Shades of Fortune (7 page)

Felix, in the silence that follows, clears the soup bowls, one by one, and serves the salad course.

“This is my cook's famous Niçoise salad,” Mimi says brightly, breaking the silence. “Instead of tuna, she uses smoked Scotch salmon, and she's found a little shop where we get
fresh
pimentos!”

“Mr. Greenway,” Nonie says when her mother is out of earshot, “I must apologize for my mother. It's—well, it's Alzheimer's disease, I'm afraid. She forgets things. She loses track. She imagines things. In other words, you really must not pay any attention at all to anything she says.”

But, across from her at the table, Alice Myerson's eyes are very wide and very bright, and two pink spots have appeared on her cheeks. “
What
—
did
—
she
—
say?
” she demands. “What did she say about me?” She flings her napkin on the table. “Why does everyone in this family hate me? Why is everyone trying to hurt me?”

“Mother,” Mimi murmurs. “Mother, dear—”

“She's saying that I'm to blame for your father's suicide, isn't she? Well, it wasn't me! It wasn't me who put that bullet through his head! If anyone's to blame,
she
is! She, and Adolph, and Leo, and all the others! Put that in your story, Mr. Greenway: that evil old woman killed my husband, killed her own son, just as surely as if she'd been in the room when he pulled the trigger! Yes, put that in!” There are tears in her eyes now, and she pushes her chair back from the table.

“Mother, please—”

“Please! Please! I'm the one who should be crying ‘please.' Please, leave me alone, all of you! All of you, in this family of hating and hurting and destroying people. Where can I go now, what can I do? When will you all have had enough of me, and let me die in peace? Never, that's when! Not till I die in my tracks from exhaustion, from the exhaustion of trying to fight back against this family that's destroyed everything … my husband … everything I ever loved. You didn't see it, Mimi, you were too young, but I saw it happening, happening every day, day after day, as she and his father destroyed him to the point where he was desperate, lost, with no one left to help him, not even I, nothing he could trust but his poor … little … service revolver. Oh!” she sobs. “I didn't want to come here tonight; I knew something like this would happen. Oh, just let me go home, Mimi. Let me go home, away from the cruelty … home …” She jumps from her chair and runs sobbing from the room.

After a pause, Mimi says quietly, “I'm sorry. My mother is … my mother is recovering from an illness. I thought she was … sufficiently recovered to … but apparently not. I'm sorry.” Turning to Sherrill and Dirk, she says, “What else can I say?”

“She got hysterical,” Sherrill Shearson says, as though this provided an explanation for everything.

Edwee whispers to Nonie. “What did I predict? A debacle. I knew something like this would happen if poor Alice were here.”

Returning to the table with his wife's grandmother on his arm, Brad Moore asks innocently, “What became of your mother?”

“Mother … had to leave,” Mimi says.

“Good riddance,” Granny mutters. “Little tramp.”

And so, I ask you, how do you rescue a formal dinner party from a disaster like this one? When the
Titanic
struck an iceberg, the passengers turned it into a romp and tossed handfuls of slivered ice at one another. In this case, there is a salad course, a main course of
noisettes de veau
and tiny green peas, a dessert course, and coffee to get through before the lifeboats can be lowered and the hapless prisoners at 1107 Fifth Avenue can be released to the salvation of their homes and cool beds. The answer is, you do your best to rescue a foundering evening with artifice, with showmanship, with bright and inconsequential chatter: the day's headlines, Bernhard Goetz, subway violence, will this extraordinary bull market ever end? Brad Moore works on Wall Street, what do his banker friends say? Outside, there is the quality of the sunset to be discussed, how, across the park, the setting sun turns the glass and concrete canyons of the West Side into ribbons of fire. Questions, questions. Mimi has questions to ask of everyone, keeping the evening afloat, keeping the conversation going, the dinner partners turning from one side to another, as the courses proceed, one after another. No one ever said that this sort of thing is easy, but Mimi does her best to carry it off, even going so far as to express her concern and shock and caring over the fate of Mrs. Perlman's little dog. “Oh, what a terrible thing, Granny.”

