Shades of Fortune (6 page)

Her guest list complete, Mimi makes a small signal with her hand to Felix, who touches a small button beside the library door. Mimi waits for a few moments to let the scent penetrate the room and is grateful that no one is smoking. Soon the Mireille fragrance will fill the air, and Mimi, ever the practiced impresario, moves toward the center of the room to make her announcement.

Edwee is still whispering to his sister. “Can you get rid of your young man when this is over?” he says. “I need to talk to you. Alone. As soon as possible. Can you drop by my house for a few minutes after we leave here?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Now Mimi is about to make her little speech, and she begins, “Family, friends …”

But her grandmother beats her to the punch. “I smell something!” she says loudly. “What is it? It's perfume. Who's wearing it?”

Mimi laughs and claps her hands. “Good for you, Granny,” she says. “Family, friends … the fragrance you may be noticing in the air means that the Miray Corporation is about to embark on an exciting new venture. We're about to launch our first perfume, and you are the first people outside our boardroom to be exposed to it. You are my special guinea pigs. Sample bottles are at each of your places at the dinner table, but this is the premiere. Now I need you to tell me, honestly, what you think.”

All noses now are poised in the air to catch the scent.

“Woodsy,” someone says.

“Yes, piney.”

“No, more floral, I'd say.”

“Beautiful.”

There is more ooh-ing and ah-ing, and then, led by Mimi's husband, there is a loud round of applause followed by congratulatory noises.

“What's in it?” someone asks.

“Oh, a bit of vetiver, a touch of clove, verbena, some lemon. But I'm not going to give you the complete formula. That's a secret, locked in the boardroom safe.”

“I think it's more exciting than Giorgio!”

“Do you? Well, that's one of the big guns out there that we're hoping to take on.”

“What are you going to call it, Mimi?”

“We experimented with literally hundreds of different names. And in the end we ended up deciding to call it … Mireille.”

“Lovely!”

“That's her real name, you know, Mireille,” Granny Flo says to no one in particular. “Mireille Myerson. She was named after my husband's company. Miray—Mireille. Get it? I gave her the nickname Mimi when she was a tiny baby because she made a little sound that was like
mi-mi-mi-mi-mi!
”

“Now that's not true, Granny,” Mimi says. “I renamed myself Mimi when I was fourteen, after seeing a performance of
La Bohème
.”

“She's lying,” Granny Flo says cheerfully. “I named her because she was always going ‘
mi-mi-mi-mi-mi
.'”

“Well, it doesn't matter, does it?” Mimi says. “What matters is that we—you, me, all of us who are stockholders—are going to be in the fragrance business for the first time. And Dirk and Sherrill, who are our special guests tonight, are going to be the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man in all our print advertising and television commercials.”

There are more congratulatory sounds.

“Frankly, it smells a little
cheap
, if you ask me,” Edwee whispers to his sister.

“But knowing Mimi, it'll have a fancy price tag.”

“Oh, we can be sure of
that
.”

Now the conversation becomes general again, with much emphasis on analyzing the new scent.

“I smell the lemon in it.”

“And cinnamon, too, I suspect.”

“Rose oil, too.”

Mimi finds her mother, who has been standing alone and somewhat apart from the others, and says, “Now, aren't you glad you came, Mother? Isn't this turning out to be a nice sort of family reunion?”

“I hate all sorts of family reunions,” Alice says. “I hate this one no less than all the others. No less and no more.”

The reporter, Jim Greenway, turns to Mimi and touches his glass to hers. “I wish you luck—no, not luck, success—with your new fragrance,” he says.

“Thank you, Mr. Greenway.”

“Please call me Jim. And tell me, when you took over the company twenty-five years ago, after your father's death, did you ever think you'd be so successful?”

“Never. I was terrified. Just as I'm terrified now.”

He laughs. “Then terror is the secret of your success?”

“Absolutely. Terror is the secret of every success. The opposite of terror is complacency, and complacency is the secret of every failure.”

“I like that,” he says.

“And you may quote me,” she says, touching his elbow and laughing the pebbly laugh.

