Harpo heard footsteps and stiffened. He wasn’t ready for company, couldn’t perform for strangers. Then Chico walked into the room, and Harpo settled down into the cushions again.
“I got you some coffee,” said Chico. “To make up for that night on the dock.”
“What night?”
“The night we left you on it.”
“Oh,” said Harpo. He craned his neck and saw that there were two mugs of coffee on the table in front of him, one brimming, the other mostly empty, both rimmed with a slick of coffee oil. “Thank you.”
“We did go back for you, you know,” said Chico. He was slouched on the chair like a real tough guy, like an 85th streeter at least. “You were already gone.”
If Harpo was going to pull this off, if he was really going to work with government men and boost a whole family from Russia, he’d need to look the part. He had to look tough like Chico. Harpo slouched. It worked. He felt tougher already. He jumped up. He should get the Chico walk down too. Start with stance. When he met those agent guys, he’d be standing like this, like Chico from the tenements, hustling, playing cards, placing bets, you never knew what he’d just been doing, but you always knew that it was dangerous.
“Are you okay, Harp?”
Chico looked more worried than scared. He needed to make some adjustments then. The Chico walk had to start with the right posture. Harpo adjusted himself.
“Did you sprain something?” said Chico. “Did you pull a muscle in your groin?”
Harpo added forward momentum, steps bouncy but not measured. He loped around the room. Then he got his arms swinging. Then he knocked over a lamp. He caught it before it fell.
“That mug is yours.” Chico pointed. “I carried both mugs of coffee together. It was harder than I thought. I had to put my thumbs in them, because otherwise they would have spilled.”
“I need to talk to you,” said Harpo. He needed this new movie idea to work. Because he’d decided. He’d go to Russia, save these families, then he’d come home and start his own, whether he felt ready or not. He’d need to have a job to come back to though. That was the only thing. “I have an idea for a movie.”
“I heard that,” said Chico.
“The idea is this. We take over a post office.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to find producers?” asked Chico. “MGM is out. That I know. I guess that MGM isn’t the only game in town. You’re right about that.”
“Groucho’s the supervisor. He sorts the mail, and we take it to the houses, you and me. At first, I rip up the letters as they come in. I get mad because I can’t read. But then you and Groucho start reading the pieces, then pasting them back together. Then we start playing around, messing with the mail on purpose, rewriting letters because we can. We take lonely girls and set them up with the shy men who love them, that sort of thing. Unhook good girls from the bad guys.”
Maybe the sad man couldn’t finish his love letter. Maybe they should do it for him, they could take other love letters and paste one perfect one together for him. This was getting so complicated. Usually, the Marx Brothers had a whole writing team and he was only in charge of the Harpo bits.
Chico scratched his face. “Wouldn’t work,” he said finally. “Letters wouldn’t keep a picture moving. Not enough action. You don’t mind that I put my thumb in your coffee?”
“We could solve mysteries. How about that? That could have lots of action.”
“I put my thumb inside your coffee. That one there.”
“I know,” said Harpo. “You said.”
“Do you mind if I put the rest of my fingers in?”
“No,” said Harpo. “Wait. Yes I mind. The letters would count for something now. I could still have that stupid look on my face while I rip them up, as we cut and paste. You and Grouch would be mad at first, but you’d get into it too, as soon as you saw how well it was working. We’d manipulate the whole world. We’d mess with everybody. We’d be able to. We’d have their mail.”
“I’d just feel better if all my fingers went in. I would feel more complete.”
“I’d be sending for things as well. I’d be learning to write, my little sidekick would help me, and that’s how we’d practise. By writing to catalogues and ordering things. Pets. A dog. A lizard. A dark suit. Disguises. They’d all arrive slowly, a running gag. Audiences love running gags. They’d all be used in the climax, all the things that come for me in the post. It would be chaos.” He’d put on all the disguises as they came. By the end of the picture, he’d be a mile thick.
“Harpo?” said Chico. “Can I put my fingers in your coffee?”
Harpo slumped back into the plush open palm of the easy chair. “Of course,” he said, “please do,” but when Chico leaned toward the mug, Harpo scrambled forward and blocked him. Then Harpo manoeuvred himself back into his seat. After a moment, Chico tried again, and Harpo kicked at him, and they both struggled, but neither fell out of their chairs. They sat back, both at once. Harpo shifted so he was lying across his chair again, facing his brother, his legs hanging close to Chico’s shoulder, just in case. This movie would work. It would reunite them. It would make them actors again. It had to work because Harpo didn’t know how to do anything else.
“It’s too much reading for a talkie,” said Chico. “The audience would have to read the originals, then the new letters. Wouldn’t work.”
“Groucho could read them out loud.”
“It would slow things down. My gut says no.”
“Well my gut says yes.”
“Harpo?”
“Yeah?”
Just then, Chico went for the coffee mug again. He moved fast, but Harpo beat him to it, arching his back and kicking him, and Chico slid out of his chair. He landed with a bump, but then shot to his knees and dipped his fingers into the coffee mug.
Harpo let himself slide off his chair and onto the floor.
