Carriage Trade (26 page)

“Will you be spending the night here, dear?” her mother asked her from the doorway.

“Would you like me to, Mother?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Well, if it's okay with you, I think I'll borrow the station wagon and drive back to the city. After all, tomorrow is another working day.”

“Oh, dear, I hate to hear you say that.”

“Why? I do have a job to do.”

“The store, the store. It's always the store. It's dominated our lives. But soon we'll be rid of it.”

“No!” she said sharply. “The store is part mine now, and I'm going to keep it.”

“Miranda, such foolishness—”

“What would you have me do instead, Mother? Sit on my fanny for the rest of my life, doing nothing—like you?”

Her mother turned on her heel, the silver chains at her waist tinkling as she did so. “Well, if you change your mind and decide to stay, just let Milliken know and Margaret will turn down your bed for you.” Then she was gone.

Miranda sat alone for a while, her thoughts racing, sipping what remained of her coffee. The coffee was cold, but she sipped it anyway. Her mother was a riddle that seemed to have no answer. She decided to make one more attempt at making peace, so she tiptoed up the stairs and down the hall to her mother's room.

Her mother's door was partway open, and her mother lay across the bed, propped up by many white lacy pillows, her face masked in a mud pack, her hair in its net. At the foot of the bed sat Margaret, who was massaging a cream called PrettiFeet between her mother's toes. In her mud pack with its tiny slits for her eyes, nostrils, and mouth, Miranda's mother looked both pitiful and comic—mummified and yet alive—and Miranda had to stifle an urge to laugh.

“Is that you, Miranda?” her mother said. “Did you change your mind?” Her mother's voice was hollow, for it was difficult to speak behind the pack. Any movement of her facial muscles tended to crack the drying mud. The mud smelled of cordite. At this point in her evening toilette, Consuelo's bedroom smelled of a mixture of Guerlain and brimstone, Shalimar and sulfur.

“I'm sorry, Mother. I didn't mean to snap at you,” she said. “It was just that you took Mr. Hockaday's terrible news so—calmly. But then you always seem to take bad news calmly. I wish I could learn to do that.”

“I'm not thinking of the paintings,” her mother said in the same hollow voice, trying not to move her lips. “I'm thinking of poor Smitty.”

“Poor
Smitty
?”

“Yes. She's been named special curator of an art collection that apparently doesn't exist. Never did exist.”

“I think Smitty is getting exactly what she deserves!”

“Oh, no,” her mother said. “Not this—not this, on top of everything else.”

Miranda felt herself about to lose her temper once more, but she refused to let that happen, so she simply said, “Well, I'm off. Good night, Mother.” And she turned and ran down the stairs.

And yet here she still is, in the quiet sun room at Flying Horse Farm. The house is asleep. She should be in the station wagon by now—its keys hang on a little board just inside the kitchen door—driving down the expressway toward Manhattan, speeding toward 11 East 66th Street and her comfortable apartment and her quiet bed. Outside, the garden is dark, for there is no moon. Somewhere in the invisible distance is her mother's Dell Garden, with its deep lake and the moon-gate footbridge running across it, where she and Blazer fed the swarming fish and he had warned her to beware of the phonies.

“These are high-quality copies, Mrs. Tarkington. But copies, I'm sorry to say.”

The house is sleeping, but suddenly it is full of voices.

“Actually, it was a display piece. But it was an antique doll. It was a pretty doll.”

And so there is another illusion shattered—the picture of her father, bundled up against the winter cold and snow, trudging through empty streets of closed and shuttered shops in search of a special gift that would in some way salvage, at least in part, a little girl's unhappy Christmas. All he had done was go down to the basement Display Department and pick out an item from its carefully boxed, catalogued, and numbered contents. From the shelves of dismembered mannequins, the boxes of ornaments and trimmings and artificial foliage, he had found a doll with a china head and moving eyes wearing a white lace nightie.

