Free Fifth Ave 01 - Fifth Avenue by Christopher Smith Page B

office complexes that he had either owned for years, or were presently under construction. There was the new hotel he was building on the corner of Fifth and 53rd.   It would be the city’s largest, it would open shortly and it was nearly $13 million under budget.  
    He learned how to control his costs years ago.   When they worked together, George Redman taught him well.
    On Central Park South, ground was being broken for Louis’ new condominium complex.   The demolition of the two prewar buildings had been completed four weeks earlier, the foundation one.
    He still had to laugh at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who asked if he would donate the four demi-relief Art Deco friezes that decorated the exterior of each building. At first, Louis agreed, seeing no reason why he shouldn’t donate them.   If anything, it would be good press and free publicity for the new building.   But once he learned that it would take weeks to remove them properly--not to mention hundreds of thousands of his own dollars--Louis had the friezes torn down, not wanting or willing to pay for what he considered worthless art.
    He moved away from the window and walked the few steps to his desk.   His office was large and filled with things he never had as a child.
    Born in the Bronx, Louis came from a poor, working-class family.   He looked across the room at his parents’ wedding picture.   In it, his mother was seated on a red velvet chair, her hands arranged in her lap, a faint smile on her lips.   She was in the simple, ivory-colored wedding dress her mother and grandmother wore before her.   She was seventeen in that photo and Louis thought she was beautiful.
    Standing behind her was Nick Ryan, wearing one of the few suits he ever owned.   It was dark blue and a few sizes too large for his slim frame, but the smile on his face and the defiant way he held his head made one notice not the suit, but the man himself.
    He wished his parents could have witnessed his success.   In the fall of 1968, Nick Ryan had been killed while on duty in Vietnam.   On the day Louis learned of his father’s fate, he quickly learned his own.   At the age of thirteen, he was thrust into the position of provider and nothing was the same for him after that.   While his mother took in laundry and became a seamstress on the side, Louis worked forty hours a week washing dishes at Cappuccilli’s, the Italian restaurant at the end of their block.   He pulled straight A’s in school.   He and his mother planned budgets together and managed to put something aside for a future they were hesitant to face.
    As a team, they were invincible.   It was in his eighteenth year, only days after Harvard offered him a full scholarship, that his mother became ill.   She was tired all the time.   There were lumps in her neck and groin.   Her joints ached.   “I’ve lost a lot of weight, Louis.   There’s blood in my stool.”
    He brought her to the hospital.   The doctor was crass, frank and cold.   After examining Katherine Ryan, he took her son aside.   “There are holes in your mother’s bones,” he said.   “She has cancer.   It’s beyond treatment.   She’ll need to be hospitalized, if only to keep her comfortable.   That will be expensive.   Do you have insurance?”
    Louis looked the man hard in his eyes. “We don’t,” he said.   “But we have money, so you treat her right just the same.”
    His private hell began then.   Times were hard and the hospital was overcrowded.   His mother was placed in a room with three other women--each struggling to hang on to lives that were leaving them.   Louis wouldn’t forget the days that followed--working three jobs so he could afford bills that were scarcely affordable; going without sleep so he could spend time with a woman who no longer resembled his mother; holding her hand because he knew that she was frightened and missing her husband.
    He remembered the never-ending stream of specialists