Carriage Trade (48 page)

But just do me one favor. If you put all this in your story, don't publish until after Mama dies. She's an old lady now, and I don't want her to suffer any more than she has already. She may deserve the blame, but nobody deserves to suffer. But after you're dead? After you're dead, you don't suffer. So will you promise me that? And me? Well, I think I've learned to live with who I am. Almost. At least I keep trying. Forgive me.… Do you mind stopping your tape for a minute until I—?

Yes, I'm all right now. Rita says it's good for me to let out my feelings now and then, not keep everything bottled up inside, the way I tend to do. Sometimes it's healthy to have a good cry. And you can't undo the past, can you? You just have to live with it, like a curse.

And now, out of the blue, just the other day comes an offer to buy my Tarkington's stock—from a man named Albert Martindale of Continental Stores, and guess who's acting as his agent? None other than Mr. Moses Minskoff! Isn't that a coincidence? Mr. Minskoff no longer works for New York State. He couldn't stand the bureaucracy, he says, and—just like Leo predicted, I give Leo full credit—the state's rehabilitation program that was helping Solly was phased out a couple of years afterward. Anyway, Mr. Minskoff now has his own company, specializing in mergers and acquisitions, and he's brokering Continental's buyout of Tarkington's. Mr. Minskoff says this is going to be the deal of a lifetime for me, and I'll get all my original investment back plus a good deal more. Leo says I should hold out and see if we can get a better offer than sixty dollars a share. But I haven't decided what to do. I'm conflicted about that too. I have these feelings of guilt about taking money for shares in my brother's store now that he's dead. Rita and I have been trying to work on that in our last couple of sessions. Sometimes, when I feel conflicted like this, I can't seem to move in any direction, and then I'll get an asthma attack, or a migraine, or break out in one of these terrible rashes. Why do I feel that, if he didn't want to give me any money while he was living, I shouldn't accept any money now that he's dead?

Yes, I was sad when I heard my brother had died. It was kind of an abstract sadness, of course, because it was so long since I'd seen him. And there was guilt, too, thinking that perhaps I should have made more of an effort. I no longer had any mental picture of what he looked like, and that was a terrible feeling.

I knew he'd had two children that I'd never met. I never hear much about the son. But the daughter, Miranda—I see her picture from time to time, in magazines like
Vanity Fair
and
Town & Country
. She's an awfully pretty girl, isn't she? From her pictures, she seems really movie-star pretty.

Any looks in the family come from my mother's side. When my mother was young, she was really beautiful. And that's another thing I'll never understand. If Mama was going to cheat on her husband, why did she do it with a man like Sidney Weiss, who was just about the ugliest-looking man you've ever seen? If she was going to make me a bastard, why did she have to make me an ugly one, with horrible orange hair?

“And so,” Peter Turner says to Miranda, turning off the recorder, “that's your Aunt Simma. That's your father's sister.” They are sitting in her apartment at 11 East 66th Street, and she is curled in a chair, looking pensive, her chin in her hand.

“Goodness,” she says at last, “what an unhappy woman!” Then she jumps to her feet. “I'm going down there to see her!” she says.

24

“Miranda Tarkington!” Simma is saying. “Solly's little girl! I can't believe you're sitting here in this room with me. When you called from New York, saying you wanted to come to Florida to see me, I couldn't believe my ears.”

“I just felt it was high time you and I met, Aunt Simma,” Miranda says.

“Aunt Simma! That sounds so strange to me. Nobody's ever called me that before. I'm just Ma to my children and Grandma to my grandchildren. How old are you now, dear?”

“I'm twenty-four, Aunt Simma.”

“Twenty-four. Just think of that. It's been many more years than that since I last saw your father. That was more like forty years ago. Well, I must say you're just as pretty as you are in photographs—prettier, even.”

“Thank you. You have a lovely apartment, Aunt Simma.”

“Yes, we like it. It's right on the golf course, which my husband likes. And the Intracoastal is just two blocks away, where he likes to fish off the bridge.”

