Shades of Fortune Read online

  “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. Recovering, 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.

  By 1915, however, Joseph Seligman—the patriarch of the Seligman family—had become much drawn to the ideas of Felix Adler, a German rabbi’s son who advanced theories of a society based on ethics rather than religious piety, and Seligman was turning away from Judaism toward Adler’s Ethical Culture Society. Thus it was that an excellently placed Seligman pew suddenly became available that year. And Adolph Myerson, applying for membership in Emanu-El, and pointing out that he was in a position to contribute handsomely to the temple’s coffers, was not only accepted but was given occupancy of the Seligman pew. It was located directly behind the Guggenheim family pew.

  The Guggenheims occupied a somewhat ambiguous position in New York’s Jewish society at the time. They were a part of it, and yet not a part. For one thing, the Guggenheims were not properly German but had originally emigrated from German-speaking Switzerland. For another, they owed their fo
rtune not to hard work and building a reputation as men of honor, as the others did, but rather to a lucky accident—not unlike the one that had befallen Leopold Myerson and his brother. Meyer Guggenheim had spent most of his life as an unsuccessful peddler of laundry soaps and stove polishes until one day in the 1880s when, in settlement of a bad debt he had been trying to collect, he was handed some shares in an abandoned mine in Leadville, Colorado. Journeying to Colorado to have a look at what he owned, he had discovered a mine shaft filled with water. But when he had the shaft pumped out, he found one of the richest veins of copper ore in the world. Out of this came the American Smelting and Refining Company, the Anaconda Copper Company, and a good deal more. By the early 1900s, the Guggenheims were among the richest families in America, their companies worth even more, some said, than the oil-refining companies controlled by John D. Rockefeller. New York’s German-Jewish upper crust would have preferred to snub these upstarts, but the Guggenheims had become too rich to ignore—a situation in which Adolph Myerson would soon be pleased to find himself.

  From his pew just behind the Guggenheims, at Sabbath services and on the High Holy Days, Adolph Myerson could not help but notice, and be attracted to, the pretty Fleurette Guggenheim, a dainty creature with wide blue eyes and golden ringlets. Adolph Myerson was able to make his presence known to Fleurette in little ways. Once, when Fleurette dropped her prayer book during the service, Adolph reached down to the floor beneath her seat and handed it back to her, for which her eyes fluttered a thank-you. On another occasion, when Fleurette appeared to have forgotten the words to a blessing, Adolph leaned across her shoulder and whispered the words in her ear.

  But the only trouble was that little Fleurette was surrounded in her pew by a number of burly and protective brothers, by an even greater number of heavyset uncles, and by her formidable father, Morris Guggenheim, one of Meyer Guggenheim’s many sons, and a man whom, when he was born, the press had dubbed “the world’s richest baby.” These little attentions of Adolph’s to Fleurette did not go unnoticed by the menfolk in her family, and after one of these, a council of war was called by the Guggenheim family at the family’s summer mansion on the New Jersey shore. Fleurette’s father stated the problem bluntly. “That nail polish man,” as he always referred to Adolph, “has been sniffing around Fleurette.”

  The pros and cons of the situation were weighed carefully. On the one hand, there was no questioning the fact that the nail polish man was a successful entrepreneur who would be able to care for little Fleurette and provide for her in the manner to which she was accustomed. On the other hand, there was the marked difference in their ages. Adolph was by then forty-five, and Fleurette was only seventeen.

  At the same time, there was a special problem in terms of Fleurette. Within the family, it had been decided that Fleurette was “simple.”

  “Little Fleurette is a sweet child,” her third-grade teacher at the Brearley School had written home to her parents. “She has a gentle, giving nature, and we on the faculty are all very fond of her, but the fact is that she simply cannot do the work at our School. At the third-grade level, when she should be doing her multiplication tables, she still cannot do simple sums. Nor have her reading or writing skills improved at all, and she even has trouble reciting the alphabet. We are terribly sorry, but we do not feel that holding Fleurette back, and asking her to repeat another grade, will provide a solution to her learning problems. It is our advice that Fleurette be withdrawn from Brearley, and that you consider the possibility of further education through the use of private tutors in the home.…”

  A later generation of therapists might have diagnosed Fleurette’s problem as dyslexia. But, in those days, the word did not exist, and Fleurette was taken out of school and tutored at home in music and art appreciation, home management, and needlework.

  “The nail polish man doesn’t know Fleurette that well yet,” her uncle Ben pointed out. “So he hasn’t noticed anything. This may be just the man we’re looking for.”

  “She’s too sweet and pretty to grow up a spinster,” her aunt Hattie said. “But who would ever want to marry her?”

