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he wasn’t much affected by where they lived. Soon enough, they’d have their multimillion-dollar condo—as long as he never slowed down.
    Nancy showed great affection for her daughter, but she had inherited her mother’s lack of aptitude for parenting. In the right mood, she could spend hours playing happily with the baby on the floor, but the tasks of motherhood bored her. Feeding a toddler three times a day— every day ? Doing laundry? Taking the child out for fresh air? Such chores annoyed her. They dampened her carefree spirit. She felt they were depriving her of her right to remain irresponsible.
    The apartment was only two blocks from Washington Square Park, where neighborhood toddlers played. Before wheeling Isabel there for the first time, Nancy girded herself for the banal chitchat she expected from the other young mothers—women, no doubt, who’d never partied from closing time until dawn. What she found floored her: there were no other young mothers there. The dozen or so toddlers running around were all in the care of their nannies. Rob got an earful that night.

    Nancy had always worn a hard shell. She was easy to meet, but not easy to know. Even women who considered her a good friend sensed that she did not want to be known. You could talk to Nancy about what she’d bought, not how she felt. You could ask about the baby’s outfit, not how she and the baby were. Nancy didn’t simply have boundaries; her friends suspected she had built castle walls around her heart. It must have gotten lonely inside.
    One of the few people to whom she felt close was Ira’s mother. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, both before and after the divorce, Ira’s mother had been a gentle, caring presence in Nancy’s life. In 1996, when Ira’s mother was dying in a hospice in Evanston, Illinois, Nancy flew out to be with her.
    The lead statuette that Nancy’s mother and father had bought in Cincinnati thirty years earlier was by the old woman’s bedside when she died. Nancy, too, had come to treasure the statuette. In the figures of the two young and innocent little girls—so trusting, so seemingly full of sweetness, hope, and love—Nancy felt a link to something ineffable and precious and lost. Her older sister, Laura, reeling from her own rocky adolescence, had married and had moved to Oregon, severing all contact with the family. But on the statuette, Nancy believed, the two of them could stay forever linked. To Nancy, the statuette symbolized the capacity for closeness so lacking in her life.
    She brought it back to New York from Evanston. It became her most valued possession, even more than the mink coat.

5. GOLDMAN SACHS
    IN THE 1990S, THE POACHING OF INVESTMENT BANKING stars became the rule rather than the exception on Wall Street. Cadres of headhunters roamed the canyons like guerrilla bands. If you were an investment banker and you weren’t regularly offered a higher-paying job at a more prestigious firm, there was something you weren’t doing right.
    Rob had been performing brilliantly at Lazard. And Lazard, though slowly sliding from the first tier of investment banks, remained a land of plenty for headhunters. In 1996, Rob’s was among the heads hunted and delivered to Goldman Sachs. If boys of an earlier era had dreamed of one day wearing a New York Yankee uniform, rookie investment bankers in the 1990s yearned for the day when they could hold in their hand a business card that said Goldman Sachs. By almost any standard of measurement, Goldman Sachs was the leading investment bank in the world.
    “Money is always fashionable,” Henry Goldman, son of the bank’s founder, said late in the nineteenth century. For the next hundred years, Goldman set the standard for haute couture in the banking world. It achieved its preeminence by being, as senior partner Gus Levy said in 1969, “long-term greedy.” As a private partnership, Goldman did not have to answer to shareholders who expected spectacular