The Girl in White Gloves

by Kerri Maher

  “I’ve looked into some properties,” she ventured. He liked it when she did her homework. She told him about the lovely villa in Roquebrun, just up the hill from the Larvotto. Then she breathed slowly and silently, waiting.

  “All right,” he finally agreed, “if it will make you happy. But we must also come up with a more public gift, something I can give you before our subjects.”

  Grace leapt up from her seat and went around the table to kiss Rainier on the cheek, then kneel beside his chair with her hand on his. She felt truly happy, her chest full of fizzy bubbles rising like those in a champagne flute.

  “You can give me anything you like.”

  He smiled and ran a finger down her jaw. For the first time in a long time, it sent a shiver of something approaching desire down her spine. She kissed him on the lips, and tightened her fingers around his palm. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He turned in his seat, then slid off of it so that he, too, was kneeling, and they were facing each other. He put his arms around her and pressed his body against hers as they kissed. Grace closed her eyes and reached deep into her memories to find a moment, a sensation akin to this one, and when she found it, she kissed Rainier harder and let him pull her to the floor.

  Chapter 2

  1949

  Her voice was not doing what she wanted it to do. Damn it. She still sounded so nasal. Grace flicked her electric kettle on again, and spooned salt into the blue-and-white porcelain teapot she’d purchased in Chinatown her first week in New York. It hardly went with the cups she’d brought from her mother’s original china set, a fine porcelain with pink and gold flowers vining the delicate pieces, but both had served her well since she’d moved into this shoebox on Sixty-Third Street. Even though her modeling money could afford her a whole new tea set from Tiffany’s, these mismatched pieces worked just fine and seemed like the perfect combination of her Henry Avenue life and her more adventurous city life.

  When the water came to a boil, she poured it into the pot and stirred with a chopstick she’d purchased from the same emporium in Chinatown, the farthest south she’d ventured on the island of Manhattan. The place was over a fishmonger’s shop and smelled terribly of seaweed and cod, but it was well-known as the best place to go for the sorts of inexpensive housewares a girl needed to outfit her room in the Barbizon. “No sense in picking out a pattern before we meet the right man,” Prudy had said judiciously to Grace and a few other girls over breakfast last fall.

  She poured herself a cup full of hot salty water, took some into her mouth, then tipped her head back and pooled the liquid in her throat, gargled, then spit it into the awaiting soup bowl. She repeated this two more times, then tried again, starting with an old favorite, Cordelia from King Lear, to put the English accent into her ear and throat: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty / According to my bond; no more nor less. / Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honour you.”

  Then she switched to The Torch-Bearers by Uncle George, trying to bring just a touch of those broad vowels and clipped final syllables to the American character Florence McCrickett. As always, she tried to speak from her abdomen, from far below any pipe the salt water had cleansed; the wash was just to allow as much of her voice as possible through. The main thing was to “stop speaking out of your sinuses,” as Don had put it. He’d offered her a pack of cigarettes to help bring her tones down, but she’d flatly refused. Her voice she could train, but her white teeth and mercifully clear complexion weren’t to be toyed with. She’d seen far too many beautiful young woman made positively yellow with those sticks—why, if she had a penny for every stunning bride she’d seen in a photograph who was unrecognizable as a friend’s mother twenty years later, she wouldn’t have to model to pay her rent.

  She’d been making progress without the smoke. The vibration of her voice in her chest and ears was an octave lower than it had been a year ago, surely. And today, something in her accent and intonation suddenly sounded new, something maybe a little like Katharine Hepburn, but not Katharine Hepburn. Something that sounded like Grace Kelly, but better. Better, older, sexier, more worldly, more poised, more sophisticated. More.

  She’d better stop there. Mustn’t jinx herself. And she really had to wash and set her hair before her date with Don. If only she had a mane like Hepburn’s, instead of this stringy mop. Well, thank heaven for curlers. She’d take her help where she could find it.

