Carriage Trade (20 page)

Later, she heard Tommy Bonham's car drive away, and the light from his headlamps arced across her ceiling. Now she heard her mother and father exchanging loud words from the floor below, and she crept out of her bedroom and tiptoed to the head of the stairs to hear what they were saying. Her mother seemed to be pursuing him from room to room, and their angry voices rose and fell as they went.

“Goddammit, Connie, it's the first of the month! You know how she gets when I'm late!”

“Why did you have to take Miranda along? What kind of cock-and-bull story did you tell her anyway?”

“Goddammit, Connie!”

“Why do you have to include my daughter in your dirty little secrets? Isn't it bad enough that I got dragged into it? Isn't that bad enough? ‘To protect you,' Tommy said. How can I protect you when you won't even protect yourself? And now you've dragged my daughter into it too!”

“She's my daughter too, goddammit!”

“A lot you care! I've tried to protect her from you. Now you've dragged her into it!”

“She doesn't know a goddamned thing!”

“What if she finds out? What if she starts asking questions? What am I supposed to say? Answer me that one, Si? Or shall I call you Sol?”

“Shut up, Connie!”

“Why couldn't you have had Billings deliver the money? Why did you have to drag Miranda along?”

“And get Billings involved in it too?”

“Billings is
already
involved! He drove you there, didn't he?”

“I told him I was delivering merchandise to a client.”

“Why couldn't you have sent a messenger from the store? Why couldn't you have just dropped a check in the mail? I'll never understand—”

“Because those are her terms, goddammit!
Those are her terms!
The money is to be delivered
in cash
. By me.
In person
. No messengers. No banks. I've told you all this a thousand times before. She set the terms. She calls the shots, whether you like it or not.”

“But there's nothing in the terms about dragging Miranda along!”

“I didn't drag her along! She waited in the goddamn car!”

“But she saw her! She knows about her! She suspects something, doesn't she?”

“She doesn't suspect a goddamn thing! Now shut up, Connie.”

“Don't tell me to shut up! I'm sick to death of trying to protect this family from your sordid, messy little secrets!”

“Who pays the bills for this family?”

“And who's seen to it that this family's name hasn't been dragged through the mud? I'm sick to death of covering up for you. I'm sick to death of covering up your filthy tracks, sweeping up your filthy messes!”

“When have you ever covered up for me?”

“When?
I'm talking about June nineteen-seventy.
Where?
I'm talking about Boston and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel!”

“Moe Minskoff worked that one out for me, damn it! You had nothing to do with it!”

“But I got dragged into it anyway, didn't I? By you—and Moe—and Tommy! I've been covering up for you for the past nine years! Do you think that's been fun for me? But I did it—and I did it for you! And this is the kind of thanks I get. If it hadn't been for me and Tommy—”

“And Moe! Don't forget Moe!”

“—you could have gone to jail! If it hadn't been for me, you could still be in jail!”

“Goddammit, Connie! Leave me alone!”

“And why did I do it? I did it for you.…”

Their voices faded as they moved into another room, and Miranda crept back into her bedroom.

The next day Miranda asked her mother, “Who is the fat old lady on West End Avenue?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Miranda.”

“You sent me to bed early when I asked Daddy to tell about her.”

“You were boring Mr. Bonham, dear.”

“I was not! What's more boring than talking about zippers?”

“Please, Miranda,” her mother said, passing her hand across her forehead, “I don't want to talk about this anymore. I have a terrible sick headache, and I'm going up to take my nap.”

And that was all Miranda ever knew.

In the northwest corner of Flying Horse Farm, Miranda's mother had created what she called her Dell Garden. A natural hollow in the land provided the setting and suggested the name, and Consuelo had a deep artificial lake built at the center of the hollow, where it was fed by a nearby spring. In this lake swam many brightly colored carp and calicoes and koi fish, some of them quite rare and valuable. Along the shallower edges of the lake bloomed aquatic plants, lilies and water irises and water hyacinths, but the center of her lake she wanted at least twenty-five feet deep, so the fish could find plenty of room to survive, in semihibernation, under the winter ice. Also, she had been told that the deeper the lake the purer would be its reflective powers with sunlight and clouds and stars. Over the years, the fish had thrived, multiplied, and grown to considerable size.

