The Banished Children of Eve (26 page)

“Of what?”

“Of the responsibility I have given you.”

“I think that I was lucky to have found you, and that you in your turn were even more lucky to have found me.”

Stark's eyes widened. This time there were no tears in them. “Luck has little to do with it, my boy,” he said. “I don't deny it plays a role in human affairs and an especially important one in the making and unmaking of men's fortunes. But luck is more than mere happenstance. Luck is the fruit of hard work. It is the result of patiently striving to put the odds in one's own favor, of long preparation to take advantage of the opportunities that circumstance may present.” Stark closed the book. “Are you frightened?” he asked.

“A little,
I suppose. Stark and Evans is undercapitalized. Most of our lucrative clients have gone elsewhere, and your departure robbed us of both wisdom and financial resources.”

“You mean
robbed
in the poetic sense, I take it.” Stark smiled.

“I mean
robbed
in whatever sense you wish to interpret it. Stark and Evans is meeting its obligations thanks to the general prosperity in the markets. Gold and credit are plentiful. Interest and dividends are paid with regularity. There is a strong demand for new issues of stocks made by banks, railroads, mines. But we have no margin. We are using all our strength to stay afloat, and when the flood comes we will be the first to go under.”

“The flood?”

“A wave of bank failures and ruined companies, a dramatic plunge in the value of stock, a general disappearance of credit.”

“You're still a cub, but you reason like a bear. I have always thought caution was a creature of memory. It's been almost two decades since the panic of '37, and I'd imagined time and California gold had cleansed the national consciousness of bitter recollections.”

“My caution comes from a simple observation: All bubbles burst, even the prettiest that catch the light of the sun and sail on summer breezes.”

Soap bubbles, small orbs of brilliant colors, they rose out of the steaming tub as his mother pulled the clothes out. She spent the entire day at the washing, months, years, a lifetime. He was a small boy sitting in the yard of their house. He watched the bubbles all morning as they rode the wind out of the yard. None escaped very far. The next day, his father would bring the carefully folded clothes to the people in town and return with more bundles to wash, and his mother would be bent over the tub and bubbles would rise again in the air and travel only a short distance before they disappeared. A first lesson in the ways of Wall Street.

“And
should the bubble burst, how will you save the firm?”

“I shall not wait until the bubble bursts. I shall begin by reducing Stark and Evans to the point at which it can survive on a handful of nuts and apples. I shall dismiss most of the staff, and close the numerous accounts that bring little or no profit to the firm.”

“You will be ostracized. No gentleman will welcome you into his house.”

“I shall make only infrequent appearances at the Board. I shall move our offices to cheaper quarters, perhaps on Pearl Street.”

“The clients will resent it.”

“Not the ones interested in making money, and they're the only ones I want. I shall also begin trading at the curb as well as at the Board.”

“At the curb? Good God, you'll be immediately dismissed from the Board, deprived of your seat and your trading privileges. Men will speak of you in the way they speak of sodomites or papists.”

“Let them. Besides, I won't trade in person. I'll do what several others of the august members of the Board have done, and hire a proxy to trade at the curb for me.”

“Where is that bright-eyed young boy who heard the voice of God on Bedford Street?”

“He is grown up and been educated by a master.”

“I take that as praise.”

“You should.”

“But be careful. Many a cub never lived to be a bear. Be patient.”

“I trust my instincts. I have come to understand that despite all the figuring and calculating that surrounds the money trade, those who succeed do so because of their sense of sight and smell, their ability to discern changes in the weather, to sniff out the future.”

“Your instincts are keen, that I don't doubt, but even men with keen instincts have been known to end up in the poorhouse.

Timing is the key. When to get in and when to get out, that's what separates the victims from the victors.”

“My
timing will be right. For the present I shall stay out of the market. But as prices continue to go up, and reason gives way to fancy, as it must, I shall lift my nose to the wind. At the heavy scent of salt, the first sign of a great storm at sea, I shall contract to deliver stock at its current price but set the date for delivery at some point in the future, when the storm will have hit hard and values will have plummeted along with the barometer. I shall then buy the stock at its low price and present it to my clients, who will be obliged to pay me the high price. And when the storm has finally passed and blown down the dreams and designs of the incautious, I shall come back into the market as forcefully as I can and have for a penny what formerly cost a dollar.”

