Searching for Grace Kelly (31 page)

“Miss?” the bus driver yelled from the front, staring at her through his rearview mirror. “This is your stop.”

Dolly was standing on a street corner, fumbling with her map, when she looked over to see an elegant gray-haired woman in a cobalt blue coat and matching pin standing nearby. The woman had a small Scottish terrier on a leash who pulled away and ran to Dolly.

“Oh, I am sorry,” the woman said. “He loves pretty girls. Do you need some help, dear?”

“I'm afraid I'm a little lost,” she said.

“Where are you trying to get to?”

“James Street,” Dolly said.

“Oh, well, you're not too far. What's the address?”

Dolly crumpled the map under one arm, dug into her coat pocket for Laura's piece of paper. “265 James Street.”

“Of course!” the woman said. “The most beautiful address in the area. It's three blocks that way, turn right, then your first left. You can't miss it.”

Dolly was intrigued.
The most beautiful address around?
What did that mean? “You know the place?” she asked.

“Well, of course, dear,” the woman repeated.

Then she told her why.

 

The look on Box's face was just what she had been hoping for, a mix of shock and amusement. “Surprise,” Laura said, sweeping past him into his apartment and toward the kitchen.

“Did we have a date tonight that I forgot?” he asked, one eyebrow devilishly arched, which he knew made him look even more handsome, resulting in him doing it more often than was called for. He leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching as she started to extract groceries from two bulging sacks.

“No, but as Grace Kelly remarked to Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
, the element of surprise is always the key to a good sneak attack.”

“Again with Grace Kelly. Can we switch over to Ava Gardner? She's more apt. She's a brunette.”

“There's nothing wrong with having a role model. And let's not forget, Grace and I were practically roommates.”

“Do I even want to know how you got past my doorman?”

“A woman has her ways.”

He laughed as he embraced her from behind. “And what are we making?”

“‘We' are not making anything. ‘I' am making you dinner to make up for the lovely fettuccine carbonara we never got around to having the last time. So it's steak Diane, along with some lovely roasted potatoes and a nice tossed salad. And, of course, this.” She extracted a bottle of red wine from a paper bag.

“Wow. This dinner just got a whole lot better. Are you seriously going to flambé a steak in my apartment? Should I have the fire department on alert?” She threw a dish towel at him. “Get out of my kitchen!” she said.

“I'm going to go wash up,” he said, stealing a kiss on his way out, “and then I will come back and set the table. I'm already starving!”

Laura slid the frying pan onto the stove, salted it, and turned on the burner, then the oven to preheat for the potatoes. A sense of calm and contentment settled over her. Perhaps for the first time since she'd arrived in New York months ago, she felt . . . grounded. She'd had excitement and drama and glamour, but this felt more real, more . . . solid. She was in the apartment of the man she loved, making dinner—

No. Not just the man she loved.

The man she was going to marry.

As she stood at the sink, the cold water now turning her hands a rosy pink, Laura could see her life unfolding, really unfolding, for the first time. She and Box would live here, or perhaps a bigger place, and then would come a house, and babies, and Thanksgivings and Christmases and summers on the Cape. Her adventure may have begun in June, but her life was really starting this very minute. Because it was time to give him an answer to his proposal.

She was getting engaged.

She hummed as she began excitedly unpacking the ingredients from the sack, pulling out the two filet steaks wrapped in brown paper, along with the shallots, cream, and butter.
Hold on—

She went rifling through the empty sack. Neither the mustard nor the Worcestershire sauce was here. The clerk at Ottomanelli Brothers must have forgotten to put them in the bag.

Her heart sank. How was she going to make a dream dinner for the night she was getting engaged without the proper ingredients?

She'd get them to deliver them. She grabbed the market's card from her purse, then dashed into the living room and picked up the phone.

She heard Box's voice, in midsentence on the bedroom extension. “. . . explained to you, babe, this isn't my fault. Like I said, it's a surprise, I had no idea she was coming.”

“How come it's always me who's getting the surprises, and they're always the unpleasant kind?” a voice snapped back from the other end of the line. Female. Cold. It sounded vaguely familiar, but Laura couldn't place it.

“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.

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?”