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and George would always make plans to go to Barbados after October 5th since the Mets were never in the post season. For Gideon it was a life of law. Grandfather Roy Bridge was determined that a Bridge would keep the family law firm alive, and he taught and mentored young Gideon in the ways of the law.
    Martha Bridge was somewhat shocked by Gideon’s choice of college: Brandeis University. “Isn’t that a Jewish school?” his mother asked.
    “Sort of mom, but it won’t make me Jewish,” Gideon replied after they discussed his application.
    “Why don’t you go to MIT, like Winston?” she pursued. “They win Nobel Prizes all the time there.”
    “I’m going for the law; their pre-law program is the best. And the sciences, they win more MacArthur Genius Awards than anyone.”
    She could see his determination, and she did not want to be discouraging, “It sounds like you’ve done your homework, son. Just don’t come back a Jew.”
    Gideon went to Brandeis, and he did not come back a Jew. He came back a Mormon. Of his six closest friends, his “brothers,” three, Gideon, Winston and Edward, were Catholic; Sebastian, Tray and Parker were Protestant; and Kish was Hindu. Religion was in their parents’ day who you were; for the brothers, religion had become what you were and that was quickly fading.
    On the day Gideon was preparing for his conversion and induction into the Mormon faith, his mother and grandfather accompanied him to the Mormon Temple. Gideon tried reassuring his mother, “Mom, it’s still Jesus.”
    “Gideon, it’s not our Jesus,” she replied.
    During the Baptism Mrs. Bridge cried audibly all through the ceremony. She thought to herself, “If you live long enough, everyone will turn on you.”
    Not quite, in fact in Gideon’s case, he was a Mormon for exactly one and a half years. He felt that religion should help him see things in a new light. When he performed his mission work in Venezuela, he came away unimpressed and uninspired. The happiest day of Mrs. Bridge’s life was not when Gideon returned from South America, but when he said, “Mom, you’re right, he’s not our Jesus,” and with that Gideon repatriated himself into the open arms of Catholicism, Harvard Law and the Bridge Law firm.
    And now all seven brothers were men, embarking on the work of their lives. Kish and Edward had success in investment banking and kept the Brunswick Fund growing significantly. Traynor Johnson completed his studies at the US Naval Academy and became a Navy Seal. Parker Barnes joined the family construction business after graduating from Columbia with a degree in architecture. Winston Trout did likewise joining this father’s solar engineering firm after MIT. And Sebastian Ball Jr., well, the acorn did not fall far from the tree. He went to UPenn’s Wharton School, as had his father, and was able to make money as readily as his hedge-fund-owning dad. Together they made a formidable team, and the son had vision and the guts to support his visions. So these seven boys, each an only child of a wealthy family, became “brothers” at the age of four and inseparable as they emerged as adults.
    But as they grew life’s consequences would affect them; in a most dire way for some.

 
    Chapter 10
     
    After a year at the Auburn Prison, CJ Strong had settled into a routine of sorts. He found he could handle the day-to-day business of being a prisoner, but what got to him, what weighed on him like a crushing weight was the coercive nature of every second of every day. The physical place was crushing with its thirty-foot-high grey walls and armed guardhouses at the corners of the yard. He remembered his religious teaching that God was omni-present; in Auburn only the guards were omni-present. Whether in his cell, at work in the prison power plant, when reading to illiterate prisoners over lunch two days a week, playing basketball during his hour and half of “freedom” as an honor prisoner, at meals, in