2

As her other guests arrive, Mimi greets them one by one at the library door and leads them to be introduced to the Mireille Couple, who stand in front of the mirrored bookcases in an impromptu receiving line, rather like a bride and groom, smiling, now, their soon-to-be-famously-seductive Mireille smiles. No one would ever believe that the word asshole had been spat moments earlier from Sherrill’s carefully parted lips. These, of course, are tutored smiles, carefully practiced in front of mirrors and Polaroid cameras, improved upon by dentists and modeling coaches. A word should be inserted here about Mimi’s own smile, which is quite different. It, too, has evolved as a result of a certain amount of practice—we all should practice our smiles from time to time—but Mimi’s smile is a curiously intimate smile, a communicative smile, a smile that seems to have words in it. When Mimi smiles at you, her smile seems to take all of you in, saying, in the process, that you have never looked better, healthier, prouder, more sure of who you are and where you came from; that you, this perfect new you, impeccably put together as you have always wanted to see yourself, are the only person living in the world whom Mimi has ever wanted to see or talk to. Naturally, there is also a reverse effect. When Mimi turns this smile away from you, as she must, you feel that you have been left floating in some limbo, without a friend left in the world. The patroness of that smile has fallen in love with someone else.

“Aunt Nonie,” Mimi says, “I want you to meet our special guests of honor, Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon. I’ll tell you why they’re going to be so special to us as soon as everybody’s here.… Oh, and here’s Jim Greenway, who’s also special. Jim’s going to write about us in Fortune magazine and so, of course, you’re all under strictest orders to say nothing but the nicest things about us. Mr. Greenway isn’t interested in family skeletons.”

“Not true. I like family skeletons,” Jim Greenway says.

“Ah,” Mimi says with a look of mock disappointment. “Then you’re in for a letdown, I’m afraid. This family doesn’t have any skeletons.”

“Oh, but we do! We do!” cries Granny Flo in her piping voice.

“Well,” Mimi says with that rich and easy laugh of hers, “if anyone knows which closets they’re hiding in …” Turning from Greenway, she says, “And you must be Mr. Williams, Aunt Nonie’s friend.”

“Business associate,” he says.

“How exciting! Later, you must tell us all about it.”

Felix moves among the guests, taking drink orders, and a maid in a black uniform appears with a tray of canapés.

“What’s that?” Sherrill whispers to Dirk.

“It appears to be artichoke bottoms stuffed with caviar.”

“Ooh, caviar!” She helps herself to one and takes a tentative bite. “Oooh, it’s salty.”

“Yes, I rather expect it would be.”

Speaking to whomever might happen to be within earshot, and gazing straight ahead of her with dead, dull eyes, Granny Flo says, “My daughter’s real name is Naomi, after Naomi in the Bible, but everybody has always called her Nonie. When she was a little girl, she was such a stubborn little thing, and I was always saying to her, ‘No, Naomi, no, no, no, no, no.’ And after a while, before she did anything, she’d look at me and say, ‘May I do that, Mama, or is that a nonie?’ And I’d say, ‘No, that’s not a nonie,’ or, ‘Yes, that’s a nonie,’ whichever thing it was she wanted to do, and that’s when I decided to call her Nonie. My husband, Adolph Myerson, used to say I was good at naming things. My newest daughter is only two years old. Her name is Itty-Bitty. That’s right, I’m eighty-nine, and I have a daughter who’s just two years old! She’s my little Yorkie, and she’s as itty-bitty as they come. She weighs just two and a half pounds. She follows me around, wherever I go, and because I’ve lost my eyesight I have to be careful not to step on her, but she seems to understand because she stays just behind me, making little sounds for me to tell me where she is—whiff-whiff-whiff. I thought of naming her Whiffy, but I didn’t. I named her Itty-Bitty. I used to live in a big place, but now I live in a hotel. Itty-Bitty is the only dog who’s allowed to live at the Carlyle. Now my friend, poor Mrs. Perlman, on the other hand.…”

“Mother, do shut up!” Edwee says.

Now everyone is here except Brad Moore and Badger, and small conversational groupings have developed in the room. Except for Alice, who stands alone, looking nervous and a little frightened, waiting for her valium to give her a boost of chemical courage, enough to join a conversation. Mimi notices her mother’s discomfort and starts to move toward her, then decides against it. One of the tenets of the Betty Ford Center is that people like her mother should learn to cope with situations on their own. So she settles for a smile of reassurance in her mother’s direction from across the room. Her mother’s response is a hunted look.

“Yellow tulips!” Granny Flo exclaims, her eyes fixed on empty space in front of her. “Mimi? Where did you find yellow tulips in August, Mimi?”

“Your eyesight must be improving, Mother,” Nonie says. “How did you know these were yellow tulips?”

