He had the beach to himself. In the distance, where the road off which Anna had turned to reach the house ended, a woman in a head scarf was throwing sticks for her dog. Apart from her there were only sand and waves, crashing on the beach and throwing up spray. The sand near the dune was fine and hard to walk across, but down by the ocean’s edge it formed a smooth, solid surface. When Harry reached that area, he started to walk westward.

“Tell me more about what happened,” I said as I followed him.

It was hard to keep up with his long strides, and his renewed sense of purpose reassured me. He remained silent for about three hundred yards and then grunted a couple of times as if preparing to say something. The disadvantage of walking by him was that I couldn’t see his face to observe his reactions, but it provided detachment, like an analyst’s couch. The silence extended as we walked, and then he halted, facing the sea, where tiny waves foamed into the sand.

“It could have been a great deal,” he said. “A great deal. It wasn’t a sure thing, they never are, but if the market hadn’t tanked, it would have worked out fine. There was no way I could have known. I couldn’t have known.”

He gazed at the horizon, and he seemed to be responding bitterly to the voices in his head. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he bent down to pick up a shell and scraped sand off the underside with his thumb as he spoke.

“It was about a year ago, I guess. Things were going so well for Seligman, it was great. There were rumblings over subprime and some hedge funds had closed, but it felt like our time had come. We’d turned that little place into something. You know what I’d always wanted it to become? I wanted us to be like Rosenthal. They were never going to let it happen. I know that now.”

Even I had heard of Rosenthal amp; Co.-everyone had. It was the one Wall Street bank that had escaped the housing crisis, had come through the crash without collapsing or even being bruised. Everyone seemed to admire it, or be jealous of it, or think it had some unfair advantage. I didn’t know the difference between one bank and another, but I could grasp what had driven Harry. There was an outfit like that in every field-the place for which everyone wants to work. Episcopal was the Rosenthal of New York medicine, or so we convinced ourselves and so the patients believed.

“I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene,” Harry said. “Knows his stuff. Hard-assed on deals, would squeeze you for a dime, but I thought he was a good guy. Nora was friends with Margaret, his wife. We’d see them on weekends out here. They’ve got a place over in Sagaponack.

“Greene left Rosenthal in the mid-nineties and started his own firm. He called it Grayridge, after a hill in Georgia he knew as a child. So he says, anyway. Felix thinks Greene made it up. He’s never met anyone who’s heard of the place. It was good timing, when LBOs and hedge funds were getting big. A decade later, he was a billionaire. He had the Rolling Stones at his fiftieth birthday. It was fun,” he added wanly. “He calls me one day, supposedly to chat about CDS clearing or something. ‘You know, Harry,’ he says, ‘it’s time for us to talk. I think Seligman and Grayridge would make a great fit.’ I thought it was a terrific idea, it could put us up there with Rosenthal, so I said, ‘Sure, Marcus, we’ll take a look.’ I’d heard talk that things weren’t going well for him. They might be in trouble.”

“What did you find?”

“I’ll tell you what I thought I saw: a firm that had grown too rapidly and had a few problems, but nothing we couldn’t handle. We’d close down a couple of funds, inject maybe a billion in capital, and have a good business. Plus, we wouldn’t have to pay a premium, and there wouldn’t be any messing about with who was in charge. Marcus would take the number two spot and we’d see how things went from there.”

“It didn’t work out?”

Harry sighed. We had reached a rivulet that ran down from a pond behind the dunes and couldn’t go farther. He scored a curve in the sand with the toe of one shoe, and the bottom of the tiny trench filled with water like the moat of a sand castle.

“We did the deal, but the market went bad and it turned out Grayridge had bonds on its books that Greene hadn’t told me about. Mortgage paper that everyone thought was safe. We held the triple-A, for fuck’s sake, stuff the ratings agencies loved. It all turned to junk and we lost billions. I felt like I was being dragged down, like I was drowning. You don’t know what it feels like to see everything you’ve built falling apart.”

He shuddered at the memory, and as I looked over at him, I understood for the first time what had brought him to Episcopal. Loss is hard on the psyche. We aren’t built to cope with it immediately: it takes a period of mourning. The worst thing is feeling trapped and helpless, unable to fight or flee. It made sense of everything-even Harry’s gun. Harry turned at the rivulet and started walking back. I followed, catching up after about ten yards.

“What did you do when you found out?”

“We had no choice. The share price had gone to shit and we were in trouble rolling over repo funding. Not just us-half the Street was in distress. I’ve never known anything like it. We ended up one weekend at the Fed begging them to help us out. They agreed to it, but Treasury demanded a sacrifice.”

He swept his right hand across his throat in a slitting gesture. As he did it, he closed his eyes and tightened his jaw, as if his hand were cutting his throat like a blade. He looked as if he were experiencing the agony of death.

“That’s when you lost your job?”

“I lost everything. They ruined me.”

“And all these losses. No one realized?” I said. I’d thought that people who worked on Wall Street were smarter than that. It was the people like me who made stupid mistakes with money, not bankers.

“A couple of hedge funds made money out of it, and Rosenthal did fine, of course. Treasury made sure of that,” he said stonily.

I felt sorry for Harry at that moment, realizing what Felix meant by him having a heart. He radiated a baffled sense of loss, as if someone had stolen from him everything he’d had. He walked slowly up the path toward the steps without me. I stayed where I was to take in the view of the house, now arrayed on the dune above me. Nora was in the room where we’d talked earlier, reading a magazine on one of the sofas. Farther along, I saw a room with bookshelves lining one wall and a desk with a twin-screened computer. It had to be Harry’s study, where Nora had found him with the gun. By the time I got back up to the lawn, he was in his chair again, looking tired and downhearted.

I sat by him. “There are a lot of things I think it’s worth us talking about.”

“Analysis, you mean?” he said with an edge of contempt, either at me for being a psych or at himself for being vulnerable.

“I wouldn’t suggest therapy at this stage, more of a conversation, but a regular one, two or three times a week at first.”

“I guess that’s okay. I’ve got time. All I’ve got is time,” he said.

I walked back to the house. It was the third time I’d talked to him and the first time I’d felt better as a result. My discomfort about having discharged him from the hospital was easing, and I thought I was starting to gain some insight into his condition. There was even a prospect of getting Harry back to Episcopal and into treatment. This could work out fine, I thought.

7

I found Nora in the kitchen talking to Anna, who was perched on a countertop in bare feet, crunching a green apple. “You two met before, didn’t you?” Nora said, and Anna nodded silently, her teeth embedded in the fruit.

“Anna kindly drove me here,” I said.

“I can take you back to the city, if you want,” Anna said, having finished her bite and lobbed the core into a trash bin. “I’m going to see a friend.”