New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [458]
“You know who lived there.”
“Tell me.”
“John Lennon. The Beatles.”
“Right. I knew that. He got shot there. And his wife Yoko Ono made a beautiful garden in the park opposite.”
“Did you ever go in there?”
“I know you’re going to take me anyway.”
“Too right I am.”
They crossed Central Park West and entered the park. He led Emma to the entrance of Yoko Ono’s garden.
“It’s called Strawberry Fields, after a famous Beatles song,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Now, look down at that plaque on the ground. What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Imagine.’”
“Right. That’s after a song too.” He hummed a bit of it.
“You really shouldn’t sing, Dad.”
“It’s about everybody in the world living in peace. Well, it’s about quite a lot of things that I guess were important to John Lennon. But the real point is kind of existential. You can change the world if you’re prepared to imagine something better. You have to imagine. Do you get it?”
“If you say so.”
“Well, I do.”
They strolled round it.
“There would have been deer here originally, of course.”
“Like all over Westchester.”
“Exactly. Manhattan was a big Indian hunting ground when the Dutch first came. Your ancestors, you know.”
“Yes, Dad.” She rolled her eyes, but with a smile. “I know. I’m descended from the Dutch and the English, and I don’t know who else.”
“Broadway, pretty much, was an Indian trail. And another trail went up somewhat east of Central Park.”
“Great. Do I have to know all this?”
“I think so.”
“Anything else?”
Gorham was silent. He was thinking.
“It’s funny, this is called Strawberry Fields because of the song, but when it was in its native state, there could easily have been wild strawberries here. Have you ever eaten wild strawberries?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We must remedy that sometime. We ought to go camping and eat wild strawberries.”
To his surprise, she seemed to like the idea.
“We could do that. Go camping together.” She put her arm through his. “Can we do that? Promise?”
“I promise.”
They walked across the park arm in arm. The sun was warm. He didn’t try to preach to her any more, and she seemed quite happy just walking by his side.
His children were all right, he thought. All they needed was a challenge. Look at some of their friends—Lee, the Chinese boy, had got to Harvard. Or look at the people who had risen to be mayors of the city in recent decades. Fiorello La Guardia, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani—Jewish, black, Italian, every one of them had come up from poverty the hard way. You might like this one or that, but what a story for a great city. Plenty of his kids’ rich friends came from families who’d been on the Lower East Side two generations earlier. The American dream was not a dream; it was a reality. People came here for freedom and, hard though the way up might be, they found it. To make it, you needed the work ethic. And a good thing too.
He thought of Dr. Caruso. Caruso actually did a day a week unpaid at a clinic in the Bronx. Few people knew that. But the guy had also invested brilliantly in the stock market boom and then sold out at the peak in 2008. Bought himself a town house on Park which cost a serious amount of money. By chance, the very same month, the guy who’d finally bought 7B had been indicted for fraud.
“That’s a first for the building,” Gorham had remarked to Vorpal. “We never had an indictment before.” He’d shaken his head. “And who’d have thought it? The guy had six times assets.”
Fortunately, Vorpal had no idea that there was irony in these remarks.
It had taken two years, after the tragedy of 9/11, before Gorham Master had left the bank, and when the transition had come, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. It happened one evening at dinner.
He and Maggie had been making a point of getting together with Juan and Janet every few months, and they had been at the Campos’s apartment one Sunday brunch when Juan had remarked that of all the people in their MBA class at Columbia, the one he’d be curious to meet would be Peter Codford.
“That can be arranged,