Then Chico wiped his hand on his pants and slumped back against the couch, looking thoughtful. He pointed to the upright. “Maybe your idea could work for music.”
“Nobody sings letters.”
“People pay big money to listen to the opera though.”
“Nobody would pay to hear me sing,” said Harpo. “Not when they can get a record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’ for twenty-five cents.”
“That’s a good line,” said Chico.
“That’s a good line,” he repeated in Chico’s Italian accent. The dangerous accent. The accent that his brother had developed in New York. So that people would think he was Italian. So that they’d stop beating him up for being a Jew. God, what was Harpo thinking about? The world was a scary place. How could he hope to manoeuvre through it alone? How could he hope to usher another person, a whole family through the world when he was so scared himself.
Harpo heard quick little footsteps down the hall, like rain on a patio, and suddenly the little footsteps turned into little people. They rounded the corner right into him, Blima with a tumbledown carpet bag and Sonja trailing a pillowcase behind her. Blima wouldn’t look at him.
“Where are you two off to?” asked Harpo.
“Blima is running away,” said Sonja.
Harpo knelt. Blima turned to face the wall, and Sonja held up her unevenly stuffed pillowcase.
“What’s in there?” he asked.
“My bear called Dodo,” said Sonja, “and two books and a jacket.”
“Are you leaving too?” asked Harpo.
“I have to be with my sister,” said Sonja.
“I need to talk to her first though.” And Harpo turned to Blima. She still wouldn’t meet his eyes, turned again, to face the banister. She had a choice. She could turn around and let Harpo hug her, or she could run down the stairs and out the door. She could feel like Harpo loved her, or she could pretend he didn’t and she was all alone in the world. He’d had that choice before. He remembered being a kid as little as Blima, and feeling his options out on a dark stage after the audience had left and the managers had swept up. He’d never wanted Minnie to feel bad.
Abruptly, Blima turned and threw herself into his arms, and he grabbed the railing to keep from overbalancing, from falling right down the stairs.
Then suddenly he didn’t know what else to say. He wanted so badly to make everything better. What were the words he’d learned in the crosswords recently? Corporeal, tacit, torrent, enumerate. Consistent. Topography. Limbless, but that might have been in a dream. None of them helped, anyway. But he had to do something. This was his chance to redeem himself.
“I have a question for you, monkey,” he said finally. But he didn’t really need to ask what had happened. Ayala had meant to do something nice for her, but it had gone horribly wrong. She’d wanted to say, “I love you,” but instead had called her an upstart or a gorilla. He’d never seen anything like it before, except maybe for Minnie, and Groucho sometimes too. They made no sense. Loving was so easy. And they were people who loved so deeply. Harpo could tell Blima that. That she was easy to love, that it was clear to everyone else how much her mother loved her. “Would you watch a movie about a postman?” he said instead, surprising even himself. “I mean. If the Marx Brothers made a picture about mailmen, would you watch it?”
“Yes,” whispered Blima. “Can we watch it tonight?”
“Before we run away?” said Sonja.
Harpo smiled. He knew it was a good idea. “I haven’t made the movie yet,” he said. “Remember? You’re writing the story with me, monkey. Now, Sonja can help too.”
“Oh yeah,” said Blima.
“I can’t quite remember where we were,” said Harpo. “So I’ll set the scene. Chico and I play mailmen. We’re partners and we go door to door together. Chico knocks on the doors, and when the women answer, he goes inside and takes chocolates and flowers out of his mailbag. I sit down outside on the porch steps, and all the neighbourhood dogs sit beside me, and I pull dog biscuits out of mine.”
“Because you like animals,” said Blima, clapping her hands.
“That’s right.”
“I know that from the pictures. One time, you whistled a love song to a horse.”
“So I did,” said Harpo. “So. One day, while I’m delivering mail, I see a woman through a dirty window. She’s waiting for the mailman and crying.”
“She’s sad because she’s in love with two people. Only, she can just marry one of them.”
“Oh?”
“She’s in love with the doctor, but that’s only because he was her childhood sweetheart. That means that they played with the same toys sometimes. She’s also in love with the other man. She might not know it, but she loves the second man more.”
Harpo’s fingers were tingling. Simon was a doctor. He’d figured something out. “Tell me more about the doctor,” he whispered.
“The sad woman’s mother makes her marry the other man,” said Blima, “because they pray together in the same temple. And the doctor married someone else too. Sometimes the sad woman pretends she’s sick so she can visit the doctor during the day. When they kiss in his office, her daughter hides in the cupboard even though there are boxes of needles in there. Sometimes they talk about dangerous things and the daughter gets scared. She wants them to stop so she acts up.”
“Were there lots of doctors where the woman lived?” whispered Harpo. “Or was there just the one?”
“Just one,” said Blima. “She doesn’t really love the doctor at all, I changed my mind. She just thinks she does. And the doctor doesn’t love her at all either. So when she tries to send love letters in the mail, since she doesn’t mean them, they don’t get there. That’s the rule. You have to believe in the letter for the mail to work. So he doesn’t get the letters and that’s why he never writes back. That’s why she doesn’t get any letters. That’s why she’s crying. Except then how would people get the bills they have to pay?”
