The Banished Children of Eve (32 page)

“I've been accused of being many things,” Halsey said, “but ain't nobody accused me of being that.”

There was a tapping at the door so gentle that at first Bedford didn't hear it.

“Who's there?”

“Mr. Bedford, sir, it's Margaret.”

He pulled the chain above him. The water rushed down.

“What is it?”

“Mr. Bedford, I was just closin' up da house and wonderin' to myself if you was all right in dere or maybe had fallen asleep or needed somethin'. You've been in dere a terrible long time.”

“Everything's fine,” he said. “I'll be out in a minute.” He found it impossible to be harsh with the servants, to see them as part of some separate order of existence. He left that to Sarah. They were afraid of her. He noticed how attentive they were when she was in the house, and how that attentiveness waned when she was away. They would never knock on any bathroom door
she
might be behind, that was for sure. They would wait.

Bedford placed the newspaper on his lap. Should have gone to meet Halsey at the Trump. No use hiding. Sooner or later it would all have to be faced. He reminded himself again: Don't panic. He glanced down at the paper. The obituary notices. He wasn't tired. His stomach rumbled once more. Although his taste for food hadn't diminished, his insides were a ruin.

In the early autumn
of the first year of the war, he had closed the office for several days. Had sat by himself at his desk for an entire day. He had remembered the contempt he had felt for the victims of '57. How pathetic they had seemed at the time, how weak, their eyes blazing with fear, like trapped animals. He had imagined that their weakness and fearfulness had led them to destruction. They had chosen to ignore the brute nature of the struggle they were involved in, and as a consequence the struggle devoured them. Sitting there in his empty office, Bedford had come to understand that perhaps their fear was the outcome of their ruin, not its origin.

On his second day alone, Bedford had done a mental inventory. He had played his instincts and bet that the country would walk to the very edge of civil war but recoil from the abyss. However foolish they had come to seem, his instincts had been widely shared. But others had hedged their bets, especially after Lincoln's election. They had liquidated investments, invested in gold and foreign assets.

When war came, his losses had been devastating. As he recovered from the shock, he decided to approach the matter more rationally, not suppressing his instincts but tempering them with a reasoned judgment as to what lay ahead. The war, he calculated, could last only a year. At the end of that time, the North would have either crushed the South or realized that such a victory could not be achieved and negotiated a peace. In the meanwhile, the withdrawal of southern investments, the absence of cotton for northern mills, the destruction of shipping, the loss of crops, the possible sacking of border cities and ports, and a halt to railroad construction would all leave the economy in a shambles.

In the evening, Ward and Bedford dined together at home.

“The
war will ruin the economy,” Bedford said.

“Quite so.”

“It is a clear lesson of history?”

“I thought history didn't interest you.”

“I am asking a question.”

“Ah, history always tells us several things. For example, in the case of war, history tells us the economic energies of a nation can be either vitiated or invigorated.”

“Depending on whether it wins or loses?”

“In history, nothing is so simple.”

“Could you get to the point?”

“Well, in the case of war with another country or power, a nation may well find that the requirements of its military efforts strengthen its commercial prowess no matter what the outcome. Britain lost its struggle with the American colonies, but the exercise of fighting such a distant war stimulated its productive capacities.”

“And you believe this war could do the same for us?”

“This isn't simply
war,
Charles, a struggle such as Britain fought against Napoléon, waged by both sides on the territory of other nations. Nor is it of the type the English and the Dutch fought, waged mostly on distant seas. Nor the kind of
pique-nique
we had with the Mexicans. This is civil war, and civil wars are ipso facto destructive for all involved. The French civil war lasted for half a century and ruined the country. The English civil war lasted nearly a decade and left scars that have perhaps never healed.”

“Those were religious wars, were they not?”

“Charles, you know more than you let on. Yes, religion was one of the issues, and one might well understand the decline of the Gaul and the rise of the Saxon by recognizing that in France it was the Catholic forces that triumphed, but in Britain the Protestant. Yet whatever the issues, the universal results of civil wars are the same, and were pointed out very nicely by Gibbon in his summation of the struggle that brought Constantine to the imperial throne. The first is a ruinous expense of blood and treasure. The second, an oppressive escalation in taxation. I don't see any reason to believe that we shall escape such a fate, do you?”

