New York - The Novel

went wrong now, it would all be his fault.
    She’d left the apartment at eight this morning. At eleven, in the middle of a meeting in one of the big, wood-paneled conference rooms in the ten floors of Branch & Cabell’s Midtown offices, she had started to go into labor. She’d been very calm; he could just imagine it. She’d excused herself, called him to bring her bag, and gone down in the elevator to find ataxi to the hospital. It was uptown, but at this time of day, it shouldn’t take her long. He needed to hurry.
    “Bella,” he called.
    “Yes, Mr. Master.” Bella was standing behind him already. Thank God for Bella. She always knew where everything was.
    “Did I forget anything?”
    Bella was a treasure. She came from Guatemala, and like so many of the domestics in New York, she had begun her career as an illegal immigrant, but her previous employers had managed to get her a green card. He and Maggie had employed her three years ago—after all, with two people working full-time, it was a lot easier if one had a housekeeper. When they had first engaged her, Gorham had been a little uncertain about the forms of address to be used nowadays, but Bella had solved that for them. She’d been working in a big Fifth Avenue apartment before and she sensed, quite correctly, that the people in the Park Avenue building expected everything to be formal. “Mr. and Mrs. Master,” she called them, and they didn’t argue.
    But there was another tactic involved in employing Bella. In a little while, they’d planned to have children. Maggie wanted someone whom she could really trust already in place, as part of the family, before that happened. The understanding was that when they had a baby, she’d be the nanny too. Recently, though, Bella had been dropping hints about how much she had to do, and he could see the writing on the wall. Within a year, he reckoned, Bella’s idea was that they’d be employing a nanny as well as a housekeeper. And this was not what they wanted to do. There might be a battle ahead there, he supposed.
    “No, Mr. Master.” Was there a hint in her tone that he was always looking for things? Maybe not. Anyway, she smiled. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
    He told himself not to be foolish. Bella was right, of course. Maggie was in good condition. They’d seen the sonograms. The baby was fine. And it was a boy. Gorham Vandyck Master, Jr. The names had been Maggie’s idea, not his, because she knew it would please him. She might not share his dynastic sense, but she was happy to go along with it. Well, it did please him. So if Maggie was okay with the idea, why fight it?
    The baby was fine, and the doctor was fine as well. Caruso was a good doctor. Not everyone had the guts to go into obstetrics these days. If anything went wrong, everyone wanted to sue the obstetrician. The insurancepremiums for obstetricians were so high that many medical students reckoned they just couldn’t afford to get into the field. Caruso was only a few years older than he was, but Maggie had researched him and been impressed.
    Dr. Caruso had turned out to be a nice man, as well. Gorham had happened to meet him one evening about six months ago, when the doctor was walking home. His surgery was only a few blocks down from them on Park Avenue, so they’d walked along together and had quite a chat. “I live over on the West Side,” he’d told Gorham, “on West End Avenue. Unless the weather’s bad, I walk to work and back across the park every day.” He’d smiled. “Even doctors need to take exercise, you know.”
    “Were you brought up on the West Side?”
    “Brooklyn. My father had a house in Park Slope. But I went to school here in the city.” He named a private school that Gorham knew well.
    “Great school. Did you enjoy it?”
    “To tell you the truth, not really. The other boys mostly treated me like dirt.”
    “For living in Brooklyn?” It was true that the splendid brownstones of Park Slope had become rundown in the fifties, and most of the respectable folk had moved out. But in the sixties, a renewal had been under way. All kinds of people had moved into the area, many of them people who wanted to restore the houses for their own sake. The private-school kids probably didn’t live there, but all the same … “I was brought up on Staten Island,” Gorham said.
    “Nice place. Brooklyn wasn’t the problem, though.”
    “You were on scholarship? They were mean to you because you