New York - The Novel

camping together.” She put her arm through his. “Can we do that? Promise?”
    “I promise.”
    They walked across the park arm in arm. The sun was warm. He didn’ttry to preach to her any more, and she seemed quite happy just walking by his side.
    His children were all right, he thought. All they needed was a challenge. Look at some of their friends—Lee, the Chinese boy, had got to Harvard. Or look at the people who had risen to be mayors of the city in recent decades. Fiorello La Guardia, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani—Jewish, black, Italian, every one of them had come up from poverty the hard way. You might like this one or that, but what a story for a great city. Plenty of his kids’ rich friends came from families who’d been on the Lower East Side two generations earlier. The American dream was not a dream; it was a reality. People came here for freedom and, hard though the way up might be, they found it. To make it, you needed the work ethic. And a good thing too.
    He thought of Dr. Caruso. Caruso actually did a day a week unpaid at a clinic in the Bronx. Few people knew that. But the guy had also invested brilliantly in the stock market boom and then sold out at the peak in 2008. Bought himself a town house on Park which cost a serious amount of money. By chance, the very same month, the guy who’d finally bought 7B had been indicted for fraud.
    “That’s a first for the building,” Gorham had remarked to Vorpal. “We never had an indictment before.” He’d shaken his head. “And who’d have thought it? The guy had six times assets.”
    Fortunately, Vorpal had no idea that there was irony in these remarks.

    It had taken two years, after the tragedy of 9/11, before Gorham Master had left the bank, and when the transition had come, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. It happened one evening at dinner.
    He and Maggie had been making a point of getting together with Juan and Janet every few months, and they had been at the Campos’s apartment one Sunday brunch when Juan had remarked that of all the people in their MBA class at Columbia, the one he’d be curious to meet would be Peter Codford.
    “That can be arranged,” said Gorham, and later that year, when Peter was in town, Gorham and Maggie invited them all to dinner.
    It had proved to be a delightful reunion for the three old friends. Peter had been particularly interested in the work Juan did. “I’m especially interested in what you say about El Barrio,” he remarked over dessert,“because Judy and I are setting up a foundation whose focus is going to be on America’s inner cities. We want to look at problems right across the country, and El Barrio is exactly the sort of area that would be of concern to us.”
    “Now I know that you are truly rich,” said Juan with a laugh.
    “If you’ve been financially successful, you have to decide how you’re going to use the money. But my own contribution will only get the foundation started. Raising new money will be a crucial part of the foundation’s ongoing task. We really need a banker as a CEO, I think.”
    “Maybe Gorham should do it,” said Maggie.
    “Really?” Peter turned to Gorham. “Would you be interested? I couldn’t pay you the kind of money you make at the bank, but it could be a really interesting challenge.” He glanced at Judy, who nodded and smiled. “I’d love to talk to you about it, if you might be interested.”
    Six months later, Gorham had become the first CEO of the Codford Foundation. Together with his income from his bank shares the foundation salary gave him enough to get by. Less than Maggie was making now, by far, but what did that matter?
    And he’d been a brilliant success. His years as a banker certainly gave him many skills, but his genuine enthusiasm for what the foundation was doing made him a wonderful advocate for the cause, and he discovered that he had a genius for fund-raising. He’d never been happier in his life. A year ago, he’d even been honored at a big New York dinner.
    “But I still have a long way to go,” he told Maggie. “I shall never consider myself successful until I have secured a significant donation from Vorpal and Bandersnatch.”
    “We’ll go to work on them together,” she promised.

    When they got to their building, he gave Emma a kiss.
    “Thank you for coming to see the Chagalls with me,” he said.
    “It was fun. Aren’t you coming up?”
    “I just have an errand to run.