by Tom Rinaldi
Back he went into the skating routine. By this time, the entire house was in an uproar, his friends falling over one another, wondering how long he could last. Then someone realized that it was a shame to deprive anyone in the Mods the sight.
“One of the guys started playing music,” Howells said, “to make more people watch.” Slowly, heads started to peek out windows to investigate, and then to cheer and jeer the nude man in the hockey skates. Someone in the house flipped on the outdoor lights to improve the visibility, particularly for the women in houses across from the rink. Quickly enough, the scene was an X-rated spectacle, one man celebrating his body, in his element against the elements, stripped and flying free in the New England winter. Sober or buzzed, exhibitionist or maverick, free spirit or house jester, Welles owned the moment and the Mods, unconcerned with shrinkage or too numb to care. He had a venue and an audience, and the impulse was reason enough to risk any reaction.
After skating across the slick space, after absorbing all the taunts and shouts, after wondering if frostbite might be getting the better of the best of him, he skated over to the back of the house. There was only one problem.
“Being good roommates,” Howells said, “we locked the door.”
• • •
As the father is talking, his voice pauses between one story and the next, and in the space between words the slide show plays again. The picture comes without conjuring. It appears, sudden and bright.
The image of the boy, now a man, comes to him with clarity. It is a splendid Monday in spring. May 24, 1999. He is high up in the stands of Alumni Stadium, in a crowd looking over the football field at Boston College. The field is filled with students, 2,140 of them dressed in cap and gown. The class of 1999 is about to graduate, to turn its tassel and grasp its degree, to step away from the leafy campus in Chestnut Hill and into the wider world.
The problem for the father is, he can’t find his son. His vantage point is perfect for taking in the entire scene, but poor for spotting a single person. All the young men and women stand so far below, a dark monolith facing away from his lens. He wants to see his son’s face, and for the son to see his, to see his pride.
For such moments, when the father was in a crowd or at a distance and there was no easy way to get his son’s attention, he’d developed a call the son would instantly recognize, a sound he’d respond to by instinct, no matter how loud or chaotic the circumstances. He started using the sound when his son was just a boy, playing hockey or lacrosse or football, often to celebrate a goal, or a score, or a big play. Each time, the son would look back or up or across toward the father. It became a reflex. It was their code.
If the call ever embarrassed the boy, he never let on. As he grew older, and his games became more competitive, and the sports more serious, teammates would sometimes make fun of it, or ask if he ever wanted to tell his father to stop making the sound. But the boy never told his father, and he never asked him to stop.
So, from high up in the stadium now, trying to get his son’s attention, he lowers the camera. All around, other families are yelling and shouting for their graduates, trying to make the same connection, to take the same picture.
When the father signals, the sound cuts through all others like an arrow. It pierces the din, dropping into the son’s ear. He hears and he turns back up to face the stands. He looks, and then delivers the smile, aimed toward the sound, and at the father, and into the lens.
What the camera can’t capture is the sound—the one the father hears as the soundtrack of the slide show, the song of the code, the note that would always find its way to his son’s ear.
It is the sound of a siren.
• • •
Call it a very long pass, across fourteen years, from one lacrosse player to another. That’s how Welles landed the job so many others coveted. He was headed to Wall Street.
The foot into Sandler O’Neill, a small but powerful investment banking firm specializing in the financial sector, came from a hometown connection, Stacey Sennas McGowan, a managing director at Sandler. She was the president of her class all four years at Nyack High School, and after graduating in 1981, she went on to play varsity lacrosse as a team captain at Boston College. During Welles’s sophomore year, he and Alison had talked about what he planned to do the upcoming summer. He was interested in finance, so Alison had a conversation with Fran Sennas, Stacey’s mother, and shortly thereafter, Welles was on his way to apply for an internship.
At the interview, Welles was asked, “What would you say if I told you we weren’t going to pay you anything this summer?”
“That’s okay,” he said. “The experience will really be worth it.”
“Of course we are going to pay you,” the interviewer said. “But I like your attitude.”
He was in. Five days a week. Eight weeks. His summer of work. Each day he drove over the Tappan Zee Bridge to Tarrytown with Jeff. Together, they took the train to Grand Central Terminal, and from there, Welles caught the subway downtown. He liked it immediately, all of it: the firm was filled with characters, the city a throbbing buzz. The weeks flew by, and he made a good impression. Two years later, Welles was back, hired as a junior associate. He started almost immediately after graduation.
The job wasn’t exactly on Wall Street. The offices were roughly a quarter mile northwest of it. He could see them anytime he wanted to from the apartment he found, with a few college classmates, across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was working at 2 World Trade Center. Twenty-two years old with a view to forever, or at least the sliver of forever glimpsed from the tower’s windows, pinched between protruding columns on either side.
The South Tower. The 104th floor.
• • •
The dress code for the office was unwritten. There was no line in an employee handbook, or direct mention during orientation. There didn’t have to be. The fashion template was simple and inflexible. Casual Fridays were for insurance offices and weak enterprises that had lost their edge. This was finance, son. Wear a suit.
