buy the more expensive grade of eggs or butter or potatoes, and that would have broken her heart. Then she would count the eggs to make sure that the maid didn’t help herself to more than two a day! There wasn’t any justification for this at all. My father was the head of a small and very successful admiralty law firm. In his case that really meant the sole owner, his partners were that in name only, really they were employees. Those were the days when the practice of admiralty law in New York was profitable. Thus we lived in a beautiful house on a nice street but in Dickensian penury. I went to a Jesuit school on Park Avenue that cost next to nothing, but gave one a pretty rigorous education. My father had lunch at the Downtown Association and dinner at whatever restaurant his shipowner clients favored. That was also the era of flamboyant shipowners: many Greeks, most of them related to one another, Norwegians, and even one Czech lady who made a fortune buying broken-down cargoes and then chartering them into the Korean War trade. Of course, my mother didn’t control my father’s bank account, so he was well dressed in the Wall Street lawyer style—well enough to cut a decent figure at the table of those magnates. My father and mother didn’t go on vacations. My father thought that would have a demoralizing effect on the office. I was just beginning college when my mother died. Father took this event rather sentimentally, although they had fought all the time—over money. For instance, he collected Dutch pewter. Every piece he bought was a nail driven into her flesh. Anyway, I thought he would continue to live his perfectly regular life, except buying more frequently and more important pieces, when into the picture stepped Bonnie the Bimbo! She was the widow of one of his minor Greek shipowners, some sort of cousin by marriage of the Kulukundis clan—although she was perfectly American herself, from Nashville, with that unforgettable and unbearable accent—and he had done a will and maybe a trust for the husband. It’s always a good deal to do a client’s will in addition to the work for his business. Few things attach him to you more solidly than when he remembers that you will handle his estate. The husband died suddenly, my father became the executor or trustee, and one thing led to another. What a life he had with her! I used to think of my mother turning over in her grave like a chicken on a spit as the tap of the Schmidt fortune was opened to pay for gutting the house and redecorating at least twice, a butler imported from Hong Kong, a box at the opera, and on and on. Also my father gave up Brooks Brothers for the most expensive tailor in New York. That’s where this number I am wearing came from. Luckily, until the last couple of years, when he put on some weight, we were the same size. And then he died, leaving, as aforesaid, to Bonnie everything he still had—which was a lot, as he kept on earning good money and had never spent it before. At the time, it felt like a kick in the rear end that I didn’t need, but I got over it, and I must say I think Bonnie gave my father the happiest years of his life! Besides, I think he thought I had rejected him.
How?
His firm was one of those law practices that at the time the founder’s son could inherit. Without quite saying it, my father rather assumed I would. When it turned out that I was a good student and got clerkships, first on the court of appeals and then on the Supreme Court, and later firms like Wood & King courted me, he couldn’t, of course, tell me don’t go there, come to work for me. That would have been ridiculous, and he knew it. I believe, though, he expected me to stay just long enough to get some solid experience at a big firm and then join him. But when that time came, I made no move, and he was too proud to ask. So nothing happened, except that, after I was made a partner, Dexter King told me about running into my father, some years earlier, at the Downtown Association, and how my father asked whether I was doing well. He is on the right track, Dexter replied, and