Searching for Grace Kelly

by Michael Callahan

  He said it with fire, with lust. With hatred. Her heart beat uncontrollably, both revulsed and enticed by his emotional violence. She wanted him to stop. She didn’t want him to stop. This was frightening. This was thrilling.

  All she had to do was scream, kick him in the nuts, and it would all be over. And in that thought—the thought that she was not a prisoner, that she had a choice to make—she lost the battle with herself.

  “Yes, darling, oh yes,” she whispered back, her free hand crawling up underneath the back of his shirt, scratching him, clawing at him, branding him. “I want to be bad for you.”

  ELEVEN

  Pretty, glittery, and odd. This was Mademoiselle to Laura, or at least the Mademoiselle she had been exposed to in the brief period she’d been working inside it. Pretty because it was so very much so: delicate glass vases of bright yellow tulips and daisies dotting the desks, women in pencil skirts and tailored shirts and shiny patent-leather shoes briskly walking up and down halls, their hair pinned in clever updos or worn down in short bangs, all copied from Alexandre of Paris with meticulous care. The thrumming click-clack of typewriters and heels on linoleum produced a peculiar lilting concert of femininity that served as the magazine’s soundtrack.

  Had she truly only been here two weeks? It was hard to believe her apprenticeship was hurtling toward its close—she felt as if it only had just begun. The thought depressed her. How would she ever be able to leave the verve of the city, leave Dolly and Vivian and the Barbizon, to return to the staid world of college in New England?

  How can I leave Box?

  He’d asked her to dinner during the week but she’d begged off; he’d settled for a cute, if brief, after-work date in the coffee shop. She hadn’t mentioned her impending departure, and he’d never asked—boys never thought of or worried about things such as the actual logistics of a fledgling romance. She’d replayed the night at El Morocco more often than was no doubt healthy, but there was so much she wanted to preserve in her mind, details and smells and snippets of conversation she wanted to box up—ha!—and unpack on a cloudy day in the future. Intellectually she realized she had already been given so much on this brief sojourn in Manhattan, more than some girls ever experienced in a lifetime. Yet it didn’t feel temporary or like a lark. It felt like a start.

  Two weeks in, the college apprenticeship at Mademoiselle had been a dervish of parties and events, she and the other editors a makeshift sorority winding their way through New York. She’d been amazed and disappointed at how much of their collective “work” had revolved around dressing up and simply appearing, graceful mannequins being glided into a luncheon here, a book party there, a gallery opening over here. Picture, please. Over here, please. Just last week they’d spent an entire afternoon in the Central Park West salon of some forbidding dowager, sipping tea from Wedgwood cups and looking over the hostess’s impressive collection of Colonial-era letters. (Who knew Martha Washington had such lovely penmanship?) One of the girls whispered that the itinerary was originally supposed to have been a visit to the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Baroness Rothschild de Koenigswarter, but that had been scrapped; the baroness was evidently still too broken up over the death of the saxophonist Charlie Parker, who had succumbed in her residence. For her part, Laura wished they could have gone to the Fifth Avenue mansion of the mysterious Russian financier Serge Rubinstein, inside which he had been found strangled in January.

  That night it had been a performance of Inherit the Wind at the National Theatre. She’d confessed to Box that she had been hoping for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Morosco. “Oh, so that’s the kind of girl I’m dealing with,” he’d joked. He’d promised to take her next week.

  During the days it was busywork, messengering, and inventory taking, reams of papers that needed to be filled out cataloging the never-ending parade of dresses, gloves, shoes, hats, slacks, and scarves that cluttered the office’s halls and closets, each hoping to be selected for one of the magazine’s fashion pictorials or the holiest of grails, the cover. Yesterday they’d all been herded into the conference room to “vote” from a series of finalists for the image that would appear on the cover of their vaunted college issue in August, though it was an open secret that the vote, like their input into anything else to do with the magazine, actually meant nothing. Mrs. Blackwell would decide what the cover would be, just as Mrs. Blackwell decided everything at Mademoiselle, down to what brand of lotion was stocked in the powder room.

