Some days things just work out, Judy thought to herself. She’d pick out a new doctor on Park Avenue from this list and check them out with Arnie. Positive energy really paid off.

Judy ran her finger down to the Upper East Side entry and emboldened in black letters with four stars was Dr. Francesca Weissman—listed as “an Upper East Side must. The choice of today’s A-list.”

Judy was miserable again. If Francesca Weissman was really the best, Judy was stuck with her.

·CHAPTER THREE·

Albert

With his two older sons off at Deerfield, Albert Tremont read to his nine-year-old twin daughters every night. Even if Judy had booked him for drinks and into another dinner, Albert was unwavering in his routine and his commitment.

“But Daddy, I’m not interested in Great Expectations,” Charlotte whined to him. Her sister Jane was hanging on every word. Jane had started the lower-school poetry journal and had gotten a verse poem published in The New Yorker in second grade. Charlotte would have preferred to e-mail her friends about the Collegiate boy who was the first to tongue-kiss Taylor Schultz, the fastest girl in sixth grade.

“Charlotte, when you grow up you’ll remember that I read to you every night. Something my father never did at all.”

Albert tried to do everything his father never did. But despite all of Albert’s rigor, his father still informed every nuance of his life. Ten years ago, at the time of his father’s death, Albert openly predicted that the great man’s specter would finally diminish. Now Albert just never mentioned to his wife or his therapist that he continued to see his father as both his social calling card and the source of his underlying insecurity.

William Blanchard Tremont had been the founding partner of W. B. Tremont, the venerable Wall Street investment banking boutique. Although William Tremont was a Boston Brahmin, he was quick to recognize the energy of C. W. Cahn, the German Jewish financier, and initiated a formidable partnership. Tremont Cahn became an international investment bank on a par with Lazard Frères and Crédit Suisse. Before he died, William Tremont sold the company to the Singapore Bank and walked off with a major fortune and a Wall Street legacy. He also left one son, Albert.

Albert was a graduate of Deerfield Academy, Amherst College, and Stanford Law School. Throughout his academic career he excelled in the classics, and by the time he graduated Amherst he was able to read ancient Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Old Norse. He also mastered junior varsity croquet. Not that Albert really cared about hitting wooden balls with a mallet, but he liked the link to Lewis Carroll.

For someone who had spent so much time struggling to find his own niche, Albert had very little fire under him. His sophomore year at Amherst he sold drugs in the surrounding Connecticut River Valley, but it was a limited period of entrepreneurship. Albert took PCP, rhinoceros tranquilizers, on the beach in St. Barths over a Christmas vacation and offered them to a member of the French Foreign Legion. He ended up in a Gustavia jail until his father arrived to post bail. From that time on Albert did what he was told—first by his father, then by his wife.