  When she stepped out of the shower and into the steamy salmon-pink-tiled bathroom, Grace was delighted to see Prudy and Carolyn leaning over the white sinks adjusting their makeup. Towel clad, Grace approached them. “Well, hello, ladies,” she said, draping one damp arm around Carolyn, which her friend shook off with good-natured irritation.

  “Hey, watch the cashmere, Kelly,” she said of the soft baby blue sweater that hugged her curves in just the way that got her so many modeling jobs in town. It was a marvelous contrast to her dark hair.

  “It is a lovely shade. New?” Grace asked.

  “Nice, isn’t it? Gift from Bloomingdale’s after the shoot today,” said Carolyn, turning around to face Grace and lean against the sink. “And I deserved the bonus. It was grueling, what with Mr. Shoemaker’s hand on my bum between every take.”

  Grace shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Randy, Randy, Randy,” she tutted, “when will you ever learn?”

  Prudy giggled. “Is his name actually Randy?”

  “Yes,” Grace laughed. “Never was a man more appropriately named.”

  “Little does hopeless old Randy know that some of his regular girls have taken up running for exercise,” said Carolyn.

  “You might be able to outrun one, but won’t you just run into another?” asked Prudy.

  “I’d love to run into someone good. Captain Joseph A. Truss from the Copacabana last weekend, remember him? He said he runs in Central Park every day. Mmmmm,” said Carolyn, sounding like she had just taken a bite of her favorite chocolate.

  “Maybe I should join you,” mused Grace, pulling the towel off her head and running a comb through her hair.

  “Always room for one more,” said Carolyn.

  “But you’re practically engaged to Don,” Prudy pointed out. Her friend was sometimes a little too practical for her own good—always home by curfew, never late for one of the secretarial jobs that supplemented her acting. Grace appreciated and even shared many of Prudy’s pragmatic habits, but occasionally she could do without the moralizing.

  “But I’m not engaged yet, am I?” Grace said, more to rib Prudy than anything else.

  Her friend shook her head and said, “I should start calling you Sphinxy.”

  “Why would she want to marry Don?” Carolyn demanded. “Grace could have anyone. Every time we go out, no fewer than three different men, all much more successful and better dressed than Mr. Richardson, will send Grace drinks.”

  “Drinks aren’t love,” said Grace, opening her bag of curlers, selecting one of the small ones, rolling a section of hair around it, then securing it with a bobby pin.

  “Exactly,” said Prudy. “Why trade love for fun at the Copacabana?”

  “Because it’s fun,” said Carolyn. “And who said Grace is actually in love with Don? I don’t think you are, Gracie. I think you’re just enamored of the idea that one of your first acting teachers liked you enough to want to take you out.”

  “Nothing wrong with flattery,” Grace defended herself, rolling another section of hair around a curler.

  “Do you love him or not?” Carolyn asked, as if something in her own life were at stake.

  “Maaaadly,” Grace drawled, then giggled.

  “You’re impossible,” said Prudy, and Carolyn agreed.

  Grace smiled at her friends, then realized she’d f
orgotten to use her new voice with them. All this time, she could have been practicing! She mustn’t be so careless in the future.

  The truth was, she did love Don. She wasn’t sure if it was his dark good looks, or his relative age—he was eleven years older, after all—or the way he carried his long, slim body like a loosely draped scarf, but Don Richardson had captivated her from the moment his gaze fell on her in his scene-study class at the Academy. He’d waited patiently till she completed his class before suggesting they go to Katz’s downtown to “discuss her upcoming classes,” but she’d known the whole semester that he wanted her. And that she wanted him.

  It had been thrilling to sit across from this man with a tangle of black curls falling into his large black eyes who knew so much about theater and New York, like the deli where they ate hot, mustardy sandwiches with ribbons of a pungent and delicious meat between slices of dark bread. Well, what was a girl to do? Of course she’d kissed him. Feeling heat and possibility buzz between them, eighteen-year-old Grace had known real desire for the first time in her life.

