Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

digesting her black coffee and cigarettes. The social column was usually read out loud to no one in particular, with appropriate emphasis when either her or my father’s name appeared.
    Even her dinner parties made the Miami News ’s “Party Camera” column, with “Buffet supper celebrating completion of their pentagon-shaped dream house was given by Lew Smith and his wife Esther.” The black-and-white photograph shows Mom dishing out her creation to a waiting line of hungry decorators. Below the story is another photograph of “Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Mimms swinging in Lew Smith’s backyard.” Hmmm.
    If my father had a particularly favorable write-up, she’d lean over to his side of the bed, pick up the phone, and dial the office. “Guess what Kay wrote about your new designs for the Allen residence? Uh-huh, yes…but she didn’t mention that fabulous revolving bar that you had designed at poolside. Ummm, only three photographs, but at least one’s in color on the front page. No, she didn’t show the master bedroom, only the living room. Okay, enough chitchat, I haven’t even put my face on yet, let me go…” After the daily news briefing, she then would fiddle with the crossword puzzle for a half hour while the gold cigarette holder dangled from her red lips long after the cigarette had been extinguished.
    There were times when she would throw the society page across the room in a fit of rage. After having just had lunch with Frank Lloyd Wright at an American Institute of Architects event, she was justifiably furious when the paper mistakenly quoted the maestro. “Listen, what he said to me during dessert was that he thought Miami was nothing but a future slum. You don’t think they’d put that in the paper, do you? Of course not. They’re nothing but a bunch of cultural illiterates. They wouldn’t know great architecture if it fell on them. But that’s exactly what he said to me. And instead they print some meaningless trash. Did they mention that little pat on the back that he gave to Alfred Browning Parker, which should have been more of a hug? After all, he was one of Frank’s best students at Taliesin. No, they’re too stupid to understand the symbolism of that gesture. Alfred is a genius. And he knows how to pick them; that’s why Alfred works with your father on the interiors. Honestly, I need to get that editor on the phone…” But that call would have to wait; she needed to focus on her jewelry fitting. Would it be black pearls and jade or just plain emeralds today? Mom was lucky: her sea captain brother, Max, used to roam the world and would pick up a few precious “rocks” in every port. My father would then have one of his jeweler friends fashion them into massive gold-encrusted works of art that doubled as both conversation pieces and lethal weapons.
    My mother did not have to color-coordinate her jewelry to that day’s outfit, since she wore the same black dress every day. Her closet was filled with rows and rows of identical little black cocktail dresses, all made by her mother from an old Dior pattern that she had bought from the back pages of Vogue . It was a kind of uniform, as she served in the fashion army on the front lines of style.
    It would often be close to noon before the blackout shades in the bedroom were finally lifted to admit the white-hot glare of the Miami sun. With half the day now gone, she was just about ready for her cameo appearance at my father’s design studio as bon vivant, confidante, and personal secretary to Mr. Lew Smith, interior designer to the stars.
    One night my father was attending a meeting of the Designers and Decorators Guild, where he was acting president. I was lying in bed with my mother, watching Johnny Carson as he interviewed some starlet about her new celebrity crash diet that consisted only of coffee, cigarettes, and pills. While she looked