  “Oh, I do hope I’m not intruding on your lovely daydream,” Cat Eyes snapped, tossing a pile of folders onto Laura’s desk. For the life of her, Laura couldn’t understand this steadfast, virulent animosity, which had first reared its head at the initiation that first day, continued right past the luncheon at Barnes & Foster, and only intensified since. There were more than a dozen college editors here for the four-week apprenticeship; why had Laura been the one elected to receive all of the sarcasm and derision?

  “Not at all,” Laura replied evenly. Cat Eyes would be the one thing she would definitely not miss. “Do these need to be filed?”

  “They need to be taken to Mrs. Blackwell’s office. If her secretary isn’t there, just leave them in her in-box. Then you can go.” She clomped away.

  Well, at least it’s Friday, Laura thought. Tomorrow she would—

  Tomorrow. Saturday.

  She’d completely forgotten.

  She’d made the date with Pete the bartender to go to the beach. To be precise, Vivian had made the date for her to go with Pete the bartender to the beach. After brunch on Sunday, Laura had decided she didn’t care what Vivian thought, that she needed to cancel. Better to concentrate on just one guy, she’d reasoned, especially when she was only going to be in New York for two more weeks. But then she’d forgotten to actually call Pete. And now it was here, tomorrow, and no doubt he’d secured transportation and a picnic basket and God knows what else, and she couldn’t in good conscience ditch now.

  I should make Vivian go, she thought as she walked down the hall with the files, toward the posh corner office of Betsy Blackwell.

  Laura had never been to even the exterior office of Mrs. Blackwell’s lair; she suspected this was true of most of the college editors. Only the crème de la crème of the masthead was ushered in—the managing editor, the art director, the fiction editor—along with important guests from the worlds of publishing, entertainment, fashion, politics, and commerce. Laura had always imagined what such an office would look like but held slim hopes of ever finding out. College editors never went in the office.

  No sign of the secretary; desk light out, typewriter sheathed. Laura saw the in-box on the credenza and started to place the files on top.

  Unless.

  She looked around. Not a soul. Mrs. Blackwell’s door was open, but Laura heard nothing. Could it hurt? Just a peek? After all, when would she get this opportunity again?

  Laura slowly stepped toward the office door, passing by completely and quickly glancing in. Empty. She looked around again.

  Thirty seconds. Just a quick thirty seconds.

  Other than one of Mrs. Blackwell’s trademark Sally Victor hats—thrown carelessly on the sofa—the entire office looked more like a salon. Laura’s heels sank into the deep pile of the rug.

  Internally the office was known as “the bower,” and Laura now understood why: Its delicate pale green eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture, accented by dark green walls, conjured a feeling of being in the reception room of some English country estate. The editor’s desk, all romantic curves and Victorian flourish, contained a slender silver vase holding a lone red rose, along with a gleaming silver inkstand. A lacquered gaming table sat nearby, two telephones resting on top.

  Laura had been to her father’s law office in Greenwich many times, and it was, objectively speaking, impressive: a meticulously curated homage to mahogany and leather and brass, all selected by Marmy, naturally, and all meant to convey an air of power and authority. But this—t
his was the office of a woman. Of a powerful woman who didn’t mind showing she was a woman. A Chinese red lacquer vitrine in the corner held what appeared to be dozens of miniature shoes and antique dolls. A mural by John Burton Brimer dominated the opposite wall, the painting its own testament to the intersection of power and femininity: a collage of dresses and shoes and hats, along with the representation of a typewriter, and a woman who may or may not have been Betsy Blackwell herself. There were awards and plaques and other honoraria given to the philanthropic and influential. Laura walked over to the windows—Lexington Avenue on one side, Fifty-Seventh Street on the other—and clutching the file folders to her chest, watched the light slowly fading in the reflections of the buildings around her. Two disparate but equally important questions flew into her head: How does someone get an office like this? And, Can I do it?

  “Are you looking for something?”

  Laura pivoted, the files tumbling to the floor. Her eyes zeroed in on those of Betsy Blackwell.

  “Oh, no, I . . . oh, Mrs. Blackwell, I’m so sorry, I was just walking these over . . .” She dropped to her haunches, frantically pushing fallen papers back into folders, manically trying to scoop them off the floor. She popped back up, attempting to fix the askew papers while appearing calm and professional, which she was not, and not like an impertinent apprentice caught snooping in the boss’s office, which she clearly was. Laura could see it now (“I came in to find some girl in my office”), Cat Eyes firing her for sure.