There is a little silence, and then Miranda says, “Peter Turner let me listen to the tape of the interview he did with you. I hope you don't mind.”

“Oh,” she says. “That means you know my shameful secret, that I'm illegitimate. Well, I guess that's all right. You're family, after all.”

“I don't think illegitimacy is all that shameful,” Miranda says. “I think it's rather romantic. In England you'd be called a love-child. Your mother's love-child.”

“Love-child? Well, perhaps. But I only wish my mother had picked someone more attractive to have this love-child with.”

“Looks are only skin deep, remember. He may have had other qualities—”

“What they were, I can't imagine! After I found out what I did, I couldn't bear the sight of him. I had to switch to another dentist. It was that hard for me to accept.”

“Actually, your tapes told me something much more important than Grandmother's involvement with Dr. Weiss. That's one reason I decided I needed to talk to you.”

“Oh?” Simma Belsky says.

“You see, since my father died, there are a number of aspects of my father's life and business that I've been looking into, and Peter Turner has been very helpful. I've learned all sorts of things I didn't know before, family secrets that had been kept hidden from me. For instance, I didn't know my father's original name was Tarcher. And I never knew he'd been to prison.”

“Did that come as a terrible shock?”

“A bit of a one, yes. But I had to admire the way he'd been able to bury his past.”

“The State of New York helped him to do that,” Simma says.

“I don't think so, Aunt Simma,” she says. “Peter and I have done some checking, and there never was any prisoner rehabilitation program in New York State in the late nineteen-fifties such as Mr. Minskoff described to you and your mother. That was all a lie.”

“Really?”

“Moses Minskoff never worked for the State of New York in any capacity. He was not my father's parole officer. Moses Minskoff was a small-time crook who knew my father when they were both inmates at Hillsdale. In fact, when Moses Minskoff first came to see you and your mother, he was on parole himself. I brought along a copy of Moses Minskoff's criminal record at the time he was sentenced to Hillsdale. I thought you might like to take a look at it.” She reaches in her purse, withdraws a sheaf of papers, and hands them to Simma.

“My God,” Simma says, reading through them. “Fraud … petty larceny … extortion! I should have listened to my husband. He said we shouldn't trust him,”

“I'm afraid he was right. Moses Minskoff is a con artist. He came to you and your mother, posing as a parole officer, in order to extort money to help my father start his store. With your mother, he preyed on her maternal feelings. With you, he resorted to a rather primitive form of blackmail.”

“My God!”

“Moses Minskoff has been a fixture in my father's business life for as long as I can remember. He was always on the periphery of things, but he was always there. Daddy used to call him Mr. Fixit. When things needed fixing, Mr. Fixit fixed them. If money was needed, Mr. Fixit found it—somewhere. It begins to look as though, in the early days at least, Moses Minskoff was using Tarkington's to launder money that may well have come from criminal sources. How long that went on, we still don't know. But certainly, in the beginning, Daddy needed money, and Moses Minskoff provided it, and Daddy didn't ask any questions. You see, it's important to remember that, where Tarkington's was concerned, my father was the idea man. He was also a super salesman; it was he who created the store's reputation for fine merchandise and superb service. Moses Minskoff hardly ever came into the store, but he was always there in the background, making deals. When Daddy began to suspect that some of the deals weren't on the up and up, and started asking questions, it was too late. Moses Minskoff had his claws too deeply into him for Daddy to escape.”

“It begins to sound as though this man should be thrown back into jail, Miranda!”

“Peter and I certainly think so. But we don't have enough hard evidence yet. Once we do, I'm going to have to decide whether or not to take what I know to the Attorney General's office. There's a danger; that land of publicity could permanently damage the store's reputation, and we don't want that.”

“Of course not.”

