My father sighs. Her eyes are shaded by dark glasses. She is a million miles away, he thinks, walking down the aisle to the popcorn stand as Khrushchev and Eisenhower eye each other on the screen.
My father was probably not a very popular person at Princeton. He had many annoying qualities even then. He studied little and did exceptionally well, which his classmates found distressing, especially those sons of Princeton alumni who had to struggle to keep up or lose their lives. My father was also exceedingly modest about his achievements, and his modesty irked them.
He never really fit in anywhere. He was not a pusher, a striver, a tweed bag, a jock, or a lounge lizard. He was not even my father yet, or my mother’s husband. He did not join clubs. He would not give the password. He would not shake secret handshakes. He never went to a football game. He never sang the Princeton song or wore a black and orange scarf. He never pinned a pennant on his wall or gave a stuffed Princeton tiger to a woman. Women liked him for no reason, certainly through no effort on his part. They must have thought him dark and romantic. They liked him even despite the vague smell of popcorn and Baby Ruths that seemed to follow him everywhere. But my father had little interest in real-life women; after all those years in the front row, they must have seemed too small to him.
I can imagine my father sitting by himself in front of a large black-and-white television in his dorm, watching Grace Kelly the film star become Princess Grace of Monaco. “She will be a princess twice, a duchess four times, nine times a baroness, eight times a countess,” the TV commentator says. “However, since a majority of the prince’s domain now exists in name only, her kingdom in reality is a small one, covering three towns and 22,000 people.”
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 = 3t − 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.”