Carriage Trade (43 page)

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.

Before going to work at the store, I considered myself a moderate social drinker. But working with Si, helping him start up the store, was stressful. Retailing itself is stressful. People in the theater complain about the horrible hours they have to work, giving performances eight times a week. But no actor is on stage for much more than two hours per performance, and that adds up to working only sixteen hours a week. But in retailing you work from eight-thirty to six-thirty, six days a week, and that adds up to
sixty
hours a week. I'd come home from work and have a few drinks to unwind, to relax, to relieve the day's stress. I'd take my bucket of ice cubes, my glass, and a bottle of vodka, and pour down vodka until that feeling of relaxation came over me. Some nights it took longer than others. Some nights I drank until I passed out on the sofa, and I'd wake up in the morning, still in my clothes, with a half-empty glass of vodka on the coffee table beside me. Staring at me.

I only drank at home and at night. I never drank at work. At least I was smart enough not to do that.

I told myself I drank because of the stress of my work. I told myself that I drank because I was lonely, and because I missed Erick, and because I was not dating anyone. I told myself I drank because my evenings alone were boring, and because I didn't like going out to bars, and because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. I told myself I drank because that was the only way I could get a good night's sleep. Oh, I could give myself dozens of reasons why I drank.

I had too much to drink at one of those opening promotional parties for the store, and that was how I ended up in bed with Si.

When Si and I began our affair, he didn't like it when I drank, so I had to plan my drinking times around him—before he got to my house, after he left, after he fell asleep, and so on. I was very clever. Alcoholics often are. He might never
see
me have more than one or two drinks, but I was still managing to put down my full share.

After we were married, it was the same thing. I was a secret drinker. At least I thought I was keeping it a secret from him, but I'm not sure. Vodka isn't supposed to leave any odor on your breath. And when I found he was still seeing other women, that gave me another excuse to get drunk—anger and humiliation because my new husband was unfaithful. We had terrible quarrels. I don't remember what started most of them, because I was drunk. We'd quarrel, and he'd stalk out of the apartment into the night, and bingo! Another excuse. I'd get drunk because my husband had walked out on me, and left me alone, and was probably out with another woman. Sometimes he'd scream at me. “You've been drinking, haven't you?” And of course that just gave me another excuse. I'd get drunk because my husband had called me a drunk.

No, it was my drinking that destroyed my marriage to Si as much as anything else. I know that now.

I decided that if we had a baby, perhaps that would keep our marriage from becoming unglued. Perhaps a baby would make him give up the other women. It was a foolish notion, but in 1963 I went off the pill and became pregnant with Blazer.

All through my pregnancy, I found myself thinking that the baby I was carrying was actually Erick's baby. Erick and I had planned to have children as soon as his term of enlistment was up, but he never made it, and I found myself telling myself, This is really Erick's baby, my gift to him; this is Erick's legacy, the legacy of our love, of everything we had together and were to each other. I even had the crazy notion of naming the baby Erick, if it was a boy. That would be my revenge on Si for everything he had put me through.

And this just gave me another excuse to drink—guilt that I could think such disloyal thoughts, guilt that whenever Si and I made love I'd pretend I was still making love to Erick, that all through Si's and my affair I'd really been sleeping with Erick's ghost. Once, when Si and I were making love, I even cried out Erick's name. He pulled away from me and said, “I'm Si, not Erick, remember?”

It was all because of my drinking. But I didn't mean to give you a lecture on alcoholism, though they do encourage us to talk about it.

One other thing I noticed about Si after we were married. He had a wonderful eye for fine merchandise. And he was a marvelous salesman. I used to say that Si Tarkington could have sold rainwear in the Gobi Desert, bikinis to the Eskimos, condoms to the Pope. But he was not a businessman. He had no real sense of business strategy. He understood the bottom line, but that was about it. All the details that
got
you to the bottom line just didn't interest him. At the end of each selling day, he'd go over the store's figures, department by department, comparing each department's figures with those of the week before, and so on. In retailing, we have an expression called “making the day.” A department has made its day if its figures are at least equal to—or preferably better than—those of the same date the year before. Si would check to see whether a department had made its day. But a lot of other things have to be factored into making the day—national holidays that fall on different dates, world events, the Dow-Jones average, even the weather. A good retailer keeps files on all these factors. Si couldn't be bothered with those little details. And if you'd shown him the company's balance sheet, he wouldn't have been able to make head or tail of it. Si had studied bookkeeping, not accounting.

Business strategy was left to a man named Moses Minskoff, who was sort of a silent business partner. Mr. Minskoff almost never came into the store, never had an office there. But he and Si were often on the phone together.

Mr. Minskoff always struck me as a very shady character. Si called him a diamond in the rough, but to me he was more rough than diamond—a grossly fat man who chewed cigars, smelled of garlic, and had a New York Jewish accent strong enough to start a pogrom. I disliked Moses Minskoff very much, and, even though Si insisted that he was important to the business, I began to suspect that Si didn't really like him either. Whenever Moses Minskoff's name came up, a cloud passed across Si's face—a worried look. I began to think that Si was somehow afraid of Moses Minskoff, even though Minskoff didn't seem all that bright to me. I began to wonder whether Minskoff was blackmailing Si in some way, and I got the distinct impression that Si would have liked to get rid of him but couldn't figure out a way to do it.

Still, Minskoff definitely had his uses. Sometimes a designer's or a manufacturer's shipment would come in short, or we'd suddenly need a certain garment for a certain special client who wanted that item right away and would settle for nothing else. The buyer or the salesperson would bring the problem to Si, and Si would heave a deep sigh and say, “Well, maybe we better bring in Mr. Fixit,” as he called him. And he'd call Minskoff and explain the problem, and somehow or other whatever merchandise the store needed would come through right away. Mr. Fixit had fixed it. It was uncanny, because he had no retailing experience whatsoever.

