Searching for Grace Kelly

by Michael Callahan

  “Look, I’ll make it up to you. Don’t I always make it up to you?”

  “For once I would like to come first. Why is that so much to ask? I’ve been very patient with this whole situation. Very few girls would be.”

  Laura felt her heart beginning to constrict. She was having trouble breathing.

  No. No, no, no.

  “You’re being unfair,” Box whispered. “I’m in a tough spot here. You know the situation with my trust. I’ve got to get married to get it. There’s no other way. And I’ve got to marry someone—”

  “Your parents approve of. I know, we’ve had this discussion before, remember? You don’t have to remind me that your parents think I’m trash.”

  “That’s not true. They just never got to know you.”

  “Right! Because they think I’m trash. Well, I’m not. And I am tired of you and them treating me like I am. Do you know I was on a commercial shoot today? Well, I was. For Old Gold cigarettes. With Ted Williams, no less. Did you know he was the comeback player of the year in baseball this year? Well, he was. And he’s just gotten a divorce. And he was paying a lot of attention to me.”

  Of course, Laura realized. Agnes Ford.

  Box was still talking, all hushed urgency and promises, but Laura had stopped listening. There was no point in hearing another word.

  She dropped the receiver onto the sofa, grabbed her hat and coat, and fled the apartment.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The seconds bled into eternity, and Laura realized she had no idea how long she had been wandering around the Upper East Side of Manhattan. An hour? Two? Ten? She found herself meandering through the streets as if she were dreaming, and any minute the alarm would go off and she would see Dolly sitting in front of their mirror, removing the nightly bobby pins from her hair.

  She passed small café windows, their cozy glows illuminating patrons laughing over coffee or dithering over whether to order dessert. Shop windows showed paper pilgrims and ceramic turkeys, a nod to Thanksgiving, only a week away. She’d invited Box to Greenwich for Thanksgiving, to meet her parents and—ha-ha—to show them the ring. Now she would go home and face General Marmy alone, report that she’d gotten attacked on the flank, lost the war. Or maybe she’d just stay here and sit in the Barbizon coffee shop and eat dry turkey over white bread and mashed potatoes in lumpy beige gravy.

  She crossed streets and rounded corners, bumping into happy couples, weaving through briskly walking loners, observing two overweight policemen flirting with two young women who themselves might have been Barbizon girls. They had the look.

  The streets were dry and fast, a mad confluence of Checker cabs and Dodges and Chevys and the occasional foreign sports car, honking and turning and looking for parking and fighting for parking. The blood of the city continues to pulse, no matter whose heart is full or whose is breaking or whose is giving out. She remembered standing in Grand Central the day she arrived, determined she would write the stories of the people inside it. Instead, she’d written captions about shoes and scarves. A writer? She’d been too busy dancing.

  She hadn’t cried yet, which surprised her. Maybe New York had toughened her. Or maybe, deep down, she just wasn’t so surprised to find out Box had been a fraud.

  After all, aren’t I?

  She was half a block from the Barbizon when the thought hit her: What if he’s here? Had he seen the telephone receiver dropped on the couch, then jumped into a cab to come find her? Was he now parked in the lobby, sitting with a bouquet of roses and a thousand apologies, waiting to pounce, to tell her what a colossal misunderstanding this all had been?

  Laura practically tiptoed into the hotel, eyes quickly darting around to every nook and cranny, but a preliminary sweep turned up nothing. The space was eerily quiet, the gleaming floors undisturbed by the click-clack-click-clack of heels. Even the huge potted ferns looked fatigued, arching toward the middle of the room as if they’d decided to indulge in the luxury of a nap. Laura hurried over to the reception desk, where Metzger sat, reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea. “And how may I help you, Miss Dixon?” she said, never looking up from her pages.

  “Has anyone been in asking for me?”

  Metzger kept reading. “No. You were expecting someone?”

