The Banished Children of Eve (30 page)

Nobodies.
Bedford stood alone and put his drink down on the table. He had an image in his head of Mr. Stark looking down from the window of the Merchants' Exchange Building on the crowd in the street. That was the race he belonged to, the race he had risen from, numerous as the stars of the heaven or as the grains of sand upon the seashore. Charles Bedford had changed into Ezra Van Wyck and back into Charles Bedford so as to molt his nobodiness and put on somebodiness. He picked up his glass of brandy and took a mouthful of it. Suddenly he understood that what he had felt earlier wasn't anger at being relegated to a table with the likes of Jay Gould, but fear. The race of nobodies could never be stopped. It was endowed with an endless capacity for multiplication and a remorseless urge to advance.
We are coming Father Abraam, three hundred thousand more, / From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore; / We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear, / With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
Come they would, the war would only accelerate the process, and just as the somebodies became secure in their somebodiness, the nobodies would arrive to overthrow them, assuming their trappings and their airs, purchasing their presumptions as well as their furniture, possessing their daughters as well as their houses, growing secure in their somebodiness until the new wave of nobodies descended on
them.
Bedford suspected the process was as old as time, but he was too little acquainted with history to be sure. What he did know from experience was that if it hadn't been the rule of existence, it was now.

The room was
clearing out. Bedford looked for Gould but didn't see him. He had no idea when Gould had left. He had sensed the raw energy in the boy-man across from him. He had felt it in his handshake. Gould couldn't be all that much younger than Bedford, but it was as if a millennium separated them. Bedford saw he had made the mistake all somebodies make, presuming that somebodiness was an indelible grace, and like most nobodies-turned-somebodies he had imagined that he still understood the appetites and aspirations that drove the nobodies. Gould's touch, Gould's eyes, Gould's restlessness, punctured such illusion. Bedford knew: A whole new race of nobodies has arrived, is arriving, will arrive, hungrier than even those who had come before, more aware of the opportunities around them, boy-men with bigger plans and fewer scruples, ready to rewrite the rules whenever it was to their advantage.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly stare before. We are coming, coming, coming.

Bedford felt a loosening in his bowels. His stomach grumbled. His irregularity was becoming chronic. The cook didn't help. Perhaps he shouldn't wait until Sarah returned to replace her; perhaps he should do it now. He knew he wasn't being quite fair. The disruptions he was suffering from weren't entirely due to his cook's lack of culinary skills. He broke wind loudly. He pulled the chain that hung above his right shoulder.
Swoosh,
the water came down from the tank above his head, surged around the bowl, and gurgled down the pipe. Bedford left the paper across his lap. He put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his fists. The floor filled his view, black tile laid next to white.

He
had been playing faro on margin, using his debts as security on new debts, double or nothing, with only nominal payments required by the house. Sometimes Morrissey himself would come over put his arm around Bedford's shoulder, a fraternal embrace that also demonstrated the iron strength in his arms. He told Bedford that no man's bad luck lasted forever, that if you stayed at it, if you believed in luck, luck would return that belief. Morrissey loved to talk. The wheedling garrulity of the Irish, coachmen, servants, tradesmen, they were all skilled at creating an enshrouding fog of words, as though they were always trying to hide something. Bedford tried fervently to believe in his luck, but he kept losing.

“O ye of little faith,” Morrissey said to him. “You're not trying hard enough to believe.”

“Luck is more than faith,” Bedford said. “Luck is the result of patiently striving to put the odds in one's own favor. Luck is what happens when you have gained a position from which it's possible to take advantage of the opportunities that circumstance may present.”

“That sounds too complicated for me,” Morrissey said. “I'm a man of simple faith. I'll leave the higher reasoning to the likes of yourself.”

The chits mounted steadily, month after month of losses, until the night Morrissey put his arm around Bedford's shoulder, the pressure slightly greater than usual, and offered not encouragement but an ultimatum. “Charlie,” he said, “we need for you to make a settlement of your account.”

