Carriage Trade (10 page)

“I guess you would say we weren't close,” Rose says. She removes her glasses and wipes them with her hanky. “But still—still, he was my son. My firstborn. I had my feet in the stirrups on that table, and my doctor said, ‘Push, Rose … push hard … push as hard as you can … you're pushing life into your baby. If you push hard enough, I won't have to spank his bottom when he comes.' And then they handed him to me, and he smelled—so sweet! Why did he have to die? Why is life so unfair?”

The others are silent now, and Rose, trying to collect herself, replaces her glasses on her nose.

“We fought,” she says. “But he was still my little Solly.”

“So that's where your money comes from,” Esther says at last, and Lily, from across the table, makes soft hushing noises.

“That's what we fought about. After my late husband died, God rest his soul, and Solly needed money to start his store, I loaned him some. It was called buying his store's stock. I didn't get as much as I was supposed to get. Not nearly as much. Simma was smarter. My daughter fought for her fair share and got it. Simma wouldn't have anything to do with Solly either, after he tried to do to her what he did to me. So you see I've had my share of
tsuris
. Lots of trouble in the family. My life hasn't been the bowl of cherries some of you seem to think it was, or maybe I sometimes like to pretend it was. But what can you do? Oh, my.” She dabs at her eyes again. “Put one foot after the other, like my late husband used to say, God rest his soul. Funny, I always thought Simma was the brainy one in the family. I always thought Simma was the one who should have had all the success, not Solly. I can't complain about Simma, can I? She's given me a wonderful son-in-law I love like my own son, three beautiful grandchildren, and two greats. Simma visits me every week, come hell or high water, rain or shine.”

“She's nice, too,” Lily says.

Rose closes her eyes, and blinks twice, and takes a deep breath. “So Solly's dead,” she says. “Well, I don't guess there's anything I can do about it now, is there? Solly lived in New York. Had fancy friends. Get on with your life, as my late husband used to say, God rest his soul. Pick up the pieces.” With a sniffle, she slowly picks up her hand again, re-sorts the cards into suits, and fans them out between her fingers. Her hand trembles slightly. “Oh, dear,” she says. “I've forgotten what our contract was.”

“Four spades,” Esther Pinkus says narrowly.

Rose studies the cards in her hand and then the cards arrayed before her on the board. “Partner, how could you have bid us up to four spades with that mess?” she says indignantly, and leads with her club ace.

Esther Pinkus promptly trumps it.

Ben Rosenthal crosses the room to Rose's chair and rests his hands gently on her shoulders. “I'm sorry, Rose,” he says. “I just want to say that I'm truly, deeply sorry. I know how you feel. I lost one of mine, too. Car accident. It's not easy.”

“Well, you should be sorry,” she says. “We're definitely going to lose this one. Thank God we're not vulnerable.”

Early that same evening, Diana Smith, thirty-four, lets herself into the side entrance of the store with her own key. Inside, she leans against the door for a moment, feeling dizzy. The last three days seem to have passed in a trance. Her doctor has prescribed Valium for her, and the pills turn time into a dreamlike haze, through which she feels she is moving silently and disconnectedly, like a swimmer under water, but going nowhere. She reaches in her purse to fish out a cigarette but then remembers where she is. She is here, in Si's store, where there is a no smoking policy. She closes the purse. She is not even entirely sure why she came here. What was it? Oh, yes. To check her department. To say goodbye to it, perhaps. Because, the way things stand now, this may be her last time inside these doors. Who knows, when Tommy Bonham takes over—as he surely will—what will become of her? She staggers forward, reaching out to steady herself against a display counter.
Did I take two of those dreamy little pills or one? I can't remember
.

Oliver, the security guard on duty tonight, nods to her. “Evening, Miss Smith.”

“Good evening”—
his name?
—“Oliver.”

“Sad day for all of us, ain't it, Miss Smith?”

“It surely is.”

“Say, you feeling all right, Miss Smith? You look a little—shaky, sort of. A bit off your feed. Green around the gills, like the fella says.”

“I'm fine. I'm just a little—upset. As we all are, Oliver.”

