21

“My father did a very brave thing,” Mimi is saying. “In retrospect, given hindsight, it may not have been the wisest thing to do, but, at the time, something had to be done, and what he did took courage. He acted decisively, and he acted fast. I was terribly proud of him at the time.

“If you talk to others in the industry, you’ll hear them say that Henry Myerson took a deeply troubled company and drove it virtually into bankruptcy. But that’s not a fair appraisal of what really happened.

“To begin with, you have to understand that this is a business where newness is everything. You’ve got to keep introducing new things—new nail and lip shades, new creams, new fragrances. This year’s new nail shade may not be all that different from last year’s, but at least it has a new name, and looks a little different, and seems new. My grandfather understood this, and the Revsons understood it—they learned it from Grandpa. The Lauders are just now beginning to understand the importance of newness. I mean, Estée came out with something called Youth-Dew twenty-five years ago—a perfectly good fragrance, with a nice name. But when Estée introduced Youth-Dew, her market was women in their thirties and forties. That’s the major market for all of us. This is a business about women—and men, too—wanting to stay looking young longer. And it’s in their thirties and forties that Americans start worrying about losing their youthful looks and begin turning seriously to perfumes and cosmetics for help. We have to grab our customers during those golden years. But the trouble with Youth-Dew today is that women who started using the product twenty-five years ago are now in their fifties and sixties, and let’s face it, Youth-Dew today is considered an old ladies’ scent. Over at Lauder, they realize they’re losing their younger market, and so now they’re busily developing new products to try to recapture this market. You’ve got to keep moving forward in this business. You can’t just sit back and enjoy the success of a certain product. And you can never go backward.

“But to get back to my father, and what he did, or what he tried to do. First of all, you have to remember that among the other tremendous problems he inherited was what we still refer to here as the Candied Apple Fiasco. Whenever we sense some sort of a problem brewing with a product, we still say, ‘Beware of the Candied Apple!’ Or, ‘Is there a Candied Apple in the woodpile?’ Candied Apple was a lip and nail shade that my grandfather introduced a couple of years before he died. It was a disaster. Who knows why? Sometimes there’s no clear answer to why a product, or a color, just refuses to catch on, but Candied Apple was one of these. It just didn’t fly, as we say in the trade. I still think the name is kind of cute, and the color was … well, it was the color of the candied apples they sell at carnivals. The shade seemed to have a lot of fun things going for it. The ads were full of roller coasters and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. But the shade just would not move off the shelves. Maybe the name wasn’t sexy enough, wasn’t sophisticated enough. Maybe it sounded too gloopy and teenagey. Maybe the name reminded women of the acne set. Maybe it sounded too digestive. Who knows? But, whatever it was, the customers, as we say, stayed away in droves. Candied Apple was the Edsel of the cosmetics business.

“My grandfather blamed my father for the failure of Candied Apple, which was really unfair. My father had nothing to do with developing the shade, and the name was my grandfather’s—the names were always his. But what happened was that, when they were spot-testing the products, my father brought some samples home to Mother, and Mother loved Candied Apple. She loved the color, and she loved the name. My father passed this fact along to my grandfather, and as a result of this one-woman sampling of public opinion, Grandpa immediately decided that Candied Apple was going to be the hit of all time. He immediately upped the advertising and promotion budget. He hired extra salesmen. He quadrupled the production order. And then, when Candied Apple fell flat on its face, he blamed Daddy for the enormous production overrun. That was the way Grandpa’s mind worked. He could never take the blame for any business misjudgment himself. It had to be someone else’s fault. In the case of Candied Apple, Daddy became the scapegoat—just for passing along the word that my mother liked the shade!

“It was ridiculous, it made no sense. As you know, my grandfather never had a very high opinion of my mother, never thought she was good enough for his precious oldest son. Why did her vote have so much weight in this particular matter? Who knows? Maybe he was looking for an omen of good fortune, and that was it. In this business, we’re always looking for omens, portents. Charlie Revson would never hire anyone if the number on his license plate added up to thirteen. I’m superstitious, too. Why am I having my launch party for Mireille on the seventeenth? Because an astrologer told me that this would be the most auspicious date for me!