Bedford
didn't. He abandoned the market and decided to wait until it reached bottom before he reentered. The country seemed to sink into a depression, just as he thought it would. For a few weeks, the atmosphere on the Street was quiet, almost tranquil. But slowly at first, then with astounding rapidity, the war turned into the single greatest engine for production in the nation's history. Contracts for rifles, wagons, uniforms, boots, corn, ammunition, artillery, and ships poured out of Washington. In the East, the factories ran all day and all night. In the West, the railroads expanded across the newly laid track, and the trains ladened with grain and meat and lumber came puffing eastward. Government bonds were issued in massive amounts, an unprecedented flood, and hawked with an unheard-of urgency and success by Jay Cooke and his ubiquitous agents. More and more business was done on margin, the buyer putting up a small part of the purchase price of a stock. The pace of business swirled and gathered like the gush of a spring thaw, a roaring volume of water that grows stronger and stronger until it obliterates the river-banks, pouring down the valley, carrying all before it. A new Deluge, different from the last. A new day. New exchanges sprang up for trading stock and they were filled with new faces, men even younger-looking than Halsey. These newcomers trotted through the streets—nobody seemed to walk anymore—waving papers, shouting at the top of their lungs. Many of them followed only one stock, in rails, or canals, or petroleum, or banks. They seemed not to know that anything else existed, nor to care. Bedford found them crude, impudent, and contemptible, but he realized they were becoming masters of the market.

Old Tom's was deserted. The colored waiters stood around solemnly, with their white towels draped over their arms. Bedford knew them all by sight but had never exchanged more than pleasantries. He wondered if they resented the war for bringing in a new order that was depriving them of their livelihood. For the first time in all the years he had been going there, he made an effort to engage them in conversation. They were polite but distant. He gave up after a few tries. He ordered another coffee with brandy. One thing was for sure: The war had disproved Stark's theory of the relationship between a full stomach and a successful broker. That notion was being trampled into the earth by a thundering horde that barely had time to eat. In place of the colored peddlers who had wandered the district selling hot corn or oysters, coffee stands sprang up, sidewalk booths that offered quick food and drink, which was devoured by men who blew on their coffee as they gulped it and consumed a roll in two mouthfuls.

In the first
winter of the war, the administration made its initial issue of “greenbacks,” paper currency backed by neither gold nor silver but only by the good word of the government. A whole new speculative game was born. Everyone on the Street instantaneously understood the rules. If the North were to lose the war, the greenbacks would be worthless, and the demand for gold would become insatiable, its price skyrocketing. But if the North won and could redeem the greenbacks in specie, the opposite would be true: In relation to paper, gold prices would drop. Within a few weeks of the greenbacks' appearance, there was an intense competition for exclusive rights to telegraph lines, and some of the roofs around the district sprouted rookeries for carrier pigeons. The race was on for news of the campaigns in the West and along the James, news of Union victories deflating the rise in gold prices, rumors of defeats inflating it again.

After several months in which a number of brokers bet openly on the defeat of the Union, gold sales were banned from the Board's activities. But Gilpin's News Room opened across from the Board in Lord's Court, and the gold business was carried on with an even greater intensity. Brokers fled Lord's Court and dashed in and out of the News Room. The trading was so heavy that it also supported another gold exchange, farther down on William Street. The Coal Hole was located in a poorly lit, badly ventilated basement. There was a steady traffic through its doors all day. Bedford avoided the News Room altogether, and on the one visit he made to the Coal Hole, he stood in the back. With its haze of tobacco smoke hanging over everything and the constant clatter of voices, it reminded him of a concert saloon. There was a raised platform at the far end with a long blackboard mounted to the wall, on which a line of clerks entered and erased the ever-changing prices of trades. Men jostled and pushed to see what was happening. A fistfight broke out, and one man was knocked, unconscious, to the floor. The trading never stopped. In a corner of the room was the slight figure of Jay Gould. Men were running up to him and then scurrying away. As Bedford watched, he realized Gould was conducting a network of trades throughout the room, dispatching runners in every direction, sending and receiving bids, keeping track of it all in his head.