  Laura didn’t know what it was—Metzger’s barely concealed contempt, the nervous energy pulsing through her own body, the sudden realization that she’d invested almost her entire New York experience in living someone else’s lie—but the weight of Box’s betrayal tumbled down on her with sudden, shocking force, almost knocking her to the ground. She placed her palms on the reception counter to steady herself. But she couldn’t stop the tears.

  Metzger’s eyes darted up from her novel. “I see,” she said. She placed her bookmark, stood, and beckoned one of the other managers from across the lobby. “Mona, can you take the desk for a few minutes?” she asked. “Miss Dixon and I are going in the back to have some tea.”

  Perhaps it was the haze of tears still pooling in Laura’s eyes, but in the warm light of the room, Metzger looked kinder, softer than she did when she was remonstrating her charges throughout the Barbizon, the forbidding Catholic school nun minus the wimple. Laura hadn’t even known this space existed. Tucked in back of the reception area, it was a small sitting room with a wallpaper pattern of yellow roses with green stems, and a plush love seat and coffee table. There was a club chair and a small television in the corner, and another doorway that led into a galley kitchen, where Metzger now emerged, carrying a tea tray with a pink floral-patterned teapot, two cups and saucers, and a small plate of butter cookies. Laura stood by the petite bookcase on the other side of the room, trying to calm herself by scanning the spines. Her eye caught two black-and-white photographs in pewter frames sitting on top.

  They were each pictures of young handsome men. The one on the left was wearing a sailor’s uniform.

  “That’s John,” Metzger said as she busied herself setting the tea out on the table. “He was Olive’s husband.”

  Olive ran the elevators most weeknights and the occasional Sunday. “What happened to him?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time. They got married when he was on leave. Then he got new orders. He was so excited: ‘They’re sending me to the Pacific!’ Which they did. To Pearl Harbor. Six months before the Japanese decided to drop by for an unannounced visit.”

  Laura pictured tiny, frail Olive, excitedly making plans for a home and family, only to turn on the radio to find out her new husband was dead. Laura pointed to the other photo, to a man who was equally striking, though in a different way. This man was in a suit and carried himself with a certain kind of élan, encased in an aura of good breeding. “And him?”

  “He belongs to me,” Metzger said, now perching on the end of the sofa, pouring the piping tea. “Or he did. That’s my Rudy.”

  Laura studied the portrait, conjured an image of Nick Charles waiting in a café for Nora and Asta. She tried to picture this man romancing icy, detached Metzger. “He was killed in the war also?” she asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. He was a college professor from Poland, who had come to New York as a visiting instructor. We met at NYU. He was so very charming. You can discern that just from the photograph. We were to be married. But then in the late thirties, he was called back to Poland for a family emergency and never returned.”

  “What happened?”

  “Hitler happened. Rudy was an intellectual and a Jew. He was gassed at Treblinka in 1942.”

  In 1942 Laura had been seven years old, worried about angering Marmy if she dirtied her party dress, as Metzger waited in New York for her lover’s return, only to have her dream end before it began.

  Laura took a seat on the sofa. “I’m so sorry. You said you were to be married. So you married later, then?”

  “Oh, no. I have never been married.” She smiled at Laura’s perplexed face. “‘Mrs. Metzger’ comes from a very old tradition of English estates. You see,
a woman who worked ‘in service’ would be called ‘Mary,’ for example, until she was old enough to be called ‘Miss Smith.’ If she reached a certain age and was still unmarried, one day she was suddenly called ‘Mrs. Smith.’ It was considered more stately and dignified. It projects more authority.”

  “But certainly you had opportunity,” Laura interjected, then immediately admonished herself for her impetuousness. But she felt a window opening onto a universe within the Barbizon she had never known existed and couldn’t curb her curiosity. And she was desperate for distraction from her own life. “I mean, you could have married if you had chosen to.”

  Metzger smiled ruefully. “Not all of us get multiple rides on the carousel, Miss Dixon. Some of us only go around once.” She picked up a butter cookie, dunked it into her tea. “Now, I invited you to tea so we could discuss you. I am fairly familiar with the sight of a girl dissolving into tears in the lobby of this building, but I must say I am a bit surprised to see you among the number. Trouble with your Mr. Barnes?”

