Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “You have? What have you heard?”

  “How charming you are, how gracious—”

  “Did my daughter tell you that?”

  “She. And others.”

  “Whenever Naomi Myerson starts talking like that, it means she wants something. Money, usually.” She turns to her other dinner partner and says, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jim Greenway, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I’m researching a story on the Myerson family, for Fortune.”

  “There wasn’t any fortune. Didn’t you know that? When my husband died, it turned out he’d spent it all. I had to sell everything—everything except my paintings. Did I tell you about my friend Mrs. Perlman’s little dog?”

  Sherrill Shearson is now on Edwee Myerson’s right, and turning to her somewhat loftily, aware that she is a member of a lower social order, he says to her, “You certainly make a handsome couple. Are you two married?”

  She giggles. “Are you kidding? Dirk’s bisexual.”

  Nodding, Edwee takes this information in, and his eyes travel across the table to where Dirk Gordon sits, carefully spooning his soup, and he gives the younger man a long, appraising look. “Really. How interesting,” he says.

  From across the table, too, Edwee’s wife catches this look of calculating appraisal. “Edwee,” she mouths. “You promised!”

  His answer is an almost indiscernible wink.

  “One thing I’m interested in knowing about,” Jim Greenway is saying to Granny Flo, the sad saga of Mrs. Perlman’s pet having come to an end, “is what caused the rift between your late husband and his brother, Leopold, years ago. Can you tell me anything about that?”

  “Why, it was perfectly simple,” Granny says. “My husband was jealous of Leo. Leo was tall and dark and handsome and always got the girls. My husband was short and fat and ugly. Do you still have your grandpa’s portrait in your library, Mimi? You could see in the portrait how ugly he was. No girl would look at Adolph, except me.”

  “There must have been more to it than that, Granny,” Mimi says.

  “That was the gist of it. I’d have much rather married Leo than Adolph, but Leo was already married to someone else, so I had to settle for Adolph. ‘Settle for Adolph,’ my father said. My father was Morris Guggenheim, in case you didn’t know. When he was born, he was called the world’s richest baby.”

  “Interesting,” Jim Greenway says.

  “But he wasn’t the world’s richest baby. That’s the point. So don’t put that in your story.”

  Nonie’s friend Roger Williams is still trying to draw Granny’s attention away from her other dinner partner. “Nonie and I are about to launch an exciting new business venture of our own, Mrs. Myerson,” he says.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “Spot foreign exchange. You see—”

  “Foreigners,” she says. “That reminds me of President Hoover, when my husband and I were invited to the White House. President Hoover was fat, and so was his wife. She was named Lou—Lou—Hoover. And they were both fat. Not too tall, either, but fat. Isn’t that funny that both would be fat? My husband used to call them Tweedledum and Tweedledee; isn’t that funny? He could be funny, my husband. But I remember we talked about all the foreigners. President Hoover said there were too many foreigners coming into the country. He wanted them stopped, and I think he was working on some sort of way to stop them. How much does Nonie want from me this time?”

  “Well, if you were interested in coming in as an investor, Mrs. Myerson, we’d certainly be most happy to—”

  “Nothing to do with foreigners! There are too many of them. President Hoover said so, and he ought to know.”

  “Mother,” Nonie begins, “what Roger is trying to explain is—’

  But at that moment, Felix steps into the dining room and whispers something in the senior Bradford Moore’s ear. Brad Moore frowns slightly, places his napkin beside his plate, rises, and says, “Excuse me—a business call.”

  In his absence, Edwee turns to Alice, who is on his left. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” he whispers to her.

  “Isn’t what interesting?”

  “Brad has a woman on the West Side. But wouldn’t you think she’d know better than to call him at home—while he’s at dinner?”

  “What makes you think that, Edwee?”

  “I know what I know, Alice.”

  “I don’t believe any of this!”

  “I’ve seen the woman. I’ve seen them together, holding hands. So, who is going to tell Mimi that her husband has another woman? Shall you, or shall I? Obviously, she’s got to be told.”

  “I told you I don’t believe you.”

