Carriage Trade (7 page)

“Smitty.”

“Who else?”

“Smitty knows her stones. Anyway, I'm touched that he'd leave that to me, Mandy. Of course I could never wear it. It was like his signature. It was
his
ring. It will always be his ring.”

“I suppose so, yes.” She sips her Lillet.

“And what about the art collection?”

“That was something of a shocker, too. Mother gets to keep up to twenty paintings for her lifetime. The rest go to the museum—
but
only if you-know-who is made special curator of the collection.”

“Smitty again.”

“How'd you guess? That was a little callous of him, don't you think, putting Mother and Smitty in the same paragraph of the will? But again, Mother was cool as a cucumber when she heard. Didn't blink one mascaraed eyelash.”

“Callous? I'm not so sure, Mandy. It could be his way of giving Smitty a new job. Getting her out of the store—for your sake.”

“Really? You think so?”

“That's the way his mind worked. He's left you and your mother a major share of the store's ownership. And I don't think Smitty is one of your favorite people.”

“Really? You noticed that? Well, aren't you smart, Mr. Tomcat. I
loathe
Smitty!”

“But you have to admit she's been a good jewelry buyer. Her department's figures have been among the best in the store.”

“Unless he let her pad them—among her other special perks.”

“No. She never padded any figures. No figures were ever padded.”

“You mean those are her real boobs? Anyway, it's nice to hear you speak of her in the past tense.”

He winks at her, and she smiles back at him.

“Actually,” she says, “I don't know why I resent Smitty so. It's not as though she was the first of Daddy's girlfriends, and she probably wouldn't have been his last. It was just that—”

“That she was getting to be a little too important to him. In a way, it may be good that he died when he did, before he did something—foolish.”

“You mean, like—”

“She told me she was going to marry him.”

Miranda stares at him, but his eyes, as he sips his cocktail, wander away from hers.

Whenever Miranda looks at Tommy Bonham, she has never failed to be struck by his extraordinary good looks. “Heck, I was just a little Hoosier hick from Indiana,” she has often heard him say. “Until Si Tarkington plucked me out of a cornfield when I was a kid of twenty-three, on a hunch that I might have some ability, brought me into the store, and taught me everything I know about retailing.”

Well, that makes a charming story, but Miranda knows enough about Tommy's background to know that it isn't entirely true. What would her boulevardier father have been doing in Indiana? And in a cornfield, no less? No. Tommy may have come from Indiana, but after graduating from Bloomington, where he'd been a theater major, he'd brought himself to New York, hoping to find work as an actor. In New York, Miranda supposes, Tommy's good looks and—she imagines—his sexuality stood him in good stead. His first job at the store was as a salesman in the shoe department. But he rose fast, very fast—thanks, no doubt, to his good looks.

In his mid-forties, Tommy still has those good looks and that smoldering whiff of sexuality that is as lingering as his Giorgio cologne. But all traces of an Indiana cornfield have vanished, or been banished, by now, except perhaps in his slightly windblown blond hair, his deeply pigmented blue eyes, and that trio of dimples when he smiles. Otherwise, he suggests a cornfield about as much as a polished George III candlestick does. He has a burnished look, a finished look, the look of something designed and crafted with great care. She has heard Tommy Bonham described as “too good-looking,” but if he gets away with such good looks it is mainly because he seems to be so utterly unaware of them.

Miranda Tarkington has known plenty of handsome men—men who are handsome and know it—men whose eyes, when they enter a room, seem to travel on automatic pilot to the nearest mirror. But Tommy's eyes never do this. They travel to the nearest woman and seem to tell her immediately that she is looking her best. Tommy is not the “
Dah
ling, you look
mah
velous” type. His eyes say that for him. This is also the double secret of her mother's famous beauty. She appears to be completely unconscious of her looks. And when her azure eyes fix on the person she is talking to, that person suddenly feels that he or she is the most interesting, important, and desirable creature in the universe.

