Shades of Fortune (69 page)

MYERSON CLAN LOSES ITS BELOVED MATRIARCH AT 90

Beloved? Well, by some, I suppose … but matriarch, certainly. She was found in her chair in her sitting room by Harry, her favorite night bellman, when he came up to tune in Lawrence Welk for her on television. At first he thought she was asleep, but when he couldn't awaken her, he phoned down to George at the front desk to say, “Mrs. Myerson won't wake up!” Nor did she. Itty-Bitty was sitting on her lap, guarding her protectively. In fact, the hotel staff had quite a struggle with the little dog to get her to relinquish her place on Granny's lap so that Granny's body could be removed. Rose Perlman is very lonely now, having lost her last contemporary friend, but she does have the companionship of a new Fluffy.

The turnout for Granny Flo's funeral was enormous, nearly filling the main sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El. No one had realized that she had so many friends and admirers. The family was all there, in the front pews: Mimi and Brad and Badger, seated together; Edwee Myerson, a few seats away, his face expressionless; Nonie, weeping quiedy, clutching the arm of her friend and partner, Mr. Williams; her contemporary, Alice, dry-eyed and with what even seemed to me a quiet smile of triumph hovering about her lips; and the Leo cousins. All told, as I counted them, four generations of the Myerson clan were represented there—five, if you counted the old lady who had been wheeled down the center aisle in her coffin.

The entire staff of the Hotel Carlyle, just up the street, had been given two hours off to attend the services, and they were all there, along with scores of others who, though they might have known Granny Flo only slightly, had been recipients of her benefactions, large and small, over the years.

During the eulogy, Mimi stood up and said a few words. “Though she lacked a formal education,” I heard her say, “she possessed a great store of what I can only call natural wisdom.”

Rabbi Sobel delivered the final eulogy. “Though small in stature,” we heard him say, “Fleurette Myerson was large in spirit, large in heart and giving, large in the spirit of
zedakah
, of righteousness, large in wit and humor and courage. Though the last years were handicapped by near-blindness, this daughter of Israel bore her affliction with grit and without complaint. Her life …”

As the rabbi spoke, a small, dark object made its way out of one of the back pews and scuttled down the center aisle of the temple, toward the ark and the bier on which Granny's flower-blanketed coffin lay. It was Itty-Bitty, who had been smuggled into the sanctuary by Harry, Granny's favorite night porter, underneath his jacket, and who had been released, either by accident or design—no one ever knew—at just that point in the service. There was a collective gasp in the temple when the mourners realized what had happened.

Itty-Bitty proceeded briskly toward the coffin, her toenails clicking on the polished marble floor; and when she reached the bier, she sniffed it once or twice, then lay down beside it, whimpering softly.

From the pulpit, Rabbi Sobel saw what was happening and paused briefly. Then he continued, “Her life touched hearts large and small.” And there was a ripple of soft laughter from the mourners.

Itty-Bitty now resides with Badger and his lovely new wife, Connie. Yes, Badger was married about six months ago, to a girl he had been seeing quietly for some time. Badger's announcement came as quite a surprise to Mimi, but Mimi and Connie get on famously. Badger and Connie are expecting a baby in the fall. Will this mean that there will be a fifth-generation Myerson to run Miray? No one has a crystal ball, of course, and such occurrences within a family company are pretty rare. But they have happened.

On the other side of the matrimonial coin, Edwee and Gloria were divorced not long after our story ended. At first, Edwee tried to fight it, but when Gloria threatened to expose some of his more bizarre sexual experiments, Edwee backed down, and Gloria ended up with a nice settlement. Also, Gloria was clever enough to have her bruises photographed in the aftermath of what happened at home that night following the Mireille party at the Pierre. “Always have your bruises photographed,” she now counsels friends who find themselves in similar situations. “And always have it done, in color of course, on the second day after he beats you up, 'cause that's when they look the worst. I'll give you the name of the most marvelous little man, who does fabulous color work, who used to work for Bachrach.”

