Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “What did you say?” she asked him.

  He said nothing, but she had heard him: “Cock teaser!”

  26

  For the next few hours, with her convertible top still down, she drove randomly through the night neighborhoods of the North Shore, up one winding lane and down another, discovering pockets of civilization she never knew were there. Through picture windows, television sets flickered. In dining rooms, families sat at dinner. She passed what had to be a pair of lovers in a parked car. She paused to watch a touch football game in a lighted field behind a school. Everywhere the world seemed ordered, planned, sequential, and organized according to human rules as she struggled to compose her own cascading thoughts. At a McDonald’s drive-through window she ordered a Big Mac and fries. Tommy’s chicken adobo had gone uneaten, and she ate her burger in the parking lot, using the big carton on the passenger seat beside her as a table. Finally, she saw that her gas gauge was close to empty, and she headed homeward toward the farm.

  At the entrance, she pressed the five-digit code, and the electric gate swung slowly open, then closed behind her, and she drove up the long gravel drive past the rhododendron hedges. The night had grown chilly, but she needed the fresh air to be able to think clearly, and her head was full of thoughts and plans. Thoughts had to match with plans. She looked at her watch. It was eleven o’clock.

  The big house was dark, but the entrance lights had been left on for her, and she parked in the circle, turning off her headlights and ignition. Then she let herself out of the car, lifted the heavy box from the seat, lugged it up the front steps and across the terrace to the front door, and let herself in with her key. With the box in her anus, she tiptoed up the carpeted steps to her room, where Margaret, as promised, had turned down her bed for her. She placed the box in the bottom of one of the two walk-in closets and closed the door. She would go through its contents later.

  There was a sliver of light under her mother’s door, so she went down the hall and knocked.

  “Is that you, Miranda? Come in, darling,” her mother’s voice said.

  Connie was sitting up in bed propped by many pillows, reading a paperback. “I thought I heard your car in the drive,” she said. She folded down the corner of a page to mark her place and laid the book aside. “Well, how was your dinner with Tommy?” she asked.

  “Interesting,” Miranda said. “Not a festive occasion, exactly, but interesting. Mostly we talked store business.”

  “The store, the store,” her mother said wearily, reaching for a cigarette. “Your father was getting a little tired of Tommy, you know. I don’t know what the matter was, but for the last six months of his life or so, he’d frown whenever Tommy’s name came up. Your father had become less than satisfied with Tommy’s performance. The blush was off the rose.”

  She sat at the foot of her mother’s big canopy bed, her hand on one of the ribbon-twisted bedposts. There was something about her mother’s appearance tonight that was different, and she couldn’t immediately put her finger on what it was. Then suddenly she knew. “Why isn’t your hair up in rollers?” she asked. “You don’t even look as though you’ve creamed your face!”

  “Oh, I’ve quit all that,” she said with a smile. “It was such a bloody nuisance.”

  “Your Dead Sea mud pack? Your mask?”

  “That damn mud pack! It stank, and the rollers meant I had to sleep in one position, on my back, all night long. I hated it. I’d wake up in the morning with a stiff neck. In order to sleep, I had to take a Seconal. Then it was two Seconals. I was afraid of becoming addicted to Seconal, so I decided to quit all that nonsense. It’s much more pleasant to read myself to sleep.”

  Miranda had always regarded her mother’s elaborate beauty routines with a queer mixture of amusement and derision. Then why was she all at once dismayed to hear they were being abandoned? “Mother, don’t you want to stay looking beautiful?” she said.

  “I’ve decided it’s time I looked my age,” she said. “Why not? When your father was alive, perhaps there was a reason for all that silly business. Now there just isn’t any. I’ve also decided to let my hair go to its natural color. Look.” She lifted a strand of hair. “You can already see where the gray’s beginning to come in.”

  Miranda reached out and covered her mother’s hand with her own. “Oh, Mother, I don’t want you to get old!” she cried.

