Shades of Fortune (13 page)

“I'd never heard of any until the other night,” Mimi says. “Granny Flo is often confused these days. As Nonie said, you mustn't give too much weight to what she claims to remember.”

From Adolph's rapturous description of the “Garden Suburb” that, in those innocent prewar days, the Bronx was designed to become, and from his talk of pride in having “a part” of this development, it is possible to suppose that Adolph Myerson was the developer himself. He was not. He was a housepainter, and on that fateful day in April 1912—the day that would change the fortunes of the family forever—Adolph and his five-years-younger brother, Leopold, were engaged in painting the kitchen of one Mrs. Spitzberg, in her new apartment at 3124 Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

And if Adolph had been able to persuade his Lizette to join him in America, he would have been able to do no more than to take her on the streetcar to look at, and admire, the Bronx and the rising buildings along the new Grand Concourse. He could not have afforded to bring her there to live, for the Bronx was the choice of address for the newly affluent, and Adolph Myerson was not one of these. Every poor Jewish immigrant, even those who had at that point made it out of the ghetto of the Lower East Side and into the less crowded reaches of Brooklyn or Harlem, dreamed of one day moving to the Bronx. The Bronx was a beacon that was at once both economic and psychological, for by crossing the Harlem River it was possible to feel that one was entering the mainstream of American life. For immigrants such as Adolph's parents, who had begun the long journey to America in 1879, when Adolph was nine, the trip had entailed going from island to island—from Hamburg to England, from England to Ellis Island, and from Ellis Island to Manhattan. But if one could attain the Bronx, the only borough of New York City that is not surrounded on all sides by water, one was at last setting foot on the mainland.

But Adolph and Leopold's father, Herman Myerson, had not been so fortunate. Arriving in New York, he had found work as a housepainter. When back troubles had made him no longer able to scale a ladder, and forced him into retirement in 1888, when Adolph was eighteen and Leopold was thirteen, his two sons had followed him into the trade. By 1912, the families of prosperous lawyers, doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and accountants, who had put themselves through City College, were moving into splendid apartments in the Bronx. But Adolph was still living with his parents in a railroad flat on Henry Street, and Leopold, who had by then married and had a young son of his own, lived not far away in a similar flat on Pell Street, still on the Lower East Side.

As for what actually happened on that life-changing day in 1912, while painting Mrs. Spitzberg's kitchen, we are forced to rely on accounts that Adolph gave verbally to his family, since no living witnesses to the event remain. As Adolph later told it, the brothers had been bickering, as they often did, on the job. The two had never met Mrs. Spitzberg, but Leopold had decided that Mrs. Spitzberg was wrongheaded, if not downright crazy. She had decreed that her kitchen be painted fire-engine red.

“This is craziness, this is
narischkeit,
” Leopold kept muttering (according to Adolph). “Why does a woman want her kitchen painted the color of a fire engine? A kitchen should be white, or maybe yellow. Not like a fire engine!”

“This is a rich woman, Leo,” his brother had counseled. “A rich woman wants her kitchen painted like a fire engine, so she gets a fire engine. A good tailor cuts the cloth to suit the customer. Our job is to give Mrs. Spitzberg what she wants.”

“She won't like it when it's done, wait and see,” “Leopold predicted. “When she sees all this red, like the bedroom of a whore, she's going to make us do it over. Wait and see. And how many coats of white paint will it take to cover up all this red? Three? Four? Maybe five?”

“Mrs. Spitzberg is the boss.”

And it was while the brothers argued, back and forth, over Mrs. Spitzberg's color scheme, mixing a five-gallon drum of paint to the exact hue of an N.Y.F.D. truck, that Leopold accidentally poured an extra quart of the chemical toluene into the mixture. At least that was the way Adolph told it. It could easily have been the other way around and could have been Adolph who supplied the accidental overdose of toluene. But Adolph invariably blamed every careless act on his younger, clumsy brother, and so the story would go down through the family for seventy-five years that the extra toluene had been Leopold's misstep, and that it was Adolph's ingenuity that had managed to save the day.

