A sunny, warm-ish weekend with temperatures in the 50s and cooling down at night. Hardly what you’d call winter.

Meet the Gotrocks. We know there are a lot of rich people in New York. Just take a look up and down Park or Fifth or Central Park West or South with the thousands of apartments now changing hands (when they do) in the multimillions. And if they ain’t enough, (and it seems they aren’t) the Plaza Hotel is being converted into condominiums as the world now knows, and I hear from the horse’s mouth that buyers (for apartments such as a one bedroom for $4.5 million plus) are practically beating down the doors to get in.

Even more: Over at 15 Central Park West they’re just now putting up the steel for the huge new Robert A. M. Stern-designed luxury condominium due to open in 2007 that will rival the most luxurious residential buildings in New York and they’ve sold a billion dollars worth of them already.

The year 2005 might have been the best year for tax revenues for the City of New York. According to very reliable sources there were10,000 New Yorkers with incomes of $15 million or more last year. Considering that figure takes in a good number whose incomes were $20 to the occasional $100 million, the total comes to at least $150 billion. and that does not include all of those high income earners who work in Manhattan but live out of state — like Connecticut or New Jersey. Nor does it even take into account the thousands whose incomes are more than a million. Nowadays people talk about vast sums as if they are commonplace.

We’re so used to hearing or reading massive financial figures (professional athletes, movie and TV actors, film grosses, Harry Potter sales, real estate prices) that they’re as meaningless as NeverNeverLand. And for many many more of us, they are NeverNeverLand. Because, ironically, tens of thousands of people in Manhattan — children, the elderly — are increasingly going to bed hungry every night. Too bad, but true, and not augering well for any of us, rich or poor.

The figures do explain why New York City is the leading philanthropic metropolis in the world. I am reminded, however, of one of those philanthropists, the distinguished Lewis Cullman who wrote a book a couple of years ago (You Can’t Take It With You; The Art of Making and Giving Money) about his life, at the end of which he advised, strongly advised, men and women of wealth (like himself) to give it away to make a better community. However Mr. Cullman’s insights which appear to be based in common sense which is, ironically a rare quality, made rarer to many of us by the accumulation of worldly goods and wealth.

Which brings me to a story which I am going to tell with the requisite discretion, leaving out the names and the places. It is a winter’s tale about two couples who apparently had it all — the kind of people with those large annual incomes.

Late thirty-somethings, attractive, popular, multi-residential, international nomads with the world at their feet, the first couple had been married for more than a decade. Parents of two young sons, she was bright and beautiful and he had an internationally famous name and homes on two continents. The other couple, also foreign-born enjoyed great wealth and homes although no children after years of trying.

The two wives were best friends and because of that the couples were inseparable, often traveling together, often visiting each other at their houses here or abroad.

One day several years ago, the husband of the first couple (with the two sons) asked his wife, “for tax purposes,” as he put it, to take out a new mortgage on their splendid country house. Although she was well aware of her husband’s great family wealth, she assumed he knew what he was doing, and so she did.

Very shortly after this transaction occurred and papers were signed, the wife was asked by her best friend (the wife of the second couple) to have lunch: the best friend had “something very exciting to share” with her. So the two women lunched, and indeed, the news was very exciting: the friend announced, miracle of miracles, after years of being told by doctors that it was not possible — that she is pregnant! Hoots of joy from the two women filled the restaurant. Wine glasses clinked, tearful kisses and hugs were exchanged, and toasts were made to a wonderful new life for the now pregnant friend.

That afternoon when she got home, the wife (and mother of the two sons) told her husband the brilliant news about their friend being pregnant. His response? “Yes, I am so thrilled!” “Oh,” replied the wife, a little surprised, “then you already know?”

To which he replied: “Yes, of course I know; I am the father.”

The father?! He was the father?!

Was she sitting down at that moment? Because she needed to be. Not only was he the father, as he coldly and blithely told her, but he was going to divorce her, marry their friend and move abroad! Furthermore, because they (the first couple) had been married abroad themselves, he was not bound by community property laws in this country, and her taking out the mortgage on their house was his way of getting his cash out of the house and leaving her with the debt. Nice, no?

The divorce took place as he wished. The first wife was left with their two young sons and very little money. She lost the house in a foreclosure and moved to a small and very modest apartment in the city.

Meanwhile her husband and her best friend, now married, moved to the Europe and became parents of a baby girl. Time did little to heal the betrayal. The man not only abandoned his first wife but never came to see his boys, thoroughly satisfied to be the father of a beautiful young daughter.

It was a cruel fate for the first wife, left not only with little to live on and to support her boys, but the eternal mark of betrayal by both friend and lover.

Five years passed and It would seem, as it so often does in these situations, that the husband and the best friend simply got away with it, living happily and in the splendor of his family’s legendary wealth. Until a couple of weeks ago — when news came — that the man had been in a terrible automobile accident, a terrible automobile accident where he lost an arm. And his adored little daughter, who was with him — was killed.