Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Now hold your horses,” she said. “What’s your hurry? Sit down.”

  “Well, I have several appoint—”

  “Just sit where you are for a minute, Mr. Minskoff. So you’re talking Fifth Avenue? Rent free?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “So let’s talk dollars and cents for a minute, Mr. Minskoff. Just exactly what kind of an investment are you talking about having me make?”

  “For three hundred thousand dollars, I can offer you a six percent interest in Tarkington’s, Incorporated.”

  “Too much,” she said. “I can’t afford that. Let’s make it half of that. A hundred and fifty.”

  “Let’s split the difference and make it two twenty-five.”

  “I said a hundred and fifty.”

  “Very well,” he said. “For an investment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you would receive three percent of the outstanding shares of the company’s stock. Do we have a deal?”

  “I’m going to think about it.”

  He looked at his watch again. “I’m afraid there won’t be time for that,” he said. “As I mentioned to you, there are investors all over town scrambling to get onto this bandwagon. If we wait as much as twenty-four hours, there won’t be any more shares of stock available for purchase.”

  “Street floor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My Leah Roth boutique. I want it on the street floor.”

  “In most specialty stores, I believe the millinery department is located on one of the upper floors.”

  “I’m afraid of heights,” she said with a wink. “I want street floor, near the main entrance.”

  He hesitated briefly. Then he said, “Very well. I’ll see to it that that’s arranged.”

  “Then we have a deal,” she said, and extended her right hand.

  “Good,” he said, taking her hand and pumping it. “This is a very wise and wonderful decision you are making, Mrs. Tarcher. I can assure you that you will not regret it. And may I add that everything Dr. Weiss said about you is true.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And if you see Sidney, give him my—regards.”

  “I’ll surely do that,” he said.

  “So—now when do I get to see Solly?”

  “Silas. Remember?”

  “So, Silas. When do I get to see him?”

  “As soon as we get this little bit of paperwork out of the way, I’ll arrange a meeting for the two of you,” he said. He gathered up his big floppy brown briefcase, which had THE STATE OF NEW YORK emblazoned in large gold letters on the flap. “Of course that meeting should not be here, or at your apartment in the Bronx. We must try to keep him away from his old influences, to avoid any temptations.”

  “It was that bad crowd he ran around with. He ran around with a bad crowd.”

  “Exactly. Now, if you’ll just have a cashier’s check ready tomorrow, payable to Tarkington’s, Inc., I’ll bring around all the necessary papers for you to sign. How’s tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock?”

  She nodded. “It should be interesting to see him. Now that he’s so changed and all.”

  “I think you’ll find the change in him absolutely astonishing,” he said. He smiled at her. “The thing Dr. Weiss told me he remembered most about you was your beautiful green eyes, Mrs. Tarcher. I see what he meant.”

  She returned his smile. “Tell me something, Mr. Minskoff,” she said. “Do you have a wife?”

  “I do indeed. A beautiful wife, if I do say so.”

  “What’s her coloring?”

  “She is a blonde. A beautiful blonde.”

  “Good. I have a gift for her.” She moved to a cupboard at the back of her shop, opened the door, and removed a pink straw sailor hat from its stand. “This was designed and made for a rich society girl from Long Island, also a blonde,” she said. “It was to have been part of her wedding trousseau. But at the last minute she broke the engagement and called off the wedding. You know how young people are these days. I could have charged her for it, of course, but I don’t like to do business that way. I’d like your wife to have this, Mr. Minskoff.”

  “What a beautiful hat, Mrs. Tarcher!”

  “Each of those little silk roses was individually made by hand. It takes a girl almost two hours to make a single rose.”

  “My wife Honeychile will love it, Mrs. Tarcher.”

  “Let me put it in a box for you.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tarcher! We state social workers don’t make much money, you know. It will be a real thrill for Honeychile to own a Leah Roth hat.”

  “May she wear it in good health,” Rose said.

