by Carole Maso
“What is it?” I ask.
“Are you dreaming again?” Fletcher says.
“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her?” I ask Fletcher, who smiles, happy to be able to answer anything for anyone.
“Yes, I do,” he says. “Sure. Why not?”
My father walks into the kitchen carrying an empty soup bowl.
“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her, Dad?” I ask.
He runs his hand along a copper pot that glints in the half-light.
“Oh, probably,” he says finally. “Someday,” he sighs.
My father is far away. His silence is so deep and seductive that it seems he has had to travel a great distance to the surface to form even these few words. He does not buoy up to the surface like a swimmer or some other temporary guest of water. His life is down there—in deep blue, in gray, in green, in tangled plants, in dim light.
Still, I would like to rescue him. I put on a black bathing suit. A silver whistle hangs around my neck. My eyes are clear and focused, my body is muscled, much stronger than my ordinary body, set for the task.
I would like to dredge him up from those depths, breathe my life into him, beach him on some even shore. I dive once, twice, hold his head in the air, push water from his lungs.
He turns on the faucet and submerges his soup bowl in warm water. “How about a movie?” he asks in his dreamy, underwater way. He is back in the air again. I have succeeded in some small way, I think.
“Sure,” my brother and I say in unison. “What movie?” My father shrugs. “Whatever you like,” he smiles.
Father’s love of the movies always reassured us; it made him seem like other fathers to us.
“Oh, any movie will do,” he says gently, helping us on with our coats. But I wondered a little, as we drove into the afternoon without any idea of where we were going or what time it was, whether even the movies meant something different to Father than they did to us.
Grace Kelly turns to say good night to Gary Grant at her hotel room. A faint smile drifts across her face and she slides her pale arms around his neck.
My father gasps in the front row and sinks into his plush, red seat in the tiny theater at the edge of campus in Princeton, New Jersey. He looks through his fingers as she presses her mouth to his.
I imagine my father spent many afternoons peering through his fingers, marveling at the great and not so great movies of the 1950s in that dingy theater with its lobby of fake ferns, its big old stage, its touches of gold and brocade. Bits of plaster and paint would fall into his dark hair from the ceiling, and, looking up, he would see on either side of the stage an artist’s version of royal boxes, made from plasterboard, red painted curtains pulled back to reveal an attentive king and queen.
“What a dive, Louie,” my father must have said affectionately to the apathetic owner, wiping what he imagined was the dust of centuries from Louie’s bald head, pulling candy wrappers and gum from the bottoms of his own shoes. “What a dive.”
Dive or not, my father never missed a movie and indeed saw most of them at least twice. I can imagine him sitting alone in the front row, devouring popcorn and waiting for the masks, one of tragedy and one of comedy, pinned to the musty velvet curtain, to part and the screen to light up. In that final second before the first reel began, he must have felt a small thrill in the pitch black, his whole body weightless with anticipation. There were newsreels then, and before To Catch a Thief or The Country Curl he could watch his lovely Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in real life, on the arm of Clark Gable or Oleg Cassini. “Oleg,” he thought, chuckling to himself, “what a great name.” He watched as she took the arm of Prince Rainier III of Monaco. My father witnessed it all. He saw Rainier visit Grace’s home. He saw the Kelly family, blond and athletic, smiling and waving for the camera, Grace off to one side, unlike them, distant and mysterious. He watched as tons of flowers rained down on her from Aristotle Onassis’s private plane as she stepped from an ocean liner onto Rainier’s yacht.
My father sighs. Her eyes are shaded by dark glasses. She is a million miles away, he thinks, walking down the aisle to the popcorn stand as Khrushchev and Eisenhower eye each other on the screen.
My father was probably not a very popular person at Princeton. He had many annoying qualities even then. He studied little and did exceptionally well, which his classmates found distressing, especially those sons of Princeton alumni who had to struggle to keep up or lose their lives. My father was also exceedingly modest about his achievements, and his modesty irked them.
