I Know Where I'm Going

I Know Where I'm Going



Kate picked up the paper doll package. She held it carefully and turned it around to examine it from all angles. She put it down.

“I never buy fancy boxes,” she said. “You have to pay extra, and I’d rather invest my money in more chocolate. This one is adorable, though. Since you’ve already paid extra for it, are you planning to take the box away with you?” she asked me.

“No. I was just going to leave it for George.”

“George doesn’t play with dolls,” she said, “and I like the flowers she’s holding.” It was a small bouquet of colored paper flowers. A few years later, when I visited her in New York, I saw the paper doll box in her kitchen. The chocolates were long gone, but the box had been given a full life.

Whitney, Cukor’s yellow Labrador, had entered the room, aware of the chocolates, but more interested in Kate. When she rose to leave, he followed her. He had brought his leash with him.

“Whitney likes to walk with her,” George told me. “He runs around the property here all day, but he’s always ready for a walk with Kate.”

Kate left, closely followed by Whitney and his wagging tail. Halfway through the door, she said, “George, do you really think you have enough butter for baking brownies for tomorrow?”

“I’ll have to check with my accountant,” he answered.

After she had gone, Cukor said to me, “You probably noticed the way she softened and changed when she said Spencer’s name. Well, that’s nothing compared to the way it was here when they were together. It was often just the three of us. Sometimes Ruth [Gordon] and Garson [Kanin] were here. Sometimes Joe Mankiewicz and Judy Garland, too. It was all very private, Kate giggling like a schoolgirl, simpering, blushing girlishly whenever Spencer just looked at her.

“A great deal of their romance was conducted here. I have a very romantic house. Their relationship was subtle and neither one would have committed any indiscretion or embarrassed anyone.

“But there is no doubt that with Spencer, our girl was a girl, not a woman. He brought out a side, an aspect of Kate that she enjoyed having brought out. That simple.

“She learned to cook the best steak anyone ever made. Steak was Spencer’s favorite meal.

“There are some who would lean toward analysis. Kate would not have liked that. It’s not my cup of tea. They might have said that she had missed that aspect of her girlhood and was enjoying it late. Or she had enjoyed her teenage years so much, her college days, that she was trying to relive the past. That wasn’t so. I know because she told me she wasn’t very happy then.

“She was just enjoying herself in a part for which life didn’t seem to have cast her, but which she thoroughly enjoyed.

“She was recapturing the present.”

© 2010 Charlotte Chandler