  Outside, in the street, he knew he should spend the rest of the afternoon trying to round up more investors. But there were a couple of fillies running in the fifth at Aqueduct that he was interested in. The IRT station was right across the street, and if he caught an uptown train, then switched to the F train, he could be in Ozone Park by post time. He ran down the subway steps, the hatbox swinging by its cord in one hand, the big briefcase in the other. For a large man, Moe Minskoff moved fast.

  “We got a hundred and fifty big ones from your old lady,” he said that evening. “We’re on our way, Silas baby, we’re on our way!”

  “Si,” he said. “I think I’d rather be called Si.”

  “Whatever you say, pal. But we got a hundred and fifty big ones from the old lady. A hundred and fifty big ones—and a hat.” He tossed the pink-and-white hatbox onto Silas Tarkington’s sofa.

  “Watch it, Moe!” Si snapped. “My mother puts a lot of work into those hats of hers!”

  “Aw, come off it, Si. Shit. It’s just a hat the old lady couldn’t sell.”

  “And stop calling my mother the old lady!”

  Moe Minskoff stared hard at his friend. “What’s with you, pal?” he said. “You got a wild hair up your ass or something?”

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking about my mother.”

  “Shit. You never gave a shit about your old lady, and she never gave a shit about you.”

  “She just gave you a hundred and fifty thousand bucks, didn’t she?”

  “Shit. That was because I promised her a nine percent return on her money and some rent-free space in our store.”

  “She’s still my mother, and that’s still her money—and she gave you that for my store, not our store.”

  “Your store, our store, what’s the diff? I still got the dough out of the old lady.”

  “I said stop calling her that, Moe!”

  “Jeez,” Moe said. “What’s all this mother shit all of a sudden? She never once came to see you in the joint.”

  “That was because she was too busy—working to make a living for her family.”

  “So all of a sudden she’s the Virgin Mary? She was too busy gettin’ it off with Weiss, the tooth doctor, is what it was. He was drillin’ her in more ways than one, that’s for sure.”

  “Shut up, Moe!”

  “You shoulda seen how her eyes lit up when I mentioned that fucker’s name.”

  “I said shut up!”

  “Jeez,” he said. “I get you a hundred and fifty big ones from your old lady, and I get this shit. Some gratitude I get. Some thanks.”

  “You can take your hundred and fifty big ones and blow them out of that big fat ass of yours, one by one!”

  Moe Minskoff’s eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Come off it, pal,” he said. “Don’t give me no shit. I know what you’re pissed off about. I know you like a book. It’s not me calling your old lady your old lady, is it? Shit, no. It’s because you wouldn’t have shit if it weren’t for your old lady and your old man. Here’s you, Mr. Big Shot, quittin’ school and sayin’ you’re gonna make a million bucks, like Mr. John Jacob Astor. What happens to you? You wind up with zip to ten in the slammer. What happens to the old man and the old lady? They end up makin’ the million makin’ and sellin’ ladies’ hats! They amounted to somethin’, and you didn’t amou
nt to a shit sandwich. That hurts, doesn’t it, pal? That’s a tough booger to swallow, ain’t it? Knowing you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in if it weren’t for the honest dough your old man and your old lady were making with the honest sweat off their honest balls, while you were making license plates in the joint!”

  Si lunged toward the other man, seized his necktie by the knot, jerked his head backward, and punched him with a hard right to the jaw, a blow that sent Moe crashing on his backside to the floor. “Take that, you fat shmuck!” he said.

  For a moment, Moe lay there, looking dazed. Then he leapt to his feet and charged at Si. With his left elbow, he pinned Si’s neck against the wall and, with his right fist, began slamming punches at Si’s face, while Si concentrated his returning punches on Moe’s gut, trying to deliver a certain little liver punch he’d read about. He needed that little liver punch to free himself from Moe’s weight.

  Now pause, reader, for a moment, and consider the physical disparities between the two combatants.