And Welles did, happily. It was part of the identity he sought in working at Sandler, going back to the summer internship. Most of his suits were regular Brooks Brothers issue, different hues of blue and gray, with a crisp white or blue shirt and the accompanying yellow, red, or blue tie.
Very early in his tenure there, during the autumn of 1999, Welles chose to accessorize a bit, and in doing so made one of his first discoveries in professional life, even when it came to the benign field of wardrobe. He learned a fast lesson.
“There was a period of time where the guys would be wearing suspenders,” Jimmy Dunne, Sandler’s senior managing principal, recalled. “I did it for a while.”
As one of the firm’s founding partners, Dunne could wear whatever he wanted.
It was another matter for a junior associate, who had barely cashed his first few paychecks, to wear the braces. Not that Welles understood the distinction, until the first time a senior associate saw him working in equity research with his suit jacket off. Whether the suspenders were plain or cartoonish didn’t matter. There was a rule, unwritten or not, and Welles had broken it.
The senior trader came up behind Welles and, without warning, pulled the suspenders sharply back and then released them, slapping his back with a loud and painful snap.
“Who the hell do you think you are, J. P. Morgan?” he asked.
Welles looked at him, confused.
“After you make a million dollars here, then maybe you can wear suspenders. Until then, don’t ever wear those things again.” The trader walked away, laughing.
• • •
But there was one part of Welles’s personal dress code that would not be subject to office fashion or bent to anyone’s unwritten rule. It was a constant, tucked in the back right pocket of every set of trousers and every pair of suit pants he wore every day. There
were times when he would take it out, place it on his desk, and leave it there, though few noticed.
Natalie McIver did.
The assistant to the director of equity research at Sandler, she spent a lot of time with the firm’s junior associates. Research was typically the first posting for those just joining the company.
Many of the junior associates wanted to leave research quickly after a relatively short tour of three or four months. They wanted to move to the rush of the trading desk, or the rewards of fixed income, or the prestige of mergers and acquisitions, whether with Sandler or not. To those new to Wall Street, the trading desks were the bright precincts where fortunes were made and the path to rooms where deals were forged. For the uninitiated, research, though essential, could feel like time in the salt mines, back of the house.
McIver sensed that Welles was different. While he might not be destined for a career as a research analyst, he didn’t have the air of a man passing through or biding his time. The work was demanding, and that suited Welles just fine.
He was at his desk each day before eight, and stayed as late as the day demanded. During earnings season, it demanded quite a lot.
“The quarterly earnings for all the stocks that we covered, that becomes like a reporting frenzy,” McIver said. Often, multiple companies reported their earnings on the same day. “That would go on for almost one month per quarter,” she said. “So that was four times a year where it was like a month, solid, of crunch time.”
The hours were often long and stressful, but Welles showed little wear. Even in the busiest weeks, he kept his sense of wonder about where he worked, at the nerve center of the financial world, 1,126 feet up in the sky.
During one of the busier weeks, with everyone in the department juggling multiple reports and assignments, McIver was surprised by a tap on her shoulder and a sudden introduction.
“Natalie,” Welles said, “this is my dad.”
He’d given no notice that his father would be visiting, or that he would be taking time out of the day to show Jeff around the office. “None of us ever did that,” she said. “Nobody ever brought their family through that I’d remembered. It was just so neat that he didn’t take it for granted. I would meet my dad for lunch, but he would meet me downstairs. I never brought him around. I never thought of bringing him up.”
McIver watched as Welles guided his father through the office. The visit was short, but Welles made sure to show off the star attraction: the view from the narrow windows westward, where the research department faced, looking out over the Hudson and Jersey City, where she lived, and beyond.
What struck McIver too was Welles’s ability to keep the job in perspective. His father’s visit was one example; another was the red bandanna in his back pocket.
The first time she noticed it, Welles had taken it out and placed it on his desk. This was easy fodder, and the response was quick.
“What are you doing with that?” she asked. “I’m the one from Ohio. What are you doing carrying a bandanna?”
It became a source of ribbing and jabbing whenever Welles took it out. McIver and another research associate, Judd Cavalier, led the charge.
“What are you, a cowboy?”
“You forget this is New York? This isn’t the South!”
“Howdy do there, Welles?”
Welles would laugh and offer his own jabs right back, but the bandanna remained, either in his pocket or on his desk.
Most people in the office had no idea he carried it, or what its origins were. But those like McIver, who worked close to him in those first few months at Sandler, as he was just beginning to build a career and discover what life might be like looking at a computer screen, days spent wearing a suit and answering a deadline and earning a salary, recalled it clearly.
Whenever someone needed something extra done, some deadline beaten, some thorny issue solved, the response was predictable.
“We would always tease him,” she said. “Someone would just say, ‘Hey, Welles, can you do . . . ?’ Anything. Fill in the blank. ‘Hey, you’ve got to solve this, fix this trade report . . .’”
