New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [427]
“No, Mr. Master.” Was there a hint in her tone that he was always looking for things? Maybe not. Anyway, she smiled. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
He told himself not to be foolish. Bella was right, of course. Maggie was in good condition. They’d seen the sonograms. The baby was fine. And it was a boy. Gorham Vandyck Master, Jr. The names had been Maggie’s idea, not his, because she knew it would please him. She might not share his dynastic sense, but she was happy to go along with it. Well, it did please him. So if Maggie was okay with the idea, why fight it?
The baby was fine, and the doctor was fine as well. Caruso was a good doctor. Not everyone had the guts to go into obstetrics these days. If anything went wrong, everyone wanted to sue the obstetrician. The insurance premiums for obstetricians were so high that many medical students reckoned they just couldn’t afford to get into the field. Caruso was only a few years older than he was, but Maggie had researched him and been impressed.
Dr. Caruso had turned out to be a nice man, as well. Gorham had happened to meet him one evening about six months ago, when the doctor was walking home. His surgery was only a few blocks down from them on Park Avenue, so they’d walked along together and had quite a chat. “I live over on the West Side,” he’d told Gorham, “on West End Avenue. Unless the weather’s bad, I walk to work and back across the park every day.” He’d smiled. “Even doctors need to take exercise, you know.”
“Were you brought up on the West Side?”
“Brooklyn. My father had a house in Park Slope. But I went to school here in the city.” He named a private school that Gorham knew well.
“Great school. Did you enjoy it?”
“To tell you the truth, not really. The other boys mostly treated me like dirt.”
“For living in Brooklyn?” It was true that the splendid brownstones of Park Slope had become rundown in the fifties, and most of the respectable folk had moved out. But in the sixties, a renewal had been under way. All kinds of people had moved into the area, many of them people who wanted to restore the houses for their own sake. The private-school kids probably didn’t live there, but all the same … “I was brought up on Staten Island,” Gorham said.
“Nice place. Brooklyn wasn’t the problem, though.”
“You were on scholarship? They were mean to you because you weren’t rich? That’s despicable.”
“No—as a matter of fact, we weren’t short of money at all. My father began his life as a bricklayer, and my mother’s family ran a delicatessen. But then my father received a legacy from his uncle and became a developer. Small-time stuff—he bought up Brooklyn houses, restored them and sold them—but he did pretty well.” Dr. Caruso paused. “No, the problem was nothing subtle. It was because I was Italian. Simple as that. Italian name. Dirt.” He shrugged. “Now I’m their obstetrician.”
“I hope you charge them top dollar,” said Gorham drily.
“I live well. Actually, my son just started at private school, and he has no trouble at all.”
Ethnic was fashionable nowadays, Gorham thought, and he was glad of it. He’d heard of Jewish families, for instance, people who’d anglicized their East European names a generation ago, recently deciding to return to the original ones. Attitudes were changing. His own blue-blood name only gave him pleasure because it was honestly derived, from historical roots. At least, that’s what he told himself. “My view of ancestry is strictly postmodern,” he liked to pronounce at dinner parties. “A harmless ornament, to be shared with one’s friends.” That was pretty good, he thought.
And was Caruso any relation of the famous tenor? he’d asked. The obstetrician’s intelligent face was not unlike pictures of the great singer.
“Who knows?” said Dr. Caruso. “Way back, perhaps. My