The day before, the civil ceremony was held in the sixteenth-century throne room of the palace. “Both were tense and grim faced,” the smirking newsman reports, “and there was no hint of a smile through the half-hour ceremony. Twice Miss Kelly looked distraughtly at Rainier but he did not look back. He fidgeted in his chair, put a finger to his lips, or twiddled his thumbs.” My father shakes his head at this.
The camera scans the church. The guests are seated. “There’s A\a Gardner!” my father says to no one at all, pointing to a dot on the screen.
The prince enters, all sashes and medals; the music begins: the fifty-pipe organ, the orchestra, the choir. A chill goes up my father’s back. He can feel her standing at the edge of the screen. She appears. She walks, slowly, slowly down the aisle. She is even more beautiful than in the movies. He closes his eyes and becomes the prince. She takes his arm. “Oui, Monsignor,” she says when the marriage vows are exchanged.
“Oui, Monsignor,” a classmate says who has just entered the room.
“Oui, oui! Monsignor!” another boy says with lust, “ah, oui!”
“There she is,” Joel laughs, “the Queen of the Slot Machines!”
“Shh,” my father says.
“Oh, come on,” Teddy says.
There is some tension, a friction in the room that lets my father know, without taking his eyes from the screen, that the weekend must be nearing. There is a restless quality among his classmates. They shift their weight from one foot to the other as they look at the TV with my father.
“Are you ready?” they ask.
“What?”
“We’re going to Vassar,” Joel says, “don’t you remember?”
“Oh, sure. Sure,” my father says, a little dazed, looking up to see them with their overnight bags in hand, Princeton sweaters blazing. “Yeah, sure.”
“Well then, hurry up, Turin. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” my father says.
“All right, we’re leaving in ten minutes. Come on, Turin.”
There is something in their syncopated marchlike voices that my father likes. “OK, all right,” he says. They’re funny, my father thinks. Everything they say sounds like a cheer.
He notices that Joel is wearing a raccoon coat though it is April and much too warm.
“What’s that animal on your back?” my father asks Joel, the chubby one.
“Turin, I’m driving, so you’d better be decent to me,” Joel says.
“Sure,” my father says. “It was only a joke, Joel, only a joke.” As long as I have known him, my father has never been funny.
“You’re a real winner, Turin, you know that.”
My father smiles, nodding. He never really listens much to what anyone says. My brother and I used to catch him, nodding his head and smiling, “Sure,” when some more intricate answer was called for. “Sorry,” he’d say in his dim way when he realized he had been caught. “Sorry. What did you kids want?”
My father is lost in the royal wedding. Walking to Joel’s Buick, he sees himself in a tuxedo gliding toward a dove-gray limousine. With his gloved hands, he makes one elegant motion with his arm, allowing the others into the car before him.
“Turin, be real,” Teddy says, carrying his math books under his arm, planning to get my father to tutor him in the car. This is probably why my father was invited in the first place.
“It’s just common sense,” my father will say somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. “This cancels
out y, x
is raised to the third power, and then it reduces on both sides, so
x
= 3
t
− 1. Get it?”
Though my father has taken just the minimum requirements in math, it is his true strength. He seems not even to lift the pencil from the page as he solves the problems for Teddy.
Over the car radio he hears more details of the wedding. He closes his eyes. The boys sing. My father seems to be dozing.
Christine pads down to the TV room in her slippers and bathrobe; Sabine sits smoking a cigarette and looking out the window, her feet up on the windowsill. “How is your hair doing?” Sabine asks, not turning around—she does not have to—she knows my mother’s walk, her smell, the patterns of her breath by heart.
“All right, I suppose,” my mother says, touching the hard, pink rollers.
My mother sits down, her hands deep in her terry-cloth robe.
“All this fuss, Sabine,” she sighs. “Why, hmm? Pourquoi?”
She watches the TV screen dully as President Eisenhower throws out the first baseball of the 1956 season.
The camera angle changes. It’s the wedding, “Fifteen hundred newsmen have gathered,” the TV broadcaster says soberly, “substantially more than the number that converged on Geneva last summer when four heads of state were the center of world interest.” Sabine laughs with glee. One French magazine has twenty-nine reporters on the story. There are five hundred photographers.
