Shades of Fortune (54 page)

“I'm not talking about that,” he says. “I'm talking about how I've felt for the past two years.”

“Two
years?
I thought you said it started three months ago. Or was that another lie?”

“Two years—while I've been trying to have a marriage, and all you've thought about, or talked about, is a new perfume.”

Felix appears at the doorway again. “Dinner is served, ma'am,” he says.

“Excuse me,” she says, “but I'm feeling a little grippy tonight. I'm going upstairs to bed. Mr. Moore will be dining alone tonight, Felix.”

Felix nods, and lowers his eyes.

Upstairs in her bedroom, Mimi turns the key in her lock and flings herself, face forward, across her bed, dry-eyed. I am not crying, she thinks. I am not going to cry. She turns her head a little to one side, and lying still, the thoughts rush through her head. I made a scene, she thinks. I promised myself I would never make a scene, but then I went ahead and made one anyway. But what the hell. It was the rotten timing he chose to tell me this, even though I knew about it anyway. And I let him hurt me, even though I promised I would never let anyone hurt me that way again. I let him hurt me and, even worse, I let him know he hurt me. Yes, you picked a swell time to tell me this, you bastard. The words from a Kenny Rogers song flash by.
You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. Three hungry children and the crops in the field …
You picked a fine time to tell me, you heel. A fine time to tell me, schlemiel. Edwee and a pornographic videotape. Condoms. Abortions. Filth, trash, sluttish women, filth and more filth. Candied Apple, rotten apples, filth rotting maggoty in a warehouse cellar, Mother, Daddy, Me, Badger, a man with a false scar, and a man with foolish dimples and a smile, and a line that is probably also false and rotten to the core. What if I were to tell you that Badger is not your child, but his, that I'm sure of this now? What if I were to tell you that Badger is a bastard? In England, they call it a love child. But I must not think about these things, she tells herself.

I must think about the party, I must think about launching “Mireille” on the seventeenth, the fragrance that is on my throat and behind my earlobes and between my breasts and on my wrists right now, this lovely and intoxicating and exciting fragrance that bears my name, and the lovely and intoxicating and exciting party that is going to introduce “Mireille” to the world. That is all that matters now, the party. That is the single most important thing in my life right now, the party; the absolutely single most important thing in the entire world. It begins with a
P
. It is a party with a capital
P
, and a party is gaiety and laughter, champagne in silver coolers, caviar in ice-sculpted bowls, beautiful men and beautiful women in their most beautiful dresses, lipstick-red roses scattered across white tablecloths, a full-ounce bottle of “Mireille” at each place setting (Mark wanted five-ounce bottles, but I said “Too show-offy”), and waiters in lipstick-red mess jackets, especially dyed to match my “Brandy by Firelight,” that wonderful amber-crimson shade, red-gold, and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, a party to end all parties, champagne at sunset, not a bad name for a nail shade. Beauty. That is my business: Beauty. Perfume.

And she thinks: Did I just think that? That the only thing that matters to me right now is a party? Beauty? Perfume?

At the party, she will decide. At the party, she will make her choice. If Brad doesn't come to her party, that will be a signal. If Michael comes, and behaves as sweetly as he has promised to behave, that will be her second signal. These signals, omens, will point the way. It will be a beautiful way.

With one eye, she sees one of the buttons on her bedside phone light up, indicating a ring. It lights again, and then a third time. Obviously, someone has been instructed not to answer. She watches the blinking button, and presently she is counting the yellow blinks, the way one might try counting sheep before falling off to sleep. Thirty-six, she counts, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine …

The phone will ring all night.

Suddenly she picks up the receiver and shouts, “Leave us alone, you filthy whore!”

Then she breaks the connection with her fingertip and leaves the receiver off the hook.

She prays that she will not have the dream tonight. Then it comes: the shadow flying across the windshield, her mother's scream. Only she is not dreaming now. She is wide awake.

