Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  I asked him what that was.

  “You have a very quick, almost violent temper.”

  I thought, Oh, God. My Irish temper, my mother used to call it. That meant he’d been talking to my last boss. He’d blamed me for something one of the other girls had done, and I got so mad I trashed his office—threw his files all over the floor, dumped out his desk drawers, emptied his wastebasket into his IN box, really tore up the place. That’s what got me fired. “It’s true,” I said. “It’s something I’m trying to work on about myself. Whenever I lose my temper, I get into trouble. I think I’ve learned that it isn’t worth it.”

  “Retailing can be a very stressful business,” he said. “Particularly around the holiday season. There’ll be long hours, tight delivery schedules, impatient and demanding customers. We can’t have any outbursts of temper here, Miss Smith. Can you keep that pressure valve under control?”

  “After the last experience, I think I know how to handle it,” I said. “I guess you’ve been talking to the people at Shaughnessy Construction.”

  He smiled at me. “No,” he said. “I saw it in your handwriting sample.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s one other thing you should know about me. I’m really terrible at figures.”

  “I saw that in your sample too,” he said. “But I assume you can read a price tag and tell a customer what an item costs.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m talking about long sheets of figures, computer printouts—”

  “All that—daily sales figures, pricing, inventory keeping—is handled by my office. All you need in this job is good taste and a knowledge of fine jewelry—an ‘eye,’ as I call it—a winning, service-oriented personality, and an ability to sign a vendor’s receipt. My office handles the rest. When can you come to work for us, Miss Smith?”

  That was when I realized I had the job.

  “I’m taking a big gamble on you, Miss Smith,” he said. “A big gamble.”

  At first, I thought Tommy Bonham was my pal. I thought the little suggestions he made were his way of being helpful. Later, I was not so sure whether Tommy was my pal or not. There was something about the way he played his brand of office politics that I began not to like so much, not to really trust. Tommy is a manipulator, a conniver. He’s very good at playing one person against another. Maybe he feels he can get the best work out of people by keeping things stirred up. But at other times he seems to just enjoy making mischief, causing trouble. Of course he was our liaison between the sales staff and department heads and Mr. Si, as everybody called him. He had Mr. Si’s ear, and he was always making us aware of that fact. He’d say, “Mr. Si hasn’t been too happy with your work lately,” and things like that. Or, “Your department’s figures weren’t as good for May as they were for April, and Mr. Si wonders why.” Who knew whether Mr. Si was really saying these things? Or Tommy would try to get one buyer to criticize another buyer’s performance. Like, “Miss So-and-So in Lingerie has taken a lot of sick days lately. Do you think she’s pregnant?” And you’d have to be careful what you said, or it could get back to Mr. Si.

  In the beginning, I had very little to do with Mr. Si. Oh, I’d met him, of course. I’d been introduced to him when I joined the store. He was very polite, almost stiff and formal. “Welcome to our Tarkington’s family,” and all that. Whenever he passed my department he’d wave and smile, but he was rather aloof, really. The thought of a romantic relationship with him never entered my head because—well, he was at least twice my age, and he had this coldly beautiful white swan of a wife who wafted in and out of the store now and then, smelling of Shalimar and looking as though she’d been packaged by one of our window dressers. And I’d gathered that there was sort of an unwritten rule against employees socializing after hours. At the time I was dating two or three different guys, no one in particular and no one seriously. If there was anyone at the store I’d have liked to date, it would have been Tommy Bonham, just because he was such a gorgeous hunk and because—well, you know, a girl can’t help but wonder what a guy like that, who’s such a smoothie, such a cool customer, would be like in the sack. “Like a wild animal!” the other girls whispered, though none of them could claim to have had firsthand experience.

  But Tommy never showed any sexual interest in me, except once, and I’m not even sure that was what it was. I’d been working there about three months, and Tommy came into my department. “Mr. Si is a little disappointed in your figures, Smitty,” he said. “We know this is a new department, but we’d been hoping you’d do better. Do you have any idea what might be wrong?”