The chemical toluene is a thickening agent, which, added to a paint, causes it to cling more evenly to the brush and also to dry more quickly. But, with as much as a whole quart of toluene added to a drum of paint, the paint becomes too viscous to use, hardens within seconds after exposure to the air. If the brothers had attempted to apply such a mixture to Mrs. Spitz-berg's kitchen walls, the result would have been a sagging, gummy mess.

We can be sure that Adolph Myerson spent some time berating his brother for his clumsiness. After all, nearly two dollars' worth of ingredients—two dollars that had come out of the brothers' pockets—had been wasted. Leo had been able, according to Adolph, to come up with no solution other than to throw the mixture out, swallow the loss, and start mixing another drum of paint. But then Adolph—and, again, we have only Adolph's word for this—came up with his inspiration.

Women had been painting their fingernails for years, though usually with clear lacquer or a pale pink shade. Only in the theatre did actresses paint their nails bright red. But fashions were already moving toward a more liberated era, which would come to a climax in the Roaring Twenties, and the painted-lady image, no longer confined to actresses on Broadway, was being taken up by fashionable women on Fifth Avenue who were appearing with crimson-painted nails. The only trouble with nail lacquers of the day was that they dried slowly, and a woman often had to sit immobilized for twenty minutes or longer, with her fingers outstretched, while she waited for her nails to dry, unable to perform any other task without risk of smearing her polish. Adolph's brainstorm was to peddle his fire-engine-red housepaint, which his brother had considered ruined, as a new kind of quick-drying nail lacquer. Dipping a fingertip into the drum of paint, Adolph showed his brother how quickly it dried hard and lustrous and smooth.

“We'll sell it as nail polish,” he said to Leo. Or so he always claimed.

In any case, Adolph moved quickly at that point. He immediately sealed the drum of red paint tightly, before exposure to the air caused its surface to form a thick “skin.” That very day, he was able to buy a wholesaler's overstock of small bottles with tiny brushes affixed to their caps, for a total cost of ten dollars. With the paint transferred to the little bottles, he began peddling his new quick-drying nail polish door-to-door, concentrating, for his customers, on the newly rich Jewish ladies who were moving to the Grand Concourse. From a five-gallon drum of spoiled housepaint that had cost him less than two dollars, he was able to create thirteen hundred bottles of half an ounce each, which he sold for ten cents apiece. Thus, for a total investment of twelve dollars, Adolph's return was one hundred and thirty dollars—a profit of more than a thousand percent, and no businessman could possibly complain of figures like these! What was more, Adolph's customers were delighted with his product. News of it spread by word of mouth. New orders and reorders poured in, and Adolph and Leopold Myerson were on their way. Within a year, the brothers were able to place their nail polishes in five-and-ten-cent stores, and to begin advertising with the slogan, “Dries in just seconds' time!” … and with the brand name Miray, which Adolph came up with by rearranging the various letters in his name.

By the time Adolph Myerson was rich enough to move to the Bronx, he was too rich to want to live there.

And the Battle of the Brothers was well under way. Which one deserved more credit for their success? The brother who had had the lucky accident, or the one who had had enough wit to turn it into profit?

“My first memory of him?” Mimi says. “Oh, I must have been six or seven, so that would have been nineteen forty-four or 'forty-five. My grandparents lived in a big ugly house on Madison Avenue and Sixty-first Street. It's gone now, but it took up half a block, and the other half of the block belonged to August Belmont. Granny, of course, was a Guggenheim, and her money helped, and how she and Grandpa met is a whole other story; they were not from the same sort of background at
all
. The house had great, wide marble steps leading up to the front door, which was on Madison, and I remember my mother leading me by the hand up those steps and making me practice my curtsy on each step as we went up. I had to have my curtsy perfect before she would ring the bell. I remember how humiliated I felt, curtsying and curtsying, going up those steps, a little girl curtsying in front of a huge, blank, closed front door! People passing by on the street must have looked at that little girl, dipping down in deep curtsies in front of a door, again and again, bobbing up and down like a marionette, and thought that there must be something terribly the matter with her. There was a girl in my class at Hewitt who was a spastic. It was probably multiple sclerosis, or something like that, but in those days it was explained to us that Eileen McKensie was a spastic—she had this terrible, lurching gait. I was sure that everybody on the street was watching me, and was thinking I was a spastic, just like Eileen McKensie.…”

“One more time, Mireille,” her mother said. “Just one more time before we ring Grandpa's doorbell.”