It is Tommy's good looks, Miranda often thinks, that have made him ideally suited for working in what is essentially a woman's store. Tommy's looks, she is certain, were what made her father elevate him to his second in command. In fact, all her father's employees were chosen for their looks, Smitty included. Form over substance, any day. Miranda herself would never have been allowed to work in the store if she hadn't been pretty. And it is interesting that Silas Tarkington should have chosen a man who could have been his wife's fraternal twin to be his right-hand man. “I have always loved to be surrounded by beautiful things,” her father once said. Miranda sometimes wonders: What did—but it should be
what does
, since she is still alive—Alice Tarkington, who is Blazer's mother, look like? Miranda doesn't know. She has never met her, and naturally there are no pictures of her father's first wife. But Alice must be, or must have once been, a beauty, Miranda thinks.

Like her father, Tommy Bonham has his special ladies whom he always takes care of. When he spots one of Tommy's special ladies alighting in front of the store from a taxi or a limousine, James, the doorman, presses a special button by his station. This causes a buzzer to sound in Tommy's office. Then James steps forward, tips his cap, greets the woman by name—he is nearly as good at names as Tommy is—and offers her his hand to help her from her car. Meanwhile, Tommy is bounding down four flights of stairs—he doesn't wait for the elevator—to greet his client as she enters the store, rather like the concierge at a small, expensive European hotel greeting a longtime favored guest.

“Do you have anything to show me, Tommy?”

“As a matter of fact, we have several pretty new things,” he says, taking her arm, not intimately but just so.

Other men occasionally feel uncomfortable with men as handsome as Tommy Bonham. Perhaps he stirs in them unwelcome feelings of homoerotic lust. But women fall in love with the Tommy Bonhams of this world. Most of Tommy's special ladies, Miranda long ago decided, are to some degree or other in love with him. Most rich men's wives, she also decided, must endure very boring husbands. And so Tommy, being unmarried, is able to perform, for his special ladies, all sorts of little tasks that their husbands have no interest in, or are unwilling or unable to take on. In addition to helping them select the perfect pair of sandals for the perfect ball gown, he takes them to lunch. He suggests new things they might do with their hair. He helps them decorate their apartments, escorts them to charity balls, to opening nights at the theater, to the shows at the galleries along Fifty-seventh Street and upper Madison. He listens to, and sympathizes with, their various tales of bitterness and woe. All this, of course, has been good for business and the store, and Miranda has often wondered how far these relationships have gone. But Tommy is too smart, she thinks, to have let any of these relationships progress through any bedroom doors. And he has been careful to spread the largesse of his attractive company around, so his name has never been attached to any of his special ladies as that lady's special walker or, as they say in England, laughing-man.

The comparison of Tarkington's to a small European hotel is an apt one, and in her father's monthly meetings with his staff he often said, “We must always remember to treat our clients as our guests.” For the store's best clients, Tommy's office will make hotel, restaurant, and airline reservations. It will make massage and even dental appointments. It will suggest lawyers for divorces, doctors for plastic surgery. Last year, Tommy even escorted one of his special ladies as she toured New England, shopping for a boarding school for her son.

When Miranda first met Tommy—it was at the farm in 1980, when she was just thirteen—she fell in love with him herself. She was down from Ethel Walker for the weekend, and he came for the weekend too, and she thought he was simply the most gorgeous hunk of man she had ever met. Encountering him the next morning by the pool, clad only in his white bikini, she had been so embarrassed that she had run into the pool house, pretending to hear the telephone ring, rather than spend time with him in that nearly nude state. She carried fantasies of him with her back to school. Then, of course, she fell in love again with someone else, then out of love again. Then in love again, and out of love, with still another boy. Half of her life, she sometimes thinks, has been spent falling crazily in and out of love, each time harder and more cruelly than the last. There was even a time when she was convinced that she was in love with Blazer, her own half brother, rationalizing that, while sex with one's full brother was definitely taboo, sex with one's half brother would only be half bad—not that anything of the sort came close to happening.