  “Well,” I said, “this department is kind of tucked into a corner of the store, where we don’t get the traffic they get on the center aisle, and I don’t have that much square footage or display space. Women like to browse for jewelry, but they don’t buy it on impulse, the way they buy handbags, shoes, and apparel. I need space for women to browse, spot a piece, remember it, and come back and buy it.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “If they can’t see it, they won’t want it.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “There’s this one vendor, Harriet Minskoff, who keeps insisting that I call her Honeychile. Her stuff isn’t very pretty and, quite frankly, a lot of it isn’t very good. And yet I gather it’s sort of store policy to take her things on consignment, display them, and try to sell them. Just between you and me, her things cheapen my department.”

  He frowned. “Mrs. Minskoff is something of a special case,” he said.

  Later, I found out what sort of “special case” this Mrs. Minskoff was. At the time, I thought she might be a girlfriend of Mr. Si’s. Not at all. It was her husband, a man named Moses Minskoff, a man I never actually met, who had his hooks into Si somehow, some debt Si owed him from years ago. I never did find out what it was. Si wouldn’t talk about it. But I knew Si had been trying to get free of Minskoff for years, and Tommy was trying to help. But Minskoff had stuck to Si like a leech, and I was stuck with trying to sell Mrs. Minskoff’s crappy stuff, which had to be displayed front and center.

  Anyway, Tommy said to me, “You know, Smitty, a lot of our jewelry customers are males, looking for gifts for their wives or girlfriends. I wonder whether you might try for a little sexier look. You have a wonderful body and great breasts. What if you were to try to display a little more of a cleavage? I don’t want you to look cheap, of course, but try displaying a little more cleavage. And I want to suggest a scent for you. Try Equipage.”

  Well, at the time I didn’t know whether this was a come-on or not, but I decided it was just an honest business tip. So I tried it. And believe it or not, sales improved. I could tell by just looking at the bottom line. A month later, Tommy came by again. “Mr. Si is very pleased with your last month’s figures, Smitty,” he said. He grinned and tapped his breastbone with his fingertip. “That’s doing it. You look sexy but not cheap. You’ve got that Catherine Deneuve look.”

  Then, a couple of months later—I remember it was still summer—Tommy came by my department again and said, “Mr. Si is really happy with your department’s figures, Smitty. In fact, he’s looking into ways to give you more display space.”

  “That would be terrific,” I said.

  “He’d very much like to discuss this with you and get your input.”

  “Great,” I said. “Does he want to see me now?”

  “If you’re free, he’d like to invite you to lunch next Saturday at his farm in Old Westbury. Can you make it?”

  “That would be terrific,” I said.

  At the time, I thought to myself, If he wants to invite me to lunch, why doesn’t he do it himself, instead of having his chief honcho do it for him? But I thought, What the hell? Maybe this is the way things work here. Everything goes through channels, through a chain of command.

  “Mrs. Tarkington will be in Paris, for the prêt-à-porter collections,” he said. “So it will be just the two of you, lunching alone. Will you be comfortable with that?�
��

  “Sure!” I said, in a kind of breezy way, trying not to show how excited I really was. Lunching alone with the Big Enchilada. Maybe he was going to offer me a raise! Maybe he was going to make me street floor merchandise manager! That’s where you get into the real money in retailing, as a merchandise manager.

  “You might want to bring up the Mrs. Minskoff problem when you talk to him,” he said. “He’s aware of it, of course. But hearing from you that there’s a very serious problem here might have more impact on him.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Mr. Si’s car and driver will pick you up at your apartment at eleven-thirty next Saturday morning and drive you out to Long Island.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Great! That was hardly the word for it. I’d been invited to a private business lunch with the big boss himself, and I’d even been given an agenda, a business problem that needed solving. And I was going to be driven to Long Island in a chauffeur-driven Rolls! My only wish was that somehow my mother could be there to see me as I got into that car.

