Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  But at least it would give me something to leave in my will to Simma and her children and my two little greats. Unlike my late husband, may God rest his soul, I’ve made a very careful will.

  As for Solly, I’ve tried to forget about him the way he seemed to forget about me. Forget about him, I told myself. Let him keep his shiksa in the lap of luxury and forget about me. I didn’t even know it when he divorced the first one and married another one. I didn’t even know it when I had two more grandchildren, one by the first and another by the second. Forget about all of them, I told myself. Why give yourself the aggravation from remembering?

  But of course I can’t forget about him. And of course I love him. I’ll always love him, even though he’s dead. A mother can’t forget about her firstborn, her only son. A mother can’t stop loving her firstborn, her only son. It’s just not possible. Because that was what he was, my firstborn, my only son. Oh, my.…

  Sure, you can talk to Simma. I’ll give you her number, but I don’t think she can tell you any more about my son than I’ve already told you. Simma lives in Lauderdale, like I told you, but she’s in Las Vegas till the middle of September. I had a card from her today. Since Leo has retired, they do a lot of traveling—Las Vegas, Disneyland, they go to all those places. That means you’ll have to make another trip down here if you want to talk to her in person. She and Solly weren’t that close. Is it worth it? It’s up to you. It’s your nickel.

  20

  Mrs. Alice Markham Tarkington (interview taped 9/11/91)

  Si Tarkington? Oh, dear. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, I guess I should remind myself. Where to begin? Let’s see.…

  I taught him how to dress. I can take credit for that. He had intuitive good taste and a flair for women’s fashions, but that may have been in his genes. After all, both his mother and his grandmother were talented millinery designers, and some of his fashion decisions, such as hiring Antonio Delfino as in-house designer, were strokes of absolute genius, but he had no idea how he himself should dress or what the president of a store like Tarkington’s should look like.

  He thought he should dress like a banker, in dark three-piece suits, white shirts, sober neckties, and black wingtip shoes. I told him that wasn’t quite the look for him, and he seemed to think the only alternative was to dress like a Hollywood producer. I tried to explain that for a successful fashion retailer there was a happy balance in between.

  I started out by taking him to Paul Stuart’s custom shop. Si wasn’t tall but he had a good figure, trim and flat-bellied, with a nice set to his shoulders. They made him a beautiful cashmere double-breasted blazer in navy blue, side-vented of course, and several lovely pairs of slacks in gray and doeskin. Then I picked out some Turnbull & Asser shirts with three-button cuffs and coordinated ties. We traded in the wingtips for brown Gucci loafers, and we bought gray and navy cashmere socks at Dunhill. “There,” I said, when we’d finished with my makeover. “Now you look like the president of Tarkington’s.”

  In retailing, how you present yourself to the customer is as important as how you present your merchandise. For the next three or four years, he never bought an article of clothing without consulting me. If he got a reputation as a snappy dresser—“impeccably tailored,” I think The Times called him in their obituary—it was thanks to me. There’s not much else about Si’s life or career that I can claim responsibility for. Remember, I wasn’t married to him for very long. Only three years.

  I really hadn’t planned on getting married again. I’d been terribly, passionately in love with Erick, my first husband. Erick’s death was a terrible blow. I sometimes think that a love like mine for Erick only happens once in a woman’s lifetime. That certainly was the case for me. No one, before or since, ever lighted up my life the way Erick did, and when that light went out I knew he would be irreplaceable. Si understood that. He never objected to the fact that, even after he and I were married, I kept a photograph of Erick in his uniform in a frame on my dressing table. I still do. I didn’t keep any photographs of Si, I’m afraid, because there was really only Erick.

  But there are different kinds of love, and different reasons for a woman to marry a man. When I first met Si I got caught up in the excitement and adventure of the store he was creating, so caught up I began to feel I was somehow part of that creation. He really didn’t know what he was doing in the beginning, you know. He was flying by the seat of his pants and had no idea where he was going beyond some vague goal of opening a super-elegant shop for women’s designer apparel that everyone in New York would drop dead over. He was leaving everything to luck, just hoping that somehow luck would carry the day. His plans changed day by day, minute by minute, while he kept his fingers crossed and tossed the spilt salt over his left shoulder. It was, “Shall we have a Small Leather Goods Department? Yes! No, we won’t! Yes, we will. Shall we get into lingerie? Never! But why not? Umbrellas—no! But what about designer umbrellas? Cosmetics? The cosmetics business is full of crooks.… But what if we put the cosmetics counters here?” It was like that, every day. And it was exciting, because you never knew what would happen next.

  It was like the old days of making movies in California. Neither the director nor the writer nor the actors had any idea of what the story was going to be about or how it was going to end, but they started shooting anyway, hoping for the best.

  I felt I was a part of whatever it was that was going to be born in this wonderful old building, and I was helping him with the birth. And he was helping me, helping me to stop grieving for Erick, because grief is such a self-defeating emotion. Grief can be a terminal illness, at least it could have been for me.

  Sex is grief’s opposite. It’s so mindless. It’s like cooking because, though you enjoy it while you’re doing it, you’re always glad when it’s done, and you can never exactly remember all the ingredients that went into it. At least that’s the way I do it, and I’m told I’m an excellent cook!

