We refuse to call this a second honeymoon, despite what you’ll think. Just visiting special places, doing touristy things, visiting museums, cathedrals, shopping, eating too much. Cheers!
XXXX & OOOO
Brad & Mimi
Then, just the other day, I ran into her on 57th Street, coming out of one of those china shops just east of Park. She had just been looking at a set of Chelseaware plates decorated with lobster claws, she said. Brad’s birthday was coming up, the double-five. She asked me how my book was coming. “Moving along,” I told her.
“Just don’t forget the lesson of the Sèvres vase,” she said. “Things are more interesting when they’ve earned a few battle scars,” and she laughed that special pebbly, thrilling laugh of hers.
Then she was off, blowing me a kiss. She was still a woman whom, if you saw her on the street, you would look at twice, whether it was her posture, or her sense of style, or her loose and bouncing blond hair, or her extraordinary eyes, and as she walked quickly away from me down 57th Street, I saw various heads turn—both men’s and women’s—for a second look.
For a moment I wondered what she meant by her parting piece of advice. Then I decided that I knew. She was telling me that a damaged marriage, like a broken piece of porcelain, can be redeemed through love and caring.
Meanwhile, the acquisitive Mrs. Rita Robinson has abandoned her quest and, I understand, has moved on in search of other prey. In New York, perhaps more so than in other places, life goes on.
As for Michael Horowitz, from what I read in the papers, he just goes on making money, and with each successful deal, the more grandiose grow his future plans. Right now, he has unveiled a scheme to turn a tract of abandoned railroad yards on the Upper West Side into a whole new city within a city: theatres, shopping malls, a sports arena, high-rise luxury apartment and office towers, and, for good measure, a structure that will be the tallest building in the world with views from here to Philadelphia. Sometimes I think that with men like Michael money and deal-making become a narcotic, and that the more money he makes the more he needs to feed his habit. Certainly he has more money now than he could ever possibly spend. And sometimes I wonder, too, whether his coming back to pursue Mimi after all those years was because she represented, to him, one deal that he had never quite been able to pull off. But I also wonder—since he doesn’t seem to be the kind of man cut out for marriage—whether, when they said good-bye, he was bitterly resigned to his loss, or whether he was secretly a little bit relieved. Perhaps he always knew that he was someone who could provide a certain summer to her heart, but not the full four seasons of the year. Who knows?
Meanwhile, his enemies—and he has many—and his competitors, all those people who call him “Michael Horror-witz,” predict that he is riding for a fall. So far, this hasn’t happened, and he climbs on, higher and higher, toward the center of the Big Top, and when he reaches that … But in the meantime he must climb on, higher, faster, toward whatever dizzy goal remains.
His friends say that he will never marry.
Michael Horowitz and Badger finally met for the first time just two months ago. Their meeting was quite accidental. They met—almost literally bumped into one another, in fact—as they were stepping out of their respective shower stalls in the men’s locker room at the Century Country Club in Westchester County. Toweling his hair dry, the younger man stepped out of his shower and turned right. The older man, doing the same thing, stepped out and turned left. Thus, each other’s bare shoulders and elbows barely missed colliding in the process.
“Oops. Sorry.”
“Sorry.”
Stepping back, it was Badger who first realized who the older man was. “You’re Michael Horowitz,” said Badger.
“Yes.”
“Badger Moore.”
The two nude and dripping men shook hands with one another as formally as was possible under the circumstances, though neither man could avoid casting his eyes briefly downward to see how the other was hung. Then both quietly slung their towels around their middles.
Both are well-muscled and flat-bellied, and there is even a certain physical resemblance between the two of them, though Badger Moore is an inch or two taller than the older man.
“I didn’t realize you were a member of this club,” Badger said, immediately realizing that this sounded snotty. He hadn’t meant it to sound that way.
“Yes. They’re letting in quite a few of my element these days.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Never mind. It’s a long story.” Then Michael said, “By the way, I really wasn’t trying to take over your company, you know.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“No hard feelings, then?”
