Carriage Trade (16 page)

“Will you give up your beauty routine? The Dead Sea mud packs?”

“Well,” she says, still smiling, “some habits are harder to break than others,” and she reaches for another cigarette.

“Will you give up this apartment?”

“Of course, when the store is sold. I've always hated this apartment, you know. Everything in it is fake, including—but never mind.”

“Mother, where was Blackie when Daddy died?” Miranda asks suddenly.

“Blackie?”

“Blackamoor. Daddy's dog.”

“Why, in his kennel, I suppose. Yes, I'm sure he was in his kennel. Why do you ask?”

“Sometimes he swam with Daddy.”

“Well, he didn't on Saturday,” her mother says. “But I don't understand what—”

“What became of the TV set?”

Her mother looks briefly at her hands, then up at Miranda. “The TV set?”

“The TV set that President Ford gave him. It was always in the pool house. It wasn't that night.”

“Oh, that,” her mother says. “It was sent out for repairs several weeks ago, I think.”

“Where was it sent?”

“To a repair shop, I suppose! I don't know
which
repair shop your father sent it to, for heaven's sake!”

“Sent out for repairs in its Lucite case?”

“I suppose! I just remember your father mentioning something about repairs. Really, Miranda, I—”

“There was a power outage in the whole pool area of the farm that night. Did you know that?”

“Yes. Yes, I remember one of the maintenance men mentioning that. Something to do with a circuit breaker. It was fixed the next morning.”

“Yes, I know.”

“What do you mean you know?”

“I went out the next morning, and everything was working fine.”

“That's what I just told you! There was a problem. It was fixed. But I really don't understand this line of questioning, Miranda. What has any of this got to do with—?”

“I think you're lying to me, Mother. I think there's something you're not telling me.”

“Lying? Why would I lie to you? Don't be ridiculous, Miranda! What have dogs, TV sets, and power failures got to do with what we were talking about? We were talking about our need to sell the store. We were talking about my travel plans and—”

“I think Blazer was right this afternoon,” Miranda says evenly. “All you ever cared about was Daddy's money.”

“Oh, Miranda!” her mother says with a sob. “What a dreadful, wretched, cruel thing to say to me! You don't understand anything, do you? You understand absolutely nothing at all!”

At that moment Milliken appears at the library door. “Supper is served,” he says.

Consuelo Tarkington rises from the green leather chair in one swift, synchronized motion. Miranda also rises and follows her mother out across the marble foyer to the dining room on the opposite side, where the smaller of the two tables is set for two with lighted candles in a seven-branched candelabrum.

As Milliken seats Miranda at her place, she says to him, “Do you know what happened to Daddy's TV set, Milliken, the one he kept in the pool house?”

“Ah, the one the President gave him. It was apparently stolen, ma'am.”

“Stolen? Was that it?” Consuelo says brightly. “I thought it was sent out for repairs. Well, I knew something happened to it.”

“Very proud of that TV set he was, too, ma'am. He always used to show it to visitors. We apparently had a prowler that day at the farm. I heard the dog barking, and I went out to investigate. The first thing I noticed was that the television set was gone.”

“Was anything else missing?” Miranda asks him.

“Yes, ma'am, there was. There was an underwater watch that I believe you gave him for his birthday several years ago. He was very fond of that watch too, though he didn't wear it all that much. He kept it in the pool house, and that was missing too. His clothes were hanging in the dressing room, and I found that his billfold was missing from his right rear pocket, where he always carried it. I doubt there was much money in it. He never liked to carry cash, but the burglar got that too.” He turns to Miranda's mother. “I'm sorry, ma'am, but I didn't tell you any of this at the time. I thought you'd had enough that day to upset you. Because, you see, when I found his clothes in the dressing room, that was when I went out to the pool and found him—Mr. Tarkington, your poor father, ma'am—floating there.”

“You
found him, Milliken? I thought you found him, Mother. That's what the paper said. That's what you told me.”