  And Si was a very sexy man. “But he’s so short,” my friend Bev used to say. Well, to me a man doesn’t have to be tall, dark, and handsome to be sexy. A man can be short, dark, and handsome—and sexy. Si had a wonderful body, always tanned and well-exercised. He always seemed to radiate good health and—well, I guess you’d have to say virility—from every pore. That’s why when I heard he’d had a heart attack—well, it just didn’t seem to me the right kind of death for a man of Si’s enormous vitality. Now if I’d read he died in Yellowstone wrestling a grizzly, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised.

  So when Si Tarkington and I became lovers, it all seemed quite harmless and fun. Neither of us was married, and so neither of us was hurting or betraying anyone. We tried to be discreet about it. All love affairs should be discreet, but they should be particularly discreet between two people in the same workplace. Nothing makes a fellow worker more uncomfortable than suspecting that two other people in the office are having a love affair. It doesn’t just make other people feel uncomfortable. It makes them mad! “Look at those two damn fools!” they say. Neither Si nor I wanted to be thought of as two damn fools.

  So, the way I thought of it at least, we were just having a nice, discreet love affair, nothing more. I didn’t ask myself, or him, whether I was the only woman in his life. In fact, I was pretty sure I wasn’t. There were the usual hints: Another woman’s perfume on his hand, another woman’s lipstick on the handkerchief. A matchbook from the Copacabana. A gentleman doesn’t go to the Copacabana by himself. I thought, So what? I refused to let myself be upset. After all, I had no special claim on him, and there’s nothing worse than a jealous, possessive woman—nothing.

  We always met at my place, never his. That was fine with me. He said he was ashamed to let me see his apartment because it was small, in not such a great neighborhood, and, I gathered, sort of messy. He lived very frugally in those days, in order to put as much money as possible into the store. Of course it occurred to me that his own little apartment was perhaps where he took some of his othe
r women, that he didn’t want me to see evidence of other women that might be lying around. Well, that’s very considerate of him, I thought. No woman likes to see another woman’s pantyhose drying on a man’s towel bar, no matter what the man is to her—even if the other woman is his wife.

  So that’s the way it was. He’d come to my apartment. We’d have a drink. We’d talk about the day’s business at the store. We’d make love. I’d fix him something for dinner, and then we’d talk about the store some more. We never went out, because we didn’t think it would help anything if we were seen together. It was all quite simple between us. It was nice. It was exciting. It was friendly. It was fun. Given hindsight, I can see that it should have stayed that way.

  Around 1960, I think it was, he started fixing up the top two floors of the building as an apartment for himself. It was hard to figure out what else to do up there. Those two floors had been the Van Degans’ servants’ quarters; if you can believe it, the Van Degans once kept forty-three servants in that house. Most of those two floors consisted of tiny little cubicles, just cells, really, and it was difficult to see how they could be turned into retail selling space. We found out that we couldn’t tear down too many partitions up there without structurally weakening the building. If too many partitions were removed, the roof could fall in, but he removed as many as it was safe to do. There were two or three larger rooms. The servants’ dining room was up there, and that was good-sized. Can you imagine it? The servants used to have to carry their meals up seven narrow flights of back stairs from the kitchen in the basement! I used to wonder whether they really ever bothered. Also, the Van Degan children’s nursery was up there, another big room, and that became Si’s library. A third big room had been intended as a ballroom but was never finished. That became the living room of the apartment. When The Times called it a “twenty-two-room luxury duplex,” they must have been counting the walk-in closets—which were former servants’ rooms, naturally. Twelve rooms was more like it.

  The apartment was pretty, if I do say so, because I helped decorate it. Still, Si cut a lot of corners. For instance, he wanted his library filled with books with expensive-looking bindings. But when he found out how much books like that would cost, he used fake books instead.

  After the apartment was finished, he tried to lease it for a while. But nobody wanted to live on top of a busy retail store and share the elevators with the customers. It was not in a residential section of Fifth Avenue. No one liked the idea of being listed as the building’s “janitor.” And so, rather than let the apartment become a white elephant, Si finally decided to live in the place himself.

  “This apartment is too big for one person,” he said to me. That was when he asked me to marry him.

  It took me completely by surprise. He’d never mentioned marriage to me before, and I certainly never had. But I immediately thought, Why not? It suddenly just seemed to make good sense.

  No, I was not in love with him—not, at least, in the wild, irrational sense of the love I’d had for Erick. I was fond of him, yes. I respected him. I admired many things about him. I admired his ambition. I admired his energy, which was boundless. I admired his enthusiasm, and I was touched by his naïve, almost childlike faith in his own infallibility. Having made a success of his store, he was convinced that the course of his life would be a continuous upward curve. He could do no wrong, because he was Silas Tarkington!

  But I do think he was in love with me. When I first went to work for him, for instance, I wore brown lipstick. I don’t know why. Sometimes a woman likes to have a little trademark, and brown lipstick became mine. But one day I decided I was tired of it, and I came to work wearing red lipstick. That night, when we were alone together, the first thing he said to me was, “Where’s your brown lipstick?”

