Searching for Grace Kelly

by Michael Callahan

  Anyway, it’s been almost three months now, and I am so happy. I know you are yelling at this page right now, saying, “Three months?! How can you not have told me for three whole months?!!” because everyone knows I can’t keep a secret for five seconds. But I didn’t want to jinx it. So I said to myself, “Dolores, we are going to keep our mouth shut until we are SURE this one is going to stick around.” (You know it’s serious when I call myself Dolores.) And here we are!

  Oh, you must, must, MUST come down to the city, Lulu! Maybe Jack has a friend and we can double. Oh, wait, I need to tell you more about him. In addition to being very tall and wide (but not fat), he’s a graduate student, though now for the life of me I can’t remember where. But in addition to his gorgeous teeth, he tells the corniest jokes, and speaking of which, we both love corn muffins! I finally got up the nerve to introduce him to the girls last week. Even Vivian (I told you about her in my last letter. She’s the British girl who barged into our room and we covered for her and then she invited us to the Stork Club, only we weren’t really invited) was impressed, and she’s never impressed about anything.

  Anyway, that’s my big news. Things at Katie Gibbs are good (I can’t believe I’ll be finished in five months!), and I am still temping at the publishing house, although I have carefully avoided You-Know-Who and his gardenias. I want Jack to come take me to lunch one day just so I can walk with him right past his desk, happy as a clam!

  Well, got to run, Lulu, I have ten pages of shorthand to transcribe before tomorrow. I miss you ALL . . . THE . . . TIME and want you to get your rear end on a bus and come visit!!! Say hi to Rose and the rest of the gang for me.

  Love,

  Dolly

  Telegram from Vivian Dwerryhouse to Mrs. Beatrice Dwerryhouse, 2 High Street, Leeds, LS1 4DY, United Kingdom, September 8:

  DEAREST MUM

  GREETINGS AND LOVE FROM NEW YORK STOP MISSING YOU ALL AND WOULD MUCH LOVE TO VISIT HOME STOP PLEASE ADVISE SOONEST IF YOU CAN WIRE PASSAGE STOP ANXIOUSLY AWAIT YOUR REPLY WITH GREATEST AFFECTION

  VIVIAN.

  FOURTEEN

  Laura was just beginning to doze off for a delicious dinnertime catnap when Dolly burst through the door, cheeks flushed and ready for a gab. “Hi, hi, hi!” she exclaimed, arms full of papers and bags, handbag swinging from her elbow like a trapeze. Dolly was one of those girls who always seemed to arrive and leave laden with an assortment of packages and bags.

  She dumped her things all over the small side table. “I love fall!” she said, slipping off her jacket. “Don’t you? What am I saying, of course you do—you’re from New England. Is it really as pretty there when the leaves turn as they say? I imagine it must be just breathtaking. Maybe I can get Jack to take me sometime. That would be just dreamy. We could pack a picnic—”

  Laura tuned out somewhere around the apple picking. Sometimes she just didn’t know where Dolly got the energy. She adored her roommate, but sometimes she just wished she would take that energy someplace—anyplace—else.

  Laura had been out late. Again. How did Agnes Ford and the other models do it? Laura wondered. Out with one guy this night, another the next, constantly primping—the hours they must spend on their hair alone!—never mind all of the eating and drinking. She’d gained a good five pounds over the summer and had now sentenced herself to pre-work swims in the Barbizon pool three mornings a week. Which had only served to leave her artificially invigorated every morning, buzzing around the office like a bumblebee as she threw herself into her new position at Mademoiselle, only to crash by four in the afternoon, trudging around like she was walking through a field of molasses and craving red licorice.

  But last night had been truly wonderful. Wasn’t every night with Box wonderful? But then, her nights with Pete were turning out to be just as splendid, in a completely different way. God, she was beginning to sound like Dolly, all over the place. With Box it was theater and carriage rides and candlelit dinners at the St. Regis; with Pete it was hot dogs (to his boyish delight, she’d learned to love sauerkraut) and long walks through the Village and lively arguments about whether Absalom, Absalom! could legitimately contend as Faulkner’s most underrated work, though Laura insisted that Pete was only arguing that so he could be contrarian because everyone else always picked As I Lay Dying. They enjoyed a breezy camaraderie, and it was during this type of jocular interplay that they had their best moments, when she felt the admiration pooling in those big eyes of his.

