Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “What’s that?”

  “Forgive me, but I tend to think of the two of you, you and Peter, as two children, trying to run this complicated store. I keep wishing there were someone—someone with a solid background in retailing—who could help advise you. These courses you’re taking at N.Y.U.—is there someone there, an instructor perhaps, who could work with you, at least at the beginning?”

  “As a matter of fact there is,” Miranda says. “His name is Mark Horowitz. Before he retired and went into teaching, he was the comptroller at Bonwit’s for thirty years.”

  “That’s the sort of person I mean. Would he do it?”

  “For me, I bet he would! He calls me his star pupil.”

  “Good. Then ask him. You see how simple it is to find solutions once you put your mind to it?”

  “Mother, I don’t know what to say.”

  “There’s nothing you need to say.”

  “I may fail, you know.”

  “You won’t fail. You’re a Tarkington woman, and we Tarkington women are not put together with flour-and-water paste.”

  She reaches out and touches her mother’s hand, and her mother squeezes her hand in return. “I’ll say this much,” Miranda says. “I love you, Mother.”

  “I love you too. And don’t forget I also loved your father, and your father is a part of you.” Connie Tarkington stands, and her hand rests lightly on her daughter’s shoulder as she looks out across the pond. “I’m glad I had them dig this pond as deep as I did,” she says. “Creatures need depth to love and procreate. I sometimes think there is nothing but a deep pond between life and death, and the bridge is love. Love is the bridge between where we are today and wherever we’ll find ourselves tomorrow. Between the night terrors and—” She shivers suddenly. “It’s getting chilly, isn’t it,” she says. “The days are getting shorter. Let’s go inside. We both have so much to do. We’d better get started, if we’re going to have the store in shape for the Christmas season. Come, Miranda. Come, Bicha. Come, kitty.”

  Her eyes seem to come to rest on a line of evergreens just along the ridge, and she raises one hand in the attitude of a priest bestowing a blessing, and realizing her mother is saying goodbye to the Dell Garden, Miranda looks away.

  34

  “Well, hello, stranger!” he says cheerfully as she steps into his office the next morning. “We’ve missed you around here. How was your vacation?”

  “Just fine,” she says. “Tommy, we need to talk.”

  “Sure,” he says, and he rises, steps quickly past her, and closes the office door behind them. “Sit down, Miranda, and tell me what’s on your mind. Have you given any more thought to that little proposal of mine?”

  She remains standing. “That’s not what I came to talk about, Tommy,” she says.

  He frowns. “Something’s bothering you, I can tell. The other night at my house. One minute you were so warm, so passionate. And the next minute you were cold as ice. What happened? And last week you stayed away from the store, as though you were trying to avoid me, and when you called on the phone it was only to discuss figures. Obviously, I’ve said or done something to upset or offend you, Miranda. Please tell me what it is.”

  She looks him squarely in the eye and forces the words out. “We’ve decided to let you go, Tommy,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean, let me go?”

  “We don’t want you working at the store anymore.”

  His eyes narrow slightly. “We? Who is we?”

  “A majority of Tarkington’s stockholders.”

  “What majority? Where do you get your majority?”

  “My mother, my grandmother, my Aunt Simma—and myself.”

  “You—women?”

  “I can get you executed proxies if you’d like. But that shouldn’t be necessary, should it? I think you and I understand each other.”

  “Your grandmother? But your grandmother is senile, for God’s sake!”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s not. But that’s neither here nor there. We still represent fifty-five percent of the voting shares of this company.”

  “You mean you women are firing me? You can’t do that!”

  “Why not? I believe I just did,” she says.

  “Who in God’s name is going to run the store?”

  “I am,” she says.

  He laughs softly. “You can’t run it without me.”

  “Oh, yes, I can.”

  “Now, Miranda, be sensible,” he says. “You know you don’t have the experience to run an operation like this one. Oh, maybe some day you could, but not yet. The Christmas season is coming up. Do you know what that means? Of all times of the year to—”

  “Our Christmas orders are all in. Merchandise is being shipped.”

