Shades of Fortune (48 page)

“What? Who is this?”

“It's Mimi Myerson,” she yelled. “I'm Alice Myerson's daughter. We're on the plane. My mother is drunk.”

“What? I can't hear you.”

“My mother, Mrs. Myerson, is drunk! What should I …?”

“No. Not if she's drunk. She can't register here unless she's sober.”

“Then what should I do?”

“No … sobriety to register … hotel … Los Angeles or Palm Springs. Bring her here tomorrow,” she heard the distant, crackling voice saying. “Sobriety … condition at admission. Do you want us to …” But the rest of the conversation became unintelligible.

“I'll call you from Los Angeles!” Mimi said, and replaced the headset.

And when she parted the curtain to return to the first-class section, she saw her mother. She was kneeling on her seat now, her arms across the back of it. She had taken off her blouse and was cupping her breasts in her hands, saying to the grey-suited man behind her, “Don't you like my tits? What's the matter with my tits? Don't you think I have pretty tits? Don't you think my tits are as good as Marilyn Monroe's?”

The stewardess and the young first officer were struggling with her, trying to cover her shoulders with a blanket, and the stewardess was saying angrily, “Cover yourself up, woman!”

The grey-suited man was on his feet. “May I please change my seat to tourist class?” he said.

“I'm sorry, sir. Economy class is completely full.”

“How much more of this shit do we have to put up with?” the man said. “I demand a refund on this ticket!”

“You can take that up with the passenger service agent when we reach Los Angeles, sir.”

“Refund!” Alice cried. “I'm the one who should be entitled to a refund! For abuse, mistreatment, insults … party poop!”

“She's my mother,” Mimi said. “The best thing to do when she's like this is to ignore her.”

“Ignore me? Why should I be ignored? Because I was an unwanted child? Is that it? Because my mother didn't want to have me because she was afraid I'd spoil her famous figure? Because I was supposed to be an abortion, but it was too late? That's true! She told me so! Afraid I'd spoil her famous figure! Well, what do you think of these tits of mine? Party poop! This old party poop is trying to pretend he doesn't think I have great tits!”

“Cover yourself
up
, woman! Ain't you got no
shame?
”

“If you'd served her the drinks she wanted, this wouldn't have happened,” Mimi said. “Anyone who's dealt with alcoholics knows that.”

“Our FAA regulations state—”

Eventually, they had been able to subdue her, strap her in her seat belt, and cover her upper body with a blanket, because she refused to put on her blouse. Throughout the rest of the trip, though, she continued to scream and shout and sob, while Mimi sat rigidly beside her.

When they were finally parked at the jetway at LAX, the captain announced, “Will all passengers please remain seated, and with their seat belts fastened, for just a few more moments while we attend to some airport business.”

That was when two uniformed airport policemen (the captain had apparently radioed ahead about the problem) boarded the plane, moved quickly to where Alice Myerson was seated, and, showing remarkable teamwork, snapped handcuffs about her wrists, and carried her, kicking and screaming, out of the plane and down the jetway.

And so Alice had not spent the night in a hotel. She had spent it in the drunk tank of the Los Angeles County Jail, and Mimi had spent it in an anteroom outside, waiting for it to be morning in New York, when she called her husband and arranged for a local lawyer to handle her mother's bail and release and to apply whatever leverage was possible to persuade the reporter from the
Examiner
who covered the police blotter not to publish a story about the episode on Flight 142.

It was early afternoon before all arrangements had been made and Mimi and Alice were able to enter the hired limousine that was to drive them over the mountains to Palm Springs.

Beside her, in the back seat, Mimi's mother was a huddled, disheveled, red-eyed figure.

“It was all
your
fault, you know,” she said once. “You got me started thinking about all those things long ago. You started it.”

But Mimi, who had had no sleep the night before either, said nothing as the big car made its way down out of the mountains toward the desert valley floor below.

Finally, her mother said, “I'm sorry,” and began to cry.

23

“You've got to do something about your mother's drinking,” Brad said to her. This was in the summer of 1960, during her father's first year as the company's new president. “She called me at the office this afternoon, and I couldn't make head nor tail out of what she wanted. When she's drunk, she gets belligerent. The first thing I knew, she was shouting at me and calling me foul names. I finally had to hang up on her and tell my secretary not to put through any more calls from her.”

“Everybody's tried everything,” she said. “I used to pour her liquor down the drain, but she just found cleverer places to hide her whiskey. I tried to close her charge account at Sherry-Lehmann, and she just went to another liquor store. We had a doctor prescribe something called Antabuse; it's supposed to make you deathly ill when you take a drink. But she wouldn't take the pills. I've tried to get her to join Alcoholics Anonymous, but she won't attend the meetings. I've tried calling her early in the morning, and have had friends call her, to catch her during the hangover period, to give her pep talks. It doesn't help. I even went to a group called Al-Anon, which is supposed to be for the families of alcoholics. But all those people seem to do is sit around and hold each other's hands—and pray.”

“Well, somebody ought to do something.”

“What else is there to
do
, Brad? Tell me.”

“What she's doing is ruining her reputation.”

“But she just doesn't care about her reputation, don't you see?”

“They're even talking about it at my office. Those girls at the switchboard—they know what's going on.”

“Or is it
your
reputation you're worried about? Is that it, Brad?”

“I just wish you'd do something about it.”

“You wish
I'd
do something?” she said, suddenly angry. “Why must it be me? Why is she suddenly all
my
responsibility?”

“She's not
my
mother,” he said. “My mother doesn't behave that way. My mother's not a drunk.”