I've seen very little of Mimi lately. In recent months, she has been turning more and more of the control of her company over to Badger, in preparation, perhaps, for her retirement or, more likely, for her assumption of the role of sort of an elder stateswoman at Miray. And now, of course, as a Senate wife, she spends much of her time in Washington, though she is far from retired at Miracorp.

The choice to see little of Mimi has been partly my own, for my own peace of mind, you might say. Because, you see, at the time when I thought that Mimi might be going to leave Brad, I had the crazy notion that she and I might—but no, I think I'd rather not go into that at this point.

During congressional recesses, she and Brad usually travel, and from time to time she remembers me with a postcard from one exotic place or another, such as one I received a few weeks ago from St.-Jean-de-Luz in the south of France. I knew, of course, that this was where she and Brad had spent their honeymoon in the autumn of 1958. She wrote:

We refuse to call this a
second
honeymoon, despite what you'll think. Just visiting special places, doing touristy things, visiting museums, cathedrals, shopping, eating too much. Cheers!

XXXX & OOOO

Brad & Mimi

Then, just the other day, I ran into her on 57th Street, coming out of one of those china shops just east of Park. She had just been looking at a set of Chelseaware plates decorated with lobster claws, she said. Brad's birthday was coming up, the double-five. She asked me how my book was coming. “Moving along,” I told her.

“Just don't forget the lesson of the Sèvres vase,” she said. “Things are more interesting when they've earned a few battle scars,” and she laughed that special pebbly, thrilling laugh of hers.

Then she was off, blowing me a kiss. She was still a woman whom, if you saw her on the street, you would look at twice, whether it was her posture, or her sense of style, or her loose and bouncing blond hair, or her extraordinary eyes, and as she walked quickly away from me down 57th Street, I saw various heads turn—both men's and women's—for a second look.

For a moment I wondered what she meant by her parting piece of advice. Then I decided that I knew. She was telling me that a damaged marriage, like a broken piece of porcelain, can be redeemed through love and caring.

Meanwhile, the acquisitive Mrs. Rita Robinson has abandoned her quest and, I understand, has moved on in search of other prey. In New York, perhaps more so than in other places, life goes on.

As for Michael Horowitz, from what I read in the papers, he just goes on making money, and with each successful deal, the more grandiose grow his future plans. Right now, he has unveiled a scheme to turn a tract of abandoned railroad yards on the Upper West Side into a whole new city within a city: theatres, shopping malls, a sports arena, high-rise luxury apartment and office towers, and, for good measure, a structure that will be the tallest building in the world with views from here to Philadelphia. Sometimes I think that with men like Michael money and deal-making become a narcotic, and that the more money he makes the more he needs to feed his habit. Certainly he has more money now than he could ever possibly spend. And sometimes I wonder, too, whether his coming back to pursue Mimi after all those years was because she represented, to him, one deal that he had never quite been able to pull off. But I also wonder—since he doesn't seem to be the kind of man cut out for marriage—whether, when they said good-bye, he was bitterly resigned to his loss, or whether he was secretly a little bit relieved. Perhaps he always knew that he was someone who could provide a certain summer to her heart, but not the full four seasons of the year. Who knows?

Meanwhile, his enemies—and he has many—and his competitors, all those people who call him “Michael Horror-witz,” predict that he is riding for a fall. So far, this hasn't happened, and he climbs on, higher and higher, toward the center of the Big Top, and when he reaches that … But in the meantime he must climb on, higher, faster, toward whatever dizzy goal remains.

His friends say that he will never marry.

Michael Horowitz and Badger finally met for the first time just two months ago. Their meeting was quite accidental. They met—almost literally bumped into one another, in fact—as they were stepping out of their respective shower stalls in the men's locker room at the Century Country Club in Westchester County. Toweling his hair dry, the younger man stepped out of his shower and turned right. The older man, doing the same thing, stepped out and turned left. Thus, each other's bare shoulders and elbows barely missed colliding in the process.

“Oops. Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

Stepping back, it was Badger who first realized who the older man was. “You're Michael Horowitz,” said Badger.

“Yes.”

