“All right?”
Maggie had refused an epidural. Typical Maggie. She was going to do it all herself, without help, in her own way.
“Okay,” said Gorham. He went to the foot of the bed and looked at her severely. “I guess it’s time you learned how to breathe.”
The first breathing lesson had taken place three months ago. Husbands and wives were supposed to go together, so that they could learn to practice as a team. It was all part of being a modern husband and father, and he was fine with that. They’d gathered in a little conference room at the hospital. He and another father got there first. The nurse who was giving the class arrived a couple of minutes afterward. Then they waited.
After five minutes, the nurse asked where their wives were. After ten she started to get cross. The other man, a small, balding guy of about his own age, sighed and looked at him.
“What’s your wife do?”
“Lawyer. And you?”
“Mine’s an investment banker.”
They’d both turned to the nurse.
“We’d better start without them,” they said.
Now that Maggie had made partner, the pressure wasn’t quite so bad. But if anyone thought she was going to break off an important meeting to go to a breathing class …
And she hadn’t. Not to the first, nor the second. The third time, she did turn up. The nurse hadn’t been too happy, but Gorham didn’t mind—he was getting pretty good at breathing by now.
“Okay,” said the nurse, looking bleakly at Maggie. “The key is to get a rhythm going that helps you to relax. You’re going to learn to breathe in, on RE … count one … two … three … four … and LAX … RE … one … two … three … LAX. As the contractions get a little closer, we may want to speed it up a bit. So, just follow your husband now while he gives you the time. And RE … one … two …”
The duty nurse’s head appeared round the door. “There’s a call for a Ms. O’Donnell,” she said.
“Would you please tell them she’ll call back later?” said the nurse.
“I’m afraid,” said Maggie, “I’ll have to take that.” She started toward the door.
“Would you please sit down?” The nurse’s voice was rising in anger.
“Sorry,” said Maggie as she reached the door.
“This is your baby,” screamed the nurse.
Maggie turned, glanced lovingly at Gorham, and gave the nurse a brilliant smile.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re a great team. He’ll breathe, and I’ll have the baby.”
“Breathe … two … three … Push,” said Gorham and the doctor. “Breathe … two … three … Push.”
“Push now …” said the doctor. “Good girl … that’s it … almost there … push … hard as you can …”
“Aagh,” screamed Maggie.
Dr. Caruso wasn’t talking now. He was busy. He was pulling the baby out.
“One more time,” he called. Maggie gave another scream …
Gorham stared. Dr. Caruso took a step back. The baby cried out. Caruso smiled.
“Congratulations. You have a son.”
So that was it.
A few minutes later the doctor remarked to them both: “I see you both went to the breathing classes. Good job.”
Gorham looked at Maggie, and Maggie looked at Gorham.
“Absolutely,” said Maggie.
So everything was all right. After a while Maggie wanted to rest for a few hours, so Gorham decided to go back to the apartment. He took off the scrubs and the nurse told him to drop them into the chute that went down to the laundry. He got his things together, and prepared to leave. He was just about to walk off the floor with Dr. Caruso when he realized what he’d done.
“Shoot. I left my watch in the pocket of the scrubs. It’s gone down into the laundry.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Caruso. “Was it a Rolex?”
“Oh no. Nothing expensive. All the same …”
“You can tell the nurse, and she’ll let the laundry know. They might find it.”
“Do you think this happens quite often?”
“Probably.”
“Do they ever find the watches?”
“I couldn’t say. I believe the jobs down there are quite popular.”
“Right.”
“Look at it this way,” said Caruso cheerfully. “You may have lost a watch, but you’ve gained a son.”
When he got home, Gorham called Maggie’s parents and his mother. Then he opened a bottle of champagne, and made Bella have a drink with him to toast the birth, and told her she should come with him when he went back to the hospital, so that she could see the baby. He wanted Bella to bond with the baby too.
But first there was some time to kill. He was too excited just to sit down and look at television. He certainly couldn’t do any work. He started to pace about the apartment.
Maybe he’d call Juan. That would be good.
But he put it off for a moment, and continued to pace. He hardly wanted to think about the subject, but he couldn’t help himself.
What the devil was he going to do about that offer from the investment bank?
Millennium
THE CRISIS IN the life of Gorham Master developed so gradually that, as the years passed, he himself could not have said when the process first began. Probably it was when he’d refused the offer to join the investment house at the time of young Gorham Junior’s birth. At the time it had seemed for the best, and Maggie had agreed with his decision, too.
Since then, the flow of his life had been even. The stock market crash of ’87 had quite soon become a memory, albeit a painful one, as it subsided into its proper place as one more of the cycles of market boom and bust that had been repeating regularly now between London and New York for about three hundred years.
It had been succeeded, however, by another recession, this time in the New York real estate market, which had been rather beneficial to the Master family. For soon after his second son, Richard, was born, an eight-room apartment in the building became available. “And the asking price is only seventy percent of what I reckon it would have been two or three years ago,” he told Maggie. The financial logic was impeccable: trade up in a down market. It was an estate sale, too, and the trustees of the estate were glad to sell to a qualified buyer who was already in the building, so that there were no problems with getting the co-op board approval, and no need even to pay commission to a realtor. Gorham and Maggie were able to negotiate a highly advantageous price. They sold their six-room apartment, took out a joint mortgage for the difference, and bought the eight. The following year, Gorham had stood for election to the co-op board, and served on it for several years.
