Carriage Trade Read Free Page B

health and good spirits. He was always exercising. He’d never had heart trouble that any of us knew about. He must simply have overdone it, doing his daily laps in the pool.”
    Mr. Tarkington is survived by his wife and daughter. A previous marriage ended in divorce. Cremation took place Saturday under the auspices of Frank E. Campbell, and interment at Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn will be private. There will be no funeral service, though the family suggested that a memorial service may be held at a later date.

Part One
    MIRANDA’S WORLD

1
    The Lincoln Building at 60 East 42nd Street is one of those solid, dependable New York office buildings, put up between the two world wars, which manages to confer upon its business tenants an aura of instant sobriety and respectability. No one flashy would ever lease space here, the building seems to say; no one who was the least bit sleazy would be comfortable. Stepping through the big bronze-and-glass doors into the marble elevator lobby, the visitor is immediately surrounded by a sense of probity. You are expected to be on your best behavior here, the vaulted ceilings of the lobby whisper almost audibly.
    This is not a fashionable address; it is merely good. Forty-second Street isn’t what it once was. Across the street, behind the imposing granite facade of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Station, the homeless curl asleep in corners, looking like bunches of rags dropped from a great height. But from the twentieth-floor windows of the law offices of Mssrs. Kohlberg, Weiss, Griffen & McBurney, the blue-and-white flag of the Yale Club can be seen proudly flying above its Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, and it is from the Yale Club, and luncheon with his legal peers, that Mr. Jacob Kohlberg, senior partner of the firm, has just come for his two o’clock meeting. The Times obituary of Silas Tarkington is spread open on his desk.
    â€œVery nice,” Jake Kohlberg says, tapping the newspaper with the tip of his index finger. “He got the front page, and a full page inside the paper. Si couldn’t have asked for a better sendoff.”
    â€œThat was Tommy Bonham’s doing,” Miranda Tarkington says, almost proudly. “When Daddy died Saturday, Tommy pointed out that if we notified the papers then, the obituary would be lost in the Sunday paper. Tommy said, ‘Wait till tomorrow morning. He’ll get the front page on Monday.’”
    â€œOf course one might have wished they hadn’t mentioned that business about underworld connections,” Jake Kohlberg says.
    â€œThose rumors have been around forever,” Miranda says. “No one pays attention to them anymore.”
    â€œAnd he received other awards that could have been mentioned.”
    â€œBut those were the two that Daddy was proudest of.”
    â€œThey might have mentioned that our father also had a son,” Blazer Tarkington says. This is the first time Blazer has spoken. Blazer is Miranda’s half brother, Silas Tarkington’s son by his first wife. Blazer is twenty-eight, and he has chosen today to defy the law office’s unwritten code of propriety. He is wearing a pair of faded Levi’s, without a belt, and one leg of his jeans is out at the knee, revealing his own knobby knee, which, for some reason, is scabbed. Did Blazer fall and skin his knee on the way to this meeting? His posture, slouched in the leather office chair, legs spread apart, suggests no explanation. His sockless feet are in dirty Reeboks, one of them untied. Blazer’s dark good looks are of a truculent variety. He is scowling now, his black eyebrows knitted over his black half-closed eyes and pleasantly off-center nose.
    â€œShit,” Blazer says to no one in particular, and he removes a Camel cigarette from the pocket of his T-shirt, taps it against the heel of his untied sneaker, and lights it with a match.
    In the brief silence that follows