Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Tarkington suggested something simple, ma’am. Cook has made a crabmeat salad and a bread pudding for dessert. Will that be all right?”

  “That sounds fine, Milliken.”

  “Shall I bring you a glass of wine in the library, ma’am?”

  “Lovely, Milliken.”

  Milliken has just begun calling her ma’am, a title formerly reserved for her mother. Before her father’s death, she was Miss Tarkington. Some subtle change in her status, a change apparent only to Milliken, has occurred in the last two days, and now she and her mother are both ma’ams. Should she feel pleased to be so elevated? Miranda is not sure.

  The green library was always her father’s favorite room. Of course it is really not a library at all. It is just a stage set for a library, just another of the stage sets her father created for his life. The walls and the bookshelves are covered in green leather, and so are the books themselves, but they are not real books. Behind these green leather bindings with their gold-lettered titles—Views of Ancient Rome, Seventeenth-Century French Architecture, A History of Opera, and so on—are blank pages. One whole wall of these faux books, for instance, swings open to reveal an enormous television screen. The people her father entertained here—his bankers, certain special clients, a few close friends—did not come here to read. They came to talk of money and merchandise or to play gin rummy at ten dollars a point. His “official” photograph, taken by Bachrach in 1970, half smiles at her from a low table.

  Tonight the room seems strangely still and empty. The rack containing his collection of pipes sits on his green-leather-topped desk. The elephant-foot stand—faux, like the books—holding his collection of walking sticks is by the door, walking sticks topped with heads of eagles, sea gulls, lions, snakes, and horses, carved in teakwood, ivory, brass, silver, and baleen, some of them antiques but most of them copies. As she sits in her father’s green leather chair by the empty fireplace, Miranda thinks she can still smell her father’s pipe smoke in the air.

  Milliken arrives with her wine on a silver tray. He places this on a low table beside her chair, along with a silver bowl of Cheese Doodles. Her father had a passion for Cheese Doodles and liked to nibble on them while he sipped his evening drink, which, of course, was never wine but Chivas Regal. His bar is still stocked with Chivas Regal, and the butler’s pantry contains shelf after shelf of nothing but Cheese Doodles. The sight of the Cheese Doodles moves her strangely. “Thank you, Milliken,” she says, and he withdraws.

  She is sitting in the president’s chair.

  “Just think of the things you and I could do together,” Tommy Bonham said to her.

  “You mean I’d be your co-president?” she said.

  “Partners,” he said. “Full partners. Think about it, Miranda.”

  And of course she is thinking about it now. Carefully.

  Running the store. Running it with him. Fifty-fifty. Partners. Filling her father’s shoes, in a real sense. Working with Tommy, the way her father did, as a team. Sitting at his big desk, in the corner office, pushing buttons, with Tommy’s office right next door. Or, if they are to become co-presidents, will they both have corner offices?

  Of course she has always dreamed of running the store. But it was just that, a hazy dream, with none of the specifics filled in. Now she must consider these specifics. To begin with, there is the possibility that she would be taking this big step too fast, that she is emotionally and occupationally unprepared for it, and that she will fall flat on her face. That could happen, of course, but Miranda has enough confidence in her ability and adaptability to feel sure it won’t.

  But one of the practical questions to be asked is this one: What will it be like to work with Tommy? One of the nice things about her present job, despite its boring aspects, has been her independence. She is really her own boss. She is the Advertising Department. Each month she is presented with an advertising budget, and as long as she doesn’t exceed that budget the job virtually does itself, like a plane on automatic pilot. The only actually “creative” moments occur when she discovers a new publication, studies its demographics, and proposes that the store experiment by placing an ad in it. Otherwise, she reports to no one. Tommy Bonham and she have had no opportunities to clash, or disagree, or even to interact at all. He has always left her alone, treated her with distant but polite respect—after all, as he said, she was the boss’s daughter—but now they will be interacting a great deal.

