Carriage Trade (14 page)

“Hmm,” was all she said. She didn't believe a word of it.

“We have a lot of things we need to talk about, Miranda,” her mother said to her this afternoon as they were leaving Jake Kohlberg's office. “Let's have dinner together, just the two of us, tonight at the apartment.” Now Miranda is sipping her wine in the green library, waiting for her mother.

Well, one of the things they will definitely
not
talk about tonight is Tommy Bonham's proposition. Whatever decision Miranda makes about that, she will make entirely on her own.

Still, she can't help wondering what her father would have had to say about all this. “What do you think, Daddy?” she asks him now.

“Do you really want to run the store?” the half-smiling Bachrach portrait answers her.

“Yes!”

“Women can't run stores, Miranda.”

“I'm taking night courses in marketing at N.Y.U. I got an A on my first big test.”

“You never told me that.”

“I was saving it to tell you now.”

“You don't learn marketing from textbooks. You learn it from experience.”

“What if I were to run the store with Tommy? He has plenty of experience.”

The portrait has no response to this. She has lost his wavelength.
What did you say, Daddy? I can't hear you
.

Idly, and for no real reason, she picks up the green telephone beside her chair and dials his private office number. It rings once, twice, three times; she can even hear it ringing faintly in the empty office on the floor below. Then, all at once, he answers!

“Hello. You have reached the voice-mail number of Silas Tarkington. I'm unable to take your call right now, but, when you hear the tone, please leave your name, telephone number, and any message, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Your message can be of any length. If there is any item in the store you're looking for, or if there is any way I can be of service to you, please let me know. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”

Miranda quickly replaces the receiver in its cradle. No one has erased the tape on his machine.

If there is any way I can be of service to you.…

For the first time since her father died, Miranda allows herself the luxury of a good, noisy sob.

Then, outside the room, she hears the elevator door slide open and the brisk click of her mother's Chanel heels across the marble floor of the foyer.

“Miss Tarkington's waiting for you in the library, ma'am,” she hears Milliken say.

“Be with you in a minute, darling!” her mother calls out, almost gaily. “I just want to slip into some more comfortable shoes.”

How could her mother remain so composed? Of all the odd things that happened the day her father died, perhaps the oddest was her mother's behavior. Miranda had been in East Hampton for the weekend, visiting with friends, when her mother telephoned her. “Darling, something terrible has happened,” she said, and then she told her.

Miranda, not even bothering to pack, had jumped into her blue BMW and driven directly to Old Westbury. But as she drove through the gates of Flying Horse Farm, everything there seemed as ordered and manicured as ever. She had expected to find the circular drive in front of the house filled with cars—police cars, an ambulance perhaps, reporters, television crews. She didn't know what she had expected to find, but when she parked her car at the foot of the steps leading up to the house, hers was the only car in the drive. Everyone, it seemed, had already come and gone. Dr. Arnstein had arrived by helicopter, signed the death certificate, and departed. The hearse had arrived from Campbell's, and her father's body was already on its way to New York and the crematorium. All this, it seemed, had happened before Miranda's mother telephoned her in East Hampton.

She ran up the steps to the house, where Milliken, who had obviously been weeping, greeted her. He squeezed her hand. “Your mother's in the sun room,” he whispered.

She found her mother there, in the room decorated in sunny garden colors—pinks, yellows, pale greens, and blues—sitting in a wicker chair, looking as coolly beautiful as ever in a white silk blouse and white silk slacks, working on her needlepoint. She was making a cover for her tennis racket. Her mother rose when Miranda entered the room, and they embraced, Miranda fighting back tears.

“Darling, we won't have your father anymore,” her mother said simply. “He loved you so. He was so very proud of you.”

“What happened, Mother?”

“He was swimming his laps in the pool. He just decided to swim one more lap than his fine, strong heart would let him—that's what Harry Arnstein said.”

They sat, and Consuelo Tarkington picked up her needlepoint and began listing the things she had done, and the people she had notified, since she had found his body floating earlier in the day.

“Did you call—”

“Smitty? Yes. Smitty has been notified.”

“Tommy?”

“Yes. Tommy is coming by for a drink a little later.”

“Blazer?”

“Of course.”

“Pauline?”

“That's one call I thought I'd ask you to make, darling,” her mother said. “Pauline tends to get so—emotional—and besides, you've worked more closely with her at the store.”

And so, feeling numb, Miranda had gone to the telephone and called Pauline O'Malley at her home in Kew Gardens. Pauline had immediately become so hysterical she had to hang up the phone.

Miranda returned to the sun room where her mother was pulling a thread of golden wool through her canvas, completing a flower in the pattern. She had tucked her slippered feet underneath her in the chair. She spread the canvas on her lap and examined it. Her pose was so serene it seemed almost Oriental. She could have been painted on a Chinese plate.

“What about the press?” Miranda asked her.

“Tommy's taking care of that,” her mother said. “He pointed out, correctly, that if we report it to the press today, the news will be printed tomorrow, which is a Sunday. Obituaries just get lost in the Sunday papers. But if we wait a day, there's a good chance it will make the front page of
The Times
on Monday morning.” She returned to her needlework.

Miranda sat opposite her mother. “Now tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

“He told me he was going out to swim his laps,” her mother said, without looking up from her work. “It was about eleven-thirty. I reminded him that lunch was being served at twelve-thirty. When he hadn't returned by then, I went out to the pool to look for him. That's when I found him … floating. I immediately telephoned Harry Arnstein.”

Miranda glanced at her watch. It was nearly six-thirty, which meant that her father had been dead for at least six hours. “Why didn't you call nine-one-one?” she asked.

Her mother looked up at her briefly. “Nine-one-one is a
police
number, darling. There was no need to involve the police.”