Connie Tarkington had designed her garden without any formal training in landscape design. She had arranged her plantings by hunch. Along the banks of the lake she had planted low stands of dogwood, crab apples, oak-leaf hydrangeas, azaleas, willows, and golden bamboo that rustled in the breeze. Along the rim of the hollow she had wanted deeper greens, and so this was planted with ilex, boxwood, and Norway spruce. In early spring, the slopes of the garden exploded with swaths of yellow daffodils and blue grape hyacinths. Later came tulips, iris, tall lupines, and delphiniums. In summer there were bright patches of hollyhocks and daylilies, and in fall the Dell Garden was still bright with with asters, chrysanthemums, and the reddening leaves of the dogwoods.

Across the lake ran an arched wooden footbridge, in the Japanese moon-gate style. Along the bridge, spaced at intervals, were redwood benches, where the visitor could sit and look down at the reflection of clouds in the dark water and at the playful herding and leaping of the bright fish. It was on this footbridge that Richard Avedon posed Consuelo Tarkington, in a series of romantic outfits, for that famous fashion shoot in
Harper's Bazaar
in the spring of 1980, the year she climbed to the top of the International Best-Dressed List.

In the summer of that same year, Miranda and her half brother were seated on one of the benches on the garden footbridge. He was seventeen then, and a freshman at Yale, and she was thirteen, in her first year at Ethel Walker. Over the past year, her passion for Tommy Bonham had faded, and now she was in love with Blazer, though he didn't know it. Blazer wore his hair long in those days, in a shaggy ponytail pulled back with a rubber band, a style chosen—she is certain today—only because it was designed to infuriate his father. Their final blowup had not occurred, and Blazer still came down from Connecticut to visit his father at the farm on certain weekends, and this was one of them. Miranda and Blazer were feeding the fish.

One particularly obnoxious blue-and-yellow koi was hogging all the food pellets, and Miranda and Blazer were trying to aim their pellets so the swarms of smaller fish would get their share, but the big koi was too fast for them, and when he opened his huge mouth he could engorge dozens of pellets at a time.

“Tell me about your mother,” Miranda asked him. “What's she like?” She had always been curious about Alice Tarkington, whose name was taboo in Miranda's household.

“Like? Well, let's see,” he said. “To begin with, she's ten years older than your mother and a little heavier.”

She laughed. “You mean she's fat?”

“No, not fat. But she's not as skinny as your mother. Your mother is too damned skinny, if you ask me.”

“She has to be a model size to wear the clothes she likes.”

“Yeah, I know.” With a strong overhand, he pitched a handful of pellets far out into the water. “There!” he said. “There's some that that overweight bastard won't get.”

“What else about her?”

“Well, she's nice-looking. At least I think she's nice-looking. She's not a blonde, like your mother. She's got red hair.” He grinned. “And a temper to go with it. Hell, I guess she'd have gray hair if she let it go natural. She, you know, dyes it.”

“And?”

“And, let's see. She's very athletic, my mother. She plays lots of tennis and golf. I guess you'd call her a very outdoorsy woman. She loves the out-of-doors.”

“My mother loves to garden.”

“Ha! Your mother doesn't
garden
, Mandy. She just stands out here with her parasol and points out places to gardeners where she wants them to plant her trees.”

“My mother thinks the sun can be very damaging to a woman's skin.”

“Well, my mother doesn't subscribe to that philosophy. She likes a year-round tan. In the summer she's always out-of-doors. In the winter she goes to a tanning salon. At least she used to.”

“In other words, she's just the opposite of my mother.”

“Yeah, I guess you could more or less say that.”

“I wonder if I'll ever meet her? I'd like to.”

“Well, don't take this the wrong way, Mandy, but I don't think you ever will. She doesn't want to meet you. She's very bitter.”

She had tried not to feel hurt by this. “Bitter?” she said.