He never really fit in anywhere. He was not a pusher, a striver, a tweed bag, a jock, or a lounge lizard. He was not even my father yet, or my mother’s husband. He did not join clubs. He would not give the password. He would not shake secret handshakes. He never went to a football game. He never sang the Princeton song or wore a black and orange scarf. He never pinned a pennant on his wall or gave a stuffed Princeton tiger to a woman. Women liked him for no reason, certainly through no effort on his part. They must have thought him dark and romantic. They liked him even despite the vague smell of popcorn and Baby Ruths that seemed to follow him everywhere. But my father had little interest in real-life women; after all those years in the front row, they must have seemed too small to him.
I can imagine my father sitting by himself in front of a large black-and-white television in his dorm, watching Grace Kelly the film star become Princess Grace of Monaco. “She will be a princess twice, a duchess four times, nine times a baroness, eight times a countess,” the TV commentator says. “However, since a majority of the prince’s domain now exists in name only, her kingdom in reality is a small one, covering three towns and 22,000 people.”
The day before, the civil ceremony was held in the sixteenth-century throne room of the palace. “Both were tense and grim faced,” the smirking newsman reports, “and there was no hint of a smile through the half-hour ceremony. Twice Miss Kelly looked distraughtly at Rainier but he did not look back. He fidgeted in his chair, put a finger to his lips, or twiddled his thumbs.” My father shakes his head at this.
The camera scans the church. The guests are seated. “There’s Aa Gardner!” my father says to no one at all, pointing to a dot on the screen.
The prince enters, all sashes and medals; the music begins: the fifty-pipe organ, the orchestra, the choir. A chill goes up my father’s back. He can feel her standing at the edge of the screen. She appears. She walks, slowly, slowly down the aisle. She is even more beautiful than in the movies. He closes his eyes and becomes the prince. She takes his arm. “Oui, Monsignor,” she says when the marriage vows are exchanged.
“Oui, Monsignor,” a classmate says who has just entered the room.
“Oui, oui! Monsignor!” another boy says with lust, “ah, oui!”
“There she is,” Joel laughs, “the Queen of the Slot Machines!”
“Shh,” my father says.
“Oh, come on,” Teddy says.
There is some tension, a friction in the room that lets my father know, without taking his eyes from the screen, that the weekend must be nearing. There is a restless quality among his classmates. They shift their weight from one foot to the other as they look at the TV with my father.
“Are you ready?” they ask.
“What?”
“We’re going to Vassar,” Joel says, “don’t you remember?”
“Oh, sure. Sure,” my father says, a little dazed, looking up to see them with their overnight bags in hand, Princeton sweaters blazing. “Yeah, sure.”
“Well then, hurry up, Turin. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” my father says.
“All right, we’re leaving in ten minutes. Come on, Turin.”
There is something in their syncopated marchlike voices that my father likes. “OK, all right,” he says. They’re funny, my father thinks. Everything they say sounds like a cheer.
He notices that Jo
el is wearing a raccoon coat though it is April and much too warm.
“What’s that animal on your back?” my father asks Joel, the chubby one.
“Turin, I’m driving, so you’d better be decent to me,” Joel says.
“Sure,” my father says. “It was only a joke, Joel, only a joke.” As long as I have known him, my father has never been funny.
“You’re a real winner, Turin, you know that.”
My father smiles, nodding. He never really listens much to what anyone says. My brother and I used to catch him, nodding his head and smiling, “Sure,” when some more intricate answer was called for. “Sorry,” he’d say in his dim way when he realized he had been caught. “Sorry. What did you kids want?”
My father is lost in the royal wedding. Walking to Joel’s Buick, he sees himself in a tuxedo gliding toward a dove-gray limousine. With his gloved hands, he makes one elegant motion with his arm, allowing the others into the car before him.
“Turin, be real,” Teddy says, carrying his math books under his arm, planning to get my father to tutor him in the car. This is probably why my father was invited in the first place.