“Oh, Mama,
please,
” she begged, trying to squeeze back the tears.

“Just once. Ah.
There
. You see? That was
much
better. Now remember everything I've told you. Curtsy to Grandpapa first, then to Grandmama. Say, ‘Good afternoon, Grandpa, sir,' and then ‘Good afternoon, Grandma, dear.' Then don't say another word until one of them speaks to you. Then don't forget always to call Grandpapa ‘sir,' and Grandma ‘ma'am.' Don't remove your gloves until tea is served, and then remove only the right one, to hold the teacup with, and place the right glove in your left hand. When the tea sandwiches are passed, never take more than one at a time, and never eat more than two sandwiches altogether. It isn't ladylike to appear to be hungry, so if the sandwiches are passed a third time, just shake your head politely. It isn't necessary to speak to the maid. Oh, and—my God, I almost forgot! If you have to go to the toilet, just excuse yourself politely, and always remember to put the lid of the toilet seat down after you've finished. And another thing:
never
use one of Grandmama's little linen guest towels! After you've washed your hands, dry them on a piece of toilet paper, throw that in the toilet bowl, and flush
again
. And then put the lid of the toilet seat
down again
. Can you remember all that, Mireille?”

“Why is there so much to remember, Mama?”

“Because we want your Grandpapa to think you are a perfect lady, don't we? Your Grandpapa would be very upset with us if he didn't think you a perfect lady.” With a gloved fingertip, her mother reached out to press the doorbell.

Her grandparents' butler opened the door and, bowing, admitted them wordlessly into the house.

The entrance gallery she remembered was all red damask and gilt, red cut velvet and velours. The walls were covered with damask, and the doorways leading from it were swagged with heavy red damask portieres fringed with gold. Large, heavy, and uncomfortable-looking chairs, covered with more cut velvet, lined the hall, and, from the walls, gilt-framed portraits slung from velvet-covered chains (later she would learn that these portraits had no bearing whatever on her family) gazed menacingly down upon her. The butler led Mimi and her mother down the red-carpeted entrance hall to the double staircase that ascended upward to the parlor floor, and Mimi remembered that the banisters were upholstered with more red velvet and that, where the double curves of the staircase met at the landing, the newel posts were surmounted by identical bronze statues of a winged Mercury, one foot lofted in the air, each holding up an electrically lighted flame-shaped torch. Mimi remembers reaching out to touch one of Mercury's bare heels, and her mother's harsh whisper: “Don't touch!”

At the top of the stairs, the butler led them to the closed double doors of the drawing room, tapped lightly on the door, and then stood aside to let them enter as he opened it.

“Mrs. Henry Myerson, and Miss Mireille Myerson,” the butler announced.

Her grandparents sat at the opposite end of the long, dark, formal room in a kind of five-sided bay window, its panes of green and purple and red stained glass, at either end of an extraordinary semicircular sofa unlike any piece of furniture Mimi can remember seeing before or since. It was covered in purple toy plush, tufted and buttoned in a diamond pattern. Its legs were in the shape of eagles' talons clutching golden balls. But the most astonishing thing about it was that midway in its half-circle it seemed to change its mind and become a jardiniere, for mounted in its frame was an Oriental-looking vase, planted with a tall palm tree. Later, Mimi learned that her grandfather had had this multipurpose piece specially designed for this window alcove of his house, and Mimi remembers thinking that from where her grandparents sat they could not possibly see one another through the vase and the thick palm fronds. As mother and daughter moved toward the seated couple, her grandfather rose in a maroon velvet smoking jacket, and her grandmother remained seated, a square of needle-point-work in her lap.

Now it was time for the curtsies. “Good afternoon, Grandpapa, sir. Good afternoon, Grandmama, dear.”

Her grandfather motioned them to two chairs opposite the curved sofa, and Mimi remembers seating herself carefully, as her mother had told her to do, arranging her skirts carefully beneath her, her legs crossed at the ankle, and her white-gloved hands folded in her lap.