Even the eight-room, however, was soon full. For after the two boys, they both still wanted a daughter, and in 1992, Emma arrived. The two boys had to share the second bedroom, therefore, while Emma had the third. With an eight, there were two maids’ rooms off the kitchen, and by the time Emma arrived, Bella the housekeeper had been joined there by Megan the nanny, a jolly girl from Wisconsin who lived with them for several years until she was succeeded by her cousin Millie. With this pleasant Upper East Side household, any reasonable person should have been well content.
Yet it was then, for the first time in his life, that Gorham had started to dream of living outside New York.
Not that there was so much wrong with the city. Indeed, for many people, New York was becoming a better place to live than it had been for years. Mayor Koch had been succeeded by Mayor Dinkins who, as an African American, had been perceived as more sympathetic to the troubles of Harlem and the other deprived areas. But the city had retained its reputation for crime, especially muggings, until nearly halfway through the nineties, when hard-line Mayor Giuliani had taken over. Like Giuliani or not, his “zero tolerance” policy on crime seemed to have worked. One could walk the streets nowadays with little fear of trouble.
The city felt cleaner, too. Behind t
he New York Public Library, where once the Crystal Palace had stood, the little green of Bryant Park had become a dismal enclave where rats scurried through the vegetation, and dope dealers plied their trade. Now it was made into an area where people from the nearby offices could sit and have a cappuccino. Along Forty-second toward Times Square, the dreary movie houses that purveyed hardcore porn were swept away. Downtown, Soho and the area next to it, known as Tribeca now, were becoming fashionable enclaves for people who liked to live in lofts. True, this gentrification and yuppification of the city might take away some of its older character, but on the whole Gorham thought the changes an improvement.
No, his desire to leave the city, at first anyway, was simply a desire for more physical space.
For large and handsome though the apartment was, there were times when all the family yearned for a place where they could spread out a bit. The boys would have liked their own rooms. July and August in New York City could never be anything but punishing. Many of the commercial bankers that Gorham knew lived in the suburbs. Two of his friends, both SVPs like himself, had splendid houses in New Canaan, with two or four acres around them, tennis court, swimming pool. They got up early to commute into the city, but they reckoned it was worth it.
“They don’t have working wives,” Maggie very reasonably pointed out. “I can’t be a mother and commute as well.” She smiled. “Not even if we could afford a car and driver. Anyway,” she added, “the city schools are better.”
In 1997, however, they had found a useful compromise. A country house. It was maybe a tad inconvenient that they should both have fallen in love with a little farmhouse up in North Salem. A mile or two further and they’d have been in Putnam County, where the prices and property taxes were lower, while North Salem was just inside Westchester County, and had unusually high property taxes to pay for the local school. But they adored the house, and there it was.
Gorham was pretty happy. They went up there most weekends, and the children loved it. In the summer, he and Maggie quite often commuted from the house several days a week. It took an hour and fifteen minutes door to door whether they drove or took the train down to Grand Central. He felt as if he’d opened a window in his life.
And, it had to be confessed, it fitted into his plan for his life. Other people might like to have summer houses, or rent them out on Long Island; there was the rich crowd in the Hamptons who paid big money to be there. But there were many people who preferred the quieter, more rural surroundings of the big corridor, from Bedford in the middle of Westchester, northward up the Hudson Valley into fashionable Dutchess County. People who liked horses especially. North Salem might not be deep country, but it was hardly suburban. There was a local hunt, and several estates running into hundreds of acres. Like Bedford, it was a place where rich people went, and this pleased Gorham, for he could feel that the Master family was where it ought to be.
But was he?
It was sometime in the mid-nineties when Gorham had realized the truth, that he wasn’t going any further in the bank. It wasn’t that he’d failed—his job was safe and he was still valued—but there was a group of people of the same age as he who had just done a little better. Maybe they were better politicians. Maybe they had been lucky. But he was never going to be the CEO, or even one of the tiny cadre who really ran the bank. He was going to be the nice guy just below that level.
There was another, even more disturbing thought. It was a time of amalgamation. Banks were getting bigger. Like some vast game of financial Pac-Man, one bank was swallowing another and, many people said, only the biggest would survive. Their huge monetary power and lowered costs would crush all opposition. So far his bank had neither bought, nor been acquired, but if and when that happened, two things were likely to follow, one good and one bad. The good part of it was that his bank stock and options would probably be worth a lot more money. He might come out of such a deal a quite considerably richer man, but not more than that. It was the cadre just above him that had the big stock options. He’d known ordinary bank executives who’d made fifty, a hundred million or more in these corporate games. By getting stuck where he was on the corporate ladder, however, he’d miss out on the big rewards. He might hope to make a very few million at best, if he was lucky, but not more.
