Her mother never meant to sell any of it.
In fact, the idea to open the store had come from Maeve’s boyfriend at the time, a sound engineer named Chuck, who Frankie thought looked just like Tom Selleck—only with a Brooklyn accent and red hair. A remarkably decent guy, Chuck even cleared out a dresser for Frankie when Maeve moved them into his Echo Park bungalow, a gesture that Frankie deeply appreciated, and she certainly understood why his feelings were hurt when she still hadn’t put her clothes in the drawers two months later. She always wanted to, she really did. Especially since she had just watched The Parent Trap—the Hayley Mills original; her mother refused to watch remakes—and ever since, Frankie found herself fantasizing about a secret sister of her own somewhere in the world, just waiting to be discovered at summer camp.
Still the drawer remained empty.
Because even at ten, Frankie knew her mother’s interest in Chuck would run its course and they’d move on—it was simply a matter of how long it would take.
Her mother’s extensive collection of memorabilia, however, would require more than a few drawers, and with Chuck’s house and garage already bursting with his recording equipment, it was decided she needed to rent storage to keep it all safe—an idea that withered as soon as she saw how much a climate-controlled unit went for. When Chuck innocently suggested she think about selling it, her mother looked stricken. He might as well have suggested she sell her child.
“I’m just saying, Maeve. People pay good money for that crap.”
“It’s not crap,” she said fiercely. “It’s history, it’s heart—and it’s not for sale.”
And she remained adamant.
Until a week later when one of Chuck’s director-friends came over for drinks—a die-hard Rocky fan—and, after learning that Maeve owned a pair of Sylvester Stallone’s fingerless black gloves, offered her two thousand for them. The man explained that it had been one of his and his father’s favorite movies, and that they’d watched it together one more time the night before he moved his father into a memory-care unit. Frankie would never forget the sight of the man afterward, smiling as he sank his fingers into the gloves and stared down at his hands, his face flushing with boyish wonder even as he sniffed back tears.
And that, Frankie has always suspected, was when it occurred to her mother that maybe she’d been unfair, selfish even, by keeping all these memories to just the two of them to pore over in private.
That just because someone could put a price on a collectible, didn’t mean they didn’t feel a deep attachment to it—and that maybe there was actually something beautiful and pure in the business of movie moments.
The epiphany was startling.
Later that same evening, she and her mother sat on Chuck’s living room rug and unpacked the collection.
“The most important thing is that we won’t be greedy,” her mother said as the familiar smells of unearthed fabrics—nutty suedes and rusty leathers, perfumed satins and grassy silks—began to rise around them. “I’m not saying we’ll give it all away—obviously we can’t do that—but we’ll be reasonable. And if someone really wants a piece and can only offer half, well, we won’t inflate things.” Considering Audrey Hepburn’s black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany’s had recently sold for over eight hundred thousand, the bar for what constituted inflating was already high.
And so The Memory Shop opened on April 15, 1999.
Their first sale was a pair of Jane Fonda’s glasses from Nine to Five, bought by a woman who explained that Nine to Five was the first movie she saw after her divorce was final—and that it was the first time, in her sixty-two years on this planet, that she’d gone to the movies alone. Frankie had to rub her arms to make the goose bumps go down.
Within the first year, they’d made enough to buy a new car—the eggplant Chevy that her mother would eventually drive through an intersection at the very worst possible moment twenty years later. For the store’s fifth anniversary, they held a Doctor Zhivago party and served vodka shots and ice-palace cupcakes. Ten years in, they’d been written up in The LA Times, Auction Magazine, and The New Yorker.
Endearing themselves to other buyers, however, took a while longer, especially the ones who were only interested in the sale and carried no passion in their hearts for the pieces themselves. (Her mother called them “Hoovers”—sometimes to their face—since they might as well have been in the business of selling vacuum cleaners, she said.) But eager to sniff out new competition—or new allies, depending on the day—seasoned dealers began arriving steadily within the year to scan the Simon inventory, or simply offer unsolicited advice, usually to disparage their unorthodox method of display. When a customer with waist-length salt-and-pepper hair, who claimed to have been told in her youth she bore a striking resemblance to Ali MacGraw, asked to see one of Jenny’s famous red wool hats from Love Story, and her mother insisted the woman try it on, a buyer from Beverly Hills drew them into a huddle at the counter.
“Some advice, ladies: Never let the customer touch the item. Put it all behind glass.”
To which her mother’s response was: “Then how is it supposed to breathe?”
And yet, despite their growing success, Frankie would sometimes catch her mother blotting her eyes after a giddy customer left with their purchase.
“I promised I would never sell them,” she would occasionally whisper.
But when Frankie asked who she made that promise to, her mother would just answer with a sad smile.
There’s a generous breeze following her home tonight, rippling the fronds of the gangly palms that line the boulevard, scattering litter and bougainvillea petals across the pink terrazzo stars that compose the Walk of Fame. At last count, there were more than two and a half thousand tributes, and Frankie has memorized their order, a challenge she and her mother took up when Frankie turned five. While most kids her age were learning to read from Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street, she learned from daily pilgrimages up and down the famous Hollywood landmark. “Anyone can spell ‘cat’ or ‘ball,’” her mother insisted. “But the girl who can spell Gina Lollobrigida can rule the world.”
