“I hope you charge them top dollar,” said Gorham drily.
“I live well. Actually, my son just started at private school, and he has no trouble at all.”
Ethnic was fashionable nowadays, Gorham thought, and he was glad of it. He’d heard of Jewish families, for instance, people who’d anglicized their East European names a generation ago, recently deciding to return to the original ones. Attitudes were changing. His own blue-blood name only gave him pleasure because it was honestly derived, from historical roots. At least, that’s what he told himself. “My view of ancestry is strictly postmodern,” he liked to pronounce at dinner parties. “A harmless ornament, to be shared with one’s friends.” That was pretty good, he thought.
And was Caruso any relation of the famous tenor? he’d asked. The obstetrician’s intelligent face was not unlike pictures of the great singer.
“Who knows?” said Dr. Caruso. “Way back, perhaps. My family knew him—they were very proud of that—and he always told them we were related.” He smiled. “Caruso was a man of great kindness, you understand.”
Gorham Master was glad that Dr. Caruso would be delivering his son.
He grabbed Maggie’s bag, told Bella to stay in the apartment in case they had to call her for anything, and took the elevator down to the lobby. The doorman hailed a taxi.
It wasn’t a long journey. Across to Madison, then straight up to 101st, over to Fifth Avenue and you were at Mount Sinai Hospital. Dr. Caruso would meet them there.
The taxi driver went three blocks up Park before turning left. Only a block to Madison. Then he stopped.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. Problem.” A heavy Russian accent. “Truck. He don’t move.”
“I have to get to the hospital.” Maggie was probably already there now.
“Vot can I do if he don’t move?”
Nothing. Should he get out and pick up a cab on Madison? If he did that, the minute he got to Madison, the blockage would clear. Then the Russian would go by and wouldn’t stop if he hailed it again. Then there wouldn’t be any more taxis on Madison. Such things had happened to him before. Gorham Master swore quietly to himself and closed his eyes. Patience. Clear his mind. Keep calm.
And try not to think of the other business. The business he hadn’t told Maggie about.
On the whole, during the last ten years, his life had still gone according to plan. He’d made VP years ago, and the bank seemed to think well of him. He’d shown a real talent for client relations, and he’d been shrewd in picking his corporate mentors. Several years he’d been awarded six-figure bonuses on top of his salary. This spring, he’d been made a senior vice president. That was important. But even more important was something else he’d been offered shortly afterward.
Stock options: the chance to buy bank stock at advantageous prices. Golden handcuffs, as they were known—for they were structured so that, to get the real benefit of the options, one needed to stay at the bank. A VP might get a promotion and a higher salary, but the only way to tell whether the bank really valued him was to follow the money. If the bank really wanted to keep him, it gave him stock options.
The city seemed to be prospering too. In 1977, just after the terrible arson and looting of the blackout, the new, feisty Mayor Koch was elected. The first thing he’d set out to do was restore the city’s disastrous finances. And he’d been remarkably successful. In a few years, the city budget was even out of the red. In ’81, Koch had actually been nominated by both the Democratic and Republican parties—such a thing had never happened before. “How am I doing?” the mayor would call out whenever he saw a crowd, and most of the time they told him he was doing pretty well.
And Gorham had married Maggie.
Their courtship had been typical of those where at least one of the partners is working a ninety-hour week. That certainly hadn’t been in the original plan.
Sometimes Gorham Master wondered, did the big law firms and investment banks overdo it a bit with the hours? It showed the young associates were serious and committed, of course, but was there an element of sadistic pride in it, like pledging for a fraternity? But unlike the frat pledges, this went on for years, until one made partner.
Maggie did corporate work. Often, when she had big deals going through, he’d gone down to her offices at maybe nine or ten at night, taken her out for a quick dinner, then let her get back to work until two or three in the morning. Both their courtship and the first years of their marriage had been like that. Romance snatched at odd moments, leisure organized in little compartments of time. In a way it was exciting. Wartime affairs and marriages, Gorham realized, must have been like this. But peace was a long time coming.
They had been having an affair for a year before he proposed to her. By that time he was completely crazy about her. If she wasn’t a corporate wife, he didn’t care. And she, for her part, not only loved him, but would sometimes say in wonderment: “I just can’t believe that you put up with the terrible hours I have to keep.” His fascination and her gratitude, Gorham reckoned, made a good cement in the building of their marriage.
“If you want to have it all, Maggie,” he’d cheerfully remind her, “just remember that having it all includes me.”
The marriage was at her parents’ Catholic church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her parents thought Gorham was perfect. They didn’t even mind that he wasn’t Catholic. As for Maggie, she didn’t tell the priest, but she’d already assured Gorham that their children could attend any church he liked, or none.
Juan was best man—he’d married Janet by then—and Maggie’s brother Martin was one of the ushers. Martin was a pleasant, rather intellectual fellow, and he and Gorham got along fine. At the end of the wedding, Maggie’s father had quietly suggested to Martin that if he had no plans for ever marrying, perhaps he’d like to tell him about it some time.
