The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  Edward looked through the window, and he was old and hard again. Billy lit a cigarette. “Yes,” he said, “I want to know about everybody. I haven’t been in Waterford since I left there, a couple of days after Christmas—1904, wasn’t it? Twenty-five years ago. A long time.”

  They went through the club, which was closed during the day, and dim and shadowy. Edward noted the rich appointments, the long bar, the heavy doors with their chains, the, excellent furniture, the bandstand with its silent instruments, the velvety carpet, the gaily painted walls, all bright green palms and purple mountains and dancing Negro girls and men in Latin costumes. “An open bar,” he commented. Billy smiled. “And expensive, too, and I don’t mean just the liquor.” He rubbed one finger on the palm of the other hand, significantly. “I hope you don’t obey the Prohibition laws. I hope you’re a good sound scofflaw.”

  “Evil laws are meant to be broken, or they should be broken,” said Edward, following Billy down a long carpeted hall at the back of the club and looking with interest at the various shut doors of gleaming mahogany. “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. Isn’t that what Jefferson said?”

  Billy produced a very formidable key and unlocked one of the doors. “The American people don’t break laws,” he said. “Except Prohibition. And that’s what’s wrong with the country. We’ve lost spirit. Put totalitarianism on us, with police like Mussolini’s, and we’ll all be salaaming meekly. Don’t laugh. I mean it. You can feel the rottenness growing all over the country, and I’m not referring to gangsterism, either, which is only a symptom. Talk about Mussolini! We’re just waiting for a dictator ourselves, and we’ll get one eventually, for we’re asking for him. A Mussolini, or a Trotsky, or a Hitler, or a Stalin. Well, come in. This is my private dining room, and I’ll order lunch.”

  He carefully shut the door and locked it. “I’ve got competition,” he said briefly, at Edward’s look of surprise. “I live and work and make my money honestly, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been shot at regularly. I won’t play with the boys. Not any more than I have to, anyway. How do you like all this?”

  “All this” was a magnificent office furnished with authentic antiques, Oriental rugs, and heavy brocaded curtains drawn over barred windows, whose faint outlines could be seen through the material. There were excellent paintings on the walls, and Louis Fifteenth chairs, and a leather-covered desk tooled in gold. Beyond this office waited a small but exquisitely appointed dining room, with no windows at all; a soft indirect lighting filled it with a golden glow. “I eat here whenever I want to,” said Billy, proud of Edward’s admiration. “I’ve two singers auditioning in a couple of hours, a pretty girl from Harlem, a college graduate with a voice like black velvet. Man, can that child sing! And a boy who’s studying law at Columbia, working his way through. My fellows tell me they’re finds, but I want to see how they’ll sound in the club. Acoustics can be tricky.”

  They went into the dining room, which had an Italian refectory table covered with handmade lace, and high, antique Italian chairs upholstered in old purple plush with tassels of gold thread. A bowl of yellow roses stood on the table. The walls were painted a soft gold, and the carpet was Aubusson. “A drink first,” Billy said. Edward saw him make no move, but a moment later a colored waiter entered carrying a silver tray on which was a pleasing bottle of genuine Scotch whisky, with soda, ice, and two glasses.

  “Our speciality tonight is squab with chestnut dressing,” Billy told Edward. “I hope there’re two already cooked. And there’s a bottle of sauterne cooling in the kitchen. How does that suit you?”

  He opened a golden box on a small nearby table, and Edward took a cigarette and examined it curiously. It was long and Turkish, and the thin white paper bore a gold embossed little crown, with the words “Prince Emory” written in gold script below it. “You’ve done well for yourself, Billy,” he said. “There must be more to this jazz than. I knew.”

  Billy smoked carefully, blowing up the smoke to hide his eyes. “And that’s for sure,” he said. He paused. “Ever hear of Davey Jones, the composer of Samson Smith, the first American opera?”

  “I think I did,” said Edward, with some distaste. “At least my children are everlastingly humming some song or other from it. Discordant. I’m sorry, Billy, but that’s how I feel about modern music, if you want to call it music.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Billy, and Edward looked up with some quickness. There had been a cryptic note in Billy’s voice. Was he remembering that tragic night so long ago? But Billy was smiling at him affectionately. “Every man to his taste,” he said.

