Carriage Trade

by Stephen Birmingham

  “And this is the man who was closer to you than a brother? Oh, my, oh, my,” she says.

  His words come pouring out now, rapid-fire, the sentences tumbling on top of one another. “Shut up, you stinking bitch! Listen to me! If you try to make trouble for me over this Blazer business, you’ll see the shit really hit the fan! All his dirty little secrets that I helped him keep! His real name! His prison record! The girl in Boston! The Van Degan swindle! I could go on and on. You think you can run this store without me? Well, let me tell you what you’re going to find! You’re going to find I’ve dug a hole for you so deep you’re never going to climb out of it! The walls of that hole are going to cave in on you and bury you in shit! And you know why you’ll never be able to dig yourself out of that shithole? Because you’re too stupid, that’s why!

  “You know what your father really thought of you? He thought you were a stupid, oversexed, round-heeled slut with popcorn for brains—popcorn soaked in piss! And he was right! I never should have talked him into giving you that stupid little job in the advertising department. He knew you were too stupid even for that, and he told me so. It was me, me, who begged him to give you that job, remember? And this is the thanks I get for it—fired—because you think you can be just like him, Mr. High and Mighty! You’d be nowhere if it weren’t for me! Neither would your mother! Everything you’ve both got you owe to me! I’ve done everything for the two of you but wipe the cum out of your cunts! That’s all you are, ass-wipes!”

  “Oh, my, oh, my,” she says again. “And this is the woman you said you wanted to make your full partner?”

  “Shut up! I offered you that because I knew if I gave you enough rope you’d hang yourself! And when that happened—and it wouldn’t have taken long—I’d have taken over, and I’d have what should rightfully have been mine all along, right from the very beginning. This store always should have been mine to run, and I’ll tell you what’s going to happen if you try to run it without me. In six months’ time, you’re going to find yourself dead in the water! This store is going to kill you, Miranda, just the way it killed your father. And I’m going to enjoy watching you die. I can’t wait for you to die. I hope you die very soon. And meanwhile, if you try to cause me any legal trouble over the trust fund thing, you’re going to find out what trouble really is!”

  “Are you finished?” she says. She wants to smile, but resists the impulse. “Okay. Then listen to me. There isn’t going to be any trouble if you do exactly what I say. I want you to clear out your desk and be out of here by the time the doors close at five o’clock. If you need help packing your things, I’ll send a boy up from the stockroom. Between now and when you are ready to leave, you are not to set foot outside this office. Is that clear? Oh, and one other thing.” She reaches in the pocket of her skirt. “This ring. The accounting department tells me Mrs. Lopez-Figueroa has already paid for it. True to form, her husband’s bank always pays her bills on time. Oh, to have a husband like Señor Lopez-Figueroa! It didn’t seem quite right to put this back into Smitty’s stock and try to sell it again, even though that sort of thing’s been done often enough before. It’s an excellent stone. I thought you might like to have it, in lieu of severance pay.” She places the ring on the top of his desk.

  With one hand, he sweeps the ring off his desk. It flies through the air and falls, sparkling, on the carpet. Then he raises his hand as if to strike her, and instinctively she lifts her knee slightly into what might be called the firing position. But his hand falls to his side again.

  “Goodbye, Tommy. Don’t forget to turn in your passkey to Oliver. He’ll be expecting it.” And she turns and leaves him standing there.

  “I did it!” she cries when she meets him at the Cafe Pierre bar. “I did it! I did it!”

  “Was it pretty bad?”

  “It was worse! No, it was better! I told him everything you said to tell him, and a few more things of my own!”

  “Thank God we’ve got the box of records. If we didn’t, they’d be in the incinerator by now.”

  “I can do it!” she says. “I know I can do it. Up till now, I’ve been whistling in the dark and hoping I could do it. But now I know I can do it, Peter! I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my life. I can run it! I can run the store!”

  “Of course you can do it,” he says. “I’ve always known you could.”

  “But I should say we can do it, shouldn’t I? Because we’re going to do it together, my darling, aren’t we? We’re going to do it together, you and I.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I should say we. Because we’re going to do it together.”

  “Funny. I thought I heard you call me ‘my darling.’”

  “Did I?” She laughs. “Yes, I guess I did. Yes, I did, my darling. Yes, my darling. Yes, my love. Yes, yes, yes.”

  He kisses her, and his kiss is so sudden that some of the sip of wine she has just taken spills into his mouth, and now they are both laughing, laughing at nothing at all, laughing at everything in the world, wine dribbling down their chins.

  “We’ll have to learn to do that better, won’t we?” she says, laughing and sputtering. “We’ll learn to do that next. So many things to do next … and next … and next …”

  He scoops his hand around her waist and pulls her to her feet.

  “Why is that couple dancing?” someone murmurs from the bar. “There isn’t any music.”

