Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Who are these preferred stockholders, Moe?”

  “I told you! Friends of mine who are venture capitalists, who prefer to remain unanimous, who put up a big piece of our start-up cash, remember?”

  “Are they getting nine percent?”

  “In actual fact, they’re getting slightly more, which is what preferred stockholders always get. Anyway, that was the deal I got you. And don’t mess with these guys, pal. Mess with these guys, these venture capitalist friends of mine, and you’ll find out what trouble really is! These are big guys, pal!”

  “That’s another thing I don’t like, Moe,” he said. “These friends of yours. I don’t like the sound of them at all.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to like ’em because you’re stuck with ’em, just like you’re stuck with me.” He continued jabbing his finger into Si’s chest. “You’re stuck with me, and you’re stuck with me for life! You’re not gettin’ rid of me until the day you die. And maybe not even then, pal. Maybe not even then!”

  From The New York Times, November 12, 1958:

  ELEVATOR PLUNGES AT TARKINGTON’S 5TH AVE.

  No Serious Injuries Reported

  A passenger elevator plunged from the fourth floor to the basement yesterday afternoon at Tarkington’s, the fashionable new specialty store at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, apparently as the result of a faulty cable. However, no serious injuries were reported, thanks to the quick thinking of one of the elevator’s seven passengers.

  The passenger, Howard J. Kilgour, 47, of Phoenix, Ariz., told The Times, “When I felt the elevator begin to fall, I remembered reading somewhere that most elevator shafts are constructed with a heavy rubber cushioning device at the bottom. So I ordered everybody to sit down quickly on the floor of the car. When the car hit bottom, there was quite a jolt, but at least nobody fell, and nobody was more than a little bit shaken up. There was no panic, no screaming. We were released from the car very quickly into the basement.”

  Silas Tarkington, president of the glamorous new store, expressed shock at the accident, gratitude that there were no injuries, and had nothing but praise for Mr. Kilgour for his quick thinking and quicker action. “He’s a real hero,” Mr. Tarkington said. “Our elevators were all recently inspected and safety-certified,” he added. “Needless to say, all elevators will be thoroughly reinspected before they are put back into service.” The store closed early shortly after the incident to allow for inspection and repairs.

  One of the seven passengers in the elevator at the time was Myrna Loy, the motion picture actress, who was in New York from Los Angeles on a Christmas shopping trip. Miss Loy made light of the incident. “I’d come to New York expecting to take a big plunge on some new outfits from Tarkington’s. But I hadn’t planned on literally taking this kind of a plunge,” Miss Loy said.

  19

  Mrs. Rose Tarcher (interview taped 8/28/91)

  Sure, the store was a success. At least they made it sound like a success from all the things they wrote about it in the papers. My hats sold well there. I did a good business. Maybe you remember the big Henry Ford wedding that was in 1959? No? Well, I did all the bridesmaids’ hats for that, and there were twelve bridesmaids. Those hats retailed for five hundred dollars apiece. That was a nice order. And a lot of the guests at that wedding wore my hats too.

  I never worked at the store. Solly—I guess it’s all right to call him Solly now, isn’t it, now that he’s dead?—he didn’t want me to. He said he wanted a younger woman for the saleslady. I think it was because he didn’t like my New York accent. But why shouldn’t I have a New York accent? I was born and raised in New York. He got some lady with a phony English accent. Millicent, she was. I used to talk to her on the phone. I never met her.

  But that arrangement was okay with me. I didn’t mind working out of my apartment. I filled all the orders there, and then, when they were ready, they sent a messenger up from the store to pick them up.

  And, as I say, business was good, a lot better on Fifth Avenue than it was on Union Square, and my rent was free, so I had no complaint about that aspect of it. But what I began to wonder about was, where were the dividends on that stock I’d bought? Sure, maybe I didn’t expect dividends the very first year, and maybe not even the second. But I’d bought that stock as an investment, and they’d promised me a return of nine percent a year. Now, I may not be the bookkeeper that my late husband was, but you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that for an investment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, at nine percent, I should have been receiving an income of thirteen thousand five hundred a year, right? A year went by, then two, and there was no income. Where was it?