“It’s just common sense,” my father will say somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. “This cancels out y, x is raised to the third power, and then it reduces on both sides, so x = 3t − 1. Get it?”
Though my father has taken just the minimum requirements in math, it is his true strength. He seems not even to lift the pencil from the page as he solves the problems for Teddy.
Over the car radio he hears more details of the wedding. He closes his eyes. The boys sing. My father seems to be dozing.
Christine pads down to the TV room in her slippers and bathrobe; Sabine sits smoking a cigarette and looking out the window, her feet up on the windowsill. “How is your hair doing?” Sabine asks, not turning around—she does not have to—she knows my mother’s walk, her smell, the patterns of her breath by heart.
“All right, I suppose,” my mother says, touching the hard, pink rollers.
My mother sits down, her hands deep in her terry-cloth robe.
“All this fuss, Sabine,” she sighs. “Why, hmm? Pourquoi?”
She watches the TV screen dully as President Eisenhower throws out the first baseball of the 1956 season.
The camera angle changes. It’s the wedding, “Fifteen hundred newsmen have gathered,” the TV broadcaster says soberly, “substantially more than the number that converged on Geneva last summer when four heads of state were the center of world interest.” Sabine laughs with glee. One French magazine has twenty-nine reporters on the story. There are five hundred photographers.
“After three continuous days of rain in Monaco, there is a warm sun today,” one reporter whispers, as if it were necessary to whisper, as if the event required hushed, religious tones.
I imagine my mother gets closer to the set at the moment when Grace walks down the long aisle, the better to see her dress.
“Designed in Hollywood, a fact that has Paris couturiers sniffing,” the reporter whispers, “it has a bodice of rare rose-point lace selected for its flower-and-wheat pattern, a full silk skirt and silk cummerbund. The net veil is embroidered with rose-point lace and reembroidered with thousands of tiny pearls. The skirt is fastened in the back with three bows. The back flares out to give a fan-shaped effect.”
Grace goes to her place before the white marble altar. Despite the microphones and eighty loudspeakers, no one hears her pronounce her marriage vows. “Oui, Monsignor,” is all they hear. “Oui, Monsignor.”
Rainier has trouble getting the gold band past the knuckle of his bride’s finger. She helps him with it.
The next scene is the couple riding through the streets in an open limousine. “The sun was shining in Monaco,” the newscaster tells us, “although its warmth was tempered by a brisk wind.”
They halt before the Chapel of Ste. Dévote, Monaco’s patron saint, where the princess places her bouquet of lilies of the valley at the bare feet of the statue. She makes the sign of the cross and turns.
“La Côte d’Azur!” Sabine says excitedly, like a child.
My mother studies the scene closely, the too-bright sun, the too-perfect waves. She tilts her head. She can’t decide what’s wrong. She looks down at her hands. She looks back up at the screen.
“She will never be happy,” my mother says quietly, and Sabine for no reason gets up and kisses my mother on the cheek. What does she see, Sabine wonders?
“Ah! Time to take out the rollers,” she says.
“Why don’t you come with me?” my mother asks her.
Sabine just laughs, tosses her pretty head, and takes my mother’s hand. “And your nails! It’s getting late! Vas-y, vas-y!”
They have painted their room, against the rules, pink. It is Sabine’s favorite color. On the wall hang two large Vassar pennants, rose letters on a gray field. “The rosy dawning of women’s education pushing through all that gray of the past—I like that,” Sabine had said, hanging the pennants up at the beginning of the year after they had finished their painting.
Now, as Sabine shapes and polishes each one of my mother’s nails, muttering about how neglected her hands are and how could anyone let them get that way, my mother thinks of the last time she dressed up. She had worn the same dress she would wear this night; it was a sort of mauve color with two long streamers tacked to the shoulders that flowed behind her. Though people always told her how beautiful she looked in it, she felt they were overcompensating to cover their alarm at the actual hideousness of the dress. My mother, a full-scholarship student, did not have money for dresses and could not fit into any of Sabine’s, who was only five-foot-three and small boned. Deep down, my mother must have known that whatever she wore she would be beautiful; as much as she tried through the years to overlook that fact, it was not possible.