  Miranda knows she is well liked by the store’s personnel. That will not present a problem. On the other hand, she also knows that Tommy Bonham is less well liked. She has heard members of the staff complain that Tommy is overscrupulous in his attention to detail, that his eyes seem to be everywhere in the store at once, that he is too zealous in his criticism of the slightest oversight or shortcoming. Often, when an unpleasant chore had to be performed—the dismissal of an employee, for instance—her father delegated Tommy to perform that chore. She has heard Tommy referred to as her father’s hatchet man. What will it be like with Tommy looking over her shoulder all the time, ready to catch her in her first mistake? In the beginning, at least, she is bound to make a mistake or two. Maybe even three. How will she react when Tommy, however gently, reprimands her in this process he calls “teaching her everything she needs to know”?

  “No, Miranda,” she can hear him say, “that’s not the way we do it.”

  “But that’s the way I want to do it,” she can hear herself reply.

  Stalemate. All at once, teamwork has ground to a halt.

  Would the idea of co-presidents, where each had equal authority, really work? What would it be like? There are no ready answers to these questions, she thinks. We’d have to wait and see.

  Then there is the question, What is Tommy Bonham really like? She doesn’t really know. A complicated man, she thinks. A bachelor. Tommy Bonham’s bachelorhood is by now an established fact of New York social life. Only the adjectives used to describe that famous bachelorhood have changed over the years. In the 1970’s, when he first appeared on the scene, the word for Tommy was eligible. “Handsome Thomas Bonham, one of New York’s most eligible young bachelors,” Mona Potter called him, and that description prompted a number of eligible women to set about trying to correct the situation. They had not succeeded. By the 1980’s, he had become a perennial bachelor. And now, in the 1990’s, he is a confirmed bachelor, with the word “confirmed” implying that he has taken his final solemn vows to remain in an unmarried state. Women no longer bother offering themselves to Tommy Bonham—not, at least, with marriage as their goal.

  Of course there have been the usual number of sly speculations about Tommy Bonham’s sexual orientation. Every single male past the age of thirty-five in this city is accustomed to this sort of talk, and Tommy himself has joked about it. “I know there are people who say I’m gay,” he once chuckled to Miranda’s father. “Maybe I should encourage those rumors. Maybe that would make some of these broads who are trying to get me to the altar leave me alone.” Miranda has never taken any of these innuendoes seriously. Many women Tommy has dated have offered opposing testimony. “My dear, he’s simply the best swordsman in town,” one woman gushed to her. “I’m amazed he’s never asked you out.” But Miranda knows why he never has. Because she was the boss’s daughter. Now, however, that situation has changed.

  But this in itself raises another ticklish question. Remembering her wild, schoolgirl crush on Tommy, she asks herself, What would happen if, working with him in such close proximity, those old feelings should come surging back? How would she react if he were to put his arm around her or draw her to him? That would certainly complicate things. Can she trust herself? She has often found herself more than idly wondering—what woman wouldn’t, with a man as handsome as Tommy?—whether he was just as handsomely constructed elsewhere. But no, she decides. That crush was too long ago. She has long since come to regard him as nothing more than her father’s business ad
junct, a store fixture. And he has never expressed any sexual interest in her. None whatever.

  This afternoon, though, he said something that surprised her. “You know,” he said, “I was the one who talked your father into giving you a job at the store in the first place.”

  “Really?”

  “He was very much opposed to it. He wanted you to marry a man like David Belknap, and move to Westchester, and start having babies.”

  She made a wry face. “That’s what David Belknap wanted.”

  “But I talked your father into hiring you,” he said.

  “So it’s thanks to you that I’m working for the store at all?”

  He winked at her. “That’s right. You owe me one. You owe me one, Miranda.”

