“I promised him not to be a boring, nagging old hag anymore. I told him I was going to be a whole new wife to him. I think I even signed it the soon-to-be new Mrs. Silas Tarkington.”
“I know about that letter,” she says.
“Really? How?”
“That day I was helping Pauline clear out his office, I found it among his things. It reeked of Equipage, Smitty’s perfume.”
“How interesting. Well, I didn’t put it there. I used to come home from travels to find my bed linen reeking of Equipage, which I didn’t put there either.”
“Anyway, go on.”
“The thing he had to do, I told him, was to confront Smitty. He had to take a firm stand with her. But that was one thing your father always had trouble doing with any of his women, taking a firm stand. He kept begging me to do it for him. Well, I’d done it for him before, when I was too young to know any better, with his first wife, and that had been a terrible mistake. I told him he was going to have to take a stand with her himself, if it was going to have any meaning to her. Then he asked me whether we couldn’t confront her together—so we could show a united front, as he put it, though I knew he really wanted me to be there as a sort of second in his duel. I agreed, reluctantly. It was a compromise, I knew, and a little cowardly, but that was your father. He called Smitty and asked her to meet him that Saturday morning at the farm.
“She came here that morning?”
“I met her at the door. I think she was a little surprised to see me. I said, ‘Si’s expecting you. He’s down at the pool,’ and we walked down together. I still think Si thought we women would have it out together, then and there, and he’d be spared this scene, and that was why he’d gone to the pool, hoping to avoid the confrontation by any possible means. But I didn’t think he should be let off the hook that easily. I thought Smitty should hear his decision, whatever he had to say, straight from the horse’s mouth. I was determined to keep my own trap shut. He was sitting by the pool, watching television, and Blackamoor was with him, and he looked horrified when he saw us walking toward him. For a moment, I thought he was going to jump up and run away. But he just turned off the TV set.
“Smitty spoke first. I stood a little distance away. She said, “Well, I suppose you’ve brought me here so I can hear you tell Connie that you’re leaving her and that you want to marry me.’
“At first he said nothing, looking at me. Then he just shook his head.
“‘Then what the hell is this all about?’ she said.
“‘I’m not ready to leave Connie,’ he said. ‘And I’m not ready to marry you, Smitty.’
“‘What the hell does that mean—you’re not ready?’
“‘Just what I said.’
“‘But you don’t love her. You love me. Tell her so.’
“‘That’s not really true, Smitty,’ he said. ‘I do love Connie.’
“‘But you told me you didn’t love Connie! You told me you loved me.’
“His eyes searched mine for some assistance, which I wasn’t quite prepared to give him. ‘I do love Connie,’ he said, ‘but I loved you too.’
“‘You loved me too?’ she repeated. She glared at me. “What about some of the things you called her—Miss Sexual Refrigerator—all of that? You’re just saying these things now because you’re terrified of what she could do to you, aren’t you?’
“‘Am I?’ The question lacked conviction.
“‘Because she’s blackmailing you. Because she knows how you’ve swept your mother under the rug, keeping her in a dreary little apartment on West End Avenue! She knows that dirty secret.’
“He was still looking anxiously at me. Tell her, Connie,’ he said.
“‘Si’s mother is in a nursing home in Florida and has been for almost ten years,’ I said. ‘A very nice nursing home. The best Si and I could find.’
“She looked confused, disoriented. ‘But you told me you never loved Connie!’ she said. ‘You told me you never loved her—ever.’
“‘Did I?’
“‘Of course you did. You know you did. Tell her you never loved her.’
“‘Never?’
“‘Tell her!’
“‘Don’t push me this way, Smitty,’ he said. ‘Don’t crowd me. You know I don’t like to be pushed or crowded. Don’t force me to say things I don’t really mean.’
“‘When? When did you ever love her, just once for a single minute?’ He was looking at me so desperately now, begging me for some suggestion as to how to answer this question and end all this, as though I was the only one who could rescue him now. I had to help him.