  “The nail polish man.”

  “Opportunity knocks but once, Morris,” said Aunt Hattie.

  “The nail polish man, then,” Fleurette’s father agreed.

  “And the sooner the better, Morris. Before he has a chance to … find out.”

  And so it was that the Guggenheims proposed Fleurette’s hand in marriage to Adolph Myerson, and not the other way around. At the time, Adolph was almost dizzy with happiness over his good fortune.

  With Fleurette went a dowry of one million dollars.

  Now, more than seventy years later, Fleurette Guggenheim Myerson sits in her apartment at the Carlyle with her second-born child, and only daughter, Naomi, on a quiet Monday afternoon. The apartment is not small, considering that it has but a single occupant. There is a thirty-foot living room, a fair-sized dining room, a “service” kitchen, a small library dominated by a giant remote-controlled television screen, and two bedrooms and baths, the second of which is called “the guest room,” though to anyone’s knowledge it has never housed a guest. From its location on the twentieth floor, Granny Flo’s apartment commands a view of Central Park, not unlike Mimi’s view a few blocks to the north, and from Granny’s bedroom windows there is even a view of the East River and, beyond it, of Queens and the rising and descending planes at La Guardia Airport—all views, of course, that Granny is no longer able to enjoy.

  Still, though not small, the apartment seems that way because it is so crowded with furniture—pieces from the big house on Madison Avenue, as well as from two other houses in Maine and Palm Beach, that Granny has been unwilling to part with. Even a fully sighted person, one might think, would have difficulty picking her way between the nested stacks of little tables, the chairs and ottomans and benches and the floor lamps that are assembled here. But, Granny insists, she has memorized the narrow, twisting passageways that lead between the furniture from one room to the next and can navigate them even in total blindness by reaching out to touch the back of an armchair here, the fringe of a lampshade there. Adding to the sense of crowdedness in the apartment is her art collection, which covers every vacant space of wall from floor to ceiling in every room, two rather unremarkable Bentons having been given just as much prominence as the extraordinary Goya upon which Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum gazed so long and thoughtfully the other day.

  Granny is seated in one of the many armchairs now, with Nonie opposite her, and with her tiny black Yorkshire terrier, Itty-Bitty, nestled in her lap. Itty-Bitty’s chin rests on her mistress’s knee, and her buttony round, black eyes gaze intently, even suspiciously, at Nonie, while her mistress’s eyes are blank, unfocused. Granny Flo is trying to explain once more to her daughter that Nonie’s father did not resent her simply because she was a girl.

  “Your papa loved you just as much as he loved the boys,” she says. “What you forget is that when you were growing up he was busy building his business. There wasn’t as much time for fathering as he’d have liked.”

  “Still, he shortchanged me in his will.”

  “His will was to give the boys enough to carry on the business.”

  “And I was left with virtually nothing. Nothing to build a life on at all.”

  “I’m not a bottomless pit, Nonie,” her mother says again.

  “Just five million, Mother. That’s all it would take. Five million is nothing to you.”

  “Five million? Nothing? You talk as if five million dollars was no more than the cost of a streetcar ride!”

  “Surely one of your Guggenheim trusts. Each of your uncles left you—”

  “A trust is a trust! I don’t know what a trust is, Nonie, but I know that much. Mr. What’s-his-name at the bank explained it all to me. I get the income from those trusts, but I don’t get the whatchamacallit until after I die. Then it goes to you and Henry and Edwee and Mimi, in
a trust. It’s all invested in different things.”

  “Henry’s dead, Mother,” Nonie says.

  Her mother hesitates. “He is?” she says. “When did Henry die? Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  “Years ago, Mother. Anyway—”

  Thoughtfully, her mother scratches Itty-Bitty’s topknot, which is secured with a tiny yellow grosgrain bow, and the little dog closes its eyes and squirms with obvious pleasure, nestling itself deeper into its mistress’s lap. Which Itty-Bitty is this one? Nonie tries to remember. It is at least number three, if not number four. There have been many Itty-Bittys over the years.

  “Anyway, couldn’t you borrow against one of those trusts, Mother? Enough to give me just a short-term loan? Because I could pay you back in just a few months’ time—maybe even less.”

  “But I don’t understand what you want it for, Nonie,” her mother says. “I know your young man said it had something to do with foreigners, and I told him that President Hoover was against the foreigners. He seemed quite impressed at how well I know the Hoovers.”

  Nonie sighs. “Mother, Hoover has been dead longer than Henry has,” she says. “And this has nothing to do with foreigners. It’s called spot currency exchange. And if you’ll just try to listen to me, Mother, I’ll try to explain to you again how it works.”