As for men, she knew what the other girls said. Because all men liked sports, the rougher the sports the better, men liked to play games with you. They played cat and mouse. They teased you, taunted you, and led you on until, if you weren’t careful, you found yourself in a dangerous place from which there was no escape: pregnant. Then they tossed you aside, never to be heard from again. If you accused them, they would simply deny it, and there was no way of proving—unless he admitted it, which he hardly ever did—that this one or that one was the one who made you pregnant. And so you were left all alone, with no one to befriend you. This had happened to at least one girl at Miss Hall’s School. She had been whisked away, in tears, in a chauffeur-driven car—not even her parents would come to collect her—and she had never been seen or heard from again. She had vanished without a trace, dropped off the face of the earth.
In their cat-and-mouse games, men liked to “string a girl along.” Often, they strung several girls along at the same time, just for the hell of it, leading a girl deeper and deeper into the web of deceit until, bored with a girl who seemed too willing to be trapped, they simply cast her aside and went on to another one. For each new girl, each man had “a line.” The fishing imagery was no accident, for that was all it was, a casual fishing outing in which each fisherman tried to get a bigger, juicier specimen to nibble on his bait. Once he caught her, he either tossed her back into the pond or brought her home and fried her for dinner. This may seem a naive view, but remember that this was Miss Hall’s School for Young Ladies of Sheltered Sensibilities, and the more hard-bitten knockabout era of the 1960s had not yet dawned. After she had waited nearly an hour, Mimi decided that Michael Horowitz was no different from any of the others. She had stupidly fallen for his line too quickly. He had moved on to more exciting fishing grounds. He had stood her up. He probably did this sort of thing every day. To mix metaphors, she was just another notch on his belt. She decided that she did not even like him. He was too cocky, too boastful and braggarty, too full of himself, too show-offy—that hundred-dollar bill! She decided that if she ever saw him again she would simply hand his skate laces back to him without a word. She gathered up her skates to go.
But, just then, she saw a figure in a red parka running toward her through the park.
“Sorry!” he said breathlessly when he reached her. “Got tied up at the job in Jersey. No way to call you. Look—I’ve got to run again, but can you have dinner with me tonight? Can I make it up to you with dinner?”
“Well, I suppose so,” she said.
“Good! Thank God you waited!”
“If I waited any longer, I’d be frozen stiff.”
“How’s the Rainbow Room? Do you like the Rainbow Room?”
“That would be very nice,” she said. She had never been to the Rainbow Room.
“Good. Meet me there at seven-thirty. I’ll have the reservation.” He blew her a kiss and was off again, in another blur of moving red parka.
“The Rainbow Room!” her mother cried excitedly. “Your father and I were there years ago. They have dancing there, you know, so what do you think? Your ballerina? Or your blue sheath? Yes, I think the blue sheath, don’t you? And your blue coat, but first I think we should snip the padding out, don’t you? I just don’t know what people are wearing this winter. Everything in the stores looks so awful—I mean sequins, and all that. Or do you think your ballerina—or is that too long? The New Look is long gone, I know that much, but there isn’t time to raise the hem. No, I think the blue sheath, definitely. What time is he picking you up?”
“I’m to meet him there.”
“Really? In my day—”
“He’s coming in from New Jersey. It’s easier.”
“Then you’ll need taxi money. You can’t take the bus to the Rainbow Room! Don’t worry, I have taxi money. Where did you meet this young man, anyway? At one of your school dances? Who is he, anyway?”
“He says he intends to become the richest man in New York.”
“How exciting! Now quick, run fetch me your blue coat so I can snip out the shoulder pads. I know that shoulder pads are definitely out this year. Is it a boy you met at the Choate dance? Of course it must be. Choate means he’s from a fine family.”
