Nyna Giles - The Bridesmaids Daughter: From Grace Kellys wedding to a homeless shelter – searching for the truth about my mother

THE
BRIDESMAIDS
DAUGHTER

First published in the UK in 2018 by September Publishing
First published in the USA in 2018 by St Martins Press

Copyright Nyna Giles and Eve Claxton 2018

The right of Nyna Giles and Eve Claxton to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from
California Dreamin. Copyright Hal Leonard LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed,
sustainable sources by Hussar

ISBN 978-1-910463-51-2 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-910463-52-9 (ePUB)
ISBN 978-1-910463-53-6 (Kindle)

September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org

To my mother, Carolyn,
whose beauty and kindness are forever
imprinted on my heart.

And to anyone suffering in silence,
in the hope that you may find your voice.

T he day my mothers story first slipped out into the world, I was twenty-nine years old. It was March 1989, and Id just dropped my daughter at her nursery school before driving over to my local A&P supermarket to pick up groceries. My son was still a toddler, sitting in the shopping cart, kicking his little legs as he waited for me to pay at the checkout. I remember glancing down and smiling at him as I stood on the line. He was such a sunny and easy child; I looked forward to our time alone in the mornings together after his big sister went to school and before his midday nap.

My husband and I lived with our two young children in a nice, comfortable house in a suburb of New York, the same town that hed grown up in. I was a stay-at-home mom; I spent my days taking my children to playgroups and nursery school, to their doctors appointments and the supermarket. Our friends were my husbands college friends and their wives, people who knew almost nothing about my family or my past. I preferred it that way. I thought I could keep everything neatly in its place, the same way I cleared up the childrens toys before my husband came home at the end of the day.

That day at the supermarket, the woman ahead of me in the checkout was still unloading her groceries from the cart, so I turned to glance at the magazines in the rack as I waited. And thats when I saw it. The headline on the cover of one of the tabloids.

PRINCESS GRACE BRIDESMAID LIVING
IN N.Y. SHELTER FOR HOMELESS:
PHOTO EXCLUSIVE

I whipped around to make sure no one else had noticed. My face was on fire, my stomach tight.

No one in my world knew about my mother, about the connection to Grace. Would they even guess that the woman from the headline had anything to do with me? I grabbed a copy from the rack, tucking it under a quart of milk. Then, as fast as I could, I paid for the magazine and the groceries and fled to the parking lot, unloading the shopping bags and little Michael into the car, before climbing into the drivers seat and slamming the door behind me.

In the quiet of the car, I opened the magazine, searching for my mother.

There she was, on page nineteen. Gray circles under the hollows of her dark eyes and streaks of silver running through her cropped black hair. In the photograph, she was sitting on the steps outside the shelter where she lived, wearing a thick white scarf around her neck, pausing to place a small knitted hat on her head. For the most part, the article about her was accurate. My mother did sleep each night in a homeless shelter on the Upper East Side of New York. Her bed was number eighty-five, a small metal cot covered with a regulation blue blanket, in an open dorm. Each morning at 7:00 A.M., the guards shook her awake, and she got up and left the shelter, going to Bergdorf Goodmans department store to wash in the basins of the ladies lounge, spending her days in the local parks, libraries, and churches.

The part about Princess Grace was also true. My mother and Grace Kelly had first met in New York in 1947 when they were teenagers living in next-door rooms at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Grace was studying acting; my mother was modeling for Eileen Ford, and had just arrived in New York from Ohio. After Grace became famous, the two women remained close, and when Grace married Prince Rainier in Monaco in 1956, my mother had been at her side as one of her bridesmaids.

The article went on to explain that since Graces death, Carolyns story had taken a very different turn. Now, only a few years after Graces fatal car accident, Carolyn was lonely and destitute, living in a shelter.

What the article didnt say was that while my mother may have been lonely, she was not alone. She had family who cared about her, who tried to persuade her to seek help, to find housing. Each month, I accepted her collect calls, and my husband and I paid a local diner so she could eat her meals there. I was the bridesmaids daughter, and while I might not have told my friends and acquaintances about her situation, I thought about my mother all the time. I worried about her, hoped that she was warm enough, leapt every time the phone rang, terrified something had happened to her.

And as often as I could, I went into the city to visit her. My mother and I would meet in a little square set between buildings on West Fifty-eighth Street where she liked to sit and pray. She was religious, devoted to the Virgin Mary, and she believed the little square was blessed. I knew I could always find her there, sitting on a bench, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer. From a distance, no one would have guessed my mother was homeless. Not a hair on her head was ever out of place. Proper appearance was always very important to her. She liked to wear white for purity: white slacks, white shirt, white scarf, white tennis shoes.

Together, wed go to a nearby diner for lunch, spending the next hour or so picking at our food and trying to make conversation.

My mother usually wanted to talk about astrology. She was obsessed with star signs and the movement of the planets.

The planets are colliding this week, shed say, shaking her head. We have to be very careful. Its a dangerous time.

She was always concerned, always anxious. She had a lot of advice. If I talked about my husband, shed tell me I should leave him. If I brought up something about my children, she told me that I should take them to the doctor; she was worried about their health. She was concerned about me, too. She wanted me to see a doctor; I didnt look well.

We need a miracle, shed say to me. Ive been praying for a miracle for you.

But when I tried to talk to my mother about what we could do to improve her own situationhow we could help her find a stable place to stayshed shut me down.

Well talk about it when the sun is shining, shed say.

And that was that. She didnt want my help. More than anything, she seemed to want to be left alone. I had spent so long trying to separate myself from my mother, forging my own life in order to survive; Id even changed the name she had given me, Nina, spelling it with a