Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  They sat, and Consuelo Tarkington picked up her needlepoint and began listing the things she had done, and the people she had notified, since she had found his body floating earlier in the day.

  “Did you call—”

  “Smitty? Yes. Smitty has been notified.”

  “Tommy?”

  “Yes. Tommy is coming by for a drink a little later.”

  “Blazer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Pauline?”

  “That’s one call I thought I’d ask you to make, darling,” her mother said. “Pauline tends to get so—emotional—and besides, you’ve worked more closely with her at the store.”

  And so, feeling numb, Miranda had gone to the telephone and called Pauline O’Malley at her home in Kew Gardens. Pauline had immediately become so hysterical she had to hang up the phone.

  Miranda returned to the sun room where her mother was pulling a thread of golden wool through her canvas, completing a flower in the pattern. She had tucked her slippered feet underneath her in the chair. She spread the canvas on her lap and examined it. Her pose was so serene it seemed almost Oriental. She could have been painted on a Chinese plate.

  “What about the press?” Miranda asked her.

  “Tommy’s taking care of that,” her mother said. “He pointed out, correctly, that if we report it to the press today, the news will be printed tomorrow, which is a Sunday. Obituaries just get lost in the Sunday papers. But if we wait a day, there’s a good chance it will make the front page of The Times on Monday morning.” She returned to her needlework.

  Miranda sat opposite her mother. “Now tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

  “He told me he was going out to swim his laps,” her mother said, without looking up from her work. “It was about eleven-thirty. I reminded him that lunch was being served at twelve-thirty. When he hadn’t returned by then, I went out to the pool to look for him. That’s when I found him … floating. I immediately telephoned Harry Arnstein.”

  Miranda glanced at her watch. It was nearly six-thirty, which meant that her father had been dead for at least six hours. “Why didn’t you call nine-one-one?” she asked.

  Her mother looked up at her briefly. “Nine-one-one is a police number, darling. There was no need to involve the police.”

  “But they would have sent the life squad. They might have—”

  “You would have had police sirens—police ambulances—screaming down Heather Lane? Upsetting all the neighbors who were trying to enjoy a quiet Saturday afternoon? Really, Miranda. You know the thing your father loved best about the country was the peace and quiet here.”

  “But they might have saved his life!”

  Her mother looped another stitch through her canvas. “Miranda, I assure you there was no life left to save,” she said. “Harry Arnstein confirmed this.”

  “But still, that’s what I’d have done!”

  She spread her canvas on her lap again. “I’ll tell you another reason why I didn’t do that,” she said. “If you get the police involved, they’re required by law to perform an autopsy. Do you know what an autopsy involves? If you don’t know, I’ll leave it to your imagination, but it’s horrible. I wouldn’t dream of having such a thing done to your father.”

  “How long did it take Dr. Arnstein to get here?”

  “He was here within the hour.”

  “You see? That hour could have been crucial. The life squad could have—”

  “Miranda, please!” Her mother was beginning to show her first signs of impatience. “I did what I had to do. I don’t think I even thought of calling nine-one-one. I’m not even sure I knew there was such a number. I wanted your father’s life to end the way he would have wanted it to end—with dignity, and taste, and grace, and with just me and his old friend Harry Arnstein with him. Not with sirens screaming.”

  It seemed to Miranda that her mother was making a lot of different excuses that didn’t quite hang together. She hadn’t called 911 because the life squad would make too much noise and disturb the neighbors. The life squad would have meant an autopsy. She hadn’t even thought about calling 911. She didn’t even know there was such a number. She wanted the death to be dignified and private. “Why did you wait so long before calling me?” she asked. “You say he died at twelve-thirty. I didn’t hear from you until after four.”

  “What would have been the point? I felt I had to do first things first.”

  “I might have liked to have seen him one last time. I might have liked to have said goodbye to him.”

  “I wanted to spare you that,” her mother said.

  “Spare me? That’s what I’d have liked to do, Mother!”

