“Do they have a girls’ boxing team?” George said, and the three of them laughed again.
“Would you like to have dinner with us, dear?” Dewey said to her.
Libby looked at her mother, and the corners of the girl’s lips curled just so slightly into the hint of a smile. She is taunting me, the little minx, Sarah thought. “Thank you, Dewey, but you’ll have to excuse me, I’m not feeling very well,” Liberty said. “I think I’ll go to my room. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Seabrook. It was nice to meet you.” And then, in a loud whisper to her mother: “She’s dying.”
Sarah felt the blood drain from her face.
“Who’s dying?” Dewey said after she had left.
“Frankie’s mother,” Sarah said.
“I’m sorry,” Dewey said. “We’ll send flowers.” He and George went into his study for a drink before dinner and left Sarah standing adrift in the foyer, which suddenly seemed airless and dark.
The dining table was walnut, hand-carved; according to Dewey, it had been in the family for five generations. It was long enough for a dozen people, and sometimes they had enough people over for dinner to fill it, but tonight just three places were set. Constance had laid out the Lenox bone china, all raised gold and cobalt blue, on a freshly ironed Irish linen tablecloth. In the middle of the table was the silver menorah Sarah had brought with her from Tallinn; it was the only talisman of that former life that she had left.
The yellow light of the sconces and the glow of the candles danced in the silverware and the cut crystal. Dewey told Constance to bring out the 1921 Château Latour he had been saving for a special occasion.
As Constance served the consommé, George told Sarah how Dewey had been trying to get him into the market.
“Because you must be the only man in American not profiting by it,” Dewey said.
“You see?” George said. “He is quite relentless in his pursuit. But I have told him, this market is not the place for a prudent businessman like myself. There are too many cheap bonds flooding the market, inflating values, and far too many uneducated investors dabbling with money they don’t have.”
“Dewey, he has a point,” Sarah said. “Plus, the what-you-call-it money is back up to six percent,” Sarah said.
“Call money,” Dewey said, and smiled.
“And I read today about this board you are always talking about, what is its name, Dewey?”
“The Federal Reserve Board.”
“That one. They are all moaning like I don’t know what, but they sit on their tushies and don’t do anything. You let the fox in the house, he will eat all the chickens. One day you got no chickens left, it’s no big surprise.”
George raised an eyebrow. “You know about the Federal Reserve Board?”
“She knows quite a lot about the market,” Dewey said. “In fact, she does rather well at it.”
“I make a few dollars. Not like Dewey, for fun only.”
George gave her a tight smile. “I’m impressed.” He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “But I’m afraid America is becoming too fast and too flashy for men like me. There’s your Mr. Morgan on Wall Street, building himself the biggest yacht in the world, and he doesn’t even have the time to go sailing. What’s the use? I heard he’s bought himself a Tintoretto, and he has no interest in art.”
“Art is a good investment, George.”
“You see, I thought it was culture. Call me old-fashioned if you like. Anyway, I’m sure J. P. Morgan can take care of himself. But to my mind, there’s too many people getting loans from their banks to play this market. And they give it to them! What if I go to my banker and say I want a hundred dollars to put on a horse? It’s the same thing.”
“It’s what banks are for, George, to lend people money so they can make money. People have a duty to invest. It’s what makes America strong!” And for the first time in their married life, Dewey banged his fist on the table. The silverware rattled. Even George looked shocked.
The look on Dewey’s face, how his eyes bulged in his head like a crazy man. He looked like one of the meshuggeners standing on their boxes on Wall Street, the ones he always made fun of. Something was changing in him, Sarah thought. Sometimes he was not her Dewey anymore.
“I thought it was hard work that made America strong,” George said.
“People owe it to themselves and their country to get rich.”
“But, Bill, surely, not everyone can be wealthy. Life doesn’t work that way. Nations don’t work that way.”
“This one can!”
George took his time to answer, measuring out what he wanted to say inch by inch. “One thing that life has taught me, Bill, is that you can trust too much and believe too much. I’ve already lost too much to risk the things I treasure ever again. So whatever J. P. Morgan says, you can count me out of all this. Don’t mind me saying, but it sounds to me like castles in the air.”
Dewey pushed away his soup and leaned forward, pointing his finger at his friend. “They just put a new ticker system in at the Exchange because the old one couldn’t keep up, listings and trades are growing so fast. What does that tell you?”
“Bill, you’ve been in this business your whole life, so I suppose you’d know better than me. But tell me this, what if you’re wrong? There’s all these people buying stock they can’t afford on margin, but no one’s selling. And all these profits everyone says they’re making, it’s all on paper. It’s not real. And if it’s not real, I don’t trust it. Do you, Mrs. Dewey?”
Sarah stared at her husband. Look at my Dewey, she thought, that look on his face. What is wrong with him these days?
“If stocks do fall,” George said, “there will be margin calls everywhere and no one able to pay them. People could get seriously hurt.”
“That won’t happen. It can’t happen. There’s people behind all this who won’t allow it.”
“What people?”
“You’ll see.”