From the doorway, Felix announces, “Dinner is served, madam.”

Entering the dining room, Mimi immediately notices that the place cards have been changed, and she also knows immediately who must have done it. But she decides to let the seating remain as it is, though she can't refrain from a slight feeling of annoyance at Aunt Nonie. Nonie is always creating mischief like this. Let it pass, she thinks. She will not let it disrupt the planned flow of her evening. Now, in the dining room, fingering their Mireille samples, everyone is exclaiming over the packaging.

“Elegant.”

“Lovely.”

“Sophisticated. I love the colors. Black and gold.”

“And the bottle. A perfect teardrop shape.”

“Look—the bottle is by Baccarat!”

“It certainly
looks
expensive,” Edwee says.

“Thank you, Uncle Edwee.”

“Suggested retail is a hundred and eighty dollars an ounce,” young Brad says.

“I'd pay that.”

The soup course is served, and Felix moves around the table, pouring the wine. From the head of the table, Bradford Moore turns to his mother-in-law, who is seated on his right, and says, “It's wonderful to see you, Alice. You're looking positively radiant tonight.”

Alice, who actually still looks a bit uncomfortable, despite her valium, covers her wineglass with two fingers of her right hand before Felix can fill it and says, “Why do people keep telling me how wonderful I look, Brad? Is it to remind me of how awful I looked before?”

“I didn't mean it that way at all, Alice,” he says. “You always look wonderful.”

“No, I don't. You know I always don't.”

“Alice is so
sensitive,
” Granny Flo says to the table at large. “That's always been Alice's problem.”

Hearing this, from the other end of the table Mimi says brightly to everyone, “Once we'd settled on the black-and-gold color scheme for our packaging, we wanted the perfect models—one dark, one fair. And voilà! Sherrill and Dirk!” She lifts her wineglass. “I'd like to propose a toast: to the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man!”

“Hear, hear.”

And, half-rising, young Brad says, “And I'd like to propose another: to my brilliant, beautiful, and sexy mother. Here's to you, Mom!”

“Hear, hear.”

“Thank you, Badger.”

In Nonie's new arrangement of the seating, her young friend Williams is now placed at Granny Flo's right, to take advantage of her good ear. “It's such an honor to be seated next to you, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I've heard so much about you.”

“You have? What have you heard?”

“How charming you are, how gracious—”

“Did my daughter tell you that?”

“She. And others.”

“Whenever Naomi Myerson starts talking like that, it means she wants something. Money, usually.” She turns to her other dinner partner and says, “Who are you?”

“My name is Jim Greenway, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I'm researching a story on the Myerson family, for
Fortune
.”

“There wasn't any fortune. Didn't you know that? When my husband died, it turned out he'd spent it all. I had to sell everything—everything except my paintings. Did I tell you about my friend Mrs. Perlman's little dog?”

Sherrill Shearson is now on Edwee Myerson's right, and turning to her somewhat loftily, aware that she is a member of a lower social order, he says to her, “You certainly make a handsome couple. Are you two married?”

She giggles. “Are you
kidding?
Dirk's bisexual.”

Nodding, Edwee takes this information in, and his eyes travel across the table to where Dirk Gordon sits, carefully spooning his soup, and he gives the younger man a long, appraising look. “Really. How interesting,” he says.

From across the table, too, Edwee's wife catches this look of calculating appraisal. “Edwee,” she mouths. “You promised!”

His answer is an almost indiscernible wink.

“One thing I'm interested in knowing about,” Jim Greenway is saying to Granny Flo, the sad saga of Mrs. Perlman's pet having come to an end, “is what caused the rift between your late husband and his brother, Leopold, years ago. Can you tell me anything about that?”

“Why, it was perfectly simple,” Granny says. “My husband was jealous of Leo. Leo was tall and dark and handsome and always got the girls. My husband was short and fat and ugly. Do you still have your grandpa's portrait in your library, Mimi? You could see in the portrait how ugly he was. No girl would look at Adolph, except me.”

