“Right here in the Japanese garden?”
She had a garden she called her Dell Garden, landscaped in a Japanese style, with an artificial lake and an arched bridge, and we were walking there. Like everything else she did, it was perfect. Too perfect.
“Yeah, let’s muss up all these carefully raked little Japanese pebbles of hers. The gardener will think the dog did it.”
“Those little pebbles do look temptingly smooth,” I said. American pebbles wouldn’t do for Connie, of course. Her pebbles had to be imported from Kyoto.
“Whaddaya say?” he said.
“I say okay!” I said.
You see, when he talked with me, he even spoke differently—more down-to-earth, more direct. People always talked and wrote about Si’s courtly manners, his polished poise, his impeccable tailoring, his suave bearing, his dignified appearance. That was just his corporate pose, his boardroom manner. With me, he was uncourtly, unpolished, non-impeccable, non-suave, and downright undignified. With me, he could loosen up and be himself. With me, he was just the overgrown kid from the Bronx that he really was at heart. He could let his hair down. He didn’t have to put on an act.
I hope you can get that across in your story—the other side to his personality that he showed to me. He was really like two different people, the public figure that everyone else saw and the private man he was with me.
Love letters? No, I never wrote him any love letters, and he never wrote any letters to me. Are you kidding? That would have been much too dangerous. Letters can be found, lying around. We had to be very careful, particularly at the store, so no one would suspect what was going on. At the store, it was no more than a wave and a “Good morning, Mr. Si.” If I had any business with Si, I was careful to route it through Tommy Bonham, who was more and more beginning to run things for him.
Meanwhile, the person at the store I began to dislike more and more was Tommy Bonham. I decided Tommy Bonham was a hagfish. Do you know what a hagfish is? It’s a particularly nasty little marine creature of the South Pacific. When it gets swallowed by a bigger fish, it doesn’t get digested and it doesn’t die. Instead, it starts feeding on the innards of the bigger fish until the bigger fish dies. Then the hagfish swims away, looking for its next meal, which will be some other poor fish’s mouthful. To me, that describes Tommy to a T. To me, that’s what Tommy’s doing right now, sucking up to Miranda, looking for his next meal. I just hope she’s not foolish enough to swallow his bait.
A year or so ago, I even began to suspect that Tommy was plotting something against Si. I had a question to ask Tommy about some merchandise I’d ordered, and I went up to his office. Linda, his secretary, was away from her desk, and I started to go in when I saw he was with somebody—a fat man—so I stepped away without their seeing me.
I heard Tommy say, “Si isn’t going to like this little scheme, you know.”
“But that’s the beauty part of this particular proposition,” I heard the fat man say. “Si ain’t gonna know whether he likes it or not likes it, because Si ain’t gonna know about it!”
Later, I ran into Linda, who’d become sort of a pal of mine, in the ladies’ room. “Who was that fat man in Tommy’s office this morning?” I asked her casually, as though I really didn’t care.
“That,” she said with a wink, “was the famous Mr. Moses Minskoff. Watch out for him. He’s a fanny-pincher. And also a tit-grabber.”
“I thought he hardly ever came into the store.”
“Son-of-a-bitch hardly ever does. Today, we had a rare treat. My left nipple is still sore.”
So that was the other half of Harriet Minskoff, who liked to be called Honeychile, formerly of the funny jewelry, more recently in the luggage business. I saw the Minskoffs again, that night when people gathered at the farm after Si … died. But I didn’t speak to them. In fact, I gave them both a wide berth. I was only there for a few minutes, to pay my respects. I didn’t want to go at all, but Connie begged me to come. She said I deserved to be there, which I thought was a funny way of putting it. Like it was my … punishment, or something.
Anyway, neither of the Minskoffs looked like the kind of people who would have been old family friends of Si’s. And the scrap of conversation I’d overheard certainly didn’t sound at all friendly. I debated whether to tell Si about it but decided against it at the time. After all, Tommy might have struck me as a hagfish, but he was still Si’s second in command, and Si relied on him for a lot of things, and I didn’t want to stir up trouble. One troublemaker in the organization was enough.