  “But you yourself admitted—just the other night, to me—that you had a lot to learn about retailing. And the only person who can teach you anything about this store is me.”

  “I’ve learned a lot just in the past few days,” she says. “I’m a fast learner. Always have been. Smitty will help me, too.”

  “Smitty? What’s Smitty got to do with it?”

  “Smitty’s agreed to rejoin us.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he says, running his fingers through his thick blond hair. “Just calm down a minute. Just settle down and try to talk sensibly, Miranda.”

  “I am calm. Do I seem agitated?”

  “Just a minute. Hear me out. Do I have a right to know why you—you women—have made this very unwise, financially dangerous decision? Can you tell me that?”

  “For several reasons,” she says. “Funny business with the Retail Credit Corporation in Atlanta. Sales records that don’t match up with shipping records. Discounts and rebates. Too much consignment selling. The disappearance of the employees’ pension fund. These things have been going on too long.”

  “I can explain all that,” he says.

  “The only thing I’d like explained,” she says, “is what you managed to do with all the money you seem to have skimmed from us. You never struck me as a particularly high liver. Where did the money go? I wonder, is it in some numbered account in Switzerland? Is it in some bank in the Cayman Islands? But I don’t ever expect to get to the bottom of that.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he says. “Just wait a minute. You’re making a very serious allegation there, Miranda. I can explain.”

  “Then please do,” she says.

  “To begin with, your father and I were very close. He was my closest friend. I loved him like a brother, Miranda. We were even closer than that. We were like—like one soul. He often told me that he could never have had the success he had without me. We were that close,” and he presses the two forefingers of his right hand together in demonstration. “Now your father was a great merchandising genius, as you know, a true retailing innovator in every sense of the word. But every genius has his shortcomings, and your father was no exception. I used to refer to your father’s shortcomings as his little blind spots. He was a man with great merchandising ideas, but he was not a financial wizard. Covering his little blind spots was where I came in, and I handled nearly all the store’s financial matters for him, increasingly so, over the years, as he placed more and more trust in me. But there were times when, in your father’s enthusiasm for his ideas and innovations, he let himself get carried away, and he’d overextend himself, and that’s when I’d have to step in to try to rescue him financially. And sometimes, in order to do that, I’d have to resort to certain fiscal practices which—to an outsider, at least—might seem a little bit … unorthodox. That was what happened with the pension fund, when Pauline caught us short by unexpectedly announcing her retirement. But I assure you that I have careful plans in the works right now—the details of which I can’t go into yet—to have that fund fully restored by the end of the year. And I can promise you, Miranda, that every red cent of the money you see as missing was plowed back into helping your father run this store. If you�
�ll let me go over the books again with you, I can show you exactly where and how. If it hadn’t been for me, your father would have been a ruined man, and this store would have been bankrupt years ago. I did it because I loved and believed in this store. I did it because I loved and believed in your father. And I did it for your mother’s sake, and of course for your sake too, because I loved you so. Do you believe me, Miranda?”

  “Perhaps,” she says, feeling her resolve beginning to waver. “But still—”

  “I love you, Miranda,” he says. “Whatever it is you think I’ve done that’s made you decide to ruin me now, I’ll always love you. Remember that.” He reaches out to take her by the shoulders.

  “Please, no,” she says, stepping away.

  “Remember those feelings you had for me years ago, when we first met? By the pool? The blue swimsuit with the red mermaid? You still have those feelings, don’t you?”

  “I was just a child,” she says. “And somehow I feel we’ve been over this ground before.”

  “My child love. Face it, Miranda, you need me and I need you. It was to be you and me, from the moment we met.” His gaze at her is steady and hypnotic. “Now, why don’t you calm yourself down? You’ve let the store’s little problems worry you far more than those little problems are worth. Relax, and we’ll talk some more later.” He glances at his watch. “In fact, why don’t we have lunch? Let me book a table for the two of us at Le Cirque, and we’ll talk over a nice relaxed lunch.”