“‘When?’ he asked me.
“‘Perhaps it was in Positano,’ I said quietly. ‘At the Hotel Sirenuse.’
“‘Yes, and the Villa Rufolo.’
“‘Where I sprained my ankle on the steps.’
“‘And I had to carry you—’
“‘Shut up, you bitch!’ she screamed at me. ‘He loves me!’
“Then I heard him say in a strong voice, ‘I’ve always loved Connie. And I think I always will.’
“I was terribly pleased and proud of him, Miranda, when I heard him say those words—say them to her, in front of me. I suddenly couldn’t think of any time in my life when anyone, your father or anyone else, had ever told me that he loved me in such a direct way. Certainly my father never told me he loved me. A great burden seemed to be lifted from my shoulders just then. All those troubled years”—she touches the corner of an eyelid with a fingertip and tosses a final pellet to the fish—“seemed to just drop away. I wanted to say, Thank you, darling, but I couldn’t seem to find my voice. Smitty began calling me all sorts of names: a cold-blooded bitch, things like that. I’ve never seen anyone so angry. But Si just stood up and said, ‘That’s all I have to say to you, Smitty. That’s what I asked you here to tell you. Now I’m going to swim my laps,’ and he turned on the television set and dove into the pool.
“She went running toward him, and it was like déjà vu. All at once I knew what she was going to do. I screamed ‘Stop!’ and Blackamoor began to bark, and I heard her say, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will!’ And she picked up the television set and threw it at him, as though she wanted to hit him over the head with it, but she missed—and the set flew into the water with him. And then—but perhaps this was only my imagination working—it seemed as though the whole surface of the pool was lighted with a land of blue flash. I saw Si’s body flinch violently, then stiffen, and I knew it was all over.”
“Then what did you do, Mother?”
“There were several things I had to do, and I had to do them quickly. First I had to deal with Blackamoor. He knew your father was in some kind of terrible trouble, and he started to leap into the pool after him. I grabbed him by the collar. Blackie’s a big, strong dog, and he gave me quite a struggle. But how would it have looked if both Si and his dog had been found dead in the pool? Somehow I got Blackie back into his kennel, and I locked him there. Then I pulled all the circuit-breakers in the pool area. When I got back to the pool she was still standing there, looking stunned at the horrible thing she had done. I said, ‘How did you get here?’ ‘A rental car,’ she said. ‘Did anyone see you come in?’ She shook her head. ‘Then no one will see you go,’ I said. ‘Get out of here. Get out of here as fast as you can. As far as I’m concerned, you were never here. Don’t worry about me. I’ll take care of everything.’ She left then, without another word.”
“And the TV set?”
“I knew I had to get rid of that. I pulled it out of the water by its cord, but then I couldn’t think of what to do with it.”
“What did you do with it?”
She points with her finger to the pond below, and the fish, seeing the shadow of this gesture, think they are about to be fed again and leap to the surface with open mouths. “I carried it out here and dropped it in the pond. It’s down there somewhere, forty feet down. Then I remembered the Lucite case he’d had made for it, and I
ran back to the pool house and got it, and dropped it in too, and watched it sink. It seemed to take forever to go down, and I knew I didn’t have that much time. Blackie had set up such a howling I was afraid someone from the house would come out to see what the matter was. By then I was a mess. My slacks were sopping wet, and my shoes were covered with mud. I ran back to the pool house, and then I did a lot of crazy things. I took his wallet from his trousers pocket and that underwater chronometer you gave him. I thought, if there was any suspicion, I’d make it look as though there’d been a burglary. Those were quite unnecessary things to do, of course. Then I took off my dirty shoes, walked back to the house barefoot, and went upstairs, changed my clothes, rinsed off my shoes, and by then it was nearly noon. I rang for Milliken. I said, ‘Mr. Tarkington’s at the pool. Run down and tell him that it’s nearly lunchtime.’ When he came back to tell me that he’d found what I knew he’d find, I called Harry Arnstein in New York.”
