Fatal Reaction

it seemed as if someone had lowered the volume of the city. The cacophony of Michigan Avenue evaporated, buffered by an open expanse of park and the much larger silence of Lake Michigan. Our new apartment was in an elegant building nestled in the elbow of Lake Shore Drive just where it reaches out to embrace the shore. Built at the turn of the century, the apartment itself had been designed by David Adler, an architect whose sense of scale was so legendary that he supposedly could look at an eighteen-foot ceiling and tell instantly if the cornice was even a fraction off.
    By any measure it was a grand apartment. My mother always said it was the best in the city. She should know— it had once been hers, a wedding present from my grandparents who’d made their home in the one directly above it. Later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Palm Springs, Mother combined the two apartments, adding a graceful curved staircase and creating arguably the most stunning duplex in the city.
    They sold it when I was six and we went to live in the big house in Lake Forest where I grew up. In the intervening years the apartment changed hands a number of times. It had most recently been purchased by Victor Sanderson, who’d died six weeks later after choking on a piece of roast beef at the Saddle & Cycle Club. His widow, Phyllis, continued to live there but grew more eccentric with each passing year. Over time she closed off progressively more of the apartment until she was living in the smallest of its twenty-one rooms, eating cold soup by candlelight in order to save on the electricity. According to the attorney who handled the estate, she left behind a fortune totaling over $120 million.
    Stephen pulled the car under the arched portico of the building and the liveried doorman touched the bill of his cap. We waited for a moment while he released the wrought-iron security gate. As the gate parted noiselessly, Stephen eased the car down the steep ramp into the underground garage. Beneath the luxury apartments of Chicago’s Gold Coast lies a subterranean world. Cars are washed and filled with gas, dry cleaning makes its way in and out of closets, meals are cooked, and groceries are delivered. I wondered what my new neighbors would think of my battered Volvo. No doubt they’d assume it belonged to the maid.
    Mother and her decorator, Mimi Sheraton, were already upstairs waiting for us. We found them in the living room which, without furniture, seemed roughly the size of the cargo hold of an ocean freighter. Despite the fact that the walls had been painted the color of Pepto-Bismol, the intricately carved egg-and-dart moldings made my heart turn over in their symmetry.
    Dutifully kissing the air beside my mother’s perfumed cheek, I immediately wished I had thought to put something else on that morning. Mother, in a scarlet Valentino cocktail dress, reduced the severe uniform of my navy suit and pearls to rags with one withering glance. If Mussolini had put one-tenth the effort into his quest for world domination that my mother spends on looking beautiful, we would all be speaking Italian right now.
    Mother, who was due at an important party (one of her more irritating oxymorons), had come to advise us on the architect’s latest sketches for the kitchen and the master suite. Mimi, drawings in hand, led the way while two assistants of dubious sexuality hovered in the background with clipboards and tape measures. Mimi Sheraton was the quintessential society decorator. At least two face-lifts older than my mother, she favored St. John’s knits and was unabashedly condescending to everyone who crossed her path, carpenters and contessas alike. Much of her career had been spent endlessly redecorating my mother’s houses, and as such she counted as more of a fixture of my childhood than many of my actual relatives.
    I had grown up in a house that was in a constant state of redecoration. By the time I was ten I’d already had my fill of window treatments and floor coverings. Deciding where to move the file cabinet in my office was more than enough to satisfy whatever occasional urges I might feel to alter my surroundings. I was more than happy to entrust matters both large and small to my mother and Mimi. As far as I was concerned, the extent of my role in the proceedings was to write checks and feign interest.
    Stephen, on the other hand, could usually be counted on to summon enthusiasm for the process. Once we