I hear a voice call out, “Richard Burton gave me that candelabra as a thank-you after we made love in July of 1954.”
I don’t dare turn around. I know it’s her.
“I wanted so badly to have his child,” she says. “I laid on my back with my feet in the air for hours following our congress, but no luck.”
My eyes refocus on the silver. “It’s heavy.”
“That’s because it’s real!” Miss Gracie shouts. Then, “Please enter, dear. Let’s begin this scene.”
I turn and head toward the voice, that voice, coming from a dimly lit living room carefully protected from sunlight by dark window coverings. There, she waits. With Uta Hagen by her side, Miss Gracie is standing in the center of the room like it’s a stage. She’s chic and casually stylish for being eighty years old, wearing a peach turban-type wrap on her head and what appears to be a pink silk nightgown over a blue silk nightgown. Silk on silk on silk. She looks like she dressed to match the drapes. It’s a room that looks decorated by a movie studio set-design department. The curtains are from the fifties, pastel and faded and velvet. The couch is floral and long and boxy, with cushions so old they’re indented with butt impressions—perhaps the asses of Cary Grant or Gene Kelly or Ann Rutherford.
I walk down a step that leads to the living room, careful not to knock over a table filled with headshots—some of her and some of Kathi—each with a Post-it note attached and a name scribbled on it: for Dave, for Michelle, for Tony.
“Those are pictures sent to Kathi and me by our many fans,” Miss Gracie says. “They mail us headshots asking for our autographs and I always sign them and send them back. However, Kathi ignores them because she doesn’t like to sign free autographs—she prefers to sell her signature at conventions and whatnot, like some kind of pinup girl. But, in my day, you respected your fans, so I hired a handwriting expert to forge her signature, and that takes care of that. Please sit down.”
The floors are carpet but also covered in rugs. Carpet on carpet on carpet, so many layers to this universe. I look down and Miss Gracie suspects judgment.
“I once owned numerous homes that were tens of thousands of square feet,” Miss Gracie says. “I used to have so much room for all these rugs that I didn’t have enough of them. Now that’s all changed. Now they’re all piled on the floor beneath us. You’re standing on history.”
I nod politely and walk to the couch, passing an open door to my right. I can’t help but look inside.
“My bedroom,” Miss Gracie says. “Filled with treasure. Ignore the mess.”
There’s an unmade bed with a headboard not connected, just propped on the wall behind the mattress. A wig sits on top of a vase. Jewelry is piled in a cardboard box on the floor.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the money tree.
Behind me, photos cover a piano that’s too big for this house; a huge mirror hangs over the mantel. Miss Gracie’s gaze follows my every movement, and like Kathi, she seems to be able to read my thoughts.
“That mirror belonged to Bugsy Siegel, the weary gangster,” she says. “He used to keep it at his bar so he could always see who was coming up behind him. No one was ever going to stab him in the back. Or me! Right, dear?”
I smile and look to the other side of the room, to a bookshelf packed with biographies and autobiographies of her friends. One shelf doesn’t have books. It has—
“Yes, that’s the original Rosebud sled,” she says. “From the classic film Citizen Kane. I find the film’s performances to be quite offensive. The sled, however, I always loved and snapped it up at an auction.”
The sled’s runners look as if they’re held to the shelf with a large clump of the cheap white tacky stuff teachers use to hang posters on their classroom walls. A pair of men’s black dress shoes are beside it.
“Humphrey Bogart wore those in Casablanca, dear,” Miss Gracie says. “Don’t touch them.”
Assistant Bible Verse 9: Don’t touch anything.
I turn from the history of the bookshelf adornments to the history of her being, Miss Gracie, living and breathing and before me.
“Hello, dear,” Miss Gracie says, waving for me to sit on a wingback chair. She and Uta Hagen take their places across from me, on the aforementioned worn but wonderful sofa. “I once had a dancer named Charlie—I’m hopeful that it will help me to always remember your little name, even though it’s so common.”
“Thanks,” I say, but then slow down, trying to keep up with Miss Gracie’s word games. Did she mean my name is “common” as an insult? There’s no time to know. “I love all of your movies,” I tell her.
She winces. “I’m not in movies,” she says. “I’m in motion pictures.” She shakes her head, then continues. “This is Uta Hagen,” Miss Gracie says, motioning to the furry beauty beside her, a white Pomeranian. “I named her after the monster.”
“Nice to meet you, Uta Hagen,” I say to a blank and disinterested doggie stare.
“I wasn’t sure if you would survive Kathi’s employ for this long, all these months,” Miss Gracie says. “Many secretaries don’t.”
“Thanks. It’s so vintage that you call me a secretary. These days we call ourselves assistants—” But I stop as I notice Miss Gracie’s face melt.
“You’re a secretary,” she says. “Let’s not jest ourselves.”
“Right. Yes, ma’am.”
“Additionally, it’s hard for me to invite new people into our lives, our family. At least until I realize they can keep up. You do realize, you’re part of our family now, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, a brief bit of my father’s life lesson (BE POLITE!) making itself present in the room.
“Ma’am? Oh, you’re very sweet. Are you Southern?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m from New Orleans.”
“Oh! New Orleans. What a wonderful city. I once shot a film there—well, it was a scene in a film, in a cemetery. In the scene, I cried and held that city’s dirt in my hand,” Miss Gracie says, standing, making a fist, reliving the moment. “And I cursed the gods for taking my beloved husband and forcing me to visit my lover’s rotting corpse in this gruesome grave!” She exhales, sits, speaks normally. “Of course, I was just acting. In real life, I’ve hated all my husbands.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“My daughter is mentally ill. You must make sure she doesn’t leave her purse in Nordstrom again. Or her glasses at Mr Chow. Or her car keys at Givenchy. And take all the credit cards out of her wallet. You control them. You’re in charge of the money. Do you understand? I will fire you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I resist an urge to correct her, an urge to say she can’t fire me, that I don’t work for her, I work for Kathi. But the power Miss Gracie commands onscreen is the same in real life. Her presence in the room is crushing.
“I heard Kathi had a medical incident,” Miss Gracie says. “Roger was cooking and saw the whole thing out of the kitchen window. He saw you with Kathi by the gate. He was narrating it to me moment by moment while our quiche burned. I couldn’t go out and help because I had a mud mask on, and Roger couldn’t help because he has diabetes. But when he told me that Kathi outstretched her two hands to you, and you outstretched your two hands to her in return, and you held her—”