Carriage Trade (41 page)

“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?

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.