“Yes, he’s got to think I might play ball with him. I’ll call Vivienne,” I added, trying not to sound too eager. “He’ll take it as an encouraging sign if I start dating his cousin again.”
But once more the telephone rang before I could call Vivienne. This time it was Emily. She had decided to spend the day visiting old acquaintances, and one of my chauffeurs had driven her out to Long Island to see Steve’s wife. Emily did not know Caroline well, but it was typical that once she heard Caroline was convalescing after a cancer operation she had offered to call on her.
“Emily?” I said, glancing at my watch. “Where are you?”
She told me she was still at the Sullivans’ house. The housekeeper had just walked out, the children’s nurse had given notice, Caroline had had to return to the hospital for a second operation and Emily had volunteered to play the Good Samaritan.
“That’s bad news about Caroline,” I said, remembering our mother reading us the story of the Good Samaritan on countless far-off Sundays. “I’m sorry. Maybe someone should cable Steve,” I added, although Steve Sullivan was the last person I wanted back in New York at that time.
“Caroline said he didn’t come before and he won’t come now. She’s very bitter about Steve—oh, it’s all so sad, Cornelius! Apparently Steve’s been having an absolutely blatant affair with that dreadful girl Dinah Slade. How he could! Everyone knows she almost wrecked Uncle Paul’s marriage.”
“Yes.” I felt acutely embarrassed to be discussing marital infidelity with Emily.
“You knew about Steve and Miss Slade?” she said shocked.
“Hal Beecher told me when he got back to New York. Well, I guess I’d better go now, Emily,” I said, and hung up as fast as I could.
A minute later I was still clasping the telephone, but Vivienne—at long last—was on the other end of the wire.
“Hello,” I said, and although the butler had already taken my name I found myself repeating feverishly, “This is Cornelius Van Zale. How are you?”
“Ah, yes,” she said, “the banker. I remember. I’m very well, thank you. How sweet of you to inquire after all this time.”
I felt uncomfortable but managed to laugh. “Sorry I haven’t been able to talk to you lately, but—”
“Why, that’s all right! Making money must be such a time-consuming occupation!”
I seriously wondered whether to hang up, but I was very, very tired of being celibate.
“Well, my schedule’s certainly crowded,” I said, “but I do have a spare five minutes in three hours’ time. Maybe I can call you back then in the hope of finding you in a more sociable mood. Goodbye.”
“Wait! Cornelius, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean you to take offense! Come and have a drink with me this evening.”
“I’d rather take you out to dinner.”
“Well, I— No, I guess I can cancel that. Yes, dinner would be lovely.”
I began to feel I was at last making progress. We went to Pierre’s. The black marble columns in the vestibule had never seemed more erotic. Vivienne wore a midnight-blue gown with a neckline which ended within a gasp of the navel, while I wore my best nonchalant expression and tried to stop shifting around in my chair. All food seemed unbearably irrelevant.
Finally I had the opportunity to say, “I have some very fine French brandy at home which I’ve been saving for a rainy day. Would you—”
She said she would. I could hardly restrain myself from rushing headlong into the Cadillac. Every wasted minute seemed a tragedy.
We were waiting in the drawing room for the butler to bring the brandy when she murmured, “I guess all your girls tell you what beautiful gray eyes you have. Maybe I should admire your mouth instead.” And she trailed a finger lightly across my lips.
“Forget my mouth,” I said incoherently. “There are other more important parts of my anatomy.”
Two minutes later I was closing the door of my bedroom, tugging off our clothes and pulling her into bed with me.
There is something fundamentally absurd about the sexual act. When I learned the facts of life during my ill-starred semester at school I simply could not believe that human beings were capable of such extraordinary posturing, and even after I had a clearer idea of the pleasure involved it still seemed obscene that two people should be driven to such desperate intimacies. My numerous short-lived affairs had blunted this judgment, but until that night I had continued to feel that my sexual encounters were divorced from the normality of my daily life. However, Vivienne changed my outlook by putting me at ease. Previously I had always feared I was laying myself open to ridicule by exhibiting such bizarre behavior, but Vivienne taught me that sex was neither ridiculous nor bizarre but as natural and logical as a mathematical progression.
I performed feats which I would have thought impossible for longer than I would have thought endurable. In between orgasms she would tell me how masculine I was until by dawn I wanted to relay her praise by bellowing it from the rooftops. At seven o’clock, an hour after I had sunk into an exhausted sleep, my valet glided into my room to wake me and promptly glided out again, but the closing door woke me and presently I prised open my eyelids, crawled out of bed and flung back the drapes. Beyond, the wall the traffic was already droning on Fifth Avenue, and below me in the garden the birds were chasing each other among the trees. The sky was a pale blue, the color of peace and tranquillity, and far away downtown the great ticker of the New York Stock Exchange was silent and still.