Once she confessed to Kathy Williams, who had been her best friend at Walker, that there were times, when she was with a boy, that she had felt land of an electric shock down
there
.

“You're obviously a nymphomaniac,” Kathy had told her. Then Kathy had made a confession of her own. “I'm a lesbian,” she whispered. After that, Miranda never felt quite the same way about Kathy Williams. And she had also stopped signing the entries in her secret diary “M.T.T.,” which would become her stylish monogram when she married Blazer and became Miranda Tarkington Tarkington.

At school and college, she had taken her good grades for granted. After all, good grades were what her parents expected of her. Then, when she was twenty-one, a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and was handed a gold Phi Beta Kappa key, she suddenly discovered she was smart. Smart women with Phi Beta Kappa keys didn't fall in love, she decided. They had careers.

She had always loved the store. It had been her private castle, and the precious items it displayed she pretended were her personal treasures. And so, though her father had initially disapproved, she had persuaded him to let her go to work at Tarkington's. She had started, at her father's insistence, in the mail room, at the bottom—“Where you'll discover that running a store like this isn't all glamour”—sorting and delivering the letters and memos, delivering the copies of
The Times, The Wall Street Journal
, and
Women's Wear Daily
to the men on the executive floor, men like her father and her old crush Tommy Bonham, whose offices were in the older part of the building that had been the Van Degan house—big, walnut-paneled offices with high ceilings and tall windows facing Fifth Avenue and the park, offices that smelled of old wood and wax and leather—and to the less high-ups, the merchandise managers and buyers, whose offices were in the new L-shaped addition where, though efforts had been made to replicate the grandeur of the old building on the selling floors, the offices were often small, low-ceilinged, and windowless—and smelled new.

Delivering interoffice mail might have sounded like a dull job, but Miranda discovered that it didn't have to be. She could read all the memos and learn what the buyers were buying and how much they were spending. She learned about the store's markup policy, which was nothing if not whimsical; buyers marked up their merchandise to what they thought the traffic would bear. She also learned a lot about the politics of storekeeping: who was in favor and who was not, which departments were in trouble, and why, and what was going to be done about it. She learned that, though her father officially made all the decisions, it was really Tommy Bonham who ran the store.

Then, after her stint in the mail room, she had worked as a secretary for the sportswear buyer. Then she had been made an assistant buyer, which was just a fancier term for secretary. Then her father had given her the title of Director of Advertising.

It was a flashy title, but it didn't mean a hell of a lot, and her father certainly knew that when he created the position for her six months ago. After all, the store's advertising was so-called institutional advertising—just advertising the store's presence, never any specific merchandise—and it was always the same, just a way of saying rather grandly to the public, “We're here.” Mostly, her father had explained to her, her job would consist of ordering the ad space, making sure the store got the column inches it ordered, keeping the scrapbooks, and periodically being taken to lunch by space salesmen.

Still, right from the beginning, Miranda had tried to make the job into something more than that. She had designed a new, and snappier, company letterhead and bill head. “Our bills and letters look as though they were being sent out by a Wall Street law firm,” she said to her father, showing him her new designs.

“That's what I like about them,” he said with a smile.

Next, she had suggested colorful bill stuffers. The store had just opened a tiny new gift boutique with one-of-a-kind treasures, bibelots, and boxes, including a pair of rare Romanov Easter eggs designed by the court jeweler, Peter Carl Fabergé. Miranda proposed announcing the new boutique with a bill stuffer showing a color photograph of the eggs.

“Bill stuffers are just that,” her father said. “Just stuff. They're an annoyance. They go straight into the wastebasket, like the renewal slips that keep falling out of the pages of magazines. My kind of woman wouldn't like them.”

Her next campaign had been to have Tarkington's produce a catalogue.

“Catalogues are not our style,” her father said.