“After three continuous days of rain in Monaco, there is a warm sun today,” one reporter whispers, as if it were necessary to whisper, as if the event required hushed, religious tones.
I imagine my mother gets closer to the set at the moment when Grace walks down the long aisle, the better to see her dress.
“Designed in Hollywood, a fact that has Paris couturiers sniffing,” the reporter whispers, “it has a bodice of rare rose-point lace selected for its flower-and-wheat pattern, a full silk skirt and silk cummerbund. The net veil is embroidered with rose-point lace and reembroidered with thousands of tiny pearls. The skirt is fastened in the back with three bows. The back flares out to give a fan-shaped effect.”
Grace goes to her place before the white marble altar. Despite the microphones and eighty loudspeakers, no one hears her pronounce her marriage vows. “Oui, Monsignor,” is all they hear. “Oui, Monsignor.”
Rainier has trouble getting the gold band past the knuckle of his bride’s finger. She helps him with it.
The next scene is the couple riding through the streets in an open limousine. “The sun was shining in Monaco,” the newscaster tells us, “although its warmth was tempered by a brisk wind.”
They halt before the Chapel of Ste. Dévote, Monaco’s patron saint, where the princess places her bouquet of lilies of the valley at the bare feet of the statue. She makes the sign of the cross and turns.
“La Côte d’Azur!” Sabine says excitedly, like a child.
My mother studies the scene closely, the too-bright sun, the too-perfect waves. She tilts her head. She can’t decide what’s wrong. She looks down at her hands. She looks back up at the screen.
“She will never be happy,” my mother says quietly, and Sabine for no reason gets up and kisses my mother on the cheek. What does she see, Sabine wonders?
“Ah! Time to take out the rollers,” she says.
“Why don’t you come with me?” my mother asks her.
Sabine just laughs, tosses her pretty head, and takes my mother’s hand. “And your nails! It’s getting late! Vas-y, vas-y!”
They have painted their room, against the rules, pink. It is Sabine’s favorite color. On the wall hang two large Vassar pennants, rose letters on a gray field. “The rosy dawning of women’s education pushing through all that gray of the past—I like that,” Sabine had said, hanging the pennants up at the beginning of the year after they had finished their painting.
Now, as Sabine shapes and polishes each one of my mother’s nails, muttering about how neglected her hands are and how could anyone let them get that way, my mother thinks of the last time she dressed up. She had worn the same dress she would wear this night; it was a sort of mauve color with two long streamers tacked to the shoulders that flowed behind her. Though people always told her how beautiful she looked in it, she felt they were overcompensating to cover their alarm at the actual hideousness of the dress. My mother, a full-scholarship student, did not have money for dresses and could not fit into any of Sabine’s, who was only five-foot-three and small boned. Deep down, my mother must have known that whatever she wore she would be beautiful; as much as she tried through the years to overlook that fact, it was not possible.
Sabine knows. Looking at my mother’s sculpted features as she combs out her hair, she says, “You will be the belle of the ball. Isn’t that what they say? The belle of the ball?” Mv mother smiles her reluctant, nervous smile and nods.
The last time they dressed up was in winter w hen my mother got the letter from the
Pans Review
saying that her poem had been accepted for publication. It was her first. She was just twenty years old. Years later, because of my mother’s poem, that issue would sell for hundreds of dollars. That night, having drunk much champagne, which they were not used to, they ended up shedding their chiffon, which my mother said they looked absolutely ridiculous in anyway, and they ran naked, in honor of Paris, in the snow in the Vassar Quad.
“The
Pans Review
!” my mother screamed.
“How perfect!” Sabine said. “It’s symbolic. Don’t you see?” she said, giggling. “We French know what’s good!”
“I’m
trying
to study,” someone shouted from the third floor of Lathrop, clearly not having looked out the window to see the two nude nymphs.
My mother composed herself. “I can only say that I am stunned—but do graciously accept—the Nobel Prize.” She was freezing and giddy.
