New York - The Novel

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    “Look at this,” he invited young William.
    William looked down at the illuminated page. The colors were rich. The gold leaf shone mystically.
    “It’s beautiful, sir.” He’d heard that Morgan spent a good part of the bank’s huge profits buying such things.
    “It is,” Morgan murmured, then turned his attention away from the treasure to his guest. “We’ll sit down.” He motioned William toward a pair of leather armchairs by the fire. As soon as they were seated he began. “Your father tells me you like machines.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Study engineering?”
    “It’s a hobby.”
    “Mathematics?” The eyes, like shuttered coal furnaces now, were resting on him.
    “I like machines more than numbers.”
    “What else do you like?”
    William hesitated. He wasn’t sure. Morgan was watching him, not unkindly.
    “If you’ve something specific, you can come to see me again,” he said. And then he got up. The interview was over.
    “Thank you, sir,” said William, as he left the room.
    “How did it go?” his father asked eagerly, on his return.
    “He said I could come to see him again.”
    “He did? That’s splendid, William. Splendid.”
    And in truth, William realized, the great man had been perfectly fair to him. It had taken Morgan rather less than half of one minute to see, with absolute clarity, that this young man had no idea what he wanted, no burning ambition, no particular talent, no achievement—in short, nothing whatsoever that could be useful to the Morgan bank. So he hadn’t wasted any time. Come back, he had said, when you’ve something to offer. And he was right.
    But to his father’s chagrin, William had never gone back.
    Several of his friends had been going into brokerage houses, others into trusts. “If Morgan takes you, he’ll work you to death,” they warned him. And in any case, he’d known in his heart that Morgan wouldn’t take him. There was no reason why he should.
    Months had passed, and he’d quietly let the matter slide. His father had been disappointed, but had said nothing.
    And in the years that followed, he hadn’t done so badly. He was a partner in a brokerage, nowadays. He speculated a little, but the biggest money he’d made came from his partnership in a trust.
    Trusts were a way to make a lot of money. Originally, they were set up to take care of the funds for old-money families like the Masters. When grandfather made a will, with a nice big trust, the money would be managed for the family until it was all paid out. Depending on the terms of the trust, that could be many years. So trust companies were sound, conservative—trustworthy, in other words. At least, that was the idea.
    But then some bright young fellows discovered that there was a legal loophole in these arrangements. The trust companies could also take in money, and invest it as they liked. Behaving like a bank, but without any of the rules that restrained a proper bank, they would pay high interest rates to attract the extra funds, and then undertake the wildest speculations. In short, despite their respectable-sounding names, most of them were pirates. Proper bankers, men like his father, were suspicious of the trusts.
    “What sort of cash balances do you fellows keep?” Tom Master had once asked him.
    “Oh, quite enough,” he’d said, which of course meant next to none.
    “I met Pierpont Morgan at a reception the other day,” his father had continued. “I asked him what advice he’d give to a young man in a trust. You know what he said? ‘Get out.’”
    Well, Pierpont Morgan was semiretired now. He spent a good deal of time supporting the Episcopal Church and its liturgy. He’d built a magnificent library next to his house to keep his fabulous collection of books and gems. Every year he went on his travels to Europe and returned with priceless treasures—old masters, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, medieval gold. Often as not, he just gave it straight to the Metropolitan Museum. His son Jack Morgan, a first-rate banker, but not so terrifying, was running the bank day to day.
    The great man might despise him, but at least, William had been able to reflect, he had managed to prosper pretty well in recent years. The market had mostly been rising. The trust had made a fortune; the brokerage house, too. If you were making money, then you must be doing something right. They took in ever more money, pledged against the value of the stocks they held, and