“Bills?”
Blima slumped. “My daddy gets bills, and he says he doesn’t believe that he should have to pay them. They still get here though.”
“How about this,” said Harpo. “One day the beautiful woman gets into a fight with her husband. It’s nothing serious. Just a little thing. An argument about socks or dishes or something silly. She writes a letter to another man, not a man she loved, just a man she knew when she was a kid, a friend. She only wrote it because she was feeling sore at her husband. After she sends the letter, she feels just awful and she regrets what she did. That’s why she’s crying.”
“Yes,” said Blima. “That’s why she was crying all along.”
“She wants to get the letter back so that she can get rid of it. She doesn’t want it to get there; she’s scared she’s going to ruin her family. So she tells Harpo everything, and Harpo the Postman finds the letter. He tracks it down, and rips it up, and everything is saved.”
“Except can he do that?”
“Harpo the Postman?” said Harpo. “He can do anything.”
“Can he write a new letter instead,” whispered Blima.
“Okay…” Harpo scratched his chin.
“Let’s write a letter from my mother to my father.” “Let’s write a letter that’s just for you. I can do that. Letters can’t be that hard to write.”
“I already have some,” said Blima, and she shuffled to her carpet bag, and pulled out letter after letter. “Sometimes when pretty ladies check out, they leave letters under their pillows. I’m allowed to keep them because our parents never look at what’s inside, and the maids don’t know that I can read.”
Harpo opened the envelopes. “These are great,” he said. This was research too. It would have to be.
“I know they’re love letters,” said Blima, “because there are I love yous on every page.”
“That’s it!” said Harpo. “Let’s cut out every time someone writes I love you, and tape all the I love yous to the underside of the table.” Because wouldn’t that be the perfect love letter? What mattered more than that?
Blima nodded seriously. “I’ll get the scissors and the paste.”
When they were done, they lay under the table, Blima’s head on Harpo’s stomach, Sonja curled nearby.
“Can you tell me more about your mischief stories?” asked Sonja.
“I’ve done loads of bad things,” said Harpo. “I get into lots of mischief. I went to a black-tie dinner, and I wore a black tie, but no pants. I ran out of the bushes with no clothes on once so my friend would miss his shot in croquet. Oh and I caused mischief one time in a hotel in Montauk, Long Island, not far from here. I wanted to go on a fishing trip with my friends. I booked our stay and I got a wire from the hotel the next day that said, ‘Trust you are Gentile.’ So I checked into the hotel as Harpo MacMarx so they wouldn’t think I was Jewish, and I brought a walking stick and tam-o’-shanter. I was afraid my friends wouldn’t like me anymore if I caused them trouble. But then that night I told them, and they were angry on my behalf. We left. And I got the last laugh, anyway, by asking the concierge for directions to the nearest Jewish temple.”
Harpo sat up on his elbows. Blima was fast asleep. Sonja too. He took off his sweater and tucked it around them. He felt kind of like a father, doing that. He crept away.
Harpo padded into the forest, listlessly touching the tree branches as he walked, shaking their bony hands.
There would need to be a climax in this movie. There would have to be great danger, and a great resolution. So the sad lady was stuck in the company of a bad man. A good guy loved her, so that was good, but the hustler would have to show up one last time. It would have to be scary. So the hustler, he’d come to the post office where they were hiding out, and he’d bring his crew. They’d have guns. Harpo would pack them all into a steamer trunk. No. Not scary enough. He would sneak the lady out through the back entrance, into the night. But they’d be caught. The hustler would fire. An explosion of glass. The only light bulb shattered. But then Harpo the Postman would run right into the hustler, protected by all that extra padding of disguise after disguise after disguise. The hustler would pull off Harpo’s jacket, and he’d have another jacket on underneath. Then the hustler would pull that one off, and he’d have a dress. But then the hustler would pistol-whip Harpo, and that would hurt, so Harpo would cower…
Harpo stopped. He heard a creak, footsteps in the darkness. So he edged forward, and saw them, a group of men huddled by the lodgehouse, great buckets of paint in their hands, flashlights. One man held an axe. Another swung the beam of light to the wall. Dirty Jews, the graffiti read, your not safe here either.
At first Harpo cowered. But then he straightened and edged forward. He couldn’t hide forever.
“That’s not how you spell that,” and he was surprised to hear his own voice. The men all turned toward him, their faces contorted with anger and surprise. The biggest one looked like a boot, another like the tip of a pencil. Mean-looking men, all of them. He should have stayed hidden. He edged away.
“You need an apostrophe.” Harpo sounded calm, but he was having trouble breathing, couldn’t catch his breath. “Because you really mean to say ‘you are not safe.’ You’re is a contraction of you are.” At least Groucho would be proud of him. He hadn’t realized that he remembered that rule. Or the word contraction.
“Are you one of them?” growled the pencil top.
Harpo turned and ran into the woods.
After minutes and minutes of running, Harpo slowed, then stopped, then realized nobody was following. He was safe. So he looked up. He saw trees without a break, and strange plants— lichens? He’d never even seen them before, had just read about them in books.
He wasn’t safe. He was lost.