His English had advanced together with his perspectives as a promoter on a planetary scale. He and his corporate-trained sons and Yale Law School daughters had moved up and up from sphere to sphere, no limit to their adaptability.

‘So you had a Roosevelt-style brain trust?’

‘No. I had people it benefited me to consult, and I’d like to arrange occasional meetings with you, to be filled in on this or that. I wouldn’t have believed that of all the people present, only you and I understood the clinch Frances got into with Cressy.’

He was right. Few people can take such things in.

‘I’m not all that good at business,’ I said.

‘For business I don’t need you. Don’t even try to advise me. I’ll only now and then ask you. In my active years I did very little socializing. I have to do it now. And there must be a way to make it pleasanter.’

I said, with my usual reserve, that I’d be very pleased to be a part of his brain trust.

‘You can satisfy your curiosity about me, too, up to a point,’ he said. ‘Of course, you’ll have to be discreet. But I think you already are keeping thousands and thousands of things to yourself. You have that look. Has anybody ever told you what a Japanese face you have?’

‘Chinese, I always thought.’

‘Japanese,’ he insisted.

When I got home, I undressed and examined myself in the long bathroom mirror. The old man was right, you know. I have Japanese legs, straight from one of Hokusai’s bath scenes. The thighs are muscular, and the shins are concave. I’d look even more Japanese if I were to shorten my hair and wear a fringe. I began to revise my image accordingly.

For years, since, I have met with Sigmund Adletsky and other members of the family to whom he recommended me and who wanted my advice, usually on matters of taste.

One thing I learned in my contacts with the old man: Wealth so profound can have no adequate human equivalent. He is very old now and small – light enough to fly away into the everlasting. His sons and grandsons, however, still report to him. His judgment in business matters, old style, is as sound as ever. The new world economy is unfamiliar to the founder. About his descendants, he once said to me, ‘I’m now in their brain trust.’

Coming from a direction altogether different from Frances Jellicoe’s or Sigmund Adletsky’s is a person, a woman, whose name is Amy Wustrin. I briefly dated her in high school. Amy might or might not know the extent of the feelings that developed as a result of this hand holding, fondling, petting – the effects of this heady intimacy on me. It is of course impossible to guess what people know about one another.

When she was twelve or so, I watched her on roller skates – riding toward puberty. And in high school at fifteen at the annual Costume Day, when she wore tights and high heels, I saw her fully feminine thighs, the gloss and smoothness of sexual maturity on the cheeks and in the brown gaze: she transmitted messages of which she may not even have been aware.