Wolfman - Art Bourgeau

by Art Bourgeau

  Wolfman

  Art Bourgeau

  1989

  To Donald I Fine, with Thanks

  Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best,

  "Our chief want in life is somebody

  who shall make us do what we can."

  1. And in the second year of (his) reign, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled, and his sleep brake from him.

  2. Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams . . .

  3. And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled to know the dream.

  4. Then spake the Chaldeans . . . O King, live forever: tell us thy servants the dream, and we will shew the interpretation.

  5. The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the interpretation thereof ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill.

  6. But if ye shew the dream, and the interpretation thereof, ye shall receive of me gifts and rewards and great honor . . .

  — Daniel: Ch. 2, Vs. 1-6

  CHAPTER 1

  LORING WEATHERBY took his tea and moved to the club chair that looked out the window at the park trees. It was days now since the crash of the stock market, and he had slept once since then. Outside it was still dark, the trees rely more shadows in a land of shadows ranging from dark to black.

  The house was quiet. There were no sounds of people sleeping, pets snoring or even clocks ticking. The only sound was his own breathing. The only light a glimmer from the kitchen. Loring took a sip from his tea and sat down in the club chair.

  The chair was his favorite possession. It had come from an auction at Freeman's, and before that from a parsonage, as attested to by a small brass plaque on the rear leg. The leather was old and cracked but not torn, and the parade of clerics whose backs and bottoms had graced it before him had given it a shine more than skin deep. A shine that seemed to go down, down, down, like a warm red bottomless oxblood pool. The house was cold. He pulled the collar of his silk brocade dressing gown tighter to keep out the chill and settled back to wait. The four days of sleeplessness had taken a toll, and there was nothing so much that he wanted as to walk away from everything around him. To be released. To chase rainbows or butterflies. To be carefree. But he knew it was not to be.

  The stock market crash had come on Thursday last. It had started in the morning with just a downside trickle. A little profit-taking. A minor market adjustment. Nothing to be concerned about, but by afternoon a hurricane through downtown Philadelphia could not have wreaked more financial havoc. Blue chips, high flyers, utilities, transportations, mutual funds, even over-the-counter penny stocks were savaged. Nothing was spared. Fortunes were wiped out in minutes.

  He settled deeper into the chair, its warmth for a moment taking his mind off the past four days. True it was nothing more than the leather reflecting his own body heat, but in the darkness it seemed a powerful circle that surrounded and kept him safe from the cold of the house. He allowed himself to relax with it and for a moment tried to envision the faces of the clergymen who had enjoyed it before him. Good men, kindly men, like Father Frank and Father Mike at St. Ignatius. Outside, the darkness was giving way to the gray of the false dawn. The shapes of the trees were becoming more distinct. Gone were the leaves. The late autumn rains had seen to that.

  What was left was a January landscape in November. One that would have depressed many, but not Loring. Winter was his element. He was strongest in cold.

  The grayness drew his focus outward and brought his mind to the present. He reached for his tea and raised it to his lips before he realized the cup was empty. For a moment he was confused. The cup had been full when he sat down. Then he smiled. The chair, it always felt so good. After he sat down it had probably lulled him into that half-asleep/half-awake state where people did things without thinking and he had drunk it without conscious thought. Four days without sleep could make one forgetful. At least of the little things.

  He picked up the cup and saucer and went to the kitchen for a refill. As he pushed open the door the light above the stove seemed to blind him. He stopped and looked away, blinking rapidly until the sensitivity of his eyes diminished. Then he crossed the kitchen and poured more Earl Grey, being careful not to look at the clock on the stove. It was Monday, that was all he needed to know. The rest would come soon enough, he told himself as he felt his stomach begin to tighten, the first stirrings of the cramps and the pain Monday pressures always brought.

  He added cream and sugar to his tea and stirred with the spoon nestled on the saucer. In the light it was obvious he was a handsome man, with blond hair and aristocratic, chiseled features that in profile seemed to belong on a coin. He was above medium height and lean. Under his robe he was nude, his skin alabaster white and smooth. He had the muscle definition of a swimmer: light and graceful rather than the heavy slabs of a wrestler or football players. But this morning he felt tired, leaden, older than his thirty-one years, a feeling he tried to shake off. Time was a game men played with other men. To give it, take it away, control was the key to winning because time was life. Time was money. But it is no more than the passage of suns. It was not God.

  He took a sip of his tea. After the crash on Thursday had come Friday. A day for digging out and placing the blame, except there had been no relief. The market began where it had left off and continued downward, dropping hundreds of points throughout the day. By mid-afternoon one broker was heard to remark that he felt like he was on an elevator whose cable had snapped and he was just watching the floors fly by. Another one updated the old, old garment district joke: "What's the only thing worse than Thursday? Friday." No one laughed. By closing, over twelve hundred points had vanished in two days.

