New York - The Novel

roof of the Exchange when he saved them. There were trust men, whom he despised, but who camped outside his door to beg for favors. All manner of Wall Street fellows filled the narrow financial forum as the tall, burly banker in his high top hat strode out of his temple.
    Jupiter looked neither right nor left. His eyes glowered as though lit by volcanic fires. His swollen, bulbous nose bulged from his face like a mountain from which his mustaches spread down like silver lava flows. Did Vulcan fashion his thunderbolts in there? Quite likely.
    As he strode rapidly down the street, the crowds parted in front of him, as mortals before a deity. And so they should, thought William. Morgan might support his church, and like to sit with bishops, but when he descended into Wall Street from banking’s Mount Olympus, he was above mortal men. Then, truly, Morgan was Jupiter, king of all the gods.

    But alas, he was still a man. In the months that followed, one question was often asked: “Morgan will not always be with us. What’ll we do then?”
    Some argued that more regulation was needed, to stop the abuses that had led to the crisis. But William Master was sure this was a bad idea.
    “Things got a little out of hand,” he agreed. “But we don’t need socialism. The banks can regulate themselves, as they do in London.”
    It would take six years before a Federal Reserve system with limited powers was instituted.
    For William, however, life soon returned to normal. When his wife asked him, “Did we nearly lose everything?” he reassured her.
    “I suppose if all the trusts had failed, Rose, then we should have failed too. But we were never really in trouble.” It seemed to comfort her so much that, after a while, he almost believed it himself.
    The first weekend in November, he took the Rolls-Royce out alone, for a fifty-mile drive. He thought of taking young Keller, too, but decided not to. If Rose had found out, it would only have annoyed her.

    If the panic of 1907 was to change the life of young Salvatore Caruso, it was a small event the month before that he always remembered.
    He had already dressed up. He was wearing the suit with long trousers that his older brother had worn before him. His white shirt was spotless.He might be going to his first communion. But to everyone, except his mother, at least, the meeting today was more important even than that. So he was anxious to complete the errand as quickly as possible.
    It had been his mother’s idea to send him to the priest’s house. Not their own parish priest, but the silver-haired old man who’d come to say Mass in their church the week before. And where did he live? In the Jewish quarter, of all places.
    It wasn’t far. You only had to cross the Bowery and you were in it—the Lower East Side’s tenth and thirteenth wards, which ran across to the river just below the old German quarter. Its poor streets—around Division and Hester streets, through Delancey, and all the way up to Houston—housed small factories, varnish shops, ironworks and tenements which, for a generation now, had been filled to overflowing with the Jews of Eastern Europe. On Rivington Street, however, near the river, was a Catholic church.
    Salvatore hadn’t enjoyed the old man’s sermon. It had been about Christ’s temptation in the desert, when Christ had gone up to a mountain and the devil had told him to jump off, so that God could save him. But rightly, the priest reminded them, Jesus had refused.
    “Why didn’t he jump?” Salvatore had whispered to Anna. After all, if Jesus could walk on water, why not fly? It seemed a grand idea. But not to the old priest.
    “Tempt not the Lord thy God!” he had cried, looking straight at Salvatore. God is all-powerful, he had explained, but He does not have to prove Himself. It is sacrilege—again he looked at Salvatore sternly—to challenge God to do anything. He does only what is necessary for His plan, which we do not understand. If He gives us poverty, if He gives us sickness, if He takes a loved one from us, that is part of His plan. We may ask for His help, but we must accept our fate. “Do not ask Him for more than you deserve. If God wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings. So do not try,” he told them firmly. “For that is the temptation of the devil.”
    Concetta Caruso had liked the sermon very much, and she had thanked the old priest afterward. They had talked. She had discovered that his mother came from