He had stood before the receptionist, again given his name, and she had risen from her chair and shown him to the office of the man he had learned was his father.

The glass boardroom table was long, dominating the room. There was a smaller table in a corner, a vase with fresh flowers, a coffee urn, some comfortable looking chairs. Shelves of books, many of them leather bound, on a wall near the chairs. He had guessed this to be some sort of informal greeting area, used for pleasant talk.

It was unoccupied as he entered, and there was no smell of brewed coffee in the room.

After several minutes the father had entered and stood regarding him from the head of the long glass table. He, the son, waited beside a window looking down on the great city skyline’s tallest office towers. None of them were close to reaching its height.

Instructed to sit at the foot of the long glass table, the son watched the father he had never met before that moment, the stranger with a face so much like his own, settle into a chair at its opposite end. He was a tall man, his posture very rigid. They had seemed separated by many miles. The father wearing a perfectly tailored suit of some fine, light fabric. The son hoping the sleeve of his sport jacket would not ride up to show the frayed threads on his right shirt cuff. He had saved to buy the jacket for their meeting. The old shirt was his best. There had been no money for another after he bought the jacket.

The father observed the son across his long glass table and asked why he had come to him. His voice was calm and without inflection. His exquisite suit was like soft but impermeable armor. He truly seemed miles and miles away.

Seated by the window, the son answered him and wondered if his voice would fail, fall as short of reaching the father’s chair as the tops of the skyscrapers below. Still, his request seemed a fair, even modest one. The son knew of a deep and broad accumulation of family wealth, but did not then appreciate its meaning, and would have mistaken its neglected leavings for the brightest and rarest of jewels. The son knew of respected legitimate children, but he did not then consider himself their equal, let alone their better by vast degrees.

The thrust of what he wanted was recognition.

The father looked at him without any whatsoever.

“Listen to me this once, because once is all you get,” he had said. “You have no place here, no help, nothing to gain. Your mother is a piece of loose candy in a common bowl. Any man can reach into it for her, and I may have had a taste. If the bowl was passed to me or put in easy reach, why not? I can’t be sure. Hard candy, it’s a cheap temptation. Sweet but uninteresting. Meant to be indulged and forgotten.”