  Laura felt her face flush. She felt embarrassed. “I . . . It feels silly to talk about it.”

  “That’s the problem with all of you girls,” Metzger said. “You all think you’re the first ones to ever have your hearts broken. You look at us like we’re ghosts who’ve never been in love or dreamed a dream. You look down on us. And on ‘the Women’—don’t look so surprised, of course we know you call them that—and you think you’re so much smarter than we are. When the only thing you really are is younger and luckier.”

  Laura stayed silent. How were you supposed to answer that type of withering charge? She had come here under the pretense of getting comfort from an unexpected corner and now felt under siege. Perhaps sensing this, Metzger did something unexpected: She reached over and placed her hand on Laura’s arm. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

  And just like that, out it came, like a wave crashing across a jetty. And not just the story of Box and Agnes Ford and the clandestine phone call, but all of it: Marmy, Pete, Mrs. Blackwell and Mademoiselle, her delusions of a grand marriage, her desire to be a writer, her fear that she would never be that writer at all.

  Thirty-five minutes and two humiliating outbursts of tears later, Laura sat, swirling the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup, waiting for Metzger to issue some sort of verdict. Was this the part where she told girls to pack up and go home, where she warned that not every young woman was ready for the big city, and sometimes it was better to return from whence you came?

  Instead, Metzger started clearing the coffee table, slowly stacking the cups, napkins, and spoons back onto the tray. “Do you have any advice to offer?” Laura said. “I could sure use some.”

  Metzger shook her head, the veil of inscrutability dropping once again. “Girls don’t come to the Barbizon for answers, Laura.” It was the first time since she’d arrived in New York that Laura could recall Metzger addressing her by her first name. “They come to find out what questions they need to be asking.”

  Laura stepped into the phone booth on the mezzanine and picked up the receiver, taking one more glance at her watch. If she timed it right, Marmy would be in the bath following her weekly mahjong game, where she threw out tiles as she casually character-assassinated any woman who’d recently earned her ire—She didn’t buy any tickets to the charity ball or She had the nerve to hire that caterer she knew I was going to use for my party—with the ruthlessness of a military sniper.

  Laura gave the operator the number and prayed that he, not she, would pick up.

  “Hello.” His voice, deep and resonant, steadied her.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Well, this is a nice surprise. Is everything all right?”

  No, Daddy, it’s not. My heart has just been smashed to pieces, and I’m alone and scared and unsure, and I just want you to tell me that it’s all going to be okay, because you’re my dad and you wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. “I’m fine,” she said, choking on the second word. Why had she made this call at all? Now that he was on the line, the only thing she could think of was how desperately she wanted him off it.

  “Have you been reading your stock tables?” he asked. She heard the rustling of a newspaper, pictured him standing at his desk in the library, flipping through the Courant or the Times. He did his catch-up reading at night. He’d taught her how to read the stock tables when she was only eight—“It’s important to know how the world works, honey”—and loved to boast to his golfing partners about his daughter’s growing knowledge of American commerce. But he loved her in a way that was palpable, in a way Marmy never could. Perhaps not unconditionally, but genuinely. The problem was his love was a moving target; out of nowhere he would say something or make a loving gesture that made your heart bounce, and then wouldn’t do or say anything like it again for months. Years.

  “Actually, Daddy,” she said, fighting to keep her composure, “I’ve . . . I’ve had a rather tough day. I just wanted to hear a friendly voice, I guess.”

  Ask, Daddy, please ask why. Please, let me tell you. Please. I don’t know why I need you to do this right now, but I do.

  “Well, that’s New York for you, kitten,” he replied. “Up one day, down the next. Now you can see why I decamped for Connecticut. Did you want to talk to your mother?”

  Tears again began streaming down Laura’s face. She managed to eke out, “No.”

