Shades of Fortune (17 page)

“This soup is delicious, Matilda!” Miss Emily said.

“Thank you, Miss Emily. It is made from larks' tongues and quails' eggs, of tiny golden apples from sunny Spain, of spices grown in the Fairy Islands, of herbs cultivated in far Cathay, of honey and hibiscus blossom and raspberry flowers, and salted with Mother's tears.…”

“You see, Mr. Greenway,” Granny Flo is saying, “the thing that distinguished my husband from his brother, Leo, was that my husband came up with the idea of giving his colors
names
. I mean, he named his colors. He was the first one to do that. Before that, if a nail polish was pink, it was called pink. If it was red, it said ‘red' on the label, and if it was clear, it said ‘clear.' But Adolph was clever. I think I told you that his first color was from a paint that was supposed to be the color of a fire engine. So what did Adolph decide to call it? He called it ‘Three Alarm.' Wasn't that clever? Three Alarm caught on right away. Women liked it, and they liked the name. All those others who came later, Revlon, Arden, Rubinstein, and the rest, with their fancy names for colors—they just copied Adolph. He was the first, with Three Alarm.” Granny Flo spreads her fingers. “I remember the first time he painted
my
nails with Three Alarm; I thought it was so pretty. Adolph used to say that I had pretty hands, and he loved to have me wear his polishes. He liked me to wear the kind of little lace gloves that have the fingers cut out, so that I could display my fingers—and his polishes, of course! You may notice that I no longer wear nail polish. That's not out of disloyalty to my husband. It's because I can no longer see my fingernails, and my pretty hands, so what's the point?”

“Your granddaughter mentioned that your husband used to read from an appointment book, Mrs. Myerson.”

“Oh, yes. His appointment book. Every Sunday afternoon.”

“Was that what you meant when you mentioned a diary the other night?”

“Oh, no. The appointment book was an appointment book. The diary was a diary. He put everything in the diary, the good things and the bad. He read the appointment book to us to remind us of how busy he was, of how hard he had to work, and also to help him memorize all the appointments he had in the week to come. It was a loose-leaf thing. At the end of each week, he threw all the used pages out. But the diaries he kept. Eventually, there was a stack of them”—she holds out her hand—“there was a stack this high. He used to read aloud to me from them. I was never much of a reader, but I liked to listen to Adolph read to me from his diaries. He never read to anyone else from these because, well, frankly, Mr. Greenway, because there were a lot of things in there that were confidential. Family matters. Not for publication.”

“And the diaries are gone now?”

“Gone, yes. Disappeared. If you ask me, Leo took them, but I can't prove that. Leo's dead now, and there's no way of proving that. Leo was a crook.”

“A crook?”

She holds up her hand. “No. Don't put that in. Don't put it in that I said Leo was a crook. Leo is dead, and speak no ill of the dead is what I always say. Just say that Adolph and Leo had … different business philosophies. Yes, that sounds good. Different business philosophies. And my husband was smarter, what with coming up with the idea of names.”

“Can you remember any details from the diaries, Mrs. Myerson?”

“Ha!” she says. “I might choose to remember some of the good things, Mr. Greenway. But you won't get me to remember the bad things. You heard what Mimi said Thursday night at her party: ‘Say only nice things about the company to Mr. Greenway.' I was thinking before you arrived that there are some not-so-nice things I could say about my son Edwee—things even my daughter doesn't know—but I'm not going to say them. They're not for publication—not yet, anyway. We'll see. Besides, most of the bad things are dead things now. They died with my husband, with Leo … and with poor Henry, I suppose. But where was I? Oh, the good things, the good things …”

“What are the good things, Mrs. Myerson?”

“The good things are that we're the recognized leader in the American cosmetics industry today!” she says triumphantly. “And you can quote me!
That's
for publication. The Magnificent Myersons—that's what they called us back in the thirties. That was the headline of the article about us in
Town & Country
. I could probably dig the article out for you, if you'd like. They called us magnificent then. Then there were some hard times. But now we're magnificent again, and you must give Mimi all the credit for that.”