“Anyway, I won’t say that the Candied Apple Fiasco was the sole reason for the horrible state of affairs the company was in when Grandpa died, but it certainly hadn’t helped. And among all the other problems my father inherited when he took over the company were thousands and thousands of unsold tubes and bottles of damned Candied Apple sitting around in Miray warehouses, gathering dust, where they were already beginning to call it Rotten Apple. It wasn’t just a question of changing the name and reintroducing the shade as something else. That’s often done in this industry. Candied Apple had been given very distinctive packaging: each lipstick tube had a bright red apple on its cap, and the top of each polish bottle was also an apple shape. So, part of Daddy’s plan to rescue the company in its emergency situation was to try to unload the Candied Apple overstock, to get rid of the loser. It made good sense to me at the time. Of course, I was desperately young then—barely twenty—and not very clever and knew none of the things about the beauty business that I know now. I was a babe in the woods, and I adored my father. To me, he was the handsomest, smartest, bravest man in the world—the knight in shining armor who was going to charge forth and save the company single-handedly. As I say, given hindsight and what I know now, I would probably have to revise that opinion. Daddy made one fatal mistake. What he tried didn’t work, but it was a brave try.

“And you have to remember that, over the years, my father had been given fancy titles but no authority, no real power. All the final decisions were made by my grandfather. There are subtleties in this business that maybe my father hadn’t grasped, but then how could he have? No one had ever consulted him on anything. My grandfather may have been a tough administrator, but he was a lousy teacher. After Grandpa died, Daddy had about two days to learn everything there was to know about the beauty business!

“Meanwhile, I’ll always have to give Granny Flo credit for coming forward the way she did. God knows, without her help, we wouldn’t possibly be where we are today. For all her orneriness, for all her contrariness—for her blow-ups like the one at my mother the night of my party—I have to forgive her and remind myself what she did at the time of that crisis, in ’fifty-nine and ’sixty. She proved herself to be a real stand-up lady. At the time, she had more guts than anybody.

“She immediately put all her properties up for sale, and the timing turned out to be just right. Madison Avenue was already becoming commercial north of Fifty-seventh Street, and Madison and Sixty-first is now an office tower. I have to give Michael Horowitz credit, too; he handled that sale brilliantly. His negotiations for the air rights over that corner piece were fantastic. He also made a beautiful deal for ‘Merry Song,’ Granny’s place in Bar Harbor. Where ‘Merry Song’ used to stand, there are now four hundred and fifteen time-sharing condominiums, a shopping mall, and a marina for medium-sized boats—tacky-looking, but very profitable. Of course, Michael took his commissions on all these deals. He wasn’t just doing this out of the kindness of his heart, but all these were good deals for Granny, and Granny turned over almost all the profits to my father, to help him keep the company from going under. I remember seeing her sitting there, at her desk in the little apartment she moved to at Thirty Park Avenue, just writing out these enormous checks!

“The yacht, Mer et Son, was more of a problem. It was something of a white elephant. The Arabs and the OPEC boys hadn’t come into the market yet, and nobody wanted a big boat like that. Also, Granny and Grandpa hadn’t been invited to join the Northeast Harbor Fleet Club, so Mer et Son had been lying at anchor for several years in the little cove at the foot of Granny’s lawn. Her hull had become badly silted in, and she was covered with barnacles, and she was listing badly. She looked like hell, and she was probably filled with rats. Finally, Michael was able to make a deal with the U.S. Navy, who agreed to take her over as a training cruiser. No big profit there, of course, but there was a tax deduction, which was helpful.