  “Sick of it,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” he begged, “please don’t give up the brown lipstick! I love you in brown lipstick, darling!”

  So I went back to brown lipstick. Yes, I think he loved me.

  Naturally, when a woman says she’s going to marry a man, one of the first things she wants to do is meet his family. At that time, there was only his mother, and I could tell he was reluctant to take me to see her.

  I knew about the name change. He told me he’d changed the name for business reasons, because Tarkington sounded snappier than Tarcher, and I must say I agreed with him. Tarkington, with all those clicking consonants, just had a better ring to it, and Silas sounded more distinguished than Solomon. I often wondered whether the store would have had as much success if it had been called Tarcher’s instead of Tarkington’s. So much in retailing involves this sort of cosmetic doodling and juggling.

  I knew he didn’t like to talk about his past, so I never asked him about it, though I gathered his childhood had been unhappy, with a much-younger sister whom his mother doted on, while ignoring him, and a father who was all business and never had much time to spend with either of his children. At school, he told me, because he was smaller than other boys his age, the bigger kids picked on him. It didn’t seem all that unusual a story.

  But what I didn’t know was that his mother was the legendary Miss Rose of Leah Roth Millinery. “But then I must meet her,” I begged him. “I love her work. Those hats she designed for the Ford wedding were so delicious—each one different, and yet they all worked together as a single perfect ensemble of colors.” This was true. They did.

  So he took me up to see her. Reluctantly, as I told you.

  The visit did not go well. She was a tiny woman, but what a tartar! She immediately lit into him about some old family money dispute. She was not the least bit nice to me. For a woman who designed such beautiful things, she certainly had an unpleasant personality and a sharp tongue. I saw immediately why Si preferred to keep his mother at arm’s length.

  Afterward, Si was very upset. “Now you see,” he said. “Now you see why I didn’t want you to meet her.”

  I felt badly, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Si and I were married in his apartment. I’d sent invitations to his mother and to his sister and her husband. There was no response to either of these invitations. I found this all rather sad. But then, there’s nothing that can divide a family like disagreements over money.

  We’d both decided, beforehand, that after we were married I would no longer work for the store. Employees just don’t like working for husband-and-wife teams, and when the husband makes an unpopular decision, the wife gets the blame. Still, living there over the store, I could keep an eye on things, and without ever being bossy with the staff I could make private suggestions to my husband. It seemed to me like an ideal arrangement.

  What I hadn’t counted on was Si’s infidelities. Somehow, when we were just casual lovers, I hadn’t minded being just one of several women in his life. And somehow I had the old-fashioned notion that once a man and woman marry they are pledged to all eternity to remain faithful to each other. But in Si’s case, at least, I was wrong.

  It wasn’t long before the little clues started to appear. The strange lipstick, not brown, on the handkerchiefs. The matchbooks from nightclubs and restaurants. The long evenings out, which, he explained, were spent meeting with clients, with wholesalers and suppliers from the market, with designers and their reps. Did these meetings always have to take place at Copacabana and El Morocco? Then there were the telephone calls to the apartment from callers who hung up when I answered. What had never bothered me before bothered me terribly now, because now he was my husband! Looking back, I think Si was a man who was constitutionally unable to be faithful to a single woman. It just wasn’t in his makeup. Women were like an addiction for him. He was powerless to resist a pretty woman when she presented herself, and now that he was the president of New York’s most fashionable store, a lot of women presented themselves. Women were a kind of drug for him; he got his fix from all different sizes and shapes. I’m sure it wasn’t long before his second wife discovered this. I som
etimes think women were his tragic flaw. Women were his undoing.

  But I don’t want you to think that Si’s womanizing was the whole cause of the failure of our marriage. I take a lot of the blame too. I was not exactly a rose to live with.

  I’m an alcoholic. I’m what’s called a recovering alcoholic. We alcoholics are never cured of our illness, you see. We are always recovering. I’ve been sober now for six years—six years, three months, and fourteen days, to be exact, because we count each new day as it dawns—thanks to a wonderful program and three months spent at the Betty Ford Center in California.

  Here’s an amusing little story. While I was out there, Mrs. Ford came to visit the center, as she often does, and to talk to us. When she was introduced to me, she said, “Oh, Mrs. Tarkington. I’m delighted to meet you because I met your charming husband once, when he brought some clothes from the store to the White House, and he brought your delightful little daughter with him. How is darling Miranda?”

  I said, “Well, Mrs. Ford, Silas Tarkington is my ex-husband, and the daughter you met is his daughter by his present wife. The fact is, I’ve never met Miranda.”

  She was very sweet. She just reached out and touched my hand and said, “Just keep up the good work you’re doing here, my dear.”

  How did I become an alcoholic? Well, I suppose it started when I first went to work for Tarkington’s, but I don’t want to imply that my work at the store, or Si himself, was really to blame, though I did at the time. The alcoholic will find dozens of excuses for drinking. There are really only two culprits, though—the alcoholic and alcohol. I’m no exception. Si and the store had nothing to do with it, though it took the program at the Betty Ford Center to teach me that.