Now, as I set this material down, I notice that a strange thing has begun to happen. Though I have been working on this story for less than four weeks, it is as though each member of the Myerson family is trying to adopt me, for his or her personal reasons. It is as though I am to serve as a kind of private messenger, a bearer of personal sentiments between them. There are only seven members of the immediate family (I am not counting Edwee's wife, Gloria, as an immediate family member), so this doesn't present much of a chore. But it's as if, even in a family as small as this one, lines of communication between the individuals are often jammed. And I have been assigned the task of unjamming them, passing along the little dispatches from one to another. I feel a bit like Jodie, who is the traffic manager in Mimi's office, a formidable Irishwoman whose formidable responsibility it is to see that each new job is carried out from initial concept to finished product ready to be shipped.

For instance, when I was interviewing Brad Moore in his Wall Street office yesterday about the problems—or rewards—of a two-career household, he said a strange thing. I see Brad as a decent, intelligent, and somewhat shy man who, as a lawyer, doesn't want his own feelings to be revealed too much. Behind the obvious polish and poise of the man, there is a certain dignified reserve, and it is easy to see why, in considering various New Yorkers to fill the late Armitage Miller's unexpired term in the U.S. Senate, the name of Bradford Moore, Jr., has been brought up several times. But occasionally there are breaks in that reserve. And yesterday he suddenly said to me, “You know, Jim, you must make it clear in whatever you write about us that my wife is the most important person in the world to me. Not just the most important woman. The most important
person
. Whatever you hear in this very gossipy business she's in, no matter what you may hear the gossips say, she is the most important person in the world to me.”

I thought: Fair enough. Then I thought, “My wife.” Not “Mimi.” And, question: If he wishes to convey the message that his wife is the most important person in the world to him, why does he tell me? Does he want me to pass that word along to her? Has he ever told her that himself?

7

It is Wednesday night, and Mimi and Brad Moore are having dinner at home alone at 1107 Fifth Avenue. “This will be a rare pleasure, sir!” she said to him cheerfully on the phone when he called to say that, for a change, he would not be working late tonight.

“A rare pleasure?”

“It seems like ages since you and I have had dinner together at the usual time and place.”

“Only three and a half weeks.”

“Anyway, we can have a good talk, darling. I've got loads to tell you about.” And she thought: Interesting, that he has been keeping count of the days and weeks as well. But counting them, perhaps, for a different reason.

She has been telling him about her idea for applying a scar to the face of the male model, but he has seemed only mildly interested. “Anyway,” she says, “who knows whether it'll work? I hope I'm not boring you with this.”

“It's not that,” he says, spooning his fresh raspberry dessert from a raspberry-decorated dessert plate. “It's just that I don't have a pictorial sort of mind, I guess. It's hard for me to visualize what differences it would make.”

“Do I have a pictorial sort of mind? Maybe I do. You, being a lawyer, have a mind trained to deal with facts, which is why you're so good at what you do. Me, in the beauty business, I deal all day with fantasy—artifice. Women's fantasies, for the most part, not hard, male facts.”

“Are facts exclusively male?”

“I think, for the most part, yes. Don't you think women fantasize more than men do?”

“I've never really thought about it,” he says.

“You see? There you are. The difference.”

They sit catercorner at one end of the long candlelit table, and she thinks: Is she blackmailing you, my darling, this nameless, faceless woman? Surely you, the brilliant lawyer, would know how to deal with a blackmailer. But I do know this: if she is blackmailing you, then I do hate her, this other woman whom I would love to hate. She says, “Is something on your mind, darling? You seem … preoccupied. Is it the Sturtevant case still?”

He touches his lips with his napkin. “Well, yes, I suppose so. It's still going on. It's all over money, of course. Sturtevant
père
versus Sturtevant
fils
. I had to spend an hour this afternoon listening to Sturtevant
père
tell me what an asshole his son is. Can you imagine it? A father and his son fighting over money?”

She laughs softly. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I can,” she says.

“Oops. Sorry. I forgot about that.”