  Last night Box had taken her to ‘21,’ where they’d run into various people of the variety Dolly always called “the Swells,” as in, “So, who among the Swells did you see out this time?” That was the thing about Dolly: Laura knew part of her resented that she got to go to these places and Dolly did not, while at the same time wanting every detail of what it was like to be in these places, down to the folding of the napkins. Not that Laura could recount the napkins at ‘21’ with any alacrity. She’d drunk far too much champagne for far too long and stayed out far too late. It had been another long road through Mademoiselle today—she’d spent the entire day at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, pulling research on marriage rituals around the world—and had been just drifting off when Hurricane Dolly had touched down, whirling at full force.

  “Here,” Dolly said, tossing her a thick sheaf of bound mimeographed sheets. “I brought you a present.”

  “What’s this?” Laura yawned, thumbing through them. It appeared to be a book manuscript. The front page was stamped: PROPERTY OF JULIAN MESSNER, INC. PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.

  “The most amazing novel,” Dolly squealed in delight, plopping onto the edge of the bed. “They just bought it, and everyone says it’s going to be a blockbuster. It’s called The Tree and the Blossom. It’s the most scandalous thing you’ve ever read in your life. I was blushing as I typed in the revision notes! It’s all about this small town in New England called Peyton Place. You have to tell me if New England is really like this. Because if it is, I’m moving.”

  “Can’t you get in a lot of trouble for taking this out? It’s an unpublished manuscript.”

  “Oh, no one’s going to care if a couple of girls read it under the covers. I marked the good parts. And look at it this way: Next year, when everyone is talking about this, you’ll have already read it! Your coworkers will be crazy jealous.”

  The door opened and Vivian walked in, clutching a steaming paper cup of coffee, a newspaper tucked under her arm. “I’m surprised they let you upstairs with that,” Dolly remarked, slipping off her shoes. The Barbizon matrons were fanatical about the prohibition of food in the rooms. Mice and insects were bogeymen warned of in apocalyptic terms.

  “It was the nice one running the elevator today,” Vivian said. “The one with the bad skin. I only buy a coffee and a biscuit if I see she’s on duty.” She nodded toward the manuscript on the bed. “What’s this?”

  “Dolly’s scandalous novel,” Laura said.

  “What’s that?” Dolly asked in reply, pointing to Vivian’s arm. “I’ve never seen you with a newspaper in the entire time I’ve known you.”

  Vivian handed the paper to Laura. “It appears we have a celebrity in our midst. Page twenty-three.”

  Dolly scooched over as Laura thumbed through the paper. Their collective eyes were scanning page 23 when Dolly let out a piercing shriek. “Wow!”

  There it was, in black-and-white, right in Nancy Randolph’s column in the New York Daily News.

  I had the good fortune of a long-overdue visit to the always glamorous ‘21’ last night and was delighted to see Doris Duke, looking luminescent as always. She is just back from a pleasure tour of Iran. Among those listening to details of the journey were department store heir and man about town Box Barnes and his lovely date, Mademoiselle magazine editor Laura Dixon, whom Box says has just deferred her forthcoming senior semester at college because, he said with moony eyes, “she can’t stand the thought of being without me.”

  Laura felt the remnants
of her lunchtime tuna salad curdle into the back of her throat. Mrs. Blackwell would be furious, assuming she had inflated her position to a Mademoiselle “editor” when she was but a lowly, and brand-new, editorial assistant. And Pete! Pete would read this, know she had been seeing Box the whole time. And then—

  The thought hit her like a truck. Oh . . . my . . . God.

  A mushroom cloud of panic ballooned around her, interrupted only by a sharp rap at the door. Vivian answered, unveiling the ever-pale, skeletal face of Mrs. Metzger.

  “Miss Dixon,” Metzger said officiously. “Your mother is here.”

  They sat in a back booth in the Barbizon coffee shop, Marmy declining Laura’s feeble suggestion they go somewhere nearby. There would be no delay in the reckoning.