“What difference does it make?” her mother cries. “One of us found him first, and then the other came! I can't even remember it all that clearly!” Miranda looks across at her mother, and tears are streaming down her face, and Miranda realizes that she has never seen her mother weep before. Her mother makes small balls of her fists and pounds them on the polished tabletop, and the china and glassware rattle and the candle flames dance. “What I want to know is why you're doing this to me, Miranda! The most horrible day of my entire life, and you keep harking back to it, harking back to it, trying to make me remember all the horror I've been trying so hard to forget! Let sleeping dogs lie, for God's sake! Leave me alone—just leave me alone!” She dabs at her streaming eyes with her linen napkin. “Now look what you've done! Cook has made this beautiful crabmeat salad, made it with her famous Armagnac mayonnaise—my favorite—and I've lost my appetite completely. With all I had to do today, I skipped lunch. When I came home tonight, I was hungry, but now my appetite's completely gone!” She flings her napkin onto her untouched plate, pushes back her chair, rises from the chair with a simple fluid motion, and runs sobbing from the room.

As quickly and discreetly as he can, Milliken withdraws from this unhappy domestic scene into the pantry, and Miranda sits alone.

Arriving at his small cottage at the far end of Heather Lane, about four miles down from Flying Horse Farm, Thomas E. Bonham III parks his Mercedes, pockets the keys, and walks up the flagstone path to his front door. This cottage was once the gatekeeper's lodge on one of the big estates, long since broken up by a developer into half-acre plots with split-level houses selling in the $450,000 to $750,000 range. Split-level or not, this is still Old Westbury, a fashionable country address.

This cottage is Tommy Bonham's weekend getaway place. Normally, on a Monday night, which this is, Tommy would be in Manhattan, in his apartment on Sutton Place. But today, with the store closed in Si's honor, and with Tommy's only appointment having been drinks with Miranda at the Pierre, he has decided to spend an extra night in the country and drive back to New York in the morning.

In his front entryway, Tommy Bonham tosses his Mark Cross briefcase in a chair, kicks off his Gucci loafers, and moves, in his stocking feet, into the lighted living room, loosening his Turnbull & Asser necktie and unbuttoning the collar button of his shirt. He tosses the necktie over a lampshade. Then he sheds his jacket, tosses it into a chair, unbuttons his shirt cuffs, and sinks into the big Victorian sofa, causing a large pile of retail trade journals on the sofa to slide precipitously toward him.

Nino, his Filipino houseboy, whose full name is Saturnino Salas, greets him, making clicking noises with his tongue. “Could burn your tie like that, Tommy,” Nino says, but instead of removing the necktie from the lampshade, Nino merely turns off the lamp.

Tommy Bonham is a notoriously slipshod housekeeper, and Nino doesn't appear to do much to help. A number of people who have visited Tommy, both in New York and here, have wondered how such an elegantly put-together man can live, apparently quite happily, in such disarray. Though Miranda has never been in the Sutton Place apartment, she has visited her neighbor's weekend cottage a number of times, and what is she apt to see there? A pair of dirty tennis sneakers on the coffee table, a half-filled cup of coffee on the window-sill with a dead fly floating in it. Coming in from the pool, he will drape his wet trunks over this same lampshade to dry.

His dining room table is always covered with at least a week's worth of newspapers and journals, along with paper clips, ballpoint pens, pencils, scissors, and a great deal else. This, he explains, is his “desk” when he works at home. His bedroom is even worse. Miranda has never seen his bed made. Overfilled dresser drawers hang open, their contents—socks, underwear, handkerchiefs—spilling out. In one corner of the bedroom is a stack of cardboard cartons, the kind you can pick up at a supermarket when you're packing to move, and Lord knows what these contain. When Miranda used his bathroom, his jockstrap was hanging from the doorknob, and one peek at the unlovely contents of his medicine cabinet was enough for her—uncapped, half-empty tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream squeezed from the middle, slivers of soap, rusted razor blades, broken combs, hairbrushes matted with blond hair, ragged toothbrushes caked with dried paste, an open box of condoms, and a brown and gluey substance spilled across the glass shelves in which a rusting nail file, several pills and capsules of dubious origin, and a rolled condom had become more or less permanently embedded.

“Why don't you let me straighten this place up for you?” she asked him once.

“No!” he had cried, almost in panic. “Right now, I know exactly where everything is!”