The new tenant from 2G is on his way out when she reaches the steps, and he holds the gate for her. He and his roommate are having a housewarming party later if Frankie wants to come? She’s tempted; he’s ridiculously adorable—sandy haired and lanky, a Bull Durham–era Kevin Costner, down to the blue eyes and aw-shucks stubble—and if her heart wasn’t still bruised from Dennis’s recent rejection, she just might.
The courtyard is bathed in shade, the coppery light turning the yellow Spanish-style stucco walls a soothing peach as she walks past the kidney-shaped pool toward the alcove of mailboxes. The High Life is one of the older complexes off Hollywood Boulevard—two floors with everyone’s apartments open to the outside so a person would think she might be living in a motel, which is possible, considering the rate of tenant turnover. When she moved in five years ago, the rental agent pulled up pictures on her phone of the building in the forties when it was a chaperoned dormitory for young women looking to get into the movies, and rising stars like Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth crisped poolside. Saul Manheim, who lives in 1E with his Pomeranian, Bogart, has lived at the High Life since ’71. He claims Harrison Ford was the building’s handyman before he hit it big with American Graffiti. Frankie has no idea if it’s true, but she likes to imagine Harrison shirtless and sweat slicked on the roof, carefully replacing a stretch of curved Spanish tiles and tossing her down one of his rakish Han Solo grins as she walks by.
Reaching into her mailbox, she pulls out a tangle of flyers, then a padded envelope, the name on the return address causing her heart to swell with affection: Peter Williams, the man her mother had been living with when she died.
She gives the package a gentle squeeze, trying to guess the contents. It shocks her that she could have left something behind, recalling how brutally thorough she and Peter were the day she came over to extract the last pieces of her mother from his apartment; how sure she had been that the hole in her heart couldn’t be hollowed out any deeper, only to uncover the sharpest cuts in the most innocuous of places—a near-empty bottle of her mother’s rosewater shampoo, a grocery list—and drown all over again. Particularly crushing was finding the still-sealed box of her mother’s favorite tea, orange hibiscus, a reminder of a future that was planned and abruptly stolen—but it wasn’t the hardest discovery that day. That distinction would always be reserved for the blank birthday card found in her mother’s nightstand drawer, bought for Frankie’s upcoming thirtieth birthday, forever waiting now for wishes that would never be given.
So what could be in this package?
She hastens her steps up the wrought-iron stairwell to her second-floor apartment, possibility pulsing through her as she pushes inside. Lowering her bag to the couch, she drops beside it, the sweetly stale smell of cold Thai food drifting from the pile of empty take-out containers she left on the kitchen counter with a vow to clean up as soon as she got home, but all that will have to wait now.
Her heart hammers as she tears open the mailer, finding an envelope inside, this one with a Post-it stuck to the top.
Frankie,
I emptied out my file cabinets the other day and this envelope was in the very back. Not sure what’s inside but knowing how your mother felt about sealed letters, you should be the one to open it.
I’m not sure if you’ve lost my number, but it’s still 555-551-8968. Call me if you ever want to talk.
I miss her every day.
Peter
She runs her thumb over the bulk of the envelope, warmed by Peter’s words, reminded of how well he’d known her mother—how well her mother had let him know her. Of all the men, there was no question that Peter had held her heart the tightest. But had her mother loved him? She couldn’t recall her mother saying so—but then she couldn’t remember having heard her mother use the word “love” with any of her boyfriends. Only with Frankie. And then, all the time.
His comment about his number sends a pang of guilt; Frankie’s not sure why she’s avoided calling him. Far from losing his number, she’s kept it on her favorites screen, seeing his name every time she taps into her contacts. She rarely called him in all the years he and her mother lived together, but in the days after Frankie lost her, it felt right to make his number more prominent, as if their mutual grief might bond them in a way they never knew when Maeve was alive. But whenever Frankie thinks to call, fear stops her, fear that their lack of connection will only be amplified now, and that hearing his voice, and knowing her mother’s won’t be in the background, will only make her mother feel truly gone. And as much as her stomach twists with remorse for not reaching out to Peter, she’s just not prepared for that.
Tears prickling, she pulls in several deep breaths, trying to prepare her thundering heart for this second layer of discovery. The crash of hope and fear is dizzying. Hope that whatever is under this sealed flap may be a revelation of some kind, a piece of her mother’s past she didn’t dare confess until Frankie was older. Things her mother meant for her to know but ran out of time to share. Maybe even, at last, the identity of her father …
She studies the sweep of the writing on the front of the envelope. To Maeve, with love and gratitude. Always. Was this her father’s writing?
When she wedges her fingernail under the seal and rips it free, Frankie can’t help feeling like a skydiver pushed out of a plane.
