In the phone booth Daisy fumbled frantically in her change purse. It bulged with infuriating pennies and unusable half dollars. No dimes. Finally she dredged out two quarters. She dialed Supracorp, got a wrong number and listened, appalled, as the first quarter dropped. The second time she dialed with the care of a scientist dealing with a dangerous bacteria culture.
“Mr. Shannon’s office,” trilled one of his secretaries after Daisy had been put through by the switchboard.
“Please, may I speak to him?” she asked, breathing so fast that she could hardly speak.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Shannon is in conference and he particularly asked not to be disturbed,” the secretary said with the self-satisfied pleasure of the shoe clerk who tells you he has nothing at all in your size. “Would you like to leave a message?”
Daisy took a deep breath and found a voice of ringing metal. “This is Princess Daisy Valensky and I want to speak to Mr. Shannon immediately,” she commanded.
“Just one minute, please.”
“I’m in a pay phone, I’ve run out of change and if you don’t put him on in two seconds, I’m going to …” Daisy realized she was talking to dead air. The secretary had put her on hold.
“Daisy?” Shannon said, with tense concern.
“Pat, is it too late?”
“Too late for what? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I’m fine. But is it too late to put the Elstree thing back together, everything, the whole campaign, me included, media, stores, everything—is it too late to go back to yesterday where everything was before I saw you?”
“Wait a minute, how do you know what’s been going on?”
“Kiki told me, but that’s not important. Pat, Pat, it’s too complicated to explain on the phone but I’ve … oh, I’ve come into my own self is the best way I can say it … it’s …”
The operator’s voice intoned, “Five cents for the next five minutes, please.”
“Daisy, where are you?” Shannon shouted.
“Will you take five pennies, operator?” Daisy asked pleadingly.
“Daisy, what’s the number there for Christ’s sake?”
“Oh, Pat, just listen, I could have been one of quintuplets and I’d still be me, I could cut off all my hair or dye it black, I could never paint or ride again, or I could learn Speedwriting or sky diving, or I could become an interior decorator or a movie star or a bookbinder, and I’d still be me,” she exalted.
“Where the hell are you calling from?”
“The zoo. Pat, Pat, don’t you see? I’m the person you know, just her—or is it just she?—never mind, but I’m no one else, I’m me, Daisy Valensky, from the inside out, all the way through down to rock bottom and I like it, it feels good for the first time, really good, and real, Pat, real, as if I deserve it, the good of it and the bad of it—oh, I keep forgetting—it’s not too late to go back to the plans for the Princess Daisy business, is it, to cancel the cancellations?”
“Hell, no, of course not, but Daisy, where are …”
His voice was cut off and the shrill of a nonfunctioning telephone replaced it.
Daisy looked in astonishment at the box on the wall. She, the utterly efficient organizer of a thousand complicated location shoots, had failed to follow the basic technique required of the lowliest production assistant: when calling from a public booth, give your number and wait to be called back. She hung up the phone and went to borrow some change from Kiki. She hadn’t finished talking to Patrick Shannon, not by a long shot.
If a person lives in Manhattan long enough he gets to accept the fact that there are perhaps only a dozen perfect days in any given year; days during which New York City regains that sea-girt light that once was responsible for so much of the magic; days on which a breeze sweeps the city but does not blow so hard that it creates whirlpools of filth on the pavement; days on which it is possible to remember and understand that the city was once a pastoral island, surrounded by swift rivers; days on which the eye is able to see clear across town from the Hudson River to the East River; days during which New Yorkers congratulate themselves on sticking it out during the rest of the year.
It was on the night of such a day that The Russian Winter Palace Ball took place. An unexpected calm descended on the detail-burdened spirit of Candice Bloom as she woke up that morning, looked out of the window and sniffed the air. She knew immediately that there would be no last-minute illness in the ranks of Warner Le Roy’s four hundred and fifty employees at the Tavern on the Green; no single one of the six hundred guests, carefully culled from the upper reaches of every segment of New York’s overlapping worlds of society, the arts and power, would fail to appear; there would be no problem with the ice sculptures melting before they could be displayed; none of the horses hitched to the troikas would bolt and run off with their precious passengers; the night would be mild, the stars would be clearly visible in the plum-colored New York sky and there would be no need to put up a tent on the outside terrace of the restaurant, that, only yesterday, had been planted with seven hundred pots of tall daisy bushes flown in from California. No moon, but who needed a moon with two thousand candles and sixty thousand twinkle lights? In every bone of her lanky and skimpily fleshed frame she knew that Friday, September 16, 1977, was going to be her lucky day.
