New York - The Novel

then he, Gorham Vandyck Master, was going to have a very serious disagreement with him. It could be a blazing row. And one really didn’t want to have a blazing row with the chairman of the board of a Park Avenue building.

    The game was due to start a little after 1 p.m. They really needed to get going.
    “Come on,” he said. “We’re taking the subway.”
    “We are?” his son said, in astonishment.
    Didn’t anyone in this family use public transport? When the nanny took young Gorham, Jr., or his siblings to any of their appointments, she took a taxi. When Bella ran errands for Maggie, she probably took a taxi too. At least, he thought, it cost less than having your own car and driver, which several of the people in the building did.
    The Masters kept just two cars. The Mercedes sedan in the garage round the corner, and a nice blue SUV for Maggie, which lived in the garage of the country house.
    “Getting in and out of Yankee Stadium can be a hassle,” he said firmly. “The subway will be quicker.”
    As they rode in the subway, Gorham looked at the three boys with affection.
    Gorham Vandyck Master, Jr., a thirteen-year-old, fair-haired son of privilege; Richard, eleven years old, a thinner, wirier version of his brother; and young Gorham’s best friend, Lee.
    Gorham could never figure out Lee’s Chinese name exactly, but it didn’t matter, because everyone called him Lee. He had met Lee’s parents one time when they had come to collect him from the apartment. They lived up in Harlem, hardly spoke a word of English; the father was a plumber or something. But their son was a genius.
    It always seemed to Gorham Master that Lee was totally round. His friendly face, under a mop of black hair, was round. His body wasn’t fat, just round. His temper was so easy that Master reckoned his psyche must somehow be round, so that everything bounced off it. Lee took the subway from Harlem each morning and, Master was convinced, just turned himself into a ball and rolled along the sidewalk from the station to the school.
    But Lee wrote the best essays in his grade. He’d surely finish up at Harvard or Yale or some Ivy League place. And what did he want to be? Once, when they were all sitting in the kitchen, the boy had confessed that he’d like to be a senator. He also wanted to be a big collector of Chinese art. “And you know what,” Master had told his son afterward, “he’ll probably make it.” And the thought filled Master with pride for his country and his city.
    And how did this kid come to be at his son’s fancy private school? With a scholarship, of course. Maybe twenty percent of the kids there were on scholarships.
    If there was one thing New York private schools were good at, it was raising money. He’d no sooner paid the hefty tuition fees for Gorham, Jr.’s, first trimester in kindergarten when the parents’ committee had hit him for a donation as well. They didn’t waste any time. And before they even graduated, the kids in twelfth grade organized themselves to start donating as alumni. Just to get everybody into the habit. And the scale of giving was astounding. The parents’ committees raised several million in donations every year; the accounts were so impressive they were scary.
    But if the system was scary, it meant that those scholarship kids from poor homes got the best education available in America, and the rich parents were happy to pay for them. That was the American way. Of course, it didn’t do any harm to the school’s academic results, either.
    Gorham, Jr., had plenty of friends, but Lee was the closest to him. Both kids were nice, both ambitious, both striving for excellence. He was proud of the friend his son had chosen.
    They got to the game with time to spare.

    Yankee Stadium, the Bronx. The House that Ruth Built, scene of Babe Ruth’s greatest triumphs. The huge stadium was packed, the crowd expectant.The Yankees, the biggest sports franchise in America, were going for their fourth consecutive World Series in a row. That would also be a fifth in six years.
    He had great seats—field level, on the third-base side. The boys were thrilled. And today, the Yankees were playing the Red Sox.
    The Boston Red Sox. The ancient rivalry, so full of passion—and heartbreak, if you were a Red Sox fan.
    At 1:15 the game began. And for the next three and a quarter hours, Gorham Vandyck Master enjoyed one of the happiest afternoons of his life. The game was wonderful. The crowd