“The way I see it,” he’d said to Maggie, “the process is similar to what happened in the nineteenth century with the railroads. In those days, competing companies fought for control of the route along which people and freight was to be carried. Dot.com companies are racing to gain control of an information highway, to build up a huge network before any significant traffic actually flows along it.” He shrugged. “People are investing in expectations.”

But people were investing, and getting hugely rich. The NASDAQ exchange was booming. Kids in their twenties were walking away with tens, even hundreds of millions, and buying huge lofts down in Tribeca because they thought the old-money crowd on Park and Fifth were boring. Private equity men who arranged these IPOs were making similar amounts. Wall Street traders were getting huge bonuses and buying multimillion-dollar apartments for cash.

Was his family benefiting from this explosion of money? Maggie was doing well—lawyers always did. Her brother Martin was now living with a man who, having sold a small dot.com company, had bought an entire building in Soho for use as a private residence and art gallery, in addition to the beach house he owned out on Fire Island.

Gorham, however, had failed to join the party. As he looked back now, he regretted that decision not to join the investment house in ’87. He should have taken the high road—God knows what he’d be worth now if he’d done that. Most days, in the office, surrounded by commercial bankers like himself, he was too busy to let it prey upon his mind. But sometimes there would be sudden ugly reminders.

Going to watch the ball game at his children’s private school, for instance, one couldn’t fail to notice the limousines outside the gym from which some of the fathers, the Wall Street big hitters, had just stepped. Not that anything was ever said, of course, but while he winced at the school fees, these were the guys giving the million-dollar gifts to the school and going onto the board of trustees. He knew. The kids knew too. People always knew, in New York. The worst occasion, though, had been in the fall of ’99, when he and Maggie had gone to dinner with Peter Codford.

Peter Codford had been at Columbia with Gorham. He had then gone into venture capital in California for a while, later setting up his own private equity operation in New York. He and Gorham hadn’t seen each other for many years when they happened to meet at a conference, and Peter had invited Gorham to dinner.