New York - The Novel

slowly. “I love my brother. What should I do? What can I do?”
    “I don’t know, Father.”
    He half turned his face to look at her. The tears were streaming down his cheeks to his mustache.
    “Promise me, Sarah, promise me you will never do such a thing as Herman has done.”
    “You want me to promise?”
    “I could not bear it.”
    She paused, but only for a moment. “I promise.”
    Perhaps it was for the best.

Verrazano Narrows
1968
    E VERYONE AGREED THAT Gorham Master was going to be successful. He was sure of it himself. He knew exactly what he wanted, he had it all mapped out, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
    At Groton he’d been impressive, and now he was a sophomore at Harvard. If his studies at the university were important to him, so was baseball, and he’d shown himself to possess the true outfielder’s instinct for reacting to a ball as soon as it’s been hit. Men liked Gorham and so did women. Blue bloods liked him because he was a blue blood; and everyone else did because he was friendly, and polite, and a good sportsman. Employers, in a few years’ time, were going to hire him because he was intelligent and hard-working, and knew how to fit in.
    His closest friends would have known two other things about him. The first was that, though not lacking in bravery, he had within him a decided streak of conservatism and caution. The second, which was related to the first, was that he was determined to be as unlike his father as he could.
    But it was because of his father that he’d returned to New York from Harvard this chilly February weekend.

    His mother’s message on Wednesday had been clear. Come sooner rather than later. And when he’d arrived at her Staten Island house on Saturday evening, Julie had been direct.
    “You know I hadn’t seen your father for a couple of years when hecalled me the other night. He wanted to see me to say good-bye. So I went, and I’m glad I did.”
    “Is it really so bad?”
    “Yes. The doctor told him he has cancer. The prognosis is that it won’t take long, and I hope for his sake that the end will come soon. Naturally I told you to come at once.”
    “I can’t quite take it in.”
    “Well, you’ve got until the morning. And Gorham,” she added firmly, “be nice.”
    “I always am.”
    She gave him a look. “Just don’t get into a fight.”

    On Sunday morning, as the ferry started across the broad waters of the harbor, there was a cold wind coming in from the east. How many times, Gorham wondered, had he taken this ferry with his father when he was a child? Two hundred? Three hundred? He didn’t know. But one thing was certain: every time he had taken that ferry, and stared across at the approaching shoreline of Manhattan, he had vowed that he was going to live there. And now, here it was again, looking somewhat bleak on a gray February morning, but no less inviting to his eyes.
    Of course, the place had changed quite a bit since he was a child. The waterfront, for instance, had completely altered. When he was a young boy, the docks of lower Manhattan had still been crowded with working men unloading cargo vessels. Some of that cargo handling was skilled work, too. But then the big containers had started to take the place of the old cargoes, and there was less and less work for the men on the docks, even across on the Brooklyn wharfs. The new facilities with their giant hoists were at Newark and Elizabeth ports now, over in New Jersey. The passenger liners still came on the Hudson to the West Side piers, but splendid though it was to see the liners, the waterfront now was a genteel echo of what it had been once.
    The city, it seemed to Gorham, was being tidied up and streamlined. The mighty hand of Robert Moses had continued to lay down highways for the motor car, and for the huge trucks which now delivered to, and frequently blocked, the Midtown streets. Moses wanted to sweep away the slums as well, and in numerous places along the East River, high-rise blocks, for better or worse, were springing up in their place. Urbanrenewal, it was called. The masses of small manufacturers and factories that had crowded the poorer districts, especially in Brooklyn and the New York waterfront areas—those dirty, grainy, humble powerhouses of the city’s wealth—had also been melting away.
    But if Manhattan was changing its character, if services were replacing manufacture, if Ellis Island was long since closed, and New York’s huge