“I’ve learned to see with my nose,” her mother says. “When you lose your eyesight, your other senses get better. I’ve lost my eyesight, but I can see with my nose! I smelled tulips, and I smelled yellow.”

“I didn’t realize tulips had any odor at all.”

“You see, Nonie? That’s where you’re wrong.”

Mimi takes all this in. Another remarkable thing about Mimi is her ability, even at a distance, to follow the drift of a number of different conversations at the same time, to filter them out, as it were, and to discern their implications, even in a much more crowded room than this one. At her dinner parties, she is able to observe, and hear, all her guests at once and, whenever situations seem to be approaching rocky or dangerous shoals, to avert unpleasantnesses with a swift, bright change of topic.

In one corner of the room, Nonie’s young escort, Roger Williams, has pulled Nonie aside and is saying to her, “What was all that business in the car about? Between your mother and your brother?”

“Mother and Edwee have been going at each other like that for years,” she says. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Your brother doesn’t like me.”

“Makes no difference. Edwee’s not the least bit important to our plans. As I told you, the only person you need to make a good impression on is Mother.”

“I gather your mother has an important art collection?”

“I suppose so. It’s sort of a mishmash. She’s got some Thomas Hart Bentons, a few Impressionists—a couple of Cézannes, an Utrillo, some Monets, a Goya portrait of some Spanish countess. She got a lot of things in the Depression when they were dirt cheap. She got her four Picassos at a time when Picasso would give you a painting if you bought him dinner.”

He whistles softly. “It sounds as though some of those might be pretty valuable today.”

She shrugs. “Maybe so. Art is the one thing I don’t know much about.”

He nods, frowning slightly, having noted that art is “the one thing” she knows little about.

“Anyway,” she whispers, “I slipped into the dining room a few minutes ago and changed the place cards. Mimi won’t notice. I placed you next to Mother, so you can work on her. The way we discussed.”

He nods again.

“Even though she’s blind, she’s a pushover for younger men.”

In another part of the room, Jim Greenway is saying to Mimi, “One thing that interests me is what caused the famous rift between your grandfather, Adolph Myerson, and his brother, Leopold, and what caused Leopold to leave the company in nineteen forty-one, never to return. What was it, do you know?”

“I really don’t. It all started before I was born, and in nineteen forty-one I was only three years old. I have only the dimmest recollection of Uncle Leo. There are cousins, of course—Uncle Leo’s children and grandchildren—and some of them are still Miray stockholders. But I’ve never met them. The rift, as you call it, was that complete. Sad, but whatever it was left us a divided family.”

“Where’s Nonie?” her grandmother suddenly cries, though no one is standing in her immediate vicinity. “Someone take me over to my daughter, Nonie. I want to talk more to that young man she brought. Is she having an affair with him, or what? Does anybody know?”

In the little silence that follows, Mimi says brightly, “Quick, everybody: come to the window and look at the lake. It’s covered with seagulls. That means there’s a storm out at sea. Whenever there’s a storm on the Atlantic, the seagulls fly in and settle on the lake. Isn’t it wonderful?”

There is a general movement toward the library window, and a great deal of ooh-ing and ah-ing over the sight of the lake afloat with birds. “Isn’t it nice to have reminders that, after all, we live in a seaport?” Mimi says.

Edwee moves toward his sister. “Well, that was a charming outburst from our mother, wasn’t it?” he says. “And, speaking of affairs, are you ready for a bit of on dit?”

“What’s that?” she says.

“Note that the master of the house has not appeared yet. Well, it seems that Brad Moore has some woman on the West Side.”

“Has some woman?” she asks, looking puzzled.

“Is keeping a woman. In her twenties, I’d say. Certainly younger than Mimi. Not bad-looking, in a cheap way.”

“How do you know this, Edwee?”

“I was lunching the other day at Le Cirque with Nancy Reagan and Betsey Bloomingdale and another friend, and who should I spot in the farthest, darkest corner of the restaurant? Brad Moore. In very serious conversation with this woman. Their heads were bent together. His hand was on top of hers. She was obviously unhappy. She was weeping. Well, what do you think of that?”

“How do you know she’s from the West Side?”

He makes a vague gesture with his right hand. “She had that West Side look. You know—bangs.”

“Bangs.”

“A déclassé look. So. Who should be the first to tell our dear little Mimi what’s going on, you or I?”

“Well, I—”

Edwee suddenly presses his index finger to his lips. “Ssh!” he says. “He just walked in.”

Sure enough, Brad Moore has just arrived and greeted his wife with a kiss, and is moving around the room shaking the hands of the male guests and kissing the cheeks of his female in-laws. He is followed very shortly by his son, Badger, who looks, as always, happy and alert and is tugging at the sleeves of his dinner jacket as though he had just tossed it on in the elevator.

