On a quiet Sunday afternoon Rachel and I cross the sun-flooded lawns where patients recline in striped canvas deck chairs or, shepherded by attendants in white, shuffle the brick pathways which wind among flower-beds and hedges. Rachel has been accompanying me on visits to the Mount of Olives Rest Home ever since she learned my mother was a patient there. There is nobody else I would have admitted this to but Rachel. Her own utter lack of reticence is what gave me the courage. She has no qualms about telling anybody anything. I’ve heard it all, blow-by-blow accounts of her two marriages, intimate details of her frequent, calamitous affairs.
The barricades I had built up over the years had to be taken down piece by piece the night of my confession. The telling was a hard struggle, with myself, with memory, even with Rachel. The final struggle was to hold back my tears, but that struggle was no more successful than the others had been. I sat in a chair weeping and then she wrapped me in her wiry arms, pressed my head tight to her flapper’s bosom where with every sob I gulped her fragrance: tobacco smoke, cologne, the comfort of warm, tired flesh. It was, I suppose, the moment I knew I loved her.
For years my mother has been withdrawing further and further into a dense mist of apathy, eating whatever is put in front of her, going to bed when told, getting up when told, seldom speaking, never smiling. It is as if the rest of us are ghosts, shadowy presences whose existence she cannot quite credit. Except for Rachel Gold. She is the most solid, the most real to my mother. That much was clear from the beginning.
The first time Rachel came with me to Mount of Olives we found Ma in her room, standing in front of the window, occupied with the only thing she ever seems interested in – cleaning the glass with her handkerchief.
“Ma,” I said, “I’ve brought you a visitor.” She did not turn to see who this visitor was. The handkerchief continued to squeak in tight little circles.
“Mother, it’s Harry.”
For a second, the circles stopped, then began again, more rapidly than before.
“Mother, stop that. Come and say hello.”
The circles whirled on the glass, faster and faster.
“I know you can hear me, Ma.”
She began to whimper softly, the handkerchief spinning more and more frantically. Her head, bobbing with the effort, shook loose a few stray strands of hair from her bun.
I was about to speak again when Rachel touched my sleeve, stopping me. She lit a cigarette and then crossed the room, her customary boiling, decisive energy leashed a little, but still capable of making her skirt snap, and took up a position by my mother at the window. Ma did not acknowledge her presence; she continued doggedly polishing the glass, her eyes pinned on a vast tree spreading its branches directly outside her window.
Rachel said, “I’m a friend of Harry’s. The name is Rachel Gold and I give a very decent manicure. If you do a lot of windows one thing you’ve got to look after is your hands. And you’ve got nice hands, very shapely. Unlike Harry, who owns a set of bricklayer’s mitts. Besides, he’s the nervous type and chews his nails. Anyway, if you’d like, the next time I come to visit I could do your nails for you. However you’d like. If you’re the conservative type we could go with a little clear polish. If you feel like kicking over the traces, fire-engine red. And we’ll chat while I do it. It’s a very relaxing thing, to get a manicure and make small talk. Would you like that?”
My mother stopped rubbing at the window, she turned and intently searched Rachel’s face.
“Well, Harry,” said Rachel, “I think your mother and I have a date.”
When we said our goodbyes that afternoon, I saw that Mother’s eyes never left Rachel; they followed her out the door. I hadn’t seen that happen before.
So the manicuring sessions became a ritual. I noticed a change in Ma, nothing miraculous or earthshaking, just a tiny heightening of attention. In the past, I had only hurled bits of stilted conversation at her: How was she feeling? Wasn’t that a nice rain last night? Weren’t the flowers in the grounds beautiful at this time of year? Hard little pellets of desperate talk which rattled off her solitude like cold sleet off a tin roof. Nothing but racket.
But what Rachel did was different. A kind of girlish conspiracy grew between them, a conspiracy which revolved around small luxuries and attentions which had never been part of my mother’s hard life – manicures, chocolates, the cosy beauty-shop conspiracy of women.