There are two more envelopes inside: notecard-sized with scalloping on the flaps, one to My Dearest Mitch, the other to My Beloved Gabe. There’s also a photograph of a crowd in formal wear on a town dock. In the center of the picture, a man and a woman stand close under a banner that’s been stretched across the pier: WELCOME TO THE FOURTH ANNUAL STARDUST FILM FESTIVAL!
Frankie is familiar with the festival—who in Hollywood isn’t? Started a few years after Redford’s Sundance by Glory Cartwright and Mitch Beckett, a Hollywood power couple before there were Hollywood power couples. Their movies, always pairing them as star-crossed lovers, were some of the biggest films of the seventies. Having never been farther east than Tucson, Frankie always wanted to attend. Her mother, however, wouldn’t hear of it. “We don’t need to go all the way across the country to rub elbows with people who live down the block, baby.”
She looks between the envelopes, pieces sliding together: the letter for My Dearest Mitch must refer to Mitch Beckett—but who is My Beloved Gabe? Setting down the letters, Frankie picks up the photo for another look, turning it over to find a single word, in the same handwriting as on the envelopes, Peace. Whatever that means?
Glancing back at the man and red-headed woman standing together in the center of the picture, recognition sparks: Mitch Beckett and Glory Cartwright.
A knock on the front door brings her to her feet. Saul Manheim stands in the corridor in a gently wrinkled blue suit and ivory bow tie, holding a huge aluminum pan with both hands. For an eighty-two-year-old, his upper body strength is impressive.
His dog, Bogart, circles his feet, tiny black eyes bulging through a nest of orange fur.
“I thought you might be hungry.”
Frankie scans the pan. “Casserole?”
“Lasagna.”
She sighs, stepping back to let her neighbor enter. “You really need a bigger fridge, Saul.”
“Tell me about it,” he says, coming in with Bogart on his heels. “Six years, and they won’t take the hint.”
They are Saul’s female friends and neighbors—the Brisket Brigade, as he calls them—who swooped in with their edible charms within days after Saul lost his wife, Ruth—a well-known makeup artist who earned two Academy Award nominations for her work. Pictures of her cover Saul’s apartment. Frankie never met her, but she feels as if she knows her.
“You look nice,” she tells him as he sets down the pan on her stovetop.
“The community center’s showing An Affair to Remember. I thought I’d take Maureen from next door.”
“I already ate, you know.”
“Let me guess: three raisins and a cube of cheese?” Saul snorts. “You Hollywood gals are all meshuggeneh.” He looks around her apartment. “Hey, how come I don’t see that guy with the great hair anymore?”
She peels back a corner of the foil and leans in for a whiff of garlic and tomato sauce. “Dennis and I broke up.”
“Too bad. Good-looking guy. Dead ringer for that Brad Pitt fella.”
“Is this the part where you make me feel better, Saul?”
“Sorry, kiddo. What I mean is: Good riddance, the schmuck.” He glances over at the envelopes where she’s left them on the coffee table. “New acquisitions?”
“They’re from Peter,” Frankie says, retrieving the letters and handing them to Saul. “My mom was saving them. I’m pretty sure the one for Mitch is Mitch Beckett, but I have no idea who Gabe is.”
“One way to find out,” Saul says, his thumb dancing toward the flap.
She shoots him a disapproving look. “You know I can’t open them.”
“’Course not. You’ll get more for them sealed.”
“I can’t sell them either.”
He blinks at her. “What are you talking about? You and your mother always had letters in the store. Don’t you remember she sold me that one Ann-Margret wrote to Elvis? God, it was spicy.”
“Opened letters,” she reminds him. “Sealed ones are different.”
Saul sniffs. “Yeah, they’re worth more.”
While there were very few rules that her mother lived by, never being the first to open another person’s sealed letter was near the top of Maeve Simon’s playbook. Something about opening someone else’s confessional love letter when she was young and feeling desperately guilty over it. Frankie’s explained this to Saul before. She suspects he’s conveniently forgotten.
“This was in the package, too,” she says, handing him the photo.
While Saul leans toward the glow of the stove light to study it better, she swipes the side of the pan, extracting a fingertip of melted cheese and frowning as she chews.
“It doesn’t make sense. My mother was never a fan of theirs. I don’t even think we carried pieces from their movies in the store.”
Frankie tries to remember and can only come up with a red bolero jacket worn by Glory Cartwright in one of her early roles, before she and Mitch Beckett made their films together. One item, hardly proof of devotion.
So why had her mother kept these items separate, as if they were precious?
“What doesn’t make sense to me,” Saul says, “is why she never mentioned knowing a huge star like Beckett.”
Bogart lets go a sharp bark, and Frankie lowers a frilly ribbon of pasta into the dog’s tiny mouth. “Just because she had this stuff doesn’t mean she knew him.”
“No, but if she’s standing this close, I’m assuming she at least met the man. She’s real young here, but that sure looks like Maeve,” Saul says, tapping on the woman beside Mitch Beckett, and Frankie is certain all the blood in her face has sunk to her ankles.
She’s been so fixated on the letters, she just assumed the copper-haired woman beside Mitch Beckett was his red-headed wife. But now Frankie’s chest tightens with recognition.
The woman in the picture is, unquestionably, her mother.