Carriage Trade (25 page)

“Yes, and each time she returned a dress for credit, she bought something else. And she always paid her bills on time. So what she had was kind of a revolving credit line.”

“Do you remember Mrs. LeMosney's fingernail, Mother?”

“Oh, yes, tell that story, Miranda!”

“Well, Mrs. LeMosney had these very long fingernails. They were sort of her trademark, and she always painted the undersides of her nails too—bright red, as red as the shirt you were wearing that day, Mr. Turner—”

“How can you remember that? It was at least ten years ago!”

“Anyway, she was terribly proud of her fingernails. And one day she was in the store, trying on some things, and Daddy was helping her, and suddenly from the dressing room came this blood-curdling scream. The little dressing room maid came running out, crying, ‘Mr. Si! Mr. Si! It's Mrs. LeMosney!' Well, Daddy naturally thought she'd died in there or something—she was well over eighty at the time, and Daddy was always worried that one of his—well, that one of his less youthful ladies would die in the store. So he went rushing into the dressing room, certain that Mrs. LeMosney had literally shopped until she dropped. There stood Mrs. LeMosney in her bra and half slip, in tears, staring at her left hand. ‘I've broken a fingernail!' she sobbed. Well, the first thing Daddy did was to call Pauline and have her make an appointment with a manicurist to try to repair the damage—with a false nail or whatever. And after Mrs. LeMosney had gone off to the manicurist's, still in tears, Daddy went back to the dressing room. Crawling around the floor on his hands and knees, he found the broken-off nail in the carpet. He had the nail embedded in the center of a Lucite cube as a paperweight, and he had the cube inscribed
Left Index Fingernail of Audrey LeMosney, Broken at Tarkington's Fifth Avenue, September 23, 1983
and had it gift-wrapped and sent to her.”

“For Christmas. He sent it to her for Christmas.”

“And speaking of Christmas, do you remember my terrible Christmas, Mother?”

“I do indeed. You were a very naughty girl. Tell that story, Miranda.”

“I must have been five or six—”

“Five and a half.”

“And it was Christmas Day, and we were spending it in the apartment over the store. That morning, I'd opened all my presents, and by ten o'clock or so I was bored with them all, so I went downstairs to the store, which of course was closed. In the middle of the center aisle on the street floor, the display department had set up this magnificent Christmas tree. It seemed at least twenty feet high—”

“Well, perhaps not quite. The ceiling is only eighteen.”

“It seemed that tall to me. Anyway, it was covered with candy canes and tinsel and popcorn balls, and underneath it were all sorts of packages, beautifully wrapped in different colored papers, tied in gorgeous ribbons and bows—big packages, little packages, packages of all shapes and sizes. I suddenly got it in my head that this was a Christmas tree my parents had forgotten about and that all these packages were more Christmas presents for me, so I started tearing open the packages—there were hundreds of them. Of course each one I ripped open turned out to be nothing but an empty box, but I kept at it, thinking that at least some of them had to contain gifts for me. I don't know where the store's security staff was while I was doing this—maybe in the basement, having a cup of Christmas cheer. But when I'd opened every gift box and found them all empty, I started on the candy canes and popcorn balls. They turned out to be made of papier-mache, but I kept pulling them off the tree, anyway—as high up as I could reach—hoping to find a real one. I was in a gift-getting frenzy!

“Well, when somebody finally came to look for me, I was mad as hell. I was crying, stamping my feet, and saying, ‘There's nothing here for me!' When my parents saw what I had done, something told me that they were not pleased.”

“It was the most godawful mess,” her mother says. “Your father was furious.”

“Naturally. That display was supposed to stay on the floor until after New Year's. The store was going to open the next morning. Someone was going to have to rebuild the whole thing. I was miserable. I wasn't just miserable for myself, but I was miserable because I soon realized all the trouble I was causing everybody else. Cyril Marx was still director of display then, and he had to leave his Christmas dinner on Staten Island and come in to supervise. So did two of his assistants. Everybody was in the basement, rewrapping boxes. Even Daddy helped.”

“So did I,” her mother says.