It was Wednesday, the twenty-third of October, 1929. The vast prosperity roller-coaster of the nineteen-twenties, having crawled a month ago to the top of its highest glittering pinnacle, was pausing for one last halcyon moment before teetering over the brink into the abyss far below.
“My God,” I said to Vivienne. “I’d like to stay in bed with you all day.”
“Then why don’t you, darling?”
“No, I’ve got to go to work. The market’s been in bad shape this week and today’s the day the bankers have to flex their muscles to restore confidence.”
“How wonderful it must be to be God!” said Vivienne, pulling me on top of her as I fell back into bed. “Or do you feel more like Moses parting the Red Sea?”
Naturally neither of us dreamed that the investment bankers were soon to feel more like King Canute. I escorted Vivienne home in my favorite Cadillac, and went downtown with Sam.
We all went downtown, all the bankers of Wall Street, the famous names and the nobodies, but no bands played, no flags waved, no one cheered as they might have cheered an army marching into battle. No one even knew that a war had begun; everyone still thought in terms of unruly skirmishes, and besides there was no visible enemy, only the unregulated market soaring and plunging like quicksilver in a fragile glass, the shadowy laws of mass psychology which no one had ever bothered to understand, and the fickle crackle of paper riches which had no root in reality.
It was all so peaceful, the autumn sun falling in the dark canyons of Wall Street and shining on the spire of Trinity Church, and long afterward I thought that this eerie peace was one of the most terrifying characteristics of the Crash. People can grasp the actuality of a hurricane, an earthquake or a great fire; they can grasp the realities of war; but what they find hard to grasp is the magnitude of a disaster which arrives on a pale pretty peaceful day in a silence broken only by the sinister tip-tapping of the ticker tape.
“The market’s still a little sickly, I see,” said Lewis, pausing by the ticker in the great hall at noon. “I thought we were going to see a recovery today after this week’s heavy selling.”
“Let’s just hope the market doesn’t take a turn for the worse,” said Martin Cookson, whom Steve had long since nicknamed Cassandra.
I was just reassuring a client that afternoon that we were seeing only another “technical correction” of the market when Sam burst into the room. As soon as I’d hung up he said, “All hell’s breaking loose on the floor of the Exchange.”
/> Rushing down to the great hall, we joined the crowd in front of the ticker and saw the prices start to plunge before the gong sounded to end trading for the day.
“It’ll rally tomorrow, of course,” said Lewis as we held an emergency partners’ meeting. Later I told Sam I hoped Lewis arranged to have the words engraved on his tombstone.
Someone agreed with Lewis by pointing out that the day’s trading had been no heavier than the previous Monday’s, although Martin argued that on Monday two and a half million shares hadn’t changed hands in the last hour of trading. There was much useless discussion about what we should do, but in the end we could only come to the obvious conclusion that we should present a calm soothing front to the world by uttering as many expressions of confidence as possible.
“Excuse me,” I said in the humble voice I kept for partners’ meetings, “but suppose no one believes us?”
Everyone looked at me as if I had uttered a blasphemy.
“Not believe us?”
“My dear boy!”
“Of course, you’re very young …”
“I think you forget, Cornelius,” said Lewis grandly, “that we’re the gods of Wall Street! If we say something is so, then of course it will be so.”
I wasn’t the only one with doubts. With uncharacteristic emotion Martin exclaimed, “But can’t you fellows see what’s happening? We’re already locked into a classic chain reaction downwards—the decline in prices leading to calls for more collateral from margin customers, the inability of the customers to meet the calls leading to the forced sales of their holdings, these sales leading to a further decline, the further decline leading to still more calls—”
“Bullshit!” said Clay Linden angrily. “All we’re seeing now is the shaking out of the lunatic fringe which attempts to speculate on margin. Monday was a bad day, but yesterday was fine. Today was terrible, I agree, but Lewis is right— tomorrow will be better again. We’ve had our crash. Now for God’s sake let’s pull ourselves together and muster the guts to go on.”
I wondered whom to believe. I was inclined to back Martin, who had a first-class brain, but brilliant people are notorious for losing touch with reality. With increasing alarm I wondered what was going to happen next.
The dawn came. The sky was gunmetal gray. Wall Street exuded a miasma of uneasiness, and everyone headed automatically for the nearest ticker.
