Shades of Fortune (36 page)

And I know that Mimi is also very preoccupied with the details of her launch party, which will be on September 17. This will be a big, fancy affair at the Pierre, and the invitations are already at the printer, and the guest list is being drawn up. All the department store heads and all the buyers will be invited, of course, along with the editors and writers from the fashion press, plus the usual members of the Manhattan social zoo: Vreeland, Pat Buckley, Judy Peabody, Brooke Astor, Susan Gutfreund, and the rest. And there'll be the usual Big Question, which no one will know the answer to until the last minute: Will she or won't she show up? Jackie, that is. Half of Mimi's office staff, it seems, is working on the guest list, adding names, taking others off.

But I must say Mimi brightened up considerably when I mentioned that I'd like to interview some of the people whom the family call “the Leo cousins.”

“Yes,” she said emphatically. “Yes, I think you should talk to them, Jim. After all, it's no secret in the industry that there's one whole branch of my family that doesn't speak to the other branch. And, frankly, I'd like to know what's behind all this myself—
why
Grandpa had Leo's portrait painted out.”

Then she made a surprising suggestion.

“What would you think,” she said, “if I came along with you when you do these interviews? Would that cramp your journalistic style too much? Maybe you could be just the one to help me break the ice with them. After all, it's ridiculous for this sort of family feuding to go on for nearly fifty years! All the offending principals are dead, and surely it's high time that their offenses, whatever they were, should be forgiven. Maybe if I went with you, I could convince them that I'm not the ogre they've been brought up to believe I am. Maybe you could provide me with a toe in the door to these people who, after all, are stockholders of this company. Could I be a tagalong, Jim? What would you think of that?”

I told her I would be delighted to have her come along with me, that it would be my pleasure.

“I can give you all their names and addresses,” she said. “I'm sure they're all perfectly nice people, though there's one who's not quite right in the head.”

When I left her, she seemed in a much brighter mood, anticipating our trips to the various surrounding suburbs.

Why does it please me to be able to put her in a brighter mood?

Then, no sooner had I got back to my apartment than I had a telephone call from her Granny Flo, in a very agitated state.

“I've been invaded, Mr. Greenway!” she cried. “I've been invaded again! Edwee's been in my house again, I can smell him! I know how my own son smells, and I can tell he's been here again, snooping around. George, at the front desk, denies it, but I know he's lying. What are they trying to do to me, Mr. Greenway—all of them? George talks to me as though I'm teched in the head, as though I've lost my marbles. But I haven't lost my marbles! George talks to me like I'm a child—talks to me like someone telling a child there's no such thing as the bogey man. But there
is
a bogey man, and his name is Edwee Myerson! Edwee and someone else, because I can also smell another man! And if that isn't proof enough, there's the way Itty-Bitty's been acting, jumping all around, yip-yip-yipping, trying to tell me something's wrong, and then, suddenly, lifting her little leg against the leg of my chair and weeing! Itty-Bitty never does that unless something has been going very wrong. Help me, Mr. Greenway, help me. You're the only one I can trust. I'm surrounded by enemies! My own home isn't safe anymore!”

I asked her what I could do to help.

“Talk to Nonie,” she said. “I think Nonie knows what's going on. Talk to Nonie, and see if you can get it out of her what they're trying to do, because Nonie isn't on my side, either!” Then, holding out the carrot at the end of the stick, she said, “Don't forget, there's a lot more things I could tell you, Mr. Greenway—a
lot
more! You've only just scratched the surface, Mr. Greenway, with the things I could tell you about this family!”

And so I called Nonie and asked to see her. She was polite, but a little cool. “Of course, I should be
delighted
to see you, Mr. Greenway,” she said in her cultured-pearls voice. “But this week is just
not
turning out to be a
ruling
week for me. My poor calendar is simply chockablock. Call me next week, darling, and I'll try to set aside some time for you.…”

And so, inevitably and willy-nilly, it seems, I am being drawn deeper into the personal problems of this family in which at the beginning I had only a detached, professional interest.

And yet I don't find myself resenting this involvement. I am beginning to feel as though I am one of them.

17

“I'm Jittery, Mimi,” her mother says, twisting her rings. “That's the only way I can describe it. I'm jittery. I'm all a-jitter. Thank you, dear, for coming by. I told your Mr. Greenway that I just wasn't up to seeing him today.”

“Well, he's not
my
Mr. Greenway, Mother,” Mimi says. “And you don't have to see him at all, if you don't want to.”

They are sitting in her mother's cozy living room in Turtle Bay, overlooking the private central courtyard with its fountain, leafy trees, and busy squirrel population. “Oh, I'll see him,” her mother says, “because I know he wants to talk to all of us, and because I know you want us to talk to him. But not today, because I just feel so … jittery!”

“You look fine, Mother. In fact, you've never looked better.”

“God love you for a liar! I know how I look. There are mirrors in this house, too, you know!”

Mimi looks into her mother's face and tries an encouraging smile. But it is true. In another year, her mother will be seventy, the beginning of old age, and Mimi must admit that her beautiful mother, the mother she once thought must be the most beautiful woman in the world, is looking old.

“What kind of a story is it, do you think, that he wants to write, Mimi?”

“I have only one theory when it comes to dealing with the media,” she says, “particularly the print media, and that's be honest with them. If you're not, they'll just make up something. But I like this man. I think he wants to write an honest story.”

“He'll want to ask me about your father, I'm sure. But that was so long ago—more than twenty years. I'm not sure I'm up to going back to all those memories, at least not today. Of course, they told us at the Ford Center there'd be days like this, when you just … can't seem … to …”

“What's wrong, Mother?”

Her mother's laugh is almost gay. “I want a drink, that's what it is! I want a drink, right now! A nice cold drink, with lots of ice, that I could nurse, the way I used to. My medicine. Liquid courage—that's all I want!”

“Deep in your heart, Mother, you know you don't.”

“That's not true! Deep in my heart, I
do!
I keep a bottle, you know, right over there in that sideboard. They tell us to! Face your enemy, they say! Well, what would you say if I told you I'd opened that sideboard at least twenty times this afternoon and faced my enemy! But I've resisted, Mimi. I've resisted.”

“Good,” she says. “Good for you. I'm proud of you, Mother. Because you remember some of the things that happened.”

“What things? What things happened? Oh, you mean on the airplane, going to California. Yes, I admit I was a naughty girl then—and thank God you were there to help me, Mimi. But other times I wasn't so bad, was I? I used to think of whiskey as my friend. It used to help me sleep at night. Now I have trouble sleeping, I can't—”

“Doesn't Dr. Bergler give you something?”

“Oh, yes. The valium. And Seconal, to sleep. But lately the valium doesn't seem to be doing what it did at first. And, with a Seconal, I sleep only three or four hours, and at two in the morning I'm wide awake, and thinking …”

“Thinking what?”

“Thinking that it wasn't like that when I could carry a drink to bed with me, and nurse it as I fell off to sleep, wonderful sleep! And I never had a hangover, Mimi. I never knew what a hangover
was
.”

“Not even that morning in California, Mother? You looked pretty sick to me.”

“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!”