“And it's not that
much
money, is it?”

“Lousy thirty thousand dollars. By the way, I met Leonard Lauder today.”

“Ah. My stiffest competition.”

“Somebody brought him over to my table at lunch and introduced him. He said, ‘I know who you are—you're Mimi Myerson's husband.'”

“Honestly. I'd have thought Leonard could have come up with a snappier opening line than
that
.” And she thinks: So, my midnight guess was correct. It
does
bother him, this sort of thing. It's gone on for years, but it's finally begun to get under his skin, and who can blame him? She says, “And so what did
you
say?”

“I said, ‘And I bet you're one of Estée Lauder's kids.'”

“Ah!” she cries. “Good for you, Brad. Wonderful. I can just see the expression on Leonard's big, dopey face!”

“He did look a bit, well, crestfallen, I guess.”

“Does that sort of thing bother you, Brad? Tell me the truth. I mean, I get it too. At that Statue of Liberty party, for instance, when your firm hired that party boat, and it was all lawyers. And all the men, and their wives, came up to me and said, ‘You must be Brad Moore's wife.' Most of them had never heard of Mimi Myerson.”

“Hell, I'm used to it by now,” he says.

“But it isn't always Leonard Lauder who does it—and you get the chance to zap him the way you did. Congratulations, darling.”

“Well, I must say I thought I was pretty quick on my feet today.” His craggy, homely-handsome Yankee face is smiling now, recalling it, and Mimi thinks: Ah, the ice is beginning to break a little bit.

And why, she asks herself, do I always think of his as a Yankee face? Because of the prominent nose, of course. Why are the Jews often thought of as a big-nosed people? Mimi's own nose is small. So is her mother's, and her grandmother's. So have been the noses of everyone she has known in her family. Yet the noses of old New England families like the Moores—big, rawboned outdoorsmen, descended from Highlanders and Gaels and Celts—were inevitably large, with flaring nostrils. Looking at her husband now, she is pleased to see that Brad, at fifty-one, has not lost his rugged good looks, not lost his hair, which is going grey in all the right places, and, perhaps best of all, not lost his figure. You are a fine figure of a man, she tells him wordlessly. I can see what she sees in you, whoever she is, wherever she lives, whatever she does for you. For that, I can sympathize with her.

The maid appears to clear the dessert plates and says, “Would you like me to serve coffee here, or in the library, Mrs. Moore?”

“We'll have it here, I think, Edna. It's easier.” To Brad she says, “Really, the only reason why I use the name Myerson in the business is because a lot of our customers still associate Miray products with Grandpa. I actually overheard a salesgirl at Magnin's in Chicago saying to a customer, ‘You know, there really is a Mireille Myerson who makes this night cream; she's the granddaughter of the founder.' I think it gives our customers a good feeling to know that there's an actual person behind the name.”

“Of course. Makes damn good sense.” Their coffee arrives.

“It doesn't bother you that much, then.”

“It wouldn't bother me at all, if every time it could be Leonard Lauder.”

“Do you know that we're the only company in the industry that's kept a member of the family at its head into the third generation? All the others—Revlon, Rubinstein, Arden, all of them—got gobbled up by conglomerates the minute the founder died. Which reminds me. I got the silliest letter from Uncle Edwee today.”

“Really? What's he want?”

“Well, among a lot of other silly stuff—really, Uncle Edwee has got to be the silliest man on two feet—he wants me to give him the home telephone number of—are you ready for this, darling?—of our new male model.”

Brad Moore appears to choke slightly on the first swallow of his coffee. “My God,” he says. “I thought Edwee had stopped chasing after the little boys. I thought that was what Gloria was for.”

“Actually, it worries me a little bit. If there was any kind of scandal—even any kind of backlot talk—about our supposedly virile young male model and Uncle Edwee, it could knock our campaign into a cocked hat, if you see what I mean.”

“Don't you have a morals clause in the kid's contract?”

“Oh, we do. But that doesn't stop the titillating little rumors from circulating through the industry. Rumors alone could sour the whole campaign, if not sink it altogether.”