  “Obviously, you won’t mention this to anyone else in the store,” he said.

  “Absolutely not,” I promised.

  It was a tall order, keeping that promise. I wanted to squeal the news to everyone in sight. But I kept my promise, and I was so excited that I could hardly wait for next Saturday to come.

  Of course I didn’t find out till later that this had always been a part of Tommy’s job, lining up women for his boss whenever the boss’s wife was out of town.

  With Tommy’s looks and Si Tarkington’s money, they had a winning combination.

  Si Tarkington and Prettyboy Bonham. What a duo.

  29

  Diana Smith (interview taped 10/19/91, continued)

  Billings, the chauffeur, picked me up in front of my building that Saturday morning at eleven-thirty sharp, and I was driven out to Old Westbury in the back seat of the Rolls, feeling like a queen. I’m sure Billings knew perfectly well what this mission was all about—he’d probably made this same run with a girl out to his boss’s house a hundred times before—but I didn’t know that yet.

  I’d dressed for this meeting very carefully. I wore my white linen—it was still my best outfit—though naturally I’d thrown out the damn patent leather belt. I dressed it up with a scarf this time. I wore what I thought a girl should wear for a business lunch with her boss in the country. Very little jewelry, just gold earrings and a gold bracelet.

  Flying Horse Farm was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen—the circular gravel driveway, the white Georgian columns—and Si was standing on the front steps to meet us. I’d never been in a house like that before, and Si took me on a little tour: the white living room overflowing with chairs and sofas in red and green English chintz, with a Lautrec, a Gauguin, and a Cézanne on the walls; the dining room draped in green faille swags at the chair rail and, above that, the most beautifully delicate green-and-white striped wallpaper, with tiny roses trailing between the stripes. Upstairs, his wife’s pale yellow bedroom had a canopy bed of white tambour trimmed with red satin ribbon, and his bedroom walls were covered with hunter-green felt, with matching draperies, and a Dufy watercolor over the fireplace. His bathroom was all green marble and bronze-tinted mirroring, and his bedroom even had its own kitchenette and wet bar. But you’ve been to Flying Horse. I don’t need to describe it to you. Everything about it was perfection. Every beautiful, tiny object was perfectly in place.

  Later, I found out that Connie’s perfectionism was one of the things that irritated him about her. He liked to make a bit of a mess now and then. But that wouldn’t do for Miss Perfect. With her, everything had to be just so, right down to the arrangement of the Shalimar bottles on her bathroom shelves: big bottles on one shelf, smaller ones on the next, and so on.

  Lunch was very polite and rather formal, served by Milliken, in white gloves, on green-and-white Meissen china that matched the wallpaper. I noticed the little touches. For instance, the roses and baby’s breath in the centerpiece had been misted, so they looked as though they were covered with dew. I made one gaffe. When I unfolded my napkin, a small dinner roll flew out of the center and bounced across the carpet. Milliken scooped it up without comment and immediately replaced it with a fresh one. Si pretended not to notice.

  Our conversation at lunch was rather formal too. “We’re very pleased with the figures in your department, Miss Smith,” he said to me.

  “Please call me Smitty,” I said. “Everybody does.”

  “Then you must call me Si,” he said.

  “It will be hard not to call you Mr. Si,” I said, “the way everyone else in the store does.”

  “That will also do,” he said with a little smile.

  I mentioned the problem of Mrs. Minskoff’s line of jewelry.

  He frowned. “I know what you mean,” he said. “The Minskoffs are old family friends, and I was trying to do Mrs. Minskoff a little favor. But I agree with you. I’m trying to get Mrs. Minskoff into the luggage business.” He smiled again. “You may have noticed that Tarkington’s does not have a luggage department,” he said.

  Lunch had started with a wonderful cold fennel soup. Now we were into the next course: a fluffy omelet, filled with crabmeat, and fresh baby asparagus.

