Old Adletsky was sitting at my table, and he, too, was taking it all in. My guess is that few things of this nature occurred in the presence of a man so rich. For him, what happened during dinner may have been something like a return to earlier, immigrant days. To be a trillionaire is like living in a controlled environment, I imagine. He was a little guy, shrunken by his great age. Not very big to begin with. In the New World, his immigrant melting-pot generation of malnourished teeny-weenies produced six-foot sons and large, luxuriant daughters. I myself was both larger and heavier than my parents, though internally more fragile, perhaps.

I didn’t expect Adletsky to take note of my presence, and I was surprised a few days after the dinner party by a note from the old man’s secretary. I was requested to call his office for an appointment. At the bottom of the note were two words in Adletsky’s own hand: ‘Please do.’ Nearly a century ago, he had been taught to write in Cyrillic or, more probably, Hebrew characters, judging by the scrollwork of the capital P.

Thoroughly trained in the Adletsky system, the appointments secretary was unable to tell me, on the phone, why I was asked to come in. So I visited him in his glassy lair, his penthouse office suite. I went downtown and was conducted to an express elevator, activated by a special key. I felt about this swift ride as I used to feel about the pneumatic tubes that once connected department store salespersons to the cashiers. The sales slips and the dollar bills were sucked into the pipe, and – snick-snick – here are the new socks and there is your change.

You no longer face an executive across his desk. You sit with him on a divan. Beside you is a coffee table with a demitasse, a dish of sugar cubes.

I sensed that I was thickening my face defensively under Adletsky’s scrutiny. The old man had no need to ask personal questions. My life and deeds had been sifted by members of his staff. Evidently I had survived the preliminary screening. He had been so fully briefed that there would be no talk about my origins, education, accomplishments – thank God.

He said, ‘At Frances Jellicoe’s dinner, the name Jim Thorpe came up, and only you could identify the college that wonderful athlete came from …’

‘Carlisle,’ I said. ‘In Pennsylvania. An Indian school.’

‘You have no special interest in this; you just happened to know it. Do you have lots of general information in your head? Excuse me for asking, Mr Trellman, but when was the Federal Reserve Bank established?’

‘Back in 1913? … “Harry” is good enough.’

I could see that he was pleased, though in the penthouse dazzle I felt that all my ‘preparations’ were disintegrating. Preparations? Well, the title of Stanislavsky’s famous book is An Actor Prepares. Everybody prepares, and ascribes to others a power to judge, grants them the possession of standards that may be nonexistent.