4

Mardell La Tour, at twenty-three years, one month, was devout about her personal fantasies and had found a way to put them to use. Her best friend, Hattie Blacker, was practically knocking her brains out trying to get a master’s in sociology so she could go on to take a doctorate in the behavioral sciences. For the past year, Mardell had been backing up Hattie by researching various forms of human behavior. So far, she had been a trapeze artist named Francie Braden; a professional tennis bum called Lally Ames; a lady mud wrestler in Hamburg, Germany, billed as Gert Schirmer; and a movie press agent in L.A. known as Janet Martin. She didn’t need to do those things for a living, but she was determined to help Hattie.

Mardell, a mask name, had been born a Crowell and baptized Grace Willand. She was a graduate of Foxcroft, Bennington, and the Yale School of Drama. Her father was an Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Her mother was a painter and sculptor. They were so rich that if they closed an account in just one of the banks that held a small part of their money, it would constitute a run on the bank, forcing it to close. They lived in a large Federalist house in Georgetown that had a cribbage room, two bowling alleys in the basement, and a tunnel to the houses of whoever it might be that would be running for the presidency in ’72, ’76, and ’80, as well as last year, ’68, and in the the presidential election years before that. They were venerably old money that had owned a large portion of the country for many generations on both sides of the family.

There was nothing gnawing about the need to imbed herself within imaginary lives—i.e., being able to live other lives under the safe umbrella of money, improvising a living, moving, talking sketch of one life then moving on to the next—she merely wanted to help her friend Hattie Blacker shine above all the other members of her class at Columbia, not only because Hattie had really taught her how to play tennis, but also because Hattie had brought Freddie into Mardell’s life.

Freddie was the dream man of Grace Crowell’s decade. Ever since she had come out in Washington four years ago, Freddie had been either the secret or open target of every girl she knew. In a polygamous society Freddie could easily have had twelve or fourteen wives, all desirable; all knockouts. He was just nonpareil in every department. He was extremely beautiful in a brutishly lovely way. He was as graceful as any defecting Russian ballet dancer. At nineteen she had listed all the marvelous things Freddie was or had (he owned two Houdon busts, for one example), but she hadn’t bothered to remember all of them because she was simply too busy remembering Freddie after each time she saw him—which was as often as he could get away from his rather secret job in Washington.

She kept in touch with Washington through an exchange of letters with her mother. Sometimes, to stay in the character she was living currently to help Hattie research her papers, she wrote “case letters” to the people who she felt were closely related, dependent upon, or committed to the imaginary characters whose life she was living at the moment. The letters to the imaginaries were written because they were tools that helped her to expand her characterizations. Hattie was entirely too grateful for the research Grace was doing for her, to the point where Grace had had to tell her, “Oh, don’t be so wet, Hattie. I was a drama major. All these living impersonations help me, too. I mean—what better training could there be for an actress or a playwright than to live other people’s imaginary lives under the conditions in which they might live them?”

Briefly, in the five years since graduating from Foxcroft, Crowell/La Tour had tried coke, astrology, gin, psychedelic mushrooms, eastern religions, jogging, space shoes, transactional therapy, high-protein food, and W, which was either a newspaper, a magazine, or a catalog. She had never worked in either London or Paris. She had been in Shaftesbury to get the Sunday newspapers one summer weekend when she and Freddie had been the guests of some people named Weldon.

In fact, the Mardell La Tour identity hadn’t existed until she walked into the Casino Latino at show change time and had been hired on the spot. Blocking out the fantasy of this succeeding life as Mardell La Tour, showgirl, she was thinking of becoming a sexual glutton—albeit with only one man, if possible—but then all the way around the barn, just to see what it was like and to be entirely ready and able when and if the great legal moment happened with Freddie.

She was thrilled to meet a genuine hoodlum and to find him to be such a polite man who was so intent on doing what he saw as the right thing. The headwaiter, Mr. Smadja, was a darling. She learned from him that the Latino was owned by the Prizzi family, the nonpareil Mafia family of the United States, or at least prima inter pares, as her own father was to the American government. After a while, just keeping her ears open in the dressing room, she discovered that Charley Partanna was the underboss and the enforcer for the family and this knowledge drove her into rigorous disciplines of fantasy.

A week or so after she met Charley for lunch she wrote to her mother:

I have met the most fascinating man in New York. I think I could make him into a wonderful paper for Hattie Blacker. He’s what they call in his trade a “hit person,” my coworkers tell me, and if you don’t know what that is, it is just as well. He’s utterly ethnic, really adorable, and is an executive with one of the crime organizations of Brooklyn, which is a borough of New York City. He has marvelous manners and, although he is thirty years old, he is working for a high school diploma by attending night school. He has five months to go, making two and a half years of steady hard work in all. He seems to respect the diploma he will get more than the knowledge. He treats me as if I were a tiny, delicate, slightly confused Dresden doll, if your mind can fit me, a Size 16, into such a frame.

Seriously, he could represent a chance for some of the best research I have ever done. Hattie Blacker says that when she gets her doctorate she is going to settle into American tribal sociology. I am thinking seriously about doing a long paper for her on my friend, which is something that really could burnish the Blacker shield.

I had lunch with Edwina, whom you will remember because she married poor Puffy Witzel aboard that darling little train in Scotland. I see Charles, my crime executive, three nights a week after his school and my work. During the rest of the days and nights I either catch up on my reading or I do a few rounds of the discos with Chandler or Freddie. That has reached a most interesting point: Freddie wants me to marry him.

I think there’s a novel in Edwina. Three hours before her husband’s funeral she had a selection of widow’s weeds delivered to her from Bendel’s and Mainbocher, at the Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue. She tried on seven outfits right in the room where Puffy was laid out (with the door locked, of course), but finally went out to the crematorium with only her sable coat over a bra and panties. She says she hates being a widow so she certainly isn’t going to dress the part.

I am eating a lot of Sicilian food because that is the only food my crime executive friend understands. It seems to be either saffron and sardines—or is it pine nuts and currants and anchovies?

All my love to Daddy,

Warmest and dearest to you,

Gracie