Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “One of M-M-Mimi’s little whimsies, I fancy.” Edwee Myerson has a little stammer and has particular trouble with his m’s and his b’s. In the back seat, Gloria reaches out and tickles Edwee’s crotch with her lacquered fingertips. “Naughty little pussycat,” he whispers.

  At 200 East 66th Street, Edwee and Gloria’s limousine makes its first stop, which is to collect Naomi Myerson, Edwee’s older sister and Mimi’s aunt Nonie, along with her escort for the evening, a somewhat younger man named Roger Williams, whom Edwee has not met before. Edwee’s greeting to this Williams is of the customary chilliness he reserves for all strangers whose names are not familiar from the press and, in particular, for male friends of Nonie’s. Nonie, after all, despite her fame as a great beauty in her youth (the forties and fifties), has had notably poor luck with men, both as husbands and as lovers, and even as casual acquaintances.

  “Darlings,” Nonie murmurs as Edwee’s driver helps her into the car and as she immediately fills the interior of the vehicle with waves of some violent and passionate and dangerous new perfume. “Darlings, I want you to meet my brilliant new friend, Roger Williams,” she says as they settle into the car. “Roger, these are my brother, Edwee, and his wife, Gloria.”

  “Hello,” says Edwee, extending his hand halfway.

  “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” says Gloria.

  The car moves northward into the traffic.

  In the flattering evening light, and within the tinted-glass interior of Edwee’s car, Naomi Myerson, whom everybody in the family calls Nonie, is almost beautiful again. Nonie is not young, but few people in the family can do more than guess at her exact age, and she has lied about it for so long that even she, if she suddenly decided to be truthful, would probably be unable to give you the figure. Only her mother could tell you the date of her birth, and her mother would never dare to do this, knowing how Nonie feels about this subject. Not even Edwee knows his older sister’s age, though by the time he was ten years old Nonie had already been married and divorced. You do the arithmetic.

  Nonie’s age is a secret she will carry with her to her grave. She has never been required to reveal it. By the time she was old enough to drive a car, her father could afford a chauffeur, and so Nonie has never owned a driver’s license. The birthdate on her passport is off by a mile. Though she has worked—oh, Nonie has worked at a number of different enterprises and enthusiasms—she has never needed to apply for Social Security. If you are rich enough, there are some things you never have to do. If one is rich enough, too, one can occasionally find oneself in certain financial straits, which has been one of Nonie’s recurring problems, but more of that later.

  Suffice to say that Nonie Myerson (through all her marriages she has always kept Myerson as her “professional” name) looks younger than she is. She takes good care of herself. She is always dieting, and she is proud of her slim legs and slender ankles, and of being a perfect size four. Tiny, almost invisible scars behind her hairline have replaced wrinkles that might have appeared. In the past, pregnancies have been terminated before they could threaten her with stretch marks. Her hair is still the glossy auburn shade that it always was, and thanks to the ministrations of a clever hairdresser on East 69th Street, it still bounces like a teenager’s when she walks. Tonight, in a short black Dior, which flatters her, with a simple strand of pearls at her throat, pearl-and-diamond earrings, and a single diamond solitaire on her ring finger, she looks, as her friends sometimes say about her, “remarkably well-preserved.” Needless to say, they do not say this to her face.

  She has a habit of sitting with her chin tilted upward, as though balancing something very small and light—a feather, perhaps—on the tip of her perfectly sculpted nose. In the car, she sits this way now.

  “So what’s this dinner party all about?” her new sister-in-law, Gloria, asks again, this time of Nonie.

  “I expect little Mimi has some sort of announcement to make,” Nonie says. “Something about the company. She said it was going to be mostly family, but there would be one or two surprise guests. Don’t you detest surprises?”

  “What a wretched business,” Edwee says. “How does poor Mimi stand it, dealing with that class of people?”

  “I haven’t seen you tearing up your dividend checks, Edwee dear,” Nonie says, still balancing whatever it is on the tip of her nose.

  “I mean so vulgar. The cosmetics business. Not much better than the rag business, is it? So Jewish.”

  “Well, Edwee dear, we are Jewish,” Nonie says.

  Gloria lets out a little squeal. “Edwee?” she cries. “Are we Jewish? You never told me that!”

  He pats her knee. “Just a little bit Jewish,” he says. “Don’t worry your little head about it, pussycat.”

  “But I think I should of told my mother about that, if I was going to marry somebody Jewish, I mean.”