  I spoke to my son about it. “Where is this so-called income I’m supposed to get?” I asked him.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” he told me. “There’s still some start-up costs we have to cover. As soon as they’re paid off, we’ll start sending you your dividends. That’ll be any day now.”

  Well, “any day now” was turning into a longer and longer time.

  I called that nice Mr. Minskoff, who’d set the whole thing up for me, and asked him about it. He told me that New York State’s case with Solly was now completely closed. Solly was now completely on his own, and Mr. Minskoff was off that case entirely. Solly was now in charge of everything, and I should take the matter up with him.

  “I’ve tried taking the matter up with him,” I told him, “but I get nowhere.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing further that this office is empowered to do for you, Mrs. Tarcher,” he told me. I began to think I was getting the run-around.

  In 1960, I had to put my mother, God bless her, into a nursing home, and that was a big drain on my finances. I kept calling Solly, and when I could get him on the phone I’d ask him where my income was, when my dividends were going to start. He gave me more about start-up costs that needed to be recovered and more “any day now.” When I could get him on the phone, that is. A lot of times I’d call him, and I’d get a secretary who’d say he was tied up with a customer or something and couldn’t come to the phone right now. Remember, I wasn’t supposed to let anyone know that it was his mother calling. I was Miss Rose from Leah Roth Millinery.

  “I’ll have him get back to you, Miss Rose,” the secretary would say. But then he started not returning my calls.

  I knew I was getting the run-around when I read in the papers that he was fixing up the top two floors of his building and turning them into a fancy apartment for himself. A “twenty-two-room luxury duplex,” the papers called it. Well, I thought to myself, if he can afford to fix up a twenty-two-room luxury duplex for himself, why can’t he afford to pay me my dividends?

  Oh, every now and then he’d send me presents. He’d send me a cashmere sweater from the store, or half a dozen scarves, or nylons, or a nightie, or a couple of nice pairs of gloves. It was as though he thought these presents would keep me off his back. Once he sent me a mink coat. But you can’t use a mink coat to put food on your table. You can’t use a mink coat to pay the milkman and the butcher. Since I couldn’t get him on the phone anymore, and he wouldn’t return my calls, I started writing letters to him. “Thanks for the mink,” I wrote him, “but where’s my dividends?”

  No answer to these letters.

  That was when I decided to speak to my daughter Simma, whose husband’s an accountant, thinking maybe Simma and Leo would have some suggestion about how I should deal with this run-around.

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that Simma and Leo were being given the same run-around as I was! Simma had bought stock in his store too, and this was the first I’d heard about it! Mr. Minskoff had been to see her too, not long after he’d come to see me, and she’d put in a hundred and fifty thousand of her money too, the same as me. But somehow, thanks to Leo, Simma had been smarter. She’d got them to issue her a lot more shares of stock than I got. But her story was the same—no dividends. Why she never told me
about making this investment I’ll never know.

  “Let’s face it, Ma,” Leo said to me. “Your son’s a crook. He always was a crook, and he’ll always be a crook. I’ve shown those shares of stock to my brother the lawyer, and shown him that agreement you both signed, and he says it’s got more loopholes in it than a screen door. In effect that agreement says he doesn’t have to pay you any dividends until he feels like it, and he obviously hasn’t felt like it, and it doesn’t look like he’s ever going to feel like it. That agreement means meaningless.”

  “Write him off, Mama,” Simma said. “He’s no good, so just write him off. We both have. Just don’t go sending any more good money after bad.”

  “How could you have let Simma get involved in this whole thing in the first place, Leo?” I asked my son-in-law. “Me, I can excuse. I’m his mother. But you—you’re supposed to be this big-shot accountant. Shouldn’t you have taken care of Simma’s money better?”

  They just looked at each other, guilty-like, like there was some sort of secret between them that they didn’t want yours truly to know about. I still don’t know what it was. Ashamed, probably, because they hadn’t invested the money better.

