Searching for Grace Kelly (20 page)

“Can't you get in a lot of trouble for taking this out? It's an unpublished manuscript.”

“Oh, no one's going to care if a couple of girls read it under the covers. I marked the good parts. And look at it this way: Next year, when everyone is talking about this, you'll have already read it! Your coworkers will be crazy jealous.”

The door opened and Vivian walked in, clutching a steaming paper cup of coffee, a newspaper tucked under her arm. “I'm surprised they let you upstairs with that,” Dolly remarked, slipping off her shoes. The Barbizon matrons were fanatical about the prohibition of food in the rooms. Mice and insects were bogeymen warned of in apocalyptic terms.

“It was the nice one running the elevator today,” Vivian said. “The one with the bad skin. I only buy a coffee and a biscuit if I see she's on duty.” She nodded toward the manuscript on the bed. “What's this?”

“Dolly's scandalous novel,” Laura said.

“What's
that
?” Dolly asked in reply, pointing to Vivian's arm. “I've never seen you with a newspaper in the entire time I've known you.”

Vivian handed the paper to Laura. “It appears we have a celebrity in our midst. Page twenty-three.”

Dolly scooched over as Laura thumbed through the paper. Their collective eyes were scanning page 23 when Dolly let out a piercing shriek. “Wow!”

There it was, in black-and-white, right in Nancy Randolph's column in the
New York Daily News
.

 

I had the good fortune of a long-overdue visit to the always glamorous ‘21' last night and was delighted to see Doris Duke, looking luminescent as always. She is just back from a pleasure tour of Iran. Among those listening to details of the journey were department store heir and man about town Box Barnes and his lovely date,
Mademoiselle
magazine editor Laura Dixon, whom Box says has just deferred her forthcoming senior semester at college because, he said with moony eyes, “she can't stand the thought of being without me.”

 

Laura felt the remnants of her lunchtime tuna salad curdle into the back of her throat. Mrs. Blackwell would be furious, assuming she had inflated her position to a
Mademoiselle
“editor” when she was but a lowly, and brand-new, editorial assistant. And Pete! Pete would read this, know she had been seeing Box the whole time. And then—

The thought hit her like a truck.
Oh . 
.
 . my . 
.
 . God
.

A mushroom cloud of panic ballooned around her, interrupted only by a sharp rap at the door. Vivian answered, unveiling the ever-pale, skeletal face of Mrs. Metzger.

“Miss Dixon,” Metzger said officiously. “Your mother is here.”

 

They sat in a back booth in the Barbizon coffee shop, Marmy declining Laura's feeble suggestion they go somewhere nearby. There would be no delay in the reckoning.

Her mother looked as she always did, whether in joy—though Laura could not really recall a day when her mother had ever been truly joyful, at least in the colloquial sense of the word—or distress. Her hair, a mousy brown despite the hours she logged at the beauty parlor, fell in short, brittle waves, giving her the appearance of a schoolteacher who had managed to marry well. Her nails were plain but buffed—Marmy thought nail polish a vulgarity—and she tapped them, slowly, painstakingly,
click . 
.
 . click . 
.
 . click
on the table as they waited for the waitress to bring them their iced teas. She wore a lemon-yellow dress with a pronounced Peter Pan collar, but the combination, designed to evoke ladylike warmth, somehow only managed to make her appear even more severe.

Walking into the lobby, gripped with growing paralysis, Laura had expected to encounter her father as well. But it turned out that Marmy had come alone to lower the boom. Laura had pictured her family at that morning's breakfast table, David idly chattering on about his friend's baseball card collection as her father pored over the business pages and her mother wanly glanced through the advertisements for Peck & Peck, until she came upon Nancy Randolph and the tale of the young girl who had managed to charm New York's biggest catch. The girl who at that very moment was supposed to be sitting in a classroom at Smith.

Marmy took a delicate sip of her iced tea, added in two carefully measured spoonfuls of sugar, then slowly stirred, like one of Macbeth's witches brewing toads. Laura stared at the drink, at how the tiny agitated crystals gave the glass the appearance of a dirty snow globe.