  When Don had finally laid her in his bed one dark, snowy March afternoon, she’d never been more grateful to that sweet, nervous boy in Ocean City the previous summer for doing her the great service of dispensing with her virginity, though of course she hadn’t felt so callous about her virginity then, and it had broken her heart to realize when he went away to Yale that they really weren’t right for each other. How could she possibly marry someone so interested in stocks and bonds who hadn’t even enjoyed the one and only Broadway show he’d ever seen? She’d gone to confession as soon as she realized this, and admitted the sin of lust to the priest on the other side of the iron grate, though of course she hadn’t been so foolish as to admit she’d acted on that lust. She had her mother, Margaret Majer Kelly, to thank for that pragmatism; though she’d converted to Catholicism to marry John B. Kelly, her mother had been raised Lutheran as the daughter of German immigrants. She’d actually told Grace the night before she first received the sacrament of penance, “You don’t have to tell the priest everything. Some things are best left between you and God.”

  Though she’d never admit it to any of her Catholic friends, Grace was far less interested in how her adolescent lust affected her relationship with God than the fact that it had made her forget the solemn promise she’d made to herself throughout her childhood that she would make a name for Grace Kelly onstage, like Uncle George. Though she had another uncle who was a vaudeville actor, Grace had never been drawn to him as she’d been to refined, learned George. Her father’s older brother was the one person in her whole family who’d used his creative talents, instead of his hands, to succeed in life. He’d won a Pulitzer for writing The Torch-Bearers! Even her Olympian rower father had to admit that was pretty impressive.

  So no—however lusty they were, she felt no regrets about her feelings for Don because they were extensions of her love for theater. Still, she wasn’t in a rush to marry him. A part of her was curious—yes, just a bit—about what it might be like to go out with men as well-heeled as those who sent her drinks the nights she went out with girlfriends.

  But all that felt too complicated, and too private, to explain to even Carolyn and Prudy. So she changed the subject: “Enough about me, girls. What are you two up to this evening?”

  * * *

  Darling,” she greeted Don in the foyer of the Barbizon, where small potted palm trees lent an exotic charm to the otherwise heavy, oaken space, the only area in the entire twenty-three-story building where men were allowed. Her black patent pumps clicked on the spick-and-span floor, and the light petticoats beneath her chiffon skirt tickled her shins. Her smooth box calf handbag dangled from the crook of her arm as she put one gloved hand on his elbow and placed a gentle red-lipped kiss on his cheek.

  “You’ll need your hankie for that, I’m afraid,” she said, nodding and raising her eyebrow toward the lipstick on his cheek. The makeup experts at the magazine shoots all told her she’d have to powder her lips to high heaven to avoid leaving such marks, and she simply wasn’t willing to spend that much time fussing over her face. Besides, Don was well trained in carrying the monogrammed handkerchief she’d given him for just this purpose.

  As he rubbed away the stain, he said, “You sound different.”

  “Do I?” she said coyly. So, she’d been right about what she heard earlier. The thought made her a little giddy.

  “It’s good,” he said, with that intense look he sometimes got. I swear, Grace thought to herself, as a hot rush of longing coursed through her.

  Don smiled, returned her kiss on the cheek, then cautioned, “But you’ll need to modulate it. Right now it’s a bit much. Too Laurence Olivier.”

  “Killjoy,” she said, smiling right back at him, though she felt her heart drop like a stone into her stomach. While their attraction was close to perfect, their statures were not. She needed to land her first big part: that would show him they were no longer teacher and student, no matter what it said in the faculty handbook of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

  They met two couples, theater friends of Don’s who were all between gigs and working other jobs, substitute teaching and tending bar, at a checkered-tablecloth place in the West Fifties where they made their way through several bottles of Chianti and enormous platters of chicken parmigiana and garlic bread served family style. Grace enjoyed getting good and tipsy though she eschewed the second helpings she knew would have helped her head the next morning, hoping that a few glasses of water might instead do the trick.