  “Everything else okay, then?” More rustling.

  She cleared her throat. “Yes. I have to go. I’ll see you soon. Bye.”

  She hung up the receiver but kept clutching it as she sat in the quiet of the phone booth, the only sound that of her heaving tears.

  “Pass the gravy, honey.”

  Vivian reached over and handed the heavy china gravy boat to one of Nicky’s uncles—Luigi? Or was that the one with the ill-fitting suspenders who did all the belching?—then returned to her veal. The food, at least the part she’d managed to eat, was delicious: hearty, homemade fare that was foreign to her existence flitting around New York restaurants.

  They sat at a long table in a cluttered square dining room in Jersey City. Ugly, crowded, and smelly, it was the antithesis of Englewood, where she had spent all of those secret Wednesdays going out to play checkers with Sy at the old actors’ home. Cranky Sy, always flirting with her. If he could see her now.

  “She’s not eating,” Nicky’s mother was yelling from the other end of the table, jabbing her fork in the air. “Nicola, why does she not eat? She doesn’t like my cooking? She is too skinny!”

  “Ma, she’s eating, she’s eating,” Nicky replied. “Eat,” he whispered urgently. “You’re insulting my mother!”

  Vivian scooped up another forkful, inserted, chewed, smiled. Repeat. This was her life now. She followed orders. Nicky had murdered Act, as casually as he might have picked up his laundry. She had a recurring nightmare of Act, terrified as he was being slowly beaten to death, begging for his life, finally succumbing to the pain and telling Nicky about Vivian’s appointment in the Bronx. Act’s blood was on her hands. The bars may not have been visible, but she had now been sentenced to prison.

  A woman in a flowered housedress seated near Uncle Luigi was complaining about the declining quality of tomatoes. A young man with an olive complexion and movie-star features issued a report on his first week working for the pencil factory, which was ultimately decreed a success. Two small children, a boy and a girl, chased one another around the table, ignoring commands to stop, until they got on Uncle Luigi’s nerves so badly that he flung his hand out like a whip, walloping the boy in the face. No one said a word.

  She and Nicky had come here, to “Sunday dinner,” to announce their engagement. Or, more specifically, for Nicky to announce their engagement. His family wouldn’t be happy he’d knocked up a girl—a Brit, no less—but family was family and his mother, after she spent a suitable amount of time weeping and lamenting and screaming, would accept the situation and li
ve with the shame showered down by the other women in her Brooklyn neighborhood. Nicky thought it might be good to start over someplace else, like here in Jersey City, where they could move into this house, with his grandparents. His grandmother could teach Vivian how to cook and clean. Then, after the baby was born and things were settled, they could look for their own place. Have more babies. Then they would be the ones having the Sunday dinners.

  He’d told her all of this almost as an aside, as if it were all just a formality and he was just making sure she had her copy of the schedule. Her wants, her desires, had ceased to matter the day he’d caught her trying to rid her body of his progeny. From now on she would simply be an accessory, a necessary accoutrement to give birth to his children and iron his shirts and dress up. He’d have the bonus of a beautiful, exotic foreign wife who could sing “Jingle Bells” on key at the family Christmas party.

  She had managed only one slight victory, and that was convincing him to hold off on the engagement news. It was, she gently argued, too much to spring her on his family for the first time, the report of their impending marriage and child on the way as well, all in one pasta-laden sitting. Better to get the family used to the idea of her first. He’d considered this much more thoughtfully than she’d imagined he would and had mercifully seen it not as a delay tactic or an affront to his masculine authority, but as a gesture of kindness and sensitivity to his family. After all, it was going to be bad enough that they were going to have to get married by a judge in the city hall, not at Our Lady of Loreto. At least not until Vivian had converted. He’d already made an appointment for her with Father Agnelli just after New Year’s to get her started.

  “Apologies,” she said, rising from the table. Almost immediately, the men rose with her. The Italians were nothing if not gallant. “I need to use the loo. Could you tell me where it is?”