  “Doesn’t Mumsy like Jewish people, pussycat?”

  “I just don’t think she’s ever known any.”

  “Well, now she knows me,” he says.

  “Does that make me Jewish?”

  Edwee, changing the subject, turns to his sister, who has been ignoring all this, still gazing upward at the ceiling of the car, and says, “Mostly family. Does that mean poor Alice will be there?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Then I predict a debacle,” Edwee says.

  “Not necessarily. Alice’s been behaving herself lately. The Betty Ford Center, you know.”

  “But how long will that last? How long have all of Alice’s other treatments lasted?”

  “I think we should try to show Alice that she has our support,” Nonie says.

  “Until the next fiasco,” Edwee sighs.

  “Who is Alice?” the young man named Roger Williams asks in a pleasant voice.

  “Ah,” says Edwee, settling back in his seat and carefully lighting his pipe. “A very good question, Mr. Windsor. Who is Alice?”

  “It’s Williams.”

  “Mr. Williams, then. Who is Alice? How would you answer that, Nonie dear?” Without waiting for her reply, he continues, “Alice is Fair Alicia, no relation of ours whatsoever, except by a little fluke of circumstance called marriage. Alice is dear Mimi’s mother. She is our tragic sister-in-law, in tragic decline, the widow of our tragic brother Henry, who was Mimi’s father. Alice is La Dame aux camélias. She is Alice of the haunted past.”

  “I see,” Williams says drily. “Now I know all I need to know about Alice.”

  “Alice is of little consequence to this family, other than the fact that from her loins sprang Mimi, like Athena, full-b-b-blown, from the head of Zeus. There are some Williamses in Cincinnati. A very fine old family. Are they your people?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I thought not,” Edwee says, dismissing this elegant young roughneck with a gesture of his pipe.

  The car has one more stop to make before heading toward its final destination at 1107 Fifth Avenue. This is at the Carlyle, to pick up Fleurette Guggenheim Myerson, Edwee and Nonie’s mother, Mimi’s grandmother, and the widow of the great Adolph Myerson, who started everything. As the long black limousine approaches the Carlyle, the doorman recognizes it and steps into the lobby to assist Mrs. Myerson through the door.

  Fleurette Myerson, whom Mimi and the younger members of the family call Granny Flo, is eighty-nine now, and a little frail, and nearly blind, but she still manages to get around a bit. To be certain that she will not be late when her son’s car comes for her, this tiny lady has been sitting in the Carlyle’s lobby for the better part of the past hour. As the car pulls up, Fleurette Myerson emerges from the hotel entrance, one hand tucked into a bellman’s elbow, the other gripping a Lucite cane, while the doorman holds the door open for them. Edwee’s chauffeur leaps out of the car with unusual speed, for it will take the three men to steer Mrs. Myerson safely into the back seat without mishap, see that she is settled there, her cane within her reach, a karakul robe spread a
cross her lap. Now, with her reticule perched on her knees, she sits securely throned under a soft coronet of pale purple hair.

  “Thank you, Harry,” she says to the bellman as these small feats are accomplished. “That one’s called Harry,” she says to the others in the car. “He’s on nights. He’s a good boy. He finds Lawrence Welk for me on the TV.” Now her small gloved hands flutter about the interior of the car, touching the others, identifying them by the feel of a kneecap, a shoulder, a wrist. “There’s someone else in here!” she cries in a fluty voice. “I recognize Edwee, I recognize Edwee’s sweetie, I recognize Nonie—but who’s this other one?”

  “This is my friend Roger Williams, Mother,” Nonie says, guiding her mother’s outstretched hand toward his. “Remember I told you about him? How brilliant he is?”

  “I’m not Edwee’s sweetie anymore, honey,” Gloria says with a giggle. “I’m Edwee’s wife, remember?”

  “Oh, yes. I did know that.”

  “You sent us that silver candle thing. Remember?”

  “An epergne,” Edwee corrects.

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  “How are you, Mother?” Nonie asks, brushing her lips against her mother’s cheek.

