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“How do you know?”

“Listen, when I brought you over here this morning and made you look at those two huge Chagalls by the entrance to the Met, did you have trouble doing that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean did you complain all the way across the park about having to look at the damned opera house—by the way, it’s a very fine opera house and a damn sight better than the old one, but never mind that. I mean, were you able to stare at the Chagalls and take them in?”

“I had great difficulty.”

“No you didn’t. I watched you.”

“That is so unfair. You’re worse than Mommy.”

“Wow. Impressive insult.” He looked at her seriously. “Emma, you have to understand. Attention deficit disorder exists. A few people have it, and if they really do, it’s no joke. But nowadays, half the kids in your school say they have it. Why’s that?”

“You get extra time in exams.”

“Right. It’s a racket. The parents tell the doctors they think their kids have it, and the doctors go along with it, and soon everybody has it, so they can have extra time with their exams and improve their grades.”

“Isn’t that a good reason to have it?”

“No. And I also know the Ritalin racket.”

“Meaning?”

“Ritalin is the drug usually prescribed for ADD. Ritalin helps concentration. It also has the useful property of letting you stay awake and mentally alert through a day and a night. If you have to pull an all-nighter on a college essay, it’ll get you through. So the kids who claim to have ADD get prescribed the Ritalin, and then they sell it to the college kids. Do you think I don’t know that?”

“So what’s your point?”

“The fact that there’s a secondary market in something doesn’t make it right.”

“Mommy doesn’t say I haven’t got ADD.”

“What does she say?”

“She says she doesn’t know.”

“Your mother’s a lawyer.”

“You think you’re so clever.”

“I pay for your school fees. And I pay for your tutors. Last year you had a tutor for math, and another for science, and another to prepare you for your SATs. Shortly you will have a tutor to help you prepare for your college applications. Your mother will insist on that. You have so many damn tutors that I don’t know why I pay for you to go to school. But I am not paying for ADD. That is final. And let me tell you something else. There are kids all over America who don’t have all these fancy tutors, and who just sit down to do their SATs and applications, without any help at all.”

“But they don’t get into the best schools.”

“Actually, you’re wrong. I’m very glad that some of them do.”

Gorham shook his head. You could say, of course, that he’d brought this upon himself. He’d raised the kids in pampered privilege precisely because he wanted the best for them, and now he’d got what he paid for. But it went beyond his kids, who were a little spoiled, but fundamentally sound. New York, it seemed to him, was just the pinnacle of a more general problem.

Look at what happened if one of the kids got sick. Antibiotics, right away. It wasn’t just New York, or even America. He had friends in Europe who told him that the socialized doctors there did exactly the same thing. Give the child antibiotics and stay out of trouble. The only trouble was, did any of these children build up natural resistances? The new bugs that resisted antibiotics were going to come and get them one day.

There was never a downside. Nothing must be allowed to go wrong. You could find the tough old American spirit on the sports field. But was that enough?

“I can’t believe you won’t let me have ADD,” Emma said.

Yet maybe deep down, he thought, she was pleased. Kids like it if you say no. He remembered his son once, when he was a little guy, saying something about another boy: “His parents don’t care about him at all, Dad. They let him do anything he likes.” There was wisdom in that.

“Let’s walk back across the park,” he suggested.

“Walk? Okay.”

But a tiny detour first, he thought. Just up to Seventy-second Street. It was a grand street to walk across. As they came to Central Park