We never saw Suzanne again, but there were more trips to the ballet, and I loved every one of them. When we got back to the house on Long Island, my mother always put one of her Tchaikovsky records on the sound system in the living room, and I’d whirl around, impersonating the ballerinas I’d seen at the theater, the gorgeous sounds of the orchestra filling the room up to the rafters.
Then, whenever The Red Shoes played on television, we made sure to watch. It was one of my mother’s favorite movies. In the film, Moira Shearer plays Vicky, a prima ballerina who has the starring role in a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Red Shoes.” Early in the story, Vicky falls in love with a young composer, but finds herself torn between her love for him and her devotion to the ballet impresario Lermontov. Forced to choose between her lover and her dancing—and knowing she can’t have both—Vicky eventually breaks down. Before a performance in Monte Carlo, she dances out into the streets, spinning uncontrollably, unable to stop, as if bewitched by her shoes like the girl in the fairy tale, until she jumps or maybe falls in front of a passing train.
The film ends with Vicky lying close to death on a stretcher. Her legs are broken and bloody—she will never dance again. She asks her lover to remove the red shoes.
This was life’s tragedy, the film seemed to say: that art and love were incompatible, for a woman at least. I remember the tears in my mother’s eyes as she watched.
At the time, I thought my mother loved The Red Shoes for the same reasons I did—the gorgeous colors of the costumes and Vicky’s red hair, the dance sequences that looked like vanishing dreams. But in hindsight, I’ve come to believe there was another reason she felt such a strong attachment to Vicky’s story and to the ballet in general. I think she understood the stories viscerally. Out on Long Island, she, too, was held captive by her life’s circumstances, caught in a spell cast long ago, without any way to break it.
CHAPTER 9
Carolyn
Like so much of my parents’ marriage, their wedding day remains something of a mystery to me. When I was a child, no one ever talked about the ceremony or reception. The anniversary was never celebrated. While I could go to my mother’s closet and find the bridesmaid’s dress from Grace’s wedding in Monaco, I never saw her own wedding outfit—she had given it away to her cousin. Many years later, when I started to look into my mother’s story, I had to hire a researcher in Florida to go to the city clerk’s office to track down their marriage certificate in order to even know the date of the wedding: Monday, March 14, 1949.
My parents were married at the First Presbyterian Church in Miami Beach. A local newspaper report explains that Malcolm’s cousin and his wife served as witnesses; they lived nearby. After the short ceremony, the couple went to the North Shore Hotel for the reception.
Most women chose to have a maid of honor or a bridesmaid or two to stand alongside them on such a day. But Grace was busy in New York appearing in her graduation play, The Philadelphia Story, so Carolyn was completely alone, stepping into her new life without a friend by her side.
Only one photograph from the wedding survives. In it, Carolyn and Malcolm are carefully making the first cut in a small, three-layered wedding cake. Malcolm’s hand is resting on Carolyn’s as she holds the knife. With a model’s professionalism, my mother has wrapped her other hand gently around his arm, so that her new wedding band can be seen. She’s wearing a pale tailored suit, with a jacket that buttons up to the neck, and a straight skirt that falls to midcalf. Malcolm wears a gray business suit, with a tie and boutonniere. Carolyn looks calm and tender; Malcolm is the only one smiling. When the celebrations were over—and the wedding night survived—the couple took a honeymoon trip, first stopping in Palm Beach and then at Sea Island, just off the coast of Georgia. After a week, they drove back to New York to start their life together. Carolyn had already packed up her belongings at the Barbizon so she could go directly to her new home—Malcolm’s apartment on the East Side in Tudor City.
Grace was also packing her bags and leaving the Barbizon, but for a very different reason.
Earlier in the year, she had started seeing someone new: Don Richardson, her acting professor in her final year at the Academy. Like Malcolm, Don was an older man, recently divorced. Don lived in a small and sparsely furnished apartment in an old unheated brownstone on Thirty-third Street. With Don, Grace saw a very different side of New York from the one she had experienced with Alex. Don was a professional actor and theater director. He didn’t care about nightclubs or money; he was an