“You have to be very cynical in this business,” her father had said to her—yes, it was right in this room—when she was desperately trying to persuade him to give her a job in the store. “You're not cynical enough, Miranda. This is a business for gamblers, high rollers. I don't see you as a born gambler. Everything about designer apparel is in the roll of the dice. I've often compared retailing to show business, but, believe me, retailing is even riskier. A true gambler gets as much of a thrill out of losing as he does out of winning. That's what gamblers call ‘heart,' but a gambler's heart is hard and his blood is cold. I don't see you as a hard-hearted, cold-blooded person. You're not tough enough for this business. You're soft, you're feminine, you're easily hurt and easily disappointed. Cynicism is what you lack, knowing that you're either going to win or lose, and that winning is all a matter of luck, of chance.”

“Just give
me
that chance, Daddy,” she said.

On the card table, the tarot cards are still spread in a fan shape, face down. If I'm going to place my faith in luck and chance, she thinks, I might as well place a little of my faith in magic too.
Think hard, really concentrate, on any question you want answered or any problem you want solved
. She thinks hard, and the question comes.

It is:
Who am I?
She picks a card at random and turns it face up. It is the High Priestess.

Interesting. The High Priestess is the most powerful female court figure in the deck. She symbolizes wisdom and secret influence. She is also a figure of mystery and a certain ambiguity. She wears a strange headdress—an orb with antlers, signifying her ability to rule and also to fight for what she wants. A blue robe cascades from her head and shoulders and falls across her knees and feet like a freshet of spring water, denoting fluidity and an ability to compromise. Behind her grow palm and pomegranate trees, and in the far distance, on a hill, stands a castle—riches. The face of the High Priestess stares directly and serenely at Miranda. Studying that face, Miranda thinks, I am that loosely draped lady, she is me. See how surely and squarely she sits, chin tilted upward, resolute, proud, secure in her world, unafraid of the future. See how she seems to be spreading her wings, prepared to fly, borne by the wind. She is me. Oh! She is me.

Who am I? I am not my father's soft and easily hurt and disappointed daughter. I am not his little china doll. I am tough and I am strong and I am cynical and also flexible, and flexibility was not exactly your strong suit, Daddy dear, and I am going to show them all how strong and tough and cynical yet flexible I can be. Oh, yes.

Of course there is another side to the High Priestess that reveals itself when the card is held upside down. She also symbolizes love, marriage, motherhood, relatedness, sexual passion, and supportiveness of friends and family, and suddenly, Miranda has another revelation.
I will gather up the pieces of this fragmented family and put them together again
. I will find my long-lost grandmother and the Aunt Simma I never knew I had. I will bring back Blazer, too, and even his mother. That is all a part of my destiny, according to this little card. She feels a sudden rush—a rush of adrenaline almost like a burst of sexual excitement—as she contemplates all that she has suddenly been assigned to do.

Everything my father broke, I will mend.

I will even let myself fall in love again, for love is just another of the tools with which one builds a life.

Impulsively, she turns over another card, and there he is, the Magician, who denotes the power to turn mere ideas into action, to turn dreams into reality, to translate promises into deeds. He is Tommy Bonham, who has offered to help her. Of course.

In the distance, the hall clock strikes twelve, and still Miranda stays at the card table, studying the esoteric symbols in her hand.

It is the memory of that little gesture of Miranda's—reaching out from that magic card table to touch her mother's hand—and the look of a deeply shared intimacy that seemed to pass between the two women, that Peter Turner has carried home with him. Earlier, he had sensed a certain tension between them. But in that brief gesture they became a mother and a daughter.

Talk about grace under pressure, he thinks. Both women demonstrated that rare asset tonight. Considering the pressures they both must have been under during these past few days, he is even more impressed. Miranda is beginning to see the whole fabric of her father's life, that he had stitched together as elaborately as a needlepoint design, fly apart before her eyes, he thinks. How much more will come?

As he slides his long legs between the cool sheets of his narrow bed at the Dakota, he also thinks, She noticed me standing there that day in the quad outside Calhoun. She remembers my red shirt. I remember her fiery mane of chestnut hair.

He turns out the light and, with a little sigh, realizes that tonight he has managed to fall in love with Miranda Tarkington.

Again.