  “It’s a situation we all have to face, Miranda,” she said. “Fortunately, you’ve got a long time before you have to deal with it.”

  “Let me just put some night cream on your face!”

  “No!” she said with a laugh. “I threw most of the greasy stuff away. It got all over the bed linen. Please, Miranda, I’m quite content to let my face do whatever it decides to do.”

  Miranda felt tears standing in her eyes, and still she did not understand why these revelations of her mother’s had managed to upset her so. Had she worshiped Connie’s beauty too?

  “I’ll promise you one thing,” her mother said. “I won’t let myself get fat. I’ve got enough vanity left not to let that happen. Now let’s talk about something more interesting than your mother’s face and figure.”

  With that, a blue Persian cat leapt onto the bed and made its way purposefully across the bedclothes. “What in the world is that?” Miranda cried.

  “Isn’t he beautiful? His name is Bicha. I’ve always loved cats, and always wanted one, but your father was allergic to them. Bicha, meet Miranda. This is Miranda’s house too, at least part of the time.”

  Miranda held out her fingertips to let the cat sniff them, which it proceeded to do, daintily, gingerly. Then she rubbed the cat’s throat and felt its purr box come to life. “I think Bicha likes me,” she said.

  “Of course he does. Cats are marvelous. Sometimes I think cats hold the key to everything. All they need is a little stroking, and everything else they take care of for themselves.”

  Bicha spread himself out across the bedclothes, his forepaws folded beneath him. He looked first at her mother, then at Miranda, yawned, and blinked.

  The two women sat in silence for a moment, admiring Bicha.

  “Mother, I’ve been thinking,” Miranda said.

  “Yes?”

  “About Smitty.”

  “Yes?” There was no change of tone in her voice.

  “The other night you said you felt sorry for her.”

  “Yes. I do.” In the same tone.

  “I said I disagreed. I said I thought Smitty got exactly what she deserved. But I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I’ve decided you were right. I feel sorry for her too. I think we should both feel sorry for her. She’s got no job. She’s got no money. Obviously, the curatorship Daddy wanted for her isn’t going to work out. She’s got no family that she’s close to. She’s got no”—cautiously, now—“man in her life anymore.”

  “All this is true, Miranda.” No change in tone.

  “She hasn’t got much of anything, has she? I feel we’ve sort of let her get washed overboard and left her to sink or swim.”

  “Yes, I feel the same way,” her mother said.

  “I wonder whether we shouldn’t try to toss her some sort of life jacket.”

  Her mother sighed. “There are a lot of women out there like Smitty,” she said. “She’s got good looks, but not the best. She’s got a good mind, but not the best. She was elected to the National Honor Society in high school, but just barely. Women like that—I pity them. If they don’t find the right man by the time they’re thirty, they’re doomed. Doomed to revising the facts about themselves and blaming other people for their plight. Then, by the time they reach about age thirty-five, they panic. How old is Smitty now?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Yes. You see? The onset of the panic age. You might want to remember this bit of motherly wisdom, Miranda, in contemplating the next decade of your own life. But what kind of life jacket could we toss to Smitty?”

  “We could offer to g
ive her back her old job at the store. She loved the job, and she was awfully good at what she did. She was a damned good buyer. The figures from her department were among the best in the store.”

  “But the store’s going to be sold, Miranda,” her mother said.

  Miranda bit her lip. “It hasn’t been sold yet,” she said.

  “What’s Continental up to, anyway? Why do they keep extending their deadline?”

  “Because they’re having trouble collecting the voting shares necessary to buy us out,” she said. “And our employee shareholders are turning out to be surprisingly loyal. They don’t want to sell because they don’t want the store to change.”

  “You mean they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs.”

  “That too, of course. But I’d also hate to see them lose their jobs. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, but—”

  “I haven’t agreed to sell my shares yet. And neither have you.”