Sabine knows. Looking at my mother’s sculpted features as she combs out her hair, she says, “You will be the belle of the ball. Isn’t that what they say? The belle of the ball?” Mv mother smiles her reluctant, nervous smile and nods.
The last time they dressed up was in winter w hen my mother got the letter from the Pans Review saying that her poem had been accepted for publication. It was her first. She was just twenty years old. Years later, because of my mother’s poem, that issue would sell for hundreds of dollars. That night, having drunk much champagne, which they were not used to, they ended up shedding their chiffon, which my mother said they looked absolutely ridiculous in anyway, and they ran naked, in honor of Paris, in the snow in the Vassar Quad.
“The Pans Review!” my mother screamed.
“How perfect!” Sabine said. “It’s symbolic. Don’t you see?” she said, giggling. “We French know what’s good!”
“I’m trying to study,” someone shouted from the third floor of Lathrop, clearly not having looked out the window to see the two nude nymphs.
My mother composed herself. “I can only say that I am stunned—but do graciously accept—the Nobel Prize.” She was freezing and giddy.
Sabine made a large snowball and handed it to her. “L’Académie Française hails you as a genius. Incroyable!” Mv mother takes it, curtsies, and they both fall into the snow, shaking not from the cold, she thought, but from something else.
She could have lain there in the snow forever, looking up at the billions of stars, listening to Sabine singing “Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle.” “The next Edith Piaf,” my mother shouted, and Sabine got up and in her big voice began to sing “Je ne regrette rien” loud enough to call the attention of the security guard.
“Quel dommage,” Sabine cried, and the two bluish, naked girls were brought to the infirmary by a blushing elderly man in full uniform. My mother recited her published poem for the young nurse, and she in turn promised she would not tell anyone else of the incident, though they were lucky to be alive, she quickly added.
My mother had supposed the dress, left in the snow, was ruined, but now,
stepping into it this night before the Vassar/Princeton mixer, she thinks it looks as if she has never lain in the snow, never drunk champagne, never sung French songs with Sabine.
“I just don’t know about all of this,” my mother says, feeling it to be a mistake as soon as she leaves the room for the dance. Even as she walks forward down the path, she is stepping inward and bowing her head in shadow.
My father might have missed my mother completely, standing against the wall, partially hidden by two larger, more aggressive members of the senior class, had he not been primed to see her, and in fact, had he not been actually looking for her. Grace, the wedding, the ocean in Monaco had buoyed him forward. Joel’s filthy car plastered with Princeton stickers had become the leading limousine in the entourage, and that evening he was a prince in a great ballroom, his French was impeccable, his shoes shone, his gait was confident. He did not hesitate when he saw her.
“God, what’s Turin doing?” one of his classmates says, as he sees him gliding toward my mother, the most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen.
“She was more beautiful than Grace Kelly,” my father told me once, and there was a thrill in his voice still. As he approaches her, she turns her head to the side and he sees that classic, timeless profile. His eyes haze over. He does not dare look at her straight on, he thinks. He does not dare focus on such beauty; it is too much to bear.
“Would you like to dance?” he asks, concentrating on a space somewhere over her left shoulder. He cannot look directly into her eyes; it would be too dangerous. She would disappear, he thinks, be gone forever after one dance; he has to be careful, to watch out, for those eyes, that face could return over and over to haunt him long after she has left.
“Yes, I’d like to dance,” my mother says quietly, looking at this impossibly tall, skinny man in front of her.
Through the entire first dance and then through the second and third, my father talks continuously and very quickly and still looks over her shoulder, not at her, though as the night progresses he moves his gaze slowly from over her shoulder to her actual shoulder, and then to her neck, and then to the top of her head. He closes his eyes and the dream presses close to his new suit.