Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 2: A Gift

My mother gave me away when I was two weeks old. Yes: I was a gift. That’s what she later told me: a gift. Of course, I was also the unthinkable, in a world that must never know about me, at least not the world which knew and celebrated her. I was to be hidden from it.

Later I realized that I was also to be hidden from her, the deeper the better.

“And given sounds so much better than hidden, don’t you think?” she said once after I had come to know her. “And so much better than unthinkable.”

The original benefactee — if I can be permitted to invent a word — was my father. His name was Jiddu and at that time (I was born April 10, 1928) he was a reasonably well known mystic. Indeed, he was quite famous in his day, even though today, if remembered at all, he seems more myth than man. Still, he has left a bit of a legacy, along with not a few schools and foundations scattered here and there about the world. But the man on the street, were you to mention his name, would look at you blankly, take his time, and then shake his head.

At first Jiddu argued that she should keep me. “Children should be with their mothers,” he said. “That’s why women give birth and not men.” Besides, would a child not be in his way as much as in hers? This, however, he soon had to admit — even to himself — simply was not true. Sure, to him I would be a burden, an inconvenience and an embarrassment, but to her I would be the end of a career, the end of a successful life.

So in the end he relented — though, from what she later told me, not all that gracefully — and accepted me: a gift to be hidden.

You could plainly see that I was his and her son. The color of my hair and the color of my skin were his; the color of my eyes, and the shape of my nose and mouth were hers. If my father had entertained any thoughts of contesting his involvement, he must have abandoned them the moment he saw me. Very much his, and very much hers. Not that I cared then.

So, he accepted me, but he didn’t keep me around for long. A week or two, from what I’ve been able to piece together; just long enough to realize what a burden I actually was. Then he packed me off to Madanapalle, a small town smack in the middle of Southern India where he had grown up, and where his mother still lived.

The long and the short of it: I was raised by a wonderful Indian woman named Madhuri (who among other things knew how to talk to snakes) in a town not so seldom overrun by rats (not in and around Madhuri’s house of course, her snake friends saw to that) and, for three months of the year, home to inclement weather.

This all happened in the spring of 1928. As I said, I was born in April of that year. In other words, I’m getting on a bit. Well, you do the math, as they say. But I’m doing pretty well, not all that much worse for the wear, if I may say so. This I ascribe to clean air and vegetables.

A month to the day after giving birth to me, and with the embarrassment now safely out of the way (I was en route to India, in fact), principal photography of War in the Dark — which was the working title for The Mysterious Lady, one of my mother’s many films — began in Los Angeles. This was the first time Harriet had been seen in public since she grew too large to be seen at all in December of the year before.

As an aside: I’m afraid that I can’t refer to my mother by her real name for her estate (which does not include me) has trademarked it, and I really can’t be bothered with the legal wrangling it most likely would entail to obtain the right to use it for this little tale. So, instead I’ll use Harriet Brown, her alter-ego, the name she herself used on so many occasions in the (often misplaced) hope of staying unrecognized and out of sight. They didn’t, or couldn’t, trademark that. Besides, strange though it may seem, she was always Harriet to me.

Even though she had exercised hard and showed no evidence whatever of her recent pregnancy, no sagging or stretch marks — she was only 22 years old then, and quite resilient — she nonetheless wanted no one on the set that did not firmly belong there, just in case, and she requested that it be blocked off by a maze of black screens. This request was granted, as were most of her wishes.

She worried unduly. No one did notice, and no one ever found out.

I am mentioned nowhere, by anyone. Not by Beaton, who did know but had given Harriet his word — which he honored — that he would never reveal her secret. Not even by Miss de Acosta who, if indeed she knew — I am sure she suspected — kept me out of her rambling diaries.

Officially, I still don’t exist.

But I came to exist for her, and she for me, and when all is said and done, that is what counts.

© Wolfstuff