Constance brought in a whole trout, slow-cooked. Everyone stopped talking while she sliced the fish off the bone and served it on their plates with asparagus and capers. Sarah felt George watching her.
He leaned forward. “You and Liberty,” he said.
She felt her cheeks blush hot. Here it comes, she thought. Does he know something after all? She smiled and nodded, but didn’t trust her voice to speak.
“You don’t need to worry,” he said.
“We don’t?”
“Whatever happens in the market, your husband will take care of you. Won’t you, Bill?”
“Of course,” Dewey said, and raised his glass in a mock toast. The candlelight reflected in his eyeglasses. There was something about the way he said it that chilled her bones. He is lying, she thought, lying to me and to Mr. George Seabrook right here, who is supposed to be his good friend. He has a secret. I know because I know that look, I put on that same expression every day myself.
Cannot kid a kidder, like they say.
38
Sarah turned on the light on the bedside table, took off her eye mask, thinking it must be morning. A quarter past four. Her head ached, and her eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep. Had she slept at all? At the back of her mind was the vague remembrance of a dream, a lot of running, people shouting.
Dewey was snoring beside her, dead to the world. She went to the window, parted the curtain, and peered down at the sleeping city.
What would have happened to Libby, she wondered, if Micha had gone to George Seabrook back then, after the fire, and told him what had happened? He didn’t have a wife, so Libby would have had a nanny first, then a boarding school as soon as she was old enough. What kind of life would that have been? This way, she’d had a mother’s love, a happy family, and in the end, she had lost none of the richness she had been born to, had she? Sarah had made sure that Libby got the very best, in the end.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to imagine what it would have been like if Libby had been hers, really hers, if she had
felt her growing inside.
She saw herself on the boat from Russia, Liberty sitting low in her belly, and her unable to keep her food down, not because of the rocking of the ship, but because her time was so close. Then hurrying back to the tenement, the baby coming quickly, in a rush, Micha having to fetch one of the neighbor women to help her through the labor. In her daydreams Tessie Fischer swaddled her newborn in a blanket and laid her in her arms. “I am going to call her Liberty,” she said as Micha beamed at her.
Sometimes it was all so real. If it wasn’t for that George Seabrook, eventually that was the way it would have happened. That man. He kept getting in the way of a better past.
The world, it seemed to her, had gone mad. There were airplanes chasing each other through the concrete canyons downtown, buzzing the Woolworth Building, one had even flown under the Brooklyn Bridge. It boosted stock prices at Curtiss-Wright and Boeing, at least.
Then this madman—what was his name?—Babson, told a journalist that an eighty-point stock market crash was coming. One newspaper called him “the prophet of loss,” and the name stuck. Soon everybody was talking about this schlemiel. For two nights Dewey did not get home until almost midnight. He said it was nothing to worry about, a market correction.
A few days later everything seemed to go back to normal, and no one talked about this Babson anymore. Dewey was right about things again. She stopped worrying.
Fall came and with it another heat wave with the mercury soaring into the nineties. She read about a rancher in Texas who hooked a radio to a loudspeaker and hung it on a corral post so his cowpunchers could stay up with the latest prices. She told Bill the next morning at breakfast, and for once he did not laugh at her.
“I heard that too,” he said, in a way that made it sound like he thought it was a good idea.
Then late in September there was another drop. Dewey came home and told her not to worry herself. “Organized buying support” would steady the market; men like Morgan and Meehan, he said, had billions of dollars behind them; they would make sure any falls did not get out of hand.
Still, Sarah decided to stop going to the Plaza.
Libby went back to Westover, and Sarah went back to her old life again. But it was not the same for her anymore, all they talked about at the mah-jongg parties and the soirées was the market, always the market. Even Jane Pargetter knew about this organized buying support. Everything is going to be jake, she said. Nothing to worry.
Jane Pargetter was right. By the end of the month, everything was fine again, and Dewey seemed his old self. They were rich. The world was rich. Everybody was rich.
“But if things do go wrong,” Sarah asked him one night, “how bad can it be? You are just a broker, right? You deal the hands, but you don’t put money in the pot, you don’t deal yourself in. Right?”
He patted her hand. “Let me worry about business, darling,” he said. Then he went into his study and shut the door.
When had it started? Sarah was never sure. Was it that schmuck Babson, or was it that drop in September? Was that when they all should have known? One day she came home from one of her parties, and there was the New York Times lying there on the hall table.
YEAR’S WORST BREAK HITS STOCK MARKET
But maybe even that wasn’t the start, because a week later the newspapers were full again of stories of cooks and cowhands and cab drivers who had gotten rich overnight. Dewey said the ups and downs of the market, that was the way it was. It sold newspapers, but it didn’t mean anything.
She even started going back to the Plaza again.
Then one Wednesday she got home late in the afternoon, a little tipsy from all the champagne, and she heard the radio in the kitchen, where Cook was making the dinner. She took a step closer, leaned in the doorway to listen. Prices were falling again, the announcer said, and he sounded breathless, like he was a millionaire type too. Over six million shares had been sold, he said, just today. It is the biggest crash in stock market history.
