New York - The Novel

given him a job in his office, but the work was very light, and as long as he turned up for a few hours each day, his father didn’t seem to mind.
    “Making money’s quite boring, really,” William had said. “I have more fun with my car.”
    Though this was probably true, Charlie reckoned that his father must be making a fortune, on top of the fortune he’d inherited.
    Most people they knew seemed to be doing well. For although, at the Great War’s end, there had been the usual post-war recession, it hadn’t lasted long. And once it was past, in New York at least, the Roaring Twenties had begun.
    It was an amazing time to be a New Yorker. Europe, devastated by the war, was still on its knees. The British Empire was severely weakened. London was still a great financial center, but New York was now richer and more powerful. All over America, helped by anti-trust legislation and other safeguards, modest enterprises had blossomed. American industries and cities were booming. But New York was the financial center through which this new wealth flowed. Wall Street men bought into the newly created wealth, traded its stocks and prices soared. Brokers get rich when stocks are traded. Speculators get richer still. William Master speculated,but his main business was the brokerage house, which he pretty much owned these days.
    If his father was so accommodating toward his literary ambitions, Charlie shrewdly guessed that behind this lay two calculations. First, that William reckoned it was wiser to keep a genial eye on his son than provoke a quarrel. Second, that the family now had so much money that it didn’t matter anyway.
    And Charlie was happy. He loved the Village, with its intimate atmosphere, its theaters, its writers and artists. He took the modest salary his father paid him, and never asked for anything more. He showed up at the house for social gatherings if his mother wanted, and when he did, he was charming to her guests, who found him witty and amusing. If he’d written some songs for the music publishers in Tin Pan Alley, they thought it was delightful. They promised to come to his play, when it was performed. “Young people are leading such exciting lives, these days,” they said.
    Which brought him to Peaches. His parents hadn’t met Peaches before, and his mother was eyeing her, cautiously.
    “What a very pretty ring, my dear,” she said, at last.
    Peaches was wearing a short dress and a smart coat with a fur-trimmed shawl collar, which she’d opened when she sat down. Her hair was bobbed, under a cloche hat. Her lips were dark red. While the waiter was getting their drinks, she’d taken out a cigarette holder, put a cigarette in it, and taken a long draw, blowing the smoke politely over Rose’s head. The ring was an elegant little art deco piece, a pair of garnets set in white-gold filigree. The garnets matched her lips.
    “It was made by a friend,” she said. “He’s the bee’s knees.”
    Rose didn’t like the flappers. She thought their haircuts made them look like boys, and their dresses were much too short. Before the war, the Gibson Girl look, the trim blouses and skirts that places like the Triangle Factory had catered to, had suggested a new female freedom. And the end of the war had brought them a very real freedom: the right to vote. But to Rose, freedom meant responsibility, yet the flappers seemed to think they could be free with their morals as well. They smoked and danced the charleston; many of them quite certainly made free love. And they seemed to be everywhere you looked.
    She wasn’t surprised that Charlie had taken up with a flapper, but, as usual, she was disappointed in him.
    “Where do you come from?” she asked the girl. A simple enough question.
    “London.” She looked bored. Charlie for some reason seemed to think this very funny. “Paris too,” she added. “Then Washington.”
    “Did you like Washington?” Rose asked coldly.
    “It was dull.”
    “And where did you meet Charles?”
    “In a speakeasy. He was half cut.”
    “I was plastered,” said Charlie with a grin.
    “But I could see he was no kluck,” Peaches added, obligingly.
    “I’m just a flypaper,” Charlie said.
    “Stick around.”
    How Rose hated the way these young people talked. She’d heard it all before, of course. They thought they were so clever. It had also dawned on her that Peaches had not lived in either London or Paris, or even Washington probably, and that this was