“Buy low, sell high. An admirable if unoriginal formulation. But tell me, how does a boy from Albany know so much of the sea and its storms?”

“It came to me in a dream.” Now it was Charles's turn to smile.

“You were the new Noah, floating in the Ark with the debris of the wicked all around you?”

“Yes, the new Noah, I like that.”

“Well, Noah, I pray to God your nose is trustworthy.” Stark picked up his coffee mug and gently tapped it against Charles's. “Here's to the Deluge,” he said. “Ruin to the foolish and wealth to the wise.”

The storm came in 1857. It struck suddenly, with the failure of a single bank. It was as if a solitary cloud had been punctured and all the water of the heavens had spilled through it. Charles had heard the word
panic
used to describe what happened when men began to realize that the paper they held in their hands wasn't an invitation to new riches but a one-way ticket to pauperdom. But he found himself unprepared for the terror that actually descended. Crowds gathered everywhere, in front of banks, the Merchants' Exchange, the telegraph offices. Pushing led to shoving, shoving ended in fistfights. Serene, self-confident brokers turned into wild animals, screaming and ranting in the streets, the froth of madness on their lips. For days the crowds poured into the streets. When the police proved unable to handle them, the militia was called out. Gradually a ghostly calm descended, but the newspapers reported the progress of the storm as it swept across Austria, France, Britain, Scandinavia, bubble after bubble bursting, the sheer scale of the disaster leaving the world amazed and governments concerned with their very survival.

One morning
, when Charles stepped out of the Broadway stagecoach and walked to his office on Pearl Street, Wall Street was empty and quiet. It reminded him of East Hampton after one of the great winter storms had blown away trees and flooded the land, the shore looking as it must have on the morning after the Deluge receded, all fresh and scrubbed and ready for new life. Many offices were empty. One small, elegant granite-faced structure, formerly the headquarters of a respected brokerage, had been turned into a soda dispensary. The Mining Exchange, which had been set up on William Street to compete with the Board, was a ruin, its doors ripped off their hinges, windows broken, papers strewn everywhere.

The Board itself, housed in its new headquarters at Lord's Court, was deserted. A handful of brokers appeared each day for the sake of keeping it open. They whispered among themselves, then left. Passing on the other side of the street from the Board, Charles ran into Morris Van Shaick, a friendly rival of Mr. Stark's and a former elder of the Board. Van Shaick was standing in a doorway, staring across at the facade of the Board's building. His firm had been in decline for some time. The panic had put it out of its misery. Charles said hello. Van Shaick tipped his hat. That afternoon the old man drank arsenic in his office and died. Two days afterward, a letter from Van Shaick arrived on Charles's desk. It had been written the day Van Shaick committed suicide. The script was a spidery scrawl. It read:

Bedford, keep the spring in your step. But in your mind

the poet's thought—all that wealth e'er gave—awaits alike the inevitable hour—the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

M.V.S.

As the
months passed, activity began again. New faces appeared, most of them young, around Charles's age, many of them former members of the tribe of nobodies. The Board's membership committee, eager to fill the depleted ranks, ignored for the moment the traditional requirements of lineage and pedigree. What mattered now was the four-hundred-dollar initiation fee.

The results of the debacle were far more extensive than Charles had expected. Overnight he had gone from being a smalltime broker, the youngest member of the Board, to being one of its veterans, not only a survivor of what had occurred but a beneficiary. Men who had recently found it difficult to acknowledge his existence now sought his advice. One of the Board's former titans, a fourth-generation broker, stood in Charles's cramped, shabby office and wept. He begged for a loan, the words interspersed with sobs, money enough to keep himself afloat until, as he said, “some order returns to the world.” Charles gave him a hundred dollars to pay some immediate expenses. But he knew that the “order” this man hoped to see return was gone forever. Anyone who thought otherwise couldn't be trusted with a larger sum. Soon after the broker left, a telegram arrived from Stark:
AND GOD BLESSED NOAH AND HIS SONS AND SAID UNTO THEM BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY AND REPLENISH THE EARTH.