Bedford had the
feeling that fate had turned against him, that no matter what he invested in or didn't invest in, it would be the wrong decision. He went home most nights. The war had interrupted Sarah's periodic visits to England, but a steady stream of traffic came the other way. Usually there were two or three British guests in the house, most of them self-styled poets or philosophers who always seemed to find the house too stuffy or the streets too dirty or the help too forward and familiar. At dinner they prattled on about the war. Bedford barely listened, and Sarah grew angry at his inattentiveness. Some evenings they put on theatricals in the parlor, elaborate productions that required weeks of rehearsals. Bedford would stay for a few minutes, then go to his room. He didn't despise Sarah, but he understood that his desire for her had been flamed by her inaccessibility. Like success, wealth, a fine home, his own firm, Sarah had dangled at the end of the branch, far out of reach. But eventually it had all fallen into his lap, and Sarah with it. She was more calculating than her uncle; Bedford had always understood that and didn't resent it. If she had fallen into his lap, it was because she had climbed into the tree and taken aim at where he sat below. He could provide her with the things she wanted and had no other way of obtaining. But he had come to find her tedious. In this, too, she surpassed her uncle. Her conversation always dwelt on the arts, aesthetics, the realm of the beautiful and the true, and in it was the implication that Bedford spent his days in the basest of activities.

Morrissey's was
a place to go instead of home. Bedford couldn't remember precisely when he began to make a nightly visit. He came for several weeks just to watch Halsey, who never matched his performance of that first evening. Gradually Bedford learned the game. Once in a while, he placed a bet. The first time that he waged heavily, he held his own. Across the next few weeks he continued to stay even, losing one night, winning the next, never straying too far in either direction. Faro absorbed more and more of his attention. At the office, he played faro in his head. On an evening in early June, he won close to $3,500. In August, he and Halsey traveled on the
Rip Van Winkle
to Albany and hired a coach to take them to Saratoga. They spent a week at the place Morrissey ran there in the summer, and both of them were stung by the size of their losses. On the night boat back down the Hudson, Bedford couldn't sleep. He sat on the deck and smoked cheroots. The sky was starless. The paddle wheel slapped steadily, softly, on the water, a happy sound. Bedford felt a surge of hope. He wouldn't despair. Look at the twists that fate had taken in the past fifteen years. He lived under a lucky star, which although locked for a moment behind the night clouds was up there somewhere, shining. Something would come along at the right moment, the way it had done that day on Spruce Street when he saw the advertisement for Stark and Evans outside the
Tribune
offices. He fell asleep on deck. In the morning he woke up with a painful stiff neck. His clothes were soaked with morning dew and the river mist. When the boat pulled into the berth on the North River, the city was barely visible through the cloud of heat and dirt and coal dust that enveloped it.

A crowd at the end of the pier waved the boat off. The engines went into reverse and turned the water into foam. There was a small knot of policemen hauling something out of the water. Bedford stood at the railing. At the end of the policemen's rope was a body so bloated that it had burst the seams of its clothing, which hung on it like so many rags. A deckhand stood next to Bedford. He said, “Never fails, we get one of these almost every time. If they gotta kill 'emselves, I wish they'd do everyone a favor and jump into the Hell Gate, where they wouldn't interfere none with the river traffic.”

Back in the
office, Bedford pored over the books. His own finances and those of the firm were sinking even faster. He began going to Morrissey's every night. His luck had to change. Instead, he piled loss on top of loss. Halsey did the same, and soon their names were linked.
The Faro Twins. Broadway's biggest losers.
It was Halsey who started swiping bearer bonds from some of the brokers he represented on the Curb and fencing them with somebody he knew uptown. Bedford resisted as long as he could. He kept waiting on luck. Finally he asked Halsey for the name and address.