Her guest list complete, Mimi makes a small signal with her hand to Felix, who touches a small button beside the library door. Mimi waits for a few moments to let the scent penetrate the room and is grateful that no one is smoking. Soon the Mireille fragrance will fill the air, and Mimi, ever the practiced impresario, moves toward the center of the room to make her announcement.

Edwee is still whispering to his sister. “Can you get rid of your young man when this is over?” he says. “I need to talk to you. Alone. As soon as possible. Can you drop by my house for a few minutes after we leave here?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Now Mimi is about to make her little speech, and she begins, “Family, friends …”

But her grandmother beats her to the punch. “I smell something!” she says loudly. “What is it? It’s perfume. Who’s wearing it?”

Mimi laughs and claps her hands. “Good for you, Granny,” she says. “Family, friends … the fragrance you may be noticing in the air means that the Miray Corporation is about to embark on an exciting new venture. We’re about to launch our first perfume, and you are the first people outside our boardroom to be exposed to it. You are my special guinea pigs. Sample bottles are at each of your places at the dinner table, but this is the premiere. Now I need you to tell me, honestly, what you think.”

All noses now are poised in the air to catch the scent.

“Woodsy,” someone says.

“Yes, piney.”

“No, more floral, I’d say.”

“Beautiful.”

There is more ooh-ing and ah-ing, and then, led by Mimi’s husband, there is a loud round of applause followed by congratulatory noises.

“What’s in it?” someone asks.

“Oh, a bit of vetiver, a touch of clove, verbena, some lemon. But I’m not going to give you the complete formula. That’s a secret, locked in the boardroom safe.”

“I think it’s more exciting than Giorgio!”

“Do you? Well, that’s one of the big guns out there that we’re hoping to take on.”

“What are you going to call it, Mimi?”

“We experimented with literally hundreds of different names. And in the end we ended up deciding to call it … Mireille.”

“Lovely!”

“That’s her real name, you know, Mireille,” Granny Flo says to no one in particular. “Mireille Myerson. She was named after my husband’s company. Miray—Mireille. Get it? I gave her the nickname Mimi when she was a tiny baby because she made a little sound that was like mi-mi-mi-mi-mi!”

“Now that’s not true, Granny,” Mimi says. “I renamed myself Mimi when I was fourteen, after seeing a performance of La Bohème.”

“She’s lying,” Granny Flo says cheerfully. “I named her because she was always going ‘mi-mi-mi-mi-mi.’”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” Mimi says. “What matters is that we—you, me, all of us who are stockholders—are going to be in the fragrance business for the first time. And Dirk and Sherrill, who are our special guests tonight, are going to be the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man in all our print advertising and television commercials.”

There are more congratulatory sounds.

“Frankly, it smells a little cheap, if you ask me,” Edwee whispers to his sister.

“But knowing Mimi, it’ll have a fancy price tag.”

“Oh, we can be sure of that.”

Now the conversation becomes general again, with much emphasis on analyzing the new scent.

“I smell the lemon in it.”

“And cinnamon, too, I suspect.”

“Rose oil, too.”

Mimi finds her mother, who has been standing alone and somewhat apart from the others, and says, “Now, aren’t you glad you came, Mother? Isn’t this turning out to be a nice sort of family reunion?”

“I hate all sorts of family reunions,” Alice says. “I hate this one no less than all the others. No less and no more.”

The reporter, Jim Greenway, turns to Mimi and touches his glass to hers. “I wish you luck—no, not luck, success—with your new fragrance,” he says.

“Thank you, Mr. Greenway.”

“Please call me Jim. And tell me, when you took over the company twenty-five years ago, after your father’s death, did you ever think you’d be so successful?”

“Never. I was terrified. Just as I’m terrified now.”

He laughs. “Then terror is the secret of your success?”

“Absolutely. Terror is the secret of every success. The opposite of terror is complacency, and complacency is the secret of every failure.”

“I like that,” he says.

“And you may quote me,” she says, touching his elbow and laughing the pebbly laugh.

From the doorway, Felix announces, “Dinner is served, madam.”

Entering the dining room, Mimi immediately notices that the place cards have been changed, and she also knows immediately who must have done it. But she decides to let the seating remain as it is, though she can’t refrain from a slight feeling of annoyance at Aunt Nonie. Nonie is always creating mischief like this. Let it pass, she thinks. She will not let it disrupt the planned flow of her evening. Now, in the dining room, fingering their Mireille samples, everyone is exclaiming over the packaging.

“Elegant.”

“Lovely.”

“Sophisticated. I love the colors. Black and gold.”

“And the bottle. A perfect teardrop shape.”