Oliver nods again and continues on his rounds.

At the Hermès boutique, she pauses and lifts a sample flask of Equipage and sprays it behind her ears, on the backs of her wrists, in the cleavage of her breasts. Equipage is Diana Smith's signature fragrance, and the scent makes her feel more like herself. “I love the way you always smell,” he used to say to her.

“When a woman finds a scent that suits her, she should always stick to it,” she told him. He used to give her bottles.

She makes her way slowly down the center aisle, under the Baccarat chandeliers, toward the back of the store to where, under an archway of polished walnut, her own department is situated. There, in locked glass cases, her merchandise is displayed. On the store's books, this merchandise is valued at four million dollars, but she knows enough about retailing to know that the value of a store's inventory has little relationship to its real value, which is always considerably less. She moves slowly from case to case, earrings in one, rings in another, necklaces and bracelets in a third, pins and brooches and jeweled buttons in a fourth. Now she remembers why she came here tonight. She wanted to think about precious stones, and not about other things.

She has always had a special feeling for gems, and it is really only the precious ones that interest her. She has never been able to have much enthusiasm for semiprecious stones: the garnets, the tourmalines, the amethysts, turquoises, moonstones, opals, and the rest. But precious gemstones are quite another matter, and the sight of a nearly flawless, fiery diamond can induce in her an almost narcotic rush, a kind of adrenaline high.

Each stone—to her, at least—has its own distinct personality. An emerald, for instance, she sees as a man's stone. Rubies and diamonds look cheap and vulgar on a man, and there is a reason why Tiffany has never offered a man's diamond ring for sale. Tarkington's doesn't go quite that far, but when a man comes into the store looking for a diamond ring—or diamond studs or cuff links—Smitty's salespeople try, as politely as they can, to discourage him, to steer him toward emeralds or some lesser green stone such as aquamarine or malachite: masculine stones.

Rubies are tarts' stones, Smitty's least favorite of the big four. She's never met a woman wearing a ruby ring—or necklace, or ear clips—that she didn't instantly dislike and consider a tart. Tarkington's has its share of tart customers, of course—high-class tarts, to be sure, expensive tarts, but tarts just the same, or kept women. And when she sees such a woman sashay into her department, she will wink at her salesperson and slyly whisper, “Bring out the T.C.”—the Tart Collection.

When a woman asks to look at emeralds, Smitty tends to think: Dyke.

Sapphires? Well, they are sort of a problem. Smitty has looked at some gorgeous sapphires in her time, but to her a sapphire has always been an old lady's stone. Old ladies with blue hair seem to be made for sapphires. There is a particularly lovely sapphire and diamond necklace in one of her cases right now, sold to her with documentation indicating that it once belonged to the Grand Duchess Tatiana of Russia—and it may have, though the vendor's price was almost suspiciously low—that Smitty has always admired. But she reminded herself that she is too young for sapphires. “You'll have plenty of time for sapphires, Smitty old girl,” she told herself. “Puh-
len
-ty of time.”

But diamonds—ah, diamonds are an altogether different story. They are ageless, forever young, pure, hard carbon, flash-formed in the volcanic bubbling of the young earth's crust. A good diamond is as beautiful on the ring finger of a teenage bride as on a dowager's lavaliere. In the glass case in front of her is the diamond he promised her: square-cut, 3.9 carats, finest gem quality, in a perfectly simple platinum setting. Using another key, she unlocks the cabinet, picks the ring out of its black velvet pocket, and slips it on the third finger of her left hand.

She could very easily turn, now, and walk out of the store wearing the ring. It was rightfully to have been hers. Oliver, even if he notices her walking out with an item from her own stock, would not question her. She has often borrowed items from stock before—for an important party, for instance, somewhere she might be recognized, photographed, written about. “Diana Smith, Tarkington's savvy jewelry buyer, wearing a diamond butterfly in her hair,” Mona Potter might write. Si even encouraged this sort of thing. This sort of publicity did nothing but good for the store, and it cost Si absolutely nothing. He always encouraged his executives to look their absolute and most expensive best when they went out in public. It helped the store's image. Longtime salesladies, whom Si trusted, were even allowed to borrow designer apparel from the store's inventory. Smitty has done this too.

