He had wanted so badly to be an old family, a dynasty, a name that had always mattered.

He had been the son of a dockworker who learned that money could buy the appearance of lineage, and he had bought it by the yard, and none of it, I thought, looking at the little red disk of wax, had made him for one hour the kind of man a family is actually proud of.

“This is the Lake House Trust itself,” he said.

“The Lake House, in Upstate New York, and the thirty thousand acres of land around it — your father never regarded it as a vacation home, whatever he told the world.