Shades of Fortune (18 page)

“What about little Gloria?”

“Exactly. If Gloria suspected some sort of hanky-panky was going on, there's no telling what sort of fuss she might kick up. Suddenly, Gloria's become a loose cannon in all this. Stupid Uncle Edwee!”

“Gloria's a bimbo.”

“And a dumb one, to boot. I can deal with smart people easily enough. It's the dumb ones you have to watch out for.”

He is smiling again. “Which category do I fall into?” he says.

She laughs. “I've been dealing with you all these years, haven't I?”

“So I take it you're not going to supply Edwee with the young man's number.”

“Let's say I'm not running a dating service. If he keeps after me—and he may—I'll say I have no idea what his number is. I'll suggest that he call the agency, who won't give out telephone numbers, either.”

“Would it help if I had a word with Edwee?”

“What would you say to him, Brad?”

“I'd just say that I'm aware of this, ah, interest of his, and I'd suggest that he'd be playing with fire if he decides to pursue this interest. Just a word or two from me might be enough to scare him off.”

“Well, let's wait and see if we hear anything more from him. Maybe it was just a … passing fancy, though I wish I didn't suspect that that casual little postscript of his was the whole point of his letter. But sometimes, if you ignore a problem—”

“It gets bigger. I think I should have a word with Edwee.”

“All right. Yes, do that, Brad.” Suddenly she reaches out and covers his hand with her own. “Have I told you lately, darling,” she says, “how wonderful you are to put up with my crazy family? My crazy family, and this crazy business we seem to be in?”

“It's certainly never dull, is it.”

“Neither is life in a lunatic asylum. Tomorrow, for instance, I'm having lunch with Michael Horowitz.”

His eyes flicker with interest. “Oh?” he says. “What's that to be about?”

“I'm not sure yet. But have you noticed how Miray stock has been behaving? For most of this year it's hovered between fifty-two and fifty-five. Today, it closed at sixty-seven and five eighths.”

“Rumors about the new fragrance, maybe?”

“We thought perhaps it was institutional buying. But Badger's found out that it's not an institution. It's Michael himself.”

“What for, I wonder? His game is real estate, not the beauty biz.”

“That's what I intend to find out. Badger and I think he may be attempting some sort of takeover.”

“Again, what for? He's always been a kind of family friend, hasn't he?”

“Well, yes, in a funny way I guess you could say that. He seems to have a peculiar interest in anything to do with the Myersons. First, after Grandpa died, and there didn't seem to be any money left anywhere, Michael appeared on the doorstep to help Granny sell the Madison Avenue house. Then he helped her sell and subdivide the place in Bar Harbor.”

“Those were good deals, weren't they?”

“Oh, yes—at the time. Very. Good deals for Granny, as the seller, and for him as the developer. Then, for a while, we didn't hear much from him. Then, two years ago, he suddenly bought Grandpa's Palm Beach house and moved into it.”

“That was a good deal, too, wasn't it? The place was a white elephant nobody else wanted. Granny Flo couldn't even give it away.”

“Well, he made us our best offer—after letting the place sit on the market for years, begging for buyers, until it began to look like a distress sale.”

“Better than paying taxes on it for another twenty years.”

“And now this. Do you see a pattern emerging, Brad? I do.”

He hesitates. Then he says, “Wasn't he an old beau of yours, Mimi?”

“Oh, I guess, sort of. Once upon a time, years ago.”

“Well, maybe that's it,” he says.

“Oh, no,” she says. “That's silly. In any case, he's not behaving like an old beau now. He's been buying our stock very secretly and underhandedly, through dozens of different brokerage accounts. This seems definitely hostile. Badger thinks so, too.”

“Know something? I bet he's still in love with you.”

“Oh, no,” she says, perhaps too quickly. “It's not that. He was—oh, it was so long ago I don't even remember it. Anyway, what I wanted to ask you was, if it begins to look as though we're heading into a takeover fight, would McSwain, Moore and Hollowell represent us? Or would that be a conflict of interest?”

He is thoughtful for a moment and then says, “No, I don't think that would be any problem. I'd have to discuss it with the other partners, of course. But I think we could handle it. After all, one of our young guys got Bob Hollowell his divorce.”