“Yeah, she's bitter, all right. She's about the bitterest woman I've ever known. After all, the old man asked your mother to marry him even before he asked my mother for a divorce. Wouldn't you be bitter? I'll tell you how bitter she is. If I come out here for the weekend, she won't even ask me how it went. She won't ask me what I did or anything, and she won't listen when I try to tell her. I've learned not even to mention Flying Horse Farm to her, or anything about Dad's new family. When
Architectural Digest
published all those pictures of the farm, including this garden, she refused to look at the magazine. Needless to say, she won't set foot inside the store. She won't even walk on that side of Fifth Avenue when she's in that part of town. If she happens to be walking across the street from the store, she won't even look in the store's direction. That's how bitter she is.”

“That's sad,” Miranda said.

“Yeah, I guess so. But it was a pretty bitter divorce.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Nah, I was too little. But that's another thing she's bitter about. She felt the old man abandoned her and her two-year-old kid.”

She sighed. “What a strange family we are,” she said. They had run out of fish-food pellets.

“Yeah. Strange. Sad. And add a couple of more S-words: shallowness, superficiality, and secrets. That's what this family is all about, Mandy. I could add another word beginning with an S, but I couldn't use it in front of a well-brung-up young lady.”

“Shallowness, superficiality—?”

“What's Tarkington's all about, anyway? Putting a lot of shallow, superficial dresses on the backs of a bunch of shallow, superficial women, trying to turn them into something they're not, telling some rich old broad she looks divine in a dress that makes her look like an Eighth Avenue hooker—an
expensive
Eighth Avenue hooker, but an Eighth Avenue hooker just the same.”

“Daddy says running a store like ours is like putting on a piece of theater.”

“Yeah, right, and what's a piece of theater? Pretense. Make-believe. Lies. Phoniness. You don't think a piece of theater is anything like
life
, do you? And Tarkington's isn't even good theater, if you ask me. It's more like Hollywood, like an old Joan Crawford movie. Its more like television, that tells you if you'll just buy a Cadillac your neighbors will think you're John D. Rockefeller. Or if you'll try our deodorant you can have a date with Robert Redford. I'll tell you what the store is
really
like. It's like Chicago. Ever been to Chicago?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Chicago is the phoniest city in the world. All along the lakefront are these big mansions and apartment buildings with doormen in fancy uniforms. But walk two blocks inland from the lake and you're in Scuzbagsville—cheap bars, flophouses, and porno shops. Chicago is all facade. Behind the facade, Tarkington's is just a tarted-up version of the
shmattes
business.”

“Shmattes?” She giggled again. “Another S-word. What does shmattes mean?”

“Rags. Junk. Trash. That's what all the family lies and secrets are designed to protect: the fact that the old man's in the rag business. Secrets on top of secrets, lies on top of lies. Nobody even knows the old man's age, for Chrissake. No, we gotta keep the old man's age a secret to protect the image.”

“He says age is a boring, unimportant statistic.”

“Sure—so nobody will know how old he is. Or where he was born, or who his parents were. That might hurt the old image, right? Image! It's all done for image, for illusion. It's all done with mirrors, so step right up, folks, and see the little lady sawed in half onstage. That's about how real he is. Everything
about
the old man is phony, Miranda. Silas Tarkington isn't even his real name. He was Solomon Tarcher before he changed it. My mom told me that.”

She remembered her mother's words:
Or shall I call you Sol?

“And look at the phonies he surrounds himself with—men like Tommy Bonham.”

“Is he a phony?”

“The only thing he likes about Bonham is that he
looks
good. More facade. Bonham looks good, so he's good at buttering up the ladies.”

“Blazer,” she asked him, “is my mother a phony too?”

He hesitated. “I've got no quarrel with your mom,” he said. “I like her, actually. But she's his shill, his beard, his showpiece, his flagship customer. She's
the
Tarkington's woman. But I'll say this for her, she doesn't seem to mind letting herself be used like that, to display the merchandise. That was one reason—one of the main reasons—why the old man divorced my mom and married yours. After I was born, Mom got a little heavy. She didn't look good in designer dresses anymore. So the old man traded in a size twelve for a size eight, and got a ten-years'-newer model in the bargain. I once heard your mom say that when she was pregnant with you she only gained eight ounces. Can you imagine that? Eight ounces! No wonder you were such a shrimpy little thing when you were born.”