But then last year, after the two suburban stores folded—which had been Tommy’s idea, and which I’d argued against—I ran into Tommy in the corridor and said, “I’m really sorry about White Plains and Morristown, Tommy. I know you put a lot of work into those stores, even though I questioned their feasibility at the time.”
He gave me a really evil look and said, “Are you implying that Si should have listened to you and not to me?”
Now, mind you, I didn’t want to get into it with Tommy. I didn’t want to lay my job, or maybe my career, on the line by getting into it with him. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t want to make him my enemy. He could have been a very dangerous enemy to have. He was still the executive V.P. and general manager of the company, and I was just a buyer for one department. On the other hand, I had thought my position with Si was secure enough so I could speak to Tommy about the business as a peer. I realized I was mistaken, so I simply said, “Of course I wasn’t implying that, Tommy. I’m just sorry that the suburban stores didn’t work out. We all are.”
“Just because you’re fucking the boss, don’t get the idea that you’re going to run the place,” he said.
I thought, How does he know that, unless, with his hagfish way of thinking, Prettyboy Bonham just figured it was a good guess? But that remark really made me mad. My pressure valve blew. “I think you’re the one who’s fucking the boss!” I said.
He was smiling a really nasty smile. “Don’t forget, I’m the one who lined the two of you up for your very first fuck,” he said. “I do that for all his girls. And I’ll be around here long after you’re gone and forgotten, sweetheart.”
“You really are a shit, aren’t you?” I said.
“You’re not stupid enough to think he’ll ever marry you, are you?” he said.
“He’s asked me to! He’s even picked out a ring!”
It was true. There was a beautiful diamond ring I’d taken on consignment from an estate sale. Three point nine carats. He’d promised to buy it for me as soon as he was able to divorce Connie. It was the same ring, incidentally, that Miranda either pinched or borrowed from my department the day I quit my job.
“You stupid fool,” he said. “You’re even stupider than I thought you were. He’s always got a ring picked out—for all his girls. He’ll never leave Connie.”
“He wants to!”
“He’ll never leave her. She means too much to him. You mean nothing to him. To him, you’re nothing more than a convenient weekend piece of ass.”
“Liar!”
He was still smiling. “You’ll see,” he said. “And by the way, Smitty, stop in the ladies’ room on the way back to your department. Your lipstick’s on crooked.” Then he walked away.
Well, after that little scene, I was so furious with him, and I hated him so much, I decided to tell Si about the little conversation I’d overheard between Tommy and Minskoff. Also, I was a little scared. Tommy could have tried to have me fired on the spot for the way I’d spoken to him that afternoon, and if push came to shove between Tommy and me—well, I just didn’t know what might happen. Would Si let Tommy fire me? I suddenly didn’t know. But I decided I’d better cover my tracks or else I’d be right in the middle of a very ticklish office situation.
So I told Si about Tommy and Minskoff. He didn’t seem too surprised, but he seemed very interested. He kept nodding his head, and there was a grave expression on his face. Finally, he s
aid, “Thank you for this information.” And so I think I planted a little seed in Si’s mind that Tommy was not to be trusted, that he was up to no good, that he and Minskoff were plotting something. Because right after that I know Si was starting to think of ways to ease Prettyboy out of the company. And I’m certain that if Si hadn’t died when he did, he’d have figured out a way to get rid of Tommy—to vomit out the hagfish.
Oh-oh. Your tape’s run out.…
They are sitting in the living room of Smitty’s small apartment in Morningside Heights, not far from Columbia University. Winter is coming, the days are shortening, and though it is not yet five o’clock, the sky outside her windows is already growing dark. From the street below, there is a rattle of trash cans being emptied into the revolving maw of the collector’s truck. She reaches out and turns on the bridge lamp beside her chair, and nervously twists the gold bracelet on her left wrist. The lamplight reveals tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and suddenly Peter Turner feels intensely sorry for this woman.