“Oh, no,” she said, letting her voice fill with sarcasm. “Of
course
not. Because
your
mother's a real New England
lady
. That's what you're saying, isn't it? Your mother's a proper Boston Brahmin, and my mother's a drunken slut. Is that what you're trying to say to me?”

“Skip it,” he said. “Let's see what's on TV.”

“No, I won't skip it, Brad. I want to know what it is exactly that you're trying to say to me.”

“All I'm saying,” he said, “is that I can't understand what it is about you people that makes you feel you don't have any control over your lives.”

“Now wait a minute,” she said. “Just what do you mean by ‘you people'? Do I detect a faintly anti-Semitic slur here?”

“Of course not. But I was brought up to believe that if there was a problem in a family, there was usually a solution to it, and someone in the family took charge. And I'm saying that if you don't do something about your mother's drinking, nobody will. Your father doesn't seem able to control her. He doesn't even seem to try.”

“My father happens to have more important things on his mind right now!”

“Then that leaves you, doesn't it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That leaves me. But what about you? Have
you
offered to do anything to help? Of course not.”

“As I said before, she's not my mother.”

“Have you offered to help in any
other
ways? Everybody else in this family has been making sacrifices. Look what poor old Granny's doing! Even Edwee's loaned Daddy money, but what have you done?”

“Edwee didn't loan him any money. All he did was purchase a few more shares of Miray stock.”

“It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? Cash? That's what the company needs now, isn't it? Even Nonie's been making sacrifices. She's fired her servants, she's looking for a smaller apartment. But we haven't done one damn thing!”

“We?”

“
You
, then. I don't have any money. But you seem to be doing all right. But I haven't seen you offering to write out any checks!”

“I don't know anything about the beauty business. I don't want to get involved in it. I have my own career to worry about.”

“Oh, of
course!
”

“And our livelihood, yours and mine.”

“Of
course
. Why don't you come right out and admit it, Brad? You find the beauty business a little
common
, don't you. Not quite tuned to your fine New England taste.
You
—
you're
down at Sixty-seven Wall Street with all your
Social Register
snobs!”

“Well, if you're so hot on helping out your father, why don't
you
do something?”

“What could I do, besides offer to take over the company and run it for him? Which I could probably do, by the way. I know a few things about the business. But I hardly think he'd take kindly to that suggestion. Do you?”

“You could do
something
.”

“Like be a saleslady at Macy's, you mean. Something—while you do nothing! No, I'll tell you why you won't do anything to help, Brad Moore. It's because you're a cold-blooded, cold-hearted New Englander—a cold-fish Yankee, long on pedigree but short on feelings. At least we Jews have feelings. At least we Jews pitch in and pull together and help each other out when the chips are down! You and your Puritan stoicism! Puritan selfishness is all it is!”

“Look,” he said, “we shouldn't quarrel like this. Let's stop.”

“I think I know what this is all about,” she said. “When you married me, you thought I was going to inherit a lot of money. Now that it turns out I didn't inherit a lot of money, you turn on my family and start criticizing them.”

“That's hogwash, Mimi, and you know it's hogwash.”

“Is it? I'm not so sure, I think you thought it was okay to marry a Jewish girl as long as she was a
rich
Jewish girl. But now that it turns out she's
not
a rich Jewish girl, but a poor Jewish girl, it makes all the difference, doesn't it? Then you start criticizing, finding fault. Well, I apologize for the fact that the money you married me for failed to materialize!”

“Hogwash,” he said again.

“Listen,” she said, “speaking of ‘you people,' I know how
you
people talk. A poor person who's an alcoholic is called a drunken bum. But if you're talking about a
rich
person who's an alcoholic, you say, ‘Old So-and-So's been hitting the bottle a bit lately.'”

“Please, let's stop this, Mimi. You're getting into things that have nothing to do with—”

“You started this!” she said. “All I did was ask you how your day went, and your started in on my mother—whom I happen to love.”

“Your mother pretty much managed to ruin my day!”

“See? There you go again!”

“Look, we're all under a strain,” he said. “I know that, and fighting with each other won't help. And, you know, I was thinking. Maybe if we were able to make a baby … maybe that would help. What do you think? Shall we try again tonight? Without your … you-know-what.”

“A
baby?
” she cried. “Are you out of your mind? You'd drag an innocent baby into this mess?”

“Maybe it would make us feel more like a family, you and me. Maybe it would help take our minds off … all the other business.”

“You see? That's all you want. You want to put all of Daddy's problems out of your mind. You just want to forget about what's happening to my family. You want to get everything out of your sight, and out of your mind.”

“Think about it, Mimi,” he said, reaching out to take her hand. “Let's try—”

“No,” she said, pulling away from him. “Don't touch me. I want nothing to do with a man as cold as you are.”

He rose from the sofa and headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to spend the night at the Harvard Club.”

“Good!” she called after him. “Perfect. That's the perfect address for you! Go to the Harvard Club. Go—and stay. Stay as long as you want. You can stay there forever as far as I'm concerned! Cold-blooded Yankee WASP bastard!”

The next morning, he returned and packed a suitcase, while she watched him wordlessly.

“You told me to call you if I needed you,” she said. “I think I need you, but I'm not sure what I need you for.” They were sitting in his huge, high-ceilinged living room on Riverside Drive. “I'm frightened, Michael. I don't know what to do.”

He gave her a long, sideways look, saying nothing.

“They sent me away to school,” she said. “To learn. I don't think I learned very much. Everyone says you're very smart. They say—”

“You're growing up,” he said. “When I first met you, you were just a little kid with a broken skate lace. Then you broke my heart.”

“I probably shouldn't have called you,” she said. “I probably shouldn't be here.”

“No, I'm glad you called me.” He rose and crossed the room and sat down beside her on the sofa. “I think you need a friend,” he said.