New York - The Novel

makes the first flight to Paris, we give him the same honor.”
    “I get it.
Vive la France.”
    “Esattamente.”
    As they walked back home together afterward, Salvatore looked at his uncle with affection. Uncle Luigi was in his sixties now, yet he had just the same curiosity and enthusiasm about the world as he had in his thirties. Live forever, Salvatore thought, I should be lonely without you.
    “That was a fine thing you did for Angelo,” Uncle Luigi remarked. “I do not think I could have done it.”
    “Not really,” said Salvatore. And in truth, it hadn’t been so difficult.Partly, it had to be said, it had raised his own status within his family. It had certainly impressed everyone at the wedding. He was sure, also, that Paolo had intended him to share the money with Angelo. And one other thought had also been in his mind.
    “It was what Anna would have wanted,” Salvatore said.
    In a way, it made him free.
    1929
    It was halfway through September when Uncle Luigi went to see his broker. He enjoyed these visits, usually. It was twenty years earlier that he’d overheard someone in the restaurant talking about the firm. He always tried to listen, if Wall Street men came into the restaurant—and as its reputation for first-rate Italian family cooking spread, they sometimes did. By doing so he’d learned a lot of things. The brokerage house in question, he’d heard, was very grand, and patronized by important men on the street, but they took small accounts as well, and treated all their customers with nearly equal courtesy.
    He liked going in through the handsome doorway, and seeing all the clerks at their desks, and sitting down in the big leather chair in the paneled room where, once a year, a senior clerk would politely review his account with him.
    “I’m wondering,” Uncle Luigi told him, “whether to sell my holdings.”
    “Why would you want to do that?” The clerk was a small, dapper man, in his forties.
    “The market’s down a bit.”
    “There’s been some profit-taking, but that doesn’t surprise us.”
    “Nothing goes up forever,” Uncle Luigi pointed out. “Look at real estate.”
    It was true that since 1925, despite the astonishing boom in the stock market, the overall price of houses in America had actually been going down. But the clerk only shrugged.
    “Real estate’s one thing, the market’s another. The fact is that in the last six years, the market has gone up by five times. On the third of this month, the Dow was at three hundred and eighty-one. That’s the highest in its history, you know.”
    “But that’s partly what worries me,” Uncle Luigi said. “On average, the prices of stocks are now over thirty-two times their earnings.”
    The clerk smiled, to show that he was impressed that this little Italian should know all this.
    “We would agree that future gains may not be so steep, but we don’t see any reason for the market to come down. We think it’s moved to a higher plateau. And I can assure you, the investment is still coming in.”
    Uncle Luigi nodded thoughtfully. What the broker said was true. People were still piling money into the market, but they were being encouraged to do so. A year ago, this dapper man had politely informed him: “We have been dealing with you for many years now, sir, and your investments are excellent collateral. We should be glad to lend you extra funds if you’d like to increase the size of your portfolio.” Luigi had declined the offer, but he wondered how much of the money now invested in the stock market was borrowed. The greater the borrowing, the more like a bubble the thing must become.
    “So you advise me to hold on to my stocks?” he asked the broker, after a pause.
    “We expect the market to rise soon. I’d hate to see you miss out.” The clerk smiled. “I’m buying myself, I assure you.”

    Rose Master made a very big decision that night. It wasn’t easy, and she’d been thinking about it for some time. It might, she reckoned, affect the family’s future happiness and position more than they imagined. For clever though her husband and her son were in their different ways, she believed she had more foresight.
    It concerned the cottage in Newport.
    Charlie came to dinner that evening. She’d been rather hurt by her son that summer. During the whole time, he had come to Newport just once, and his father had undoubtedly dragged him there on that occasion, telling him, “At least come once, to