“Look—the bottle is by Baccarat!”

“It certainly looks expensive,” Edwee says.

“Thank you, Uncle Edwee.”

“Suggested retail is a hundred and eighty dollars an ounce,” young Brad says.

“I’d pay that.”

The soup course is served, and Felix moves around the table, pouring the wine. From the head of the table, Bradford Moore turns to his mother-in-law, who is seated on his right, and says, “It’s wonderful to see you, Alice. You’re looking positively radiant tonight.”

Alice, who actually still looks a bit uncomfortable, despite her valium, covers her wineglass with two fingers of her right hand before Felix can fill it and says, “Why do people keep telling me how wonderful I look, Brad? Is it to remind me of how awful I looked before?”

“I didn’t mean it that way at all, Alice,” he says. “You always look wonderful.”

“No, I don’t. You know I always don’t.”

“Alice is so sensitive,” Granny Flo says to the table at large. “That’s always been Alice’s problem.”

Hearing this, from the other end of the table Mimi says brightly to everyone, “Once we’d settled on the black-and-gold color scheme for our packaging, we wanted the perfect models—one dark, one fair. And voilà! Sherrill and Dirk!” She lifts her wineglass. “I’d like to propose a toast: to the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man!”

“Hear, hear.”

And, half-rising, young Brad says, “And I’d like to propose another: to my brilliant, beautiful, and sexy mother. Here’s to you, Mom!”

“Hear, hear.”

“Thank you, Badger.”

In Nonie’s new arrangement of the seating, her young friend Williams is now placed at Granny Flo’s right, to take advantage of her good ear. “It’s such an honor to be seated next to you, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“You have? What have you heard?”

“How charming you are, how gracious—”

“Did my daughter tell you that?”

“She. And others.”

“Whenever Naomi Myerson starts talking like that, it means she wants something. Money, usually.” She turns to her other dinner partner and says, “Who are you?”

“My name is Jim Greenway, Mrs. Myerson,” he says. “I’m researching a story on the Myerson family, for Fortune.”

“There wasn’t any fortune. Didn’t you know that? When my husband died, it turned out he’d spent it all. I had to sell everything—everything except my paintings. Did I tell you about my friend Mrs. Perlman’s little dog?”

Sherrill Shearson is now on Edwee Myerson’s right, and turning to her somewhat loftily, aware that she is a member of a lower social order, he says to her, “You certainly make a handsome couple. Are you two married?”

She giggles. “Are you kidding? Dirk’s bisexual.”

Nodding, Edwee takes this information in, and his eyes travel across the table to where Dirk Gordon sits, carefully spooning his soup, and he gives the younger man a long, appraising look. “Really. How interesting,” he says.

From across the table, too, Edwee’s wife catches this look of calculating appraisal. “Edwee,” she mouths. “You promised!”

His answer is an almost indiscernible wink.

“One thing I’m interested in knowing about,” Jim Greenway is saying to Granny Flo, the sad saga of Mrs. Perlman’s pet having come to an end, “is what caused the rift between your late husband and his brother, Leopold, years ago. Can you tell me anything about that?”

“Why, it was perfectly simple,” Granny says. “My husband was jealous of Leo. Leo was tall and dark and handsome and always got the girls. My husband was short and fat and ugly. Do you still have your grandpa’s portrait in your library, Mimi? You could see in the portrait how ugly he was. No girl would look at Adolph, except me.”

“There must have been more to it than that, Granny,” Mimi says.

“That was the gist of it. I’d have much rather married Leo than Adolph, but Leo was already married to someone else, so I had to settle for Adolph. ‘Settle for Adolph,’ my father said. My father was Morris Guggenheim, in case you didn’t know. When he was born, he was called the world’s richest baby.”

“Interesting,” Jim Greenway says.

“But he wasn’t the world’s richest baby. That’s the point. So don’t put that in your story.”

Nonie’s friend Roger Williams is still trying to draw Granny’s attention away from her other dinner partner. “Nonie and I are about to launch an exciting new business venture of our own, Mrs. Myerson,” he says.

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Spot foreign exchange. You see—”

“Foreigners,” she says. “That reminds me of President Hoover, when my husband and I were invited to the White House. President Hoover was fat, and so was his wife. She was named Lou—Lou—Hoover. And they were both fat. Not too tall, either, but fat. Isn’t that funny that both would be fat? My husband used to call them Tweedledum and Tweedledee; isn’t that funny? He could be funny, my husband. But I remember we talked about all the foreigners. President Hoover said there were too many foreigners coming into the country. He wanted them stopped, and I think he was working on some sort of way to stop them. How much does Nonie want from me this time?”