  Epilogue

  From The New York Times, March 11, 1992:

  GROUND BROKEN FOR FLYING HORSE ESTATES

  Old Westbury, N.Y.—One of the last great estates on Long Island’s North Shore disappeared today as the Allen B. Sirkin Company of Manhattan broke ground for an ambitious new development. The estate, known as Flying Horse Farm, belonged to the late Silas R. Tarkington, the retailing tycoon. The Sirkin development will divide the 82-acre property into building lots of up to one acre each, where some 75 “personalized” luxury homes will be built to sell in the $1 million to $1.5 million range. The development will be known as Flying Horse Estates.

  The Tarkington estate had included a small manmade lake. In the process of draining and filling this lake, an amusing relic of Silas Tarkington’s era was discovered by workmen. It is a television set affixed with a brass plaque reading For Silas Tarkington, a great merchant, with warmest thanks from President and Mrs. Gerald R. Ford, 1976. “We have no idea what the TV set was doing at the bottom of the lake,” Mr. Sirkin said. “But since it has some historic significance, it will be preserved and displayed in our new clubhouse, though the set is obviously no longer in working order.”

  Rumors Denied

  Meanwhile, members of the Tarkington family denied rumors to the effect that Flying Horse Farm had been sold in an effort to raise cash for Tarkington’s, the fashionable Fifth Avenue specialty store that has been reported troubled with management uncertainties since the founder’s sudden death last August. “The farm was simply too much for my mother to handle,” said Miranda Tarkington, 25, the store’s new president and the daughter of the founder. “Also, it harbored unhappy memories for her,” Ms. Tarkington added, “since my father died there.” Silas Tarkington’s widow, now Mrs. Jacob Kohlberg, is in the process of selling other of the former couple’s properties, Ms. Tarkington confirmed. “My mother has a new husband and a whole new life now,” Ms. Tarkington said. “That keeps her very busy.”

  Ms. Tarkington also denied rumors that the store has experienced fiscal upheavals since her father’s death, noting that the store had a “better than average” Christmas season and that this year’s first-quarter figures are expected to surpass last year’s. She also stressed the store’s “new and more youthful” management team, in which Peter Turner, 29, an M.B.A. graduate of Harvard and a former journalist, serves as the store’s executive vice president and general manager. Turner replaced Thomas E. Bonham III, 45, who retired in October of last year and who had been serving as the store’s interim chief executive.

&
nbsp; Ms. Tarkington preferred not to comment on whether Mr. Bonham’s retirement had been forced or voluntary. “You really should ask him that question,” she said. Mr. Bonham could not be reached for comment, however, and The Times was told he was on his honeymoon. Bonham recently married the former Harriet Minskoff, the widow of the mysterious financier who, just days before his still-unsolved murder last fall, took out a $10 million accident-insurance policy on his life. The newlyweds, accompanied by a manservant, were said to be cruising aboard the Minskoff yacht, somewhere in the Philippine Sea.

  Acknowledgments

  My own career in retailing was youthful and brief, but memorable nonetheless. During the course of it I was able to meet, and get to know, a number of the great merchandising giants of their day, including Bernard F. Gimbel, Bruce Gimbel, Adam and Sophie Gimbel, Andrew and Nena Goodman, Jack Straus, Mildred Custin, Dorothy Shaver, Jo Hughes, and of course my boss, the late, legendary Bernice FitzGibbon. These people, and the perfumed jungle of department and specialty stores they inhabited were in no small part the inspiration—if that’s not too pompous a word—for this novel, and I have even given a few of them small cameo (and fictional) roles in the story. I’d like to thank each of them now for this privilege.

  More recently, I am also indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Fred Lazarus III, of the Federated Department Stores family, both of whom took time off from a busy schedule to read this book in manuscript, and to point out details where I hadn’t got it quite right. Thank you both, Fred and Irma. Similarly, Mrs. Phyllis Sewell of Cincinnati, a former Federated executive, read the manuscript with a keen and finicky eye, and made many helpful suggestions. Even before a word of this book was written, Mrs. Sewell gave me an invaluable “update” course on retailing in the 1980’s and 90’s. Thank you, Phyllis.

  My favorite editor, Genevieve Young, was, as always, endlessly helpful and supportive of the project, as well as endlessly demanding and hard to please. But who would want an editor who was any other way? My friend, Dr. Edward Lahniers, who understands more about the workings of the human mind than most people, read the novel chapter by chapter as it emerged from my typewriter, and offered acute and valuable psychological observations about my characters’ motivations and behaviors. “Now why would she react like that?” was his favorite question, and he was usually right. She just wouldn’t react like that.

  I’d also like to thank my friend and agent, Carl D. Brandt, for his cool, smooth, and professional guidance of this project from the beginning.

  And, last but not least, I’d like to thank the woman to whom this book is dedicated and who, in ways she may not realize, became this novel’s heroine.

  Stephen Birmingham

  About the Author

  Stephen Birmingham is an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham’s work focuses on the upper class in America. He’s written about the African American elite in Certain People and prominent Jewish society in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite, and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other nonfiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address. Birmingham lives in southwest Ohio.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Stephen Birmingham

  Cover design by Angela Goddard

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2633-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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