  The lunch was excellent. During it Edward told Billy about his family while Billy, who knew the story only too well, listened politely, and smoked, and motioned, from time to time, to the silent colored waiter to pour more wine in the crystal glasses. He listened with real intentness, however, to Edward’s voice and its intonations, rather than to the words. He waited for Edward to speak of David, but he did not.

  “Well,” he said at last, while they ate their pêche bombe, “you, too, have come a long way, and your family with you. But you haven’t mentioned old Dave. I remember him a little, and it seems to me that we’ve played the same cities sometimes. At least,” he added hastily, “I thought I’ve seen his name mentioned in the newspapers. Or am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong,” said Edward. He put down his glass of wine. “He’s—the worst disappointment I’ve had, and I suppose you’ve understood that they’ve all disappointed me. Greg with his damned idiot book The Forgotten! All about the starving, noble, striving, voiceless working class. As if such a class exists in America! I read the book in manuscript, and I laughed as I hadn’t laughed in years. Greg wouldn’t know a working man if he saw one. He’s seen thousands, of course, but he’s never recognized them. They don’t fit into his Götterdämmerung idea, muscular, lighted eyes, heroic faces, marching into some illuminated future and stamping down, in their Valhalla passage, such grubs as me. The men he sees riding around in Fords or Buicks and such, and in silk shirts, aren’t recognizable to him as workingmen. It would kill him to know the truth. Well. His book was quite popular. I bet the working people who read it, if they hadn’t sense enough to avoid it, didn’t recognize themselves either, as those mighty heroes of his. But the critics here in New York loved the book. They postured about it. And none of them can afford dinners such as the American ‘working class’ eats every night.”

  He drank another glass of wine, angrily. The unhealthy color was deep, under his cheekbones, and Billy watched him with some apprehension. He remembered that David had told him that Edward had had a “breakdown” six months after his father’s death. He had been in Chicago then, and in the hospital for some time.

  “I’ve told you about Sylvia. Her precious Ellis had a heart attack, just on the eve of a concert tour, which I don’t believe in, not a damned word of it. They’re home, of course, living on me. Oh, I suppose the man has some talent; I’ve heard him play. Anything would sound good on a Stradivarius, which I had to buy for him. Ralph’s still with his wife, playing around all over the world, at my expense. Greg’s now writing the great American novel, and I’ve given him up, after The Forgotten.”

  “I read The Forgotten,” said Billy. “Not bad writing. What the critics call taut and sensitive, and full of social significance, though what the hell that is I don’t know. They have a special jargon, especially in New York. Well, at least they’re all busy, aren’t they? But you haven’t told me about your children. Two, did you say?”

  Edward’s dark face lightened. “Yes. Going on fifteen. They’re geniuses, both of them, though their mother won’t admit it. Gertrude writes; editor of her school paper. She’s sold two poems to a woman’s magazine, and wonderful ones, too. And Robert’s in his school band, at the Englebert School for Boys. He composed a new school song. Nice kids. Robert’s the handsomest, everybody says. Everybody says Gertrude looks like me, poor child. Robert resembl
es his mother; he grows more like her every day.” Edward’s voice softened with love.

  “My two kids are in school, too,” said Billy. “They’re older than yours. They’re in the South.”

  “Private school? In the South?” Edward was surprised.

  “Sure. And the best, too.” Billy looked smoothly at his friend.

  Edward pondered on this. Billy smiled. “Don’t believe everything you hear about the South,” he said indulgently. “I couldn’t get them in good schools in the North. Oh, they bleed up here about the poor oppressed darky in the cotton fields in Alabam’. They sob their hearts out over the Uncle Toms and the Aunt Susies. I’m not saying that everything is too lovely for words down South; it isn’t. But it’s getting better all the time, and even as it is now it’s better for the Negroes than up here. At least we have friends in the South who’re working their heads off for us. If fools in the North don’t start to agitate in Dixie—and I hear rumors they’re thinking of it—we’ll be all right in a couple of decades. They’re already inspecting the South, to see what they can stir up. But go on. Anything else you can tell me about your family and Waterford?”

