Searching for Grace Kelly

by Michael Callahan

  “Sounds like you were impressed.”

  “Yes. And discouraged.”

  He opened one eye, squinting against the sun. “Why?”

  “You read the great authors—Dickens or Dostoyevsky or the Brontës—and you don’t compare yourself to them. I mean, how can you? They were the pillars of their day. And that’s what is so reassuring. They were of another day. Not your day. But then I read something like this, just quick, little postcardlike stories from a writer who is not a pillar but who is here, right here and right now, sitting somewhere at a desk with his typewriter and creating this stuff, and then it hits me just how difficult it is to actually do it.” She relayed the story about meeting Betsy Blackwell last night, how one of the editor’s first questions had been whether she was keeping a journal, and how moronic she had felt to have to answer that she had not.

  “So, why haven’t you?”

  Laura looked at him—at his wide, open, honest face with its quirky features; his hair had dried and was now sticking almost straight up in the back, like a German shepherd’s tail alerted to a backyard squirrel. “You know what?” she said. “I think I am ready for a dip. You coming?” She bolted up and dashed toward the surf.

  Hours later, after they had washed up and changed at the bathhouse, they strolled up the Boardwalk. The famous wicker rolling chairs, pushed by strapping men on both sides, rumbled gently past, the younger couples inside them gazing and laughing romantically, the older couples inside them stoic or, in one case, fast asleep. Lights were just starting to twinkle from the honky-tonk amusement piers jutting out onto the ocean, and to their left the windows of the imposing grand hotels lit up in random patterns, as guests dressed for an evening out. They came up to the entrance of the Steel Pier, with its curving arches and whitewashed siding and elegant cupola, the words STEEL PIER spelled out in blazing, white-hot electric bulbs. Pete looked up, pointed.

  “Right there. Back in 1930, Shipwreck Kelly sat there for forty-nine days on a thirteen-inch steel disk on top of a flagpole overlooking the Steel Pier.”

  “Any relation?”

  “Alas, no.”

  Laura glanced up, incredulous. “At the risk of sounding like either a snob or a rube: Why would anyone do that?”

  He shrugged. “That’s Atlantic City.”

  For the first time he took her hand in his, led her through the archway onto the pier. She didn’t know what was more alarming: that she had thought of Box once today, or that she had thought of Box only once today. Two Saturday nights—well, technically, this was Saturday day into Saturday night—two completely different dates with two completely different guys. Box was movie-star looks, breeding, sly wit, high taste, and excitement; Pete was a slightly gawky, everyday Joe, but fiercely intellectual, funny, genuine, and without guile. On the beach today, he’d casually remarked, “Teddy Roosevelt once said, ‘A man would not be a good citizen if he did not know Atlantic City.’” Who quotes Teddy Roosevelt? And who quotes Teddy Roosevelt talking about Atlantic City?

  He bought them hot dogs (and was suitably aghast when she confessed she’d never before had sauerkraut). He attempted—several times—to win her a teddy bear throwing baseballs through a hole in a bed sheet and missed every time. “I was distracted by a girl,” he said, trying to be flirtatious and not quite pulling it off.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said as they sat on a bench afterward and watched the carousel spin by.

  “I’m not quite sure how to take that, given that I am, in fact, currently here.” He grinned at her. “Inside your head are you on a date with a better version of me?”

  She inhaled on the straw of her soda, the iciness an assault on her teeth. “Most guys I know talk all about themselves when they’re with a girl, and you don’t seem to want to at all. You keep asking me all the questions.”

  “Which you keep not answering.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve answered everything.”

  “Except why you haven’t been writing since you’ve been in New York.”

  She glanced at him, unprepared for the look of genuine affection emanating from his hazel eyes. She watched the snapping, popping reflection of the carousel dance in them, but it didn’t impinge on their seriousness, a steady warmth that sliced right through all of the light. The hairs pricked up on her arms. She looked away.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. The truth is I’m embarrassed. It’s easy to say you’re a writer, to dream it. Doing it is something else. Because what if I do it and it’s terrible? What if I’m just deluding myself?”

