Memories of a Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Goddard grandparents. After all, she was the only granddaughter. I could also imagine a barn or, given the quality of this stuff, more likely a warehouse, where those two families of slavers turned industrialists stored unneeded furniture, paintings, table silver, and linen to be drawn upon as needed in order to furnish homes of younger sons and daughters. Lucy had at the time of that first visit given me a rapid tour, pointing out the improvements she and Thomas had made after decades of neglect by the bedridden previous owner. When we returned to the library, Thomas was there, having just returned from the office, and offered drinks—a whiskey for her and martinis poured out of a cut-crystal shaker for him and me. I congratulated them on their elegant, indeed luxurious, installation. Lucy shook her head rebelliously, agesture I remembered as typical when she was going to contradict you and felt strongly about it.
    The location isn’t all that good, she said. Many people one knows consider being even a couple of blocks north of Seventy-Second Street unacceptable as a matter of principle.
    I raised my eyebrows at that.
    No need to make funny faces, she told me. We’re also on the wrong side of Park Avenue. The good buildings are on the other side and get the morning sun. We had to settle for second best not because I wanted to but because my trustee wouldn’t give me one penny more. Just in case you have any doubts about it, that’s where the money comes from. My trust! If we were trying to make do on what Thomas makes at Kidder we’d be living in Harlem or Hoboken and I doubt you’d be visiting us!
    I thought it odd that Thomas hadn’t gotten the job with Morgan Stanley he had hoped for. A moment later, he explained. Kidder had always been his second choice, but it moved to first place when Al Gordon, the head of the firm and a great man, came to Cambridge to recruit him personally and made clear that he and Thomas would be working closely together.
    Lucy’s vision of what their existence would be if they had had to depend on Thomas’s salary struck me as peculiarly noir. I supposed that all good investment banks paid their young people pretty much the same, and yet my cousin Josiah Weld, who had gone to work for Morgan Stanley and was Thomas’s exact contemporary, didn’t seem to live in dire misery.In fact, Josiah’s mother had recently told me how much he earned. It was a modest amount but hardly coolie wages, and when a week earlier I had gone to drinks with Josiah and his wife, Molly, at their apartment on Central Park West and Ninety-Third Street, I hadn’t had the impression that I was slumming—even if it wasn’t Park Avenue, north of Seventy-Second Street! It so happened that the conversation at the Welds’ had turned to how young people were getting by in New York—Josiah’s classmates who, for example, were also investment bankers or lawyers and, like him, had very little money of their own or received minimal help from their families. According to Molly, those who already had children lived in more-or-less-rundown middle-class apartment buildings on the upper reaches of West End Avenue or even on West 106th Street. Lower-middle-class, Josiah corrected her. There wouldn’t be enough bedrooms, she went on, but one could manage. The big problem if you were way uptown was coming home at night. One had to be very careful. That is why, Molly concluded, they had decided to wait a couple of years before they had children. The picture the Welds had given me had seemed on the whole reasonable; it was pretty much what I had expected.
    As for Lucy and Thomas’s spread, it put them in a different league. A Kidder partner, perhaps even Mr. Gordon himself, would have felt quite comfortable ensconced in their apartment. I had a fleeting feeling that the apartment and everything about it spelled trouble. The expense would remain beyond Thomas’s ability to sustain for several years, even if his ascent to