of course,” she said, which I thought was an arrogant thing to say.

“Yes,” I said. “I know who you are.”

“And you know that I can never be your mother.”

“But you are my mother,” I answered. “Are you not?”

“I am, yes, of course I am, but can never be,” she said.

“Officially, you mean?”

“Yes. That is what I mean. Officially.”

“Jiddu told me.”

“He is right.”

To which, again, I had no reply.

“Tell me about your school,” she said. “What subjects are your favorites?”

“Actually,” I informed her, “I live in London now, I’m finished with school.”

“Ah, yes.”

“But I went to Cambridge. And to answer your question, my favorite subject was Architecture. Medieval Architecture, to be precise.” As she studied me, I felt not a little judged and I found that I did not like her very much.

“Yes, yes” she said, as if I were wearing on her patience a little. “I remember. Jiddu told me. You are an architect. That is what you know, how to make buildings. You design them.”

“Not quite yet,” I said. “I am an apprentice. I am learning.”

To which she made no reply. Instead she said, “What else do you know?” This struck me as an odd question, deserving of an odd answer.

“Snakes,” I said.

Which she ignored. Then, after some apparent deliberation, she said, “Buildings are good things. They don’t fly away.”

“Ma’am?” I said.

“It’s a good career, designing buildings.”

“I agree.”

“There is much value in buildings,” she went on. “Good things to own. They stay put, buildings do. They don’t fly away. Or age; not very fast anyway.”

“I wouldn’t own the buildings,” I said. “I would only design them.”

“I know,” she said.

She looked me over again, from head to toe, then her eyes reached my face and settled on mine. Held them for quite a while. In silence. I could make nothing of her expression. Then, as if she suddenly had lost interest in me, she found and lit a cigarette with a gold Ronson lighter. She inhaled deeply, looked back at me, then asked, through a cloud of smoke, “Why such old buildings?”

“Ma’am?” I said again.

“Medieval. It means old?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why did you study such old buildings?”

“It’s a way of — ” how was I to put this, now that I realized that her English was not the best? “To me it was a way of grasping the fundamentals of the subject,” I said. “Like examining its foundation. What modern architecture is based on. The roots.”

She studied me through the sunlit smoke for a brief moment, then squinted a little while she removed a small flake of tobacco from her tongue with practiced fingers. Tongue once again tobacco-less, she said, “I understand.” I was glad to see that she did.

Then, before I could say anything in turn, she asked, “Snakes? What do you mean, you know snakes?”

“I grew up with them.”

“Yes, there are many snakes in India, I know that. But you said you know snakes. How can you know snakes?”

When I didn’t answer right away, she said, “What is there to know about them?”

“There’s a lot to know about them,” I said.

“Snakes are snakes,” she declared for my benefit.

“No, snakes are not just snakes. There’s a lot more to them.”

She frowned.

“They are not much understood,” I said. “Much maligned.”

“Maligned?”

“Spoken badly of,” I explained.

“Well, they should be. They are horrible creatures.”

“No, ma’am, they are not.”

Again, it was as if she had simply not heard me, for instead of answering she said, “What else?”

“Ma’am?”

“What other things did you study?”

“Oh, Mathematics. Literature. Some Religion.”

“What sort of literature?”

“Indian, and American. And some English authors too.”

“You have read Hemingway?”

“Of course.”

“And Huxley?”

“No.”

“I am a friend of his.” With some pride.

Before I had a chance to reply, she continued down the list. “How about Henry James?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have read him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I find him boring.”

And this was the first time I heard her laugh; and the first time I glimpsed the person behind that beautiful face. “That’s because he is boring,” she said. “His sentences are far too long, and they twist and turn too much. I can never make out what he’s talking about and by the time I come to the end of one of those long slithery things I don’t remember how it began and I have to start all over.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he is a little convoluted.”

“What does that mean? Convoluted?”

“Twisting too much,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” she said.