“There must have been more to it than that, Granny,” Mimi says.

“That was the gist of it. I'd have much rather married Leo than Adolph, but Leo was already married to someone else, so I had to settle for Adolph. ‘Settle for Adolph,' my father said. My father was Morris Guggenheim, in case you didn't know. When he was born, he was called the world's richest baby.”

“Interesting,” Jim Greenway says.

“But he wasn't the world's richest baby. That's the point. So don't put that in your story.”

Nonie's friend Roger Williams is still trying to draw Granny's attention away from her other dinner partner. “Nonie and I are about to launch an exciting new business venture of our own, Mrs. Myerson,” he says.

“Oh? What's that?”

“Spot foreign exchange. You see—”

“Foreigners,” she says. “That reminds me of President Hoover, when my husband and I were invited to the White House. President Hoover was fat, and so was his wife. She was named Lou—Lou—Hoover. And they were both fat. Not too tall, either, but fat. Isn't that funny that both would be fat? My husband used to call them Tweedledum and Tweedledee; isn't that funny? He could be funny, my husband. But I remember we talked about all the foreigners. President Hoover said there were too many foreigners coming into the country. He wanted them stopped, and I think he was working on some sort of way to stop them. How much does Nonie want from me this time?”

“Well, if you were interested in coming in as an investor, Mrs. Myerson, we'd certainly be most happy to—”

“Nothing to do with foreigners! There are too many of them. President Hoover said so, and he ought to know.”

“Mother,” Nonie begins, “what Roger is trying to explain is—'

But at that moment, Felix steps into the dining room and whispers something in the senior Bradford Moore's ear. Brad Moore frowns slightly, places his napkin beside his plate, rises, and says, “Excuse me—a business call.”

In his absence, Edwee turns to Alice, who is on his left. “Well, isn't
that
interesting?” he whispers to her.

“Isn't what interesting?”

“Brad has a woman on the West Side. But wouldn't you think she'd know better than to call him at home—while he's at dinner?”

“What makes you think that, Edwee?”

“I know what I know, Alice.”

“I don't believe any of this!”

“I've seen the woman. I've seen them together, holding hands. So, who is going to tell Mimi that her husband has another woman? Shall you, or shall I? Obviously, she's got to be told.”

“I told you I don't believe you.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Mimi says from the far end of the table. “Whisper-whisper-whisper. Won't you let the rest of us in on whatever gossip it is?”

“We were just talking about the West Side,” Edwee says easily. “How it's changed. All the shops on Columbus Avenue, and all the cheap merchandise one finds there.”

“This rift with his brother Leopold,” Jim Greenway is saying. “Was it sudden, when Leo left the company in nineteen forty-one, or was it a disagreement that had been building over the years?”

“Over the years. Yes, over the years. My husband kept a diary, you know, over the years. It was all in his diary—everything.”

“Really?” he says eagerly. “A diary? Do you still have it? I'd love to see that.”

“Oh, no,” she says sadly. “It's gone. Disappeared. Destroyed, perhaps. Gone, all gone, but it was all in there, the whole thing.”

“Really, Granny?” Mimi says. “I never knew that Grandpa kept a diary.”

“Oh, yes. Wrote in it every day. Put everything in. Sometimes he'd read it to me.”

“It would certainly be helpful to Mr. Greenway in his research, Granny, if we could locate Grandpa's diary.”

“But it's gone. Vanished. Gone.”

Speaking up in full voice for the first time now, Alice Myerson says, “I certainly never heard that my father-in-law kept a diary. If he had, certainly Henry would have mentioned it to me.”

“But he did. He did.”

“I don't believe you, Flo!”

From across the table, Granny Flo gazes steadily at her daughter-in-law. Then, turning to Jim Greenway, and nodding in Alice's direction, Granny Flo says, “She killed a man once, you know. It was all in Adolph's diary.” She pauses for a moment to let this sink in. Then she says, “I have to go to the toilet. Will someone lead me?”

Brad, returning from his telephone call, steps to her chair. “I'll show you the way, Flo,” he says, taking her hand.