by Marie Astor
“Lisa wouldn’t bring in a snitch!” Paul’s face was red with indignation.
“I’m sure she would not do that deliberately, but it is always better to be safe than sorry, and I for one would not hire anyone who spent four years at the DA’s office.”
“So what do you suggest? That we fire her?” Paul glowered at his brother.
“No, I didn’t say that; we would not want to get hit with an employment lawsuit either, but let’s keep a close eye on her, okay? And next time you want to hire someone in Legal, talk to me first, Paul, all right?”
“Fair enough.” Hank Bostoff rose from his seat. “Now I hope that you gentlemen will agree with me that we’ve sufficiently beaten this dead horse. Unless there are any other items to discuss, I’d like to call this meeting adjourned.”
Jon nodded in curt acquiescence as he watched Paul rise from his seat, wishing his Vassar-educated brother would keep his nose out of the business affairs altogether. Up until recently, Paul had occupied the obscure and innocuous role of Chief Marketing Officer, but just as Hank had announced his decision to ‘phase out his retirement’ and had made Jon president of the company, he upped and made Paul chief operating officer. Still, even that impulsive move might not have been as damaging had Paul not started dating that annoying girlfriend of his who, in Jon’s opinion, was abominably power hungry. Had it not been for his pest of a girlfriend, Paul would have remained a vague and obscure figurehead he had always been when it came to business. After all, how much business acumen could a failed actor be expected to possess?
Jon never really had understood his younger brother. While they were not that far apart in age, the differences in their temperaments were just too great to allow for anything more than a relationship of civilized sibling acceptance. Still, Paul was his brother and, as long as his little brother stopped trying to play businessman, Jon was prepared to forget Paul’s frivolous youth, including a double major in acting and marketing from an Ivy League university. What a waste of money that had been!
Left to his own devices, Jon might actually be able to squeeze some much-needed revenue out of Bostoff Securities after all. Of course, his father had no idea about any of this. The old man was under the impression that you could still run the business as though it were the eighties and nineties. Well, things had changed since then. Spreads had gone down to almost nil, and transparency had become the name of the game. No longer could you add a hefty spread and charge tens of thousands of dollars in commission from a client when every share traded was out there in the open electronic space. In his father’s heyday, floor brokers of the New York Stock Exchange ruled the world, and Bostoff used to be one of the most profitable agency shops, but in the past decade, the world of trading had changed unrecognizably. Now Bostoff Securities was generating a fraction of the revenues that it used to bring in. Other firms had diversified their business in order to adjust to the changing landscape, and Bostoff Securities should have followed suit long ago, but Hank Bostoff was notoriously old-fashioned, and he liked doing things the sure way, which made Bostoff Securities a dinosaur among its competitors. The firm desperately needed to open new accounts. These days hedge funds called the shots, and Jon was determined to make all the necessary concessions to get their business. Well, now that Hank was finally getting ready to retire, Jon was determined to make up for all the lost opportunities. His father might have missed the bandwagon, but Jon Bostoff would be damned if he let his legacy fall by the wayside – even if that meant bending a few rules here and there.
Chapter 6
It was six forty-five p.m. on the dot when Jonathan Bostoff pulled into the driveway of his house. At the Bostoff household, dinner was served at seven, and his wife did not take kindly to tardiness. But then it was not as though Jon minded: he was all for working hard, but he preferred to let his subordinates burn the midnight oil. Jon was at his desk at eight a.m. every morning, and he usually left work at six or a quarter to in order to spend the evening with his family. His wife, his two children, and his sizeable house were the sources of his pride.
As he often did upon arriving home from work, Jon paused on the front stairs of his seven-bedroom house to survey his domain. He had signed the deed for the house two years ago, but the reality of it was still pleasantly new to him. The prestigious Westbury, Long Island location filled him with warming pride every time he came home. His children were enrolled in the best schools in the state, and his wife presided over some of the most prestigious social committees in the country. Ah, but then Candace Bostoff, nee Covington, did not need Jonathan Bostoff to give these things to her. They were hers by birthright, and the fact that she chose to become Candace Bostoff, allowing Jon to be the one to give them to her, was an honor in itself.