  “You’re not deluding yourself.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m a bartender for the Beat Generation. I’m surrounded by writers every day. I know one when I see one.”

  She shook her head. “I wish I could share your confidence. I’ve spent two weeks in New York hanging up dresses and putting shoes in boxes.”

  He slipped his hand into hers on her lap. “Do you trust me?”

  What’s the right answer to that? she wondered. Because she did trust him. The person she didn’t trust was herself. Or her thoughts, banging against her brain like a pinball, dreaming of Box one minute, worrying about her future the next, Marmy the next, then wondering how a girl even came to live a life riding on a diving horse, then back to Dolly and whether she’d ever get married to her dream guy or end up like Ethel Mertz as Vivian was convinced, and what would have happened if it had been she, not Mariclaire, who had jumped into the lake in her billowing white gown at her coming-out party . . .

  Stop.

  Be here.

  She forced herself to look back into Pete’s eyes, probing, incessant, pure. “I’m starting to,” she said.

  “Okay, then. I want you to close your eyes.”

  Her heart sank. It sounded like a cheesy line, something one of the boys in the barn would say to Laurie in Oklahoma! as they were sitting in the hayloft, dreaming of life beyond the farm.

  “C’mon, please, it’s not corny, I promise,” he pleaded.

  Now he read minds? She complied, but not without a sigh.

  He gently placed his other hand on top of hers, his two palms now cocooning her left hand, his lips almost brushing her earlobe as he whispered, “Now I want you to picture everything you’ve seen here, on this pier. The lights, the people, everything. Picture it. As vividly as you can. You have it?”

  She took a moment. “Yes.”

  “Good. Now write it.”

  “Excuse me?” she said, eyes fluttering.

  “Keep your eyes closed! You have to try. And you have to trust me. Again, now picture everything you’ve seen here, right here, on this pier. Now imagine you’re sitting down in front of a typewriter, and there’s a clean, fresh, white piece of blank paper, and you’re turning the wheel to scroll it in, and now you’re putting the bar down to hold the paper. Now you’re going to write about what you see here. I want you to read it aloud to me as you type.”

  She almost opened her eyes—wide—and told him this was hokey, that it was, in fact, Laurie from Oklahoma!, and she wasn’t going to do it. Then she pictured his skinny face, crestfallen, wildly embarrassed that this gesture to spark her creativity had been aborted so carelessly, and how it would ruin the rest of the evening, and, really, they’d had such a lovely day . . .

  Stop!

  She took a deep breath, exhaled, and began. “Comings and goings. People come, people go. There is the old fat man with the ice cream cone, sitting on the bench by the arcade because he likes to hear the bells and boops and whooooops of the games. A teenage boy with his hair perfectly raked wins an overstuffed panda for his girl, who is giggly and failing miserably at hiding the fact she’s memorizing every crease of his smile so she’ll have something to picture when she is drifting off to sleep later tonight in her bedroom that is too pink. A diving-horse girl, done for the day, ventures out onto the Boardwalk in search of eggs and a bath, in that order, both prefe
rably hot and delivering the comfort she desperately needs after a day spent atop a quarter horse, plummeting into a freezing tub of water. Her hair is still damp as she gathers her jacket around her, chilled by the night breeze coming off the ocean. The little boy by the Giant Slide continues his argument with the man with the long nose and cigar who takes the tickets, arguing he is, in fact, tall enough to measure up to the ‘You must be this tall to ride’ sign, even though he is two years away from indeed being that tall, but his sister and her friend are already past, and he will not allow his sister to better him in anything if he can help it. A logjam of rolling chairs are stopped, because the couple in the front are kissing, and their pusher could have sworn they said the Steel Pier, but now they are at the Steel Pier and he is clearing his throat and then clearing his throat again so he can get them out of his chair and collect his five cents and get another couple in. Sea mist drifts in from the jetties onto the Boardwalk, and the air is pungent with the aromas of wet wood, hot waffles dripping with ice cream, and roasted peanuts. White lights flash out offers from every side, of dancing to the music of Louis Prima and two motion pictures playing and the General Motors exhibit, making the pier look like a department store at Christmastime. In the distance you can hear the faint, eternal tumbling of the ocean waves, the water dribbling up onto the sand, then retreating in haste, over and over, a timeless constant amid all of the electricity.”