Divorce, she thinks. Why does his mind fly to divorce, when we have been discussing takeovers and acquisitions, which, after all, are his specialty? She says brightly, “I might as well hire the best law firm in town if I'm going to lock horns with someone like Michael Horowitz.”

“Compliment noted,” he says.

“Because,” she says, “I don't want this company just for myself. I want it for Badger, and we both know that it's what he wants, too. I don't intend to hang on here for too many years. In a few more years, I'm going to turn it over to Badger; he'll be ready. After all, we are unique in this industry. I'm the third generation, and Badger will be the fourth, and then—”

“And then what will
you
do?”

She laughs. “I'm going to become a lazy, contented housewife, flopping around the house in my horrible bedroom slippers and coffee-stained wrapper, watching the daytime soaps.”

“Somehow,” he says, “I can't quite picture you in that role.” Then he says, “I would, too, you know.”

“You would what? Flop around watching the soaps?”

“Carry the torch for you. After all these years.”

“Why, darling! That's the sweetest thing to say!”

“Somehow, it just popped out.”

They are silent now, sitting catercorner at the dining room table, the candles in their silver candlesticks guttering in the slight, late-summer breeze that blows in from Central Park, billowing the glass curtains into the room. If one had looked in on them just then, one might have taken them for two conspirators, a two-party cabal, plotting intrigue on a summer night.

There was another summer evening. She had begun to come out of the anaesthetic at New York Hospital, and when she opened her eyes she could not understand what Brad was doing lying on an identical hospital bed beside her, his shirtsleeve rolled up, with a small bandage on his right arm. The baby had begun to come three weeks earlier than Dr. Ornstein had said it was due. She had been rushed to the hospital, and after nineteen hours of labor, the doctor had said to her, “We're facing a breech delivery, Mimi. I'm going to do a section.” She had merely nodded. “Don't worry,” he said. “Caesarian babies are beautiful babies. They don't have to be squeezed out. You'll be fine.” That, of course, was the last thing she remembered.

Some pelvic flaw, it seemed—inherited, perhaps, from her mother, who had a similar problem giving birth to her—had caused the trouble. The operation had gone well enough, and the baby had been taken, but soon afterward she had begun to hemorrhage. All this she learned later, but now, still groggy from the anaesthetic, and cross with the way she felt, it annoyed her to see her husband lying in the next bed. “What are you doing here?” she said angrily. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hush,” he said. “Don't move. Lie still.”

“What's going on here, anyway?” she said, trying to raise herself up on her elbows in the bed.

“Don't move, I said. You needed blood. I just gave three pints. I'm feeling a little weak, too. That's my blood that's going into you right now.”

“Your blood is going into me?”

“My blood is in you now. And it's in our little son. It cements us, doesn't it.”

“A son,” she said sleepily. And then, instead of that irrational anger she had felt upon first waking up, she was suddenly suffused with an almost delirious feeling of happiness. In her drugged half-sleep, she let this feeling gather and fold itself around her like a warm blanket. Details of the room floated lazily in and out of focus, and she lay in this blissful, drowsy dream. “A son,” she said again. “I want to name him after you. I want to name him after you … after you … Mi—”

“Don't try to talk. Just rest,” Brad interrupted.

“What are you thinking about?” he says now.

“Thinking? Funny, but I was thinking about the beach at St.-Jean-de-Luz,” she lies. “The day you buried me in the sand.”

“I made you look like Mae West, remember? You were always too damned skinny.”

“‘Bradford is not a very demonstrative man,' your mother said.”

“She was always saying that. ‘We Moores are not a very demonstrative family.' She seemed to think demonstrativeness was in violation of the Scriptures. Sort of naughty.”

She smiles, turning away from him toward the window. “But you were able to demonstrate some things to me that afternoon in Athens. Remember that? The view of the Parthenon from your room?”

“My, weren't we naughty then.”

“And I'm thinking about something Jim Greenway said to me today. He asked me if I thought of you as a father figure.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I said no, I thought of you as a husband figure.”

“I have some news for you,” he says.

“What's that?”

“I think I may be picked to fill out Arm Miller's unexpired term.”