  She looked up from her needlework. “Death isn’t pretty, Miranda,” she said. “You don’t know that. I do. It takes a certain amount of—practice—to be able to deal with death. You’ve had none. I’ve had a great deal. My mother, my father, my grandparents. Perhaps, the first time, I wasn’t very good at it. But with practice I’ve gotten a lot better.”

  Suddenly Miranda was very angry. “How can you just sit there like that?” she had cried. “Just sit there like some goddamned female Buddha, as though nothing has happened! Sitting there with your goddamned needlepoint—like Madame Defarge, stitching away while heads roll off the guillotine! Don’t you have any human feelings, Mother? A man is dead. Your husband is dead. Maybe you didn’t love him, but he was still your husband. And he was also my father! Whom I happened to love very much!”

  Her mother rose slowly from her chair and folded the needlepoint canvas across her bosom. “This conversation isn’t really getting us anywhere, is it?” she said. “I’ve asked people who want to pay their respects to come here for drinks at seven-thirty, and I need to freshen up. If you’d like to join us, you might want to freshen up too. You look a little windblown from your trip in from the Hamptons. Run a comb through your hair. Powder your nose.” Then she was gone, leaving Miranda fuming.

  That night at seven-thirty the guests started arriving—the old friends, some of the people from the store, the neighbors from up and down Heather Lane. Some people stayed for only a few minutes. Others stayed longer. Tommy Bonham was one of the first to appear, and Miranda watched as he took her mother in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Connie, I’m so sorry.” Blazer arrived from the Village, looking more stunned than sullen, and Miranda was pleased to see that he had put on a dark suit and necktie. Harry Arnstein was there, looking solemn and professional, and Smitty had also come out from the city, looking red-eyed and a little frightened. She shouldn’t be here, Miranda thought. And yet her mother had obviously asked her to come, and she watched as her mother made a special point of stepping over to Smitty, squeezing her hands, and kissing her lightly on both cheeks—kisses so light that flesh never touched flesh. Was this gesture done for the benefit of the audience, for the others in the room? “Isn’t Connie remarkable?” she heard someone whisper.

  Moe Minskoff, who had had financial dealings with her father over the years, also appeared with his bleached-blond wife, who was called Honeychile—to her mother’s almost visible displeasure.

  “What are those people doing here?” she heard her mother whisper to Tommy Bonham. “Who invited them? I certainly didn’t. How did they find out about this?”

  Tommy Bonham merely rolled his eyes.

  Meanwhile, both Minskoffs seemed to have decided to make an evening of it, not just a polite condolence call. They seemed to be settling in for the night.

  By eight o’clock, there were perhaps twenty people in the formal living room. Milliken was serving drinks and passing trays of caviar on toast points, and Miranda’s mother—now in a slender white silk jump suit with tiny silver bells at the belt—was moving about the room, trying to spend a little time with each guest, explaining how Si had had “a coronary accident” while swimming his laps—“Dr. Arnstein assured me it was very sudden, and there was no pain”—and soon the noise level in the room had risen, and
it was clear that all the men in their sober suits and ties, and their wives in their demure little black dresses, were drinking and generally beginning to have a pretty good time.

  “Si loved parties,” Miranda heard someone say. “He would have approved of this.”

  But Miranda was not so sure.

  Over the living room fireplace hung the large painting of Flying Flame, her father’s famous racehorse that had won the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 1971, and, leaning against the mantel with a cigar in his fist, the portly Moses Minskoff was holding forth about the painting. “I remember when I came up with the name for that stallion for Si,” he was saying. “I said to Si, ‘Si, name him Flying Flame.’”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she heard her mother say. “I named that horse.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “In actual fact, I came up with the name for that horse. I’m something of an expert on horseflesh, you know. It was the year of Comet Kohoutek, and I’d read in the paper that morning that the comet would appear like a flying flame across the sky. I said to Si, I said, ‘Si, there’s the name for your stallion—Flying Flame.’”

  “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.”