  “No, but only because Jake Kohlberg hasn’t given me the green light. He says he doesn’t like the way this particular deal smells. He doesn’t like the two-tiered aspect of it, whatever that means. He thinks a better offer might be coming down the road. Some Canadians. But where are these better offers? Where are these Canadians? If we hold off on the Continental offer for too long, the whole deal could fall apart and we’d have to go out, hat in hand, begging for another purchaser. That wouldn’t be good for us, would it? Still, I have to wait until Jake tells me what to do.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve always taken Jake’s advice. He’s always advised your father and me very well, over the years. Anyway, the store is going to have to be sold to somebody, sooner or later.”

  “Why?”

  “Jake says so.”

  “Why? Do we need the money, Mother?”

  “We very well may! Jake says your father didn’t leave his affairs in quite as good shape as he might have. He’s still waiting for some figures.”

  Miranda thought, Jake says, Jake says, Jake says. It was always the same. But she said, “I want to run the store, Mother.”

  “Oh, Miranda! You’re not still talking that foolishness, are you?”

  “I can do it. I know I can. I want to keep Tarkington’s in the family. Wouldn’t Daddy have wanted that?”

  “He wanted the store for Blazer, but Blazer didn’t want it. He didn’t want it for you. He was very old-fashioned, very Old World, in his ideas about women. He thought a woman’s place was in the home.”

  Or at his feet, Miranda thought, but she didn’t say it. Instead she said, “Are you afraid I’d run the place into the ground and land us both in the poorhouse?”

  “No, it’s not that, Miranda. I’m thinking of your future. I’d like to see you married, having children. I’d like to have some grandchildren in my old age, and you’re my only chance for that!”

  “I’ve already turned down one—no, two—proposals of marriage, Mother. So I like to think I’m marriageable.”

  “Married to the right man, of course.”

  She thought, Not like the man you married, Mother. She said, “I have no intention of becoming a spinster.”

  “No, but—this is true, Miranda—men often don’t feel comfortable marrying women who ‘do things.’ Who have a busy career. That probably sounds like a terribly old-fashioned thing for me to say, but I was raised in an old-fashioned way, in an old-fashioned city. But I still think it’s true. And I still think marriage is important, terribly important. Marriage and children. Human beings weren’t meant to live alone. Companionship is so important, some kind of companionship.”

  Miranda’s eyes and her mother’s eyes traveled simultaneously to the blue Persian cat that lay stretched across the coverlet. Her mother laughed her bell-like laugh and reached out and touched the cat’s nose with a fingertip. “Yes, that is going to be one of Bicha’s functions,” she said. “Companionship to this old lady in her old age.”

  There were several things Miranda could have said to her mother at this point, and she chose her words carefully. “I think,” she said, “that what I hear you saying is that you don’t have sufficient faith in my ability to head the store and be a good wife and mother at the same time.”

  “It’s a tall order for any woman.”

  “It’s funny. Aunt Simma and Granny Rose have faith in my ability. They’ve agreed to withhold their shares as long as they possibly can to help me fight the Continental takeover. Why can’t you have the same faith in me?”

  Her mother blinked. “Aunt Simma? Granny Rose? I haven’t heard those names in years. I’ve never met either one of them. Your father didn’t want me to. But you, I gather, have.”

  Miranda nodded.

  “Goodness, you really do want to do this, don’t you!”

  She nodded again.

  “All I want is to see you happy, Miranda.”

  “This is what would make me happy.”

  “Then tell me exactly what you want me to do.”

  “Together, Aunt Simma and Granny Rose control about fifteen percent of the company’s stock. You and I each own about twenty percent. Employees own small amounts. If you and I and Simma and Granny Rose were to issue a statement that none of us is willing to sell this stock to anyone, under any circumstances, for any price, we’d represent a majority. Continental would withdraw its offer, and Tarkington’s would be ours.”

  “Yours, you mean. I’d want nothing to do with it.”

