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About the Authors
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To my mother, Carolyn, whose beauty and kindness are forever imprinted on my heart.
And to anyone suffering in silence, in the hope that you may find your voice.
PROLOGUE
The day my mother’s story first slipped out into the world, I was twenty-nine years old. It was March 1989, and I’d just dropped my daughter at her nursery school before driving over to my local A&P supermarket to pick up groceries. My son was still a toddler, sitting in the shopping cart, kicking his little legs as he waited for me to pay at the checkout. I remember glancing down and smiling at him as I stood on the line. He was such a sunny and easy child; I looked forward to our time alone in the mornings together after his big sister went to school and before his midday nap.
My husband and I lived with our two young children in a nice, comfortable house in a suburb of New York, the same town that he’d grown up in. I was a stay-at-home mom; I spent my days taking my children to playgroups and nursery school, to their doctor’s appointments and the supermarket. Our friends were my husband’s college friends and their wives, people who knew almost nothing about my family or my past. I preferred it that way. I thought I could keep everything neatly in its place, the same way I cleared up the children’s toys before my husband came home at the end of the day.
That day at the supermarket, the woman ahead of me in the checkout was still unloading her groceries from the cart, so I turned to glance at the magazines in the rack as I waited. And that’s when I saw it. The headline on the cover of one of the tabloids.
PRINCESS GRACE BRIDESMAID LIVING IN N.Y. SHELTER FOR HOMELESS: PHOTO EXCLUSIVE
I whipped around to make sure no one else had noticed. My face was on fire, my stomach tight.
No one in my world knew about my mother, about the connection to Grace. Would they even guess that the woman from the headline had anything to do with me? I grabbed a copy from the rack, tucking it under a quart of milk. Then, as fast as I could, I paid for the magazine and the groceries and fled to the parking lot, unloading the shopping bags and little Michael into the car, before climbing into the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind me.
In the quiet of the car, I opened the magazine, searching for my mother.
There she was, on page nineteen. Gray circles under the hollows of her dark eyes and streaks of silver running through her cropped black hair. In the photograph, she was sitting on the steps outside the shelter where she lived, wearing a thick white scarf around her neck, pausing to place a small knitted hat on her head. For the most part, the article about her was accurate. My mother did sleep each night in a homeless shelter on the Upper East Side of New York. Her bed was number eighty-five, a small metal cot covered with a regulation blue blanket, in an open dorm. Each morning at 7:00 A.M., the guards shook her awake, and she got up and left the shelter, going to Bergdorf Goodman’s department store to wash in the basins of the ladies’ lounge, spending her days in the local parks, libraries, and churches.
The part about Princess Grace was also true. My mother and Grace Kelly had first met in New York in 1947 when they were teenagers living in next-door rooms at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Grace was studying acting; my mother was modeling for Eileen Ford, and had just arrived in New York from Ohio. After Grace became famous, the two women remained close, and when Grace married Prince Rainier in Monaco in 1956, my mother had been at her side as one of her bridesmaids.
The article went on to explain that since Grace’s death, Carolyn’s story had taken a very different turn. Now, only a few years after Grace’s fatal car accident, Carolyn was “lonely and destitute,” living in a shelter.
What the article didn’t say was that while my mother may have been lonely, she was not alone. She had family who cared about her, who tried to persuade her to seek help, to find housing. Each month, I accepted her collect calls, and my husband and I paid a local diner so she could eat her meals there. I was the bridesmaid’s daughter, and while I might not have told my friends and acquaintances about her situation, I thought about my mother all the time. I worried about her, hoped that she was warm enough, leapt every time the phone rang, terrified something had happened to her.
And as often as I could, I went into the city to visit her. My mother and I would meet in a little square set between buildings on West Fifty-eighth Street where she liked to sit and pray. She was religious, devoted to the Virgin Mary, and she believed the little square was blessed. I knew I could always find her there, sitting on a bench, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer. From a distance, no one would have guessed my mother was homeless. Not a hair on her head was ever out