Her mother gently laid down her spoon. “All right, then,” she declared tartly. “I'm ready whenever you are, Laura.”

The shock of her mother's sudden appearance had begun to subside, prompting Laura to try to access the conversation she'd been mentally rehearsing for weeks. Because she had already had this talk, of course—several times, in fact. She had known that she would be found out sooner rather than later. She had composed a thoughtful, even eloquent explanation and defense, refined and edited over time and repetition. One that now completely escaped her in the moment she so desperately needed it.

And so out it came, awkward and fumbling, until she found her rhythm, random phrases and arguments slowly bubbling back into her consciousness from all the practice. She had carefully weighed the decision to defer, she had every intention of completing her degree, but there was something very important happening not at Smith but here, right here, in New York, at this very moment, and she had a duty to herself to see it through. She added that she had been raised well, by parents who had taught her to think for herself, to weigh decisions and act on them, and that her only folly had been in her deception, and for that she was truly sorry.

It got to the point where Laura realized she was repeating herself, skirting into groveling. In all of her trial runs, she had never, ever groveled. Silence was a weapon with Marmy. She defied you to try it, because it was her natural gift to make people uncomfortable and self-doubting, with her pursed lips of disapproval, her arched, half-moon brows, her gray eyes, as colorless as ice cubes. Laura leaned back into the booth and tried to settle into the silence; live with it; wait it out. She watched as Marmy once again lifted her spoon and lazily circled it through her iced tea, once more agitating the unmelted sugar crystals swirling like so much confetti.

Marmy tapped the spoon deliberately on the side of the glass.

“Well, that is quite the tale, I must say,” she said. A skeptical police detective admiring a guilty suspect's outrageous alibi. She looked Laura in the eye. “And you're happy, here, in this new life of yours?”

Are you happy?
Did her mother just ask her if she was happy? Laura dared to meet Marmy's gaze for several seconds and found an expression that was new, foreign, staring back at her. Something that almost seemed like . . . intrigue.

“I don't pretend to know that every choice I make will be the right one in the end,” Laura managed, “but I do feel confidence that I have the facility to make the best decisions I can at any given moment. So yes, for now, I am happy.” She'd learned that it was always best to engage in conversations with Marmy that sounded like they could have been written by Jane Austen. In one of her initial letters from the Barbizon this summer, she had casually dropped in the sentence “I can only hope that my patient industry will yield earnest learning,” and done it without a shred of irony.

“I see. Well, your father and I are certainly disappointed you didn't feel that you could discuss this with us before making such a drastic decision, but as you yourself point out, we have raised you to think independently and to use clear judgment, so I must take you on the strength of your conviction that you have exhibited both of them when considering this course.”

Laura's eyes opened so wide she could almost hear her lids snapping. She had expected an immediate order to start packing. Instead she'd gotten something that almost sounded like praise.

She's up to something
.

The waitress asked if they wanted to order food, Marmy delicately waving her off as she took another genteel sip of the iced tea. She pressed her napkin to her lips deliberately, the way one might apply a cold compress on a fever. “And this relationship with the Barnes boy. Is it serious?”

Of course
.

Marmy had not come to admonish. Or to berate. Or to judge.

She had come to
verify
.

Laura fought the smile forming at the edges of her mouth. How could she have not seen this coming? Not conjured the image of her mother, prim and self-satisfied, leaving here and slipping behind the wheel of her navy-blue Packard with the white interior, silently humming Tony Bennett as she wound her way back to the Merritt Parkway? Marmy would be practicing her own internal monologue, the one she would deliver to her friends over bridge about her daughter and Benjamin Barnes:
Yes, we think it's very serious
and
Oh, he's such a lovely young man
and
Of course, it's up to her to decide her future, but he seems very smitten
and
We just want her to be happy, because as mothers all we want is for our children to be happy
. How many times would Marmy sit before her dressing mirror before bed, looking at her reflection and practicing the introduction: “Oh, yes, you remember my daughter, Mrs. Benjamin Barnes?”