  “No. Except about Ralph’s boy, André. I didn’t tell you. He inherited two hundred thousand dollars from—my father. None of us ever understood it.” Edward’s expression became hard and almost livid. “The least my father could have done was to have repaid me, just a little, for everything I did for him and his children—Well. The boy’s in school in Paris. At least I make his father pay for him out of the allowance I send Ralph!”

  Billy was disturbed. He had heard this before, from David, and he was distressed not at what David had told him but at Edward’s look of pent rage and hatred. “Why, that was wrong,” said Billy, sympathetically. “Is the boy that attractive, or something, so that your father could forget his own children, and your children, for his sake?”

  “That’s something we could never understand, not even my mother, not even the meat-heads, my brothers and my sister. I didn’t dislike André, the way the others did; I thought he was amusing and lively. I like all kids, anyway, so perhaps I didn’t look at him too closely. Perhaps my—my father—thought that my children would have enough, and didn’t need his money, and André did. That’s the only explanation we can arrive at.”

  He brooded on it. It had not yet occurred to him that he had been remiss in not showing as much interest in Billy’s family, and how he had arrived at all this obvious wealth, as Billy had shown in him. But Billy was not hurt. There is something of Heinrich’s simplicity in him, Billy thought. He accepts the obvious. Besides, he’s floundering along under a heavy burden. Why? Why doesn’t he kick all of them out? Poor old Ed.

  Billy said, “You’ve never told me why you were so sick in Chicago. Was it pneumonia?” (David had thought it was, or a nervous breakdown.)

  Edward looked at him, his eyes wrinkling under his frowning brows. “Who told you I was sick in Chicago?” he asked.

  Billy cursed himself for this slip. He lit another cigarette with a light air. “Who told me? Why, there was an item in the newspapers. That’s where I must have read it. After all, you’re famous for your stores. Why wouldn’t you be newsworthy? That was three years ago, wasn’t it? Seems to me it was three years.”

  “Five.” Edward was still frowning. He tapped his fingers on the lacy cloth. “I never told anyone in the family. No one would have been interested, except my wife, Margaret. And I especially kept it from her. Besides, the doctors were fools. I’d been working too hard. It could have happened to anyone.” He paused and grunted. “They said I’d had a heart attack. No, not coronary thrombosis. They said it was an old ailment; I must have had rheumatic fever at one time. Something to do with the valves. Well, I never had rheumatic fever. If I’d had compensation, they said, it’d broken down. I’ll never believe doctors after that. I’d been driving myself; I’d run into trouble with a new Congressional committee investigating monopolies. That’s the third time. Well, I’d had a cold, and it developed into bronchitis, and I couldn’t spare the time to take care of it. So one day, in my Chicago office, I collapsed. That was all there was to it. The doctors wanted to send for Margaret, but I put my foot down. Then, after I’d made them promise not to tell her their imbecile diagnosis, I had to let her come. I was in the hospital for two months, and that was fine for her!”

  He thought of those nightmare months of pain, of gasping for air on high pillows, of oxygen, of nurses, of drugged dreams and swimming visions, of aching exhaustion, of feelings of impending death. Heart failure! Stupid bastards. If he’d been a poor man, they’d have dismissed him as suffering from bronchitis, aggravated by overwork. They’d have given him a bottle of cough sirup and sent him back to a factory. “I suppose I owe them something, though, over and above their gilt-edged bills. They told my wife I’d had a nervous collapse from influenza and too much responsibility. And that’s all it was, anyway, besides the bronchitis.”

  Billy was silent. He was remembering the night in the basement of the Enger delicatessen, so many years ago. Old Ed had almost fallen into the furnace, and would have done so if Billy had not caught him. Then he had sat on the chair, shuddering and trembling and gasping for a long time. He had looked like death. He looked like death now.

  “Look,” said Billy. “You’re probably right about the Chicago doctors. But we’re forty. Now I have an electrocardiogram every six months. Good insurance. We have the best doctors in the world right here in New York. I know a wonderful heart specialist. Let’s have you checked, just to reassure yourself.”

  Edward laughed shortly. “No, thanks. I wouldn’t believe any doctor after Chicago.”