“Well, if you were interested in coming in as an investor, Mrs. Myerson, we’d certainly be most happy to—”

“Nothing to do with foreigners! There are too many of them. President Hoover said so, and he ought to know.”

“Mother,” Nonie begins, “what Roger is trying to explain is—’

But at that moment, Felix steps into the dining room and whispers something in the senior Bradford Moore’s ear. Brad Moore frowns slightly, places his napkin beside his plate, rises, and says, “Excuse me—a business call.”

In his absence, Edwee turns to Alice, who is on his left. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” he whispers to her.

“Isn’t what interesting?”

“Brad has a woman on the West Side. But wouldn’t you think she’d know better than to call him at home—while he’s at dinner?”

“What makes you think that, Edwee?”

“I know what I know, Alice.”

“I don’t believe any of this!”

“I’ve seen the woman. I’ve seen them together, holding hands. So, who is going to tell Mimi that her husband has another woman? Shall you, or shall I? Obviously, she’s got to be told.”

“I told you I don’t believe you.”

“What are you two whispering about?” Mimi says from the far end of the table. “Whisper-whisper-whisper. Won’t you let the rest of us in on whatever gossip it is?”

“We were just talking about the West Side,” Edwee says easily. “How it’s changed. All the shops on Columbus Avenue, and all the cheap merchandise one finds there.”

“This rift with his brother Leopold,” Jim Greenway is saying. “Was it sudden, when Leo left the company in nineteen forty-one, or was it a disagreement that had been building over the years?”

“Over the years. Yes, over the years. My husband kept a diary, you know, over the years. It was all in his diary—everything.”

“Really?” he says eagerly. “A diary? Do you still have it? I’d love to see that.”

“Oh, no,” she says sadly. “It’s gone. Disappeared. Destroyed, perhaps. Gone, all gone, but it was all in there, the whole thing.”

“Really, Granny?” Mimi says. “I never knew that Grandpa kept a diary.”

“Oh, yes. Wrote in it every day. Put everything in. Sometimes he’d read it to me.”

“It would certainly be helpful to Mr. Greenway in his research, Granny, if we could locate Grandpa’s diary.”

“But it’s gone. Vanished. Gone.”

Speaking up in full voice for the first time now, Alice Myerson says, “I certainly never heard that my father-in-law kept a diary. If he had, certainly Henry would have mentioned it to me.”

“But he did. He did.”

“I don’t believe you, Flo!”

From across the table, Granny Flo gazes steadily at her daughter-in-law. Then, turning to Jim Greenway, and nodding in Alice’s direction, Granny Flo says, “She killed a man once, you know. It was all in Adolph’s diary.” She pauses for a moment to let this sink in. Then she says, “I have to go to the toilet. Will someone lead me?”

Brad, returning from his telephone call, steps to her chair. “I’ll show you the way, Flo,” he says, taking her hand.

Felix, in the silence that follows, clears the soup bowls, one by one, and serves the salad course.

“This is my cook’s famous Niçoise salad,” Mimi says brightly, breaking the silence. “Instead of tuna, she uses smoked Scotch salmon, and she’s found a little shop where we get fresh pimentos!”

“Mr. Greenway,” Nonie says when her mother is out of earshot, “I must apologize for my mother. It’s—well, it’s Alzheimer’s disease, I’m afraid. She forgets things. She loses track. She imagines things. In other words, you really must not pay any attention at all to anything she says.”

But, across from her at the table, Alice Myerson’s eyes are very wide and very bright, and two pink spots have appeared on her cheeks. “What—did—she—say?” she demands. “What did she say about me?” She flings her napkin on the table. “Why does everyone in this family hate me? Why is everyone trying to hurt me?”

“Mother,” Mimi murmurs. “Mother, dear—”

“She’s saying that I’m to blame for your father’s suicide, isn’t she? Well, it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me who put that bullet through his head! If anyone’s to blame, she is! She, and Adolph, and Leo, and all the others! Put that in your story, Mr. Greenway: that evil old woman killed my husband, killed her own son, just as surely as if she’d been in the room when he pulled the trigger! Yes, put that in!” There are tears in her eyes now, and she pushes her chair back from the table.

“Mother, please—”

“Please! Please! I’m the one who should be crying ‘please.’ Please, leave me alone, all of you! All of you, in this family of hating and hurting and destroying people. Where can I go now, what can I do? When will you all have had enough of me, and let me die in peace? Never, that’s when! Not till I die in my tracks from exhaustion, from the exhaustion of trying to fight back against this family that’s destroyed everything … my husband … everything I ever loved. You didn’t see it, Mimi, you were too young, but I saw it happening, happening every day, day after day, as she and his father destroyed him to the point where he was desperate, lost, with no one left to help him, not even I, nothing he could trust but his poor … little … service revolver. Oh!” she sobs. “I didn’t want to come here tonight; I knew something like this would happen. Oh, just let me go home, Mimi. Let me go home, away from the cruelty … home …” She jumps from her chair and runs sobbing from the room.

