Shades of Fortune (26 page)

“Why would you take me home to meet your mother?”

“Because you're the girl I'm going to marry.”

“
What?
”

He was skating away from her now, skating effortlessly backward in an easy, splay-legged motion, still grinning at her, licking his ice cream cone, and there was a drop of chocolate ice cream glistening on the tip of his nose. “Gotta run now,” he said. “Gotta run over to Jersey and check on my job. See you here tomorrow—same place.”

“Wait!” she cried. “I don't even know your name!”

“Michael Horowitz,” he called back. “See you tomorrow, kiddo,” and then he was gone, a blur of red parka that disappeared among the other skaters.

But the next afternoon he had not come, and she waited for him at the same bench by the pond, her arms crossed about her middle for warmth. She had been on time, even a little early, for him, and after half an hour she decided he was not going to come. She knew, she thought, everything she ever needed to know about men, and she knew, or thought she knew, everything she needed to know about sex. At school, there was Old Pete, who was a janitor in the gym. Old Pete's office, if you could call it that, was a mop and broom closet in the gym basement, where he sat much of the day smoking endless cigarettes and reading comic books, and whenever a group of Miss Hall's girls gathered outside the cellar light that was his headquarters' only window, Old Pete would usually put on a little show for them, carefully opening his pants, taking out his swollen thing, and swinging it back and forth, pointing it at them, and stroking it as his audience watched wide-eyed. Word that Old Pete was in the middle of one of his performances would spread like wildfire across that lovely, elm-dotted campus, from one ivy-clad dorm to the next: “Old Pete's putting on his act!” And the girls, in the green plaid skirts and middy blouses that were their uniforms, would hurry down the well-raked gravel walks to the basement window of the gym, always careful to be sure that no faculty member was aware of this surreptitious congregation of well-bred, well-brought-up young ladies. What would the parents of these well-bred, well-brought-up young ladies have thought if they knew that such a thing went on at the fashionable Miss Hall's School for Girls in Connecticut? Who knew? But that was sex, Mimi knew. “The man sticks his thing in you,” the older girls knowingly explained. “It doesn't really hurt.”

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.”