Carriage Trade (15 page)

“I remember you telling me that story, Daddy,” Honeychile Minskoff put in.

“Nonsense,” Miranda's mother said. “I named him Flying Flame because his sire was named Fly By Night, and his dam was Torch Singer. You always try to do that—give a horse a name that will suggest the breeding line.”

“No,” Moe Minskoff said again. “I named him after Comet Kohoutek.”

“I know you did, Daddy!”

“Comet Kohoutek didn't come until years later!” her mother said sharply.

With that, she saw Tommy Bonham's hand reach out and touch her mother's bare arm very gently. “I want to tell the story about the Queen's visit to the store,” he said, changing the subject. “Si wouldn't admit he was nervous. But he was.…”

That was one of Tommy's great talents, avoiding unpleasantness, defusing a confrontation.

Miranda could understand the cocktail-party atmosphere that had overtaken the evening. Right after a death, there is a need for a certain release, and this was it—a release from the shock. But she wasn't feeling up to it, so she wandered from the party that was going on in the living room and out into the garden to the pool—where he died. It seemed as good a place as any to say goodbye to her father.

The pool was still as glass and inky black, though there were moonlight and starlight reflected in its glassy surface. She wondered briefly whether her mother would have the pool torn out and the excavation filled in, now that somebody had died there. She knelt by the edge and trailed her fingers in the still water. Then she put her fingertips to her lips, to taste the water in which her father had died. She stood up again.

The switch that turned on the underwater lights was mounted in a low stone wall that bordered the pool, and she walked to this and flipped it upward, but the lights did not come on. Then she realized why the surface of the pool was so still. The filter, which normally ran twenty-four hours a day, rippling the pool with its jets, was not working. She flipped the filter switch, but nothing happened. A third switch controlled the outdoor garden lights, but these were not working either.

She ran up the short flight of steps to the pool house and began flipping switches there. No lights were working in this part of the farm at all, and suddenly a shiver ran down her back, and she thought,
electricity
, the television set. Even without lights, she could see that the television set was not sitting where it usually sat, on a shelf against the far wall of the room, in its Lucite case. In the moonlight semidarkness, she searched for the television set, but she could not find it.

This was no ordinary television. In 1976, her father had made a special trip to Washington to show some designer dresses to Mrs. Betty Ford at the White House. To thank her for her purchases, Si had sent Mrs. Ford two silk Hermès scarves. The Fords responded by sending Silas Tarkington videotapes of all President Ford's speeches, along with a portable television set to play them on. An engraved brass plaque on the top of the set read:

FOR SILAS TARKINGTON
,

A GREAT MERCHANT
,

WITH WARMEST THANKS FROM

PRESIDENT AND MRS
.
GERALD R
.
FORD

1976

Miranda doubted that her father had ever played the tapes of the President's speeches, but he had the Lucite case made to display the set. And when he swam his laps, he plugged the set, tuned to the cable news network, into one of the outdoor outlets, and a red digital clock on the face of the set kept track of the time for him. He claimed that counting his laps was boring. Instead, he timed himself, swimming for half an hour, forty-five minutes, or sometimes for a full hour, whenever he was in the country.

The sight of that television set at the edge of the pool always made Miranda nervous. “What if it fell into the pool while you're swimming, Daddy? You could be electrocuted.”

“How could it fall into the pool? It must weigh twenty pounds.”

Blackamoor, his big Lab, often ran up and down the length of the pool as he swam and sometimes got excited enough to leap into the water and swim alongside, yipping with pleasure.

“What if Blackie tripped on the cord and knocked it in?”

“Nonsense. Blackie knows our routine.”

Two years ago, for his birthday, she had bought him a scuba diver's underwater wrist chronometer. “It's guaranteed for depths up to a hundred feet,” she told him.

“Great, but why do I need it?”

“It's to use instead of the clock on the TV set,” she said.

He laughed. “It would break my rhythm if I had to keep looking at a watch all the time,” he said. “I prefer my TV clock.”

Then, as a joke, she had bought him an ordinary kitchen timer, with a bell.