The kitchen, which is Nino's domain, always seems to be piled with dirty dishes and pots and pans. Nino's only duties seem to be laundering and ironing Tommy's shirts, pressing his suits and dinner jackets, polishing his shoes, and preparing his meals.

Now, at the bar, Nino fixes drinks for them both and then comes and sits beside Tommy on the sofa, pushing the pile of magazines to the floor. They touch glasses. Then, with a sigh, Tommy says, “Well, Nino, phase one is completed.”

“You offer her big job?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And she say?”

“I didn't expect her to give me an answer right away,” he says. “I think she was a little overwhelmed. It's a job she can't possibly handle, of course, but she was definitely flattered when I told her I thought she could.”

“Flattered? What is flattered?”

“Happy. Pleased with herself. Pleased that I think she's smarter than she really is. But she'll be putty—you know what putty is?” He makes kneading motions with his hands. “She'll be putty in my hands, Nino, and I'll be completely in charge of things, wait and see. It'll be my store at last.”

“And you need her because? Explain again.”

“So I can get control of how she votes her stock, before the enemy does.”

“Is like war.”

“Yeah. That's why they call it a hostile takeover.”

“Tell me again, Tommy, what is stock?”

“Shares. Shares of ownership of the store.”

“And when you have that, and war is over, we go to Paracale?”

“Yes, Nino,
caro
Nino. Then we'll go to Paracale, and we'll go there rich.”

Nino, staring into his whiskey glass, swirls his ice cubes thoughtfully. Then, as though he has seen a vision in the glass, his whiskey-colored face breaks into a smile. “Oh, you must see Paracale, Tommy,” he says. “Is not a big place, not like New York. Is a very, very small place, and only one road leads there. But is so beautiful, you will love it, Tommy. The sea—the sea is so blue, bluer than any blue sky you ever see. And in the morning, even before the sun comes up across the sea, the fishermen, in their little boats, are going out.… My father, he will be there … my mother … my sisters.…”

Tommy Bonham closes his eyes. He leans back against the sofa and runs the tip of his left index finger slowly up and down the inner curve of Nino's thigh. He has heard the description of Nino's village in the Philippines so often that he knows it by heart. He yawns and pinches Nino's knee. “I've got to get back to the city early in the morning, Nino,” he says. “Let's get to bed.”

8

Now it is Tuesday morning, and Moses Minskoff is on the telephone again. “Ah, Mr. Martindale,” he is saying. “How good of you to call me back, and to call me back so promptly. May I call you Al? Or do you prefer Albert? … Please call me Moe, then, Albert—all my good friends do.

“Now what I have in mind for you, Albert—for you and Continental—is a two-tiered tender offer. I'm going to suggest that you make Tarkington's shareholders an offer of sixty dollars a share for their holdings.… Whoa! Hold on. Yes, I know that seems a bit on the high side, Albert, but let me finish, please. Once I finish telling you my full proposal, everything will become as clear to you as a summer's day. Let us start with the sixty-dollar figure. You will offer them eighty percent of this figure in cash and the rest in Continental's stock, notes, debentures, what-the-hell—what we on Wall Street call cram-down paper. Who knows what that paper is worth? Nobody. Whatever the market will stand for, right? But everybody appreciates the value of cash, don't you agree? Of course you do.

“Now, Albert, this is going to be a two-tier offer with a kind of special spin on it, which I'll get to momentarily. The first tier of the offer, the cash tier, will have a tight deadline on it. I'm suggesting a deadline of ten business days, Albert.… Why so tight? I'll tell you why. For one thing, we don't want to give the enemy any time to organize any kind of poison-pill defense. For another thing, it's important to act fast because right now the company is in a state of shambles. Since the old man died, nobody knows who's running the store. The whole family is at each other's throats. The widow wants to sell the store, the daughter doesn't. The son got zip in the old man's will, and he may decide to sue. If he sues, the whole shmeer gets tied up in litigation, we'll be up to our ass in lawyers, and none of us is gonna get anywhere.… How do I know all this? Let's just say I got my sources. So strike while the iron is hot, Albert. Strike while the iron is hot.