by Tom Rinaldi
“I understand that too,” Welles said. And then he outlined the most basic steps he’d have to take. Not the bureaucratic or logistical ones. Those were easier, set, laid out for any applicant. He talked about the salary repercussions, the discipline he’d need. He’d calculated how to finance the move—not in the gauzy terms of a dream, but in the numbers that would support a life.
“I figure I’ll just keep working here,” Welles said. “I’ll save all my bonuses, and save as much money as I can, and then if I join the department, if I want to get married, I’ll have a nice nest egg, I can buy a house.”
He’d also pondered the time it would take him to reach the department.
“I’ll keep going to the gym,” he said. “You know I’ll keep myself in good shape. I’ll still be under thirty.”
Jeff listened as Welles added one more point emphatically.
“Dad, if I sit in front of this computer for the rest of my life,” he said, “I’ll go crazy.”
• • •
When did you stop?
When did you put the hope away, shifting it from something real to something . . . lesser? As the beach house forever not built, the grand trip always postponed, the pursuit never begun? When did the dream leave you as an aspiration and float off into the province of the never-to-be? Never to be the first-round draft pick or the perennial all-star, the name above the title or the founder of the company?
Probably, never crept up gradually. No sudden awakening in a cold sweat, no precise moment of terrible clarity. There is often no sharp edge to surrender, no bright line between chasing and letting go of the dream of what our lives could become before we get caught in the gears of daily living, the hundreds and thousands of tiny compromises that move us through the day. The clock doesn’t stop to mark the time between the last thought when your goal was still calling to you and the next, by which it had drifted past range, caught between radio stations like static, until the fade is complete. Silence.
It’s a creeping capitulation, the recognition of what we’re able to manage. That awareness comes in slow degrees, and at different times, in all our lives. It comes through the circumstances that shape us, the weather inside us, the failures that drag us below a line. You know the line—the one between what we want and what we accept.
Welles wasn’t ready to cross that line, not entirely. Almost any time of any day, he could still look down to the street and see a flashing red dot and hear the delayed and distant echo of a siren.
The sound and vision of his dream was still answering, moving, calling.
• • •
In the financial capital of the planet, working in finance meant a special place on earth, and held the rewards to prove it. Sandler O’Neill was a burgeoning force, and didn’t attract or indulge the pale or hesitant. Its culture celebrated competition in every way, against rival firms and within its walls. The firm was filled with athletes, some not as accomplished as Welles and others more so—all of whom had grown up as inherent strivers, and winners.
There was also a natural and useful selfishness cultivated to drive the firm forward, a tapping of the capitalist vein, but, hopefully, not the whole of its heart. The principals of the firm wanted all there to master the work, but also to enjoy and appreciate it. The hours were too long, the demands too great, the expectations too high, for anyone to fake his way through. There had to be a large, if not total, buy-in to thrive.
Anyone giving less would’ve been perceived as lacking, when pitted against his colleagues, and was unlikely to last. The hedging would be obvious.
That’s certainly what Jimmy Dunne believed. Despite his place in the firm as one of its founders, he was close to its entire staff, challenging and cultivating, nurturing and exacting. His office was close to where Welles spent much of his time on the trading desk. Dunne took pride in demanding a deep level of commitment, and in detecting when it wasn’t there. He had no doubts whatsoever regarding Welles’s passion for what he was doing, his investment in succeeding.
To sharpen his eye, Dunne had a pattern of questioning he followed when interviewing new graduates and new associates hoping to join or move up at Sandler. He would exchange greetings and pleasantries, easing his way in. Then he’d look across at the prospect and ask about an experience not listed on the résumé.
“So,” Dunne would say, “tell me about some job, or jobs, that you really hated.”
Typically, the applicant would pause and consider where this was headed, and what Dunne wanted to hear. He waited the applicant out until he got an answer—a specific one, with the name of the business and former boss, and the description of the work.
“That’s where I call to check references,” he said. “That way, I can find out. I want to see how the person behaves when he’s doing something he doesn’t quite want to do. Can he suck it up? Can he do the right thing?”
Looking back on it months later, after talking with Jeff, Dunne was caught off guard to learn that Welles had been sucking it up right in front of his boss’s eyes. He’d performed the tasks before him well, even exceeded expectations, but his heart wasn’t completely in the work; he wasn’t fulfilled, even after the move to the trading desk. Everything about Welles from the moment he arrived signaled to Dunne a young man thriving and fully engaged. A key strength of Dunne’s success, and the firm’s, lay in reading people, not just markets. He took pride in it. With Welles, a young man he liked and respected, his eye missed any trace of restlessness.
“I was just shocked,” Dunne said, “which was even more impressive. Because it’s one thing to do something you love and do everything you can, and try to be impressive every moment, to develop sort of an indispensable nature to yourself.
“It’s a very different thing if you’re not sure this is what you want to do, or, worse than that, you’re fairly sure this is not what you want to do.”
Welles wanted to do something else.
Shortly after talking with his father in August, he began to explore the requirements for the FDNY.
The first was obvious. An application.
• • •
Rudy.