  “What are you two whispering about?” Mimi says from the far end of the table. “Whisper-whisper-whisper. Won’t you let the rest of us in on whatever gossip it is?”

  “We were just talking about the West Side,” Edwee says easily. “How it’s changed. All the shops on Columbus Avenue, and all the cheap merchandise one finds there.”

  “This rift with his brother Leopold,” Jim Greenway is saying. “Was it sudden, when Leo left the company in nineteen forty-one, or was it a disagreement that had been building over the years?”

  “Over the years. Yes, over the years. My husband kept a diary, you know, over the years. It was all in his diary—everything.”

  “Really?” he says eagerly. “A diary? Do you still have it? I’d love to see that.”

  “Oh, no,” she says sadly. “It’s gone. Disappeared. Destroyed, perhaps. Gone, all gone, but it was all in there, the whole thing.”

  “Really, Granny?” Mimi says. “I never knew that Grandpa kept a diary.”

  “Oh, yes. Wrote in it every day. Put everything in. Sometimes he’d read it to me.”

  “It would certainly be helpful to Mr. Greenway in his research, Granny, if we could locate Grandpa’s diary.”

  “But it’s gone. Vanished. Gone.”

  Speaking up in full voice for the first time now, Alice Myerson says, “I certainly never heard that my father-in-law kept a diary. If he had, certainly Henry would have mentioned it to me.”

  “But he did. He did.”

  “I don’t believe you, Flo!”

  From across the table, Granny Flo gazes steadily at her daughter-in-law. Then, turning to Jim Greenway, and nodding in Alice’s direction, Granny Flo says, “She killed a man once, you know. It was all in Adolph’s diary.” She pauses for a moment to let this sink in. Then she says, “I have to go to the toilet. Will someone lead me?”

  Brad, returning from his telephone call, steps to her chair. “I’ll show you the way, Flo,” he says, taking her hand.

  Felix, in the silence that follows, clears the soup bowls, one by one, and serves the salad course.

  “This is my cook’s famous Niçoise salad,” Mimi says brightly, breaking the silence. “Instead of tuna, she uses smoked Scotch salmon, and she’s found a little shop where we get fresh pimentos!”

  “Mr. Greenway,” Nonie says when her mother is out of earshot, “I must apologize for my mother. It’s—well, it’s Alzheimer’s disease, I’m afraid. She forgets things. She loses track. She imagines things. In other words, you really must not pay any attention at all to anything she says.”

  But, across from her at the table, Alice Myerson’s eyes are very wide and very bright, and two pink spots have appeared on her cheeks. “What—did—she—say?” she demands. “What did she say about me?” She flings her napkin on the table. “Why does everyone in this family hate me? Why is everyone trying to hurt me?”

  “Mother,” Mimi murmurs. “Mother, dear—”

  “She’s saying that I’m to blame for your father’s suicide, isn’t she? Well, it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me who put that bullet through his head! If anyone’s to blame, she is! She, and Adolph, and Leo, and all the others! Put that in your story, Mr. Greenway: that evil old woman killed my husband, killed her own son, just as surely as if she’d been in the room when he pulled the trig
ger! Yes, put that in!” There are tears in her eyes now, and she pushes her chair back from the table.

  “Mother, please—”

  “Please! Please! I’m the one who should be crying ‘please.’ Please, leave me alone, all of you! All of you, in this family of hating and hurting and destroying people. Where can I go now, what can I do? When will you all have had enough of me, and let me die in peace? Never, that’s when! Not till I die in my tracks from exhaustion, from the exhaustion of trying to fight back against this family that’s destroyed everything … my husband … everything I ever loved. You didn’t see it, Mimi, you were too young, but I saw it happening, happening every day, day after day, as she and his father destroyed him to the point where he was desperate, lost, with no one left to help him, not even I, nothing he could trust but his poor … little … service revolver. Oh!” she sobs. “I didn’t want to come here tonight; I knew something like this would happen. Oh, just let me go home, Mimi. Let me go home, away from the cruelty … home …” She jumps from her chair and runs sobbing from the room.

