Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Well, that was different, I admit. That was my last Hing. You might say that I did that deliberately, to prove …”

  “To prove what, Mother?”

  “Oh, you ask the same sort of questions they ask at the Ford Center. To prove that I could fail, they’d say! But you don’t understand. After your father died, and I was all alone—with no real family left, and no real friends except my medicine, with you married—all my life I’d lived for your father, and for you, Mimi.”

  “Nonsense. You and Daddy fought like cats and dogs—and it was usually about your drinking.”

  “But we were used to it, that was the thing. We had our quarrels, yes, but we always made up afterward. You never saw the making-up part. There were happy times that you didn’t see. No one ever saw the happy times. And there were other happy times you couldn’t have seen because they were before you were born. They’re what I’d like to tell Mr. Greenway about, those.” Her mother rises and moves toward the sideboard at the corner of the room, and watching her, Mimi notices that her mother’s footsteps are heavy and slow. She watches as her mother stoops and opens the cabinet door and looks at its solitary contents. “Facing my enemy,” she says. And then, “What would you say, Mimi, if I said, ‘Let’s you and I have a drink right now’? What would you say?”

  “I’d say, ‘No thank you.’”

  “What if I asked you to fix me a drink, the way you used to? What would you say?”

  “I’d say, ‘No, you can fix your own drink, Mother.’”

  “And if I fixed one anyway, what would you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Her mother looks at her narrowly. “And what would you think if you found out, after you leave tonight, that I’ve gone ahead and had a drink, or maybe more than one? What would you think then?”

  “I suppose I’d sort of shrug, and think, Well, I guess the old girl doesn’t have the guts to do it after all.”

  Her mother sits down hard on a small chair. “Then you don’t really care,” she says. “You don’t really care what becomes of me.”

  “Caring has nothing to do with it, Mother. I loved you when you were drinking. I love you now. Please don’t try to confuse my loving, and my caring, with what you decide to do with your life. The Betty Ford Center was your idea, remember? I didn’t suggest it. I didn’t try to push you into it. But I supported it because I thought it was something you wanted for yourself, to make you feel better about yourself. I’d watched you go in and out of other programs. I agreed with you that one more would be worth a try, that’s all.”

  “You went out there with me! I was terribly touched when you offered to do that.”

  “Well, in retrospect, that may have been a mistake. Perhaps I should have let you go alone. After all, it was your idea.”

  “But the trouble is, I don’t feel any better about myself. I feel just the same. If anything, I feel worse.”

  “If that’s the case, that makes me very sad, Mother.”

  “I just don’t know! I sit here, and I think, What difference does it make? I’m getting old, and perhaps I’m too old, now, to change, and even if I change now, what difference does it make? I behaved badly at your dinner party, didn’t I? I made a scene.”

  “I understand that, Mother.”

  “I was cold sober, but I made a scene—the kind of scene I used to make when I was drunk, so what’s the difference? And Dr. Bergler! I think they should call him Dr. Burglar, sitting there in his office for a hundred and twenty dollars an hour! What good does it do? Today, for the whole hour, we said almost nothing. I feel I’ve run out of things to say to him. For a while, I actually thought he might have fallen asleep in that overstuffed chair of his! Then, at the end of the hour, he suddenly said, ‘Alice, do you feel responsible for what happened to your husband?’ And, coming home in the taxi, I thought: Yes, yes I do feel responsible.”

  “That’s silly, Mother. Daddy’s only problem was a father who wanted absolute power over everybody, and when his absolute power was challenged, he turned mean.”

  “No, no, there was more to it than that. I did something very bad, way back in the beginning.”

  “What was that?”

  “Guts. You talk about guts. I had guts in the beginning, believe it or not.” She stands up again, closing the cabinet door, and begins twisting the rings again on her thin fingers, moving slowly around the room. “More guts than was good for me, you might say. I said to Henry, ‘If you don’t confront him with this, I will!’ And that took guts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her mother pauses by the window, parting the glass curtains with her fingertips. “There’s one squirrel out there who chases all the others. I watch him every day. He’s always chasing the others, from branch to branch, from tree to tree. All the other squirrels must hate him. I was like that, in the beginning.”