  Afterward, they found their way to Birdland. It was jumping, but luckily Don knew the man at the ropes, and he let their little group in. “You might have to stand awhile,” the tall Irishman in the double-breasted suit told them. Inside, the small nightclub was so smoky, Grace could hardly see the man playing the trumpet on the stage at the front, though the melancholy whine of his instrument pierced the air and landed in her ear like honey.

  She’d been reading about this new club for weeks, and this was her first time. The music did not disappoint even though Charlie Parker, for whom the club was named, was not playing that night. Rumor had it he appeared irregularly because of his heroin addiction.

  Between sets, a table for two freed up, and the six of them cobbled together enough chairs to sit around it and order a bottle of whiskey. Grace allowed herself a small glass of the amber liquid; she didn’t much like it without ice and soda anyway, so it wasn’t a hardship not to indulge. Leaning back on Don’s arm, which rested on the slim wood of her chair, she closed her eyes and let the music permeate. The tune was sultry and slow, the piano and trumpet, saxophone and drums coming together in rhythms and harmonies she’d never heard before, and yet heard all the time, all over New York—in clubs from the Village to Harlem, on record players in tiny apartments and penthouses, on street corners where players left out their hats, hoping for change.

  Fordie, her family’s chauffeur and the only person at home other than Uncle George who was unfailingly kind to her, had taught Grace to always throw as much change as she could spare in these musicians’ caps. One day when she was around ten, he’d picked her up from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and from the driver’s seat, he’d handed Grace two crisp dollars out the window. “Throw these in the case,” he’d instructed her, pointing at the bass player on the wide stone steps who was plucking the strings of his instrument and making a kind of sad but buoyant music. She’d dropped the bills into the open case, and watched as the green-and-white papers fluttered down and joined the shiny nickels and pennies on the scarlet velvet below. Fordie had been the musician’s best patron that day. Men like her father, in their fine coats and felt hats, who could have afforded to drop much more into the open case, passed the musician by without even a glance.

  Back in the car, Fordie explained in his velvety tenor voice, “Never know where a man like that’s been, Gracie. Might be from
New Orleans, or Chicago, come all the way here to make his way. Or maybe he lives on these very streets, and he’s saving, saving, saving to get up to Harlem. Your uncle George had support on his way to the stage. It’s up to us to support strangers like that player.”

  Oh, how she missed Fordie.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw a commotion on the other side of the club. Someone famous had arrived, and people were getting up to offer the couple a seat. Grace didn’t recognize the platinum blond woman, but the wiry young man looked familiar. She couldn’t quite place him, so she said into Don’s ear, “Who’s that?”

  “Jack Kennedy,” said Don, “and one of his showgirls, presumably. He likes the blondes.”

  Ah. One of the Massachusetts Kennedys her father was always going on about. “And how would you know he likes blondes?” Grace asked.

  “Everyone in the theater knows Jack,” said Don. “Or knows of him. Just like everyone the generation before me knew his old man, Joe. He’s in Congress now, but from what I understand, he’s being groomed for much more.”

  Grace’s father had always admired Joe Kennedy and his ambitious family. “Shows what an Irishman can do when he decides to crush the WASPs under his heel,” he’d said on more than one occasion, like when her older brother, Kell, won the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley in England, the prestigious solo rowing race his father had been denied entry in 1920 because he was Irish and Catholic. Jack Kennedy was just the sort of man her father would love if she brought him home. How would she ever introduce Daddy to Don?

  It might have been easy to put off her friends on the subject of their relationship, but it was harder to put off Don himself, especially after nearly a year together. His divorce would be final soon, and he’d referred obliquely to another marriage once or twice: “I doubt your parents would accept a Jewish husband for their daughter. Or would they? The Irish have been almost as discriminated against as we have, in America at least. Should provide some common ground.” And in bed once while the long fingers of each of their hands danced suggestively with one another: “Oh, Grace, there might be nothing for it but to marry you.” In both cases, though she’d felt a wild flutter of excitement at his words, she’d thought it wise to keep her mouth shut.