“Never mind the tape recorder,” he says. “There are only a few more questions I want to ask you.”
She reaches for another Salem, and lights it with a match, and inhales and exhales noisily, like a man. “The only thing he didn’t like about me was my smoking,” she says. “Of course we couldn’t smoke in the store, not even in the ladies’ room.”
“Connie smokes.”
She nods. “You are going to write a fine and beautiful story about him, aren’t you?” she asks. “Because he was such a fine and beautiful man. So bighearted. Maybe too bighearted. That may have been his only flaw.”
“I’ll try,” he says. “Now let’s talk for a minute about how he died.”
She twists the gold bracelet, staring at the lighted cigarette in her hand. “How he died?” she says. “Everyone knows how he died. He died of a heart attack. That’s what the newspapers said. That’s what his doctor said.”
“Did you have any idea that he had a bad heart, Smitty?”
“No … but these things can happen suddenly to a man that age, I guess.”
“When was the last time you saw him alive?”
“Oh, dear. You’re asking me for specific dates again.”
“Can you remember?”
Her eyes shift focus, and she appears to be looking inward, at herself. “Let’s see,” she begins. “It must have been four, maybe five days before he died. Maybe a week. He came here. That was unusual in itself. He hardly ever came here. But he came here, and he sat right in that chair where you’re sitting now.”
“How did he seem?”
“He was … upset. He’d tried to have it out with Connie … told her he wanted a divorce, to marry me. But she’d refused. Told him that if he tried to divorce her, she’d create all sorts of nasty publicity. He kept saying, ‘It’s no use. It’s no use.’
“I said … I said, ‘Well, if she’s going to threaten bad publicity, we can threaten some bad publicity of our own, can’t we?’ He said, ‘How can we do that?’ I said, ‘What if we were to let it out that she made you sweep your own mother under the rug? That she made you pretend your mother was dead? When in fact she’s alive and well and living on West End Avenue?’ He just kept shaking his head and saying, ‘No, no, that won’t work. That would just make me look like a shit for letting her make me do a thing like that in the first place.’
“That had been my plan—to make her look like a shit. But I could see his point, that it could make him look like a shit as well, and his reputation was more important than hers.”
“And then?” Peter asks.
“And then … and then … and then I think I said something like, ‘Darling, let’s just let the dust settle for a few days. Let’s let things simmer down, and maybe in a few days we can both think more clearly.’ And then I said something like, ‘It doesn’t matter, darling. No matter what happens we’ll still have each other. No matter what happens, we’ll always love each other.’ But he kept shaking his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘She wants me to give you up.’ Then he began to cry.
“Can you believe it, Peter? This great man, who’d met with heads of state, was actually … crying. He sat all hunched over in that chair, actually sobbing. That’s what that wife of his had reduced him to … to tears … that great man. I went and sat on the arm of the chair and put my arms around him, cuddled him like a baby, and tried to comfort him.” She stubs out her cigarette angrily in her overflowing ashtray and immediately lights another, and in the flare of the match he thinks he sees tears standing in her eyes.
“And then what happened?” he asks gently.
“And then … and then … I don’t really remember. You see I still thought my plan to embarrass Connie might work, perhaps if I approached it from a different angle. And then … oh, yes, I remember. After he calmed down, he began talking about his will. He was rewriting his will, he said. Isn’t that strange? It was almost as if he knew he was going to die, because he was rewriting his will. He told me he was leaving me five million dollars in it. ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘I want to,’ he said. He also told me that he was leaving his art collection to the Metropolitan Museum, along with funds enough to pay my salary as special curator of the collection so I’d always have a job, if they didn’t want me at the store after he was gone. He wanted to be sure I was taken care of, he said. And he told me he’d also decided to reinstate a bequest to his son Blazer in the will, because he’d decided to forgive Blazer. But what happened to all those bequests?”
Suddenly she lets out a little shriek. The lighted cigarette in her ashtray has ignited several other filtered butts, and a column of acrid smoke is rising from the ashtray.