  Billy was sick with his own anxiety. “You don’t look well,” he said. Edward waved that aside. “I feel fine,” he said. “We’re leaving tomorrow for Europe, Ireland first. We’d have left in September, but there was that flurry about the stock market. Stocks’re still down and unsteady, but we’re pulling out of it now. I’m the executor of the will of an old friend who used to work for me, Padraig Devoe.” He thought of Padraig, and his face squeezed into momentary anguish. “His American estate. He was an Irishman. We haven’t seen his wife, Maggie, and their boy, Sean, since they left for Ireland, shortly after the war started. He—died there.” He drummed his fingers again. “I’ve invested Padraig’s money here, and it has quadrupled or more. Maggie doesn’t need it, but we like her, and I want to report to her, and that’s our excuse for going.”

  He smiled at Billy. “Here I’ve been unloading on you, and I haven’t asked you about this mysterious prosperity of yours. Now tell me. Billy,” and his voice dropped, “I never forgot you. It almost floored me when you left so suddenly.”

  The waiter came in again, carrying a telephone. He plugged it into a socket and said respectfully, “It’s Mr. Rodgers, sir. Your stockbroker. He sounds sort of crazy. He said he’s got to talk to you.”

  “I’ll call him back,” said Billy impatiently.

  “But Mr. Emory. He says everything’s crashed.”

  Simultaneously Billy and Edward jumped to their feet, and Billy seized the telephone. Slowly, as he listened, the bronze glisten of his face dimmed, and it became as rigid and lifeless as dimmed metal. He listened; he did not speak. Then he hung up the telephone and fell into his chair and looked at Edward with blind eyes.

  It was that Black Friday of October, 1929. It was the end for many people, literally. It was the end of an era. Though no one heard it, the bloody curtain of revolution and death was rising all over the world. It rose on that Friday.

  Billy said in a dwindled voice, “It’s ruin. I’ve just lost about every cent I have.” And in that same abstracted and distant voice, he told Edward.

  Edward sat down, his own face dull and blank and shocked into an awful pallor. Sweat broke out on his forehead, on his temples. His lower jaw began to tremble uncontrollably. He swallowed over and over, and choked.

  At last he said, in a far and wondering
tone, as if in a dream, “I’m ruined. This is the end. I’ve lost two million dollars or more, all my reserves.”

  Suddenly he dropped his head on the table and fainted.

  “But I am a rich man,” David protested to his mother in early November. “I took George Enreich’s advice and sold out my stock last August—”

  “And George Enreich has offered to lend Edward whatever he needs,” responded Maria wearily. “Yet Edward will take nothing except the money your father left to me. What do I need? How much land does a man need? I also have my insurance. Edward borrowed two hundred thousand dollars from me, and insists upon six per cent interest, to which I had to agree, otherwise he would not have taken my money. He immediately used that money, not to help himself but to reimburse Lady Devoe in Ireland, though she has declared that she did not wish it and that she had merely risked, through Edward’s investments for her, what a whole nation, her native land, had risked. But it is a point of honor with Edward.

  “Nor will he reduce the wages and salaries of his employees as others are doing in a desperate necessity. How long can he continue all this? My son, how can you lend any money to your brother? The suggestion would drive him mad; nothing would make him consent. Your offer comes from your heart, but sometimes the heart gives foolish messages.”

  “The situation in America is deteriorating very fast,” David said. “And Edward’s businesses will deteriorate with it. He listens to the foolish advice of ‘not selling America short.’ But America was sold short when she was entangled in the European war. Where’ve our pundits been in not pointing out to the American public that as European economy has been steadily collapsing since the war, it was inevitable that we’d suffer, too, from the world-wide depression and that we’d collapse sooner or later? Why didn’t the American politicians do something about Mussolini’s offer to unite in some sort of a strong alliance with England, France and Germany, to halt the spread of Russian Communism over Europe? That would have stopped the present rise of Hitler, too. Ed’s not the only one in this family who’s been watching events for years,” and David smiled drearily. “He isn’t the only one in the family, or the country at that, who’s terribly frightened, though he thinks he is. The collapse of European economy, and now ours, and the war that brought it on, were part of the master plan of worldwide Communism. Well, all this isn’t helping Ed. You did say, though, that he’s almost recovered from the collapse he had in New York a couple of weeks ago?”