“The real white elephant was ‘Ma Raison,’ the Palm Beach house. It’s the biggest house in Palm Beach, you know. It was Grandpa’s final folly. Back in 1960, it went on the market for twenty-two million, but there were no takers. I mean, that house is just too big for anybody … or almost anybody. The zoning laws down there prohibit that property from being broken up and developed. It can’t be put to any commercial or public use. At one point, Michael came up with a scheme to present the house to the U.S. Government, as a winter White House for presidents or visiting foreign VIPs. The government didn’t want it. The upkeep was too much. Over the years, we’ve kept dropping and dropping the price, but still nobody wanted it, and meanwhile the taxes were staggering. It sat there for over twenty years, minimally maintained, looking shabbier and shabbier. And there was another problem with that house. Its central bell tower, which has a beacon on it, was on the main flight path into the West Palm Beach airport. This made ‘Ma Raison’ not just the biggest place in Palm Beach. It was also the noisiest. Right around five o’clock, when you’d think it would be nice to go out for a quiet drink on the terrace, the big jets would start piling in from the north. You couldn’t hear yourself think.

“Meanwhile, we kept lowering the price. Finally, a couple of years ago, when the best offer we had was four million, Michael Horowitz offered four-point-two and bought it himself. God knows why he wanted it. He got it at a distress-sale price, of course, but four-point-two is better than nothing, and Granny is relieved of those god-awful taxes. And do you know what our smart little sometime friend Michael was able to do? He began putting pressure on the boys at the airport and got them to change their flight-approach pattern. You can do that sort of thing if you’re as rich as Michael Horowitz.

“But I keep digressing from what my father tried to do.…”

The first stockholders’ meeting of the Miray Corporation, with Henry Myerson as its new head, was held two days after the reading of Adolph Myerson’s will in the boardroom at Miray’s offices on Fifth Avenue. Only five members attended: Edwee, Nonie, Mimi, Granny Flo, and Henry himself. The Leo cousins, who had been notified of the meeting by telegram had not bothered to attend. Since the departures of Leo and Nate from the company in 1941, the cousins had never bothered to attend stockholders’ meetings, and, today, they were of course unaware of the special gravity of the situation. The five Myersons sat around the big table, while Henry presided from the oversize chair that for nearly fifty years had been the royal seat of the company’s founder.

“I don’t need to remind you all of the crisis we face,” Henry began.

“Henny-Penny, your tie’s still crooked,” his mother put in.

“Mother, please,” Henry said, almost angrily. “Your tie would be crooked, too, if you’d spent the last two days and two sleepless nights trying to make some sense out of the mess this company’s in!”

“Well, at least sit up straight,” Granny Flo said. “Don’t slump. Your father never slumped.”

“We face a crisis,” Henry continued, his face visibly perspiring, though the temperature outside had dropped into the teens and, among the emergency measures Henry had already ordered, the office thermostats had been lowered to sixty-five. “We face a crisis, and I’d like to outline to you the emergency measures I’ve already taken. The office staff here is being reduced by twenty-five percent, starting with those most recently employed, and the employees affected have already received their notices. The Miray sales staff in the field is being reduced by another twenty-five percent. Executives who have formerly enjoyed private secretaries will from now on use the services of the steno pool. The company employs a fleet of eleven limousines. This fleet is to be discontinued and the vehicles sold. From now on, executives will use local taxis to get about the city on business. Strict restrictions will be imposed on all business travel, and executives who have previously used first-class air travel will from now on fly economy. Similar restrictions will be applied to all business entertaining, lunches, and so on. The order for the Gulfstream corporate jet that my father placed five months ago has been canceled. Other cost-accounting measures, never imposed in my father’s day, have already been put in place by me, including plans to lease out some five thousand square feet of unneeded office space on the northeast corner of the sixteenth floor. I have placed myself in charge of cost accounting. Finally, I have asked all staff at the executive level to volunteer to accept, at least temporarily, a twenty percent cut in salary. Needless to say, I was the first executive to so volunteer.”

There was a polite round of applause.