  Her mother looked as she always did, whether in joy—though Laura could not really recall a day when her mother had ever been truly joyful, at least in the colloquial sense of the word—or distress. Her hair, a mousy brown despite the hours she logged at the beauty parlor, fell in short, brittle waves, giving her the appearance of a schoolteacher who had managed to marry well. Her nails were plain but buffed—Marmy thought nail polish a vulgarity—and she tapped them, slowly, painstakingly, click . . . click . . . click on the table as they waited for the waitress to bring them their iced teas. She wore a lemon-yellow dress with a pronounced Peter Pan collar, but the combination, designed to evoke ladylike warmth, somehow only managed to make her appear even more severe.

  Walking into the lobby, gripped with growing paralysis, Laura had expected to encounter her father as well. But it turned out that Marmy had come alone to lower the boom. Laura had pictured her family at that morning’s breakfast table, David idly chattering on about his friend’s baseball card collection as her father pored over the business pages and her mother wanly glanced through the advertisements for Peck & Peck, until she came upon Nancy Randolph and the tale of the young girl who had managed to charm New York’s biggest catch. The girl who at that very moment was supposed to be sitting in a classroom at Smith.

  Marmy took a delicate sip of her iced tea, added in two carefully measured spoonfuls of sugar, then slowly stirred, like one of Macbeth’s witches brewing toads. Laura stared at the drink, at how the tiny agitated crystals gave the glass the appearance of a dirty snow globe.

  Her mother gently laid down her spoon. “All right, then,” she declared tartly. “I’m ready whenever you are, Laura.”

  The shock of her mother’s sudden appearance had begun to subside, prompting Laura to try to access the conversation she’d been mentally rehearsing for weeks. Because she had already had this talk, of course—several times, in fact. She had known that she would be found out sooner rather than later. She had composed a thoughtful, even eloquent explanation and defense, refined and edited over time and repetition. One that now completely escaped her in the moment she so desperately needed it.

  And so out it came, awkward and fumbling, until she found her rhythm, random phrases and arguments slowly bubbling back into her consciousness from all the practice. She had carefully weighed the decision to defer, she had every intention of completing her degree, but there was something very important happening not at Smith but here, right here, in New York, at this very moment, and she had a duty to herself to see it through. She added that she had been raised well, by parents who had taught her to think for herself, to weigh decisions and act on them, and that her only folly had been in her deception, and for that she was truly sorry.

  It got to the point where Laura realized she was repeating herself, skirting into groveling. In all of her trial runs, she had never, ever groveled. Silence was a weapon with Marmy. She defied you to try it, because it was her natural gift to make people uncomfortable and self-doubting, with her pursed lips of disapproval, her arched, half-moon brows, her gray eyes, as colorless as ice cubes. Laura leaned back into the booth and tried to settle into the silence; live with it; wait it out. She watched as Marmy once again lifted her spoon and lazily circled it through her iced tea, once more agitating the unmelted sugar crystals swirling like so much confetti.

  Marmy tapped the spoon deliberately on the side of the glass.

  “Well, that is quite the tale, I must say,” she said. A skeptical police detective admiring a guilty suspect’s outrageous alibi. She looked Laura in the eye. “And you’re happy, here, in this new life of yours?”

  Are you happy? Did her mother just ask her if she was happy? Laura dared to meet Marmy’s gaze for several seconds and found an expression that was new, foreign, staring back at her. Something that almost seemed like . . . intrigue.

  “I don’t pretend to know that every choice I make will be the right one in the end,” Laura managed, “but I do feel confidence that I have the facility to make the best decisions I can at any given moment. So yes, for now, I am happy.” She’d learned that it was always best to engage in conversations with Marmy that sounded like they could have been written by Jane Austen. In one of her initial letters from the Barbizon this summer, she had casually dropped in the sentence “I can only hope that my patient industry will yield earnest learning,” and done it without a shred of irony.

  “I see. Well, your father and I are certainly disappointed you didn’t feel that you could discuss this with us before making such a drastic decision, but as you yourself point out, we have raised you to think independently and to use clear judgment, so I must take you on the strength of your conviction that you have exhibited both of them when considering this course.”

  Laura’s eyes opened so wide she could almost hear her lids snapping. She had expected an immediate order to start packing. Instead she’d gotten something that almost sounded like praise.