  “Well, actually, I’m upset,” her mother says as the car moves forward again. “Yes, you could really say I’m upset. You remember Mrs. Perlman who lived in fourteen-C when I lived at Thirty Park Avenue? Used to play mah-jongg, had arthritis? She was married to Norman Perlman who turned grey overnight, you know who I mean, he took his mother’s death so bad he turned absolutely snow-white grey overnight! Family had jewelry stores, and didn’t Rose Perlman have the jewels! Oh, my! He got them wholesale for her on Forty-seventh Street. He was so good to her, and why they never had children I’ll never know. He died of a broken heart. Anyway, she called me today, and can you imagine what? Someone in her building poisoned her little dog, Fluffy, and she thinks she knows who. She thinks someone put poison on the carpet outside her front door because she saw Fluffy sniffing and licking at something. Two hours later Fluffy was in convulsions and died in her arms! It must have been poison. Mrs. Perlman is beside herself, just beside herself. ‘Fluffy was the only joy left in my life,’ she said to me. ‘The only joy!’ Isn’t that an awful thing, to poison a little dog that’s never harmed anyone? Oh,” she says, dabbing at her eyelids with a gloved fingertip, “just look how upset it’s made me—I’m crying myself. Oh … what a cruel thing. Do you think anybody would try to poison my Itty-Bitty?”

  Nonie pats her mother’s hand. “No, I don’t think anyone would poison Itty-Bitty, Mother,” she says.

  “What’s the world coming to, I ask myself. Do you ever ask yourself that, Nonie? Edwee?”

  “I ask myself that constantly,” Edwee says.

  “Where are we going?” Fleurette Myerson asks suddenly. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “To Mimi’s for dinner,” Nonie says. “A family dinner, remember?”

  “It promises to be breathtakingly boring,” Edwee says.

  “Really, Edwee? Then why are we going?” Then she laughs. “Oh, Edwee, you’re just making one of your little jokes, aren’t you. I’m always forgetting how you like to make little jokes. Ha-ha. That’s a funny one. Still, I don’t know how I’ll have any appetite for anything, thinking about poor Mrs. Perlman and her poor little dog, Fifi.”

  “You said Fluffy.”

  “It was a poodle. An adorable little poodle. White, I think, not black like Itty-Bitty. What’s the world coming to?”

  There is a brief silence, and the car stops for a red light. Then Nonie’s friend Williams says, “Edwee—that’s an unusual name. How did you get it?”

  Edwee gives him a frosty look. “It attached itself to me in boarding school,” he says. “Groton.”

  “Why, Edwee, that’s not true,” his mother says. “I gave you that name when you were a tiny baby! When they first handed you to me in the delivery room of Mount Sinai Hospital, I took one look at you and I said, ‘He’s so wee! He’s so wee! His name is Edwin, but he’s my little Edwee!’ And that’s funny, because Mr. Monticello asked me that same question this afternoon.”

  “Who is Mr. Monticello, Mother?”

  “From the museum. He came by to see my collection. I said to him, ‘Edwee may not like what I’m going to do, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ That’s when he asked me how you got your name.”

  “What is it that you’re going to do that I may not like?” Edwee asks as the car moves forward again, and there is a trace of tension in his voice.

  “I’m thinking of giving my paintings to the Metropolitan Museum. Or at least some of them. Or maybe letting them take their pick. Mr. Monticello seemed very interested.”

  “Are you speaking of Philippe de Montebello?”

  “Yes. I was going to tell you later, but now you’ve forced it out of me by wanting to know why we called you Edwee.”

  “Mother, this is a very foolish thing you’re thinking of,” Edwee says. “Have you talked to the lawyers, M-M-M-Mother? Your collection is p-p-p-priceless, it’s—”

  “See? I told you you wouldn’t like it, Edwee. But why shouldn’t I? I used to think of those paintings as my friends. I used to talk to them. But now I can’t see them anymore, what good are they to me? Let somebody else enjoy them.”

  “Not the Cézannes … not the B-B-Bentons … not the Goya …”

  “Stop stammering, Edwee. It makes me nervous. You didn’t use to stammer. Anyway, I think Mr. Monticello wants them all.”

  “I forbid you to do this, Mother, without consulting—”

  “Consulting who?”

  “M-m-me!”

  “I should think you’d offer them to the Guggenheim first,” Nonie says soothingly. “Under the circumstances.”

  “I never liked Uncle Sol. He high-hatted me, and he high-hatted your father. And he had other women. That’s one good thing I can say about your father. He never had other women. At least that I knew about. Uncle Sol’s wife knew about his. She died of a broken heart.”

  “Mother, m-m-must I be the first one to tell you? That you are senile?” Edwee almost shouts.

  “Just like poor Mrs. Perlman’s husband. Oh, I keep thinking about that poor little dog—poisoned by someone putting poison on a rug. That’s what breaks my heart. The only joy of her life.”