  Mimi says nothing, waiting for her mother to continue.

  “You see, I was young, and I was naive, but I was ambitious, and I loved your father. I was ambitious for him. To me, he was a kind of genius—a genius whom his father refused to recognize. All he gave him in the company was lots of money, and lots of titles—vice-president in charge of this or that—but no authority, and no responsibilities. We lived well, your father and I, in those days, but you don’t remember any of that. We didn’t always live in that awful apartment on Ninety-seventh Street. We lived in style, at Eleven East Sixty-sixth Street, just a few doors from the Park. You don’t remember Eleven East Sixty-sixth Street, because you were just a baby, barely a toddler, when we had to give that up, but it’s still there. I walk by it now and then. I notice many doorbells by the entrance, so it must have been broken up, but in nineteen thirty-seven, when we were first married and your grandfather bought it for us as a wedding present, it was all ours: four stories, plus the basement, with an elevator, and a pretty garden in the back. For parties, we’d cover the garden with a tent, a yellow tent!”

  “Why have I never heard about any of this before?” Mimi asks.

  “It’s your Mr. Greenway, I suppose. Calling up and stirring up all these memories, things I’ve been trying to forget. And I was—like that squirrel—always goading your father, pushing him, saying, ‘Stand up to your father. Make him give you some responsibilities in the company! Force him to recognize your talent!’ But Henry kept telling me, ‘Just be patient. Be patient, these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ he’d say, but I wasn’t patient. And after you were born, I grew even more impatient, because now we were a family, with our child’s future to consider. Can you understand that, Mimi?”

  “Of course.”

  “And one day he came home from the office, very upset, and when I asked him what was the matter, he told me. It was something he’d suspected for a long time, and he’d found evidence to confirm it. The company had Mafia people on the payroll. They were using these people to intimidate the competition—to misdirect overseas shipments at the piers, to shoot holes in the tires of distributors’ trucks, to hijack competitors’ orders. There was even the possibility that there had been a murder. It was Revlon that Miray was after, mostly, because Revlon was the upstart and becoming their biggest competition. I said to Henry, ‘Here’s your chance! Go to your father and tell him what you know! Tell him that if he doesn’t give you the kind of position and the kind of responsibilities you deserve, you’ll go to the police! You’ll go to the FBI! You’ll go to the press! Make him turn over the company to you!’ But Henry said, ‘No, no, that isn’t the way to do it.’ He said that it was mostly his uncle Leo who seemed to have gotten the company into this mess, and that his father was already working on ways to force his uncle Leo out, and that if everybody would be patient—patient!—things would all work out in the end. And that’s when I said, ‘Well, if you won’t confront him with what you know, I will!’

  “Your father begged me not to, but I was so positive that this was the way to get both of them out—his father and
his uncle Leo—that that’s what I did.

  “Your grandfather was furious. I’d never seen him so angry. He called me a blackmailer, and worse things than that. He called me a meddling yenta. He accused me of interfering with his company’s business. He said he could never respect a man who’d let his wife interfere at her husband’s place of employment. He denied everything that Henry knew was true and said that I was nothing but an interfering, busybody wife. He threw me out of his house, told me he never wanted to see me again. It wasn’t until years later—you must have been about seven—that he would speak to me or have me in the house. Then he suddenly invited you and me to tea—do you remember that?—and I thought maybe he’d forgiven me. But I was wrong.

  “But that was the beginning of everything, when everything started to go wrong, because of what I’d done. He punished Henry terribly for what I’d done. Was I wrong to do it, Mimi?”

  “Knowing Grandpa as I did, yes, I would have to say yes, Mother, it was wrong.”