“Oh, hello, darling.” Candace rushed to greet him. As usual, she looked stunning. Her honey-blond, shoulder-length hair fell loosely down her back, and her serene, oval-shaped face was immaculately made up. Jon never understood his friends’ drooling over twenty-year-old nymphets. Candace was Jon’s age. Actually, she was six months his senior, and he thought she looked more stunning than any twenty-year-old.
“Hello, baby.” Jon leaned in for a kiss. God, he loved his wife’s smell – had loved it ever since he had stolen a kiss from her in college. It was the smell of old money, class and success – everything that Jon had yearned for for years, and everything that was finally within his grasp.
“Oh, honey – the kids are home!” Candace disengaged herself from Jon’s embrace when his hand began to wander past her waist.
“Yes, well, their daddy missed his wife,” Jon whispered into Candace’s ear.
“Dad!” Jon’s youngest son ran down the corridor toward him.
“Oliver!” Jon hugged his son. When Oliver was younger, Jon used to lift him up and twirl him around, but he was eleven now and too grown-up to be lifted up.
“Hi, Daddy.” Jon’s daughter, Amber, greeted him from afar, and he respected her newly reserved demeanor. She would be thirteen in a few months, and already the awkwardness of adolescence was beginning to manifest itself in her. Not physically, of course - Jon’s beautiful daughter was the replica of her gorgeous mother - but emotionally.
At seven o’clock sharp, Jon Bostoff sat at the head of the vast oblong table in his dining room with Oliver and Amber seated on either side of him. His eldest son, Tyler, was eighteen and had just started his first year at Princeton. The kid was a bona fide brainiac. Having taken college level classes in high school, Tyler was already a fully-fledged sophomore in his freshman year. Jon was proud of his eldest son, but he was also worried. He did not want the kid to spend his college years with his nose buried in books. Sure, knowledge was important, but it was never what you knew; it was whom you knew. There was a reason why Jon had sent his son to Princeton. He wanted Tyler to develop connections that would set him up for life, and Jon was more than prepared to foot the steep tuition bill for that.
Candace smiled at Jon from the other end of the table. The table itself had cost somewhere in the vicinity of twenty grand; it was hand-made from solid oak by an exclusive furniture designer. The price tag was obscene in Jon’s opinion, but he wanted to make sure that Candace had everything she deserved. God knew it had taken him long enough to procure it, so when he signed the deed on the house, he told Candace that she had carte blanche to furnish the place.
“Daddy!” Oliver brought Jon back to reality.
“Yes, Ollie?”
“Can we go to the beach house this weekend?”
Jon shot a questioning glance at Candace. When it came to child rearing matters, he left all the decisions to his wife. After noticing a barely perceptible nod from his wife, Jon nodded. “Sure, buddy. I don’t see why not. It will be too cold to go into the ocean, but we could still have a picnic on the beach. What do you say, Amber?” Jon shot a hopeful glance at his daughter.
“Can I bring one of my friends along?”
“Sure, pumpkin, by all mean
s,” Jon conceded. Lately, it seemed that his daughter had become incapable of doing anything on her own. Everywhere she went, she had to be accompanied by a clique of shrieking, gum-chewing, constantly text-messaging teenage girls. Well, the house in the Hamptons had nine bedrooms. The beachfront property had become Jon’s in the beginning of the year, and the past summer had been the family’s first season at the property. For Jon Bostoff, that summer would forever retain a magical quality. Sure, they had owned a summer house before, but their old summerhouse was a mere shack in Connecticut with a whopping fifteen minute drive to the beach to boot. Jon was no fool; he realized that many people would give their right arm to have his old, perfectly cozy, three-bedroom beach house in Connecticut that had since been sold to its new owner, but, in Jon’s opinion, the shack in Connecticut was not good enough for Candace, and by extension it was not good enough for him.
“And, Dad?”
“Yes, buddy?”
“For the winter break we’ll go skiing just like last year, right?”
“Slow down, Ollie. It’s only September.” Jon grinned. “But yes, we will go skiing just like last year.” Jon’s mind started doing the calculations, as he tousled his son’s hair. If the business panned out the way he hoped (and he could think of no reason why it should not) he just might swing that ski lodge he had been eyeing in Vail, Colorado. It was bound to be a nice Christmas surprise for Candace and the kids.