That’s who came to mind when Angelo Mangia met Welles shortly after the firm’s newest junior associate arrived at Sandler O’Neill. It likely wasn’t a description Welles would’ve considered flattery.
Daniel Ruettiger was the “Rudy” to whom Mangia referred, the blue-collar son depicted in the beloved 1993 sports film of the same name. The movie tells the story of an undersized but scrappy kid who dreams of playing football at Notre Dame but lacks the athletic talent and the grades to dress for the storied Fighting Irish. Ultimately, he overcomes a series of obstacles (near poverty, dyslexia, meager physical gifts) to reach his triumphant moment—suiting up for the team, playing in a game, and getting carried off the field.
Welles was, by any measure, a much better athlete and a bigger physical specimen than Rudy; he’d grown to five ten or five eleven and filled out to 180 pounds by the time he left BC. He was a better student than Rudy too. But for Mangia, that wasn’t the point. The managing director drew the comparison because he saw a bit of the underdog in the new associate, and sensed the same heart. “He wasn’t the biggest guy,” Mangia recalled. “He wasn’t the loudest guy. He was just somebody thrilled to be a part of the team, who didn’t shy away from anything.”
As part of Sandler’s culture, the more senior members of the staff were encouraged to act as mentors to those just arriving, to make certain they felt a part of the whole, and to nurture their talent in a way that would serve the company and the individual. Mangia, an attorney who helped to handle legal matters, relished the role, the chance to be a big brother to some of the fresh faces. It fit his vision of what a workplace like Sandler’s—and its associates—should be: a competitive and boisterous family driven to be profitable, of course, but also joined in their pursuits, and
judged by more than reviews and bonuses. They should care about one another.
Almost from the moment Welles walked through the doors on the 104th floor to begin a Wall Street career, he landed on Mangia’s radar, and the two hit it off. Why, exactly, was hard for him to pinpoint. Mangia was almost twenty years older, worked in a different area of the company, and was in a different stage of his life. He was also frustrated almost daily by the numbing commute from his home on Long Island to Lower Manhattan. Welles, living in the West Village, was largely immune to traffic snarls. His short subway ride or brisk walk home made Mangia envious.
The two did share a love for the city’s excitement, its events and restaurants, its juice and edge. In Welles, Mangia saw some shades of a younger self, and enjoyed being near that reflection—drawing off a young man’s energy and guiding him through the beginnings of corporate life. There were dinners and ball games, inside jokes and late nights out. They quickly grew to be friends.
As Welles made his way from the research to the trading side, Mangia could look out of his office and find his would-be protégé just fifty feet away, at his desk, energized by the bedlam and frenzy.
“There’s action going on,” Mangia said. “I look over and in the midst of chaos, there’s Welles, and he’s just beaming. Always. He’s thrilled. . . . He just really loved being at the firm and you could see it.”
By the spring of 2001, Mangia’s own time at the firm was ending, by his choice. After one more maddening slog from the suburbs to the Financial District, he returned a call from a client, who encouraged him for months to leave Sandler. The client asked him to venture out and join another shop. The company was Standard Funding, based in Woodbury, on Long Island, nearer to his home.
Like many others at the company, Mangia didn’t think he’d ever leave Sandler O’Neill. The money was too good, the rush too sweet, and he’d proved he could answer its demands. His plan was to retire there, in his time and on his terms. But the call to the client started a conversation, and soon, a new direction. He told the firm he would be leaving in May.
As his exit approached, he and Welles decided to celebrate with a dinner together. Starting off at The Red Cat, an eclectic American place on Tenth Avenue in Chelsea, they ended up making their way south for a nightcap in the Village. At a table outside a French restaurant, Welles suddenly stood up.
“Wait here,” he told Mangia. “I have to go to my apartment. I’ll be right back.”
Before Mangia could reply, Welles was gone, without any hint of an explanation, not that his friend was altogether surprised. Welles was prone to bursts of spontaneity.
“About ten minutes later, he comes back with a bottle of champagne,” Mangia said. Welles had run home to his apartment on Washington Place and back, a few city blocks away. And although there were several champagnes on the menu, he wanted to give a toast from a bottle of his own. He received the bubbles as a Christmas gift the year before from someone at the firm, and was saving it for a special occasion. A friend’s departure fit the bill.
“Here,” he said, popping it open. “We’re going to celebrate.” And so they did. Mangia couldn’t see if it was Dom Pérignon or Martini & Rossi as Welles poured, and he didn’t care.
Shortly after that night, Mangia packed up his office, said his good-byes, and left the Twin Towers behind to begin his new position at Standard. He said he wasn’t going to be far away. He’d keep in touch. In the months that followed, he did, with several of his former colleagues at Sandler, including Welles. The two talked on the phone and exchanged e-mails regularly. “I would talk to Welles about how things were going at the firm,” Mangia said. Mangia liked his new position in Woodbury, and seeing room for a young talent, he offered him a soft invitation, to see whether Welles might have an interest in doing something else.
“But that wasn’t for Welles, not coming out into the suburbs.”
When they spoke, he heard something in Welles’s voice. But it wasn’t obvious or loud, not a complaint. Mangia didn’t think that was Welles’s nature. Still, he heard a note not as bright, and it was a recurring theme.
