After first glancing in at them, Harry sat to one side of the doorway with his back against the wall, and the sound of their voices carried out to him. He heard Russell’s voice rising with a question, and their father’s voice answered in a new tone, a tone that took this question seriously.

Later Harry found his brother reading the Value Line on his own, not ostentatiously on the living room couch but in his own room on his bed. Soon Russell had made his way through years of archived issues, writing out moot predictions for a certain stock and then checking its performance in the airless lines of the newspaper’s tables.

After a few months their father brought Harry in for the same sessions, and Harry looked at the price-to-earnings ratios and the dividend yields and hoped he could match Russell’s answers. He grasped the concepts, his father asked him questions, and he thought about it and gave responses that were eventually right, but he was ready to go when the sessions were over. He would leave a copy of the Value Line on his bedside table but it would sit there while he went through issues of MAD and Sports Illustrated, and Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and White Fang.

How quickly did the family start calling Russell “the Killer” and Harry “the Cloud”? What would they have called Harry if he had been the older brother? If Russell wrote sonnets or baked bread?

Sometimes Harry thought that if he had grown up with a different kind of family enterprise—biologists or artists—he would have gone a different way, but after college he went to Harvard Business School like his father and brother, and afterward took a job at Morgan Stanley as a kind of further education. If someone had asked him, he would have said it was challenging and interesting and most people couldn’t say that about their work.

This was when he met Helen, at a party while visiting friends in Boston in the business school class behind his. He could feel his friends’ curiosity about life in the real world, casting him as the young lion. If Helen noticed this, they still somehow ended up talking about books in the kitchen.

After they were married, while he was still working at Morgan Stanley, he and his friend Van from business school made a string of significant investments whose success seemed to be telling him something: he was only the Cloud because they called him that.

So he and Van left their jobs and went into business together. Harry spent more time with his young family. His office at home was different from his father’s study—the desk and shelves and walls were white.