Over the years, Mimi had learned that her mother had, once upon a time, been a woman with great expectations for her future. After all, hadn’t she married Henry Myerson, the son of Adolph Myerson, the Cosmetics King, and of Fleurette Myerson, geboren Guggenheim, the copper-smelting heiress? She had done this, and yet, mysteriously, the expectations had never come to pass. That glorious future she had assigned herself had managed to betray her, the great promises had not been kept, and, little by little, and bitterly, the dream had begun to die a long and lingering death. Sinister forces that no one seemed able to explain had cheated Alice Myerson of all her hopes. Who was the author of this villainy? At that point in her life, Mimi herself had no clear idea, but suddenly that night she saw all her mother’s aborted dreams become refocused on her daughter’s new beau.
Her mother, the former Alice Bloch, had been the pretty daughter of Sigismund and Nettie Bloch, members of a fine old German-Jewish family. In the teens and twenties, Sigismund Bloch had prospered, wore the title “Private Banker,” and “kept an office,” as they said in those days, in Wall Street—an office he rarely found it necessary to visit. But in the Great Crash of 1929, Bloch’s bank had been one of the first to go under, and Sigismund Bloch had lost everything. He never recovered from the shock and died several years later of a disease the family diagnosed as “melancholia.” Not long after that, his widow followed him to the Bloch family mausoleum in Salem Fields, the only piece of property the family had been able to retain, a marble edifice of extravagant design with a splendid view of the Manhattan skyline.
With Alice’s marriage to Henry Myerson, it was assumed that the Bloch family’s misfortunes were about to reverse themselves. It was assumed that the new Mrs. Myerson would become the chatelaine of grand houses such as those her in-laws occupied. It was assumed that Alice would embark upon the pampered, servant-attended sort of life that the other women of the uptown German-Jewish crowd enjoyed, lives of bridge clubs, luncheons at the Plaza, formal teas with daily-polished-silver tea services, calling cards, croquet on summer lawns overlooking the Atlantic, and a once-yearly (at least) “important entertainment,” where as many as two hundred and fifty white-tied gentlemen—and their spouses, wearing the required looping strands of Oriental pearls—sat down for dinner in a house on Fifth or Madison. You could look at Henry and Alice’s wedding photographs—the radiant young couple surrounded by their friends and relatives: little Granny Flo; Grandpa Myerson looking magisterial in his goatee and pince-nez; the massive Guggenheim uncles and their Junoesque wives—and see the bright promise of that privileged future shining in Alice’s eyes.
But it had never come to pass, none of it. At first, Alice and Henry had been lavishly entertained by their contemporaries and their contemporaries’ parents. They had been on everyone’s invitation list. But gradually it was noticed that Henry and Alice were not reciprocating in kind. At first, the Henry Myersons were accused of laziness, then of penuriousness, then of both. “You can’t accept Scotch salmon and pay back with tunafish,” Mimi had overheard someone say of her parents. She had also heard her parents described as “peculiar.” It seemed inconceivable that Adolph Myerson’s son and daughter-in-law could not afford to live on the scale that had been designated for them. They were supposed to have all this money. Where was it?
Mimi knew that money was part of the key to the conundrum. But another part was more mysterious and involved certain family secrets that had to be kept. One of the secrets was the unanswered question in her mother’s repeated cry: Where is the money? As a little girl, she had sometimes asked her father, “Daddy, are we poor?” He would answer her with another question: “You’re not starving, are you? Think of the starving Armenians!” Or he would respond with a challenge: �
�If you’ll lose ten pounds, I’ll give you ten dollars.” Because as a child, she had been chubby, and it was not until she was twelve or thirteen that the hated fat began suddenly to melt away. Or he would answer with a riddle, one of his little jokes that her mother called “Daddy’s groaners.” “Why didn’t the children of Israel starve in the desert?” he would ask her.
“Why didn’t they?”
“Because of all the sand which is there.”
“Are we an unlucky family, Daddy?” she had asked him once.
“Unlucky? Why do you ask that?”
“Mama says we were all born under some unlucky star.”
“Nonsense. Want to know the formula for good luck? Give me your left shoulder. It has to be the left one.”