  Loring took his cup and returned to the living room. The room was now light enough so that everything was visible. The house was a single story cottage, the living room long and narrow. One side was almost entirely taken up by windows that looked out on the woods of the Wissahickon. The leather chair sat near the windows. One end of the room was dominated by a fieldstone fireplace, well-worn furniture was clustered around it. The furniture had the look of a men's club, a room of leather and wool, a room for winter. The rest of the wallspace was covered in bookcases, filled to capacity. There was no television in the room or the house for that matter. He did not like television.

  He carefully set his cup down on the desk before turning on a lamp and going to a bookcase filled with matching volumes. He selected two. At his desk he removed three files from the lower righthand drawer, an exercise he had repeated throughout the weekend as he steeled himself for today.

  The books were filled with graphs. He opened them to places already marked. Pushing his blond hair out of his eyes he studied first one and then the other to be certain they were what he wanted. Satisfied, he turned his attention to the filed. Each was also filled with graphs. The graphs in the first file represented the ups and downs of his clients' portfolios. The second represented the ups and downs of the market as a whole, and the third represented the events of the past days.

  One of the graphs in the books represented the growth of Iowa corn since the year 1976; the other represented a graph of sunspots for the same period. He compared these graphs with those in the file folders. They matched. He was right. He knew it. All he had to do was stick by his guns and not be afraid of what happened last Thursday and Friday. Gazing at the old inkwell on his desk, he tried to clear his mind.

  Loring Weatherby was a chartist, or so he told himself. He believed the world operated on a higher order than chaos, even the stock
market, and that to be successful one had to find the beat, to get in sync with an all-governing internal rhythm. The trick was to discover the rhythm. To that end some years earlier he had joined an institute in St. Louis whose sole function was to provide people of a like mind with graphs charting the ebb and flow of virtually everything chartable, from Florida orange production, to female babies born in Hawaii, to the sale of men's felt hats in New York City, to Ohio State football. For him there was a link, a key, a thread that ran through it all, tied it all together. And from these mountains of graphs he had found that key, at least he thought so until last week.

  Outside a bird landing on the feeder attached to the window distracted him. He stopped and watched it feed. It wasn't much of a bird. A drab winter sparrow, was all. Barely enough to hold in your hand, but one cheerfully pecking away at the unexpected bounty in the feeder. Then a blackbird arrived. Even though there was enough seed for both and a dozen more like them, the blackbird did not peck at the seed, it pecked at the sparrow until it drove it away.

  Loring felt anger. He did not want the blackbird in the feeder, not like that. It had to go. He reached across the desk and rapped on the window with his knuckle. The blackbird looked up from its feeding but didn't fly away. For a moment man and bird stared at one another. The bird's eye was black and soulless. Loring rapped on the window again. This time the bird raised its wings in flight, but there was no haste, no fright in its departure. Loring watched for a few more minutes. The sparrow did not return.

  His mind turned to the task before him. It has not been an accident but the product of months of intense research when he discovered that the graphs of the stock market's performance matched the graphs for sunspots and Iowa com production beginning almost a dozen years earlier. That was the beat, the rhythm he needed. All that was necessary was to put his clients' money into stocks that were known to be market sensitive, then to sell and repurchase as the graph dictated. It had not been foolproof. Nothing could allow for minute day-to-day fluctuations, but on the whole he had made a great deal of money for his clients with his method.

  He closed the books with a sigh and went to his bedroom to dress for work. Friday’s trade papers had blamed the computer for the crash. As the drop began it was fueled by the automatic sell-orders stored in it. It was a crash caused by technology. The Wall Street Journal quoted several sources but took no stand. The people there, Loring was sure, knew better, knew that the computer was the effect not the cause.

  He pulled on a heavily starched white shirt with a medium-spread collar, made for him like all his shirts by Vittorio, an aging shirtmaker on Seventeenth near Locust. From his closet he chose a Brooks Brothers charcoal pin stripe suit and red-and-blue suspenders.

  He believed the real cause of the crash was too much prosperity. There was no room to trade. Prices were too high. No one was making any money. Things had topped out, so a few money managers began dropping large blocks of stock in an effort to stimulate some downside action, and then to buy back, making a profit on the spread. The result had been larger than anyone could have dreamed. Over twelve hundred points lost in two days.

  Many of his clients had been hurt badly. They had panicked against his advice to hold tight, and they had turned their portfolios into ashes. Others had listened, even bought what he had advised and were now in a position to regain their losses and turn short-term profit phoenixlike. But he was concerned about the losers. Somehow he had failed them, when the chips were down he hadn't come through.

  How could he know? He kept asking himself through the long, sleepless weekend. Men against Order. They should not have prevailed but somehow they did. Not right. They were screwing around with things bigger than themselves. So little regard for transcendent forces could bring everything tumbling down.

  Once during the weekend he picked up his Missal and felt guilty because he had not been to church in so long. He opened it at random. The thought for that Sunday advised that the days were evil and that numberless sins cried for punishment. He had tried to pray but had stopped himself. Best not to concern God. Right would win out. Be careful what you ask for because you might get it. He heeded the voices. Well, not really voices, he assured himself. Just thoughts that sounded like voices . . .

