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he advised his nephew Geronimo. “This solidarity cum activism thing: I don’t know.” He was cautious by nature, a member of an association of gay businesspeople which, as Charles Duniza took pride in saying for years afterwards, had been addressed by Ed Koch when he was on the city council, it was the first openly gay organization he spoke to, and everyone had been too courteous to ask the future mayor anything about his own rumored sexual orientation. Charles was a regular attendee at the association’s suit-and-tie gatherings in the Village, and in his own way a conservative like his brother Father Jerry back home. But when the call came to march he put on his Sunday best and joined the wild parade, one of the few formally dressed persons in that defiant carnival of self-assertion. And Geronimo, straight as he was, went with him. By now they were fast friends and it wouldn’t have been right to let Uncle Charles go into battle alone.
    The years passed and the architectural practice began to struggle. The walls of the Greenwich Avenue office were lined with dreams: buildings Charles Duniza had never built and would never build. In the late 1980s his friend the celebrated real estate developer Bento V. Elfenbein bought a hundred acres of prime property in Big Groundnut on the South Fork of Long Island—its name was taken from the Pequot Indian word later more usually translated as potato— and wanted a hundred “starchitects” to build signature homes on an acre each. One of these acres was promised to Charles—“Of course you, Charles! What do you think, I don’t remember my friends?” Bento expostulated—but the project remained in the doldrums because of complex financing issues. Uncle Charles’s smile faded a little, became a little sadder. Bento, a dandy with rakishly floppy brown hair and a colorful relationship with cravats, came across as absurdly glamorous and almost shockingly charming, the scion of a big Hollywood dynasty. He was flamboyantly intellectual, with a tendency to quote Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class with a bitter irony leavened somewhat by his own, indefatigable Hollywood grin, a Joe E. Brown dazzler full of big, bright, white teeth, inherited from a mother who had been on the screen with Chaplin. “The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends,” he told Geronimo Manezes, “are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don’t mind doing because I’m an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.”
    Bento was proud to bear one version of the first name of the philosopher Spinoza. “In a translation of myself,” he liked to say, “I would be Baruch Ivory. Maybe if I’d stayed in the motion picture business that would have been a better handle. Be that as it may. Here in New Amsterdam, I’m proud to be named after Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam the Older. From him I take my famous rationalism, also my knowledge that mind and body are one and Descartes was wrong to separate them. Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind. Remember this. Spinoza said God had a body too, God’s mind and body were one just like ours. For this type of iconoclastic thinking they flung him out of Jewish society. They issued against him in Amsterdam an excommunicating cherem. The Catholics took the hint, put his immortal Ethics on their Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. He in his turn was inspired by the Andalusian Arab Averroës, who was given a pretty rough ride too, which also didn’t mean he was wrong. In my opinion, by the way, Spinoza’s theory of