Sarah was of the opinion that he drank too much. They hadn't been married a year when one day she announced she was leaving for England in order “to renew acquaintances.” Bedford had no objections. The day she left, he found a pamphlet on his desk.
The Drunkard's Disciples; Or, Twelve Brief Notices of the Dissolution and Death of Once Happy Men.
A slip of paper marked the sixth chapter:
A Young Man of Promise, Bound for Prominence in the World's Financial Matters, Is Dragged to Ruin By His Addiction to Rum, An Affliction that He Is Unable to Discern Until He Has Lost Everything, His Wealth, His Wife, His Friends, and Must Die Alone. Herein His Rise, His Fall; The Awfulness of a Discovery Made Too Late.

When
Morrissey's arm had fallen on his shoulder, the phrase had come back to him:
The Awfulness of a Discovery Made Too Late.
“Old Smoke” was what people called Morrissey behind his back. When he was a younger man, he had been in a barroom fight. A stove of red-hot coals had been knocked over. Morrissey's opponent pinned him to the floor atop those coals. The smell of burning flesh filled the room. But Morrissey neither flinched nor screamed. He slowly worked his way out of the hold the man had on him, grinding the coals into his back in order to do so, and, once free, pummeled his antagonist into a bloody, lifeless lump, punching away as the remnants of his pants and shirt smoldered. The name “Old Smoke” invoked in Bedford an image of the Devil, the Great Tempter, leading the sinner to hell, usually through Drink. But Drink had never been his problem. Sarah's father had been a drunk, one in a long line, a condition that the portrait painters had brushed out of the august faces on the walls, nothing more than a slight ruddiness on the nose and cheeks. Sarah saw drunkenness everywhere. But leaving no trace on the breath, never impairing speech or inducing a slight stagger, faro had escaped her view.

Faro had been a form of relaxation from the uncertainties of wartime. After Lincoln's election, Wall Street had been afflicted with neurasthenia. In retrospect, despite the night of festivity at the St. Nicholas Hotel, it seemed impossible that so immense and cataclysmic an event as the war could have taken any broker by surprise. Looking back, the portents of what was to come seemed unmistakable. Some bears had hunkered down the minute Lincoln was elected. Others had taken the firing on the federal supply ship
Star of the West,
which was bound for Fort Sumter, as the signal that war was inevitable. But in the end, Bedford had found it impossible to believe that men would choose the ruin and devastation of war over the amassing of profits, and he continued putting together the pieces he had picked up after the panic of '57, fitting together what he envisioned as an impregnable financial empire. He speculated that the markets would go through a ten-year period of steady growth before the boom-time delusions would reappear and the wise bulls would begin to transmogrify into ever more cautious bears. He was still hard at work when the Secessionist barrage opened on Fort Sumter, the shells falling with deadly accuracy on the last remaining bulls, a direct hit on their magazines, men left groping amid the smoke and confusion. As the heroic commander of Fort Sumter had done, the directors of the Board walked calmly amid the shot and shells in order to reassure the troops. Steady, they said, it will all be over soon. Order will be returned. The world made right again. But when the smoke cleared, Bedford knew that the fort was done for. Southern merchants defaulted on three hundred million dollars in obligations. Over six thousand northern firms went bankrupt. The banking structure seemed to teeter on the brink of ruin.

The early
days of the war were a blur. Bedford went for his usual breakfast at Old Tom's. He found it hard to leave. The cavelike atmosphere was cool and secure. From where he sat, below street level, he could see the feet and legs of brokers and messengers as they flew past Old Tom's windows, men running a footrace that seemed to grow more frenetic each day. The trading on the curb outside the Board resembled one of those famous minstrel-show walk-arounds, a crowd of men pushing and sidestepping, faces contorted, arms waving with rowdy gestures. A mob gathered outside the offices of the
Journal of Commerce,
which had been steady in its insistence that the South be allowed to depart in peace. They broke in, smashing windows and doors and draping a flag out a second-floor window. Bedford stood among the crowd. He recognized some brokers who he knew shared the same opinions as the
Journal,
but that no longer seemed to matter. They were looking for something on which to vent their confusion and frustration, and they went at their work with real enthusiasm. Afterward, they stood together in the street, on a carpet of torn and shredded copies of the
Journal,
and lustily sang “Hail Columbia.”