  “But at the time I didn’t think so! I thought it would help my husband—help him command his father’s respect. But obviously it didn’t work. That was when the money began to … go. There were other things. That was when I began to drink. I drank because I was miserable. Then the house, Eleven East Sixty-sixth Street, went. And we couldn’t afford anything anymore, no more parties under the yellow tent. We couldn’t afford to entertain our friends because there was never enough money, and our friends couldn’t understand it, and they began to think—I heard someone say this—that your father and I were ‘peculiar,’ and they stopped entertaining us. And so everything bad that happened was because of what I did. And so Dr. Bergler hit on something, didn’t he? I do feel responsible.”

  “I think you just didn’t realize the kind of man you were dealing with,” Mimi says.

  “I’ve never told anyone about any of this,” her mother says. “I’ve never even told Dr. Bergler. Maybe I’ll tell him in our next session. At least that will give us something to talk about!”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember that young man you wanted to marry, Mimi—Michael Horowitz? Do you remember how your grandpa put a stop to that? Maybe if I hadn’t done what I did, that would have worked out differently, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He was so in love with you, Mimi, I could tell. Didn’t you say he went to Choate? And you were in love with him, too. But your daddy was right about that one, too. He said, ‘Patience, be patient,” or something like that—and less than three years later Old Moneybags was dead!”

  “Yes.”

  “And I remember how helpful Michael Horowitz was to us after your grandpa died, when it turned out Old Moneybags had hardly any money left! It makes me smile, when I read in the papers about how rich Mr. Horowitz has become. If your grandpa had known that was going to happen, he might have whistled a different tune. Do you ever see Mr. Horowitz anymore?”

  “Oh, yes. From time to time.”

  “Isn’t it ironic how life works out? It’s thanks to him, really—and of course to you, Mimi—that we’re all rich again. Here I am, coming toward the end of my life, and rich again! I had a real estate agent call me just the other day and tell me he could get four million for this house! He said it was the prettiest house in Turtle Bay! Yet I wouldn’t have had it if it hadn’t been for what he did, first, and then later, what you did for Miray. Isn’t life funny?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And now you have your wonderful Brad. He’s made you wonderfully happy, hasn’t he, dear?”

  Mimi says nothing.

  “So everything works out for the best. And now I have my wonderful grandson, Badger. So handsome! And such a good young man, too, isn’t he? Badger is the future. That’s what I must think about now—the future, not the past. Oh, Mimi, isn’t it wonderful to sit here on a summer afternoon and think about the future? I feel so much better, dear, for having talked to you! Thank you for coming over and helping me get all these things off my chest. My jitteriness is gone now, Mimi. My jumpiness is gone, just for having talked to you. And … guess what? I don’t want a drink now, Mimi! I don’t think I’ll ever want another drink as long as I live. I’ve got half a mind to throw that bottle of whiskey out the window and into the courtyard.” She laughs brightly. “But then they’d … have me arrested for littering. That would be just my luck, wouldn’t it? Arrested for littering? But I do think I’m getting my guts back, Mimi. I’m going to try, anyway. I’m going to try, so hard.”

  Mimi rises and moves toward her mother, who is still standing by the window, and puts her hand on the soft portion of her mother’s upper arm. “Mother, dear,” she says.

  “I’m fine, now,” her mother says.

  From the notes:

  Driving up to Westchester in the back seat of one of Mimi’s big company cars today (one of the perks of doing a story on the beauty business is that wherever you want to go, to tour a factory or visit a lab, they send a limo to take you there), I did a stupid thing.

  Mimi seemed a little preoccupied, the way she’s been for the last couple of days, and our conversation was mostly small talk—how the Bronx keeps creeping northward, that sort of thing. But, sitting beside her in the closed quarters of a back seat, the thing I’d never noticed about her before was how wonderful she smelled. I’d never been with a woman who smelled as good as she did. Finally, I commented on it.

  She laughed that ripply, pebbly laugh of hers and told me that she was wearing her new fragrance.