  “Could we sue him, Leo?” I asked him. All this was transpiring around Simma and Leo’s kitchen table at their house in Kew Gardens, where they used to live. It was a nice house, too, with a nice kitchen.

  “What would we sue him for, Ma?” he asked me. “We gave him the money. We bought his stock. You can’t sue a company for not paving you dividends.” I had to admit he had a point.

  “What if we were to tell him that if he doesn’t pay us our dividends we’ll tell the newspapers who Silas Tarkington really is?” I asked him. Once more there was this funny look between them.

  “The trouble with a threat like that, Ma, is that you’ve got to be prepared to carry through on it,” he said. “And what would we get if we did that? We’d get him a lot of bad publicity. Bad publicity for your business too, Ma. Maybe the publicity would be bad enough to put him out of business, and then what have we got? We’ve got no dividends now, but with him out of business we’d never get any dividends.”

  “You’ve got a point, Leo,” I admitted. “You’ve got a point.” And I didn’t really want to put my only son out of business.

  “And with him out of business, where would your business go? Your business is in his store.”

  “You’ve got another point,” I admitted.

  “I say write him off, Ma,” he said. “Just write him off.”

  Well, it isn’t easy for a mother to just write off her only son as a crook, I can tell you that. It was very, very hard, believe me. I still kept hoping I could get through to him somehow, with the phone calls and the letters. But no such luck.

  I kept thinking about moving Leah Roth Millinery out of his store, just to show him I didn’t appreciate how he was treating me, and setting up shop somewhere else. There could have been advantages to that. I had certain special customers I called my personals, and they’d have followed me wherever I went. I’d also have been able to put the store’s markup into my own pocket, and the store’s markup was forty-five percent. I mean those hats for the Henry Ford wedding, for instance, that retailed for five hundred each, I only got a little over two-fifty for. The rest was markup. But a Henry Ford wedding doesn’t walk in the door every day, and now we’re talking 1959 and 1960, and the millinery business wasn’t what it used to be. Even in the old days, how many expensive hats did a rich woman buy a year? Two, maybe three. Now it was more like one hat every five or six years!

  Every designer needs a showroom, and the store gave me that, the best showroom I could ask for, right on Fifth Avenue, just inside the front door. So I decided to forget my aggravation and stay put—until they gave me the heave-ho, which they eventually did, and which I’ll get to.

  Go ahead. Change your tape.…

  Anyway, all this I’ve been telling you about transpired between 1958 and 1962—four years of aggravation. Then, in the fall of 1962, who should show up out of the blue at my front door but my son, with this shiksa he says he’s going to marry. “I want you to meet the girl I’m going to marry, Mama,” he says to me. “Alice, this is my mother.”

  “I’ve heard so much about you, Mrs. Tarcher,” she says to me.

  “I’ll bet you have,” I said. Then I said to him, “Well, it’s nice to meet the girl you’re going to marry, but when am I going to shake hands with some of the dividends you owe me? That’s what I’m waiting to say howdy-do to.”

  “Now, Mama,” he says to me. “This is the happiest day of my life. Let’s not start off this meeting talking about money.”

  “I’ll talk about whatever I like,” I said to him. “This is my house, and in my house we talk about whatever I decide to talk about.”

  “Now, Mama,” he says.

  “I don’t so much mind you stiffing me,” I said to him. “Maybe I deserve it for being a mother. Maybe that’s what a mother deserves for having a son. But Simma doesn’t deserve it. How could you stiff your very own sister, a mother herself, with two little children? That’s what has me flummoxed.”

  He started acting very strange, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Simma?” he said. “What’s Simma got to do with it?”

  “You know!”

  “Honest, I don’t, Mama,” he said.

  “Simma put up the same amount of money as me, is what I’m talking about,” I told him. “She bought stock too, through Mr. Minskoff.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking kind of funny. “I guess I forgot about that.”

  “Forgot?” I said. “Forgot about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from your very own sister? Your poor sister, who’s trying to raise and feed two little children, one of which is gifted?”

