Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

But of course they were.

  She knew that these Sunday visits were terribly important to her mother. And yet, at the same time, she knew that her mother dreaded them and always required several swallows of her medicine before setting forth downtown—“liquid courage,” her mother sometimes called it. It was all very confusing, and in the end, it was easier to let the confusions of her young girlhood flow around her and past her and wash over her, and to keep her questions to herself.

  At Miss Hall’s school, being on an academic scholarship meant that, socially, Mimi was a member of a caste very different, and apart, from that of the majority of the girls. Her scholarship meant that there were certain “scholarship duties” that she and the few other scholarship girls were required to perform. These duties were posted weekly on the school’s bulletin board. Scholarship girls had to wait on tables in the school’s dining room a certain number of weeks in every year, and this meant getting to the dining room early and eating meals separately, in the kitchen, before the dinner bell rang and the rest of the school trooped in. A certain number of hours also had to be spent pushing brooms and dustmops in the school’s corridors, while the rest of the school, gossiping and laughing, passed to and fro, on their way to this or that. A scholarship girl, busy with her duties, became invisible, and Mimi had learned to make the best of her invisibility, and even to enjoy it. What else was there to do? They can’t see me, she told herself, and I can’t see them. For me, they don’t exist.

  Scholarship duties also prevented her from joining certain extracurricular activities and clubs that the other girls joined, and even from taking part in certain sports. She told herself that she was lucky, that these were things in which she had no interest anyway. If anyone had told her she was lonely, she would have laughed at them. She had learned to enjoy the company of herself the best.

  There was a word in the school in those days that everyone used. It was hypocrisy. Everyone complained of the hypocrisy of teachers, the hypocrisy of the school administration, even Headmistress, the hypocrisy of parents, the hypocrisy of boys, and the hypocrisy of anyone whom you didn’t particularly care for. Mimi herself had noticed glaring examples of what she considered hypocrisy at Miss Hall’s and was therefore a little taken aback to discover that she herself had been branded a hypocrite.

  A girl named Barbara Badminton from Locust Valley had confronted her with this accusation one afternoon in the corridor. Planting herself squarely in front of Mimi, Barbara Badminton had said, “You know, you’re a real hypocrite, Myerson. You’re the biggest hypocrite in this entire school.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Your grandfather’s Adolph Myerson, isn’t he? He’s supposed to be one of the richest men in the entire country, isn’t he? Then why are you on scholarship? The rest of us have to pay the full tuition, but you don’t pay anything. It’s not fair!”

  Later, she had overheard Barbara Badminton and some of her friends whispering about her in the common room, while Mimi ran her dustcloth along the chair rail in the room next door.

  “You know why that hypocrite Myerson is on a scholarship, don’t you?” Barbara Badminton said. “It’s because she’s a J-e-w, and all the J-e-w’s ever want is to get everything they can for free. That’s why they’re all so rich. My father said so.”

  Mimi decided that it was beneath her dignity to let remarks like that upset her. But she could not resist a condescending, and totally patronizing, smile in Barbara Badminton’s direction when that semester’s grades were posted and Mimi received four A’s and one A-plus, while Barbara Badminton got two C’s, two D’s, and one D-minus.

  Winning good grades, of course, is not always the passkey to instant popularity.

  In chemistry class, Barbara Badminton sat at the desk behind her, and a few weeks later, during a quiz, Mimi felt a fingertip touch her shoulder. She half-turned, and Barbara Badminton hissed, “What’s the atomic weight of nitrogen? Give me the answer and I’ll be your friend!” Mimi simply turned back to the test, making sure that her left arm covered the answers as thoroughly as possible as she filled them in.

  “Bitch!” Barbara Badminton whispered.

  After that, Barbara Badminton’s enmity was even more open and outspoken.

  In 1957, the year she met Michael, most of the other girls at Miss Hall’s School were talking about debutante parties—the balls and tea dances they had been invited to in Lake Forest or Shaker Heights or Sewickley or Greenwich or Tuxedo Park, or the ones that their parents were giving for them. Every day, the girls who were members of the Badminton Set compared the invitations that appeared in their mailboxes, and in their dormitory rooms their dresser mirrors sprouted with little black-and-white engraved cards marked “Accept” or “Regret.”

  “Are you having a coming-out party, Myerson?” Barbara Badminton asked her haughtily.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not,” she said.

  “I know why,” Barbara Badminton said. “They don’t let Jews have coming-out parties, that’s why. They don’t even let them in the Social Register, and that’s a fact.”

  “No, that’s not the reason,” Mimi said sweetly. “I can’t very well have a coming-out party when I’m engaged to be married, can I?”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s your ring?”

  “We’re picking it out this summer,” Mimi said.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Excuse me, I’m on my way to the library,” Mimi said.

  “You think you’re hell on wheels, don’tcha?”

  The story, true or not (and not even Mimi was sure whether it was true), quickly made its way to the others in the Badminton Set who were, if nothing else, impressed. But being the first girl in one’s class to become engaged is not a ticket to popularity, either.

