New York - The Novel

hadn’t particularly liked it the first time. Perhaps his innate conservatism and caution had set in. He had friends who were getting into LSD, with terrible results, and in his mind he associated hard drugs with soft. Whatever the reasons, he ran with a group of friends who, for the most part, didn’t do drugs, and it embarrassed him that his father did.
    “It looks like a big mess outside. Garbage bags everywhere.”
    “It is.”
    “Nothing dims our affection for the city, though.”
    “Right.”
    “I guess you still want to come and be a banker here?”
    “Family tradition. Except for you, that is.” Had he allowed a hint of rebuke to creep into his voice? If so, his father had chosen to ignore it.
    “Do you remember your grandmother giving you a Morgan silver dollar when you were a boy? It’s nothing to do with the Morgan bank, you know. It’s the name of the designer.”
    “Remember? I keep it with me every day. It’s my talisman, the badge of my destiny.” Gorham grinned a little sheepishly. “That’s rather childish, I guess.” In fact, the dollar had a more critical significance than that. It was the reminder of the family’s past as bankers and merchants, in the days when they still had wealth—the wealth that his aberrant father had never even attempted to get back.
    But rather to Gorham’s surprise, his father looked delighted.
    “That’s good, Gorham. Your grandmother would be so pleased—she wanted to give you something you’d value. So you’ll try to get a job with a bank as soon as you graduate?”
    “That’s right.”
    “It’s a pity my father isn’t here, he could have helped you. I know some bankers I could ask.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “Bankers like people like you.”
    “I hope so.”
    “Do you worry about the draft?”
    “Not right now, but I could be eligible when I graduate. Maybe I’ll go to divinity school or something. That’s what some people are doing to get out of it.”
    “Martin Luther King is saying that the war is immoral. But I guess you don’t want to protest about it.”
    “I’ll keep a low profile.”
    “You should go to business school later. Get an MBA.”
    “My plan is to work for a few years, and then go to Columbia.”
    “Then you’ll marry, after the MBA?”
    “When I make vice president. Maybe assistant vice president. AVP would do, if I find the right person.”
    “A good corporate spouse?”
    “I think so.”
    Charlie nodded. “Your mother would have been a good corporate spouse. An excellent one.” He paused. “Things don’t always work out quite the way we plan, Gorham.”
    “I know.”
    “I should keep this place, if I were you. The monthly maintenance isn’t too bad—I’ll leave enough to cover that. And being in a good building will save you a lot of trouble.”
    “I don’t want to think about that, Dad.”
    “You don’t have to think about it. That’s just the way it’ll be. This place will suit you much better than me. I should have moved down to Soho.” He sighed. “My mistake.”
    Soho: South of Houston Street. It was a quiet, bare area of former warehouses and cobbled streets, where artists could get a studio or a loft for very little money. A short walk northward and one was in Greenwich Village. Gorham could see that his father would have been happy there. And he was just wondering how to respond when Charlie suddenly said: “You know what I want? I want to see the Guggenheim. Will you take me there?”
    They took a taxi. Charlie looked a little frail, but by the time they got out on the corner of Fifth and Eighty-ninth, he seemed to have gained energy.
    Frank Lloyd Wright’s great masterpiece might not be to everyone’s taste, but Gorham could see why his father liked it. The museum’s white walls, and its cylindrical stack, like the top of an inverted spiral cone, was in open contrast to and rebellion against so much of the recent public architecture of the city. The huge glass tower blocks that had been rising since the late fifties enraged Charlie Master. The setback laws that had forced architects to make creative designs for the higher, narrower floors of the previous generation of skyscrapers had been relaxed. Huge, flat-topped glass and metal stumps were soaring up forty floors and more, blocking out the sky. In compensation, they had to provide open plaza-like spaces for the public at ground level. But in practice, the spaces were frequently cold, and soulless, and not much used. As