After a pause, Mimi says quietly, “I’m sorry. My mother is … my mother is recovering from an illness. I thought she was … sufficiently recovered to … but apparently not. I’m sorry.” Turning to Sherrill and Dirk, she says, “What else can I say?”

“She got hysterical,” Sherrill Shearson says, as though this provided an explanation for everything.

Edwee whispers to Nonie. “What did I predict? A debacle. I knew something like this would happen if poor Alice were here.”

Returning to the table with his wife’s grandmother on his arm, Brad Moore asks innocently, “What became of your mother?”

“Mother … had to leave,” Mimi says.

“Good riddance,” Granny mutters. “Little tramp.”

And so, I ask you, how do you rescue a formal dinner party from a disaster like this one? When the Titanic struck an iceberg, the passengers turned it into a romp and tossed handfuls of slivered ice at one another. In this case, there is a salad course, a main course of noisettes de veau and tiny green peas, a dessert course, and coffee to get through before the lifeboats can be lowered and the hapless prisoners at 1107 Fifth Avenue can be released to the salvation of their homes and cool beds. The answer is, you do your best to rescue a foundering evening with artifice, with showmanship, with bright and inconsequential chatter: the day’s headlines, Bernhard Goetz, subway violence, will this extraordinary bull market ever end? Brad Moore works on Wall Street, what do his banker friends say? Outside, there is the quality of the sunset to be discussed, how, across the park, the setting sun turns the glass and concrete canyons of the West Side into ribbons of fire. Questions, questions. Mimi has questions to ask of everyone, keeping the evening afloat, keeping the conversation going, the dinner partners turning from one side to another, as the courses proceed, one after another. No one ever said that this sort of thing is easy, but Mimi does her best to carry it off, even going so far as to express her concern and shock and caring over the fate of Mrs. Perlman’s little dog. “Oh, what a terrible thing, Granny.”

The show must go on! It is one of those occasions where Mimi must remind herself that a business is not just a family, and that a family is not just a business but a shared heritage of old wounds that have not yet turned to scars, of hurts that cannot be forgiven, of seething memories that refuse to simmer down. It is the old story of love gone uncollected, and of luck, which is love’s opposite, walking off with all the winnings, and a smirk on its face.

Mimi’s husband is the first to excuse himself. “Some work to catch up on at the office,” he says. “The Sturtevant case … pretrial discovery phase … depositions to take in the morning.…”

“Of course,” Mimi says, offering her cheek again. “Don’t be too late, darling.”

Edwee rolls his eyes significantly in Nonie’s direction, and of course Mimi, who notices everything, pretends not to notice this.

The remaining guests move into Mimi’s all-white living room, where candles are lighted, and where Felix serves coffee.

Perhaps, I thought, she had worn white tonight just for this all-white room, for her dress was of the same oyster shade as the linen fabric that covered the walls. It was part of her sense of personal theatre. Later, of course, I would wonder if this room was an echo—an unconscious one, perhaps—of another all-white room that had once had a certain meaning in her life. But tonight this room was predominantly white and crystal, Baccarat obelisks and spheres and cubes, all sending refractions of colored light from low, glass-topped tables against the oversized white sofas and ottomans and low-backed chairs. In this white room, tonight, she even placed white cymbidium orchids in white Chinese vases. But there were also bright splashes of color from the walls: a huge blue-and-white Jack Youngerman, a varicolored Morris Louis waterfall cascading behind a sofa. “Is this a Jasper Johns?” I heard Dirk Gordon ask her as he admired the paintings.

“Yes, it is.”

“And this: Imari?” as he pointed to a green and orange goldfish plate.

“Kutani, actually. But you’re close. You know a lot about porcelain, Dirk?”

“A bit.” Mr. Dirk Gordon clearly did his homework on Brad and Mimi Moore.

“My husband and I are passionate collectors.”

“And this must be V’soske carpet.”

“Why, yes, in fact, it is.”

“The most expensive, and the best,” he said, a young man who would make it his business to know such things, and then, “Whoever was your designer did a marvelous job.” Mimi laughed her special laugh, and said, “Thank you,” though I knew that no room in this apartment had ever known the banality of an interior decorator. Everything in this room, right down to the little cluster of Steuben glass mushrooms that had been “planted” in sphagnum moss in an antique ironstone tureen, had been selected by Brad and Mimi themselves, for Brad also has good taste. At least he appreciates fine things.