“I could tell how furious everybody was with me—people muttering, ‘Damn little kid, damn little brat.' People worked halfway through the night, trying to find new candy canes and popcorn balls that hadn't had bites taken out of them. I knew that my own Christmas was ruined and that I'd ruined Christmas for a lot of other people as well.

“Well, while all this work and cleanup was going on, I guess my father realized how miserable I was. I'd been sent to my room, but suddenly my father came in and said, ‘Come downstairs with me, Miranda.' As I went down in the elevator with him I thought I was going to be in for more punishment. The mess around the tree had been cleaned up, but there was one gift box under it, wrapped in—I remember—gold paper, with a red ribbon. ‘There's one package you forgot to open, Miranda,' he said. ‘It's for you. Go ahead, open it.' I opened it, and inside was the most beautiful French doll I'd ever seen, wearing white lace. I still have that doll. I don't know where he managed to find it, on Christmas Day, with all the stores closed—”

“Actually, I think it was a display piece,” her mother says. “But it was an antique doll. It was a pretty doll.”

“And so, it was probably the worst Christmas of my entire life. But it was also one of the best. It was certainly a Christmas I'll never forget.” She feels her eyes mist over, remembering it. “God, I was a rotten little kid, wasn't I, Mother?”

“No, just a normally active five-year-old,” her mother says. “Angry as your father was, he realized that.”

There is a silence around the dinner table now.

“And what about his philanthropies?” Miranda says suddenly. “There was a little old lady on West End Avenue whom he used to take care of—”

Her mother clears her throat and makes a face. “Let's not go into that, Miranda,” she says. “She caused us a lot of trouble. She died about five years ago, thank goodness!”

“What sort of trouble, Mother?”

“She became very—demanding. Let's just say that some of your father's charities backfired.” And Miranda decides that the little old lady on West End Avenue cannot have been her long-lost grandmother, now living in Florida, after all.

There is another brief silence, and then Peter Turner says, “How did you and Mr. Tarkington meet, Mrs. Tarkington?”

“Meet? Oh, that's an amusing story too. It was my twenty-first birthday, and my father had given me a check for a thousand dollars. That was quite a lot of money in those days, and my father said, ‘Bobolink'—he called my two sisters and me his bobolinks—‘Bobolink, I'm giving you this only on condition that you buy yourself something pretty at Tarkington's.” She breaks off, and her face grows pensive. “The day Si died was also my birthday. Funny coincidence, isn't it? Two birthday presents. The day I found him, and the day I lost him.…

“Anyway, I came into the store, and who should come up to greet me but the owner himself? I was terribly impressed. ‘May I show you some of our things, Miss Banning?' he said. Goodness, I thought. The great Silas Tarkington himself was waiting on little me.”

“Well, you were pretty well-known even then, Mother. Three years earlier, you'd been named Debutante of the Year. Your picture had been in
Life
magazine.”

“Yes, but later I found out that Fa had set up the whole thing in advance. Fa—that's what we called my father—had phoned Silas Tarkington and told him I was coming in. It was part of the birthday present, getting the owner himself to greet me at the door and wait on me personally. But I was certainly impressed. And later, when I had decided on a dress—it was a white piqué short summer evening dress, by Dior, with red and yellow tulips appliqued on it—he said to me, ‘May I tell you that you are one of the most beautiful women who have ever set foot inside my store?' And naturally that impressed me too. Later I found out that he said that to every first-time client. But at the time I was most definitely impressed. Oh, yes.” She touches the corner of her napkin to the corner of her eye. “Shall we take our coffee in the next room?”

Once the foursome has moved into the sun room for coffee, Miranda's mother says, “Now, Mr. Hockaday, why don't you just wander through the house and look at the collection? You have the complete catalogue from Mr. Kohlberg's office, and you'll find paintings in nearly every room. Just wander through the house and take your time.… Miranda, darling, why don't you read Mr. Turner's cards? Find out if he's a suitable biographer for your father.”

“Would you like me to, Mr. Turner?” she asks him. “Among my other talents, I'm an excellent tarot reader—or diviner, as we say in the fortune-telling business.”