“I think Daddy was genuinely frightened of what his silent business partner could do to the store. Minskoff had the power to expose Daddy's past. He could blackmail Daddy, just the way he blackmailed you. Or maybe Daddy discovered that, without even being aware of it, he himself had become so deeply involved in Minskoff's shady deals that there was no way he could extricate himself. Minskoff clung to him like a leech. Right up until the day he died, my father was trying to pry himself loose, and at the end he may have thought he'd found a way.”

That way, she thinks, may have been a plan to run off to Bermuda with Smitty and leave the whole mess behind him. He had changed his identity once before. Perhaps he was planning to do it again. But she doesn't tell Simma Belsky this. “But then—” she begins. “But then he was found floating dead in his swimming pool.”

Simma stares at her. “Miranda, do you mean to say you think your father was murdered?”

“We don't know. It begins to look more and more like that, Aunt Simma, and Moe Minskoff certainly had a motive. But until we find out more, all we can do is speculate. One big reason I came down here is to warn you about him.”

“If Minskoff is as dangerous as you say he is, Miranda, isn't what you're doing a little dangerous too? Aren't you a little frightened that something could happen to you?”

She laughs. “Not yet,” she says. “But if we're able to get the goods on him—that's when I'll decide whether to be frightened or not.”

“What you're doing worries me, Miranda.”

“Well, I also came down here to ask your help,” she says. “As you know, Continental Stores is making a takeover bid for Tarkington's, and Moe Minskoff, of all people, is acting as their agent. Various stockholders have already been approached with a two-tiered offer for their shares. It's a very tempting offer, but I'm here to ask that you not accept it, Aunt Simma. To begin with, Tommy Bonham—who was Daddy's vice president and general manager—and I don't want to lose the store. We want to run it ourselves, so we're fighting this takeover. Continental is offering a ridiculously high price per share, so we're certain that if they succeed in this they'll simply sell off our real estate and inventory and close the store. Or they'll turn it into something very different from what it is, and either way that will be the end of my father's dream. My mother and I each own about twenty percent of the shares, but that doesn't give us a majority, and even my mother may decide to jump ship. If she doesn't, yours could be the swing vote, Aunt Simma. And in any case we need every vote we can get to stop Continental.”

“I see,” Simma says. “Of course I'll have to discuss all this with Leo.”

“Of course. I want you to. I want you to discuss it with him very carefully. But remember—any deal that involves Moe Minskoff is a deal that stinks. How he got involved with a chain the size of Continental is a mystery, but believe me, Moe Minskoff means nothing but trouble, and that makes us doubly determined to save the store. And it's such a beautiful store, Aunt Simma. Have you ever been there?”

“Never. I was sure my brother never wanted to lay eyes on me again.”

“I don't think that's true, Aunt Simma,” she says. “I think he loved you and your mother very much. But I think he was so embarrassed by—so ashamed of—the tactics Moe Minskoff used to get the two of you to invest that he couldn't bear to face either of you after he found out. Posing as his parole officer, for God's sake! I honestly don't think Daddy had any idea of the kind of dirty tricks Moe was using to get you to invest until it was all over.”

“Well, perhaps,” Simma says, but she does not look convinced.

“I'm sure that's how he felt. Simma, I knew my father longer than you did. There were lots of things about him that I didn't exactly approve of, but I don't think he'd knowingly betray his own mother and his sister.”

“If he felt so guilty about the way he'd treated Mama and me, why didn't he leave us the money he owed us in his will? He knew we were still in the land of the living. Why couldn't he have at least done that?”

Miranda bites her lip. “It was a very bitter will,” she says. “He was in a very bitter frame of mind when he wrote that will. But I do know that when he died he was in the process of preparing a new will. He was planning to add some additional bequests. I don't know what they were, because he died before the new will could be executed. I wish I could say that you and your mother were going to be remembered in it, but I can't.”

Now it is Simma's tone that is bitter. “Mama and I each turned over nearly half of our inheritance to him,” she says. “Nearly half! A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money in nineteen fifty-six. To me, it still is. Mama kept calling him and writing him about why there were never any dividends. We'd been promised nine percent. But he never answered her letters or returned her calls.”