Sabine made a large snowball and handed it to her. “L’Académie Française hails you as a genius. Incroyable!” Mv mother takes it, curtsies, and they both fall into the snow, shaking not from the cold, she thought, but from something else.
She could have lain there in the snow forever, looking up at the billions of stars, listening to Sabine singing “Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle.” “The next Edith Piaf,” my mother shouted, and Sabine got up and in her big voice began to sing “Je ne regrette rien” loud enough to call the attention of the security guard.
“Quel dommage,” Sabine cried, and the two bluish, naked girls were brought to the infirmary by a blushing elderly man in full uniform. My mother recited her published poem for the young nurse, and she in turn promised she would not tell anyone else of the incident, though they were lucky to be alive, she quickly added.
My mother had supposed the dress, left in the snow, was ruined, but now, stepping into it this night before the Vassar/Princeton mixer, she thinks it looks as if she has never lain in the snow, never drunk champagne, never sung French songs with Sabine.
“I just don’t know about all of this,” my mother says, feeling it to be a mistake as soon as she leaves the room for the dance. Even as she walks forward down the path, she is stepping inward and bowing her head in shadow.
My father might have missed my mother completely, standing against the wall, partially hidden by two larger, more aggressive members of the senior class, had he not been primed to see her, and in fact, had he not been actually looking for her. Grace, the wedding, the ocean in Monaco had buoyed him forward. Joel’s filthy car plastered with Princeton stickers had become the leading limousine in the entourage, and that evening he was a prince in a great ballroom, his French was impeccable, his shoes shone, his gait was confident. He did not hesitate when he saw her.
“God, what’s Turin doing?” one of his classmates says, as he sees him gliding toward my mother, the most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen.
“She was
more
beautiful than Grace Kelly,” my father told me once, and there was a thrill in his voice still. As he approaches her, she turns her head to the side and he sees that classic, timeless profile. His eyes haze over. He does not dare look at her straight on, he thinks. He does not dare focus on such beauty; it is too much to bear.
“Would you like to dance?” he asks, concentrating on a space somewhere over her left shoulder. He cannot look directly into her eyes; it would be too dangerous. She would disappear, he thinks, be gone forever after one dance; he has to be careful, to watch out, for those eyes, that face could return over and over to haunt him long after she has left.
“Yes, I’d like to dance,” my mother says quietly, looking at this impossibly tall, skinny man in front of her.
Through the entire first dance and then through the second and third, my father talks continuously and very quickly and still looks over her shoulder, not at her, though as the night progresses he moves his gaze slowly from over her shoulder to her actual shoulder, and then to her neck, and then to the top of her head. He closes his eyes and the dream presses close to his new suit.
He saved all his money to buy the suit he is wearing. He saw it advertised in the
New York Times
for sixty-nine dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, and, touching it on the page, he felt as if it already belonged to him. It was his prized possession—the famous gray flannel suit Gregory Peck had worn in
The Alan in the Gray Hannel Suit
, so the advertisement said. And as my mother, more beautiful than Grace Kelly, placed her silky head on my father’s chest, he must have felt as if this indeed were a movie. He tries to think of the gestures of his favorite film stars but he cannot think of one. And so he keeps talking.
“He was charming,” my mother told me of that night, “and more nervous than I.”
It must have been hard for my father to detect any nervousness at all in my mother, for she had an innate composure and a grace that masked any uncertainty. He kept talking.
“What the hell is Turin talking about?” Joel asks Teddy. “He hasn’t shut his mouth for one second.”
“I’ve got two tickets to this new play on Broadway,” my father says. “‘A tragicomedy in two acts,’ it’s called. Would you like to go?”
“Why, yes, I suppose,” my mother says softly. “Yes.”
“He’s an Irish writer. Lived in Paris for years as secretary to James Joyce. Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall are in it.”
“Sounds good,” my mother says.
“Brooks Atkinson reviewed it in the
Times
and described it as ‘a puzzlement,’ a ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma.’
“Yes, yes,” my mother thinks to herself.
“I was planning on going alone. I buy two tickets when I have the money because I like to have an empty seat next to me, but, well, surely you’d be much better than an empty seat.”