When Albert got out of law school he worked as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell for five years. Although he was on a partner track, Albert saw no reason for the law to overwhelm his life and left to join the family banking business. Even during his stint at Tremont Cahn, Albert’s idea of banking was closer to a nineteenth-century gentleman’s model than to the aggressive dealmakers of the late twentieth century. He preferred to go home to dinner at 6 p.m. and then on to the Philharmonic. Albert was relieved when his father sold the bank, and he happily retired at age thirty-five.

Although Albert called himself a “private investor,” he mostly hired people to do that for him. He had an office on East Fifty-eighth Street where he went sporadically to manage the family money. “Managing” was, in Albert’s linguistic mind, a euphemism for exchanging pleasantries with assorted accountants, bankers, and notaries. Happily, Albert often said, it all seemed to run on its own.

Walking down the steps of his Park Avenue triplex to join Judy and the guests in the library, Albert caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He still had a full head of thick black hair and the shining green eyes of his Irish mother. Albert had always been a very good looking man, and unlike the sartorial fastidiousness of his father, it all came very naturally to him. He knew the outside world was ominously unstable, but he loved the predictable routine of his own life. He enjoyed his biweekly trips to his office and serving on the boards of the American Academy in Rome, the New York Society Library, and his daughters’ all-girls school. The fact that one daughter was a nine-year-old intellectual and the other on probation for purchasing a Prada bag on eBay and charging it to a Spence fourth-grade teacher was something Albert tried not to think about. Anyway, it couldn’t compare with Jessica Rodman e-mailing a nude photo of herself to the entire eighth-grade class of St. Bernard’s School for boys.

Besides, Albert took a secret delight in his difficult daughter’s acquisitiveness. Charlotte wanted Prada and Juicy Couture with a passion that he had for very little, except maybe single malt scotch. The girls with private planes in Charlotte’s class had fathers whose materialistic ambitions Albert admired. At least they weren’t what he most loathed in himself, “Old-Boy Ineffectual.”

“Did Charlotte listen?” Judy asked Albert as he walked into the chocolate-colored library. For the past four years, Judy had been devoted to dark walls and multiple brocade window treatments. If you asked her period, she’d simply say, “Empire.”

“She said she wasn’t listening but I think she did.” Albert turned to their two guests. “Mr. and Mrs. Rose, I presume. How do you do?” Albert often resorted to false formality as a family joke. He then embraced Pippa and shook her husband Joe’s hand. All he really knew was she was the new decorator, and this was the first time they had come to dinner.