Laura's smirk hardened into something else, and she felt a slight scoff escape. Who knew that a few random lines in a New York gossip column could completely upend two decades of power, two decades of living under the thumb of the pressed and pleated Mrs. Theodore Dixon of Greenwich, Connecticut?

“He's nice,” she replied casually. “Of course, he's not the only young man I'm seeing.”

Her mother reached for her purse, extracted some lotion, and applied it to her hands. “I see,” she said, writhing her hands together like a hand mixer. “Do you think that wise? I mean, Benjamin Barnes is a rather prominent young man. I'm sure you wouldn't want to put yourself into a situation where your other engagements might embarrass him.”

No, embarrass you
, Laura thought. Or, more accurately,
Impede your chances of becoming an in-law to one of the most socially prominent families in New York
.

She had fantasized about this moment. This very moment. She had lain awake in her cream-and-white bedroom at home, staring up at the roof of the canopy bed, and imagined what it would be like if the day came when she would no longer have to care a whit about what her mother thought, when she would, for once, be holding all the cards. The one in control. Now that it had arrived she felt . . . nothing. She had expected a thrill, but the only emotion she could access was scorn. For her mother and her louche appetite for social standing, and for herself, for wasting all of those years worrying about the opinion of someone as shallow as a glass of iced tea.

“I'm sorry, Mother, but I must be going,” Laura said, sliding out of the booth and delivering a Judas kiss on the cheek. “I have a date with a bartender.”

“Just come in for a minute. C'mon. Just a minute.”

Dolly stood with Jack at the entrance to the Barbizon, pulling at his arm on the sidewalk, trying to haul his impressive frame through the doors. Oscar looked positively flustered, reaching for the door to let them in, then pulling his hand away as Jack insisted he couldn't, then reaching again as Jack jerked a step closer to the building, then back again when he resolutely stated, for the third or possibly fourth time, that the lateness of the hour didn't permit an extension of their date.

“You're being mean,” Dolly said, intending to sound cute but instead coming off peeved.

“I'm sorry. But I have to get back.”

“Back where? What is so important in Yonkers that you can't spend an extra ten minutes in Manhattan?”

“Dolly, please,” he said, leaning in and kissing her on the forehead. “I have to go. I'll see you soon.”

I'll see you soon
.

It was always
I'll see you soon
. Never
I'll see you tomorrow
, or
I'll meet you after work on Tuesday
and we'll go see a movie
, or
I can't wait until the weekend
—
let's make a plan
. Just always, always,
I'll see you soon
. Invariably, he did. Most of the time, anyway. There was those two weeks of silence in August that had driven her to the brink of madness, but then he'd calmly resurfaced, vague as always about his whereabouts (“Family trip” is all she'd gotten out of him), and just when she'd had it, when she was going to demand a firmer commitment, an understanding of what all of this was, or even if there was a “this,” she'd look into his eyes, or fixate on his pretty teeth, or casually brush her hand against his flat top, which always looked like he was about to enter basic training, and all of her resolve would fly right out of her body like a streamer cut loose at the Fourth of July parade.

She gave him a royal wave as he dashed down the street, smiling weakly as Oscar finally opened the door and the cool lobby of the Barbizon enveloped her. Late Saturday afternoons were always quiet. Girls were out at matinees or lunching with visiting parents or outfit-shopping for that night's date.

Dolly lollygagged, debating whether to go upstairs and take a bath, go upstairs and retrieve
The Tree and the Blossom
and take it with her to the park, or ditch both ideas and simply go into the coffee shop for an ice cream soda, when a voice across the room halted her train of thought. “Dolly! Over here! Come join us!”

Ruth—Vivian's favorite, the girl who had sung Rodgers and Hammerstein in the conservatory—was sitting on one of the long sofas surrounded by two friends, one a homely girl with spindly limbs and large feet whose name was either Marion or Miriam—Dolly could never remember—and another girl Dolly couldn't recall seeing before. Dolly walked over, pulling up a chair next to Marion/Miriam across from Ruth and the other girl.