  After a pause, Mimi says quietly, “I’m sorry. My mother is … my mother is recovering from an illness. I thought she was … sufficiently recovered to … but apparently not. I’m sorry.” Turning to Sherrill and Dirk, she says, “What else can I say?”

  “She got hysterical,” Sherrill Shearson says, as though this provided an explanation for everything.

  Edwee whispers to Nonie. “What did I predict? A debacle. I knew something like this would happen if poor Alice were here.”

  Returning to the table with his wife’s grandmother on his arm, Brad Moore asks innocently, “What became of your mother?”

  “Mother … had to leave,” Mimi says.

  “Good riddance,” Granny mutters. “Little tramp.”

  And so, I ask you, how do you rescue a formal dinner party from a disaster like this one? When the Titanic struck an iceberg, the passengers turned it into a romp and tossed handfuls of slivered ice at one another. In this case, there is a salad course, a main course of noisettes de veau and tiny green peas, a dessert course, and coffee to get through before the lifeboats can be lowered and the hapless prisoners at 1107 Fifth Avenue can be released to the salvation of their homes and cool beds. The answer is, you do your best to rescue a foundering evening with artifice, with showmanship, with bright and inconsequential chatter: the day’s headlines, Bernhard Goetz, subway violence, will this extraordinary bull market ever end? Brad Moore works on Wall Street, what do his banker friends say? Outside, there is the quality of the sunset to be discussed, how, across the park, the setting sun turns the glass and concrete canyons of the West Side into ribbons of fire. Questions, questions. Mimi has questions to ask of everyone, keeping the evening afloat, keeping the conversation going, the dinner partners turning from one side to another, as the courses proceed, one after another. No one ever said that this sort of thing is easy, but Mimi does her best to carry it off, even going so far as to express her concern and shock and caring over the fate of Mrs. Perlman’s little dog. “Oh, what a terrible thing, Granny.”

  The show must go on! It is one of those occasions where Mimi must remind herself that a business is not just a family, and that a family is not just a business but a shared heritage of old wounds that have not yet turned to scars, of hurts that cannot be forgiven, of seething memories that refuse to simmer down. It is the old story of love gone uncollected, and of luck, which is love’s opposite, walking off with all the winnings, and a smirk on its face.

  Mimi’s husband is the first to excuse himself. “Some work to catch up on at the office,” he says. “The Sturtevant case … pretrial discovery phase … depositions to take in the morning.…”

  “Of course,” Mimi says, offering her cheek again. “Don’t be too late, darling.”

  Edwee rolls his eyes significantly in Nonie’s direction, and of course Mimi, who notices everything, pretends not to notice this.

  The remaining guests move into Mimi’s all-white living room, where candles are lighted, and where Felix serves coffee.

  Perhaps, I thought, she had worn white tonight just for this all-white room, for her dress was of the same oyster shade as the linen fabric that covered the walls. It was part of her sense of personal theatre. Later, of course, I would wonder if this room was an echo—an unconscious one, perhaps—of another all-white room that had once had a certain meaning in her life. But tonight this room was predominantly white and crystal, Baccarat obelisks and spheres and cubes, all sending refractions of colored light from low, glass-topped tables against the oversized white sofas and ottomans and low-backed chairs. In this white room, tonight, she even placed white cymbidium orchids in white Chinese vases. But there were also bright splashes of color from the walls: a huge blue-and-white Jack Youngerman, a varicolored Morris Louis waterfall cascading behind a sofa. “Is this a Jasper Johns?” I heard Dirk Gordon ask her as he admired the paintings.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And this: Imari?” as he pointed to a green and orange goldfish plate.

  “Kutani, actually. But you’re close. You know a lot about porcelain, Dirk?”

  “A bit.” Mr. Dirk Gordon clearly did his homework on Brad and Mimi Moore.

  “My husband and I are passionate collectors.”

  “And this must be V’soske carpet.”

  “Why, yes, in fact, it is.”