The show must go on! It is one of those occasions where Mimi must remind herself that a business is not just a family, and that a family is not just a business but a shared heritage of old wounds that have not yet turned to scars, of hurts that cannot be forgiven, of seething memories that refuse to simmer down. It is the old story of love gone uncollected, and of luck, which is love's opposite, walking off with all the winnings, and a smirk on its face.

Mimi's husband is the first to excuse himself. “Some work to catch up on at the office,” he says. “The Sturtevant case … pretrial discovery phase … depositions to take in the morning.…”

“Of course,” Mimi says, offering her cheek again. “Don't be too late, darling.”

Edwee rolls his eyes significantly in Nonie's direction, and of course Mimi, who notices everything, pretends not to notice this.

The remaining guests move into Mimi's all-white living room, where candles are lighted, and where Felix serves coffee.

Perhaps, I thought, she had worn white tonight just for this all-white room, for her dress was of the same oyster shade as the linen fabric that covered the walls. It was part of her sense of personal theatre. Later, of course, I would wonder if this room was an echo—an unconscious one, perhaps—of another all-white room that had once had a certain meaning in her life. But tonight this room was predominantly white and crystal, Baccarat obelisks and spheres and cubes, all sending refractions of colored light from low, glass-topped tables against the oversized white sofas and ottomans and low-backed chairs. In this white room, tonight, she even placed white cymbidium orchids in white Chinese vases. But there were also bright splashes of color from the walls: a huge blue-and-white Jack Youngerman, a varicolored Morris Louis waterfall cascading behind a sofa. “Is this a Jasper Johns?” I heard Dirk Gordon ask her as he admired the paintings.

“Yes, it is.”

“And this: Imari?” as he pointed to a green and orange goldfish plate.

“Kutani, actually. But you're close. You know a lot about porcelain, Dirk?”

“A bit.” Mr. Dirk Gordon clearly did his homework on Brad and Mimi Moore.

“My husband and I are passionate collectors.”

“And this must be V'soske carpet.”

“Why, yes, in fact, it is.”

“The most expensive, and the best,” he said, a young man who would make it his business to know such things, and then, “Whoever was your designer did a marvelous job.” Mimi laughed her special laugh, and said, “Thank you,” though I knew that no room in this apartment had ever known the banality of an interior decorator. Everything in this room, right down to the little cluster of Steuben glass mushrooms that had been “planted” in sphagnum moss in an antique ironstone tureen, had been selected by Brad and Mimi themselves, for Brad also has good taste. At least he appreciates fine things.

“But her rooms don't
track,
” the designer Billy Baxter once complained, a trifle pettishly perhaps, since he had nothing to do with their design. By this he meant that the rooms—the white living room, the Tiger Lily library, the French dining room—seemed at odds with one another. Today's designers tend to pick two or three fashionable colors—at the moment, persimmon and pomegranate are two of these—and use them, with varying degrees of emphasis, throughout a house. (Remember when every smart living room had to be painted a deep mint green?) But Mimi prefers to let each room create its own experience. “After all,” she argues sensibly enough, “a person can't be in more than one room at a time.” This approach gives her house a certain sense of quirkiness and playfulness.

Mimi moves around her sparkling living room now, trying to sparkle herself. But, of course, her mother's little explosion has left the evening with a taut edge, and the sparkle can't help but feel a little forced. And so, one by one, after a polite enough interval has passed, Mimi's guests begin their thank-yous, their good-byes, and leave.

“Stay and have a quick nightcap with me, Badger,” Mimi says to her son. And, when all the others have gone, she leads him back into the library, where Felix has set out a decanter of Ar-magnac and thimble-shaped glasses.

“Yes, a brandy,” she says to young Brad's offer, and she flings herself in her long white sheath deep into a green leather sofa. Only then does she permit herself to unwind, let down her guard, and let the angry tears come. “Oh, shit, shit,
shit!
” she says through clenched teeth, making tight fists of her hands and pounding the sofa cushions with them. “Shits!
All of them!
Why did I even bother?” Badger hands her her glass, and she downs the contents with a gulp, then holds out the glass to be refilled.