“But I don’t need to tell you,” he went on, “that all these measures will have roughly the effect of applying a Band-Aid to a gunshot wound in the head. Other, much more drastic measures will need to be taken if we’re going to survive as a corporate entity. These are the measures that I’m going to ask you to vote on here today.”

There was a suspenseful silence. “Well, tell us what they are, Henny,” Granny Flo said, tightening a knot in her needlepoint.

“What I’m going to propose to you is a three-point program,” he said. “First, I’m going to ask you to agree that all dividends on Miray stock be discontinued for an indefinite period of time, until this company begins to show some black ink on the bottom line.”

There was a collective groan around the conference table, but there was also a general nodding of heads.

“Second, I ask your permission to begin immediate negotiations with all banks and financial institutions with whom we have loans, seeking to extend these loans at, naturally, the most favorable rates they can give us.”

There was more nodding of heads.

“And, finally,” he said, “the most drastic measure of all. Believe me, I’ve given this idea a great deal of long, hard thought over the past two days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this may be the quickest, most effective—maybe the only—way we can salvage this company from its present predicament. What I am proposing is an entirely new marketing strategy for Miray products. As you know, under Adolph Myerson’s leadership, Miray positioned itself gradually in an upscale, specialty-store market, working with such upscale outlets as Saks and Magnin’s and Neiman’s. On the other hand, when Miray began its corporate existence back in nineteen twelve, our products were distributed solely through lower-priced and discount outlets—the dime-store chains and neighborhood drugstore and foodstore chains. It was this marketing strategy that got Miray off the ground in the first place, years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I am saying to you that Miray, unfortunately, finds itself in that same position today—back at the ground floor, reentry level, back at square one. I am saying that, if we are to survive and prosper as we once did, we must reposition all our products in a downscale market. We have a prestige name. In a downscale market, I believe we can compete successfully with such brands as Cutex. As most of of you know, one of the biggest problems facing us right now is a huge warehouse inventory of a shade called Candied Apple. As most of you know, Candied Apple has failed, dismally, to attract the upscale market that the shade was conceived for. I believe that, in a downscale market, the shade will be successful. This will mean slashing our suggested retail prices, of course, but it will also rid us of an enormous, and expensive, overstock, and at a profit. I suggest that this new retail tactic be applied to all Miray products. With Candied Apple, the upscale market appears to have abandoned us. By repositioning ourselves in a downscale market, I believe we can rebuild the kind of success that my father built. We are going back to our roots, as it were—our humble roots. But they are also proud roots. They are honorable roots. They are roots from which we grew to be one of the leaders in the industry. They are roots from which we will grow again, and continue to grow. Like the proverbial South, we will rise again. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to approve this proposal. As I said at the outset, it is a drastic one. At the same time, as I see it here today, it may be our only hope.”

There was silence around the table. Finally, Granny Flo said, “It’s as bad as that, then.”

“It’s as bad as that, Mother.”

“I say bravo, Daddy,” Mimi said softly.

“Well, then,” Henry said. “There you have it, my three-part proposal. Shall we vote on each of the three parts separately, or on all three together?”

“Together!” Granny Flo snapped.

“Then how do we vote—for or against?”

“For,” said Granny Flo without dropping a stitch.

“For,” said Edwee.

“For,” said Mimi.

“Against!” said Nonie loudly.

“Then,” Henry said, slumping further in his chair, “my proposals have been accepted by a ninety-five percent majority.”

The next day, in Philip Dougherty’s Advertising column in the New York Times, there was the following headline:

MIRAY MARKETING SWITCH STUNS INDUSTRY

In a surprise press conference at the Fifth Avenue headquarters of the Miray Corporation, Mr. Henry Myerson, Miray’s 43-year-old new President and Chief Executive Officer, announced a startling new marketing strategy for his company, makers of a long line of luxury cosmetics, beauty, skin, and hair-care products.