Before the panic had struck, when he had moved the Stark and Evans offices to Pearl Street and dismissed three quarters of the staff, Charles had informed a large number of clients that the firm could no longer handle their accounts. He wasn't interested in the penny-ante game of percentages that Stark had played. But the account of Audley Ward, as insignificant as it was, he would keep. He had visited Ward at his home to inform him about the changes at Stark and Evans, and to reassure him. Ward had met him at the door and invited him in only as far as the front hallway.

“Mr. Bedford,”
Ward said, “I'm pleased to see you because the most dreadful rumors have reached me about the condition of Stark and Evans. It is said the firm is failing and has had to dismiss most of its staff and move to near the East River waterfront, in the same building as a chandlery.”

“The firm is in solid condition. We are only making it stronger. It is our opinion that difficult times are ahead, and we intend to protect our clients and ensure they prosper.”

“And the chandlery? Is it true you have taken up residence with a hawker of common ship wares?”

“Mr. Ward, you make it sound as if I'm committing adultery.”

Ward talked on. He said he wasn't sure he should keep his account with Stark and Evans. Men he respected were advising him otherwise. Charles stopped listening. He looked past Ward at the portraits that lined the wall leading to the staircase. The one closest was of a dignified-looking gentleman and a young girl. The girl had Sarah's lips and eyes. It must be she. She was probably upstairs at this moment. Charles had given up his regular visits to the Irish whore on Greene Street. Her resemblance to Sarah had diminished with each visit. He inclined his head slightly and tried to see up the stairs. Maybe she was standing above, listening to what they said.

“Mr. Bedford, what assurance have I that my funds are safe in your hands?”

“You have my word.”

“Your word?”

“The word of a gentleman.”

Ward looked perplexed. “I suppose I must rely on that. Quite so.”

Charles continued to pay occasional visits to Ward's home. The third or fourth time he appeared, Ward invited him to sit in the parlor. They had tea. Charles asked after Sarah. She was in England, Ward said. She had been there for the past month. She went every few years to renew the ties she had formed several years before. Her father had sent her to boarding school there as a girl. Ward dropped his voice to a whisper: “In my humble opinion, Sarah is not so much interested in old relationships as new. I believe she's in search of a husband.”

Sarah returned
unwed, and a few weeks later joined Charles and Ward for tea. Charles had his first real lengthy conversation with her. He was surprised by the strong English inflection in her voice. Several times after that she joined them. She spoke a great deal about poetry. Charles had little to add.

“Are you inclined toward poetry?” she asked.

“I am, but my inclinations are outweighed by my obligations, and I can rarely find the time.”

She looked at him in such a way that he couldn't tell if she was angry or sad. “No one should be too busy for poetry. It is the truest expression of a sincere heart.”

In the springtime, Charles asked Ward and Sarah if they would like to join him on a carriage ride into the country. They accepted. He rented a driver and a four-in-hand for the occasion. As they drove out of the city, Ward said, “We should avoid the Harlem Lane. It has become little more than a racetrack, a place where the lowest types trot about on their flimsy one-man traps, vying with each other in velocity and ostentation.” Charles told the driver to mind Ward's instructions. “We shall follow the route of retreat that General Washington took.”

Charles sat across from Sarah. Her face was framed by her Pamela bonnet, a nimbus of straw trimmed with pink ribbons and blue silk anemones. She dressed in a simple style that had mostly gone out of fashion in New York. Her skirt lacked hoops or flounces. It hung close about her body. Her long, graceful neck curved into the round, firm line of her bodice. They rode in silence, watching the scenery, until Ward announced, “This is the spot where the Americans turned and fought a rearguard action.” Charles told the driver to stop. “It is a good place to rest,” he said.