“Badger Moore.”

The two nude and dripping men shook hands with one another as formally as was possible under the circumstances, though neither man could avoid casting his eyes briefly downward to see how the other was hung. Then both quietly slung their towels around their middles.

Both are well-muscled and flat-bellied, and there is even a certain physical resemblance between the two of them, though Badger Moore is an inch or two taller than the older man.

“I didn't realize you were a member of this club,” Badger said, immediately realizing that this sounded snotty. He hadn't meant it to sound that way.

“Yes. They're letting in quite a few of my element these days.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. It's a long story.” Then Michael said, “By the way, I really wasn't trying to take over your company, you know.”

“Well, it doesn't matter now, does it?”

“No hard feelings, then?”

“None.”

“Good,” Michael said. Then he said a strange thing. “I'd really like to get to know you better,” he said. “I'd like us to be friends.”

For a moment Badger wondered whether Michael Horowitz might be gay. But he quickly dismissed this thought as both unworthy and unbecoming. “Sure,” he said pleasantly. “Let's have lunch someday.”

“I'd like that.”

“Give me a call.”

“Call you.”

The two shook hands again, and then each man headed for his respective locker—Badger's being number 24, and Michael's being 316, in the opposite direction—to dress.

To my knowledge, that lunch has yet to take place.

The only person I feared hurting with the diaries that Mimi turned over to me was her mother. I finally decided to approach Alice Myerson directly with what I knew and to ask her what I ought to do.

She said, “It was the most terrible moment of my life, beyond question. I hid the car in the garage that night, thinking that the nightmare of what happened that afternoon would go away if I could just hide the car. But Henry read the account of what happened in the newspaper the next morning, and that night he went down to look at the car. He came upstairs and said to me, ‘Did you do this?' And I said, ‘Yes—oh, yes, oh, Henry, help me!' And the next day Henry went to his father, and his father went to work to fix things up, using those friends of Uncle Leo's. I was sent to Maine, and the servants were told to say I'd been there all summer, since Mimi's birthday, to give me an alibi. People were paid off, license plates were switched, cars were switched, and everything was supposed to be fixed up.

“But then Leo became suspicious, and I'm certain Leo stole the diaries, though how he did it I don't know. Then Leo started blackmailing Henry, and then Leo's son Nate took over. He had some sort of letter proving that I wasn't in Maine but was in New York at the time. For years, Leo and Nate bled us. At first, it wasn't for too much, but it kept getting worse. It got worse and worse as the years went by, and once we had started it there was no stopping it. Nate said to Henry, ‘The fact that you're paying us is proof that she's guilty, isn't it?' Then Leo died, and Nate took over single-handedly, and it was worse than ever. He bled us and bled us until it seemed there was no blood left in us. There was no stopping it.

“Then, one night in nineteen sixty-two, Henry came home and said to me, ‘I've gotten rid of Nate. We're free,' or something like that, and I said, ‘What do you mean?' And he said, ‘I've done it—I've had him killed.' And I screamed—I was drunk, but I can remember everything I said. I screamed, ‘I can't live like this! I can't live with a man who'd do this sort of thing to me! Because you blame
me
, don't you! You're saying I have one man's blood on my hands already, and now I have another's. You blame
me
. You've always blamed
me
for everything, you and your family.' And I ran out of the house, with only my purse, and I ran … ran all the way to Grand Central Station, fifty blocks, and got on a train. I didn't even know where the train was going. I found the bar car, and I drank and drank, and finally I remember thinking it was time to get off. And when I got off, there was a motel, and it had a bar. And I didn't even know where I was, but I stayed. I don't know how long I stayed there, but it was while I was gone that Henry did what he did. And of course he did it just to place more blame on me.”

“Could that old case be reopened?” I asked her.

She smiled, and it was almost a defiant smile. “Do you know something?” she said. “I don't even care. Because that was a different woman who did all those things. I don't know her, don't even recognize her anymore. It's as though she died, even though I know she didn't die. The statute of limitations may not have run out, but that woman's statute of limitations has run out.”