Miray, long available only at the counters of select specialty and department stores in major cities, will from now on reposition its products in the cheaper retail and discount outlets across the country. “We’ve become too much of a snob name,” Mr. Myerson said. “There’s another, bigger market out there eager for quality products, and we intend to go after that.” Industry analysts announced themselves “stunned” by the latest Miray move. It is the first time in industry history, as far as is known, that a prestige name has chosen deliberately to downgrade itself.

Amid rumors that Miray may have found itself in fiscal turmoil following the recent death of the company’s 89-year-old founder, Adolph Myerson, the younger Mr. Myerson, who is Adolph Myerson’s son, assured reporters that such rumors are without foundation. “The company’s in great shape,” Mr. Myerson said. “It’s just time for the next generation to take us over and head us in some promising new directions.” Miray, a privately owned corporation whose shares are held by immediate members of the Myerson family, is not required to reveal information pertaining to its financial status. However, some dismissals of company personnel are known to have taken place in recent days, and a recently introduced lipstick and eye-shadow [sic] shade is known to have had disappointing sales. The shade, called Candied Apple, was launched with great fanfare in the fall of 1957, to a poor box office.

“It’s just a case of the new broom sweeping clean,” said Henry Myerson, referring to the employee dismissals. “I’m the new broom.”

Meanwhile, spokesmen within the industry remained skeptical about the wisdom of Miray’s about-face reversal in sales strategy. “It’s like taking Tiffany and turning it into J. C. Penney,” said one.…

“It was a disastrous move,” Mimi says. “Bold, but disastrous. I know that now. I didn’t then. What it did was to almost completely destroy the prestige and respectability and credibility of an old-line name. Years had been spent building loyalty and goodwill among a certain class of well-heeled customers. All that went out the window overnight. How does a woman feel, who’s been used to paying twelve dollars for a lipstick at Saks, when she sees the same lipstick for sale for a dollar nineteen at Walgreen’s or Kmart? She feels angry. She feels cheated. She feels as though someone she’d trusted as an old friend for years—or a lover, or even a husband, I suppose—had been betraying her all along. She feels disgusted. When Daddy decided to give up the carriage trade and go mass-market, he lost whatever we’d had in terms of customer loyalty. You just can’t turn back the clock in this business. Perhaps you can’t do it in any business.

“Meanwhile, there were several things that could have been done with the Candied Apple overstock. It could have been sold in Europe, or in Japan, or any number of Third World countries. It could have been turned over to a wholesaler and sold under a new label. Or, after a suitable period of mourning, and using the same packaging, it could have been reintroduced under a new, sexy name—Apple of Eve, or Apple of Temptation, neither of which is all that bad, come to think of it.

“And we had other products that were all doing very well in the specialty-store market. There was no need to tie everything in with the one failure of Candied Apple. But it was as though my father was obsessed with the failure of that one line—perhaps because Grandpa kept saying it was all his fault. So my father decided to have a fire sale on everything, even the products that were popular and profitable. Disastrous. Given hindsight, I see now that Daddy’s problem was more than inexperience. He was naive, an innocent, a babe in the woods.

“Other problems developed—the Leo cousins, for instance. When their Miray dividends stopped coming in, they understandably wanted to know why. They brought in their lawyers. When the lawyers learned about that little December stockholders’ meeting, they claimed that the vote taken there in favor of Daddy’s plan was illegal. The cousins, after all, held fifty percent of the outstanding shares, and a failure to vote at such a meeting is counted as a vote against the proposal, whatever it is. Daddy had never heard of such a rule and neither had any of the rest of us. So, since they hadn’t voted, the cousins claimed that they had actually voted against Daddy’s proposal. Technically, they were right. And they claimed that Nonie’s negative vote was actually the swing vote—that Daddy’s proposal had actually been defeated by a majority of the shareholders. That’s when the lawsuits started coming in, charging mismanagement.

