Read Online Shades of Fortune by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online

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?”
    â€œShe 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?”
    â€œMother … had to leave,” Mimi says.
    â€œGood 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.…”
    â€œOf 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