“She’s—bearing up,” Miranda said.
“Oh, the poor thing! She must be devastated, absolutely devastated. I should have written her a note, but I just couldn’t bring myself. I still can’t believe it. Our Mr. Si is gone … he’s gone … he’s gone!” Tears streamed down her pale cheeks.
“There, there,” Miranda said.
“Tell your mother I’m making a very special novena for her. This is my fourth day. I’m asking Our Lady to bring your mother peace.”
“She’ll be very touched to hear it,” Miranda said.
Now Pauline has more or less managed to collect herself, though there are still occasional sighs and sniffles as they pack the boxes. From her father’s bathroom, Miranda fetches a fresh box of Kleenex. She supposes that Pauline was secretly in love with her father—how else to justify such an excessive display of grief?—and she even wonders whether Pauline and her father had been lovers once upon a time. Was Pauline O’Malley ever pretty? It is hard to say at this point. Perhaps, but now she has developed the white papery skin and fine worry lines of secretarial spinsterhood. Why does a spinster’s skin become like parchment? Miranda doesn’t know, but it does.
“When we finish this, I’m going to have to clean my own desk out,” Pauline says, gently wrapping a paperweight in tissue paper and nestling it in a box of plastic peanuts.
“Whatever for?” Miranda asks her.
There is a little sob. “I can’t stay on here. I can’t stay on here now that Mr. Si is gone.”
“Oh, but we don’t want to lose you, Pauline. Mr. Bonham’s going to be running the store, at least for the time being. Couldn’t you stay and help him out?”
“I could never work for Mr. Bonham!”
“Why not?”
“Never! There was only Mr. Si. He was the only one I could ever work for, ever. No one can ever take his place.” Another sob.
“But what will you live on, Pauline?”
She blows her nose noisily. “There’s my pension fund account. Every Tarkington’s employee with more than ten years’ service has a pension fund account. And there’s my Social Security. That will be more than enough.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, Daddy left you some money in his will.”
Her eyes grow wide. “He did?” she gasps.
“Ten thousand dollars. I know that’s not—”
“Ten thousand dollars!” she cries. “Why, that’s more money than I’ve ever had at one time in my entire life! What in the world will I ever do with that much money?” There is a fresh burst of sobbing. “Oh, what a wonderful man he was, your father, what a wonderful, generous man … I’ll have to ask my brother-in-law to help invest it for me. He’s a C.P.A.”
Miranda is beginning to lose patience with this woman and her teary heartbrokenness. Here, after all, is a woman who always seemed to Miranda so coolly efficient and unemotional that she verged on iciness; her father’s death has reduced this virginal automaton to a blubbering mass of woe. Here is a woman who has spent thirty-four years working in a store where women spend ten thousand dollars for a single dress without giving it a thought, and Pauline is treating this sum as though she has been handed the output of King Solomon’s mines. “Come, come, Pauline,” she says a little crossly. “Please try to pull yourself together.” After all, she thinks, I am the one who should feel bereaved. She finds herself wishing her father had left this woman nothing at all, though she knows these thoughts are unworthy.
All her comment produces, however, is another freshet of tears.
“Look here,” Miranda says. On impulse, she picks up the signed photograph of President and Mrs. Ford. “I want you to have this too.”
“Oh, no, Miss Miranda! Not that! That was his most prized possession! That’s a signed photograph of a living United States President! Do you realize how valuable that is? That’s priceless, Miss Miranda!”
“I hardly think so,” she says. “The Fords handed them out to everyone they met. But I’m going to make it even more valuable for you.”
She slides the photograph out of its frame and, beneath the inscription (To Silas Tarkington, with grateful good wishes, from Gerald and Betty Ford), Miranda writes in her own hand, Presented to Pauline O’Malley, devoted secretary to Silas Tarkington, with gratitude and affection by his daughter, Miranda.
“There,” she says, handing it to her with a flourish. “That gives the photo a bit of a history, as the art dealers say. Now, no more tears, okay?”