  “Mine, then.” She leaned toward her mother and said with some urgency, “Mother, will you just let me try it for a year? Just one year, Mother, that’s all I ask. Please! If I make a mess of it in one year’s time, you’ll be the first to know, and I’ll concede that you were right, and we’ll sell the store. But if I don’t—if I succeed the way I want to, and I’m going to try, I’ll try so hard—then will you give me another year? Can we do it that way, Mother, letting me take it year by year? All I’m asking for is a chance, a chance to fail and a chance to succeed. Is that too much to ask of you—a chance? It’s what I want most in the world.”

  Her mother hesitated. Then she said quietly, “And of course you’re right. It would give us an opportunity to do something to help Smitty.”

  “To be honest with you, Mother, I’ve always resented Smitty. But if you feel we owe her something, offering her her old job back would be better than offering her money. It would be a more human thing to do.”

  Her mother’s eyes grew thoughtful. “I do feel badly about Smitty,” she said. “Smitty’s suffered a great deal through this … this little family situation of ours, which you and I both know about. She’s still suffering, poor thing. I do feel we owe her something. I feel guilty, too. I suppose I could have done more to prevent what happened from happening. I could have worked harder to put an end to it, I suppose, but I didn’t. Partly, it was the way I was brought up. It was a man’s world, my father taught my sisters and me, and a wife’s job was to do what her husband wanted, so I did what my husband wanted. But I suppose I could have talked to Smitty, and explained certain things to her about your father that she didn’t understand. I could have prevented her from having such high expectations … such false dreams. Perhaps. But I didn’t. Perhaps I could even have prevented—but never mind that. Was I just lazy? Or did I just know in my heart of hearts that it would end sometime?” Her mother’s voice was growing drowsy. “She was deluded, and delusions can poison a woman’s mind, and lead her to have … unrealistic expectations.… Is it all water over the dam … or under the bridge … or however the saying goes? Or …? Never let yourself become deluded, Miranda … keep your eyes open … be sure your eyes take in everything there is to see. Take your old gray-haired mother’s advice.…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Then will you help me save the store, Mother? Will you give me at least a year?”

  “Let me see what Jake Kohlberg thinks.”

  “For once, could you sa
y yes or no without consulting Jake Kohlberg?”

  Her mother yawned and covered the yawn with the back of her left hand. With her right hand, she reached out and stroked Bicha’s thick slate-blue fur. “I haven’t said no, and I haven’t said yes, and I haven’t said maybe,” she said. She closed her eyes. “It’s good you’re going to be here the whole weekend,” she said. “We’ll talk some more tomorrow. Let me sleep on this one, darling. Let your old gray-haired mother sleep on this one.”

  Miranda winced. “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about getting old,” she said a little crossly. “You’re hardly dying on the vine, Mother.” Then she said, “Maybe I’ll stay here a few days longer. I don’t feel like going back to the store right away. Maybe I’ll take a couple of days off next week. Would that be all right with you?”

  But she realized her mother had fallen asleep—as asleep as she had apparently been throughout her father’s and Smitty’s long love affair, never guessing how serious it had been about to become. Suddenly she felt a stab of pity for her sleeping, beautiful, innocent mother. Darling, did you really believe it all would end on its own? She sat for a moment longer on the bed, then rose, kissed her mother lightly on her pale forehead, and turned off her mother’s bedside lamp.

  Her mother slept. Bicha the cat, another innocent, slept. The house, a keeper of guilty secrets, slept. Miranda tiptoed down the dark hall to her own room, a route she could have traveled blindfolded, and fell across her bed, face forward, as though sleep had felled her with a truncheon from behind.

  In his cottage, farther down Heather Lane, Tommy Bonham lay beside Nino, not sleeping.

  “She not eat my chicken adobo,” Nino said. “She not like.”

  “No. It was just that she had other things on her mind.”

  “You tried to make love with her.”

  “You were listening?”

  “I stay in the cellar, like you say. I hear your voices.”

  He raised himself on one elbow. “You must have sneaked up the stairs then!”

  Beside him in the darkness, Nino nodded. “You ask her to marry you.”