The bad side, however, depressed him deeply. For as he considered all the other banks, and all the executives he knew, he became almost certain of one thing. In every likely contingency he could envision, it would be his opposite number in the other bank who would be asked to stay, and he who would be asked to leave.
With his good name intact, of course. These departures happened all the time. Plenty of men would take their money and retire quite happily, and live well for the rest of their lives. But he’d wanted more than that. He’d wanted the top, the big time. He’d wanted to be the man who was honored at important functions in the city, and who was asked onto boards. That had been the plan.
Instead of that, he was going to be the spouse of B & C partner Maggie O’Donnell, the nice guy who’d been a banker until he was eased out. And this while his kids were still in school. It hadn’t happened yet, but the prospect haunted him.
Even this might not have been so bad, however, if it hadn’t been for what was happening all around him.
New money. Nineties money. Seventies and eighties money hadn’t been so bad. When entrepreneurs had developed the technologies that became Silicon Valley, there had been something heroic about their enterprise. Technology wizards had mortgaged their houses and started working out of their garages; daring venture capitalists had had the vision to back them. Companies had been created that, in time, threw off huge amounts of cash and changed the world. In the process, some of the entrepreneurs had become vastly rich, but they had taken on few of the old-fashioned trappings of wealth. They led exciting lives of real quality. They created charities in which they became personally involved. Wealth was not about status, but about new ideas.
But nineties money, it seemed to Gorham, was different. The dot.com boom was about using the new technology to provide all kinds of services, so that new companies could be invented with such speed that he couldn’t keep track of them. Some, he reckoned, had a chance of success. But others appeared to Gorham to be based on concepts so flimsy that it reminded him of the story he’d once read about a prospectus, issued before London’s great South Sea Bubble market crash of 1720, which had announced that a company was to be formed “for a purpose yet to be discovered.” Yet these companies were being formed, their initial public offerings were being oversubscribed, and making their founders instantly rich, often before there was even a smell of profit.
“The way I see it,” he’d said to Maggie, “the process is similar to what happened in the nineteenth century with the railroads. In those days, competing companies fought for control of the route along which people and freight was to be carried. Dot.com companies are racing to gain control of an information highway, to build up a huge network before any significant traffic actually flows along it.” He shrugged. “People are investing in expectations.”
But people were investing, and getting hugely rich. The NASDAQ exchange was booming. Kids in their twenties were walking away with tens, even hundreds of millions, and buying huge lofts down in Tribeca because they thought the old-money crowd on Park and Fifth were boring. Private equity men who arranged these IPOs were making similar amounts. Wall Street traders were getting huge bonuses and buying multimillion-dollar apartments for cash.
Was his family benefiting from this explosion of money? Maggie was doing well—lawyers always did. Her brother Martin was now living with a man who, having sold a small dot.com company, had bought an entire building in Soho for use as a private residence and art gallery, in addition to the beach house he owned out on Fire Island.
Gorham, however, had failed to join the party. As he looked back now, he regretted that decision not to join the investment house in ’87. He should have taken the high roa
d—God knows what he’d be worth now if he’d done that. Most days, in the office, surrounded by commercial bankers like himself, he was too busy to let it prey upon his mind. But sometimes there would be sudden ugly reminders.
Going to watch the ball game at his children’s private school, for instance, one couldn’t fail to notice the limousines outside the gym from which some of the fathers, the Wall Street big hitters, had just stepped. Not that anything was ever said, of course, but while he winced at the school fees, these were the guys giving the million-dollar gifts to the school and going onto the board of trustees. He knew. The kids knew too. People always knew, in New York. The worst occasion, though, had been in the fall of ’99, when he and Maggie had gone to dinner with Peter Codford.
Peter Codford had been at Columbia with Gorham. He had then gone into venture capital in California for a while, later setting up his own private equity operation in New York. He and Gorham hadn’t seen each other for many years when they happened to meet at a conference, and Peter had invited Gorham to dinner.
Peter Codford was six feet four inches tall, with a spare, athletic build, and he still had the same full head of dark brown hair that he’d had when he got his MBA. Only the lines on his face had deepened. The effect was to add to the image of casual authority that he’d possessed even in his twenties. His wife Judy was lively and clever. It also turned out that she and Maggie had known each other at law school.
“I went on working for a while after Peter and I married,” Judy told them. “But then Peter had to move, so I stopped, and I never went back to work again.” She smiled. “I rather regret that.”
The Codfords lived in a fifteen-room apartment near the Metropolitan on Fifth. It was a palace, and would have contained Gorham and Maggie’s Park Avenue apartment more than twice. Peter also had a house in the Hamptons, on Georgica Pond, and another apartment, on Nob Hill in San Francisco.
The conversation was certainly easy. Both couples had the same background and outlook, as well as some shared memories. Gorham was interested that Peter was similarly cautious about the dot.com boom. “People have made a lot of money,” he said, “but there has got to be a big correction.” Peter also wanted some information about the politics of loan decisions at the commercial banks. Had it changed in the last year? He sketched a situation at a company in which he was a minority shareholder. What would be Gorham’s advice if they wanted to approach a commercial bank for a loan?
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