April 14, 1996

MORGAN GELBLUM, pale and pretty, lies slackly in her father's arms, smiling up into his beard. Is she smiling at his loving prattle or at something only she can hear? He begins to croon and she croons back, which delights him. Morgan is responding; Morgan is finding pleasure in her narrow, twilight world. It is noisy with life in this Upper West Side living room. Morgan's older sister, Madeleine, 10, marches out of her bedroom to discuss a critical world issue being debated in the fourth grade at the Fieldston School. Morgan's younger brother, Aidan, 2, all muscle and joy, bounds up on the piano bench, spins and begins to play chords with his backside. Morgan gurgles deep in her throat, and everyone laughs.

An Insurer to Benefit

Don't worry, the bankers said in 1988. Any losses from real estate loans will be "modest" and "manageable." They weren't. It will be eerily similar this week as the banks explain away the "modest" increase in losses from bad credit-card loans in their otherwise rosy quarterly earnings reports. It is hard to imagine that banks can get in as much trouble today as they did five years ago, if for no other reason than they have much more capital to absorb any losses. But it is easy to spin a plot in which the pain from the orgy of credit-card lending in recent years causes a far bigger hangover than the banks are expecting.

Just one season after the greatest moment in Devils history -- their one and only Stanley Cup championship -- the team sank to an embarrassing low today by becoming the first in 26 years to miss the playoffs just a season after becoming the National Hockey League's champions. New Jersey's season ended with a humiliating 5-2 loss to the Ottawa Senators, the worst team in the N.H.L.

Greg Norman is on the precipice again, right where he likes to be. Peering down from the top of the Masters leader board, the wind in his hair, all alone after three high-wire rounds of golf, the man who loves to live his life on the edge is right on the verge of the biggest victory of his life. After a sputtering start, in which he bogeyed two of the first four holes, Norman, 41, expanded his lead to six strokes over Nick Faldo today, using a putting stroke to die for and sailing away in a round of 71. He is at 13-under-par 203 and is threatening all sorts of Masters records, not the least of them the scoring mark of 17-under-par 271 held jointly by Raymond Floyd and Jack Nicklaus.