“Ah, Dad, I might have some Christmas break plans,” Amber ventured.
“Oh?” All at once Jon awoke from his musings.
“We’ll talk about it, Amber,” Candace shot a warning glance at her daughter. “You know how important family time is to us. Your daddy works very hard to make all of this possible.” Candace made a sweeping motion with her graceful arm through the air.
“But I want to go somewhere warm.” Amber pouted. “I was going to stay with Christy. Her family’s got a house at the Caymans.”
Jon gulped. There was a downside to having your kid attend one of the most prestigious schools in the state. You were bound to be outdone by the parents of the other kids, and there was just no way Jon could swing a tropical mansion this year. Maybe next year. Definitely next year, Jon resolved.
Later that night when Jon waited for his wife to join him in bed, his mind returned to its usual activity: tallying things up, as Jon called it, or keeping score. He was thirty-nine years old. In a year, he would be forty. Things were finally starting to get on track. At times, he wondered at Candace’s patience. In all their years together, ever since he first had kissed her at a party at Duke, she had remained faithfully by his side. Throughout their marriage, she had never once complained about their starter three-bedroom house in Connecticut, their kids attending public schools, or her driving a five-year-old Audi instead of last year’s Mercedes or BMW. Not that her family had been of the same opinion.
The Covingtons came of old money made in oil and real estate, and they expected their only daughter to be married to a man of solid stock. Granted, Jonathan Bostoff had two pennies to rub to his name, but Bostoff was not the name that Mr. and Mrs. Covington expected their daughter to carry. At Duke, Candace had had many suitors vying for her attention – wealthy, handsome undergraduates with seven-figure futures all lined up for them, courtesy of their fathers. And then there was Jonathan Bostoff, the first generation in his family to go to college, and with a pedigree that was nothing to speak of. While the Covingtons had accepted Candace’s choice of a husband, they had made it clear that they were not going to help the young couple. Candace had a small inheritance left to her by grandparents. When her parents passed on, she would receive her share of their wealth, but while they were alive, in no way would the Covingtons aid Jon Bostoff, either with their capital or with their connections. Not that Jon wanted his in-laws’ help. He wanted to give Candace the life she was meant to have all on his own.
During his years at Duke, Jonathan Bostoff fervently had wished he could alter his family history. The idea was not all that far-fetched, as many who rose to money and wealth from obscure origins often replaced their less than stellar beginnings with glamorous pasts, but in Jon’s case, it was utterly impossible. Hank Bostoff was fond of reminiscing about his “humble beginnings” in interviews and speeches. A son of a construction worker and a homemaker, Hank Bostoff went to the University of Life, as he liked to put it, and did not have any formal education beyond a high school degree. Even that he had finished at night. While he went to school at night, Hank got a job as a shoeshine boy on Wall Street. That was his first exposure to the world of finance, and even though at the time he had no idea how to accomplish it, Hank vowed to one day join the ranks of the expensively suited men who tipped him generously for polishing their fine leather shoes. While he thought of a way to materialize his aspirations, Hank bided his time by polishing his clients’ shoes vigorously enough to see his own reflection in them and reading left-over copies of the Wall Street Journal he found on the train and took home to his parents’ multi-family house in Brooklyn. As luck would have it, Hank did not have to wait long. After about a year on the job, an old floor broker noticed how quick Hank was on his feet and offered him a job as a floor runner on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
The job was exactly what it sounded like: it involved running orders up and down the trading floor. Sometimes the order entrusted to Hank could be as large as several hundred thousand dollars, but that never worried Hank Bostoff: his feet were fast and nimble, and he had a stellar memory aided by a mind that could tally up numbers quicker than a calculator. James Bellows, the floor broker who hired Hank, was getting ready to retire and did not have anyone to pass his business on to. As fate would have it, he had three daughters. Mr. Bellows did not think that the trading floor was a suitable place for young women, so old Bellows began to think of Hank Bostoff as an heir of sorts. According to Hank’s stories, which his sons heard only too frequently, Bellows recognized his younger self in Hank, as Bellows too had come from less than stellar beginnings. Gradually, Bellows taught Hank the trade, which, given Hank’s quick mind, turned out to be an easy and pleasurable undertaking for both of them.