Then she said convoluted several times to herself. Looked up at me. “That’s how you say it? Convoluted?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s how you say it.”

“It is a good word, convoluted.”

I agreed. It is a good word.

In the long silence that followed she looked down at her wristwatch, then up at a beautiful and painstakingly polished brass clock on the teak wall to the right of me, as if to confirm her initial reading. Then sighed. Whether from regret or for show, I could not quite tell.

“We’re about to sail,” she said. “You must leave now.”

When I said nothing, she added, “Cecil will take you back.”

“Back to where?” I found my voice again.

“To England,” she said.

When again my voice went missing, she realized correctly that her sudden announcement had quite stunned me, and added — and I can only assume by way of comfort — “I will send for you.”

I stood still for several more moments, not sure what to do, still surprised at the sudden dismissal. Then I took a step towards her, to shake her hand perhaps, maybe even to embrace, I’m not really sure what I had expected or even hoped. But I stopped when she did not make to rise but instead waived her right hand at me, “Tell Cecil to get you some decent clothes.”

Then she turned her face towards the nearest porthole, and made a show of surveying the glass and the sky beyond. The audience was definitely over.

Mr. Beaton and I watched the Christina pull away from the dock, happy to be untied at last, and head out into the Mediterranean. Harriet was not on deck, there was no one waving in our direction. All we saw aboard her were deck hands, busy pulling in and storing the thick lines that had tied her to the dock.

We spent the afternoon at our hotel and flew back to London the following morning. Two days later Mr. Beaton, who must have gotten word from Harriet, pulled up in a black and gray Bentley and brought me to his tailor. Time to spiff me up, he said. Harriet’s footing the bill.

His tailor was a man who fussed and mumbled a lot, but who really knew what he was doing. He measured me for what must have been an hour before letting me go. Back into the Bentley, for shirts, coats, and shoes, and a “decent umbrella,” as he put it.

Three suits were delivered a week later, and I must admit that Mr. Beaton (and his mumbling tailor) knew clothes. Spiffy indeed. I examined myself in the closet mirror. Absolutely nothing wrong with these suits. I looked rather smashing, what.

The new wardrobe also came in handy as I continued to look for positions at firms other than Grason and Hewitt. I had returned to that outfit twice, once to meet the partners and a second time to meet some of the senior architects, but each visit had left me with an ever stronger sense of mothballed and spider-webbed antiquity.

G&H — which is how Jiddu referred to them when he called on the phone to see how I was getting along — was a very proper firm, and was well regarded throughout London. It was certainly a good place to start a career, but I had yet to be convinced that they actually designed buildings at that place.

Yes, they talked about designing, and drafting, and about building permits, and structural integrity, but by my — admittedly limited — observation they seemed to spend most of their days over meals with clients where no such things were discussed; instead the topics ranged from hunting to gardening to cricket to the damn rain, good for the grass though, don’t you think? No, honestly, G&H was not for me.

Late August I finally found an apprentice position. It was with a small firm in Kensington called Hawkes and Rand, and it was exactly what I had been looking for: A place where architecture was indeed practiced. Evidenced everywhere. Every horizontal surface covered with designs, tubes of drawings littering floors and corners. Cigarettes and coffee. Laughter. Late nights. Dedication to craft. Home.

Apart from Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Rand, both of whom were still active in the firm, we were four architects, including me, the apprentice. Add to that two draftsmen and two secretaries, and you had the lot of us.

It was a busy and productive place and you could tell that the founding partners got along well by their adjoining offices, doors often left open so they could shout to (and sometimes at) each other rather than using the telephone. I fit in well. To my surprise, Jiddu was fine with my choice, too. He’d checked them out, he said. Perhaps not the port and brandy club, but up and coming, he said. Bright people, he added.

They taught me well, Hawkes and Rand did, and I think back to that time often and fondly.

As for Harriet: I thought of her often, but she apparently did not return that favor. I did not hear from her again for over three years.

© Wolfstuff