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.”