26

“Your father is dead,” her mother said on the telephone, and her voice was strangely calm, detached and dispassionate, as though she were making some not particularly interesting observation about the weather. This had been in April of 1962.

“
Dead?
” she had cried. “What happened?” Immediately she assumed that the stresses he had been under must have caused a heart attack.

“I'm not sure of all the details,” her mother said in that same distant voice. “The police are there now. Will you go over to the apartment and see what has to be done?”

“The
police!
”

“They're there. At the apartment. I tried to call him there, and a policeman answered the phone. They'd just found him. Can you go over? I'll get there as soon as I can.”

“Where are
you
, Mother?”

“I'm here—I'm in the Adirondacks. Or is it the Alleghenies? I came here yesterday—no, it was two days ago, on the train. It's a place called—” and she heard her mother call out to someone, “What's the name of this town? Oh, yes. It's a place called Cohoes, New York,” she said. “It's not far from Saratoga. I'm at a pay phone. There's no phone in my motel room. Can you help me, Mimi?”

“What are you doing
there
, Mother?”

“We had a … a little disagreement the other night, your father and I. I had to get away. I had to find a little peace. And quiet. I went to Grand Central. I got on a train. I got off at the first town that looked pretty. And peaceful. I came here, to the mountains, to be alone for a little bit. And now it's snowing outside.…”

“Have you been drinking, Mother?”

“A little—a little liquid courage. Mimi, didn't you hear what I said?
Your father's dead!
” It was the first time her voice seemed to register any emotion. “Please go up to the apartment and see what it is the police want. They were asking me all sorts of awful questions. I'll be home as soon as I can. There's supposed to be a train at—” But the rest was incoherent.

When she arrived at her parents' apartment, she was met at the door by a young police officer who looked barely old enough to shave.

“You a relative of the deceased?” he asked her.

“I'm his daughter. Please let me see him.”

“Afraid you can't. Besides, you wouldn't want to, ma'am.”

“What do you mean?”

“Put a bullet through his head. Blew his brains out, ma'am.”

She felt her body sag against the door.

“It looks like a clear case of suicide,” he said. “He appears to have been alone here. No sign of forced entry, no signs of an intruder, no indication that a burglary was being perpetrated. A neighbor heard the shot and called the precinct. We've taken the deceased to the police morgue, where they need to perform a few more tests. Then we'll release the body to Frank Campbell's. Your mother specified Frank Campbell's, ma'am.”

“Where was he?”

“You want to see where we found him, ma'am?”

She nodded.

“I warn you, there's pretty much a lot of blood.”

She followed the young officer down the front hall toward the bathroom at the end.

“You sure you want to go in there, ma'am?” he said, looking at her uncertainly. “It smells kind of bad in there, too.”

She nodded again.

He held open the bathroom door for her. “We found him there.” He pointed. “In the tub.”

She took one brief look, then turned quickly away, feeling ill. “A little disagreement,” her mother had said. Had that been enough to cause him to do this dreadful thing?

“This was a considerate suicide,” he said. “He chose the bathtub—he was fully clothed, by the way—to minimize the mess.”

“Considerate,” she whispered.

“The lethal weapon was found there,” he said, and pointed to a section of the white-tiled floor beside the tub where the outline of a pistol was traced in black Magic Marker. “Smith and Wesson, forty-four,” he said. Then he sat down hard on the toilet seat.

She noticed for the first time how pale he was. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead, though the apartment was quite cool, and there was a white, cakey substance at the corners of his mouth. “Sorry, ma'am,” he said. “This is my first one of these.”

“You poor thing,” she heard herself saying. “This must be awful for you.”

He cleared his throat. “They say you get used to it, ma'am,” he said. “That's what they tell us.”

“Let's go into another room,” she said.

Outside in the hall again, she said, “I'm sorry, I didn't get your name.”

“O'Connell, ma'am. Detective Kevin O'Connell, nineteenth precinct.”

“How long do you have to stay here, Kevin?”

“Until I hear from the forensic guys. Till they're sure they've got the—you know, all the things they need.”