  “We’ve only had one other saleswoman at the store who could sell as well as you do,” he said at one point. “Her name was Alice Markham.”

  “I don’t believe I know her,” I said.

  “No, she left a long time ago,” he said.

  Later, I found out that Alice Markham had also been his first wife. Sometimes I got the impression that he missed her. Well, after a few years of living with Miss Perfect Connie, who wouldn’t! Sometimes I wondered whether I reminded him of her—or at least of the way she was when she was my age.

  “When Delafield and Du Bois moved out, I thought we might have a little difficulty establishing our own jewelry department,” he said. “But you’ve done wonders for us, Smitty.”

  “Sometimes, when Tommy shows me my weekly figures, they even surprise me!” I said.

  After lunch, he said, “I’ve got some work to do at my desk, and Billings has to run a few errands before he can drive you back to the city. Would you like to have a swim in the pool?”

  “I’d love that,” I said.

  “There are suits in all sizes in the pool house dressing room,” he said. “I may join you a little later.” And he showed me where the pool and pool house were.

  I guess I’ve always dreamed of a life of luxury—a big house like that, a pool and pool house, lawns, terraces, gardens with raked-gravel walks, a private lake—and I found myself very quickly feeling right at home at Flying Horse Farm. It was what I’d always dreamed of.

  I think that was something else Si and I had in common. We were both born poor. Oh, I don’t come from abject poverty, the way he did. My father is a podiatrist in Eastchester, but he’s always been a very disappointed man. He hates his life. He wanted to be a real doctor, but there wasn’t enough money for medical school, so he had to settle for podiatry. My mother works as his receptionist, and there were too many of us kids—I have four sisters and three brothers—and there was never enough money for any of the finer things in life.

  As a kid, I used to ride my bike all the way out into the nicer part of Scarsdale, along those winding, wooded streets and lanes lined with big shade trees. I’d look at all the big houses—mansions, really—with their long drives and rhododendron hedges and big cars parked out front, and I’d wonder what it was like to live like that. I’d see maids in uniforms accepting deliveries, chauffeurs picking up and dropping off children from private school, and gardeners raking long gravel driveways. It was like another world.

  Even as a kid, I decided the only way I could ever have any of those things was to find a man who would marry me and take care of me.

  But Flying Horse Farm was grander than anything in Westches
ter. I decided that afternoon that the only place I really wanted to live was there. And I could have, too, if it hadn’t been for Connie.

  Anyway, I found a suit that fit me in the pool house, and changed into it, and went out to the pool to practice my dives—I was a champion diver in high school, did I tell you that?—thinking all these thoughts.

  There was a particularly tricky dive I’d been working on at the gym I was going to, a back jackknife with a full twist, and I’d been having trouble with my heels flipping backward as I entered the water. I decided to work on that one.

  So there I was, practicing my back jackknifes, and I pulled myself up out of the water and was squeezing the water out of my hair when I looked up and saw him standing there on the pool house steps in a red robe, with a big black dog wagging its tail beside him. I had no idea how long he’d been standing there. He came down the steps to where I was sitting on the edge of the pool.

  He was smiling a rather strange smile. “I’ve been enjoying watching you dive,” he said. “You’re a beautiful diver, Smitty.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I still haven’t got that damned back jackknife quite right.”

  “Another talent I didn’t know you had,” he said. “My son’s a diver too. On the Yale team.” This was the first time I knew he had a son. “You have a beautiful body,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. My body is one of the few things I’m really proud of, because I do think I’m in pretty good shape and I’m always exercising. I scrambled up the ladder again to the board, walked out to the end, turned, stood on my tiptoes, and tried the dive again. I made one of my better entries into the water.

  When I came to the surface, he had moved closer to the pool’s edge. “How was that?” I asked. “Did that look better? It felt better to me.”

  “Beautiful,” he said. Then he said, “I was going to swim some laps.”

  “Then you don’t want me working on the board at the same time,” I said, and started to pull myself out of the water again.