The summer
was brutally hot, and, along with the news from Virginia, it drove men to the edge.
Bull Run.
One broker tried to make a joke out of it. “Next time we fight the Rebs,” he said, “we should look for a place called Bear Run.” Nobody laughed. Men strove to maintain their composure. The Board continued to try to conduct business as usual. Despite the burst of new businesses generated by the demands of what was obviously going to be a prolonged conflict, the Board stuck to its practice of two auctions per day and rejected the notion of continuous trading. After the morning session, waiters brought around glasses of Saratoga water with spikes of Adirondack ice. Men drained the water and held the ice to their foreheads. From outside they could hear the roar of the curbstone brokers. Bedford's representative on the Curb said he was too busy to handle Bedford's business anymore. He suggested that maybe Jim Halsey would be available and promised to introduce him to Bedford.

Bedford disliked Halsey the minute he set eyes on him. Halsey was in his twenties. He had the thick upstate nasality of an apple-knocker. He kept his hat pushed back on his head, stood with his hands in his pockets, and rocked on his heels. A cocksure pose. He wore a tan jacket, green vest, and soft felt hat, the clothes of a clerk on holiday. Said he wanted 2 percent of all the business he handled.

Bedford laughed. “Do I look like a yokel?” he said.

“Gaze around,” Halsey said. He opened his arms to the milling mob of curbstone traders. Some of them looked as if they had come directly from a county fair. “It's the yokels who seem to be raking in the gelt.”

Bedford
declined Halsey's services. He would see him occasionally on the street, and Halsey would give him a loud hello. Bedford had sustained substantial losses in the post–Fort Sumter turmoil. He held his own in the months that followed, but he felt unnerved, off balance, and it left him tired and depressed. He had thought he had taken the measure of the market, had understood its mechanisms, had discovered the physical laws it ran by, then the thing he hadn't counted on happened, war, and he groped to find a new set of laws. As he left his office at the end of one particularly unsuccessful day, he bumped into Halsey. For once, the man's brashness seemed diminished. Without being asked, Halsey volunteered that the day's business had gone badly for him also. Bedford offered him a ride in his coach, and Halsey said he was going to Morrissey's. When they reached there, Halsey got out of the coach and held the door open.

“Come with me,” he said.

“No thanks, I have work waiting for me at home.”

“To Lucifer with work. It can wait.”

“It can't.”

Halsey leaned into the coach. He cupped his hand next to his mouth and said in a soft voice, “It's a whore, ain't it? That's who yer so anxious to see. Where yer going to? Greene Street? Or are yer off to Mrs. Woods? Can't blame yer. Whores are about the only thing can settle a man's nerves after a day like today.”

Bedford didn't smile. “You're delaying me,” he said.

Halsey rocked on his heels and kept his hand on the door. “Thing about faro is it's less work than plowing a whore, more fun than watching rats, and gives yer better odds than yer ever gonna find on Wall Street. Come on, worse can happen is I'll drop a bundle and you'll get to gloat. Might stop yer from feeling sorry for yerself.”

Bedford reached over to grab the door. Halsey took hold of his wrist. “Ain't no fun in losing money less you got somebody to watch yer do it.” For an instant Bedford felt a twinge of sympathy for Halsey.

“For Christ's sake,” Bedford said, “let go of my wrist. It will give me pleasure to watch you go to ruin.”

Bedford
followed Halsey into the House of Morrissey. Halsey purchased a handful of copper chips from an attractive woman in a décolleté gown who sat in a wooden booth behind an iron grille. Each chip was stamped “$100.” It was early, and the place was nearly empty. The curtains, rugs, and wallpaper had a faded, dingy look; the walls and ceilings were discolored by the residues of ammonia and sulfur given off by the gaslight, which although left at a low level burned from dusk to dawn, as long as men believed their luck would change or hold out. Halsey went directly to an empty faro table and stood in front of the green cloth, its surface enameled with a representation of a full suit of spades. He wiped his hands on his trousers, blew on a hundred-dollar chip, and put it on the 4. The dealer stood before a pack of playing cards laid faceup in a dealing box. He drew the top card and laid it off to his right. It was the “soda” card, and out of play. The next card out of the box was a “loser,” and lay next to the box. The following card, facing up, was a “winner.”