Shades of Fortune (14 page)

Her grandfather returned to his seat on one end of the curved sofa, and then for the longest time—an eternity, as Mimi remembers it—no one said anything at all.

Finally her grandfather spoke. “You are in school, Mireille,” he said, putting it as a statement, not a question.

“Yes, Grandpapa, sir.”

“And are your grades exemplary?”

Mimi had not understood this word but, inferring that an affirmative reply was expected, she said, “Yes, Grandpapa, sir.”

“Oh, she's doing just wonderfully, Father!” her mother had said a trifle too quickly and loudly. “Her teachers send home the most glowing reports!”

Mimi remembers her grandfather giving her mother a long, somewhat baleful look, and there was silence again. Her grandmother had resumed her needlework.

From out of some dark corner of this cavernous room a maid appeared in a black uniform with a white lacy collar and cuffs, wearing a small lacy cap, wheeling a huge silver tea service on a lace-draped cart. The maid wheeled the cart in front of Mimi's grandmother, who inspected its contents—a large silver urn and its accompanying vessels: teacups and saucers and other smaller silver bowls and pitchers for hot water, for milk, and for sugar. As her grandmother began to pour from the great silver urn, Mimi noticed that she was wearing little black lace wrist-length gloves that had no fingers! Her grandmother poured for her husband first, then for Mimi's mother, and the maid transported each person's cup to each. Knowing that her turn would be next, Mimi removed the white glove from her right hand, removing it finger by finger, starting with the pinky, as her mother had taught her, and placed it in her left hand.

“One lump or two, Mireille?” her grandmother said. It was the first time she had spoken.

In a panic, Mimi had looked quickly at her mother. They had not rehearsed this part of the ritual.

From where her hands lay in her lap, her mother raised one gloved fingertip.

“One lump, please, Grandmama, ma'am,” Mimi said.

One lump of sugar was tonged into her cup, and the cup was delivered to Mimi, who accepted it with her ungloved right hand. Then there was silence again, and, in another panic, Mimi began to realize that she did want to go to the toilet but had no idea where the bathroom was in this vast house. She squeezed her legs tightly together.

They sipped their tea. The maid reappeared with a silver tray arranged with tiny sandwiches. Mimi accepted one. It was made of the thinnest white bread she had ever seen, and inside it there was a tiny sliver of cucumber, which, as Mimi remembers it, had absolutely no taste at all. She heard her mother whisper, “Sit up straight, dear.”

Finally, her grandfather put down his teacup, rose, and crossed the room to some dim and distant corner of it. When he returned, he was carrying a small, leather-bound book. “This will interest you,” he said and, sitting down again, opened the book to a page marked by a leather bookmark.

“Tomorrow morning, a Monday, the third,” he began, “I have a marketing meeting at ten o'clock. I can devote no more than half an hour to that, because at ten-thirty I must telephone Paris and reach them before their offices close at five. Now that the war is over, Revson is going to try to beat us into the European market, but we're not going to let him. At eleven-thirty, I have an appointment with my dentist. At twelve-thirty, I am lunching with Andrew Goodman at the Plaza. Bergdorf's has not been displaying our products to the best advantage, and I intend to correct that situation with Andrew himself. At two-thirty, I have a …”

He was reading to her from the pages of his engagement calendar. He continued reading until he had recited every appointment on his calendar for the entire week that was to follow. Then he closed the book after Friday's last meeting of the day, and it was time to go.

Rising, Mimi's grandfather turned to her mother and said, “We shall do this again next Sunday, Alice. Four o'clock, for tea. Here.”

As they left the house, Mimi's mother ran down the marble steps, clutching Mimi's hand in hers. “He's invited us
back!
” she cried. “Do you know what this
means?
It means he
likes
us, darling, because he's invited us back!” She waved excitedly for a taxi in the street.

In the taxi, Alice Myerson said, “Isn't this
exciting!
Oh, your father will be so pleased. I can't wait to tell him! He'll be so pleased with you! So pleased with me!” From her reticule where she kept it, her mother removed a small flask, uncapped it, lifted it to her lips, and took a long swallow. “My medicine,” she said.