  She’s up to something.

  The waitress asked if they wanted to order food, Marmy delicately waving her off as she took another genteel sip of the iced tea. She pressed her napkin to her lips deliberately, the way one might apply a cold compress on a fever. “And this relationship with the Barnes boy. Is it serious?”

  Of course.

  Marmy had not come to admonish. Or to berate. Or to judge.

  She had come to verify.

  Laura fought the smile forming at the edges of her mouth. How could she have not seen this coming? Not conjured the image of her mother, prim and self-satisfied, leaving here and slipping behind the wheel of her navy-blue Packard with the white interior, silently humming Tony Bennett as she wound her way back to the Merritt Parkway? Marmy would be practicing her own internal monologue, the one she would deliver to her friends over bridge about her daughter and Benjamin Barnes: Yes, we think it’s very serious and Oh, he’s such a lovely young man and Of course, it’s up to her to decide her future, but he seems very smitten and We just want her to be happy, because as mothers all we want is for our children to be happy. How many times would Marmy sit before her dressing mirror before bed, looking at her reflection and practicing the introduction: “Oh, yes, you remember my daughter, Mrs. Benjamin Barnes?”

  Laura’s smirk hardened into something else, and she felt a slight scoff escape. Who knew that a few random lines in a New York gossip column could completely upend two decades of power, two decades of living under the thumb of the pressed and pleated Mrs. Theodore Dixon of Greenwich, Connecticut?

  “He’s nice,” she replied casually. “Of course, he’s not the only young man I’m seeing.”

  Her mother reached for her purse, extracted some lotion, and applied it to her hands. “I see,” she said, writhing her hands together like a hand mixer. “Do you think that wise? I mean, Benjamin Barnes is a rather prominent young man. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to put yourself into a situation where your other engagements might embarrass him.”

  No, embarrass you, Laura thought. Or, more accurately, Impede your chances of becoming an in-law to one of the most socially prominent families in New York.

  She had fantasized about this moment. This very moment. She had lain awake in her cream-and-white bedroom at hom
e, staring up at the roof of the canopy bed, and imagined what it would be like if the day came when she would no longer have to care a whit about what her mother thought, when she would, for once, be holding all the cards. The one in control. Now that it had arrived she felt . . . nothing. She had expected a thrill, but the only emotion she could access was scorn. For her mother and her louche appetite for social standing, and for herself, for wasting all of those years worrying about the opinion of someone as shallow as a glass of iced tea.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, but I must be going,” Laura said, sliding out of the booth and delivering a Judas kiss on the cheek. “I have a date with a bartender.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Just come in for a minute. C’mon. Just a minute.”

  Dolly stood with Jack at the entrance to the Barbizon, pulling at his arm on the sidewalk, trying to haul his impressive frame through the doors. Oscar looked positively flustered, reaching for the door to let them in, then pulling his hand away as Jack insisted he couldn’t, then reaching again as Jack jerked a step closer to the building, then back again when he resolutely stated, for the third or possibly fourth time, that the lateness of the hour didn’t permit an extension of their date.

  “You’re being mean,” Dolly said, intending to sound cute but instead coming off peeved.

  “I’m sorry. But I have to get back.”

  “Back where? What is so important in Yonkers that you can’t spend an extra ten minutes in Manhattan?”

  “Dolly, please,” he said, leaning in and kissing her on the forehead. “I have to go. I’ll see you soon.”

  I’ll see you soon.

  It was always I’ll see you soon. Never I’ll see you tomorrow, or I’ll meet you after work on Tuesday and we’ll go see a movie, or I can’t wait until the weekend—let’s make a plan. Just always, always, I’ll see you soon. Invariably, he did. Most of the time, anyway. There was those two weeks of silence in August that had driven her to the brink of madness, but then he’d calmly resurfaced, vague as always about his whereabouts (“Family trip” is all she’d gotten out of him), and just when she’d had it, when she was going to demand a firmer commitment, an understanding of what all of this was, or even if there was a “this,” she’d look into his eyes, or fixate on his pretty teeth, or casually brush her hand against his flat top, which always looked like he was about to enter basic training, and all of her resolve would fly right out of her body like a streamer cut loose at the Fourth of July parade.