“Poor Daddy. During those two short years he had as head of the company, most of his time was spent defending those lawsuits. He grew more and more discouraged and depressed, and the red ink kept pouring in—redder than any red that had been bottled as that goddamned Candied Apple! Thank God for Granny and, I suppose, thank God for Michael.…

“Those two years were terrible years for Daddy. He aged terribly. I watched as my handsome father’s thick, dark head of curly hair grew completely white. I watched his fine, athletic figure develop a stoop. In those two years, he seemed to age twenty. Brad and I watched this physical disintegration of his feeling helpless. And my mother was … well, drinking more heavily than ever. No help to him at all. Several times I went to him and said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help, Daddy? Can I help?’ But he’d just look away from me, and say, ‘No … no.…’

“And then he … well, if it’s true that he was a … you know, a suicide … then those two years were enough to do it, I suppose. I don’t know. Perhaps. He tried to turn back the clock, and he failed. In the end, he knew he’d failed.”

“Itty-Bitty has to go to the doctor,” her Granny Flo said on the telephone. “He has something called a plantigrade wart, the vet calls it, on his poor little left front foot, and it’s hurting him so. At first, I thought it was just a little blister, from the hot sidewalks, perhaps, but the vet says no, it’s a plantigrade wart. He needs to see a specialist. And the only dog pediatrician we can find is way up in Mount Kisco.”

“A pediatrician?”

“Yes. Who works on doggies’ feet.”

“Oh. I think you mean a podiatrist, Granny.”

“That’s what I said. And, meanwhile, Mr. Horowitz has some leases he wants me to sign on the Bar Harbor lots. I was going to go up to Mr. Horowitz’s house to sign them—they need to be in the lawyers’ hands first thing in the morning—but now Itty-Bitty and I have to take the one-ten train up to Mount Kisco. Would you run up to Mr. Horowitz’s place and fetch those papers for me, Mimi? I asked your mother, but she says she’s not feeling herself today. You know what that means. She’s pickled again. I’d ask your father to do it, but he’s so busy.”

“Tell you what,” Mimi said. “Why don’t you run over to Michael’s place, and I’ll take Itty-Bitty to Mount Kisco?” She was rather pleased with the fact that, during all these family negotiations with him, she had not had to come into direct contact with him.

“Oh, no, that won’t work,” her grandmother said. “Itty-Bitty will want me with him. If the doctor has to operate or something, Itty-Bitty will want me there.”

“Why can’t he send a messenger?” she said, trying to think of some way to avoid this encounter.

“Won’t you do me this little favor, Mimi? I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t so important. He lives on Riverside and Eighty-first. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes. Are you that busy?”

“No, of course not, Granny. I’ll be glad to do it.”

“He doesn’t trust a messenger. They come on bicycles. This is too important for a bicycle.”

“Give me his exact address,” Mimi said.

“Hi, kiddo,” he said, greeting her breezily at the door of his apartment as though more than two years had not passed since they had last seen one another. He was dressed in jeans and an open shirt, a loosened necktie slung rakishly over his shoulder. He immediately handed her a fat manila accordion envelope, and for a moment, she thought he was not even going to ask her in. Then he said, “Care to step in for a minute? See my place?”

His apartment was clearly designed to draw an appreciative gasp from a visitor, which was exactly what Mimi did when she entered it. The floor of his huge, cathedral-ceilinged living room was covered, wall to wall, with deep-pile white carpet, and the room was furnished with oversize white sofas and chairs, plumped up with dozens of big white toss pillows. Every surface that was not white was mirrored: mirrored walls, doors, table tops, and lamp bases. An elaborate track- and recessed-lighting system had been installed in the ceiling, and tall, floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors across the entire west-facing wall opened out onto a wide terrace planted with hedges and fruit trees. Mimi could not help noticing that the trees and hedges were artificial—good artificial, but still artificial. Beyond, there was a sweeping view of the Hudson, the New Jersey Palisades, the towers of Fort Lee, and the twin towers of the George Washington Bridge.

“It’s beautiful, Michael,” she said. “Not just beautiful, spectacular!”

