Rose Master didn’t approve of Charlie’s desire to be a writer. He understood. “You can buy pictures, but people like us don’t paint them, dear,” she’d once told him when he was a boy, and it was almost the same with writing. A professor could write history of course; a gentleman of leisure might write a memoir. During the war, one of the distinguished Washburn family had even been a war correspondent for The Times of London. That was different. But to live in lodgings in Greenwich Village, make undesirable friends, and hang about Tin Pan Alley, trying to write plays and songs, was a shocking waste of a life for a young man with everything to live for. When he confessed that he’d like to write like Eugene O’Neill, she’d been appalled. “But he’s a drunk,” she protested. “And his friends are communists.”

Charlie also suspected that his mother’s fear was not only that he’d permanently adopt a bohemian lifestyle, but that he wouldn’t be able to make a decent living.

Strangely enough, his father had been his secret ally. William had given him a job in his office, but the work was very light, and as long as he turned up for a few hours each day, his father didn’t seem to mind.

“Making money’s quite boring, really,” William had said. “I have more fun with my car.”

Though this was probably true, Charlie reckoned that his father must be making a fortune, on top of the fortune he’d inherited.

Most people they knew seemed to be doing well. For although, at the Great War’s end, there had been the usual post-war recession, it hadn’t lasted long. And once it was past, in New York at least, the Roaring Twenties had begun.

It was an amazing time to be a New Yorker. Europe, devastated by the war, was still on its knees. The British Empire was severely weakened. London was still a great financial center, but New York was now richer and more powerful. All over America, helped by anti-trust legislation and other safeguards, modest enterprises had blossomed. American industries and cities were booming. But New York was the financial center through which this new wealth flowed. Wall Street men bought into the newly created wealth, traded its stocks and prices soared. Brokers get rich when stocks are traded. Speculators get richer still. William Master speculated, but his main business was the brokerage house, which he pretty much owned these days.

If his father was so accommodating toward his literary ambitions, Charlie shrewdly guessed that behind this lay two calculations. First, that William reckoned it was wiser to keep a genial eye on his son than provoke a quarrel. Second, that the family now had so much money that it didn’t matter anyway.