Rachel plays it like an actress, for my mother, for me. She plays the professional beautician, mimicking the beautician’s professional chatter. But, underneath, it is more than a performance. Under the guise of gossip, she is telling my mother things about me, and me about myself. It is like a beauty-parlour séance. Rachel the medium, through which Mother and I, the world of ghosts, commune. For a long time I didn’t see the point of telling Mother anything about myself. I tried to reach her by asking about her. But now, if she is listening – and I am growing convinced she is – Mother is learning who I, this stranger, this ghost, have become since her illness.
This Sunday, Rachel is up to her usual tricks.
“You know, Tillie, I think Harry’s beginning to reveal a side of himself neither of us ever suspected.”
A faint smile plays across Ma’s lips as she sits absorbed, watching Rachel work on her cuticles with an orange stick.
“Which side’s that?” I ask.
“His ambitious side. I don’t know what you think, Tillie, but I find it surprising. Because, frankly, since he signed on to the script department he hasn’t exactly been the picture of vaulting ambition. He didn’t show much push, wasn’t a go-ahead guy. To tell the truth, I don’t think he much cares for the work. Not to say he wasn’t grateful when I put a word in for him, got him the job, but it seemed to me he was grateful for a job, not for the job. I always got the impression it was all the same to him, short-order cook, tram conductor, hod carrier, photoplay dramatist.”
“I do my job.”
“Of course he does. Better than most. Better than Wilson, or Dermott, or poor Ehrlich. Harry can write title cards in his sleep; for him it’s merely a case of filling in the blanks, like doing a crossword puzzle. For a bright boy like Harry it’s easy enough. What the camera can’t convey he puts on a title card. The trouble with the aforementioned Unholy Trinity is that they’re too stupid to recognize the blanks. If you can’t find the blanks you can’t fill them. Tillie, you wouldn’t believe what I caught Ehrlich doing the other day. He was writing a title for a scene in which hero and heroine are wound around one another, osculating. Ehrlich writes, ‘Emily and Tom kiss with inexpressible desire!’ ”
I can’t help laughing. Mother actually smiles.
“For the Dermotts, the Ehrlichs, the Wilsons of the world, contributing to the literature of the silver screen is stating the obvious. But not Harry, not for our Little Truth Seeker, Tillie. No,” she says, shaking her head, “he’s too pure to yearn for vulgar success in the movie game. He thinks that to succeed in the business is proof positive of idiocy. He has contempt for what he does.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“He has a point, I suppose, Tillie. But my contempt has limits. I may have contempt for the idiotic pictures I write, but I keep going because I want to get somewhere. Gal to gal,” whispers Rachel to Ma, “some day I’m going to direct a picture.”
“And I’ll play Hamlet.”
“You know, Tillie, in the early days, in the days of the one- and two-reelers, there were women directing pictures. Because the money boys didn’t think it mattered. Budgets were small, a thousand dollars, so the stakes weren’t big. And you could take a picture of a wagon-load of horseshit and sell it to the public. As long as the flies on it could be seen to move. People just wanted to see moving pictures. What did it matter who directed horseshit? But now the studios say picture-making has got too technical for women to handle. Not like the old days, one stationary camera, point it and shoot, painted backdrops, no rough location shooting. They say big crews of men won’t take orders from women. And they say women don’t have the money sense to handle a big budget – unlike that paragon of fiscal responsibility, Erich von Stroheim. You’ll love this, Tillie. Do you know what Erich did on Foolish Wives? He insisted, on the grounds of authenticity, that the actors playing officers wear monogrammed silk underwear. Which the camera couldn’t photograph. There’s hard-headed business sense for you. Yet Stroheim’s excesses are genius. A woman’s would be whim.”
“What are you whining about?” I say. “I’d like to make the kind of money you make. You don’t strike me as so hard-done-by.”
“He’s not listening, is he, Tillie? Because I’m not talking about money; I’m talking about power. And I think Harry is after power, too. But here’s the difference. I come right out and say what I want and Harry hides behind this polite, fastidious English facade -”
I correct her. “Not English.”
“All right, Canadian. Excuse me if I can’t see the distinction. It’s not a bad thing, politeness, I suppose, if it’s genuine and you don’t take it to extremes. But isn’t it just a little hypocritical, too? Of course, maybe Harry’s undergone a sea change, maybe he’s not really nice any more. After all, he’s made himself indispensable to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He and Mr. Damon Ira Chance are apparently as thick as thieves.”