  Si Tarkington was eight years younger than Moses Minskoff, and he was also in better shape. At Hillsdale, Si had exercised regularly and developed a wiry, muscular physique. Moe’s principal athletic activities in prison had been sleeping, eating, and watching television. On the other hand, Si had never been in a fist fight before. He had steered clear of the fights that occasionally broke out, had learned to walk away from a fight even when challenged, concentrating on earning points for good behavior. By contrast Moe Minskoff, who by his own admission was not well liked at Hillsdale, often found himself at the center of some prison brawl. Moe’s great advantage was his weight. At two hundred and eighty pounds, he weighed nearly twice Si’s hundred and forty-five. He was also three inches taller than Si, who was 5 feet 7 inches in his stocking feet.

  Moe, who had Si pinned against the wall with one massive elbow, only had one fist with which to deliver blows—his right—and he concentrated on punches to the face. Si, meanwhile, had two free fists to fight with, and he concentrated on Moe’s midsection, continuing to try to find Moe’s liver. This, he knew, was located somewhere just below the rib cage, but with Moe’s bulk the rib cage was not easy to find. He continued with rapid blows aimed at Moe’s belly and above. A picture fell from the wall with a shattering of glass, then a mirror, then another heavier picture. A lamp fell over.

  “Call me a shmuck, you little mama’s boy?” Moe was saying. “You think I liked it, going out and begging for more of your old man’s money for you? Doing a snow job on your old lady that you were too chicken to do yourself?”

  Then Si found his target and delivered a series of hard, mean, fast punches with both fists to his opponent’s solar plexus. Moe bellowed and fell back again heavily into the sofa, crashing on the hatbox. The sofa’s frame cracked and Moe fell thunderously to the floor while Si danced around him, fists in the air, shouting, “Shmuck! Shmuck! Stand up, shmuck! I’m not finished with you yet!”

  But it was over. Si’s nose was bleeding, and his left eye was almost swollen shut and turning purple. Saliva dribbled from Moe’s mouth, and he was clutching at his belly. The living room of Si’s small apartment was a shambles. The wallpaper was spattered with blood, and an upstairs neighbor was banging loudly on the radiator pipes for peace.

  Moe wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Why are we doing this?” he asked numbly. “This is no way for partners to be. We shouldn’t be fighting, babe. We should be celebrating, ’cause I even got more good news for you. My friend who owns the demolition company? He’ll let us have the place for two and a quarter. How’s that for good news? I got him down to two and a quarter, but he wants cash. Cash money, in hundreds. No checks. But that’s no problem. We can get two and a quarter in hundreds. For two and a quarter in hundreds, the place is ours, Si, baby!”

  Si spit some blood. “You okay, Moe?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Moe heaved himself up from the collapsed sofa and the floor. “Shake?” he said and offered his hand.

  “Shake. Want a beer, Moe?”

  “Beer! We should be drinking to this deal with champagne,” Moe said.

  Even by flashlight—for the windows of the Van Degan mansion were boarded shut and the electricity had not been turned on—Silas Tarkington could see the potential of the building, and for the first time since Moe had pointed it out to him he began to feel a sense of excitement about the possibilities of his new purchase. The six matched Baccarat chandeliers (though he had not yet learned they were by Baccarat) that hung from the ceiling of the long entrance corridor were thick with dust, but they could be cleaned, and they would stay. The wide double staircase with its carved rosewood railings would have to go, but perhaps the railings and the marble steps could be used elsewhere. In place of the staircase would go a bank of elevators, for the single wire-cage Otis lift that had served the family would hardly suffice.

  He flashed his torch up at the high carved-plaster and coffered ceilings and along the linenfold walnut-paneled walls. Most if not all of these interior details could be retained.