“Moe is a real operator,” Si used to say, and I'd have to agree.

Anyway, our son was born in October of 1963. I didn't suggest that we name him Erick. We named him Silas Rogers Tarkington, Jr. Si was thrilled that he had a son, and he was crazy about that baby. “He's going to blaze a trail across the skies, this son of mine,” he used to say. That was how we started calling him Blazer—for the trail he was going to blaze. “They call me a merchant prince,” he'd say, “but this son of mine is going to be a
real
merchant prince,” and he'd bounce the baby on his knee.

I really thought the birth of our son was going to mean that Si's and my marriage would get back on the right track, and for a while it seemed to. I was nursing the baby, so I stopped drinking, and that helped things right away. And because it was so easy for me to stop drinking, I told myself I couldn't possibly be that awful thing, an alcoholic. But I was. I was the kind of drinker for whom one drink is too many and ten aren't enough.

Si was a wonderful father. He did more than just bounce the baby on his knee. He bathed him. He changed his diapers and dressed him. He made formula for the supplementary bottle that my doctor had prescribed and sterilized the bottles and the nipples. He fed the baby and loved to watch him feeding at my breast. He loved all those things that husbands are supposed to hate. He didn't want me to hire a nursemaid because he said he could do everything a nursemaid could do, and do them better. And of course he showered the baby with toys—too many toys, I thought, but I didn't say anything. To Si, the sun rose and set on that little boy. He even sang Yiddish lullabies to him that his own mother used to sing:
“Roshenkis mit mandlen, Shluf sie Yidele, shluf. Shlufsie, kind meins shluf
.…”

I'd gained weight during my pregnancy, and it wasn't coming off. I was plump now, but I didn't seem to care. I was comfortable in my plumpness, and it seemed such a natural and easy way to be. When I'd worked for the store, appearances were everything, and I'd been a slave to my tape measure. But now none of that seemed to matter. Of course an alcoholic who stops drinking tends to eat a lot of sweets—something about blood sugar—and without even thinking about it, there was usually a box of chocolates within my reach.

And when a woman is nursing a baby, she can't really worry about her clothes. I'd find myself flopping around the apartment in old slippers and a milk-stained robe, and this all seemed wonderfully natural. It didn't occur to me that I might be turning into a slob because—I suddenly realized this—I was
happy
!

And then the strangest thing began to happen. I found myself falling in love with Si. It dawned on me gradually that I was in love again, but the realization came with all of love's force and anguish and terror. It was as though I'd entered a whole new world, and in the center of that universe were my husband and my baby. My memories of Erick were fading. I had to look at his photograph in its silver frame to remember what he looked like. I was finally in love with Si.

“Oh, my darling,” I whispered to him as he bathed our little son, “I love you so.” He passed the baby into my arms where I waited with a warm towel, and it was as though I'd never lived or loved before, or ever would again, just in that single moment.

And then Consuelo Banning came into our lives.

21

Mrs. Alice Markham Tarkington (interview taped 9/12/91)

I'd been nursing the baby, and when the telephone interrupted my nursing reverie I almost didn't answer it. To this day, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't. It was an unlisted number, only given to special friends. There'd been fewer of those callers who uttered a little gasp and then hung up, but it still happened, and this call might be from one of them. Anyway, I removed the baby gently from my breast, placed him in his crib, and answered the phone on the sixth ring.

“Mrs. Tarkington?” a cultivated woman's voice said. “This is Consuelo Banning. I'm here in the store, and I wondered if I might come up and see you.”

“I just stepped out of my bath,” I lied. “Can you give me about twenty minutes to slip into some clothes? Then I'd love to meet you, Miss Banning.”

“Oh, certainly, Mrs. Tarkington. I've some more shopping to do. Would half an hour be better?”

“Twenty minutes will be fine. Take the elevator closest to Fifty-ninth Street. I'll unlock it for you, so just press six, and it will take you up express.”

I knew Consuelo Banning was one of the store's more glamorous new clients. Her picture had been in
Life
magazine, and more recently she'd been on the cover of
Vogue
, photographed by Irving Penn. Getting her to shop at Tarkington's was quite a feather in Si's cap.

I had no idea why Miss Banning wanted to see me, but I certainly wasn't going to meet her in my spotted housecoat and bedroom slippers. I rummaged through my closet for something to wear and settled on a simple navy wool skirt and matching sweater, a single strand of pearls, and flats. The skirt was too tight and I couldn't get the zipper all the way up, but I pulled the sweater down over the top of the skirt, and the gap at the back didn't show. I ran a brush quickly through my hair, applied the brown lipstick Si liked to see me wear, and pinned a pair of small pearl clips on my ears. Looking at myself in the mirror, I decided I didn't look bad for a woman of thirty-four. The doorbell sounded, and I went out to greet Consuelo Banning in the elevator lobby.

My first impression of her was that she was even more beautiful in the flesh than she was in photographs—the pale blond hair, the light blue eyes with dark lashes, and that extraordinary white skin. She looked incredibly chic, in a simple black suit with hand-feathered fringe on the jacket and skirt and beautifully hand-stitched buttonholes—it had to be by Chanel. She was also wearing a small black pillbox hat of the type that had recently been made fashionable by Jackie Kennedy. On any other woman so young—she couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three—that hat might have seemed a false touch. But on her it looked perfect. Everything about her looked perfect.

“Please come in,” I said. “Did you find everything you wanted in the store?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But that's not really why I'm here. I didn't come to shop.”