This digging sarcasm is irritating. “What the hell do you know about it? Nothing.”
“Understand, Tillie, I’m only drawing conclusions from the evidence. Mr. Chance has a general factotum by the name of Fitzsimmons who guards the master’s door like it was the entrance to the Holy of Holies. And who gets admitted? Occasionally a big-name star. Occasionally a big-name director. Who else? Your boy. Seems he’s making good. Very good. Out of the blue, a lowly seventy-five-dollar-a-week title-writing drudge penetrates the Holy of Holies, is admitted to the Presence. Smells like ambition, if you ask me.”
“This is pretty lame stuff, Rachel, this routine.”
“Or maybe Harry really isn’t ambitious, maybe he’s just a guy adrift on a great green sea of wanting. You can get carried a long way from shore when you’re adrift.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I know where I want to go. Do you think Harry does?”
She’s made me really angry now. “If you’ve got something to say, say it. To me. Not my mother.”
Rachel looks up from my mother’s nails. “All right, Harry, I will. Here’s what I’ve got to say to you. You’re an intelligent man, Harry. And a nice one. One of the nicest I’ve met. Did you know I thought that?”
“No.” Then I qualify it. “Maybe.”
“I want you to remember that because now I’m going to say something you’re not going to like. I’m afraid for you, Harry, because you don’t know what you want and you’re weak. You lack the courage to take responsibility for your intelligence. You actually prefer writing title cards rather than scripts because then you’re not responsible for the end result. That makes you a blank-filler. You use your intelligence to find the answers to questions other people ask, but never to find answers to questions you might want to ask. A good man for crossword puzzles. Is that what you’re doing for Chance? Crossword puzzles? The intellectual odd jobs the Irish moron isn’t up to?”
“What is it you resent so much, Rachel? Me? Chance? Or our idealism?”
“As far as I’m concerned the jury is out on Chance’s idealism.”
“I told you. He wants to make the great American movie.”
“Sure you told me. But do I believe it?”
“He’s an eccentric, Rachel. But so is anyone who tries to do something big. Edison is. Alexander Graham Bell. Nobody can really explain them. Chance happens to believe movies are the art form of the future. He thinks they can capture the American spirit the way Shakespeare captured the spirit of Elizabethan England. Speaking of ambition, it may sound megalomaniac and preposterous, but that’s his aim. I don’t hear anybody else talking that way. Everybody else talks dollars. Not Chance. He talks art.” I wait for this to sink in. “What you say about me is likely true. Maybe I’m nothing more than Chance’s blank-filler. But let me put the question to you, Rachel. What’s better? To be a small part of something big, or a big part of something small?”
She ignores my question and fires back with one of her own. “And what’s the American spirit, Harry?”
The best I can do is one word. “Expansive.”
“Oh, that nails it, Harry. Just expansive?”
“And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality. Like the movies themselves. Chance says the movies are the only thing that can capture the American spirit because they are like America herself. It makes a kind of sense to me.”
“Quite the theory, Harry. But for myself, if I want a dose of the American spirit I’ll go to Whitman, Twain, or Crane before Rebecca of Sunny brook Farm.”
“You’re missing the point. Chance wants to make films that are the artistic equal of Leaves of Grass. He might fail but he’s got the guts to try. Besides, how many people have read Leaves of Grass in Mencken’s Sahara of the Bozarts? Or anywhere else in this country for that matter? And what about the tenements and the ghettos? Immigrants can’t read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It’s the movies that have the chance of making everybody – the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League professor – all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don’t make a people.”
“And you’re a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?”
“Because I chose this place. And I’m not the only one in Hollywood. America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn’t a country at all, it’s simply geography. There’s no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you’re going to be anything, you have to choose. Even Catholics don’t regard Limbo as something permanent. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We’d be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn’t want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don’t think that’s ignoble.”
It is then my mother says a surprising thing. “Home.” Loudly and distinctly. Both Rachel and I are taken aback.
“What, Ma?”
She points to the window.
“What, Ma?” I ask. “What?”
“Home,” she says one more time before retreating into silence.