  “The most expensive, and the best,” he said, a young man who would make it his business to know such things, and then, “Whoever was your designer did a marvelous job.” Mimi laughed her special laugh, and said, “Thank you,” though I knew that no room in this apartment had ever known the banality of an interior decorator. Everything in this room, right down to the little cluster of Steuben glass mushrooms that had been “planted” in sphagnum moss in an antique ironstone tureen, had been selected by Brad and Mimi themselves, for Brad also has good taste. At least he appreciates fine things.

  “But her rooms don’t track,” the designer Billy Baxter once complained, a trifle pettishly perhaps, since he had nothing to do with their design. By this he meant that the rooms—the white living room, the Tiger Lily library, the French dining room—seemed at odds with one another. Today’s designers tend to pick two or three fashionable colors—at the moment, persimmon and pomegranate are two of these—and use them, with varying degrees of emphasis, throughout a house. (Remember when every smart living room had to be painted a deep mint green?) But Mimi prefers to let each room create its own experience. “After all,” she argues sensibly enough, “a person can’t be in more than one room at a time.” This approach gives her house a certain sense of quirkiness and playfulness.

  Mimi moves around her sparkling living room now, trying to sparkle herself. But, of course, her mother’s little explosion has left the evening with a taut edge, and the sparkle can’t help but feel a little forced. And so, one by one, after a polite enough interval has passed, Mimi’s guests begin their thank-yous, their good-byes, and leave.

  “Stay and have a quick nightcap with me, Badger,” Mimi says to her son. And, when all the others have gone, she leads him back into the library, where Felix has set out a decanter of Ar-magnac and thimble-shaped glasses.

  “Yes, a brandy,” she says to young Brad’s offer, and she flings herself in her long white sheath deep into a green leather sofa. Only then does she permit herself to unwind, let down her guard, and let the angry tears come. “Oh, shit, shit, shit!” she says through clenched teeth, making tight fists of her hands and pounding the sofa cushions with them. “Shits! All of them! Why did I even bother?” Badger hands her her glass, and she downs the contents with a gulp, then holds out the glass to be refilled.

  “Just … shits!” she cries. Tears stream down her cheeks, but there are no sobs.

  “Okay, Mom,” her son says pleasantly. “Let it all out.”

  In a business noted for temperamental characters, Mimi Myerson is not known for emotional outbursts. During her years i
n the industry, she has been exposed to various of its titans: the volatile Helena Rubinstein, who, hearing news she did not wish to hear on the telephone, would often rip the cord from the wall and hurl the offending instrument across the room; the imperious Elizabeth Arden, who enjoyed making surprise visits of inspection to her salons where, finding nothing to her liking, she would sweep through her selling floors crying, “Fools! Knaves! Nincompoops!” while salesgirls cowered behind their counters in her wake; and the notoriously foul-mouthed Charles Revson, whose favorite tactic was to leap from his desk and shout, “You’re fucking fired! Get the fuck out of here!” Mimi has never found temperament to be an effective business tool and has always practiced a more coolheaded, evenhanded executive style, having discovered that more can be accomplished with honey than with vinegar or vitriol. But now, of course, in the privacy of her own home, and alone with her own son, it is a different matter altogether.

  “That shit Nonie!” she says now. “She changed all my place-cards. Did you know that? To put her used-car-salesman-type greasy boyfriend next to Granny, so he could talk up some new hare-brained scheme of Nonie’s. And then Edwee and Nonie, whispering together like two old maids and refusing to join the conversation. And wretched old Granny! Wouldn’t you think, after all these years, she could let up on Mother? But she never lets up! And poor Mother—who didn’t want to come anyway, but whom I made come. And those stupid-ass models: did you ever encounter such a pair of airheads? The whole thing, the whole evening, was a stupid idea to begin with. Why didn’t you tell me, Badger, that this whole evening was a stupid idea?”

  He spreads his hands. “Mea culpa,” he says. “It was all my fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t. It was my stupid idea. Even your father wasn’t a lot of help, was he? Sneaking out on some trumped-up excuse, and leaving me to sweep up the wreckage.”

  “He said the Sturtevant case. I know it’s been on his mind—”