“It’s all right, Lou.” She began to ruffle his hair, catching it between her fingers and pulling it straight up in the air, which he loved. “What’s new in here?”
Lily leaned against the counter and watched the boys open themselves to their sister, uncurling legs that had been folded up beneath them, leaning forward as if to crawl across the table. They looked so small, their bones fit together like twigs and their bodies humming at quicker speeds beneath their near-translucent skin. But Lily knew this was her fear playing tricks on her.
SHE PUT THEM TO BED TOGETHER, in Matteo’s bed, their foreheads touching. Madison was somewhere else in the house; she’d barricaded herself in her room for the night, most likely.
Lily went downstairs and clicked off the kitchen lights. She stood for a moment at the window, looking out toward the side gate beyond the garage, where she could just see the headlights of the black sedan that had been parked down the hill for the entire week. There was another one a few feet past the main gate, and another just before you made the turn onto the main road.
When she’d considered this for a few moments, she left the house and walked down through the yard, to her own house beyond the pool, the place Bob D’Amico had given her to live.
TEN
Will the United States as we know it collapse this week? It may sound like so much alarmist hand-wringing, but it’s not an unreasonable question.
Does acknowledging that you sound like a fretful alarmist really let you off the hook? Madison thought. Isn’t that even worse than being unaware, to know you’re doing it and not care that you sound crazy?
It had taken Jake Levins only one week, after the news broke, to write a column about her father. Now she sat on the floor of her closet, one hand twisting up behind her to hold the doorknob, the Monday Times spread on the floor before her.
She couldn’t think of many other situations in which it would be necessary to have a lock on a closet door, but right now she could have used the privacy. Who doesn’t give a teenager a lock on her bathroom door? Isabel and Bob D’Amico, that’s who.
Weiss and its ilk—which of course includes the late, not-so-great Bear Stearns—are nondepository institutions. Their new way of doing things, in theory, does a better job of minimizing risk. Or maybe it just does a better job of ignoring risk. Because now, post-housing bust, you have to wonder if they assumed that hidden risk would be the same thing as managed risk. Did they think their investors wouldn’t notice what was going on?
Well, they didn’t. We didn’t.
How could people stand to read this? And people who, unlike her, had no personal warmth for Jake, no memories to fight back as they read his column. Madison could hear it read aloud in his own voice, the voice that had taught her curse words in Yiddish and Italian and German, that had asked her that very summer if she was enjoying Anna Karenina and let her unspool her entire tirade against it before telling her she was wrong. But what about the people reading this who didn’t know him? How could they stomach the showmanship, the smug disdain?
Here’s another quaint term for you: “bank run.” You might think of this as a term for another century, when angry mobs of despairing depositors pounded on the closed doors of a huge marble bank building. But this revolution won’t be televised; it will happen with the click of a mouse, with an executive excusing himself to check his phone during an off-site at the Four Seasons or The Mark. It will be quieter, sure, but the effects will be the same.
Mentioning those hotels, that was amateur hour. It made him sound like he’d never actually met anyone who worked at a bank. These people had no idea how her father spent his day, they just wanted to feel like they knew.
She had never thought of Jake or Lori as “these people,” but it wasn’t really her fault that she thought this now, was it? Based on this column, it was clearly how Jake wanted to be seen.
And now we’ve arrived at my main concern this morning: Weiss & Partners. Weiss banked, in the end, on being too big to fail. But Treasury refused to put any more public funds on the line for Bob D’Amico.
It could be worse, Madison thought. It had taken Jake until the tenth paragraph to mention her father’s name.
She’d read enough elsewhere, too, to know that Jake might have leaned a lot harder on the question of whether anything illegal had happened. On her father’s public statements all year, and whether they could possibly have been truthful. On what really lay behind her father’s decision to fire Erica, to fire Jim.
Some of the other bloggers, most of whom were probably half her father’s age and had accomplished approximately one ninety-eighth what he had, seemed to be stuck on her father’s childhood, which as far as she knew no one had ever cared about before. He’d never been that kind of famous. But now, apparently, it mattered.
How could a man from such a rough background, they wondered, be so out of touch with what life was like for the majority of Americans? Because he spent his days, whether on the Gold Coast or in Manhattan, surrounded by his underlings or their equivalents. Protected from reality by an army of sycophants. (This is a dark day for Greenwich, Madison thought, all these men and their wives learning via some journalism school graduate who couldn’t get a job at the Times that they’re technically just underlings of my father’s.)
Her mother was often mentioned, too. Bob and his blond, pedigreed wife were the figureheads, the dolls atop the cake for a firm at which morality and loyalty were so cherished. One firm—the place where everyone was still married to his first wife. Or so they’d always claimed. But that loyalty extended only to the front door; D’Amico’s loyalty, in the end, was always to his own guys.
Isn’t that what the word loyalty actually meant, though? Who would talk about being loyal to strangers?
We’ve got a car rolling slowly toward a cliff. Some guy shows up and, shrugging his shoulders, gives it the final push over the edge. Do we blame that guy? Or do we blame the guys who drove the car to the cliff’s edge in the first place?