  “Mr. Minskoff didn’t give me all the full details,” he said, or something like that.

  “You can forget about me,” I said. “After all, I’m only your mother. What do I deserve for bringing you into the world? But your sister. Your own flesh and blood. That’s what I can’t understand.”

  “You always cared more about Simma than you did about me, didn’t you, Mama,” he said to me.

  “Simma was a sickly baby when she was born,” I reminded him. “She was always colicky. Chicken pox, mumps, measles, whooping cough, the whole megillah. She took a lot of my attention. You were a healthy boy of nine and already able to take care of yourself.” I almost added, And already getting into trouble, but I didn’t, because of the girlfriend being there and all.

  At this point, the girlfriend started getting into the act. I didn’t think much of her. She called me “Mother Rose.” She said, “I want us all to be one big happy family for our wedding, Mother Rose.”

  “We can all be one big happy family when he comes around with some dividend checks for me and my daughter,” I told her. “Now that he’s found out that his mother and his sister are still in the land of the living, maybe that will happen. I’m not holding my breath, but until that happens, toodle-oo to both of you.”

  She was crying at that point. But I meant what I said, and I was glad I got a chance to say it. He knew I meant it, because he never came around again, and that was the last I ever saw or heard from any of them.

  And of course there were never any dividends. Not to this very day.

  The only times I ever heard from the store were when that Millicent, with her la-di-da English voice, would phone me with an order for a hat.

  Anyway, he married his shiksa. I read about it in the papers, a big, fancy wedding. Needless to say, she didn’t have the nerve to order her bridesmaids’ hats from me, even if they wore any hats, which I don’t even know if they did or not.

  Then, in 1972, I had a letter from the store, from a Mr. Bonham. I’ll read it to you. “Dear Mrs. Tarcher: I regret to inform you that we have reluctantly decided to close the Leah Roth boutique at Tarkington’s. The market for custom millinery has declined so sharply over the
past decade that it is simply no longer profitable for us to maintain such a department, and we have decided to put the space to other use. I am sure you will understand the necessity of this move when I point out to you that over the past twelve months we have had only three orders for a Leah Roth hat. We regret this decision but wish to thank you for your many years of loyal service to the store. Sincerely, Thomas E. Bonham, Vice President and General Manager.”

  Well, he was right, of course. I’d seen it coming. I’d seen the handwriting on the wall. All through the sixties, I’d seen my business tapering off, fewer and fewer calls from Miss Millicent. I don’t know why, but all through the sixties women seemed to stop wearing hats altogether, much less the expensive custom headgear that I used to design and make. Hats like mine were becoming like the dinosaurs, extinct. Some of them are even in museums now. There’s one in Hartford, one in Portland, Oregon, and I forget some of the other places. My hats are a part of history, I guess you’d say. Ancient history. My mother, God rest her soul, would be proud of me.

  But that was all right with me. I was seventy-seven then and ready to retire. I had my savings, my Social Security, and the rest of my inheritance from Abe, enough to live on. I’d heard about this retirement community down here, so I came down. I’m not rich, but I have everything I need. We have activities here: bingo, shuffleboard, my bridge club once a week. We have a Happy Hour every Saturday afternoon. Simma and Leo live in Lauderdale—he took early retirement from his firm—and Simma and her children come to see me all the time. I even have two great-grandchildren now, just think of that. They come to see me too. I guess you could say I’m lucky, Mr. Turner. There are lots of women my age who don’t have as much as me.

  And now comes this letter from a Mr. Albert Martindale, head of Continental Stores, asking me if I’d be interested in selling my Tarkington’s stock. Simma got a letter too. So who knows? Maybe I’ll be rich after all. Maybe I’ll get back what I should have gotten back from all those years when I got nothing. But at my age a lot of money doesn’t mean much. There’s nothing more I need, nothing more I want. It’s a funny feeling, at my age, to think that you might get a lot of money but have nothing to spend it on. Life’s funny, isn’t it?