“But her rooms don’t track,” the designer Billy Baxter once complained, a trifle pettishly perhaps, since he had nothing to do with their design. By this he meant that the rooms—the white living room, the Tiger Lily library, the French dining room—seemed at odds with one another. Today’s designers tend to pick two or three fashionable colors—at the moment, persimmon and pomegranate are two of these—and use them, with varying degrees of emphasis, throughout a house. (Remember when every smart living room had to be painted a deep mint green?) But Mimi prefers to let each room create its own experience. “After all,” she argues sensibly enough, “a person can’t be in more than one room at a time.” This approach gives her house a certain sense of quirkiness and playfulness.

Mimi moves around her sparkling living room now, trying to sparkle herself. But, of course, her mother’s little explosion has left the evening with a taut edge, and the sparkle can’t help but feel a little forced. And so, one by one, after a polite enough interval has passed, Mimi’s guests begin their thank-yous, their good-byes, and leave.

“Stay and have a quick nightcap with me, Badger,” Mimi says to her son. And, when all the others have gone, she leads him back into the library, where Felix has set out a decanter of Ar-magnac and thimble-shaped glasses.

“Yes, a brandy,” she says to young Brad’s offer, and she flings herself in her long white sheath deep into a green leather sofa. Only then does she permit herself to unwind, let down her guard, and let the angry tears come. “Oh, shit, shit, shit!” she says through clenched teeth, making tight fists of her hands and pounding the sofa cushions with them. “Shits! All of them! Why did I even bother?” Badger hands her her glass, and she downs the contents with a gulp, then holds out the glass to be refilled.

“Just … shits!” she cries. Tears stream down her cheeks, but there are no sobs.

“Okay, Mom,” her son says pleasantly. “Let it all out.”

In a business noted for temperamental characters, Mimi Myerson is not known for emotional outbursts. During her years in the industry, she has been exposed to various of its titans: the volatile Helena Rubinstein, who, hearing news she did not wish to hear on the telephone, would often rip the cord from the wall and hurl the offending instrument across the room; the imperious Elizabeth Arden, who enjoyed making surprise visits of inspection to her salons where, finding nothing to her liking, she would sweep through her selling floors crying, “Fools! Knaves! Nincompoops!” while salesgirls cowered behind their counters in her wake; and the notoriously foul-mouthed Charles Revson, whose favorite tactic was to leap from his desk and shout, “You’re fucking fired! Get the fuck out of here!” Mimi has never found temperament to be an effective business tool and has always practiced a more coolheaded, evenhanded executive style, having discovered that more can be accomplished with honey than with vinegar or vitriol. But now, of course, in the privacy of her own home, and alone with her own son, it is a different matter altogether.

“That shit Nonie!” she says now. “She changed all my place-cards. Did you know that? To put her used-car-salesman-type greasy boyfriend next to Granny, so he could talk up some new hare-brained scheme of Nonie’s. And then Edwee and Nonie, whispering together like two old maids and refusing to join the conversation. And wretched old Granny! Wouldn’t you think, after all these years, she could let up on Mother? But she never lets up! And poor Mother—who didn’t want to come anyway, but whom I made come. And those stupid-ass models: did you ever encounter such a pair of airheads? The whole thing, the whole evening, was a stupid idea to begin with. Why didn’t you tell me, Badger, that this whole evening was a stupid idea?”

He spreads his hands. “Mea culpa,” he says. “It was all my fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t. It was my stupid idea. Even your father wasn’t a lot of help, was he? Sneaking out on some trumped-up excuse, and leaving me to sweep up the wreckage.”

“He said the Sturtevant case. I know it’s been on his mind—”

“Ha! You don’t live with a man for twenty-nine years and not know when he’s fibbing. If he’s working on the Sturtevant case right now, I’m the Virgin Mary!”

“Come to think of it,” Badger says, “there is a certain resemblance. But in letting off all this steam, your halo’s gotten a little crooked.”

“Oh, shut up,” she says, only half-crossly. “It’s just … it’s just that I wanted everything to be so … perfect … with the whole family … just once … to celebrate …”

He moves across the room now, sits beside her on the green sofa, and circles her shoulders with his left arm. “It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” he says. “Sometimes things just go wrong. The best-laid plans of mice and men …”

“And my beautiful dinner—people just played with their food. And Mr. Greenway here from Fortune. I’d worked so hard.”

“No more self-pity, Mimi Myerson. Nothing old Greenway writes about us can hurt us. The old farts who read Fortune don’t buy Mireille perfume. Besides, maybe you work too hard, Mom. Ever think of that?”

She looks quickly at him. “Is that it, Badger? Have I been working so hard with this company that I’ve let the rest of my family fall apart all around me?”

“Why not give me more to do? I’ll take a promotion any old day.”