The mayor had sent four hundred policemen to Wall Street. Another reporter, speaking into a microphone outside the Exchange, said he had seen trader types with their collars and shirts torn off, flinging ticker tape and order pads into the air like it was a parade, but a parade where they had lost the war.
She went into her study and found the silver hip flask she kept in the locked drawer and took two long sips at it. Everything is all right, she told herself; it’s all jake, like Jane Pargetter said. Dewey and her, they would be all right.
But what was it that George Seabrook had called the market? “Castles in the air.” Perhaps that was what they really were, and now the castles were all crumbling down.
This morning there was no one at the other end of the breakfast table. Constance informed her that Mr. Dewey had left for work early, had told her to say that he would be home very late. Sarah told Constance she wasn’t hungry either; just a cup of coffee, please. She felt a chill in the pit of her stomach. Is this how it all ends?
She stared at the letters on the table beside her empty plate and winced. Not so many party invitations these days. She picked up a plain brown envelope. The writing on it was an untidy scrawl, not the usual copperplate she was accustomed to receiving. She tore it open.
“Dear Mrs. Levine,” it began.
Levine, not Dewey.
Dear Mrs. Levine,
I am writing to let you know that our dear ma passed away on Friday last. She had the consumption as I suppose Lib has told you. I wanted to say thank you for all the money you sent her, it made her life and ours so much easier, you’ve a heart of gold, like Ma always said. So I wanted to let you know there’s going to be a wake this Friday at our old place in Cannon Street, from four o’clock. It would be good if you could make it, but I know you’re busy and all.
Now she’s gone, I was going to send back the last check, but Da said it was okay to use it to pay for the funeral and all. I hope that’s all right.
Sincerely,
Frances Donnelly
Sarah read it and read it again. No, she cannot be dead, she thought. I was going to go and visit her today. Look, it’s here in my diary. Just had so many worries lately.
“Is everything all right, ma’am?” Constance said.
Sarah didn’t answer. She let the letter fall to the floor and walked out, leaving her coffee untouched. This morning she’d need something a little stronger.
Sarah sat in the back of the Bentley, her hands clenched tight on the alligator bag on her lap, Hermès and very expensive. She wished now she had left it at home. She remembered this ride only too well: Union Square, down Broadway, off on East Houston and into that other world, the pushcarts and hawkers and the brown tenements and struggle down in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge.
She felt a clutch in her stomach, a rush of panic. I don’t want to ever come back here. I can’t. Even the memory of it makes me feel sick.
Yet something made her lean forward, tap on the glass, made Nelson take her the long way, past the Jewish theaters on Second Avenue, and “Katz’s That’s All!” The old pickle shop was still there. Surely the old man in the yarmulke couldn’t still be alive?
Nelson knew the way, remembered it from all those years ago. He pulled up across the road from the Florence Nightingale public school, parked at the curb, turned off the engine, and sat back. He didn’t say a word.
Sarah watched the trolley cars and traffic crawling along under the girders of the Williamsburg Bridge, looked up at the tenement, found the window of the apartment where they used to live, just yesterday, just a lifetime ago.
I must go up, she thought. But she couldn’t move.
Nelson watched her in the rearview mirror. “Everything all right, ma’am?” he said at last.
She nodded. “Wait here for me.”
“I should come up with you.”
“No, Nelson. I’ll be fine.”
She wasn’t as nimble up the five flights of steps as she had been in her Fol
lies days. By the time she got to the top, she was a little out of breath. She stopped outside Mary’s apartment to compose herself.
She stepped up to the door. She could hear voices inside, steeled herself. She couldn’t go back to the car, she was here now.
She rapped twice on the door with her knuckles.
She didn’t recognize Dan Donnelly straightaway. He had aged a little. They all had, she supposed, but it was more than that. It wasn’t that he was red-eyed drunk, though he was. It was the look of him. He stood there in the doorway, swaying, trying to focus. Over his shoulder, she could see the living room was full of men and women standing around with drinks in their hands, looking somber.
“Well, well, well. Sarah Levine. Or should I say Mrs. Sarah Too-Bloody-Good-for-Everyone Dewey.”
“Dan, I—”
“Come to pay your respects?”
Suddenly Frankie was there beside him. When she saw Sarah, she grabbed her father’s shoulder and tried to pull him away. “Leave it, Da,” she said, but he shrugged her off. “I invited her! Now let her be.”
“Invited her, did you? Without asking me?”
“She has a right to be here, much as anyone else.”
“She does, does she?” He turned back to Sarah, so close she could smell the booze on his breath. “You know what really got to me?”
“Da, leave it, please.”
“She never said a single word against you, not in all this time. ‘She’s just busy with her life,’ she used to say. ‘She’ll be around one day to see us. She deserves her luck.’ That was my Mary, never a bad word.”
He took a step toward her, unsteady on his feet. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Frankie pulled him back inside. Before the door closed, Sarah saw them all standing in the living room doorway, staring. She knew a couple of them, neighbors from the old days. They had the same looks on their faces that Dan had. “I’m sorry!” Frankie called after her, but Sarah had already turned away and was off running down the stairs.
Loving Liberty Levine Page 21