She jumps to her feet, carrying the smoldering ashtray, and runs into her bathroom. Peter hears the hiss of live ashes hitting water and the sound of the toilet flushing.
“I do smoke too much,” she says, returning with the ashtray in one hand and her cigarette in the other. She stands in the doorway. “So,” she says. “What happened to those bequests? Answer me that one, Peter. Obviously, Connie got him to change all that. There was nothing left to Blazer. There was no five million left to me. And the art collection? There’s been nothing in the papers about that, and there surely would have been if it had been left to the Met. Look at all the ink Walter Annenberg’s collection got. But the Tarkington Collection? Not a word about it. I’ve called the museum a couple of times, about that and about my alleged curatorship. All they’ll say to me is, ‘We suggest you take the matter up with Mrs. Tarkington.’ Well, you know how far I’d get if I tried taking the matter up with her. Obviously she got him to change everything, so that everything was left to her and Miranda. I got zilch, Blazer got zilch, and the museum got zilch. That’s Connie Tarkington for you.” She returns to her chair and lights another Salem. From the street below, a police siren wails.
“Did Si say anything more to you that night, Smitty?”
“No. He had to leave. We kissed goodbye. Oh, yes … yes, he did say, ‘I don’t think I could ever live without you.’ Something like that. I didn’t take that too seriously. After all, maybe she could refuse to give him a divorce. But how could she prevent us from meeting on weekends at the farm when she was away, the way we’d always done? I didn’t see how she could stop us from doing that.”
“And so that was that,” he says.
“Yes—the next time I saw him—no, I never saw him again.”
He hesitates. “Do you have any idea what could have happened to his television set?”
Her eyes flash. “What television set? What do you mean?”
“There was a television set that was given to him by President Ford. He used to place it by the pool when he swam his laps.”
“Oh, yes. I guess I do remember that. He never did it when we swam together, though. No, I loved him, you see, and so—”
“The TV set is missing.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” she sa
ys. “No, no.”
“Milliken says there might have been a prowler on the estate that day.”
“Prowler? How would a prowler get in? There’s an electric gate that you have to know the code for. There are electrified fences all around the property. But yes—there could have been a prowler!”
“I guess what I’m trying to say, Smitty,” he says carefully, “is, when he said ‘I don’t think I could ever live without you,’ do you think he was planning not to go on living without you?”
“You mean did he—oh, no. But wait! Wait! There was something he said once, I remember it! It was about Miranda; she worried that the TV set might fall into the pool and electrocute him. And he said to me once, ‘You know, if things ever get too much for me, that’s what I’ll do: I’ll jump into the pool and pull the TV set in behind me and that will be it, fast and neat.’ I thought he was only joking. But—but could that have been what happened? Was that why he was so upset the night he came here? Did he commit suicide—because of me? Oh, no, not because of me!”
“But why wasn’t the TV set found in the water with him?”
“Connie! Connie did something with it—hid it—something! But it wasn’t because of me, it was because of Connie! Because she wouldn’t give him the divorce. Because she was going to make him give up the only woman he’d ever loved, ever truly been happy with! Connie will try to put the blame on me, but she’s the one who made him do it! Oh, God … poor Si.…” Suddenly her face drops into her hands, and she begins to sob. “Oh, I can’t bear it,” she cries. “I can’t think … I can’t bear to think that.…” The ash falls from her cigarette and lands on the carpet.
Peter rises from his chair, steps to her, and puts his hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Smitty,” he says.
She looks straight up at him through streaming eyes, her face streaked with tears. “Oh, no,” she sobs. “You don’t understand. That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that Tommy was right, that he’d never leave her for me. Tommy was right! He knew all along! Tommy called me a stupid fool for believing anything Si said to me. He said I was a stupid fool for falling in love with him, for believing that he was in love with me, for believing that he’d ever marry me. Is that what I was, Peter, a stupid fool? Was that what I was all along? Just a stupid, stupid fool?”
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