He had looked at it. “Will this also give me my cable TV news?” he said with a smile.

And now the set was gone, and all the power in that corner of the farm was out, and her father was dead.

In the distance, from the main house, she could hear the sound of laughter. “Oh, he was a wonderful man, a wonderful man,” she heard Moe Minskoff saying. “Sucha sense-a yuma.…”

Behind the pool house was Blackamoor's kennel, and she went to look for him. There were no lights there either, but Blackie bounded up from his bed, wagging his tail, and seemed pleased to see her. But when she offered him a milk bone, he didn't want it and just dropped it back into her hand.

And so she sat with the big dog for a while, stroking his ears, with his big head resting on her lap. He seemed sad, as sad as she was, and perhaps even sadder because there was no way for him to express his sadness. From the main house, farther up the hill, the party sounds continued, and she could even hear her mother's tinkly, polished laugh. From Blackamoor now came soft whimpering sounds, whether of pleasure or sorrow she had no way of knowing.

Miranda rested her chin on the top of Blackie's head and was suddenly certain he knew that her father was gone and would never be coming back. And she had another scary, eerie feeling that the dog knew something about her father's death that she would never know. “Blackie,” she said to him, “if you could talk, is there something you could tell me?”

In the green library now there is the sudden scent of Shalimar as Miranda's mother enters the room, a little breathless. “Sorry to be late, darling,” she says, “but I couldn't get a cab and ended up walking all the way from Forty-fourth Street.” She gives Miranda a peck on the cheek. She has changed into flats, but the two crescents of pale hair that frame her face are still perfectly in place. She steps to a mirror, touches her hair, and flicks an invisible speck of lint from the sleeve of her navy Chanel suit. Then she moves quickly away from the mirror, glides back across the room, and sits in the green leather chair opposite Miranda, under Monet's painting of water lilies, where the museum light shines down on her hair, giving it frosty glints.

It is another of her mother's mysterious talents, Miranda thinks—to be able to position herself perfectly in a room, under a painting where her white skin reflects the tone and texture of the lily blossoms, and where the lamp echoes the reflected sunlight in the lily pond.

Milliken arrives with iced tea in a silver goblet, garnished with a lemon wedge and a sprig of fresh mint.

“Thank you, Milliken.” Miranda's mother fishes for a cigarette from the silver box on the coffee table, screws it into a silver cigarette holder, and lights it with a silver table lighter. Everything seems to glimmer in the lighter's blue and orange flash. In her mother's world, Miranda thinks, everything works, including silver table lighters, which never work for anyone else.

Her mother glances at the silver bowl. “Cheese Doodles,” she says. “Dear me. Remind me to tell Milliken to throw out all those Cheese Doodles in the larder.”

“I happen to like Cheese Doodles, Mother.”

Her mother throws her a quick look. “Do you? Dear me. Well,
chacun à son goût
. There's apparently a young man who wants to write your father's biography. What would he say if we told him that your elegant father's favorite snack was junk food?”

“Do we want Daddy's biography written, Mother? He never wanted it done.”

“I asked Jake Kohlberg the same question. He feels that if we don't cooperate, this man might decide to write the story anyway, and we'd have no—leverage, as Jake put it, over what he decides to say.”

“Control, you mean.”

“Exactly. Anyway,” she continues, without skipping a beat, “the will's been read, that's over and done with, and we all know where we stand. Too bad about Blazer, because your father really was going to relent and leave Blazer something. Not a lot, I think, but something.”

“But still—”

“You know why your father did that to Blazer, don't you? It wasn't just because of the things Blazer said to him that day. It was because he hoped that leaving him out of the will would galvanize Blazer into finding a job. ‘Shock therapy,' your father called it. Anyway, there's nothing to be done about that now, is there? And”—she blows out a long thin stream of smoke—“we've got more important things to discuss, you and I. We've got to decide what's going to happen next.”

“Yes.”

“I had a long talk with Jake Kohlberg after you left,” she says. “He feels very strongly, and I agree, that we ought to sell the store.”

“Oh, no!” Miranda cries.