  Her father disapproved of many things about Tommy. He disapproved of his bachelor’s lifestyle. He disapproved of his reputation as a womanizer and ladies’ man and often said that Tommy should settle down with a Tarkington’s-type woman. “He dates these Junior League girls,” she had heard her father say. “Why doesn’t he marry one of them? It would be better for our image.” Her father said these things, despite the fact that his own reputation as a womanizer and ladies’ man was becoming widespread and the women her father chose weren’t all Junior Leaguers.

  She had learned about her father’s tastes in women firsthand when she was seventeen. It was the end of her first semester at Sarah Lawrence, and her name was posted at the top of the freshman honor roll. Excited, she wanted her father to be the first to know, so she hopped on a train to Manhattan and went straight to her father’s office, feeling proud as punch, smart as paint. Looking up from her desk as Miranda marched toward her father’s closed door, Pauline O’Malley sprang to her feet and tried to block her path. “You can’t go in now, Miranda!” she cried. “He’s in conf—”

  “Nonsense,” Miranda said, “this is important,” and she pushed Pauline aside and tried the door. It was locked from the inside.

  “Mr. Si!” Pauline screamed into the intercom. “Your daughter is here!”

  Miranda pounded on the door. “Open up, Daddy!” she said. “I’ve got great news!”

  It was a few minutes before the door opened, and Miranda was astonished by what she saw. His office was in disarray. Two lampshades by his sofa were crooked, there were sofa cushions on the floor, and a picture over the sofa hung askew. Her normally impeccable father looked similarly disheveled. He was in his shirt sleeves—he never worked in his shirt sleeves—and his collar and necktie were undone. His usually perfectly combed white hair was mussed, his shoelaces were untied, and he was perspiring heavily.

  “What happened, Daddy?” she cried.

  “I was just having a little nap.”

  But she had never known him to take naps and, from the way he was breathing, he looked as though he had been running, not sleeping. “You must have had a bad dream,” she said. She knew that he sometimes did have bad dreams.

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “I was having this really very bad dream, Miranda.”

  “Well,” she said, taking charge, “you just march into your bathroom and clean yourself up. I’ll straighten up this mess.” Almost meekly, he obeyed her, and from his bathroom she heard water running. She gathered up the papers from the floor, put the desk lamp back on its base, straightened the pictures, and picked up the sofa cushions. Suddenly she heard sort of a scratching sound from inside his coat closet. She pulled open the closet door, and a naked woman was crouched there, looking up at her with frightened eyes, one arm crossed across her bare breasts and the other hand covering her crotch. She didn’t know the young woman’s name, but she recognized one of the models who paraded in designer dresses on the fashion floors. The woman was not much older than Miranda herself. “Well, excuse me!” Miranda said, and slammed the door closed. “I made the top of the honor roll, Daddy!” she shouted angrily in her father’s direction as she marched out of the office, though she doubted he could hear her over the running water.

  As she passed Pauline’s desk in the outer office, the secretary gave her a worried I-told-you-so look.

  Disgusted with him, she decided to punish her father and refused to speak to him for a solid month. When he called her at college, she refused to come to the phone.

  When she got back to Bronxville, she told her roommate what had happened. “Should I tell my mother? Or not?” she asked.

  “Not,” her roommate said. “Don’t make waves. Besides, all men are like that.”

  “Well, the man I marry is not going to be like that,” Miranda said firmly.

  Later, when they were back on speaking terms, her father had tried to offer her an explanation. “I know you found Miss Rosenthal hiding in my closet that day.”

  “I did indeed!”

  “She was in somewhat of a state of déshabille,” he said. “But let me explain. These things are something of an occupational hazard for men in my position. These girls, these little models, think they can advance their careers by literally throwing themselves at the chief executive. Sometimes, one has to literally fight these advances off, Miranda. That was what happened that afternoon. I was in the middle of fighting her off. Needless to say, I had words with her later, she apologized for her indiscretion, and I forgave her. Meanwhile, you should really telephone before just barging into the office.… I’m happy about the honor roll.”

