Shades of Fortune by Stephen; Birmingham Read Free Book Online

” 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.
    â€œYellow tulips!” Granny Flo exclaims, her eyes fixed on empty space in front of her. “Mimi? Where did you find yellow tulips in August , Mimi?”
    â€œYour eyesight must be improving, Mother,” Nonie says. “How did you know these were yellow tulips?”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œI didn’t realize tulips had any odor at all.”
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œMother and Edwee have been going at each other like that for years,” she says. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”
    â€œYour brother doesn’t like me.”
    â€œMakes 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.”
    â€œI gather your mother has an important art collection?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAnyway,” 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.
    â€œEven 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?”
    â€œI 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