“But they would have sent the life squad. They might have—”

“You would have had police sirens—police ambulances—screaming down Heather Lane? Upsetting all the neighbors who were trying to enjoy a quiet Saturday afternoon? Really, Miranda. You know the thing your father loved best about the country was the peace and quiet here.”

“But they might have saved his life!”

Her mother looped another stitch through her canvas. “Miranda, I assure you there was no life left to save,” she said. “Harry Arnstein confirmed this.”

“But still, that's what I'd have done!”

She spread her canvas on her lap again. “I'll tell you another reason why I didn't do that,” she said. “If you get the police involved, they're required by law to perform an autopsy. Do you know what an autopsy involves? If you don't know, I'll leave it to your imagination, but it's horrible. I wouldn't dream of having such a thing done to your father.”

“How long did it take Dr. Arnstein to get here?”

“He was here within the hour.”

“You see? That hour could have been crucial. The life squad could have—”

“Miranda,
please
!” Her mother was beginning to show her first signs of impatience. “I did what I had to do. I don't think I even
thought
of calling nine-one-one. I'm not even sure I knew there was such a number. I wanted your father's life to end the way he would have wanted it to end—with dignity, and taste, and grace, and with just me and his old friend Harry Arnstein with him. Not with sirens screaming.”

It seemed to Miranda that her mother was making a lot of different excuses that didn't quite hang together. She hadn't called 911 because the life squad would make too much noise and disturb the neighbors. The life squad would have meant an autopsy. She hadn't even thought about calling 911. She didn't even know there was such a number. She wanted the death to be dignified and private. “Why did you wait so long before calling me?” she asked. “You say he died at twelve-thirty. I didn't hear from you until after four.”

“What would have been the point? I felt I had to do first things first.”

“I might have liked to have seen him one last time. I might have liked to have said goodbye to him.”

“I wanted to spare you that,” her mother said.

“Spare me? That's what I'd have liked to
do
, Mother!”

She looked up from her needlework. “Death isn't pretty, Miranda,” she said. “You don't know that. I do. It takes a certain amount of—practice—to be able to deal with death. You've had none. I've had a great deal. My mother, my father, my grandparents. Perhaps, the first time, I wasn't very good at it. But with practice I've gotten a lot better.”

Suddenly Miranda was very angry. “How can you just
sit
there like that?” she had cried. “Just sit there like some goddamned female Buddha, as though nothing has happened! Sitting there with your goddamned needlepoint—like Madame Defarge, stitching away while heads roll off the guillotine! Don't you have any human feelings, Mother? A man is dead. Your husband is dead. Maybe you didn't love him, but he was still your husband. And he was also my father! Whom I happened to love very much!”

Her mother rose slowly from her chair and folded the needlepoint canvas across her bosom. “This conversation isn't really getting us anywhere, is it?” she said. “I've asked people who want to pay their respects to come here for drinks at seven-thirty, and I need to freshen up. If you'd like to join us, you might want to freshen up too. You look a little windblown from your trip in from the Hamptons. Run a comb through your hair. Powder your nose.” Then she was gone, leaving Miranda fuming.

That night at seven-thirty the guests started arriving—the old friends, some of the people from the store, the neighbors from up and down Heather Lane. Some people stayed for only a few minutes. Others stayed longer. Tommy Bonham was one of the first to appear, and Miranda watched as he took her mother in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Connie, I'm so sorry.” Blazer arrived from the Village, looking more stunned than sullen, and Miranda was pleased to see that he had put on a dark suit and necktie. Harry Arnstein was there, looking solemn and professional, and Smitty had also come out from the city, looking red-eyed and a little frightened. She shouldn't be here, Miranda thought. And yet her mother had obviously asked her to come, and she watched as her mother made a special point of stepping over to Smitty, squeezing her hands, and kissing her lightly on both cheeks—kisses so light that flesh never touched flesh. Was this gesture done for the benefit of the audience, for the others in the room? “Isn't Connie re
mar
kable?” she heard someone whisper.

Moe Minskoff, who had had financial dealings with her father over the years, also appeared with his bleached-blond wife, who was called Honeychile—to her mother's almost visible displeasure.

“What are those people doing here?” she heard her mother whisper to Tommy Bonham. “Who invited them? I certainly didn't. How did they find out about this?”

Tommy Bonham merely rolled his eyes.

Meanwhile, both Minskoffs seemed to have decided to make an evening of it, not just a polite condolence call. They seemed to be settling in for the night.

By eight o'clock, there were perhaps twenty people in the formal living room. Milliken was serving drinks and passing trays of caviar on toast points, and Miranda's mother—now in a slender white silk jump suit with tiny silver bells at the belt—was moving about the room, trying to spend a little time with each guest, explaining how Si had had “a coronary accident” while swimming his laps—“Dr. Arnstein assured me it was very sudden, and there was no pain”—and soon the noise level in the room had risen, and it was clear that all the men in their sober suits and ties, and their wives in their demure little black dresses, were drinking and generally beginning to have a pretty good time.

“Si loved parties,” Miranda heard someone say. “He would have approved of this.”

But Miranda was not so sure.

Over the living room fireplace hung the large painting of Flying Flame, her father's famous racehorse that had won the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 1971, and, leaning against the mantel with a cigar in his fist, the portly Moses Minskoff was holding forth about the painting. “I remember when I came up with the name for that stallion for Si,” he was saying. “I said to Si, ‘Si, name him Flying Flame.'”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she heard her mother say.
“I
named that horse.”

“No,” he said flatly. “In actual fact, I came up with the name for that horse. I'm something of an expert on horseflesh, you know. It was the year of Comet Kohoutek, and I'd read in the paper that morning that the comet would appear like a flying flame across the sky. I said to Si, I said, ‘Si, there's the name for your stallion—Flying Flame.'”