Right now, Smitty could go into her office and erase this item of her inventory from her computer's memory and that would be the end of it.

Except …

Except for Tommy Bonham, of course. Tommy Bonham's eyes always seem to be everywhere in the store. His memory itself is like a computer, and often even better, and if Tommy is about to take over, even temporarily, it is much too risky.

She has had her share of run-ins with Tommy Bonham in the past, and she is certain he doesn't like her. It was Tommy, for instance, who persuaded Si to open the two suburban outlets, in Westchester and Morris counties. Smitty opposed the idea from the beginning. “It won't work,” she told Si.

“Why not? Why won't it work?”

“I'll give you two reasons why it won't work,” she said. “For one thing, your salespeople. Here in Manhattan, you have a supply of bright, attractive, well-bred, and well-spoken men and women who, for one reason or another, need jobs. These are people who learn to respect and care about the merchandise they sell. These are the kind of salespeople our clients expect—people with good manners and good taste. These are people who know how to write thank-you notes and who know that when a woman buys a fifteen-thousand-dollar dress she appreciates a thank-you note from the person who sold it to her. But who are you going to find in Westchester County? Wives of bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers and advertising executives who play golf and paddle tennis. They don't need to work, and they're not going to want to work for us. People of the sort who work for us in Manhattan aren't going to want to commute to White Plains. We're going to end up having to hire former cleaning ladies from Tuckahoe.

“That's reason number one. Reason number two is that thirty percent of our clients are visitors from foreign countries. Is the wife of a Japanese businessman going to go to White Plains to shop? No way. Another thirty-five percent of our clients live in other parts of the country. Is a woman who's in town from San Francisco going to get on a bus and go to New Jersey to buy a dress?”

“But more and more of the city's money is moving to the suburbs,” Tommy insisted, and he had charts and graphs and demographic studies to back him up, and Si decided to go along with him. Tarkington's would take Scarsdale and Morristown by storm. The suburban stores would each add a new department, called “Country Living,” featuring more casual designer apparel.

Well, it hadn't worked, for the very reasons Smitty outlined, and after a while both suburban branches closed. Smitty had been right, and Lord knows how much money Si lost in that experiment. And the day the suburban closings were announced—meeting Tommy Bonham in the hall—she hadn't been able to resist saying sweetly, “I told you so!”

He had given her a look of purest hatred. Tommy the hagfish.

Prettyboy Bonham didn't like being told he was wrong. He liked it even less when that person was a mere buyer. He liked it less and less when that person was someone ten years younger than he, and even less than that when that person happened to be a woman.

She twists the ring slowly on her finger. A diamond of that size and importance looked smart when worn facing the palm of the hand. It would also look smart knotted in a scarf.

Suddenly, she is swept with an almost sexual longing for this stone. The feeling seizes at her very innards. She must have this stone and no other. It is hers. It was promised to her, and promises cannot be broken, can they? “A man is as good as his word.” Si was always saying that, and so it must be hers, and now is the time to claim it. That's what she's doing: not stealing it, claiming it. Claiming her rightful property. She extends her left hand to the light. This stone excels in all four C's of gemology: color, clarity, cutting, and carat weight. It is ice blue. In the sunlight it will throw off prismatic flashes of red and lavender. In terms of clarity, it has been rated flawless. It has been cut in the full glory of fifty-eight facets, thirty-three above the girdle and twenty-five below. In the quaint language of gemology, this stone would be classified Extra River, from the early days of African mining when the finest diamonds were found in the alluvial wash of riverbeds. Yes, it is hers, it is hers.

She could write it up as a sale. There is a client in Venezuela whose husband's bank pays all her charges. No bill has ever been challenged.

“Nice-looking ring, Miss Smith.” It is Oliver, moving silently across the thick carpet, making his rounds, a witness.

She tries not to appear startled. “Yes, isn't it?” she says easily. “I have a client, in town from Caracas. I'm thinking of taking this over to her hotel and showing it to her.”