But from her seat in the taxi beside her mother, Mimi, though her legs were squeezed together as tightly as she could squeeze them, could no longer control herself. She felt the first warm drops. Then it all came.

Her eyes brimming with tears of shame, she whispered to her mother what had happened, but her mother seemed totally unconcerned. “It doesn't matter,” she laughed. “We did it. He's asked us back! Do you see what this means, my darling? It means that everything's going to be all right!”

Of course, at the time, Mimi had no idea what her mother was talking about.

“And so that,” Mimi says to Jim Greenway, “is what my mother and I did from that day on—until I was twelve years old and went away to boarding school. Every Sunday afternoon, we'd get dressed up and go to have tea at my grandparents' house, four o'clock on the dot. It was always the same: the same little tasteless cucumber sandwiches, my grandmother with her needlework, saying nothing. It wasn't until after he died that she began to get garrulous. I think that when he was around she was too frightened of him to open her trap! And it always ended with Grandpa reading from his appointment book—everything he was doing the following week, the lunches with captains of industry, the dinners with senators, the weekly sales meetings, the appointments with his proctologist—
everything
. You see, I think that's where Granny is confused when she talks about a diary. It wasn't a diary, it was just an appointment book.… Needless to say, I finally found out where the bathroom was. And do I need to add that it had a toilet disguised as an antique wicker chair?

“What was the point of it all? Afterward, we'd go home to our miserable little dark apartment on Ninety-seventh Street, and the more of these teas I went to, the more confused I became. Obviously my grandparents were rich, but why weren't we? I couldn't understand it. I knew my father worked for my grandfather's company and had a title of vice-president in charge of something or other, but no money seemed to go with it. We had no butler, no cook, no maids—nothing but an old black lady who came once a week for a couple of hours and ran a dustrag around the place. My mother did her own cooking, her own ironing and mending, everything. It was terribly confusing to me. My uncle Edwee, Daddy's brother, was rich—and he didn't even work! So was my aunt Nonie. But we weren't. There was never enough money in our house, and there were always arguments, terrible arguments, about it. All I was able to conclude was that Grandpa gave Daddy a job, and that Daddy was lucky to have that, and he gave him a fancy title but no money to go with it. And I began to realize that these Sunday visits, these high teas, had something to do with trying to get Grandpa to give more money to Daddy, but no more money ever came.

“I was right about this, in a way, but I was also wrong. Years later, when Grandpa was an old man, he said something to me about ‘how hard your grandmother and I worked to try to get your mother to control her drinking.' I thought at the time: What is he talking about? What had they ever done to try to control my mother's drinking? Then I realized that as far as
they
were concerned, that was what all those high teas were for! They thought they were trying to control my mother's drinking by giving her high tea on Sunday afternoons! What horse-shit! What utter horseshit! She'd start drinking as soon as we'd get into the cab, with a belt of Scotch—‘My medicine,' she called it.…

“You see, my mother is an alcoholic—a recovering alcoholic, as they say. Recover
ing
, not recovered, because they tell you that alcoholism is a disease from which you never recover. My mother has been through the program at the Betty Ford Center, and maybe, perhaps, we'll see …” She crosses her fingers and closes her eyes, making a wish. “That outburst of hers at my house the other night wasn't a drunken outburst, it was an outburst of sobriety. Which is worse, I sometimes wonder, drunkenness or sobriety? At least when my mother was drinking, she could be gay—sometimes. Not always, of course. But at least she was never … boring.”

Mimi runs her fingers through her fine hair and says, “Why am I telling you all this, Jim Greenway? Why am I suddenly being so frank with you? Usually, I don't trust journalists. On television, if you make a horse's ass of yourself, it's your own fault: you did that, you said that, and you sounded like a horse's ass. But with a journalist, you have no control. A journalist, if he doesn't like you, if he
thinks
you're a horse's ass, can rearrange the quotes, add what's called ‘analysis and interpretation,' and turn you into a horse's ass on his word processor. I'm usually never as candid with journalists as I'm being with you. Why?”

“Perhaps because you can tell I like you and don't think you're a horse's ass. And perhaps because you can tell that I admire honest people and try to be one myself.”

“Am I like old Diogenes, then, wandering through the streets of Athens, with my lantern, searching for an honest man?”