  “Damn it, I am calmed down! I am relaxed!”

  “See? You’re all on edge. You’re a bundle of nerves.”

  “If I am, it’s because of things that were done here at the store—illegal things.”

  “Now, Miranda, nothing was done that was illegal, I promise you. Sure, sometimes I was forced to do things that were a little bit—creative—with the books to bail your father out, but nothing was done that was in any way illegal.”

  “I don’t know whether it’s illegal to shift funds around within a company—the pension fund into the general operating fund, for instance—but for a trustee to steal from someone else’s trust fund is definitely against the law.”

  His face goes suddenly pale, his eyes flash, and his lip begins twitching violently. “Trust fund? What trust fund? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Blazer’s trust fund. The half-million-dollar trust fund that Daddy set up for Blazer, that was to be his when he was twenty-one.”

  “I had nothing to do with that!”

  “In 1979, you somehow got the Connecticut Bank and Trust Company to turn over its trusteeship to you, and you and Alice Tarkington were supposed to administer it together. For the next five years, you and Alice authorized systematic withdrawals from it, and we’ve found matching deposits to the store’s general operating account for all of these withdrawals. By 1984, the trust fund was depleted.”

  “Who ‘found’? Who’s ‘we’? Did Blazer tell you this? Blazer is a stupid jerk.”

  “No.”

  “Was it Alice? Alice is a lush.”

  “No.”

  “Was it Jake Kohlberg? Kohlberg is a cheap shyster who’s always hated my guts because I was closer to your father than he was.”

  “No, it wasn’t Jake.”

  “Then who? Who’s ‘we’?”

  “A friend of mine and I, a friend who’s been helping me go over the books.”

  “That writer you’ve been screwing, I suppose. Your mother told me about him. He’s a lightweight, you know. He may have got an M.B.A. at Harvard, but it took him an extra year to get it.”

  “He was ill with hepatitis for most of one school year.”

  “Hepatitis? Is that what he told you? It was more likely AIDS!”

  She smiles, because she sees a light, however dimly, beginning to glow at the end of this long and murky tunnel. “And so,” she says carefully, “it looks as though you, with Alice’s unwitting aid, managed to raid my brother’s trust fund.”

  “What do you care? He’s not even your real brother!”

  “Nonetheless, I think of him as my brother,” she says.

  “Your father hated Blazer. He never intended Blazer to get any of that money.”

  “But he didn’t intend you to get it, did he?”

  “It all went back into running the store! It was done to help save the store!”

  “That may be true, but it was still illegal.”

  “It was all done with your father’s full approval. Everything I did was done with his full approval. Are you going to try to have me fired for doing what the president of the company ordered me to do?”

  “Somehow, I don’t believe that, Tommy,” she says.

  “Have you told Blazer any of this? Are you going to try to get him to make trouble for me?”

  “I haven’t decided,” she says. “I’m actually a little afraid to, because I really think Blazer might try to kill you if he knew. He has such a quick temper. It’s not so much that Blazer wants the money. I really don’t think the money means that much to him at this point. But if he knew you’d stolen it from his poor mother while Alice was—physically incapacitated—I think he might really try to kill you. And much as I distrust you, Tommy, I really don’t want your blood on my hands. So maybe I won’t tell Blazer. But,” she says, “I could always report what I know to the state Attorney General’s office.”

  He hesitates, staring hard at her. Then he says, “Your mother put you up to this, didn’t she?”

  “No,” she says. “She approves of what I’m doing, but she didn’t put me up to it. I’m telling you this entirely on my own.”

  “You know why she’s turned against me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think there’s any particular reason.”

  He sighs, spreading the palms of his hands. “I was hoping not to have to tell you about this, Miranda. But I guess I’m going to have to.”

  “Tell me about what?”