“Oh, Miss Miranda, I shouldn’t accept this.”
“But you will, right?”
Pauline reads the new inscription. “‘Devoted,’” she says. “Yes, that’s right. I was devoted to him. I’d have laid down my life for him.”
“And this too,” Miranda says, and reaches for a paperweight that is particularly nice. “I want you to have this too, as a little personal remembrance. Look, it’s even dated on the bottom: seventeen-eighty. Daddy was told that it once belonged to Catherine the Great of Russia.” She presses the paperweight into Pauline’s hand.
“But what would I ever do with it?”
“Just place it somewhere where it will catch the light.”
Now there is yet another spell of weeping. “Oh, Miss Miranda. You’ve always been so kind to me. All your family. How can I ever thank you? My cup … my cup runneth over.” When she has managed to compose herself again, she says, through her Kleenex, “Now, what about these? What shall we do with these?” She points to a line of books bound identically in dark blue leather bindings. “These are his diaries.”
“Diaries? I didn’t know he kept a diary.”
“Well, they’re not diaries really. They’re date books, where he recorded his personal appointments. There’s one for each year. They go way back to when he opened the store.”
“Well, if they’re personal, I think they should go to the farm.”
Miranda starts plucking the books from the shelf and stacking them in an empty carton. Then an idea strikes her. She picks up the most recent volume and turns to the date he died, Saturday, August 12. The page contains only a single notation: D.S.—11 a.m.
She feels her heart sink. D.S. Diana Smith. So Tommy was right. He was planning to meet Smitty on the day he died.
She turns the pages backward, and a letter in its envelope falls out. It is addressed to him in what seems amateurish typing, and the envelope is marked Personal/Confidential. Pauline is busy in another part of the room, so Miranda drops the letter quickly in her purse, to read later.
Then she remembers another date: June 1970. She runs her finger back along the books until she finds that year’s volume and begins turning the pages for the month of June. There, scrawled across two dates—June 24 and 25—she finds the notation: Boston, Ritz-Carlton, res. conf. #384-86J.
She replaces the book in its proper sequence and continues packing the diaries in their carton.
Back in her own office, after she and Pauline have finished, Miranda cancels her luncheon date, pleading urgent family business. Instead of having lunch with an ad salesman from The Times, Miranda goes to the public library. She is not sure, exactly, what she is looking for, but she has found out that the library files copies of the Boston Globe on microfiche.
She takes her little spool of film to one of the projection machines and begins running through June 1970. When she gets to the twenty-fourth, she slows the film down and begins studying the newspaper page by page as it moves across her screen. She finds what she wants in the issue of June 25. It is not a big item.
MODEL, 19, PLUNGES TO DEATH AT RITZ-CARLTON
A sometime model and actress, whom Boston police have identified as Christine Wandrous, 19, of South Braintree, either jumped or was pushed from a window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel yesterday evening. Her body struck the sidewalk on the Arlington Street side of the building, opposite the Public Garden.
Miss Wandrous, a spokesman for the hotel said, was not a registered guest at the time, and elevator operat
ors could not recall transporting the young woman to an upper floor. Although there was no immediate sign of foul play, neither was any suicide note found. A thorough police search of all guest rooms immediately above the site of her fall revealed no guests who had any knowledge of, or acquaintance with, Miss Wandrous, who most recently worked as a part-time model for Filene’s.
A sister of Miss Wandrous, Mrs. Helen McCullough of South Braintree, was contacted by police. “Somebody had to have done this to her,” Mrs. McCullough asserted. “She would never have committed suicide. She was a happy, healthy, beautiful girl, whose life was full of hope and promise.”
Funeral arrangements will be made in South Braintree.