  There was a few seconds of silence, the only sounds the noise of the pier around them, and she waited for him to instruct her to open her eyes again but he didn’t. When she did and turned to look at him, his expression could only be described as admiring. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’re a writer.”

  Then he kissed her.

  Pete drove his cousin’s car, a slightly dented 1951 Kaiser, through the Holland Tunnel and back into downtown Manhattan somewhere around eight in the morning, and as if to confirm she had lost her mind completely, she readily agreed when he suggested they duck into a Village diner for bacon and eggs before he took her home. The date was rearing up on twenty-four hours, a fact aided and abetted by the fact that they’d ended up at the Club Harlem on Kentucky Avenue until God-knows-what-time, smoking cigarettes and listening to a chanteuse with skin the color of molasses sing about tortured love and loss.

  Oh, if the crowd at the El Morocco could see me now, in a rumpled sundress and reeking of smoke, she thought after she finally parted with Pete on Seventh Avenue, insistently declining his multiple offers to drive her uptown. She’d told him to keep her cloth bag with the change of clothes and musty swimwear and drop it off at Connie’s bookshop, where she would retrieve it later. “Not a chance,” he’d grinned. “I’m holding on to it. This way I know you have to go out with me at least one more time.”

  She didn’t feel tired. Not at all. Why didn’t she feel tired? She had been up for an entire day. And yet she felt like she could stay up for three more. Maybe it was putting all of that scenery and motion into words, just like that, and sharing them with another person. Or simply knowing she could, that she had it in her, that it wasn’t just some girlish daydream but a skill she possessed, perhaps raw and unpolished, but which lived in her soul nonetheless.

  And much of it no doubt was Pete—honest, clever, open Pete and his skinny arms and bobbing Adam’s apple and unruly hair, who brought out a side of her she hadn’t even known existed. Or at least allowed anyone to see.

  She took her time meandering up the avenue toward the subway, looking in closed store windows the whole way.

  By the time she’d made her way uptown and then walked all the way to the East Side and Sixtieth Street, St. Thomas’s was just letting out, the summer faithful turned out in their best linen and pouring onto the sidewalk. Laura was a block away when she spied Vivian standing in her regular spot, still dressed in her Stork-uniform black, those whopping sunglasses planted on her face. But even through the dark ovals, Laura could almost make out Vivian’s eyes widening, could see her features slowly crawling into arrogant amusement as she played Nancy Drew and watched prim, proper, French-speaking, flute-playing, A-student Laura Dixon, of the Greenwich, Connecticut, Dixons, leisurely sauntering home from her twenty-four-hour date.

  Laura walked right by her. “Not a word,” she said, as Vivian turned and the two of them fell in step behind the Barbizon’s churchgoing girls returning home.

  TWELVE

  “Get me the Hellmann’s out of the icebox,” Bridget Elizabeth Hickey commanded from her kitchen table. She sat mashing cold boiled potatoes, staring fiercely into a large ceramic bowl.

  “I thought Aunt Moya was going to make the potato salad,” Dolly said, retrieving the mayo and plopping the jar and a big spoon on the table.

  “She refuses to use anything but that awful Ann Page mayonnaise, which isn’t even real, and I am not serving that at your sister’s baby shower. I told her to make the deviled eggs.”

  “They have mayo in them, too.”

  “Not as much.”

  Dolly sat down across the table and lit a cigarette.

  “A smoking girl now, are we?” her mother said, wielding the masher a bit more forcefully. “I guess that’s what all the girls do down in New York.”