“Please call me Peter. Can you really do that? Tell my fortune?”

“Absolutely. It's one of the more important things I learned at Sarah Lawrence. In Psychics One-oh-one.”

“Please do it,” he says eagerly.

She fetches the tarot pack from a drawer in the card table. “Come sit beside me,” she says. “Now, first I have to select your significator card. This will be the card that represents
you.”
She studies his face. “Since you have dark brown hair and eyes and are a young man, your significator card will be the Knight of Cups. You see, even though this method of divination was devised by the ancient Celts, it's very scientific. Remember that it was the ancient Celts who built Stonehenge, by which they predicted the solstices and the phases of the moon.” She makes a droll face. “This means that everything I say about you will be absolutely true.” She winks at him, removes the Knight of Cups from the deck, and places it face upward on the table.

“I'm really amazed that you remember me from Yale,” he says. “Out of five thousand students.”

“It was your red shirt,” she says. “It was fire-engine red. And you were—well, sort of staring at me.”

“Yes, I guess I was.”

“Now, I want you to shuffle the cards three times, very carefully, and while you're shuffling them, I want you to think hard, really concentrate, on any question you want answered or any problem you want solved.… Now cut the cards into three piles, away from your heart, to your left.… Now give me the leftmost pile.” She begins to lay out her tableau. “This first card covers you. This card represents the general atmosphere surrounding the problem, or the question you want answered.… The atmosphere is favorable, as indicated by the Sun.… You will attain your personal goals.… And now the Hanged Man, in this quadrant, is another favorable sign. It suggests that you are introspective, spiritual, willing to make sacrifices.… I believe the question you have asked concerns a young woman. Am I correct?”

“You're right!”

Miranda's mother picks up her needlepoint, the cover she is making for her tennis racket.

“This is unusual,” Miranda continues. “All the Major Arcana have fallen in this quadrant. One day you will be very famous. That is, your name will be known, but not your face.…”

Presently, Mr. Hockaday returns. “Mrs. Tarkington, I wonder if I could have a word with you in private?” The expression on his face is grave.

She hesitates, starts to rise, then sits again. “No, I think you can say whatever you have to say to me in front of Miranda and Mr. Turner. After all, Mr. Turner has been promised that we'll hold nothing back about my late husband.”

“I don't quite know how to put this to you, Mrs. Tarkington,” he begins. “But I'm afraid your late husband was—or whoever advised him on his purchases was—well, it was the Gauguin in the drawing room that first aroused my suspicion.”

Her needlework falls briefly into her lap, but she picks it up again and quickly draws another pale blue thread through her canvas, completing a stitch. “Is it a fake?” she asks.

“I'm afraid so, yes.”

“The Vuillard?”

“Also.”

“The three Cézannes?”

He nods.

“The Van Gogh sunflowers?”

He nods again.

“The Utrillos?”

“Yes.”

“The Hoppers and the Bentons?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“All.”

“I see,” she says.

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

There is a silence, and then Miranda hears her mother say, “Well, that, I suppose, is that. It's rather like Miranda's empty Christmas boxes, isn't it?”

Miranda, who has been staring hard at the tableau of cards spread out in front of her, reaches out now and squeezes her mother's hand, and their eyes lock briefly.

“You mentioned a Monet water lilies, Mrs. Tarkington.”

“Yes. That's in the apartment in the city.”

“I'd like to have a look at that too.”

“Certainly,” she says. And then, quickly, “No! I don't want to know.”

“I think I'd better go now, Mrs. Tarkington.”

“No. You haven't had your coffee. After she finishes with Mr. Turner, Miranda will want to read your cards. She's very clever. Do you take cream?”

“Now here in the King of Pentacles,” Miranda says, touching the cards with her fingertips, moving from one column to the next. “He is a very strong figure in your life. Pentacles and Swords dominate.…”

And now Miranda is alone in the sun room. It is almost midnight, and she is not thinking about love, exactly, though love is a part of it. The two male dinner guests have departed, and her mother has said good night and made her way up to her bedroom.