They moved toward the living room, and she noticed that his hand was moving inside the pocket of his uniform jacket, and she realized that he was fingering his rosary beads. “Was there any sort of message? Any note?” she asked him.

“Not that we've been able to turn up. Like I said, he was considerate. Most suicides who leave notes are sado-masochistic manipulative personalities with persecution complexes and private agendas to work through. That's what they taught us at the police academy, anyway. It means, like, they want to get back at somebody. This deceased was a considerate personality, in my opinion.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know of any reason, ma'am, why your father would have chosen to take his own life? Any enemies?”

“No. Yes. I really don't know.”

“Business pressures?”

“Oh, yes. Many of those. Do you need me for anything else, Kevin?”

“We may ask you to come down to the morgue to identify the deceased. When we've cleaned him up a bit, that is. The widow, I gather, is out of town.”

“My mother's on her way back to New York.”

“Meanwhile, you have my sincerest sympathies, ma'am, in your bereavement.”

“Thank you, Kevin. Or I should say, thank you, lieutenant.”

“Not lieutenant, ma'am. Detective. O'Connell. Nineteenth precinct.”

“And I hope they don't make you wait here too much longer.”

“I'll be okay, ma'am. It was just that this was my first of these. I mean, I've seen stiffs before, but not like this.”

He was still fingering the rosary beads in his pocket. She could hear the beads' soft
chink
as they fell together from between his fingers.

“Say a bead for me,” she said, and let herself out the door.

It was not until she reached the elevator that her father began to die for her, and he died again when she opened the front door of the building and stepped out into the bright sunlight of the street, and yet again when she raised her arm to hail a taxi, and again and again, all the way home.

That night, as she lay in her husband's arms, she said to him, “Was there something I could have done? Was there some signal I didn't see? Did I spend so much time worrying about what was happening to Mother that I ignored what he was going through, that I became blind to what was happening to him? Have I spent too much time caring for Badger, and you, and not enough time trying to understand the hell that the rest of my family was going through? And that time, two years ago, when you tried to tell me how terribly wrong things were becoming, and I became so angry with you, and let you … let you move out on me: should I have used that time to be with Mother and Daddy, to try to help them, instead of … instead of … nothing? Oh, why have I been so selfish, Brad? Why didn't someone—you—someone—tell me, show me, how selfish I was being, thinking only of myself? My comfort, my pleasure. You don't deserve someone as selfish as me. I don't deserve you. How could I have ever called you selfish, when I've been the only selfish one, the only selfish one, the only one.”

“You mustn't think thoughts like these, Mimi,” he said. “You mustn't let yourself. There's nothing you or I could have done that would have made things any different. Nothing either of us could have done differently would have changed anything.”

“Oh, yes,” she sobbed. “I think there was.”

A crack of light appeared in their bedroom doorway, and then the silhouette of the toddler Badger appeared in the frame of light from the hallway outside. Rubbing his eyes, he said, “Mommy? Daddy?”

“Come here, Badger,” Brad said, patting the bed. “Everything's all right.” He reached out and lifted the little boy into the bed beside them. “Everything's all right,” he said again. “Would you like to sleep in our bed tonight, Badger-buddy? Your Mommy and Daddy love you very much, Badger-buddy, and every day we love you more and more, Badger-buddy, yes we do.…”

And so, four days later, her father's simplest of funerals behind them, the little family group had met again in George Wardell's office in the Lincoln Building. This time, there were only five of them: Mimi and Brad, Nonie and Edwee, and Alice. Granny Flo had not been able to bring herself to attend, nor had she attended the funeral. She had been too devastated by the loss of her firstborn, and best-loved, child. Our little group, Mimi remembers thinking, grows smaller and smaller.

The will was read. Like the funeral service, it was simple and brief, barely one page in length. Her father had rewritten it, it seemed, simplifying everything, just a month before his death. A third of Henry Myerson's estate was left to his widow, and two thirds were bequeathed to Mimi. There were no other special bequests.