“I think you've already found several honest men.”

“Really? Who?”

“Your husband. Your son. Mark Segal, your ad director. And, I hope, me.”

“You think so?”

“I think so,” I said.

Because there is really no point in keeping up the pretense any longer that Jim Greenway and I are not the same person. It has become a dumb pretense at this point, though giving it up goes against all the journalistic principles I was taught in school. “Be careful to distance yourself from your subject,” I was taught. “Never become involved with the people you write about. Depersonalize yourself from your subject matter. Beware of the first-person pronoun.” I even had one professor who said, in all seriousness, “A good journalist should not have friends.”

And so, in dropping the pretense, am I admitting that I am not a good journalist?

It was not that, in the short time I had known her, I had become “involved” with Mimi, in the romantic sense that the word
involvement
implies. It was more that I was developing an attachment to her, an attraction to her that made me want to be her friend, and to keep her as a friend.

There was something about her that made me keep wanting to know more. When she spoke of her grandfather, for instance, that same pensive, troubled look would strike her face that I had seen after her talk with Michael Horowitz. It was a haunted look that would streak across her eyes. This woman, I sensed, was haunted by ghosts from the past: her grandfather, her father, her mother's drinking. For all her jauntiness—the way her skirts swung, her hands deep in her pockets, as she strolled through the offices of her company, the swing of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the cocky tilt of her chin—for all her apparent self-possession, her self-deprecating humor, even her occasional outbursts of mild vulgarity, I sensed that beneath all this lay a little girl too afraid to ask where the bathroom was and who, overcome by fear, would finally find herself having to pee in a taxi. From the look in her eyes, that hunted and haunted look when she spoke of her grandfather, I suspected that she was still frightened of a man who had been dead for nearly thirty years.

Isn't it interesting, I thought, the way a human life can become polarized around one particular event, or person, in the past? Polarized.

Later, of course, I would discover that the polar point, that center of gravity of Mimi Myerson's life, was someone altogether different.

6

Adolph Myerson's first great ambition, once he realized he was becoming a rich man, too rich to bother with the new Jewish bourgeoisie that was moving into the Bronx (I learned all this later from my conversations with Granny Flo), was to become a member of the congregation of Temple Emanu-El.

In those days, membership at Emanu-El was probably the greatest Jewish status symbol in the city of New York. From humble beginnings in a dreary railroad flat on the Lower East Side, and with a starting treasury of about eleven dollars, the congregation and its congregants had grown and prospered to the point where, in less than two generations' time, Temple Emanu-El occupied a splendid edifice right on Fifth Avenue, where it stood cheek by jowl with the great churches and cathedrals of the Christian faiths—a symbol of a degree of assimilation that Jews, nowhere in their history, had ever known before. It was a symbol of the triumph of the Reform Movement, of reason and rationality over Old World barbarism and provincialism. It was also a symbol of the triumphs of the American capitalist system, for the German Jews who founded it and whose families still ran it had nearly all arrived penniless from Europe in pursuit of the American Dream. Here they had pursued it and, in a remarkably short space of time, captured it, through successful careers in commerce, banking, and industry. The very splendor of the temple itself—its magnificent stained-glass windows, its hand-laid mosaic walls, its vaulting ceilings, its cascading chandeliers—announced proudly to the world that for some, at least—those willing to work hard, lead upright lives, give honest weight, and be a little lucky—America was indeed the Land of Golden Opportunity.

Attendance at a Sabbath service at Temple Emanu-El was free and open to all, to Jews and Christians alike. After all, no house of worship in America can legally close its doors to any orderly person. But membership in Temple Emanu-El was something else again. It was a little like being taken into a private club. The temple was governed by a board of trustees, all of whom were members of what had by then become New York's uptown German-Jewish establishment, and among the trustees' duties was the assignment of certain pews to certain families. Needless to say, the best pews in the sanctuary—those in front, closest to the pulpit, and those along the west wall—had long been rented by Loebs, Lehmans, and Lewisohns, who were all related to each other, and by other Loebs, Schiffs, and Warburgs, who were also related to each other, as well as by Seligmans, who were related by marriage to everybody else. The rentals of these principal pews were passed along from one family generation to the next.