  “Let’s not make it any worse, shall we?” Betsy Blackwell said, casually walking over and retrieving half of the files, shaking in a few papers here and there. “Put the others on the desk.”

  “Ye—, yes, ma’am.” I want to die, Laura thought. I just want to fall over and die, right here, on this lovely plush green carpet, and then have the cleaning woman come in with her Hoover vacuum and suck me right off the floor into the bag and throw me out.

  Laura was about to excuse herself with another round of sloppy apologia when Betsy Blackwell cocked her head, seemingly studying her. “You’re the girl who was with Box Barnes at El Morocco.”

  “I . . . I am.” Laura mentally took off, running through her memory bank. Surely she would have remembered seeing Betsy Blackwell in the club. Then again, there had been two hundred people there. It would have been quite possible to miss her.

  “I see. What is your name?”

  “Laura Dixon. I’m one of the girls here for the college issue.”

  Mrs. Blackwell had a look on her face that Laura placed somewhere between suspicion and polite amusement. The kind of look one might display holding a particularly winning hand at bridge. “Radcliffe?”

  “Smith.”

  “Ahh. The dark hair threw me. The Smith girls are always blond.”

  Laura suppressed a laugh. Who knew Connie Offing of MacDougal Books & Letters shared the same sensibility as the editor of Mademoiselle?

  Betsy Blackwell rested against her desk, one of the messy files still in her right hand. There was silence for a good five seconds, which felt like ten minutes, as the editor took stock of Laura standing in the middle of her office, looking at her as Laura imagined she might a model when a decision had to be made on whether a girl was attractive enough to pull off a photograph of a new hat. “Where have we placed you?”

  “I have been assigned to the fashion department. But I came to New York to be a writer.” Oh my God. Did I just tell the editor of Mademoiselle that I was ungrateful and that the job I was given, the job thousands of girls around the country applied for, was beneath me? Pinpricks stabbed inside her arms and legs; she felt beads of perspiration forming at her hairline. Don’t faint. Whatever you do, don’t faint.

  “A writer. I see. Well, ambition is always admirable, as long as it’s backed up by talent and hard work. You’ve been keeping a journal, then, since you’ve been in New York?”

  Lie! No, what if she asks to see it? Don’t lie! “No, I . . . I regret to say I haven’t.” She couldn’t remember a single time, not in her entire life, when she had ever felt this insipid.

  Betsy Blackwell chuckled, the slow, polite chuckle of a woman who knows how to laugh over lunch in a great hotel. “Well, let me give you a small piece of advice, dear. Start. Immediately. You want to be a writer. Write. You are in the most interesting city on the entire planet. What do you want to write about?”

  “Anything. Everything. I suppose that’s what drew me to your windows. I look out of windows and all I see are stories, of the lives of the people behind the windows.”

  Mrs. Blackwell glanced briefly over to the windows, then back. “You are standing in the magazine that has published McCullers, Faulkner, Colette. The magazine that discovered Truman Capote. Embrace your situation while you still have it. No one is going to come looking for you. You need to go look for them.” She threw the file on the desk, folded her arms. “And, after Smith? What then?”

  “I want to get a job. In publishing.”

  “What job would you like?”

  Laura laughed. “Yours.”

  And there it was. Blurted out, unvarnished and raw, and Laura would later tell Vivian and Dolly that even if that had been it—even if she had been axed, right there on the spot—the look of utter surprise she had managed to place on Betsy Blackwell’s face with her audacious answer might have been worth it. But Mrs. Blackwell started to laugh, and then Laura laughed again, and soon the two of them were laughing very loudly, almost cackling, like two girls who’d mistakenly wandered into the men’s locker room and, upon realizing their folly, had dashed out together into the hall, clutching each other in teenage hysterics.