From
The New York Times
, August 18, 1991:

87 KILLED, HUNDREDS INJURED AT EAST ST. LOUIS ROCK EVENT

Many Listed as Critical After Fans Storm Stadium Entrance

East St. Louis, Ill., Aug. 17—At least 87 people, most of them teenagers, lay dead last night as thousands of screaming fans stormed a single narrow entrance to the Riverside Stadium in this impoverished and predominantly black city to hear a concert by the Hot Jockers, a popular heavy metal rock group. At least 300 others were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, many of them critical. The basement of the A.M.E. Church here was turned into a temporary morgue, as distraught families stood in long lines to identify their dead.

The concert, scheduled for 8 P.M. yesterday evening, was sold out, according to its promoter, Milton Prokesch, 47, and thousands of young people had gathered outside the stadium waiting to get inside. When, by 8:15, the gates failed to open, the crowd grew noticeably restless, and police officers with nightsticks attempted to restore order. And when, inexplicably, only one of the twelve gates was unlocked at 8:25, the crowd of impatient fans rushed toward this single entrance, less than ten feet wide. In the ensuing stampede, many young people were crushed to death under the feet of others, while still others appeared to have died from suffocation. By the time order was restored, many trampled and mangled bodies had literally to be scraped off the surrounding streets and sidewalks, and at least one mother, Mrs. Lula Barner, 26, was only able to identify her teenage son by the color of the sneakers he was wearing. A full list of the deceased is as yet incomplete.

The seating capacity of the stadium is 70,000, but police estimated the crowd outside was considerably larger than this. It is speculated that many of the rock group's fans intended to hear the concert from outside the open-air arena, though many of the dead still clutched valid tickets in their hands. East St. Louis Fire Commissioner Julio G. Gomez, 56, insisted today that the event could not have been oversold. “This office regulates these matters very carefully,” Commissioner Gomez stated. “We were on top of the situation in every sense of the word. What happened here last night certainly should not have happened, but it did. It is too bad, but no one is really to blame. It was more like an act of God.”

“Kids' Own Fault”

Commissioner Gomez did suggest, however, that the use of alcohol and drugs might have been a contributing factor to the slaughter. While drugs and alcohol are prohibited within the stadium proper, “There is no way of controlling the use of these substances outside the gates,” he said. Arriving quickly at the scene of the carnage, Commissioner Gomez pointed to the numbers of crushed beer cans, broken bottles, and at least one shattered hypodermic syringe that lay among the corpses and the bodies of the injured. “There's your villain,” he announced, brandishing the twisted needle for photographers. “The kids like to get high before these concerts. When they get high on a controlled substance, they tend to act in an irrational and antisocial manner. In some ways, this was those kids' own fault. This department expresses sympathy to their nearest and dearest.”

The concert's promoter, Mr. Prokesch, conceded that the concert may have been overbooked “by one or two seats.” This, he said, is customary procedure, “just as our finest and safest airline companies deliberately overbook seats,” to allow for no-shows. He added that seating at the concert was so-called festival style, a common arrangement at such events, whereby the best seats are available on a first-come basis. When the doors open, there is often a sudden surge on the audience's part for the seats closest to the stage and the performers.

As to why only one of twelve gates was unlocked to admit a capacity audience, Mr. Prokesch had no explanation. “You'll have to ask the stadium's management about that one,” he said. “All I do is hire the hall. I wasn't even at the stadium when it happened. I was having dinner in my hotel suite across the river. I first learned about it on television.”

The stadium is owned by the City of East St. Louis but is managed by a concessionaire, Halcyon Entertainments, Inc. Calls to Halcyon Entertainments were referred to the office of East St. Louis Mayor Clarence M. Thomas, who is no relation to the Supreme Court nominee, and calls to Mayor Thomas's office were referred to Fire Commissioner Gomez.

Meanwhile, Sonny Lemontina, 21, the Hot Jockers' lead guitarist, said he and his group, still backstage when the mob first surged toward the stadium entrance, were unaware that anything unusual was taking place. The sounds of police and ambulance sirens rushing to the scene and the screams of the injured and dying were apparently drowned out by the group's own amplifiers, and the group itself did not learn of the tragedy until after their performance ended. “I thought we just had your normal, happy audience,” Mr. Lemontina said. “They gave us three encores. We're all real, real sorry that there were people got killed.”