Daisy woke up early on that same morning with a moment of confusion before she realized that last night she had gotten into bed with Patrick Shannon and never left it. This was the first time she’d spent a whole night in his apartment and she blamed it entirely on Lucy, Shannon’s lurcher, who, after first flirting and then spurning Theseus’s affections for an absurdly long time—at one point tucking her tail resolutely between her legs and biting him on the nose—had finally, cautiously, changed her mind just as Daisy was about to take a crestfallen but still willing Theseus home to his own pillow. Lucy was not an easy customer, Daisy thought sleepily, but if there was ever to be a chance to breed true lurcher puppies so that she could give one to Kiki, she would have to put up with the bitch. She fell asleep again for a few minutes and woke up in Shannon’s arms. Oh, but this was something outside the realm of past experience, this emotion of deep, sure gladness. From head to toe, her body was dancing with joy and welcome. There was a lack of any barrier between their two skins and their two minds and their two hearts, as, intertwined, they seemed to lie in a pool of golden light, pure, gay and penetrating, even though the sun itself had not yet entered the room. Daisy felt as if she were at the very center of the earth, like the pit of a great fruit, and at the same time she felt as if the two of them were flying together at the rim of the world, on the outer edge of experience.
“Is this bliss?” she whispered to him.
“This is love,” he whispered back and when she reached up to put her arms around his neck, he felt the tears of happiness on her cheeks.
The snow-making machines had started on the bridle path where it coiled past the entrance to the park at 59th Street. They had spread a thick carpet of snow, one hundred feet wide, all the way to the Tavern at 67th Street. There the bridle path passes directly in front of the terrace of the restaurant and the snow makers continued to cover the path until the terrace was out of their sight. Then they doubled back and covered the entrance court of the Tavern and the street leading out to Central Park West, so that the guests, whether they came by limousine or by troika, all crossed into winter. From as far as Florida, Maine and Texas, Jenny Antonio had located thirty troikas and had them trucked to New York, but even she hadn’t been able to get enough for all six hundred guests. Troikas are in short supply in the United States and, in spite of the dictionary-assured fact that any carriage drawn by three horses could be reasonably called a troika, Candice had insisted on picking only those that looked foreign, if not absolutely Russian. “I don’t intend this to look like a nouveau version of ‘Wagon Train,’ ” she told Jenny with asperity.
The Parks Department had given Supracorp permission to
gather the troikas, their drivers and horses together and erect a temporary platform from which they would pick up their passengers and depart. Joseph Papp’s chief set designer had been inspired by Supracorp’s money to develop a healthy capitalistic outlook. The result was a daisy-bowered, latticed pavilion which managed to suggest what the Kremlin might look like if anyone with taste could get hold of it. Huge flags, in Princess Daisy lapis lazuli blue, with the stylized single daisy embroidered on them, blew from every corner of the pavilion, which was bathed in the footlights and spotlights, cunningly concealed in trees. All thirty of the troika drivers had been outfitted by a theatrical costumer in authentic greatcoats and three-cornered hats, some in red, some in green and still others in blue.
That night, as dusk fell, Candice Bloom and Jenny first took their hired limousine to the Tavern on the Green, where they made a final inspection of the arrangements, lingering a minute to watch the ten ice sculptors who were just finishing their work. The press photographers were already gathered at the entrance to the restaurant. Candice decided that she had hired more gypsy violinists than anyone needed, so she delegated a group of them to trudge down ten blocks to the pavilion where they could fiddle for the specially honored guests who had been invited to assemble there and arrive by troika.
As dozens of waiters started to light the two thousand candles in their silver candelabra, Candice and Jenny climbed back into their long, black car and were delivered to the empty pavilion. A few minutes remained before Daisy and Shannon were supposed to arrive so that they could be driven to the restaurant before the first guests were due. Candice, quivering with nerves, bent over her immaculate, thoughtful, quite possibly perfect list, a creation of the Art of Public Relations which, she now insisted, deserved its own graduate school.