In a dramatic gesture, Welles would reach for the bandanna on his desk or in his pocket, lift it above his head, and wave it in the air.
“He would say, ‘This is where the magic comes from,’” McIver recalled.
Other times—“I’m a superhero.”
And once, facing some tall task, he lifted the bandanna, stood up from his chair, and made a preposterous declaration that McIver never forgot.
“I’m going to save the world.”
• • •
You’ve got to come up and see the office.”
For Johnny Howells, the request was hardly a surprise. Knowing Welles since their freshman year at Boston College, living with him in the Mods in their senior year, Howells had grown used to spur-of-the-moment ideas. Howells was visiting from Massachusetts. He liked coming to see his buddies who’d relocated to the city, or as close as their paychecks could afford. For Welles, it was a shared basement apartment in Hoboken, a short train ride away.
It was a Sunday, and for most newly graduated from the soft schedule of college life to the grind of earning a living, the office was barely tolerable five days a week, if at all. Welles was already working more than fifty, even sixty, hours at Sandler O’Neill during the busiest times, and the weekends should’ve been a necessary relief, if not a complete disconnect. His love for the city, and for the office address in particular, was a magnet for him, though, especially with a friend in town. But Howells also sensed a slight detachment as well. He liked that shade of dispassion; he saw in it a measure of humility.
“I don’t know everybody that works on Wall Street,” Howells said. “But they think they’re very important, and they’re doing important work, and I never got that feeling about Welles. He wanted to make a good living, he wanted to live in the area, and why not?”
But for Welles to become the suit he was wearing five days a week? His career was just starting, really, not even a year old. Still, Howells didn’t see it.
Taking the train beneath the Hudson, the two friends made their way to Lower Manhattan and Chambers Street. Without the press of commuters and clamor of the workweek, the atmosphere around the entire World Trade Center complex felt oddly still, as if on pause. The two entered the lobby of 2 World Trade, and then took the elevator ride and transfer on the 78th floor before finally reaching the 104th floor of the South Tower.
Sandler’s offices were deserted. The view was, of course, the reason to come, and together they absorbed the panorama through the narrow windows, the city’s full scale laid out like a map beneath them. The sunny day’s brilliance surrounded them on all sides. It was beautiful.
Welles took Howells over to his area of the office, in research. His cubicle was perhaps ten feet from a window overlooking the East River, facing away from his apartment and New Jersey.
“Hey,” he said, “take a look at this.” He took out a glass from his desk, poured water into it, and placed it down on a flat surface. As winds hit the building, Howells saw the water tremble and move, caught in the building’s natural sway. Welles showed him how some of the office doors swayed slightly on their hinges as the building registered its gentle tremors. The structure was a living thing, beneath and around them, and Howells could see the spell it cast on his friend, the pride he took in displaying its quirks of personality. This is why he wanted to make the trip. Not once during the tour could Howells remember him talking about the research, the reports, the job.
“I didn’t get the impression that he was infatuated with what he was doing,” Howells said, “as much as where he was.”
• • •
It was a surprising offer.
Welles and Chuck Platz, his friend from the summer in Madrid, had spoken only a handful of times since they’d re
turned to the States, keeping vague tabs on each other’s movements. There was little to prepare Platz for the moment the phone rang.
“Hey,” Welles said, as if they’d spent every other weekend hanging out. “Want to be roommates?”
It was the spring of 2000, and Welles was ready to move from Hoboken, to graduate fully into the life he wanted, and was seeking someone to join him, someone who had the same taste for city life that he did. Platz was living with his aunt and uncle in Westchester, trying to save money, making the commute to his job at an asset management firm based on Park Avenue. He was wandering the aisles in a local Staples when Welles rang. The timing was perfect. The answer was easy. Sure. Sounds great. Have you found a place yet? Minor detail.
Welles and Platz got a place fast, almost as soon as they started the search in earnest. They visited a spot in the West Village, just the second apartment they considered. Welles arrived first, checked it out, and headed back downstairs. Before Platz even got inside for his own look, he saw Welles walking down the street toward him, taking big strides, a huge smile on his face. Platz knew.
“Just seeing him,” he said, “I said to myself, ‘This is where we’re going to live.’”
They knew the rent would be hard, but not insurmountable. Few things are for young people eager to wade into city life, drawn by the undertow of its wonder and chance. For a rooftop look south at the towers, for a two-bedroom with an honest-to-goodness eat-in kitchen and space for an aquarium, the lease terms were a happy ransom. It would be worth every cent.
The apartment offered a view—if you stood next to the toilet, leaned hard against the wall, craned your neck upward out the top third of the bathroom window, and kept your balance, you might see it: a sliver of the upper reaches of the Empire State Building. That was north.
The view south was just slightly less limiting, but through one of the bedroom windows, at just the right angle, you could see the peaks of two silver streams reaching skyward. A trip out the apartment door, down the hallway, and up two flights of stairs to the roof of the building took them to a far more inspiring view. A mile south of the rooftop, piercing the horizon, drawing every eye: the soaring towers of the World Trade Center.