She flips through more editions of the paper, to see if there are any follow-up stories. She finds only one. It appeared two days later, buried in a back section of the paper:
AUTOPSY REVEALS MODEL WHO PLUNGED TO DEATH AT THE RITZ WAS PREGNANT
The Suffolk County Coroner’s Office revealed that in an autopsy performed on the body of Christine Wandrous, 19, the part-time model and actress who plunged to her death from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Wednesday evening, it was discovered that the young woman was pregnant. Assistant Coroner James J. Bailey said that Miss Wandrous appeared to be in the second trimester of her pregnancy. The sex of the fetus was undetermined.
A sister of Miss Wandrous, Mrs. Helen McCullough of South Braintree, told the Globe, “I had no idea that Christine was pregnant. But I’d noticed that she’d been terribly nervous and despondent in recent months. I could tell that something was deeply troubling her, and weighing on her mind. She would suddenly burst into tears for no apparent reason. I assumed it had something to do with her inability to find work.”
Occupants of the hotel rooms and suites situated directly along Miss Wandrous’s line of fall expressed no knowledge of the young woman, leading police to speculate that she may have jumped from the roof. But how she could have reached the hotel’s roof is unclear, since access is possible only through the use of a specially magnetized key-card, supplied only to members of the hotel’s maintenance staff.
A police investigation continues, with an interrogation of all hotel employees.
Well, a police investigation may have continued, but there is nothing about it in subsequent issues of the newspaper; Miranda runs the film through the next several weeks to be sure. The whole story seems to have been dropped.
Several things strike Miranda as odd about the story. First is the girl’s last name, Wandrous—like Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8, whose party-girl career ends with her fall into the paddle wheel of a ferryboat. Was Gloria Wandrous pregnant too? Miranda can’t remember. Then she thinks of the phrase “jumped or was pushed.” If Christine Wandrous managed to enter an unoccupied hotel room and jump out, she would have left behind her an open window. If she had been pushed by a guest of the hotel, would the murderer have left the window open? No, he would have closed it, to make it appear she had fallen from the roof. Neither of the stories mentioned an open window, which would have been the first thing the police looked for.
But oddest of all is the way Mrs. Helen McCullough’s description of her sister changed over the course of two days. First, Christine Wandrous is a happy, healthy, beautiful girl whose life is filled with hope and promise. Two days later, she is despondent, deeply troubled, bursting into unexplained crying jags at the drop of a hat: unemployed, pregnant out of wedlock, suicidal. At least Miranda’s father appears to have nothing to do with the tragedy, beyond the coincidence that he happened to be in Boston and staying at the Ritz-Carlton when it occurred.
Deciding that she has been pursuing a red herring, Miranda rewinds the tape and snaps off the machine.
Now, in the back seat of the Rolls with Billings at the wheel, Miranda is being driven out to Old Westbury. Beside her on the seat, as well as on the floor and in the front seat beside Billings, are packed cartons. Still more are in the car’s trunk. Each carton is labeled as to its contents. She is still thinking of her mother’s words that night: “I’m talking about June nineteenseventy! … I’m talking about Boston and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel!”
And her father’s reply: “Moe Minskoff worked that one out for me.”
But her afternoon in the library has provided no clues as to what it all means.
Then, suddenly, she remembers the letter that fell out of her father’s date book. She opens her purse, reaches for the letter, and shakes it out of its envelope.
It is a very short letter, typewritten on a single sheet of plain white notepaper without a letterhead, and it has the look of having been typed in great haste. She reads:
My darling—
Our long talk this morning has made this the happiest day of my life. This is my promise to you: We’ll leave that horrible old, boring, nagging hag behind—forever—and let me become the kind of new wife you’ve always deserved, one who loves you beyond measure, and then all the heartache I have endured for these past years—loving you unbearably, but knowing that I could not have you, all of you, all to myself, as I have so longed to do, my dearest—seems worthwhile. I have made our reservations at the Princess, and Bermuda should be lovely at this time of year. I am walking on air, hardly able to wait until Saturday, when I will be all yours, and you at last will be all mine.
The letter is signed, With all my love, the soon-to-be new Mrs. Silas Tarkington.