“Oh, Badger. You’re the best. You’re the best thing that’s happened to this family, and this company. Ever. I couldn’t run it without you.”

“Well, I do have some interesting news for you,” he says, “if we can get back to business for a minute.”

“Oh? What’s that?” The tears and the anger are gone now, and she sits up straight.

“Naturally, I didn’t want to mention this at dinner. But I’ve found out who’s been buying up our Miray stock in big units, forcing the price up.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s not one of the funds, as we thought. It’s an individual.”

“Who, Badger?”

“Mr. Michael Horowitz. Himself.”

She stiffens slightly. “You’re sure.”

“Found out this afternoon. One of his partners plays squash at the Racquet Club. He just casually mentioned it—as though he assumed I knew. I don’t envy that partner’s future with Horowitz if Horowitz learns he let the cat out of the bag.”

“No. Don’t tell anyone. I don’t even want to know your friend’s name.”

“He’s got over four percent of us already.”

“At five percent—”

“Right. SEC regulations require that he make a public announcement. But what puzzles me is why? Why would a real estate guy who’s got hotels and co-ops and casinos in Atlantic City want to get into the cosmetics business? Is it the old green-mail, do you think? Driving the price of our stock up to the point where we’ll have to pay his price to get it back? Or do I detect a not-so-friendly takeover attempt in the making? Or what?”

“Michael Horowitz,” she says. “Again. I should have guessed.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”

“First it was Grandpa’s Florida house he wanted. Now it’s this.”

“The house was a perfectly friendly sale. This isn’t. This is back-door stuff. This is sneaky.”

“He seems to want to buy up whatever belongs to the Myersons. Isn’t that pretty clear?”

“But why, I wonder?”

At first she doesn’t answer him. Then she says, “Personal reasons. Jealousy, perhaps.”

“Jealousy?”

“Maybe he sees us as old Jewish money. He’s new Jewish money. His father was a caterer in Queens. Something like that.” She laughs briefly. “Isn’t it silly? My Grandpa Adolph started out as a housepainter in the Bronx!”

“How well do you know this guy, Mom?”

“Know him? Well, I know him. Everybody knows Michael Horowitz if they’ve spent five minutes in New York.”

“Then why not call him, Mom? Set up a meeting. See what’s on his mind. Confront the guy with what we know. You’re always at your best at a high-noon shoot-out.”

She shudders. “Oh, please,” she says. “Haven’t we had enough talk tonight about shooting—about guns and killing?”

“Sorry,” he says easily. “Unfortunate metaphor. But I do think this guy Horowitz is becoming a threat that our company is going to have to face.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I’ll call him.”

“They say he’s tough.”

“I’m tough,” she says.

He laughs. “Good girl! Your halo’s back in place.”

She is silent for a moment. Then she says quietly, “This means it’s even more important for the perfume to be a success, doesn’t it.”

“Of course. If we’re going to fight a takeover, we’ll need to fight from strength.”

“Suddenly, the future of this company—your future, my future—and your future is even more important than mine—all depends on the success of a, a silly little fragrance!”

“Not a silly little fragrance. A fifty-million-dollar fragrance. A very important fragrance.”

“Well, it got off to a pretty rocky start tonight, didn’t it?”

“Tonight was just family.”

“Oh, Badger,” she says, “it will succeed, won’t it? It can’t fail, can it?”

“Of course it can’t,” he says.

But they both know that this is a business where there is never any guarantee of success, never any insurance against failure.

The two sit quietly on the green sofa, sipping their brandies. Outside, the seagulls are slowly lifting from the lake and circling back to sea, a signal that the Atlantic storm has passed. Elsewhere in the apartment, Felix moves from room to room on silently slippered feet, turning out all unnecessary lights, leaving lighted only those that will guide his master and his mistress to their respective bedrooms at their respective hours. In the library, the portrait of Adolph Myerson scowls down upon his only granddaughter and his only great-grandson from under his museum lamp.

Is the room talking?

“Practice your curtsy, Mimi,” she hears her mother’s voice say. “Lower your body a little more, bend your right knee a little deeper, and the left foot a little further back. That’s better. Now hold out your right hand for balance, and say—”

“Good afternoon, Grandpa, sir. Good afternoon, dear Granny Flo.”

“Much better. Now try it again: back straight, with your chin a little lower, but with your eyes looking directly into Grandpa’s.”

“Why is Papa unhappy, Mama?”

“Your Papa is unhappy because your Grandpa is unhappy. But if you and I can make your Grandpa happy, and your Grandma happy, your Papa will be happy, and everyone will be happy—happy as happy can be. Now practice the curtsy, chin down, eyes up …”

But from where he glares down at them from her library wall, her grandfather’s face fails to register even the slightest trace of happiness, or pleasure, or approval, at all.