New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “I know you’re going to take me anyway.”

  “Too right I am.”

  They crossed Central Park West and entered the park. He led Emma to the entrance of Yoko Ono’s garden.

  “It’s called Strawberry Fields, after a famous Beatles song,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Now, look down at that plaque on the ground. What does it say?”

  “It says, ‘Imagine.’”

  “Right. That’s after a song too.” He hummed a bit of it.

  “You really shouldn’t sing, Dad.”

  “It’s about everybody in the world living in peace. Well, it’s about quite a lot of things that I guess were important to John Lennon. But the real point is kind of existential. You can change the world if you’re prepared to imagine something better. You have to imagine. Do you get it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Well, I do.”

  They strolled round it.

  “There would have been deer here originally, of course.”

  “Like all over Westchester.”

  “Exactly. Manhattan was a big Indian hunting ground when the Dutch first came. Your ancestors, you know.”

  “Yes, Dad.” She rolled her eyes, but with a smile. “I know. I’m descended from the Dutch and the English, and I don’t know who else.”

  “Broadway, pretty much, was an Indian trail. And another trail went up somewhat east of Central Park.”

  “Great. Do I have to know all this?”

  “I think so.”

  “Anything else?”

  Gorham was silent. He was thinking.

  “It’s funny, this is called Strawberry Fields because of the song, but when it was in its native state, there could easily have been wild strawberries here. Have you ever eaten wild strawberries?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We must remedy that sometime. We ought to go camping and eat wild strawberries.”

  To his surprise, she seemed to like the idea.

  “We could do that. Go camping together.” She put her arm through his. “Can we do that? Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  They walked across the park arm in arm. The sun was warm. He didn’t try to preach to her any more, and she seemed quite happy just walking by his side.

  His children were all right, he thought. All they needed was a challenge. Look at some of their friends—Lee, the Chinese boy, had got to Harvard. Or look at the people who had risen to be mayors of the city in recent decades. Fiorello La Guardia, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani—Jewish, black, Italian, every one of them had come up from poverty the hard way. You might like this one or that, but what a story for a great city. Plenty of his kids’ rich friends came from families who’d been on the Lower East Side two generations earlier. The American dream was not a dream; it was a reality. People came here for freedom and, hard though the way up might be, they found it. To make it, you needed the work ethic. And a good thing too.

  He thought of Dr. Caruso. Caruso actually did a day a week unpaid at a clinic in the Bronx. Few people knew that. But the guy had also invested brilliantly in the stock market boom and then sold out at the peak in 2008. Bought himself a town house on Park which cost a serious amount of money. By chance, the very same month, the guy who’d finally bought 7B had been indicted for fraud.

  “That’s a first for the building,” Gorham had remarked to Vorpal. “We never had an indictment before.” He’d shaken his head. “And who’d have thought it? The guy had six times assets.”

  Fortunately, Vorpal had no idea that there was irony in these remarks.

  It had taken two years, after the tragedy of 9/11, before Gorham Master had left the bank, and when the transition had come, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. It happened one evening at dinner.

  He and Maggie had been making a point of getting together with Juan and Janet every few months, and they had been at the Campos’s apartment one Sunday brunch when Juan had remarked that of all the people in their MBA class at Columbia, the one he’d be curious to meet would be Peter Codford.

  “That can be arranged,” said Gorham, and later that year, when Peter was in town, Gorham and Maggie invited them all to dinner.

  It had proved to be a delightful reunion for the three old friends. Peter had been particularly interested in the work Juan did. “I’m especially interested in what you say about El Barrio,” he remarked over dessert, “because Judy and I are setting up a foundation whose focus is going to be on America’s inner cities. We want to look at problems right across the country, and El Barrio is exactly the sort of area that would be of concern to us.”

  “Now I know that you are truly rich,” said Juan with a laugh.

  “If you’ve been financially successful, you have to decide how you’re going to use the money. But my own contribution will only get the foundation started. Raising new money will be a crucial part of the foundation’s ongoing task. We really need a banker as a CEO, I think.”

  “Maybe Gorham should do it,” said Maggie.

  “Really?” Peter turned to Gorham. “Would you be interested? I couldn’t pay you the kind of money you make at the bank, but it could be a really interesting challenge.” He glanced at Judy, who nodded and smiled. “I’d love to talk to you about it, if you might be interested.”

  Six months later, Gorham had become the first CEO of the Codford Foundation. Together with his income from his bank shares the foundation salary gave him enough to get by. Less than Maggie was making now, by far, but what did that matter?

  And he’d been a brilliant success. His years as a banker certainly gave him many skills, but his genuine enthusiasm for what the foundation was doing made him a wonderful advocate for the cause, and he discovered that he had a genius for fund-raising. He’d never been happier in his life. A year ago, he’d even been honored at a big New York dinner.

  “But I still have a long way to go,” he told Maggie. “I shall never consider myself successful until I have secured a significant donation from Vorpal and Bandersnatch.”

  “We’ll go to work on them together,” she promised.

  When they got to their building, he gave Emma a kiss.

  “Thank you for coming to see the Chagalls with me,” he said.

  “It was fun. Aren’t you coming up?”

  “I just have an errand to run. I’ll be back inside half an hour.”

  “Okay, Dad.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

  He turned down Park Avenue. He didn’t really have an errand, he just needed to walk a little more. Park Avenue was looking its best. You wouldn’t think times were hard—not so bad for lawyers, it had to be admitted, though the family assets had decreased substantially in the last eighteen months. But it was tough for a lot of people.