  From his jewelry box he selected a set of gold cufflinks formal in design and slipped them through the cuffs of his shirt. He was almost finished knotting his tie when the sound of the phone startled him. Instinctively he looked at his watch. Not quite seven-thirty. Who would be calling him now? The phone rang again. In the quietness of the Wissahickon it sounded like a jackhammer.

  He ignored the phone beside the bed and walked into the living room to use the one at his desk. He hated the phone beside the bed. The idea of chatting from even the edge of the bed made him feel guilty, like a malingering invalid.

  "Hello." From the other end he heard a female voice say, "Loring, hi. How are you?" His sister's voice. She still had that distinctive breathless quality, but today her voice sounded different, metallic and faraway, as if they were talking from parallel dimensions of different time and space with an orange juice can and string between them.

  "Karen, what's wrong? It's not even six-thirty in Chicago."

  She laughed, the sound like someone raking a thumb down the teeth of a comb. He looked down at the phone and mentally cursed it.

  "Nothing’s wrong, silly. I'm just calling to invite you to my wedding."

  "Your wedding?"

  "I was afraid of that, you didn't get my letter, did you?"

  "What letter?"

  "I knew it, the goddamn mails. I won’t go into how wonderful he is because mom and dad are on the extensions . . ."

  Before he could ask who "he" was, as if on cue he heard a second female voice and a male voice say nearly in unison,

  "Hi, son," and he heard himself say, "Hello." This inspiring exchange was followed by a moment of silence in which they waited for him to say something else.

  When he didn't he heard Karen start again with something about the world passing her by at age twenty-seven, and how she'd met Charles, a broker like Loring, and they could play squash together when he was out for the wedding, but he blocked out most of it.

  He was furious that she had called the man on the line "dad."

  He was their stepfather, not their father. Their father was dead. Dead.

  She was chattering on. "Anyway, as I said in the letter you never got, the wedding is December 28th. Charles is like you about remembering important dates. This way, right in the middle between Christmas and New Year's, he won't have any excuse for not remembering our anniversary. And, Loring, I want you to come to the wedding."

  "Charles?"

  "Yes, I just told you, the man I’m going to marry!"

  "Everybody is going crazy with the plans," interrupted his mother. "It’s going to be a beautiful wedding."

  "That’s right," added Malcolm, his stepfather. "While you're here we want you to stay with us. It’ll be just like old times Loring was staring out the window as he tried hard not to visualize their faces. Karen, because he missed her; the others because he did not. What was he getting himself into? Outside, the blackbird returned to the feeder. The sight of his arrogance added to Loring feeling somehow put upon from all sides. Even a damn bird . . .

  "When did you say?"

  "The twenty-eighth. December 28th. Aren't you listening to a word I’ve been saying?"

  "Yes, of course. I’m just preoccupied. The market crash, you know." He took a deep breath. "Karen, I’m sorry, but I can’t be there. That week I’ve chartered a boat out of Barbados, I’m taking three couples — my best clients — sailing. But I'll be with you in spirit."

  "Son, can't you change your plans?" his mother said. His stepfather was silent.

  He would not be intimidated.

  "I’m sorry, I can't. I hate to do this but I have to go, I have a meeting in town. The market crash . . ."

  He left the house as quickly as poss
ible, afraid the phone would ring again, got into his maroon Mercedes and headed for the office.

  Traffic was light until he hit the river drive, then slowed to a crawl as yet another facelift on the Schuylkill Expressway poured thousands of extra commuters from outlying suburbs like Conshohocken and King of Prussia onto the winding road. As he finally inched his way past the Art Museum he was still thinking about the phone call.

  Other than Karen, who had come for a weekend visit some five years ago, he had seen his family only twice since he’d left home for prep school at St. Ignatius in Villanova at age fourteen. Shortly after that his stepfather had moved the family and business to Chicago. They had come east for his prep school graduation and his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, and both times had been pure hell. Memories faded, feelings didn't. He had not once been to Chicago, he had never seen their house, he had never seen his room. And he was glad of it.

  There was a line of cars at his garage on Fifteenth Street, but the attendant saw him and waved him ahead. On the walk to his office in the Penn Center complex he glanced at his watch and saw it was a few minutes past eight. The partners' meeting would already be underway. He started to walk faster, his Burberry open and blowing slightly in the cool morning breeze.

  In the conference room of Cartwright, Blanchard & Haynes the air of the meeting was tense. Most of the eleven partners were in shirtsleeves, their jackets thrown around the high backs of the conference room chairs. The table was littered with styrofoam coffee cups. Two of the partners were smoking cigars, several others cigarettes.

  William Blanchard, a stocky, powerfully built man in his early sixties and the managing partner, was on his feet at the head of the table. When he saw Loring enter he looked over the tops of his reading glasses and said, "Good morning." The simple greeting carried a note of disapproval that the youngest partner in the firm was the last to arrive at so important a meeting.

  The meeting lasted another half-hour in which the more senior partners took turns bandying phrases like trade deficit, economic reports, computer problems, echoing the industry party line begun on Friday about what had caused the crash.