The pattern of their lives changed only a little as they entered the 1980s. If Gorham needed Maggie to attend a business dinner with him in the city, she’d make great efforts to do so. Once, when Branch & Cabell hosted a weekend at a resort for all the partners, associates and their spouses, Gorham was amused, during the lawyers’ business sessions, to be taken around and entertained with all the spouses. “I like being a spouse,” he told Maggie with a grin. “I had twenty wives all to myself.”
The only other necessary defining of their positions in the early eighties had been the newly popular social acronyms.
“I have always been a WASP,” Gorham rightly declared. “And I guess I may be called a preppy. But Maggie is definitely a yuppie.”
Even this changed in 1986, however, when Maggie was made a partner. “And a partner of Branch & Cabell,” she insisted, “can no longer be called a yuppie.”
“Not even a pretty young red-headed partner?”
“Nope. But I’ll tell you something else about a partner in Branch & Cabell.”
“What’s that?”
“A partner in Branch & Cabell,” she informed him with a smile, “might get pregnant.”
Her pregnancy the next year had raised another issue.
They were happy in the apartment on Park. When they married, Maggie had done a little redecoration, and they’d had fun buying some new furniture together. The third year of their marriage, after he’d been awarded a handsome bonus, his Christmas present to her had been the money to install a new kitchen. That had been a big deal.
Maggie had made one other small improvement to the apartment. She’d opened a closet one day and found in there a carefully wrapped parcel that looked like a picture of some kind. Asked what it was, Gorham had confessed to his shame that it was the only gift he’d failed to deliver for Charlie, after his father’s death. “And so much time has passed now that I’m embarrassed to give it to the rightful owner,” he said.
“Can I see what it is?” she’d asked.
“I suppose so.”
“My God, Gorham,” Maggie exclaimed when she’d unwrapped the parc
el, “it’s a Robert Motherwell drawing. This thing is really valuable.”
“I hardly know what to do about it,” he admitted.
“Well, I’m putting it on the wall until you make up your mind.” And there, adding a special elegance to their living room, it had remained ever since.
Now they were starting a family, however, they’d have to consider moving to a larger place. They could manage in the six-room with one child, who would have the second bedroom, but if another child came along, then they’d really need more space. They liked the building, so they decided to wait for a while to see if a larger apartment became available. With their two salaries, they could certainly finance a mortgage and the higher maintenance.
Taken all together, therefore, Gorham and Maggie had a very happy marriage. Only one thing had suffered, and they both felt it. Their friends. How long was it now since they’d had Maggie’s brother come to supper? Three months at least. It was nobody’s fault, there just never seemed to be any time. And what about Juan? They hadn’t seen him for more than a year.
What made it worse was that Juan was having a bad time. Mayor Koch had done well by the city below Ninety-sixth Street, but not so well for the districts like Harlem, El Barrio and the South Bronx. Some people reckoned he didn’t care that much. Others pointed out that, when the problems were so huge, even Koch couldn’t do everything at once. Either way, Juan had been able to make very little progress. “Things in El Barrio are getting steadily worse, not better,” he’d told them. He was so discouraged that he was thinking of taking a job in one of the big utilities, where at least he could use his business skills.
As soon as the baby was born, Gorham promised himself, he’d make it an occasion to call Juan and have him and Janet to supper.
Despite these regrets, which could certainly be remedied, Gorham should have counted himself a very fortunate man. And he would have, had it not been for one problem: good fortune wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t surprising. When one thought about it, Gorham considered, New York had always been a place for people who wanted more. Whether a poor immigrant or a rich merchant, people came to New York to get more. In bad times they came there to survive, in good times to prosper, and in boom times to get rich. Very rich. Fast.
And as the eighties progressed, New York had been booming.
It was the stock market that was booming. The market and all the service industries, including the law firms, that went with it. In ’84, the market had experienced its first million share trading day. Traders, brokers, anyone dealing in shares or bonds had the opportunity to make a fortune. It was all beautifully summarized in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which had just hit the best-seller lists as Maggie’s pregnancy began.
Greed was everywhere. Greed was exciting. Successful greedy men were heroes. Greed was good.
But Gorham had to ask himself: Had he been greedy enough?
Sometimes, sitting in his office, he’d take out the silver Morgan dollar his grandmother had given him and stare at it sadly. Would the Masters in times past, the merchants and owners of privateers, and speculators in property and land, would they have sat quietly in a corporate office and taken a salary—all right, a salary with bonus and stock options—but would they have been so cautious when others were making rapid fortunes? He didn’t think so. New York was booming and he was sitting idly by, trapped by his own caution and respectability.
Was everyone of his own, old-money class doomed to mediocrity? No, some, like Tom Wolfe himself, had kicked over the traces.