  “I’m going to have you probated. I’m going to have you declared incompetent! Incompetent to handle—”

  The car pulls up, now, in front of 1107 Fifth Avenue, and the doorman strides forward. “Where are we going?” Fleurette Myerson asks again. “Is it to Mimi’s? Is that what you said? Are we at Mimi’s house now?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Nonie murmurs.

  Fleurette Myerson sits very still, her hands in her lap, as though sitting for a portrait to decorate a box of old-fashioned chocolate candies. But when she speaks to Edwee now, her high-pitched voice has a steely edge to it. “We are not going to quarrel in front of Mimi,” she says. “Do you hear me? Mimi won’t have it and neither will I. Don’t forget that there are a few things I know about you, Edwee Myerson, that you would not like to see in headlines in the morning papers. Shall I mention the name of Collier? Shall I mention Florida?” She rearranges her knees, hitches herself forward, and prepares to be assisted from the car.

  Another limousine is also making its way to Mimi’s dinner party, this one hired by Mimi herself and containing only one passenger, Alice Bloch Myerson, Mimi’s mother and the other daughter-in-law of Granny Flo. Alice did not want to go to tonight’s party.

  “Must I go, Mimi?” She had begged her daughter on the phone. “Please don’t make me go.”

  “Oh, Mother, please. I want you here. This is a company, but it’s also a family. I want all the family here.”

  “I’m just not ready for it,” Alice said. “I’m not up to it yet.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I’m not ready for them yet, Mimi. You know how they treat me. They treat me—Nonie, E
dwee, Flo—as though they were candling an egg. That’s exactly the way they treat me, as though they were holding me up against a candle, peering through my shell, looking for blood spots.”

  “That’s silly, Mother.”

  “It isn’t, Mimi. That’s the way they’ve always made me feel. Like an outsider. I’m not a real member of that family, Mimi.”

  “You’re my mother, aren’t you?”

  “But that doesn’t make me a real Myerson. You’re one, but I’m not. I’m just a Myerson by marriage. That’s the way they think of me. That’s the way they make me feel. That’s the way they’ve always made me feel. An outcast, a trespasser.”

  “Besides, I want to show you off,” Mimi said. “I want them to see the new you. I’m so proud of you.”

  “But the new me is so new yet,” she said. “I’m not sure yet who this new me is! Besides, there’ve been so many new me’s over the years that I can’t tell them apart anymore. I’m still living with the old ones.”

  “The old ones are ghosts now, Mother. Gone with the past.”

  “Ghosts, yes. But not gone. I live with them every day. I’m the ghost,” she said.

  “Mother, you’ll make me very unhappy if you don’t come to dinner next Thursday night.”

  Alice had hesitated. “Well, if you put it that way, of course I’ll have to come. I wouldn’t do anything to make you unhappy, Mimi.”

  “I’m putting it that way.”

  “After all you’ve done for me.”

  “I’ll send a car for you.”

  And so, reluctantly, Alice had dressed for the evening, choosing a simple dress of eggshell crepe, a dress that Nonie wouldn’t consider too competitive and that Flo wouldn’t think too flashy, and the car had picked her up at her house in Turtle Bay, where she lives alone, and now she, too, is moving northward up Third Avenue through the traffic.

  Just before leaving her house, Alice swallowed a valium. It is beginning to calm her a little.

  One other passenger is also heading northward, not many blocks behind Alice’s car, this one in a taxi snaking its way uptown through the Lower Park Avenue tunnel and up the ramps that make narrow, right-angled turns around Grand Central and through the Pan Am and Helmsley buildings. This is not a guest but the party’s host, Bradford Moore, Jr., Mimi’s husband. Brad Moore is unhappy, too, but not about returning home to his wife’s dinner party. Brad Moore is comfortable with dinner parties. He has been going to them and giving them since Harvard days, and handling himself at black-tie dinners is second nature now—a little to drink, but not too much, an ability to sniff and taste the wine to see whether or not it is corked, the polite and interested conversation about news events, pleasant gossip picked up on The Street or at the Downtown Club, revealed with lawyerly discretion, tact, and poise. Poised is a word often used to describe Bradford Moore, Jr., when, on occasion, his advice is sought or his opinion is asked by reporters from U.S. News & World Report or Barron’s or Business Week. And when he sees himself described as “poised” or “polished,” he smiles, remembering a small black volume his mother placed on the nightstand by his bed as a boy, titled Poise and How to Attain It.