  “Hmm,” was all she said. She didn’t believe a word of it.

  “We have a lot of things we need to talk about, Miranda,” her mother said to her this afternoon as they were leaving Jake Kohlberg’s office. “Let’s have dinner together, just the two of us, tonight at the apartment.” Now Miranda is sipping her wine in the green library, waiting for her mother.

  Well, one of the things they will definitely not talk about tonight is Tommy Bonham’s proposition. Whatever decision Miranda makes about that, she will make entirely on her own.

  Still, she can’t help wondering what her father would have had to say about all this. “What do you think, Daddy?” she asks him now.

  “Do you really want to run the store?” the half-smiling Bachrach portrait answers her.

  “Yes!”

  “Women can’t run stores, Miranda.”

  “I’m taking night courses in marketing at N.Y.U. I got an A on my first big test.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I was saving it to tell you now.”

  “You don’t learn marketing from textbooks. You learn it from experience.”

  “What if I were to run the store with Tommy? He has plenty of experience.”

  The portrait has no response to this. She has lost his wavelength. What did you say, Daddy? I can’t hear you.

  Idly, and for no real reason, she picks up the green telephone beside her chair and dials his private office number. It rings once, twice, three times; she can even hear it ringing faintly in the empty office on the floor below. Then, all at once, he answers!

  “Hello. You have reached the voice-mail number of Silas Tarkington. I’m unable to take your call right now, but, when you hear the tone, please leave your name, telephone number, and any message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Your message can be of any length. If there is any item in the store you’re looking for, or if there is any way I can be of service to you, please let me know. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”

  Miranda quickly replaces the receiver in its cradle. No one has erased the tape on his machine.

  If there is any way I can be of service to you.…

  For the first time since her father died, Miranda allows herself the luxury of a good, noisy sob.

  Then, outside the room, she hears the elevator door slide open and the brisk click of her mother’s Chanel heels across the marble floor of the foyer.

  “Miss Tarkington’s waiting for you in the library, ma’am,” she hears Milliken say.

  “Be with you in a minute, darling!” her mother calls out, almost gaily. “I just want to slip
into some more comfortable shoes.”

  How could her mother remain so composed? Of all the odd things that happened the day her father died, perhaps the oddest was her mother’s behavior. Miranda had been in East Hampton for the weekend, visiting with friends, when her mother telephoned her. “Darling, something terrible has happened,” she said, and then she told her.

  Miranda, not even bothering to pack, had jumped into her blue BMW and driven directly to Old Westbury. But as she drove through the gates of Flying Horse Farm, everything there seemed as ordered and manicured as ever. She had expected to find the circular drive in front of the house filled with cars—police cars, an ambulance perhaps, reporters, television crews. She didn’t know what she had expected to find, but when she parked her car at the foot of the steps leading up to the house, hers was the only car in the drive. Everyone, it seemed, had already come and gone. Dr. Arnstein had arrived by helicopter, signed the death certificate, and departed. The hearse had arrived from Campbell’s, and her father’s body was already on its way to New York and the crematorium. All this, it seemed, had happened before Miranda’s mother telephoned her in East Hampton.

  She ran up the steps to the house, where Milliken, who had obviously been weeping, greeted her. He squeezed her hand. “Your mother’s in the sun room,” he whispered.

  She found her mother there, in the room decorated in sunny garden colors—pinks, yellows, pale greens, and blues—sitting in a wicker chair, looking as coolly beautiful as ever in a white silk blouse and white silk slacks, working on her needlepoint. She was making a cover for her tennis racket. Her mother rose when Miranda entered the room, and they embraced, Miranda fighting back tears.

  “Darling, we won’t have your father anymore,” her mother said simply. “He loved you so. He was so very proud of you.”

  “What happened, Mother?”

  “He was swimming his laps in the pool. He just decided to swim one more lap than his fine, strong heart would let him—that’s what Harry Arnstein said.”