“It was strange,” Mangia said. “I would say, in at least four of the conversations we had over the course of that summer, he would repeat the same thing to me.”
Welles told Mangia: “I don’t know where I’m going to be. I just know I’m going to be part of something big.”
The phrase still echoed for his friend, the voice lingering years later. “He would say that, and I would laugh, and he would laugh, and that was it.”
As summer faded and Labor Day passed, Mangia checked in with Welles to ask how he was faring. He sent an e-mail. The note was simple, a reflexive inquiry between friends. “How are you doing? Hope all is well.”
The answer back struck Mangia. Their e-mail exchanges were common office stuff, hardly meant to be preserved. But Mangia kept the reply. He still keeps it, printed out, in a box in his office.
The e-mail was little more than a fragment. “I’m okay, but a few words come to mind,” Welles wrote. He listed the words in a terse column down the page:
Anxious. Frustrated. Aimless. Bored. Lobster. Cold beer. The coast of Maine.
Forever. Welles. Out.
“It was just very much out of character for him,” Mangia said. “The words anxious and Welles, those were two words I would never use in the same sentence. You never saw him anxious. He didn’t have that quality anywhere. Ever. So that gave me an uneasy feeling . . .”
Perhaps it was the feeling that kept Mangia from deleting the note instantly, as he’d often do. In time, he would print it, and ponder it. He would look at it, his eyes stopping for a moment on the date, even though he already knew. Friday, September 7, 2001.
“That was our last communication.”
• • •
A weekend night for Welles shimmered with a heady mix of chance and mystery. For this big night out, September 9, 2001, Welles was in the Village with Mom and Dad alongside. Welles saw Jeff and Alison frequently, by his invitation. By the measure of most twentysomething single men working in finance, living in an apartment in Greenwich Village, he was astoundingly open with his mother and father and eager to see them whenever he could. Sure, there were boundaries, but they were the same ones his parents wanted—the proofs of independence, and the lines drawn by the differences in age and responsibility.
As a warm and dry day faded into evening in Manhattan, there was nothing to signal the night as particularly special or different. Jeff and Alison had made their way from Upper Nyack to have dinner with Welles and a few friends. Once dinner was finished, they would part ways.
It was only in hindsight that the night gained any great significance for Welles’s parents, or the moment any weight. Maybe it can be no other way with our understanding. It was a common instant of the sort we experience and simultaneously forget, until we somehow retrieve it and assign it value. So many moments would be retrieved this way, recovered from the sea bottom of time past. What emerges, brought back to the surface and lifted to the light, will always be a bit suspect, subject to the dangers attached to all we recollect: to invention and exaggeration, to mythmaking and foreshadowing. Little of it rises to the point of pure, indisputable truth. It seems the smaller the moment, the closer we get.
One gesture abides in Alison and Jeff’s memory from that evening, a simple act, reflexive and even a little vain. Walking in front of his parents on the sidewalk, Welles reached into his back pocket for a comb to fix his hair. They weren’t surprised. He carried a comb for most of his life.
“Welles, are you still carrying that thing?” Alison asked.
She wasn’t talking about the comb. She was talking about the red bandanna wrapped around it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually seen him with it.
She laughed. “Here you are,” she said. “Living in the city. Working on Wall
Street. And you’re still carrying around a red bandanna?” Just like his father, to this day was the next thought in her head. Sure enough, Jeff was carrying a blue bandanna in his back pocket, the way he always did. Red for Welles, blue for Jeff.
“Of course, I still carry it,” Welles said, smiling. “Absolutely.”
And then, after combing his hair, he placed it back into the centerfold of the handkerchief, and put the bandanna back into his pocket.
To carry and keep, as he had for the last seventeen years.
• • •
The picture of the boy was taken at Alison’s parents’ house. The boy is maybe eight years old. He beams up from the linoleum floor of the kitchen in his blue jeans and daffodil shirt, his digital watch on his wrist and brown boots on his feet. Behind him, a wooden chair shows him its back, next to a pair of disembodied legs flaring up to some unseen torso.
He is beautiful, as is all he signifies: guilelessness and joy, the world open to him. His legs are bent; he squats in position, his hands on his knees, his chest leaning forward and his chin uplifted. The next moment is an adventure so great in possibility that he bends at the waist to meet it.
From before this age, the father has called him by a nickname: “old man.” Old man, he says, from the time the two can hold conversations. Old man, want to go to McDonald’s for some lunch? Old man, want to come with me to the firehouse? Old man, what do you think?
The boy laughs. He loves The Incredible Hulk and The Dukes of Hazzard, figures with capes and conquerors with superpowers. He loves action without needing to call it by a name. It’s every day’s awakening.
And in the picture displayed in his mind and pinned to the album, the father sees the smile and the virtue and the radiance. And he sees what we all see when we look with him. There already in the photo is the bright sash across the boy’s forehead. The red bandanna’s fold is generous and thick, trapping his blondish bangs underneath its top edge. The knot tied behind his head, its tail sticks from behind his ear, looming over his shoulder in a dash, a flat line.