  “I’m so sorry,” Laura said. “I answered that question impertinently. I just meant—”

  Mrs. Blackwell put her hand up, signaling silence, then circled around her desk and perched daintily on her Louis XIV satin-upholstered chair. She reached for the silver pen in the inkwell. “Don’t worry. As I said, ambition backed up by talent and hard work is nothing to be ashamed of.” She retrieved a piece of pink stationery and began scribbling a letter. “Good night, Miss Dixon.”

  Atlantic City was a revelation. Laura had never really loved the seashore. For the Dixons, the beach had meant various idyllic hamlets on the Cape, but for the most part it had meant Nantucket and Aunt Marjorie’s shaker-shingled house near Polpis. As a child, Laura had dreaded the trips, forced to sleep on a lumpy cot in a room that hadn’t been properly aired out, if it had been at all, a mildewy turret that reeked of pine-scented cleaning solvent. That was the thing people never really understood about old wealth—you could have it, other people might know you had it, but it was considered pedestrian and vulgar to actually show it. Not that Marmy cared. Marmy only cared that they were on the Cape, because that put her in proximity to the really old money, and as a woman who could name every family that had sailed on the Mayflower, that was good enough. But the water was always too cold, the beaches too rocky, the lobster too difficult to get to—all that messy work of cracking and peeling and the picking off of shells. And even if the Dixons were on vacation, Marmy’s rules never were, translating into a parade of summer dresses and Mary Janes that Laura was never allowed to dirty or muss. She had been a china doll, packed into the trunk and taken on holiday.

  Laura leaned back on her elbows on her towel, looking out at the crashing waves of the ocean rolling in. She couldn’t believe how different beach resorts could be. Atlantic City was everything that would have made Nantucket recoil: loud, tacky, a carnival town populated with thrill rides, taffy shops, splashy painted signs, and girls who mounted horses, led them up planks forty feet above, and then jumped off into huge tubs of water to various ooohs, aaahs, and thunderous, wondrous applause. “SHOWPLACE OF THE NATION,” the signs blared, seemingly on every corner. Punch bowls and lobster this was not.

  Pete bounded out of the ocean, his skin sparkling with salt water, and staggered toward his towel next to hers. “Sure I can’t get you in? The water�
�s amazing!”

  He stood leaning over, panting, hands on his knees. His hair flopped into his eyes, water at the ends trickling down, creating rivulets down his face. His body was thin and wiry, and standing here, dripping wet, he looked young, actually very young, like a boy of seventeen who just a few years earlier had been a member of Our Gang with a nickname like Stretch or Slim.

  “I’m good here. Maybe in a bit.”

  He kneeled down next to her, toweled his hair. “I can’t believe you’ve never been to Atlantic City before,” he said. “Did your mom keep you locked in the attic?”

  Yes. She did.

  He lay back, closed his eyes, feeling the sun bake his skin. She was concerned about him burning, but he swore he never did, despite the Irish bloodline. And you couldn’t get more Irish than being named Pete Kelly and working as a bartender. “So, how was the book? You never told me.”

  “You mean Rebecca?” she asked.

  “No, the other one. The one Connie gave you that you had with you that day at the San Remo.”

  “Oh. Will the Girl and Other Stories. I loved it. Connie was right. Some people just know how to tell tales.”

  “What was your favorite?” His eyes were still closed.

  “I think the title one. Actually, you’ll get a kick out of this. That’s the one that was set in Philadelphia.”

  “Get out of town. What’s it about?”

  “Two girls who go to an all-girls Catholic high school named John W. Hallahan. Do you know it? I looked it up—it’s a real school.”

  “I’ve heard of it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t eligible to attend.”

  “The title comes from the announcement the Mother Superior makes over the loudspeakers every morning, to try to keep the girls in line, to show that they are being watched, all the time. She gets on and says, ‘Will the girl who was seen at the corner of Such-and-Such and Fifth Street, putting on lipstick, please report to the office immediately. We know who you are.’ And it’s just this little story about these two girls from opposite ends of the social strata who end up striking up this unusual friendship in this repressive environment. I mean, it was so simple, just a character study, really, but at the same time it was also brilliant, Orwell boiled down to a high school in the middle of Philadelphia. And the writing was symphonic. I think I also liked it because it reminded me in a weird way of my own situation, of how I’ve come to know Dolly and Vivian.”