  Christ! She must think me an unobservant ass! What else would it have been?

  Our destination was a rather pretentious house in Scarsdale, one of those stucco-and-exposed-beam jobs, with a brass carriage lamp at the foot of the drive and a cast-iron blackamoor holding out a ring for a hitching post. Even before ringing the doorbell, I knew it would produce musical chimes. (It did.) Before we got out of the car, Mimi said, “Do me a favor, Jim. Kiss my left shoulder … for luck. It’s got to be the left one. Do you mind? I’m superstitious.”

  By now, I had the explanation of what I had witnessed that night with Felix. And if, when I touched my lips to her shoulder and drank in that heady perfume again, I squeezed her arms a little too tightly and pressed my body a little too close to hers, she seemed not to notice, probably because her mind was on other things.

  Our hostess, Louise Bernhardt, turned to be a pleasant enough woman, slender and elegantly suburban-looking, with frosted hair, given to chunky silver bracelets, though she was quite taken aback when she answered the door and realized that the woman I was with was the famous Mimi Myerson. But Mimi carried it off beautifully. “Cousin Louise,” she said, and gave her a little peck on the cheek. “I’ve wanted to meet you for years. Isn’t it silly that whatever it was that divided this family has gone on for nearly two generations, when no one even remembers what the thing that divided us was? One of the things I’m determined to do is to bring the scattered members of the family together again.”

  As an interview subject, however, Mrs. Bernhardt was not very helpful. When I got around to what I call The Big Question—how Adolph Myerson was able to force his brother out of the company when they were fifty-fifty shareholders of its stock—her answer—honest, I think—was:

  “I just don’t know. As you say, Adolph couldn’t have voted my grandfather out, since they were equal partners. It all happened before I was born, of course, and my grandfather would never talk about it. All I know is that he was very bitter. As children, we weren’t even allowed to utter the name Adolph Myerson in his presence. Sorry, Mimi,” she said with a nod in her direction.

  “That’s perfectly all right.”

  “And here’s another mystery,” I said. “After Leo left the company in nineteen forty-one, and for the next eighteen years until Adolph died in nineteen fifty-nine, Leopold Myerson’s office was maintained at the company headquarters.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Nothing in that
office was changed. It was kept exactly as he left it. The building staff cleaned it and dusted it, but no one else ever occupied it or sat at your grandfather’s desk. It sat empty for eighteen years. After a while, people in the company began referring to that empty office as ‘the other Mr. Myerson’s office.’ It was almost as though your grandfather’s office was maintained as a kind of shrine. But that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Why, I wonder?”

  “I simply have no idea.”

  “Neither do I,” Mimi said.

  “Can I offer you some tea? Lemonade? A drink?”

  “Did your father ever mention any of this?”

  “My father died in nineteen sixty-two when I was a very little girl.”

  “Coincidence—that was the year Mimi’s father died.”

  “Well, yes. I was eight years old.” She stood up and fished for a cigarette from a silver box. “Does anyone mind if I smoke? We’re the last persecuted minority, we smokers! You see, my father was murdered. I thought perhaps you knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes. His body was found in the Saw Mill River. He’d been strangled with a bicycle chain. I can speak dispassionately of all this, because I barely remember him. My mother remarried not long afterward, and it was my stepfather whom I grew up calling Daddy. The murderer was never found. The presumed motive was robbery. He was known to carry large amounts of cash, and his billfold was missing, along with a gold watch and a couple of rings he wore. Are you sure I can’t offer you some tea?”

  After that, it was clear she had little else to offer, and for a while she and Mimi chatted about the family: Louise’s children, and what they were doing in school, Louise’s two brothers, their wives, and their children. Then it all at once became clear that Mimi had another reason for wanting to accompany me on this journey. It was not just to have a clubby reunion with a long-lost second cousin, and at first I was annoyed with her for not coming clean with me. But I forgive her because at least now I know what her recent business with Horowitz has been all about.