“None.”
“Good,” Michael said. Then he said a strange thing. “I’d really like to get to know you better,” he said. “I’d like us to be friends.”
For a moment Badger wondered whether Michael Horowitz might be gay. But he quickly dismissed this thought as both unworthy and unbecoming. “Sure,” he said pleasantly. “Let’s have lunch someday.”
“I’d like that.”
“Give me a call.”
“Call you.”
The two shook hands again, and then each man headed for his respective locker—Badger’s being number 24, and Michael’s being 316, in the opposite direction—to dress.
To my knowledge, that lunch has yet to take place.
The only person I feared hurting with the diaries that Mimi turned over to me was her mother. I finally decided to approach Alice Myerson directly with what I knew and to ask her what I ought to do.
She said, “It was the most terrible moment of my life, beyond question. I hid the car in the garage that night, thinking that the nightmare of what happened that afternoon would go away if I could just hide the car. But Henry read the account of what happened in the newspaper the next morning, and that night he went down to look at the car. He came upstairs and said to me, ‘Did you do this?’ And I said, ‘Yes—oh, yes, oh, Henry, help me!’ And the next day Henry went to his father, and his father went to work to fix things up, using those friends of Uncle Leo’s. I was sent to Maine, and the servants were told to say I’d been there all summer, since Mimi’s birthday, to give me an alibi. People were paid off, license plates were switched, cars were switched, and everything was supposed to be fixed up.
“But then Leo became suspicious, and I’m certain Leo stole the diaries, though how he did it I don’t know. Then Leo started blackmailing Henry, and then Leo’s son Nate took over. He had some sort of letter proving that I wasn’t in Maine but was in New York at the time. For years, Leo and Nate bled us. At first, it wasn’t for too much, but it kept getting worse. It got worse and worse as the years went by, and once we had started it there was no stopping it. Nate said to Henry, ‘The fact that you’re paying us is proof that she’s guilty, isn’t it?’ Then Leo died, and Nate took over single-handedly, and it was worse than ever. He bled us and bled us until it seemed there was no blood left in us. There was no stopping it.
“Then, one night in nineteen sixty-two, Henry came home and said to me, ‘I’ve gotten rid of Nate. We’re free,’ or something like that, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I’ve done it—I’ve had him killed.’ And I screamed—I was drunk, but I can remember everything I said. I screamed, ‘I can’t live like this! I can’t live with a man who’d do this sort of thing to me! Because you blame me, don’t you! You’re saying I have one man’s blood on my hands already, and now I have another’s. You blame me. You’ve always blamed me for everything, you and your family.’ And I ran out of the house, with only my purse, and I ran … ran all the way to Grand Central Station, fifty blocks, and got on a train. I didn’t even know where the train was going. I found the bar car, and I drank and drank, and finally I remember thinking it was time to get off. And when I got off, there was a motel, and it had a bar. And I didn’t even know where I was, bu
t I stayed. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but it was while I was gone that Henry did what he did. And of course he did it just to place more blame on me.”
“Could that old case be reopened?” I asked her.
She smiled, and it was almost a defiant smile. “Do you know something?” she said. “I don’t even care. Because that was a different woman who did all those things. I don’t know her, don’t even recognize her anymore. It’s as though she died, even though I know she didn’t die. The statute of limitations may not have run out, but that woman’s statute of limitations has run out.”
I asked her what she meant by that.
“The limitations that limited that woman are gone,” she said. “That other, that terribly limited other woman, was a woman who couldn’t face the truth, couldn’t face reality. I can face reality now, and knowing that I can face reality—any reality, even the reality of this—makes me even stronger, more sure of myself. Because the reality is that I was not to blame. I was not to blame for any of it. I am without guilt. Part of the blame lies with Adolph and Flo, for the way they treated Henry and the way they treated me. But that was only part of it. The real villain was alcohol. It wasn’t me driving the car that afternoon, it was alcohol. So you see, if that case is ever opened up again, I have my iron-clad defense. Not guilty, Your Honor! I even have witnesses. Dr. Bergler, my therapist, has told me that I’m guilty of nothing—no crime, no felony, not even the tiniest little misdemeanor. The members of the support group that I go to—they’ll all take the stand and swear that I did nothing wrong, that the criminal was not even me. It was alcohol. And if you put that in your story, and I hope and pray you will, maybe it will help Mimi realize who the real criminal was, and help her understand me a little better, and appreciate me a little more, because Mimi has never really appreciated me. The real me.”