“Apparently Continental is planning to make us a nice tender offer, and there are a couple of other bidders, and Jake thinks, and I agree, that we ought to accept the best offer as soon as we can. A bird in the hand, as your father used to say. It's the only sensible thing to do, darling.”

“But we can't give up the store, Mother!”

“Why can't we? We'd all be paid a lot of money. And obviously I can't run the place, and neither can you.”

“I'd sure as hell try!”

“Darling, I know you've always
said
you'd like to run the store, but do you have any idea what it's really like? Of course you don't. Do you have any idea of how to deal with the market? You don't even know the market. Those are tough guys out there, those market people. Your father was a tough cookie, and he could deal with them. You'd be an innocent abroad, a babe in the woods. You'd be like a minnow swimming in a sea of sharks. They'd gobble you up in no time.”

Retailing, Miranda thinks, is perhaps the only business in the world where the term “the market” does not mean the customers. It means the designers, the manufacturers, the suppliers, Seventh Avenue. And it is true that she has had absolutely no experience dealing with the market. “But what about Tommy?” she says.

“If the new owners want to use Tommy's—talents, they can do so. Tommy's a bright boy. He'll always land on his feet. I'm not worried about Tommy.”

“And what about me?”

“Your job, you mean? Well, it isn't much of a job, is it, darling? Not that you don't do what you do very well. But I suppose if you still wanted to work for the store, the new owners might be able to find something for you—if you wanted something. But why should you? You'll have plenty of money.”

“It's not just money, Mother!”

“Darling, everything is money in the end, isn't it? Of course it is. If I were Miranda Tarkington, age twenty-four, I wouldn't be worried about a job. I'd be thinking about finding an eligible young man to marry. I've never understood how you could have let that nice David Belknap slip through your fingers. They're calling him the new wunderkind of Wall Street.”

“I didn't want to marry the wunderkind of Wall Street.”

“At your age, I was already married to your father.”

“I'm not you, Mother. You Consuelo. Me Miranda.”

“Of course, darling. But the point is, under the new management, you surely wouldn't want to work there. It would be Tarkington's in name only. It would be an entirely different store.”

“But that's exactly what I don't want to see happen!”

“It's got to happen, darling. You saw what
The Times
called your father—the last of the dinosaurs. This store is the last of the dinosaurs too, struggling in vain against extinction. It's an anachronism, Miranda. The women your father used to call ‘my kind of woman' are either dead or dying or their husbands are being carted off to jail. As Jake Kohlberg said to me tonight, and I agree, Tarkington's is an idea whose time has come and gone. Jake reminded me of one of your father's favorite sayings: ‘Running a store like mine is like putting on a piece of theater. It's show business.' Well, as Jake says, this piece of theater has had a nice long run, and now it's time to ring down the curtain and post the closing notice.”

“Jake Kohlberg, Jake Kohlberg, stop telling me what Jake Kohlberg says!”

Her mother looks at her, then stubs out her cigarette. “I may not always have agreed with Jake Kohlberg,” she says, “but I've followed his advice and never regretted it. And I intend to follow it this time. We tender our stock to the best offer that comes down the road.”

“Well, I'm
not.”

“Think about it a little bit, Miranda,” her mother says gently. “Think about it, and you'll agree with me. Your father's grand dream—for a specialty store to end all specialty stores—is as dead as he is.”

“I can't believe you're talking about this so cold-bloodedly,” Miranda says. “This store that he built from nothing, single-handedly, from scratch—”

“Well, he had a little help,” her mother says with a small smile.

“Help from whom?”

“From me, among other people. As Jake Kohlberg said to me this very afternoon, I've been the best advertisement your father ever had for his store. Do you think that's been easy? Do you think it's easy to stay on the Best-Dressed List? It takes time and effort and study—working with designers, studying the competition, being seen at the right places with the right people. I've done all that, and I did it for him and for his store. The only thing was, I never got paid for it. Now I'm ready to get paid. And I'm also ready to relax, get out of my girdle, and stop worrying about how I look every time I step outside my front door. I'm thinking of doing some travel, the Mascarene Islands, the Seychelles. I'm ready to let my hair down, Miranda.”