  “Mother, please don’t start.” Dolly looked around the kitchen. “How can I help?”

  “You can get me a beer.”

  Dolly glanced at the clock above the icebox. “It’s not even noon.”

  “Do you know what time my day starts? I’ve been working in this kitchen since six this morning, while you were upstairs pounding sand. I can have a beer if I want one.”

  Dolly retrieved the quart of Rheingold, filled a pilsner glass. She’d gotten into Utica around nine last night, immediately been put to work: putting up streamers, ironing the tablecloth, getting folding chairs up from the basement. Later this afternoon, twenty-three women from the Hickey and O’Rourke families would be in this house for her sister Kathleen’s surprise baby shower. Dolly had frantically tried to figure out a way to see her girlfriends, but this weekend was about family obligation, and lots of it. There’d be no time for anything but gossip over delicatessen meats and suitably oohing and aahing over the presents before she would be on a bus back to Manhattan.

  “So,” her mother said, “what’s all the news in the big city?”

  Dolly took a drag on her cigarette, shaking her head. “Nothing much.” Her mother was the last person she’d tell about her interesting morning in the restaurant with Laura and Vivian, and what had happened after they’d left. She knew what she’d hear: You’re getting ahead of yourself. You don’t know this boy at all. Who are his family? The fact he had an Irish surname would help, but without the proper parish and county-in-Ireland-his-people-are-from identifiers to inspect, this would prove but a temporary point of interest.

  Her father had been her surprising ally in her war with her mother to get permission to enroll at Katharine Gibbs and live at the Barbizon. As the months had passed, Dolly could tell, from the tone of voice in her calls and infrequent letters, that her mother had assumed Dolly’s New York tour would prove a phase—a misguided, starry-eyed venture into metropolitan “fanciness,” as she was fond of calling it.

  Dolly should be angry, sitting watching Bridget Hickey turn over five pounds of goopy potato salad with her big serving spoon, stopping only to take a sip of beer, but she couldn’t be. Her mother was, quite simply, impossibly Irish. Dolly had been a child through the Depression; her mother had navigated its treacherous pitfalls and scares as a full-fledged adult. There was a fear among that entire generation of anything that smacked of reaching too far, or too high, or of trying to make something of yourself beyond the safe confines of your own backyard, where family and neighbors could look out for you. In the thirties, family and neighbors were all you had.

  Kathleen had followed the playbook, married a guy who had been in the service and gotten a job in a local bottling plant that guaranteed a week’s vacation and a pension as lon
g as people kept drinking bottled liquids. The fact that he had a head shaped like an overturned bucket and belched constantly was immaterial. Now Kathleen was entering motherhood. Another box checked off the list. Dolly’s brothers would no doubt repeat the pattern. Stay in the neighborhood. Get a job with a local company or, better yet, the government. Outside of the priesthood, there was no occupation Irish-Catholic parents in Utica wanted more for their sons than that of mailman or police officer.

  Dolly couldn’t decide which was worse: wanting a more exciting life in New York, or pursuing a more exciting life in New York because you were afraid no one decent would want you as a wife in Utica.

  As if reading her mind, her mother said, “Aunt Theresa will be here at three to help put the food out. Regina is driving her over.”

  Dolly felt her back go up. “You invited Frank’s sister?” Frank, the louse who had been her on-again, mostly off-again boyfriend. “Why?”

  “I was at the store and I saw Regina there, and we were talking. She said she could get her father’s car and drive Aunt Theresa. Dolly, you know her hip isn’t good. And there aren’t a lot of women in this neighborhood who drive.”

  “Daddy could have picked up Aunt Theresa.”

  Her mother shrugged, stabbed a fork into the potato salad, and scooped up a bite. “Mmm. Creamy. See? This is what I am always telling Aunt Moya. You have to use the Hellmann’s. But who listens?” She downed the last of her beer, then got up from the table. “I have to go get ready.”