“Just …
shits!
” she cries. Tears stream down her cheeks, but there are no sobs.

“Okay, Mom,” her son says pleasantly. “Let it all out.”

In a business noted for temperamental characters, Mimi Myerson is not known for emotional outbursts. During her years in the industry, she has been exposed to various of its titans: the volatile Helena Rubinstein, who, hearing news she did not wish to hear on the telephone, would often rip the cord from the wall and hurl the offending instrument across the room; the imperious Elizabeth Arden, who enjoyed making surprise visits of inspection to her salons where, finding nothing to her liking, she would sweep through her selling floors crying, “Fools! Knaves! Nincompoops!” while salesgirls cowered behind their counters in her wake; and the notoriously foul-mouthed Charles Revson, whose favorite tactic was to leap from his desk and shout, “You're fucking
fired!
Get the fuck out of here!” Mimi has never found temperament to be an effective business tool and has always practiced a more coolheaded, evenhanded executive style, having discovered that more can be accomplished with honey than with vinegar or vitriol. But now, of course, in the privacy of her own home, and alone with her own son, it is a different matter altogether.

“That shit Nonie!” she says now. “She changed all my place-cards. Did you know that? To put her used-car-salesman-type greasy boyfriend next to Granny, so he could talk up some new hare-brained scheme of Nonie's. And then Edwee and Nonie, whispering together like two old maids and refusing to join the conversation. And
wretched
old Granny! Wouldn't you think, after all these years, she could let up on Mother? But she
never
lets up! And poor Mother—who didn't want to come anyway, but whom I
made
come. And those stupid-ass models: did you ever encounter such a pair of airheads? The whole thing, the whole evening, was a stupid idea to begin with. Why didn't you tell me, Badger, that this whole evening was a stupid idea?”

He spreads his hands. “
Mea culpa,
” he says. “It was all my fault.”

“Of course it wasn't. It was
my
stupid idea. Even your father wasn't a lot of help, was he? Sneaking out on some trumped-up excuse, and leaving me to sweep up the wreckage.”

“He said the Sturtevant case. I know it's been on his mind—”

“Ha! You don't live with a man for twenty-nine years and not know when he's fibbing. If he's working on the Sturtevant case right now, I'm the Virgin Mary!”

“Come to think of it,” Badger says, “there is a certain resemblance. But in letting off all this steam, your halo's gotten a little crooked.”

“Oh, shut up,” she says, only half-crossly. “It's just … it's just that I wanted everything to be so … perfect … with the whole family … just once … to celebrate …”

He moves across the room now, sits beside her on the green sofa, and circles her shoulders with his left arm. “It wasn't your fault, Mom,” he says. “Sometimes things just go wrong. The best-laid plans of mice and men …”

“And my beautiful dinner—people just played with their food. And Mr. Greenway here from
Fortune
. I'd worked so hard.”

“No more self-pity, Mimi Myerson. Nothing old Greenway writes about us can hurt us. The old farts who read
Fortune
don't buy Mireille perfume. Besides, maybe you work
too
hard, Mom. Ever think of that?”

She looks quickly at him. “Is that it, Badger? Have I been working so hard with this company that I've let the rest of my family fall apart all around me?”

“Why not give me more to do? I'll take a promotion any old day.”

“Oh, Badger. You're the best. You're the best thing that's happened to this family,
and
this company. Ever. I couldn't run it without you.”

“Well, I do have some interesting news for you,” he says, “if we can get back to business for a minute.”

“Oh? What's that?” The tears and the anger are gone now, and she sits up straight.

“Naturally, I didn't want to mention this at dinner. But I've found out who's been buying up our Miray stock in big units, forcing the price up.”

“Who is it?”

“It's not one of the funds, as we thought. It's an individual.”

“Who, Badger?”

“Mr. Michael Horowitz. Himself.”

She stiffens slightly. “You're sure.”

“Found out this afternoon. One of his partners plays squash at the Racquet Club. He just casually mentioned it—as though he assumed I knew. I don't envy that partner's future with Horowitz if Horowitz learns he let the cat out of the bag.”