  “Did she tell you she came to see me Saturday morning at my house on Heather Lane?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “I thought not. Well, she telephoned me Saturday morning and said she wanted to see me. I had no idea what it was about, but I asked her to stop by. She drove over in her car. I let her in. She was wearing a light raincoat, one of our Selancy rainwear line, though it wasn’t raining. I offered to take her coat, but she said no, she was a little chilly, she’d rather keep the raincoat on. I gave her a cup of coffee, the way she likes it, with a little yogurt spooned in instead of cream. She sat on the sofa.

  “She began telling me how lonely she was with your father gone—‘desperately lonely’ was the way she put it—how terribly she missed him, how she wasn’t sure she could ever adjust to life without a man around the house. She talked for quite a while about her loneliness, so I suggested things she might do to keep busy, instead of working for the hospital ball, which she never really enjoyed. Join the local garden club, I said. Work for that little symphony they’re trying to start in Manhasset. How about travel? She kept saying no, that there was no real substitute for male companionship.

  “I got up to get her another cup of coffee, and she lay back against the sofa and opened up her raincoat, and—Miranda, this is very difficult for me to say to you—and she had nothing on underneath it. She was naked.”

  Miranda stares at him in disbelief, with the unlikely picture of her fastidious mother sprawled naked on Tommy’s sofa suddenly flash-frozen in her mind. “No,” she gasps.

  “Oh, yes. She said something like, I want you, Tommy,’ and I couldn’t believe my eyes myself. She looked so pathetic there … the aging beauty. I said to her very sharply, ‘Pull yourself together, Connie! You’re making a fool of yourself. I have no interest in you. I don’t love you. I love Miranda.’ She jumped to her feet. She was very angry. She ran at me, and for a minute I thought she was going to try to scratch my eyes out. But instead she just called me a few choice names, buttoned her coat, and dashed out of th
e house.

  “So that’s why she’s turned against me. That’s why she’s turned you against me. That’s why she wants to get rid of me. That’s why you’re firing me—because of a jealous woman’s anger. She’ll deny it, of course, but that’s the truth. I never planned to tell you any of this, but now you know. You’re dismissing an executive with more than twenty years of loyal service because of a woman’s jealous rage.”

  She is still staring at him. Finally she says, “I know when you first came to New York from Indiana, you wanted to be an actor. I’d just like to say, Tommy, that I think the English-speaking stage lost a great performer when you went into retailing. And I’ve just figured something else out. Those E.K. bonuses you paid yourself all those years, those bonuses that were supposed to be for extra kindness. Those bonuses came from Ernestine Kolowrat, didn’t they? Your share of Daddy’s blackmail money, from the little deal you worked out with Ernestine on the side. Very clever, Tommy, I must say. You didn’t blackmail Daddy directly. You just collected a third of the money Ernestine got. I suppose, the way you figured it, that meant your hands were clean.”

  He jumps to his feet. “That’s ridiculous!” he shouts.

  “Is it? Why is your mouth twitching like that, Tommy? Is it something that happens to your face when you tell a lie? Like Pinocchio’s nose?”

  His hand flies to his mouth, and his look is one of purest hatred now, his eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Listen, you little bitch,” he says, “I’ve spent the last twenty years bailing your father out of his messes, doing everything but wipe his ass for him. If it hadn’t been for me, this store would still be a two-bit operation backed by a handful of two-bit crooks. You think your father was a merchandising genius? He was a merchandising moron, was what he was, with his stupid policy of letting customers take years to pay their bills, just for the publicity! I was the one who was the genius, trying to make his stupid policies look like they made economic sense. Who figured out ways to bail him out whenever the store was short of cash? I did! Who helped him buy his fancy houses and his racehorses and kept your mother and you in designer dresses, and you in fancy boarding schools and colleges? Who sat back and let him grab all the glory? I did. Your father would have been nothing without me—nothing but a washed-up ex-con piece of shit, which was all he ever was from the beginning!”