She offered it to him, and he kissed her shoulder lightly. “There,” he said. “That’s the good-luck kiss. Then remember the secret, magic words: ‘With a kiss on my left shoulder, my heart will beat a little bolder.’”
When Mimi had gone off to Miss Hall’s School, she had gone on a full academic scholarship, but she had been told that she must never, on pain of the most horrible punishment imaginable, mention this fact to her grandparents. In the beginning, Mimi had thought of her scholarship as an honor. She soon realized that her mother considered it a disgrace. And still another key lay in her mother’s repeated assertion that the most important mission in a young woman’s life was “to make the right sort of marriage.” It was perfectly clear that Alice Myerson, who had thought she was making the right sort of marriage, had not, in fact, done so.
And so, at a quarter to seven on the night she was to meet Michael at the Rainbow Room, Mimi waited as her mother, working with nail scissors, cut out the shoulder pads of her two-year-old blue coat, her mother taking a sip of her drink with whichever hand happened to be free. “Oh, this is so exciting, isn’t it?” her mother said. “This could be a big change for you, couldn’t it—this Choate boy? Of course, in my day, if a Choate boy was taking a girl out to dinner, he’d call for her in a taxi and come in to be introduced to her mother, or at least have his family send around a car and driver to pick her up. But times change, I suppose. And—oh, God! I nearly forgot! In addition to taxi money, you’ll need money for the matron! When you go to the ladies’ room to freshen yourself—you’ll have to go there after dinner to freshen your makeup; after all, you’re a Myerson!—there’ll be a matron there. Right by the washstand, you’ll see a little saucer with coins in it; That’s where you leave the tip for the matron, after you’ve washed and dried your hands. Some people leave only fifty cents, but I think you should leave a dollar; after all, you are a Myerson! Don’t you dare tell your father I gave you a whole dollar to do this, but I think it will look better, and after all, it is the Rainbow Room! Tommy Dorsey’s band—that’s what was playing at the Rainbow Room when your father took me there. Goodness, that was years ago. Oh, my God … oh, no!”
“What happened, Mother?”
“I’ve cut a little hole in the lining! I didn’t mean to! Oh, my God, you can’t wear this coat, Mimi!”
“It’s just a tiny little tear, Mother. It’s only the lining; no one will ever see it.”
“But what about when your nice boy from Choate helps you into your coat after dinner? If he sees this hole, what will he think of us? He’ll think we’re as poor as Job’s turkey!”
“I’m sure he won’t notice. Here, let me take out the rest of the stitches.” She saw that her mother’s hands were trembling.
“No, no. I’ve just got a few more to go. Oh, Mimi, are you sure he won’t notice? This is such an important night for you!”
“I’m positive he won’t notice. He’s not the noticing sort.”
“Thank goodness it’s a little way down inside the sleeve.” Working with her nail scissors at the stitches, she went on, “It was years ago, when he took me to the Rainbow Room. It was before you were born, Mimi—before you were even born—when you were no more than a twinkle in your father’s eye!” And Mimi watched as, with one hand, her mother brushed a tear from her own eye. “Your father has always been kind to me, I have to give him credit for that. He’s never been guilty of an act of”—she worried at the stitches with her scissors tip—“deliberate … unkindness.… I have many happy … memories. They photographed us there that night, and on Sunday our picture was in the Rotogravure.… The Magnificent Myersons, they called us.…”
“I’ll have my usual, Scotch and soda,” Michael said, and the captain, who really did seem to know him, nodded. Michael was always good with headwaiters, was always authoritative, and always tipped them well.
The captain looked at Mimi, who took a deep breath and said, “I’ll have a dry martini.”
“Excuse me,” the captain said, “but may I see the young lady’s ID?”
“What?” Michael cried in outrage. “Don’t you know who this young lady is? This is my twin sister, my fraternal twin sister, who is actually three minutes older than I am! This is an insult, asking my twin sister for her ID!”
“Certainly, Mr. Horowitz,” the captain said. “I do apologize, Mr. Horowitz.”