  One of the hit television shows of those days was called Catch Me If You Can, and it was easily the biggest of the big-money quiz shows that dominated the airwaves. With its sinister-looking, hermetically sealed “isolation booth,” the show posed a series of increasingly difficult questions to a series of contestants. But the contestant who, almost single-handedly, had made Catch Me a hit was a tall, dark curly-haired young man of vaguely Central European origins called Prince Fritzi von Maulsen. Prince Fritzi claimed to be one of the many great-nephews of Queen Victoria, and when he first appeared on Catch Me as a contestant, he quickly demonstrated an astonishing ability to answer questions ranging from American baseball to nuclear physics, from Shakespeare to science fiction.

  The youthful prince was also an enormously appealing television presence, furrowing his brow boyishly as he struggled to come up with the answer to some particularly abstruse question. Soon this charmingly foreign-accented young nobleman was receiving over ten thousand pieces of fan mail a week, many of them containing marriage proposals. When he correctly answered the question that asked where in Coriolanus Volumnia says, “For the love of Juno, let’s go” (Act II, Scene 1), he became the biggest money winner in the history of television, walking off with total winnings of $175,000. Now he was not only handsome and titled and brainy, but also rich. Following Mimi’s announcement of her engagement, Barbara Badminton began telling all her friends that none other than Prince Fritzi von Maulsen had been invited to her coming-out party, and had accepted

  Her family, Barbara Badminton explained airily, had known the von Maulsens “forever—we’ve stayed at their Schloss,” and she added that Prince Fritzi was just as sweet in person as he was on the tiny screen, “or even sweeter, and ever so much sexier.” To this news she was soon adding the fact that Prince Fritzi had “practically” proposed marriage to her, and that she was considering becoming his princess.

  “But wouldn’t it be kind of scary to be married to a man who’s as smart as that?” Mimi had heard one of Barbara’s friends ask her.

  She had heard Barbara giggle. “He told me they give him the answers to lots of those questions ahead of time,” she said. “Because he’s so good for the ratings. It’s not really
cheating.”

  Meanwhile, Mimi had had no idea, no preparation, for what it meant to be in love. It was something her mother had never discussed with her, and it was something that was not taught in school. In the books she had read, people “fell in love,” but hardly anywhere had she found a description that matched her own terrifying sensation of it. To her, it was like falling off the edge of the earth, it was like a loss of gravity. When she thought of him, her lungs seemed to collapse within her, she was unable to breathe, there was a yawning ache at the pit of her stomach that was almost nausea, her eyes glazed and familiar objects refused to come into focus, and the words of the book she was reading would dissolve into meaningless squiggles on the page. It was not a venereal longing, really, and it seemed to have nothing at all to do with what sex was. Indeed, it made those demonstrations of Old Pete’s from his basement window seem almost comical. It seemed to have no body, no form, no specificality. But just the thought of the fine, soft hairs on the back of one of Michael’s hands could bring on one of these violent surges, and she would lose her balance on the stairs and have to seize the banister for support. Or it could happen just as easily in the history classroom, in the middle of a lecture, the dizziness, and she would have to excuse herself and go to the washroom and, with trembling hands, splash cold water on her face.

  There were other symptoms. She seemed to have lost all appetite for food and had to force herself to eat, to force the straw-tasting Salisbury steak down her throat. She seemed to have lost all awareness of other people, to have been sucked into a kind of void or airless vacuum, and when this happened all the members of the Badminton Set could have stood in a circle all around her, taunting her and calling her names, and she would have been unaware of them. She had trouble concentrating, had difficulty remembering not only names of presidents and dates of wars and atomic weights, but also which dresser drawer contained her stockings and which held her sweaters. Her English teacher, Miss McCauley, was the first to mention it to her.

  “Your work’s been slipping this semester, Mimi,” Miss McCauley said. “Is anything the matter?”

  “No, no.”

  “You forgot that the essay on Coleridge was due today? That’s not like you, Mimi.”

  “I know, I—”

  “You’re not ill, are you?”

  “No, no.” And that, apparently, was when she fainted, felt her legs go weak and fell in a heap on the classroom floor.

  When she woke, she was in a bed in the school infirmary, and the doctor was standing over her. “Can’t find anything wrong with you,” he said. “Your pulse is fine, your blood pressure’s fine. Are you about due to have your period?”

  She nodded yes.

  “I suspect that’s it,” he said.

  At times, she wondered whether in fact she was sick. Early one morning she woke, shivering with icy cold, and discovered that her sheets and bedclothes were soaking wet. It was either from a feverish dream, or she had wet the bed. But she knew what it was. She was in love.

  And it all happened so suddenly, almost without warning. They had met several other times during that midwinter break. They met for skating in the park, and he took her to see the movie Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, and afterward he did a fair imitation of Astaire, touching the tip of her nose with the tip of his finger and saying, “I loff your fah-nee face, your fah-nee face.” And they went to see The Bridge on the River Kwai, and as they were leaving the theatre she said she loved the picture but didn’t understand the ending, and so he insisted on going back into the theatre to see the movie over again until she got the point that the English officer, Alec Guinness, had become so obsessed by the bridge he was building for his Japanese captors that, in the end, he was firing on his own countrymen to defend the bridge from destruction. All through that second showing he held her hand.