And of course I did not write my story for Fortune. Or, to be more honest and exact, I did not write the story their editors wanted. They wanted a story about corporate muscle, about fiscal derring-do in a glamour industry; a story that told of how old Adolph Myerson launched each new nail polish and lipstick shade by turning the Miray offices into the equivalent of the War Room in the Pentagon, in contrast with Mimi’s more limber and upbeat and personal style. I see that, instead, what I have written is a love story, about different kinds of love: of Adolph’s love for Flo and, in his fashion, his children; of Granny’s love for Henry, and her long line of Itty-Bittys; of Henry’s love for Alice; of Nonie’s love of money and power; of Edwee’s love for Goya’s Duchess of Osuna; of Mimi’s love for Brad and Badger, and her love for Michael, and Michael’s love for her. And if there is one connective theme uniting all these different kinds of love, it is that if life is a tree, as someone else has said, then love is the power that holds the leaf to the stem.
There is a favorite bar I sometimes drop in at, on Columbus Avenue just north of 72nd Street. My father used to say, “All bars are alike, but it’s the personality of the bartender that makes the difference.” That’s what I like about this particular bar. The bartender’s name is Alejandro, but everybody calls him Al, a fat, jovial Hispanic whose belly bounces when he laughs. I dropped in there the other day and was sitting at the bar, sipping a Scotch and swapping stories with Al, and I said, “Let me ask you something, Al. Booze is your livelihood. Are the distillers of America to blame for alcoholics?”
He laughed. “I tell you some-sing,” he said. “Ze alcoholics is ze biggest liars in ze world.” He placed his large palms flat on the bar. “And I tell you some-sing else,” he said. “When zey are a-sober, zey are ze even bigger liars.”
We both laughed.
Al’s bar, mind you, is not the sort of bar, nor is Al the sort of bartender, that anyone would associate with anything remotely connected with the Myersons. But as I sat there, I became aware of two older people seated at a table in the far corner of the room. They were holding hands and looking deeply into each other’s eyes, and at first, I thought that these were two elderly lovers meeting for a secret tryst, and the scene was not without its certain charm and poignancy. One is never too old to fall in love, I thought, and I said the same to Al, who’d also noticed them. Then, as my eyes grew more accustomed to the certain gloom of the place, I realized that what I had mistaken for elderly lovers were, in fact, Nonie Myerson and her brother Edwee. I stepped over to their table to speak to them.
What had happened, I learned, and what accounted for the expressions of rapture on both their faces, was that Nonie had just given Edwee her Goya. She had never been interested in art, she explained, and had never really cared for eighteenth-century anything. The eighteenth century hardly went well with her hard-edge, high-tech, contemporary decor. She had not even hung Osuna but had kept her, with her face to the wall, in the back of her refrigerated cedar closet where she stored her winter furs. Furthermore, now that her Pine Street firm was prospering so nicely, Nonie no longer felt any need for the kind of insurance her mother had intended the painting to be. Now it was his, and she felt much better about the whole thing.
I was so surprised by Nonie’s news that I never did find out why she had chosen a place like Al’s bar to announce her decision. But, considering everything Edwee had put her through, I could only conclude that it was a gesture on her part that was—well, magnificent.
About the Author
Stephen Birmingham is an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham’s work focuses on the upper class in America. He’s written about the African American elite in Certain People and prominent Jewish society in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite, and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other nonfiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address. Birmingham lives in southwest Ohio.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Stephen Birmingham
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2636-9
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Shades of Fortune Page 53