It amazed Hank just how simple the trade was. As long as you kept tabs on your orders and were quick on your feet, it was impossible not to make money. Whether the market went up or down, the floor broker still made his commission, and back in those days it was a sizeable one. Within two years, Hank was promoted to a broker, and he started working orders for old Bellows, who was finding it increasingly difficult to spend all day long on his feet. When the time came for Bellows to retire, he sold his New York Stock Exchange seat for a nifty sum and gave Hank a very generous good-bye bonus. Even more important than the bonus, Bellows recommended Hank for employment with the floor broker who had bought Bellow’s seat, who was looking to add smart, young men to his staff. Thus began Hank Bostoff’s Wall Street career.
The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange floor was a tightly knit community of family connections and recommendations. If you had the brains for the trade, you were bound to make money once you got in. The trick was to get in, and Hank Bostoff had been dealt a winning lottery ticket. From that point on, Hank Bostoff’s life was on the upswing. Within the next three years, he paid off the mortgage on his parents’ house and bought a three-bedroom house for himself in an adjacent neighborhood in Brooklyn. Hank liked Brooklyn; it was a quick enough commute to downtown, and the people there were of good, solid stock - people he grew up with and could count on. A year later, Hank married his high school sweetheart, and nine months later his first son, Jonathan, was born.
Jonathan remembered vividly the gradual transformations of his family’s house in Brooklyn: the addition of extra bedrooms and bathrooms, the expansion of the kitchen, and then, one very exciting spring, the sight of sweaty men in work clothes digging up the ground in the backyard for the pool. The pool was only fifteen feet long, but to Jon it had seemed huge. He relish
ed picking and choosing among his friends, who suddenly almost doubled in numbers, the lucky ones who would get to enjoy the cool water reprieve from the stifling summer heat. Jon had heard it many times that money could not buy happiness, but he knew firsthand that money could most certainly buy popularity and respect, and if that was not happiness, he did not know what was.
Several summers later came another big change: the Bostoffs’ move to Connecticut. By then Hank Bostoff owned his own floor broker operation and was about to expand his business into a full service broker dealer: Bostoff Securities. His wife had convinced Hank that it was time for them to upgrade their living quarters. After all, Hank often entertained at home, and he could not very well bring business associates to Brooklyn. Jon had been fourteen at the time, and he became keenly aware that while money was important, it was not enough in itself. It might have been enough in Brooklyn, but in Connecticut people wanted to know where you came from and what school degrees your father had. At neighbors’ barbecues, Jon flushed red when he heard whispers behind his father’s back, ridiculing his Brooklyn accent and saw Connecticut housewives raising eyebrows at his mother’s choice of makeup and dress.
Thankfully, his mother was as perceptive as Jon. Within a matter of weeks, she had reinvented herself, shunning loud prints for subdued pastels and toning down her makeup to the natural shades the neighborhood housewives favored. Even her diction had changed, becoming softer. Within a matter of months, Mrs. Bostoff became the neighborhood’s favorite, helping with the committee at the country club, active on the local school board – you name it, Jon’s mother was on it. His father, on the other hand, was not nearly as perceptive. He refused to alter himself for anyone; moreover, he was ridiculously proud of his beginnings – something that Jon wished his father would obliterate. There was nothing wrong with reinventing one’s past to match one’s station in life; people did it all the time. During a confidence Jon had shared with one of his dates, Stephanie Douben – a pretty blonde with an upturned nose and sky-blue eyes - Jon learned that her real name was Dobrowski, which her father, a manufacturing magnate, had changed to Douben. The fact that his own father could not be as enterprising vexed Jon to no end. Still, Jon had managed to make a good enough career in high school. Contrary to his father’s advice to go for football, Jon joined the lacrosse team and made captain. Thanks to his handsome looks, he dated some of the most popular girls in his school, and his quick wit as well as the generous allowance granted by his father made Jon well-liked by all his classmates. In his senior year of high school, Jon received an acceptance letter from Duke University. Jon still remembered his parents seeing him off to college: his father full of pride and his mother teary-eyed.