She is stunned. She feels as though she has been dealt a blow to the center of her stomach. She reads the letter once more, her hands shaking. She looks at the postmark. It was mailed in Manhattan. Then, all at once, she recognizes something else. She presses her nose into the fold of the letter, and there it is, unmistakably: the scent of Equipage. This is the letter Tommy told her about. Everything he told her was true.
Her temples are pounding, her breath feels short, and she feels almost physically nauseated. On the day he died, her father was planning to leave her mother and the family he professed to care so much about and not only run off with Smitty to Bermuda—of all the cliché places—but also to marry her. Oh, Daddy, Daddy, she thinks, how could you have wanted to do such a thing to us? She tears the letter into tiny shreds, rolls down the window, and scatters the pieces into the wind from the speeding car.
Billings, glancing at her in his rearview mirror, senses that something is wrong. “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asks her.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
Her next reaction is rage—total, absolute, and unadulterated fury—not so much at Smitty as at her father. What had happened to her gutsy father? How could he have allowed himself to be reduced to such a state of groveling servitude, to have become so besotted with this woman, to use Tommy’s word? How could he allow this woman—or any woman, for that matter—to get him to promise to give all of himself to her? How could he allow this woman—any woman—to speak of her beautiful mother, his wife for almost thirty years, in such a trashily bitchy way? Had Smitty managed to castrate him? Had he become suddenly senile? This was not the father she knew at all! All at once her father the man has become her father the wimp. All at once she has nothing but contempt for him. If this was the way he planned to treat his family, Miranda is almost happy that he is dead.
Her next wave of feelings are of total confusion and disorientation, as Miranda asks herself how she can ever face her mother again, how she can ever look her mother straight in the eye again, without having to tell her mother the truth.
Unless, of course, her mother already knows.
Her mother greets her in the entrance hall with a little kiss. She is looking lovely, as always, relaxed from her massage and rested from her nap, wearing a long hostess gown of pale blue chiffon, belted with three silver chains that tinkle as she moves. Billings is taking the car around to the garage, where the cartons of her father’s things are to be stored temporarily. “Darling, come into the drawing room and meet our other dinner guests,” her mother says. Miranda was hoping to have a serious discussion with her
mother tonight, without anger or recriminations, but apparently this is not to be. Some sort of party is going on.
“Do I need to change?” she whispers.
“Darling, you look perfect,” her mother says.
They enter the drawing room together, and two young men, both in black tie, rise from their chairs. One is fair, the other dark. One looks familiar, the other does not. “Darling, you remember Mr. David Hockaday from the Metropolitan Museum,” her mother says. “And this is Mr. Peter Turner, who is interested in writing a book about your father. Is it a book? Something, anyway. Mr. Turner, this is my daughter, Miranda.”
She shakes hands with the two young men. “Though we’ve never met, I feel I know you, Miss Tarkington,” the darker of the two says. “I saw you once when you came down to visit your brother at Yale. Blazer and I were both in Calhoun.”
“Oh, yes … I remember now. It was in the fall of Blazer’s sophomore year. Mother and I had driven up from New York. You were standing in the quad.”
“You really remember that?”
“Certainly. You were wearing a red shirt.”
“You know something—I think I was!”
“Mr. Hockaday has come to look at your father’s art collection,” her mother says. “I thought that made sense, since most of it is here, scattered about the house. The only important piece in this room is the Gauguin over the fireplace.”
Mr. Hockaday’s eyes travel to the Gauguin, and he steps closer to it. “I hadn’t noticed it,” he says. “Forgive me.”
“I understand it’s an early piece, before Gauguin went to Tahiti,” Connie says.
Milliken appears to take drink orders and then to pass hors d’oeuvres.
“Tell me how your husband assembled his collection, Mrs. Tarkington,” Mr. Hockaday says. “Did he work through any particular dealers?”
“Oh, no,” Connie says. “He didn’t trust dealers. He read in a book somewhere that people like Duveen often got Bernard Berenson to falsify the authorship and provenance of paintings in order to make sales.”
Carriage Trade Page 18