“Did you tell Dr. Arnstein what had happened?”
“No. I just said, ‘No scandal, Harry—please, no scandal.’ He understood what I meant. He took over from there. He called Campbell’s for the hearse, made arrangements for the cremation. All this took several hours. Then I called you.”
“Yes.…”
“At that point, I’d been running on energy I didn’t even know I possessed. I thought, Now I’m going to collapse. But I didn’t collapse. I just kept thinking of all the questions I might be asked, and of the answers I was going to have to give.”
“But—Smitty. Shouldn’t she be—?”
Her mother makes a little moue. “Be brought to justice? What possible reason would there be for that? For revenge? That’s not a particularly attractive motive, revenge. What good would it do? It wouldn’t bring your father or my husband back to life. It would just drag Smitty’s and your father’s names through the mud. It’s not as though Smitty’s any threat to society. She’s not going to kill anybody else. She’s like that poor Mrs. Harris who shot the Scarsdale diet doctor; it was something she did in the terrible heat of passion. What possible use is it to society to have that poor woman spend the last years of her life in a prison in Westchester, just spending the taxpayers’ money, when there are so many useful things she could be doing instead? Smitty can still have a useful life, and it seems to me she deserves to have one. Besides, Smitty knows what she did, and she’s going to have to live with that knowledge until she dies. Don’t you think that’s punishment enough? I do.”
“Yes,” Miranda says. “Yes, perhaps.”
“I’m not even sure she meant to kill him. Perhaps she just wanted to throw something at him, and the TV set was the closest thing at hand. Perhaps it didn’t even occur to her that the set was plugged in. That’s why I wanted her to come to the house the night after your father died. I wanted her to see firsthand how I was going to handle it. ‘You deserve to be here,’ I told her. But in the weeks since it happened, I’ve been thinking. Tommy Bonham is a really evil man. He likes to pit people against each other and watch them squirm. He helped drive the final wedge between your father and Blazer. He was the one who first arranged to put your father and Smitty together, and that was what almost drove a final wedge between your father and me. He must have arranged for you to see my letter and think it was from Smitty.”
Pauline needs help going through the things in your father’s office, she remembers. Someone in the family should be there when she does this. Can you give her a hand? And there was the bottle of Equipage in Tommy’s medicine cabinet. But Miranda says nothing.
“But then, carrying these thoughts one step further, I’ve been asking myself, Could Tommy, right from the beginning, from the moment he hired her, knowing the terribly violent temper Smitty had, have planned—or at least hoped—that Smitty would somehow be the instrument for your father’s death?”
“Why would he have wanted that? So he could take over the store?”
“That, and out of jealousy. He was jealous of Smitty, and he was jealous of me. He was jealous of anyone who was closer to your father than he was. If your father’s death looked like murder, I’d have been the prime suspect. The spouse nearly always is. Maybe Tommy was hoping to get rid of both your father and me. Or are these thoughts of mine too crazy, too farfetched?”
“Perhaps,” Miranda says thoughtfully. “But then again, perhaps not.”
“Tommy knew your father’s mind so well. He knew every inch of it, inside and out, almost as well as I did. He knew all his faults and flaws, and he knew just when these faults and flaws were most likely to trip your father up. He knew all his Achilles’ heels. He knew what a sad and disappointed man your father really was. It’s a terrible thing, Miranda, for a man to be told—in the press and elsewhere—what a great success he is when in his heart of hearts he knows he is a failure, that his whole life has been a sham, a pretense.”
Miranda nods.
“But that’s where I came in, of course. That’s where I found my mission, my calling. To bolster his morale, to stroke his poor ego, to try to force-feed his self-esteem. I don’t know if I really succeeded, but I tried. I tried to be his nurse, to give him tender, loving care. That probably sounds self-serving, but it isn’t meant to. It probably means there’s something wrong with me. Why do I seem to be attracted to weak men?”