Troika One: Princess Daisy and Patrick Shannon.
Troika Two: Mayor Koch, Governor Carey, Anne Ford and Bess Myerson.
Troika Three: Sinatra, Johnny Carson, Sulzberger and Grace Mirabella of Vogue.
Troika Four: John Fairchild, Woody Allen, Helen Gurley Brown, David Brown and Rona Barrett.
Troika Five: Streisand, Peters, Barbara Walters …
Something disturbed her in her devout contemplation, some movement that should not yet be there in that bright, waiting, flower-filled pavilion. No, Candice thought, no, that simply could not be Theseus. He was NOT ON HER LIST. Big, hairy and, for once, horribly frisky rather than sly, the terrifying beast bounded into the pavilion, hanging his head in a sinister manner and looking at her in a leering fashion that obviously preceded some sort of attack. Candice was frozen in bewitched abhorrence. The dreadful animal sidled up to Candice, nuzzling her crotch in a yearning way that, had she but known it, was a serious compliment. She shivered in outrage.
“He likes you,” Daisy said.
It was only then that Candice realized that Theseus was firmly attached to a leash of silver sequined ribbons into which a bunch of daisies had been threaded. She was saved from whimpering out loud. Still not daring to raise her eyes, she quavered pitifully, “Daisy, exactly what breed of chien is that, for God’s sake?”
“A noble lurcher,” Daisy answered, settling the question forever.
As Daisy advanced, all the lights in the room broke into millions of sticks of splintering brilliance as they were reflected by her dress. It was paved with silver sequins and, at the narrow waist, bands of gold and bronze sequins had been woven into trompe l’oeil ribbons. The same bands formed a great bow at the high neck and defined a wide hem. The dress was a concentration of matchless theatricality such as no one had dared to wear in the last fifty years—a once-in-a-lifetime gown, fit only to be given to a museum after tonight.
Daisy and Patrick Shannon, with Theseus between them, crossed the pavilion and stepped outside where a silver-lacquered, flower-filled troika waited for them. The muscular driver looked at the three of them kindly.
“Let me know when you’re ready and then sit back and brace yourselves,” he announced.
“Please,” said Daisy, “give me the reins. You can get down and drive the next troika.”
“But you can’t drive this thing, Miss,” the man replied, shocked.
“If I can’t,” she laughed, “then there’s no such thing as heredity.”
“It’s at your own risk,” he warned her.
“Perhaps … but that’s not going to stop me.”
Recognizing defeat, the driver jumped out, muttering to himself.
Princess Daisy Valensky rose, in one fluid, untroubled motion, and placing her weight equally and firmly on both feet, her arms extended, gathered in the six reins with a movement that made the night sing. At her touch the three white horses quieted, gentled down, waiting. Shannon and Theseus both sat easily, looking up at her. She was strong, pliant, serene, joyous, mistress and servant of the moment.
“Well?” she asked questioningly to Shannon, “how do you feel about Tallyho’?”
“I sort of prefer, ‘Lafayette, we are here,’ ” he answered.
“But why not en avant?” Daisy asked, prolonging the delight.
“Perhaps even a simple giddy-up would do,” he replied, feeling an instant’s worth of pity for all the men in the world who were not Patrick Shannon.
The silver bells of the horses jingled sweetly in the night and, with one effortless gesture of authority, so flawless, so decisive that she needed no words of command, Daisy started the three white horses at a gallop, racing the troika over the snow toward the lights she knew were beckoning in the distance.
For Steve—
my husband, my love, my best friend—always.
Special thanks go to these good friends who answered questions with the gift of their experience:
Bernie Owett
Steve Elliot
Dan Dormam
Aaron Shikler
and, particularly, to Rosemary de Courcy and her lurcher, Jake.
Bantam Books by Judith Krantz
Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed
SCRUPLES
SCRUPLES TWO
PRINCESS DAISY
MISTRAL’S DAUGHTER
I’LL TAKE MANHATTAN
TILL WE MEET AGAIN
DAZZLE
LOVERS
Princess Daisy Page 59