  One of the thrilling things about him, she realized, was his supreme self-confidence. In any situation, he moved in immediately and almost casually took command of whatever it was. This made even the most banal occasions seem somehow glamorous. He seemed to be an authority on everything. For instance, when they had gone back to see The Bridge a second time, the attendant at the door had said that it would be necessary to buy two new tickets. “I have my stubs from the earlier showing,” Michael said airily, producing them. “I happen to know that tickets for a movie are good for as many showings of the film as the purchaser wishes to view on any particular day. If there’s any question, send out the manager.” They had gone sweeping back into the theatre like royalty. “You have to know how to talk to these people,” Michael said.

  There had been no more dinners at the Rainbow Room, but there had been pizzas and hamburgers and hot dogs in more pedestrian establishments, and, during this two-week period, there were many days when he was too busy with his studies, and with his project in New Jersey—“the job,” as he called it—to see her at all. He had kept repeating that he was going to marry her, but she had decided that this was some sort of little joke with him.

  Then, on their last night together, he had very gently taken her in his arms, said, “May I?” and kissed her.

  It was certainly a pleasant kiss, bringing with it a bright little tingle of excitement, a little thrill of grownupness that gave her happy dreams that night. But that was all.

  Then, a few days after she had returned to school in Connecticut, there was a letter from him in her mailbox. “Dear Mimi,” it began.

  I have just realized that I have been guilty of a very serious oversight during our recent times together. I realize that I have neglected to tell you that I love you. Let me try to correct that oversight now. I love you, Mimi. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.…

  And he had gone on like that for at least twenty handwritten pages.

  She had immediately picked up a pen and a sheet of embossed school stationery, with its motto, Deum Servire, which the girls in the Badminton Set claimed to find “fantastically hypocritical,” and wrote:

  Dear Michael—I love you too!

  That was when it happened, all at once. She could not catch her breath, her vision blurred, and that groaning ache rose from the pit of her stomach, not nausea but something much more eruptive and overpowering and debilitating, and she knew she was in love, and that it was nothing like anything she had ever read about in any book. She had blindly sealed and addressed the letter, unable to write another single word.

  Today, thirty years later, Mimi Myerson Moore admits that she has never quite felt that way since.

  That Michael feeling.

  14

  “Of course I want to meet him,” her mother said. “I am dying to meet him, and your daddy is dying to meet him, and we will meet him, your lovely Choate boy. But—”

  “I told you, Mother, he’s not from Choate.”

  “Of course. I forgot. Where did you say he went to school?”

  “He’s just graduated from Columbia Business School.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. You did tell me that. That means he’s older than you, but that’s all right. Oh, this is so exciting, isn’t it, Mimi? Your first beau!”

  “He wants to marry me, Mother.”

  “Yes, yes, you told me that. But the thing is, before we go into this any further, before your daddy and I even meet this young man and discuss all this, there is something you must do first.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, even though she was fairly sure she knew what the first thing was.

  “You must discuss this with your grandfather, Mimi. You know how hurt he gets when he thinks anything is being planned behind his back, when he even suspects that something has been planned behind his back.”

  Mimi said nothing.

  “A letter, I think,” her mother said. “Yes, I think a nice letter from you on your personal stationery, asking if you can come to see him. On a matter of a personal nature. Concerning your future. Yes, I think that would be th
e way to put it. That you would like to see him on a matter of a personal nature, concerning your future.”

  “Why does everything have to have his approval, Mother?”

  “Why? Well, you know why, silly! Because he controls everything. Everything you, or I, or your father does, your grandfather controls. Surely you know that. And until he dies”—suddenly her mother’s eyes went blank—“until he dies, that’s the way it’s going to be.”

  “What does he control, exactly?”

  “Why, the money, of course! Where would you or I or your father be if it weren’t for his money? Where would we be? Out on the street. Beggars. He knows that, and that’s why he must be a part of any family decision.”

  “Then why couldn’t we tell him that I went to Miss Hall’s on a scholarship?”

  “What?” her mother cried. “But that was something entirely different, Mimi. Entirely different! You must never tell your grandfather that. Never!”

  “Why is that different, Mother?”

  “Because it just … is. If your grandfather found out that we couldn’t afford, well, he just wouldn’t understand, that’s all.”

  “Why wouldn’t he understand?”

  “Oh, Mimi, it’s all so complicated. Can’t you just take my word for it that he wouldn’t understand? You see, he thinks he pays your father this big salary, enough for us to live in the lap of luxury, the way he does. But if he knew where the money goes—”

  “Where does it go, Mother?”

  “If he knew where the money goes, that would be the end of everything—for all of us.”

  “But where does the money go?”

  Her mother hesitated, and her eyes withdrew. “It just … goes,” she said. “Things are expensive. Bills … bills. Shall I show you the stack of bills on my desk? Dentists’ bills, doctors’ bills—”

  “None of us have been to the dentist or a doctor lately.”

  “Other bills. Take my word for it, there are bills. I could show you the stack of bills on my desk, if you’d like.”