The question hangs in the air, unanswered. The fish, having decided that there is no more food for them, have descended to the deep water. The two women sit there on the garden bench, in the warm Indian-summer sunlight. The cat dozes.
“Jake Kohlberg doesn’t strike me as a weak man,” Miranda says at last.
“No. And we do have happier thoughts to think about, don’t we?” her mother says. “Wedding plans: definitely for me, maybe for you. And for you—first things first—you’re going to have a store to run.”
“Oh, Mother, I don’t think so. Not now.”
“Now, Miranda. You know it’s what you’ve always wanted.”
“I still do. But it’s hopeless. Peter’s gone over the books, and things are in even worse shape than we thought. The best thing we can do is have a close-out sale and put the building on the market.”
Her mother looks pensive. “I could help you,” she says.
“How? How could you help?”
“If it’s only money, I could help.”
“How?”
She gestures around her. “I could sell this place,” she says.
“Oh, Mother—not sell the farm!”
“Why not? This place is a white elephant. It’s an anachronism. People don’t live like this anymore. Think of it—eighty-two acres of prime Long Island real estate, including half a mile of shoreline on the Sound. Developers have been after us for years to buy it. It’s what everyone else has done. We’re the last of the dinosaurs—as they said of your father.”
“And give up your beautiful Dell Garden? I wouldn’t let you do that.”
She looks out at the garden. “When I first saw this hollow in the land, this was what I wanted. This garden and this pond. Where did I get the vision for it, I wonder? When I started designing it, I had no idea what I was doing. I just said, ‘Plant this tree here, plant that one there.’ And it worked, didn’t it? But it’s finished now. It’s done. I’m ready to move on to some other project. And these fish, too. They’ve bred well in this deep water. I had an ichthyologist here from Woods Hole the other day, and he tells me some of these hybrid specimens of koi are quite rare, worth thousands of dollars apiece as breeding stock.”
“You wouldn’t sell the fish too!”
“Wouldn’t you want them to have a nice home, Miranda, where they’d be fed and cared for and have a lovely sex life? You wouldn’t want to trust them to some real estate developer!”
“You’re not serious, Mother!”
“I am. Absolutely. And of course I’d sell my furniture as well. Your father’s art collection may not be worth much, but most of the furniture I researched and collected myself, and s
ome of the pieces are very nice indeed. I’m going to call Mr. Grenfell at Sotheby’s and have him come and take a look at it.”
“But, Mother, where would you live?”
“I could live in the apartment over the store—that is, if you don’t mind. Jake likes that idea. He doesn’t want to keep his present apartment because it reminds him too much of his late wife. We’d promise not to interfere with anything you’re doing. And I’ve already planned to sell the Lake Sunapee house. And I’d also sell the little apartment in Paris, which I have no need for at all now. And then there’s the Palm Beach house, which I haven’t set foot in for at least three years. And I haven’t even thought about the china and the silver and the glassware and the furniture in all those places. And then there’s my jewelry—”
“I will not let you sell your jewelry, Mother!”
“There are some pieces I just don’t wear anymore. And let’s not forget the racehorses we both own. The horse market is depressed right now, now that the Arabs have moved out of it, but there’s a filly who’s a granddaughter of Nashua, and two stallions are the sons of Flying Flame. I think that when you and I sell off some of this excess baggage we seem to have, we’ll be able to reduce the store’s debt considerably.”
Miranda bites her lip. “You’d really do all this for me, Mother?”
“Absolutely.”
“Peter’s offered to help me,” she says.
“Peter has an M.B.A. from Harvard. He should be a nice help. And Jake will help you too. I don’t know how fond you are of Jake, but to do what you’re going to do you’ll need the services of a good lawyer, and Jacob Kohlberg is one of the best. There’s only one thing.”
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