“Really, darling? How exciting!”

“That's the word from Albany. But would you like that, Mimi? Living that kind of a fishbowl life in Washington as a Senate wife? What about your business here?”

“I'd commute on the shuttle, like lots of other people do.”

“We could live in Washington during the week, and come back up here for weekends—for our Saturday shopping sprees.”

“We haven't been on one of those in ages.”

“We've both been busy.”

“Yes.”

There is a silence. Then he says, “There's something else we haven't done in quite a while.”

“Which is?”

“Why don't we fill our wineglasses and go upstairs and be demonstrative for a little while?”

“Why, Brad, what a lovely idea!”

“Promise not to tell my mother.”

“Promise.”

She rises first, and he follows. On the stairs, she says, putting her lips close to his ear, “Tonight, I think I'd like to do the thing you like best. Remember? In Athens? What you said you liked the best? After all, I've never made love to a United States Senator before.”

He takes her hand and they run up the stairs together, like the guilty children they once were thirty years ago. All's right with the world, Mimi thinks, at least for now.

“The Magnificent Myersons!” declared the headline of the picture story on the family that was published in the November 1939 issue of
Town & Country
. Bear in mind that this was a year in which nearly ten million Americans were still unemployed, when only forty-two thousand had incomes of over twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when only three percent of the country's population earned enough to pay income taxes at all.

Here are some of the picture captions from that story:

Adolph Myerson, the “Cosmetics King,” and his beautiful wife Fleuret [
sic
], née Guggenheim, of the copper-smelting fortune, take tea in the grand salon of their Manhattan mansion. Mr. Myerson, a descendant of an old French family, explains that the original family name, which is still the family motto, “Ma Raison” (“My Right”), became transliterated as Myerson in nineteenth-century America. The single goal that has fueled Adolph Myersons' success in the cosmetics industry: “To make American women the most beautiful in the world.”

Sons Henry G. Myerson, left, 24, and Edwin R. Myerson, 7, stroll with their parents on Fifth Avenue. Henry Myerson is already a force in his father's business, while Edwin, a bright second-grader, says he wants to be “a Policeman” when he grows up!

Auburn-haired debutante daughter, Miss Naomi Myerson, center, hosts a party for young friends at The Stork Club. Miss Myerson, known to her friends as “Nonie,” is a popular member of New York's younger social set.

“Merry Song,” the Myersons' spacious summer retreat at Bar Harbor, on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. A quarter-mile of manicured lawns and gardens sweeps down from the portico of the Georgian house to the sparkling blue waters of Frenchman Bay.

Mer et Son
, the Myerson yacht, lies at anchor off Bar Harbor. The 70-foot yacht, with a beam of 14 feet, a draft of 9 feet, and a gross tonnage of 24.6, was commissioned by Adolph Myerson in 1932 and built by Harvey Gamage. Like the names of the Myerson country homes,
Mer et Son
(“Sea and Sound”) is a playful sound-alike of the name “Myerson.”

“Ma Raison,” the newly completed Myerson estate in Palm Beach, Florida, which will provide the “Magnificent Myersons” with a winter retreat. Built of rose-colored stucco, in the Spanish-Moorish style, the main house consists of 80 principal rooms under 2½ acres of red-tiled roof. The property, which extends from the shore of Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean, includes an underground passageway, called “The Shell Grotto,” beneath South Ocean Boulevard, so that the family can stroll from poolside to private beach and beach cabana without crossing the street. The Bell Tower which rises dramatically above the rooftop of the main house is an exact copy of the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain. The Myersons will inaugurate their new vacation home with a Christmas party for 500 of the Palm Beach social set.

The latest “bud” to blossom on the Myerson family tree is baby Mireille Myerson, 6 months old, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Myerson, shown here with her mother, the former Alice Bloch of New York, in the gardens of the family's summer home in Bar Harbor. Once again, the family's fondness for playful, sound-alike names is apparent, for the name “Mireille,” pronounced the proper French way, to the ear becomes “Miray,” or the name of the Miray Corporation, which Baby Mireille's grandfather founded in 1912. And without the Miray Corporation, where would all this magnificence come from?
Mirabile ductu!
is all one can say.