  When you thought about it, though, the cycle of boom and bust, advance and recession, had been going on in the two biggest financial centers, New York and London, for centuries. Some busts were bigger than others—the Depression was huge. But this beautiful avenue still went on.

  Poor immigrants still arrived and found the freedom they sought, and prospered.

  And let’s face it, when you thought of the riots, the brutality, even the prejudices of generations past, New York for all its faults was a far kinder place than ever before in its history.

  The Big Apple. People thought that phrase came from the sixties. Actually it came from the late twenties and thirties, but what the hell? And what did it actually mean? Something you could take a big bite out of, he supposed. Some said it was the apple that tempted Adam. No doubt that too—New York was always materialist. But it was also the city of excellence, of art, music, of endless possibilities.

  He passed a fashionable store and was surprised to see that in their window display they were using a Theodore Keller print. It looked terrific. That really pleased him.

  And made him think of Katie. Katie Keller had done well.

  As well as her catering bus
iness, she’d opened her own restaurant in northern Westchester County. He and Maggie often went there on summer weekends.

  He remembered so well the moment of panic he’d had back on the terrible day the towers came down. She’d been in the Financial Center across the street, thank God, but it had been hours before they’d been able to make contact with her.

  Only one person that he knew himself had died that terrible day. Old Sarah Adler. If it hadn’t been for her, he’d have been in the headhunter’s office in the World Trade Center himself. Whether he’d have been trapped and lost his life it was impossible to say. But whether or not she’d saved his life in a physical sense, she’d saved it in every other way.

  Sarah Adler had gone. Along with more than a thousand others, she had left not a trace of her body that could be identified. An absolute and final loss.

  Not absolute, perhaps. She was remembered. Whenever he looked at the great space in the sky where the towers had been, he always thought of her with gratitude, and affection. And thousands of others were remembered, in a similar fashion.

  And he was glad that a new, Freedom Tower would arise to take the former towers’ place, for it seemed to him that this was everything that New York stood for. No matter how hard things were, New Yorkers never gave up.

  He continued walking. He came down past the Waldorf-Astoria, and the enclave of office buildings around the lovely, Byzantine-looking church of St. Bartholomew. As the lunch hour approached, a jazz band had started playing in the entrance of one of the bank buildings. People were gathering to stand or sit and listen to the music.

  How delightful it was in the sun. Even here in New York, time could sometimes stand still.

  And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he’d come from, and the Freedom Tower he’d been thinking of: taken together, didn’t they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. “Imagine” said the garden. “Freedom” said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn’t need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it.

  Imagine. Freedom. Always.

  Acknowledgments

  During the course of researching this novel, I have consulted a great many books, articles and other sources. I should like in particular to record my thanks and appreciation as follows.

  My warm thanks Professor Kenneth T. Jackson, for the most courteous and kindly overall guidance, and for The Encyclopedia of New York City, which sits in joint pride of place upon my desk, beside the magnificent Gotham, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.

  I owe a thirty-year debt of thanks to the curators and staff of the New York Public Library, and thanks for kind help from all the staff at the Museum of the City of New York, the New-York Historical Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the American Indian Museum, South Street Seaport, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and further special thanks to Carol Willis for her help and guidance at the Skyscraper Museum.

  One of the greatest joys of my professional life is the chance to work with distinguished historians, scholars and experts in the preparation of these books. The following have graciously read sections of my manuscript, in several cases hundreds of pages, made corrections and given invaluable counsel. I am therefore privileged to thank Graham Russell Hodges, Professor of Early American History at Colgate University; Edwin G. Burrows, Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Christopher Gray, Office for Metropolitan History, and “Streetscapes” Columnist, The New York Times; Barry Moreno, Curator, The Bob Hope Memorial Library at Ellis Island; Rabbi Robert Orkand, Temple Israel, Westport, CT; and Mark Feldman, of Weston, CT. Whatever shortcomings remain are mine alone.

  Special thanks are also due to Dan McNerney for his invaluable research assistance. And though space does not permit a complete list of all the many kind people who have given help, support, and information during the gestation of this book, I should like in particular to mention: Theresa Havell Carter, Sam Delgado, Harry Morgan, Joan Morgan, Miles Morgan, Maria Pashby, Michele Kellner Perkins, Ed Reynolds, Winthrop and Mary Rutherfurd, Susan Segal, Tim Smith, and the late Isabella H. Watts.

  My many thanks to Mike Morgenfeld for kindly preparing maps, and to Heidi Boshoff, once again, for preparing the manuscript with wonderful efficiency.

  Finally, as always, I thank my agent Gill Coleridge, without whom I should be entirely lost, my wonderful editors, Oliver Johnson at Century and William Thomas at Doubleday, whose exemplary thoroughness and creative responses to problems have so hugely improved this manuscript, and Charlotte Haycock at Century and Melissa Danaczko at Doubleday for so kindly and patiently guiding the manuscript through its final stages.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Edward Rutherfurd

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Century,

  Random House Group Ltd., London.

  Map illustrations by Mike Morgenfeld

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rutherfurd, Edward.

  New York : the novel / Edward Rutherfurd.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. New York (N.Y.)—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6068.U88N49 2009

  823′.914—dc22

  2009026584

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53023-1

  v3.0