Gorham hadn’t kicked over the traces exactly, but he had begun some quiet trading of his own, and he had done well. He’d borrowed to invest, of course—that was the only way to make money fast, and the risk was not so great in a rising market. In fact, by the time of Maggie’s pregnancy, he’d built up an impressive portfolio.
He hadn’t told Maggie. He reckoned he would when he had put by enough to really impress her—and that would take some doing for a lawyer used to dealing with clients who had very substantial assets indeed. But he was working on it. Concealing his activities from her was perfectly easy, because they filed separate tax returns.
It had been her idea, right at the start of the marriage. He didn’t know what she made, and she didn’t know what he made. They kept tally of their living expenses, which were split evenly between them, and that was all they needed to know. Until Maggie made partner, he’d assumed that he made more money than she did. Now that she was a partner, he wasn’t quite sure. Not that it really mattered, of course. But with the stock options and the bonuses he always earned, he reckoned that, yes, he probably still made more—though partners in the big law firms did awfully well. But when he finally cleaned up in the markets, he had thought with secret satisfaction, that was when he’d let her know.
And everything would have been all right, until the disaster last month.
For in October, the market had crashed. Not a crash like the Great Crash, but a vicious correction. The brokerage houses were in deep pain, and people were being laid off in large numbers. It didn’t affect someone like himself in a commercial bank, and certainly not the lawyers, who always had work adjudicating every disaster. But his private holdings had suffered horribly. Two days ago he’d gone through what was left of his portfolio after he’d dealt with all the calls, and found that he was precisely back to where he’d started several years ago. So much for his performance. It was just as well they weren’t looking to trade up to a larger apartment this year.
He hadn’t told Maggie. No need to disturb her with such news when she was about to give birth. Not much point in telling her about it afterward, either. That was what every good trader did, he told himself. Cut your losses. Keep quiet, and move swiftly forward.
It was three days ago that the offer had suddenly been made. A telephone call from a banker he knew slightly. A discreet meeting, followed by further meetings with partners of the investment house in question. Then a tentative offer. Something for him to think about.
He’d been asked if he’d like to cross over into investment banking. It was a compliment, of course. The partners at the investment bank thought he had both the skills and the client relationships to be very useful to them, and having discussed the matter in some detail, he could see the force of their argument. The fit looked good, and he quite liked the people he’d be working with.
And as always in an investment bank, there would be excitement, the opportunity for creative initiatives of his own, the chance to make a lot of money. And considerably longer hours.
It could be that this was a big chance for him. Just the sort of thing, he supposed, that the Masters in the past would have gone for. The downside was that he’d lose a bunch of stock options, and probably see less of his little family than he’d been planning.
Was it the right thing to do? Did he have the confidence? Was he ready, after taking a beating in the market, to give up his security?
He didn’t know. He wanted to discuss it with Maggie. But it wasn’t exactly the subject to raise with your wife when she was in the middle of giving birth.
They were moving. The truck driver had finished delivering, the Russian had sworn at him, the truck driver had sworn back and, with the Russian mumbling furiously to himself, they had raced up Madison. The lights were synchronized on Madison, thank God, instead of stopping you every eight or ten blocks, the way they did on Park. In minutes, they were at Mount Sinai, and he was racing in through the entrance to look for Maggie.
She had already been taken up to the fifth floor. When he got there, the first person he saw was Dr. Caruso.
“All is well,” Caruso told him reassuringly. “I had her taken straight up—she’s actually dilating pretty fast.”
“She shouldn’t have gone into the office, should she?”
The doctor shrugged. “You know your wife. Though unless there’s a problem, active women often have babies with greater ease.” He grinned. “I might have prefer
red a less hurried schedule than this.”
“At least you didn’t have to deliver the baby in the Branch & Cabell conference room. Be grateful for that.”
“True. So, Maggie says you’re coming into the delivery room.”
“I have to.”
“It’s not obligatory.”
“No, actually, I have to.” Gorham smiled. “I’ll explain later.”
“We’ll need to get you suited up then,” said Caruso. “The nurse will give you the scrubs, and if you’re wearing a watch, take it off. In the meantime, her room’s just over there, second door.”
As he looked at Maggie, a great wave of affection passed over him.
“Hi. I brought the bag. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Maggie said brightly. “No problem.”
She was a little bit scared. But only he would have known it.
“Bit of an interruption to your meeting,” he joked. “You couldn’t ask the baby to reschedule?”
“I guess not.” She smiled. “Obstinate like his mother.”
“Did you call your mom and dad?” Her parents had retired to Florida recently.
“Yes. I promised to call again, afterward. And you?”
Gorham’s mother lived in Florida too.
“I didn’t have time yet.”
A nurse appeared with pale blue scrubs. Gorham put them on. He wondered what to do with his watch. He didn’t want to leave it in the room, he’d rather keep it with him. The scrubs had a pocket, so he put the watch in there.
Dr. Caruso came back and examined the patient. A big smile.
“Well, well. You don’t waste any time. I’ll return shortly.”
Gorham went to Maggie’s side and took her hand.
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