  What impressed Si most about the mansion was the way, on each of its floors, the large rooms extended out from a central corridor, suggesting, as Moe had said, a series of intimate boutiques, each devoted to a different variety of merchandise. The house had been designed, it suddenly seemed to him, as though the Van Degans and Stanford White had actually had his store in mind.

  It was then that he had his most important merchandising idea. Suppose some of these elegant rooms could be leased out to other merchants—quality merchants, of course. The income from these leased spaces could provide Si with working capital as he developed his store. If his own areas of the store turned out to be successful, he could little by little take over the leased spaces for his own merchandise. He had seen pictures of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, with its row of little shops on either side. Each floor of his store would become a separate Ponte Vecchio. Leasing space would give him income and elbow room—room to grow. He decided, on a hunch, not to share this idea with Moe Minskoff.

  But all at once, standing in the empty mansion with his flashlight, Si Tarkington could almost see his dream—that pipe dream he had dreamed aloud in their prison cell at Hillsdale—beginning to come true.

  “Well,” she said, when he joined her at a back table of the little restaurant on West 47th Street they had chosen.

  “Well,” he said.

  “You’re looking well, Solly,” she said. “I like the mustache.”

  “I’m feeling pretty good, Mama,” he said. “But I’m not Solly anymore.”

  “I know that,” she said, “but you’ll always be Solly to me. Oh, I know I’m not supposed to call you Solly in front of other people. I’m to call you Mr. Tarkington. It seems wrong, somehow, to have to change your name. But perhaps it’s for the best.”

  “Yes. And how are you feeling, Mama? Are you feeling well?”

  “Oh, I’m feeling pretty well. Except my eyes. The doctor says I’m not to do close work anymore.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “Well, it was hard, Solly. I won’t say it wasn’t hard. It was even harder on your poor papa. He died of a broken heart.”

  He nodded, not looking at her. “You never came to see me, Mama,” he said.

  “No. Your papa didn’t want me to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even after he died, I thought I should respect his wishes.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “No, that’s not true. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t think I could bear it, seeing my only son in a place like that.”

  He nodded again. “But thank you for helping me, Mama. With the money, I mean.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, and let her voice trail off.

  They sat in silence for a while, not looking at each other, and Rose Tarcher’s fingers toyed with the paper napkin in
her lap.

  “Mr. Minskoff says you’re going to be a big man. He says you’re going to be a big success,” she said at last.

  “I hope so, Mama. I think so. I’m going to work real hard.”

  “Good. It’s good you’re going to work hard. It’s good you’re going to be a success. Your papa would have liked that. I wish he could have lived to see that.”

  “Yes. So do I.”

  “I’d like to live to see it too,” she said. “I’m not getting any younger. I’ll be sixty-two my next birthday. I’d like to go to my quiet grave knowing my only son was a success.”

  “You will, Mama.”

  Another silence.

  “How is Grandma Roth?”

  “Not too well. Getting older, bless her heart.”

  “Give her my love.”

  “I will.”

  A waiter approached them. “Oh, my goodness,” Rose said. “We haven’t even looked at the menu. Can you come back in a few more minutes?”

  “The soup of the day is cream of lentil.”

  “Thank you.… Simma sends her love. I told her I was meeting you today. I hope that’s all right. She said to give you her love.”

  “Give her my love too, Mama.”

  “I will. Oh, my. This is difficult for us, isn’t it? It’s difficult because there’s so much to say. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you know Simma’s married now, of course. She has a nice husband. He’s an accountant. He makes good money. Oh, and guess what? Simma told me this morning she thinks she’s pregnant again. Doesn’t know. Just thinks.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “That will make my third grandchild!”

  “Yes.”

  “That will be something to look forward to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re going to be a big man,” she said. “That will be something to look forward to, too. I’m glad you’re going to be a success. That would have pleased your papa. I talk to your papa every day, you know. I know he doesn’t hear me, but I talk to him just the same. I’m going to tell him that tonight, when I get home, that his son is going to be a big man. A big shot, as he would have said.”