Charlie nodded. “Your mother would have been a good corporate spouse. An excellent one.” He paused. “Things don’t always work out quite the way we plan, Gorham.”

“I know.”

“I should keep this place, if I were you. The monthly maintenance isn’t too bad—I’ll leave enough to cover that. And being in a good building will save you a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t want to think about that, Dad.”

“You don’t have to think about it. That’s just the way it’ll be. This place will suit you much better than me. I should have moved down to Soho.” He sighed. “My mistake.”

Soho: South of Houston Street. It was a quiet, bare area of former warehouses and cobbled streets, where artists could get a studio or a loft for very little money. A short walk northward and one was in Greenwich Village. Gorham could see that his father would have been happy there. And he was just wondering how to respond when Charlie suddenly said: “You know what I want? I want to see the Guggenheim. Will you take me there?”

They took a taxi. Charlie looked a little frail, but by the time they got out on the corner of Fifth and Eighty-ninth, he seemed to have gained energy.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s great masterpiece might not be to everyone’s taste, but Gorham could see why his father liked it. The museum’s white walls, and its cylindrical stack, like the top of an inverted spiral cone, was in open contrast to and rebellion against so much of the recent public architecture of the city. The huge glass tower blocks that had been rising since the late fifties enraged Charlie Master. The setback laws that had forced architects to make creative designs for the higher, narrower floors of the previous generation of skyscrapers had been relaxed. Huge, flat-topped glass and metal stumps were soaring up forty floors and more, blocking out the sky. In compensation, they had to provide open plaza-like spaces for the public at ground level. But in practice, the spaces were frequently cold, and soulless, and not much used. As for the glass towers themselves: “They are ugly, and boring,” Charlie would cry. He was particularly incensed about a group of Midtown bank towers on Park which he seemed to consider a personal affront to the avenue where he lived.

The strange, curved shape of the Guggenheim, however, was organic, like a mystical plant. Charlie loved it. He seemed quite content to look at the building from the outside. When he’d done, he told Gorham he’d like to walk down Fifth a little way.

If the volume of vehicles using the city streets had been going up for the last two decades, one relief had been granted. Most of the great avenues were one-way now. Park, with its broad arrangement of double lanes, carried traffic in both directions, but to the west of it, Madison carried the traffic uptown, and Fifth Avenue carried it down. Walking down Fifth on a Sunday morning, therefore, especially in February, was a quiet business. To avoid the garbage, they walked beside the park.