higher title a man could aspire to than “gentleman,” and this Episcopalian epithet was so constantly attached to Jackson père, often accompanied by the words old school, that his son couldn't help but sense an almost imperceptible undercurrent of condescension from those whose secret faith was more Darwinian. The old man's rectitude was in part a reaction to the flamboyance of his own father, who'd made and lost two fortunes, one in stock speculation and one in real estate, while he was growing up. A.G.'s father did all he could to temper his son's fearless and exuberant character, so reminiscent of his grandfather's, while his wife secretly undermined this program, instilling in him a sense of confidence and entitlement. Her own family was among the first families of Charleston and she saw no reason to defer to the local gentry. Her husband would scold her for saying, as she so often did, “Who's the handsomest, smartest little man in the whole wide world?” “Please, Kate,” he'd say. “You'll spoil the boy.” While A.G. absorbed from his father a respect for tradition, position and inherited wealth, his mother taught him to believe in his own secret superiority. Their marriage, from his vantage point, was a happy one, although his mother sometimes believed that she'd sold herself short, that her husband lacked the necessary fire and grit to advance her ambitions.
No family loomed larger in Chattanooga than the Keirsteads. They had made their original fortune in land and later compounded it with an interest in a soft-drink empire based in Atlanta. In the past half century their holdings had spread from the Southeast throughout the country and around the globe. A.G. had gone to school with Burton Keirstead III, aka Trip, whose father had taken a benign interest in A.G.'s career, even writing him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. They had stayed in touch after A.G. moved to New York, occasionally dining together when Keirstead was in the city, and the old man sometimes steered some business his way. As a young investment banker, it certainly didn't hurt to be acquainted with Burton Keirstead, Jr. Trip, meanwhile, married a girl from Savannah, built a house on Lookout Mountain and took an office downtown, next door to his father's, which he visited when he wasn't following the salmon from Nova Scotia to Russia, or the birds from Georgia to Argentina. Their friend Cal Bustert, to nearly no one's surprise, burned through his trust fund, bouncing between fashionable resorts and rehab facilities; marrying, spawning and divorcing; wrecking cars and discharging firearms at inappropriate targets, including, finally, himself. A.G. had flown south for the funeral, a somber yet lavish affair that lasted for three days.
Most of their former classmates, after forays into the North, settled within a few miles of their parents and married girls they'd known for years. A.G. always returned for the weddings—five of them the year he turned thirty—and always brought a different date, and in time he returned to stand as godfather to the children. He visited his parents on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Only rarely did he bring a girl along for these family holidays, and when he did, she was inevitably from what he called, without self-consciousness, “a good family.” But his parents learned in time not to get too attached to any of them.
Despite his increasing success in New York, he maintained a deep loyalty to his hometown. Chattanooga, Tennessee, the South—this was part of him, and distinguished him from the mass of rootless Yankees with whom he associated in Manhattan. He always told his drinking buddies in both cities that he would return one day, although as the years passed it became harder and harder for his friends in either place to take this threat seriously.
Within a few years he was making more money than his father, although he did not announce this fact—except to his mother—and continued to seek his father's advice on matters large and small, although they did not discuss A.G.'s love life.
Ginny was reading in the living room of the little cottage in Sagaponack she rented every August, half-conscious of the wistful susurration of the waves from the beach. The yard, which had once enjoyed unobstructed views of the potato fields, had over the years been hemmed in by houses, first by Lego-like boxes and later by vast shingled mansions that mimicked the old cottages of Southampton, but at night she could still imagine herself as a lonely beachcomber. Emma Wodehouse was just