“My twin sister has ordered a dry martini. Now get us our drinks.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“You have to show them who’s boss,” Michael said, after the headwaiter had left them. “By the way, how old are you?”
“Nineteen,” she said, adding a few months for good measure.
“That’s old enough. But I guess you do look younger. I’m a few years older than you. I’m twenty-five. You’re shy, aren’t you.”
“Yes, I guess, a little.”
“Some people say shyness is a form of selfishness. Do you agree with that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
“I don’t agree. Because I think shyness can be cured by practicing the art of self-esteem—so shyness is the opposite of selfishness, don’t you think? I used to be shy. Or at least I was considered a shy little kid. Then I read a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Mr. Dale Carnegie. It changed my life. I’ll give you that book to read, if you’d like. It could change your life, the way it changed mine.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve heard of the book.”
“And so,” he said, grinning at her, “aside from those little differences—our ages, and the shyness thing—what do you think of my plan?”
“What plan?”
“For us to get married, of course!”
“But Michael, I hardly know you!”
“Plenty of time for that. I didn’t mean get married tomorrow, for Chrissakes. How about June? There’s a song—‘It was just a wedding in June …’”
“But Michael,” she said a little wildly, “don’t I have to love you? Isn’t love supposed to be a part of it? I mean, I’m not even sure I even like you!”
Their drinks arrived just then, and when the waiter had left, Michael touched his glass to hers. “You may never like me,” he said, looking straight into her eyes. “But I’ll tell you this much, kiddo. You may never like me, but at least you’ll never forget me.”
He had been right about that.
12
Mrs. Richard Bernhardt is a thirtyish housewife in Scarsdale, and she comes to the door of her pleasant, Tudor-style house on Rockinghorse Lane to greet her visitor. “What a great pleasure,” she says as she offers him her hand. “Your reputation, as they say, precedes you, sir!”
“That could be taken two ways, of course,” he says.
She laughs easily and leads him across the wide entrance hall and into her sunny living room, which is decorated with floral Clarence House chintz and overlooks the sparkling backyard pool. “Can I get you something?” Louise Bernhardt asks. “Iced tea? Lemonade? A drink?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
They seat themselves on the sofa in front of the fireplace, the opening of which is filled with a hand-painted paper fan, for summer. Arrayed on the mantel is a handsome col
lection of polished pewter tankards. Louise Bernhardt has a certain reputation as a housekeeper and, in her living room, it shows.
“Needless to say, I’m consumed with curiosity as to why you called and wanted to see me,” she says.
“I’ll come right to the point,” he says. “If you know my reputation, you know I’m not the kind of guy who likes to beat around the bush.”
“Good,” she says. “Neither am I.”
“I’m interested in you because you’re a member of the Myerson family.”
She hesitates. “My grandfather was Leopold Myerson, that’s true,” she says. “He was an early partner of Adolph Myerson’s. But other than that—”
“And you are a stockholder in the Miray Corporation.”
“Yes. All of us are. There are six—no, seven—grandchildren.”
“Eight, actually.”
“Eight?”
“Esther’s three children.”
“Did Aunt Esther have three? Oh, you’re counting Norman. Poor Norman is … retarded, you know. We don’t usually count poor Norman.”
“Norman Stein is still a shareholder.”
“Well, yes, I suppose he is. His brother Gil handles his affairs for him. Gil is a darling. Norman is in Shady Hill.”
“I know all that.”
“Well,” she says brightly, “you’ve certainly done your homework on the family. Why this interest in us?”
“I’m interested in buying your Miray stock, Mrs. Bernhardt,” he says.
“All of it?”
“All.”
She rises and fishes a cigarette out of a gleaming silver box on the coffee table. “I hope you don’t mind if I smoke,” she says. “Really, we’re the last persecuted minority in America, we smokers!” She lights her cigarette with a heavy silver table lighter, of the variety that usually does not work. In Louise Bernhardt’s house, however, everything works, including the lighter.
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