He laughed. “Michael Taylor, San Francisco. He’s the climax decorator out there. He asked me, ‘Do you want an old-money look or a new-money look?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with a new-money look? After all, that’s what it is. Why pretend it’s anything else?’ We knocked out walls all over the place. This room used to be four smaller ones. Taylor likes built-ins. Everything’s built in. Here’s the entertainment center.” He opened a pair of mirrored doors. “TV, stereo, tape deck, concealed speakers.” He opened another pair of doors. “Here’s the communications center. It’s all computerized. Ever see one of these? Brand-new from Sony—a cordless phone.” He swung open a third pair of doors. “Here’s the wet bar—refrigerator, ice-maker. The ice-maker makes ninety pounds of ice a day. Why would I need ninety pounds of ice a day? Hell, I don’t know, but Taylor wanted me to get it.” He moved around the room, opening and closing doors of built-ins. “Anyway, I’m building a house in East Orange that’s gonna make this place look like a dump. I may not be the richest guy in New York yet, but I’m on my way. Can I fix you a drink?”

“No, thanks. I can only stay a minute.”

“Sit down,” he said. She sat down on the edge of one of the oversized sofas, with the thick manila envelope in her lap, and he sat opposite her, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fists. She saw that he had acquired a gold Rolex watch. He studied her intently for a moment, then tossed the wayward lock of sandy hair back across his forehead, jutting out his lower jaw in the same motion. “You’re looking good,” he said. “Marriage agrees with you, I guess.”

She smiled, and tapped the manila envelope with one finger, and glanced at her own watch.

“I read about your wedding in the New York Times,” he said. “It was in the Society pages. I guess if you’d married me, it wouldn’t have made the Society pages. ‘From an old Boston family,’ the Times said. That must have pleased your grandfather.”

“We’re all terribly grateful for what you’re doing for us, Michael,” she said.

“Nothing to it,” he said. “That’s what I do best—real estate deals. But something’s worrying you, kiddo. I can tell. There are little worry lines around your eyes. What is it?”

“I admit I was a little nervous about coming to see you today,” she said.

“I think there’s more to it than that. That’s why I asked your grandmother to send you up here today.”

“So. Sending me here was your idea. I should have guessed it.”

“I wanted to see how you were taking all this. You look worried. You look scared.”

“Scared? Well, it was kind of a shock to all of us, when we discovered the way Grandpa left things in his will.”

“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you think what your grandmother’s doing, what I’m helping her do, is really going to help that company?”

“Well, I gather what’s needed right now is capital, and—”

“What does your husband think? He’s supposed to be a hotshot lawyer.”

“Brad’s from New England. He’s being very stoic about it.”

“A cold fish, you mean?”

“No. He’s very optimistic, actually. He makes a joke out of a lot of it—the legal fees, and so on.”

“A joke? I wish I could see anything funny about the situation. I think your company’s in more trouble than any of you may realize. I think what your grandmother is doing is great, but I think all she’s doing is sticking her little pinky in the hole in the dike—a hole that’s going to keep getting bigger.”

“Really, Michael?” she said. “Now you really are scaring me.”

“Have you ever thought of running that company yourself? You could do it, you know.”

“Me? But it’s Daddy’s company now, and—”

“I always thought you were the smartest one in that family. I always thought you were the best of that whole lot. You’ve got brains, and you’ve got taste. Me, I’ve got no taste. This”—he gestured around him—“this isn’t my taste. This is Michael Taylor’s taste. But you’ve got everything that it takes. You’ve got beauty, brains, taste, and class. Anyway”—he jumped to his feet—“you’ve gotta run. But think about what I’ve said. From what I know of what’s going on, your family’s in a very no-joke situation. There’s more needed than sticking the little finger in the dike.”

He walked her toward the door. Suddenly, at the door, he drew her toward him and, roughly and a little clumsily, kissed her hard on the mouth. “For old times’ sake,” he said, releasing her. “Now beat it, kiddo. I’ve got work to do. But think about what I’ve said, and call me if you need me.”

All at once she was out the door, and the door had closed behind her.