As soon as trading opened, large blocks of shares in Kennecott and General Motors hit the floor, and almost immediately the ticker began to lag behind. By eleven the traders on the floor of the Exchange were berserk; the ticker had fallen so far behind that it no longer reflected what was happening, and only the bond ticker, hammering directly from the floor of the Exchange, told us that everyone was struggling to unload. The telephone and the telegraph screamed hysteria from one end of America to the other. People said it was the end, the day of judgment. It was as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis.
Everything was falling. United States Steel crashed through 200, sinking like a cement block. Radio, General Electric, Westinghouse—no meteors ever plunged to earth faster than the great stocks plummeted to disaster on the twenty-fourth of October, 1929.
The telephone lines were clogged by this time. Communications broke down, and in the resulting confusion the panic swept to new heights. Then the people began to arrive, and all roads led to Wall Street as the silent crowds streamed compulsively downtown.
When Sam and I went out we found that the people were standing neatly in rows on the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building, not talking, not moving, just waiting as if for a savior they knew would never come. They were like row after row of big black birds, subhuman, as frightening in their disorientation as the victims of some mass-executed lobotomy, and the atmosphere of fear hung over the Street as thickly as fumes over some suppurating factory.
Struggling back to the bank, we found that all work had been dislocated, and in the crowd riveted to the ticker someone said messages were flashing secretly back and forth between us and the leader of the investment banks, the great House of Morgan at Twenty-three Wall. Lamont of Morgan’s was to confer with the great commercial bankers in an attempt to form a multimillion-dollar pool to shore up the market, and at half-past one Richard Whitney, the Morgan broker, strode into the Stock Exchange not to sell but to buy.
The market, still terminally ill, rallied bravely as the House of Morgan held its hand and stroked its fevered brow.
“Morgan’s best bedside manner!” snorted Clay.
“Only Lamont could have described the greatest disaster in the history of Wall Street as a little distress selling!” scoffed Lewis, criticizing Lamont for employing the same tactics he himself had advocated twenty-four hours earlier.
The truth was we were all jealous of Morgan’s. Naturally we were proud that the investment bankers had come to the rescue, but it had been a dreadful day, we were all exhausted and we wanted some of the Morgan limelight to cheer us up. Everyone spent much time telling everyone else that if Paul had lived he would have led the bankers’ consortium and then the House of Van Zale would have been the financial savior of mankind. Everyone also expressed relief that the Crash had finally arrived. It had been terrible—disastrous, catastrophic—but it was over. It was as if we had been toiling through some arduous pregnancy, survived a hideous childbirth and produced a monster. All we now had to do was shove it out of sight in an institution and pick up the threads of normal life again.
“Whichever way you look at the situation,” said Clay, “the news has to improve. We’ve hit rock bottom. There’s nowhere else to go but up.”
I noticed that Martin kept very quiet, but I supposed he was merely wrestling with the desire to say “I told you so” as often as possible to anyone who would listen.
Everyone spent the next two days insisting that everything was fine. There was a lot of selling, but prices were steady and President Hoover was booming soothing platitudes from the White House. It was not until the close of trading on Saturday that Sam and I heard that the bankers’ consortium had disposed of Whitney’s emergency purchases in order to recoup as much of their pool as possible.
At the close of trading on Saturday prices once more began to fall.
“But that’s impossible!” I said stupefied to Sam. ‘If we’ve hit rock bottom how can we sink any lower?”
“Maybe things will pick up on Monday.”
We looked at each other. That was when we both knew that the Crash wasn’t over and that the worst was still to come.
The next day was Sunday. God was probably much entertained when everyone went to church. Sam and I squeezed into the back of Trinity and spent an hour wedged against a pillar, but it was so crowded we never did manage to get down on our knees to pray. When the service was over we went to the bank.
Wall Street was alive. People were working all day to catch up on the enormous volume of paperwork the Crash had produced, and we too worked till dusk. When we went home we didn’t know what to do. I wanted to see Vivienne, but my head was full of figures and for once sex seemed unimportant. Sam tried to drink but couldn’t finish his highball, and when he went to the phonograph I saw him look at his record of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” for a long moment before putting it away in the closet.
On Monday the brokers, bleary-eyed after working throughout the weekend to post their records and go over their customers’ accounts, assembled for the next pulverizing round of trading.
The market, very sick now, began to fade, and even the House of Morgan had no more palliatives to offer. Prices plunged point after point in a steady hemorrhage of liquidation, and instead of the decorum which should attend the bedside of a dying patient there was a seizure of frenzied activity. Clerks and messengers scurried mindlessly along the Street, bankers held futile conferences, the brokers spun dizzily through their distorted routines like a colony of mad ants. Once more the ticker dropped far behind; once more Wall Street began to drown in a sea of
paperwork as trading intensified and the breakneck volume of business became unendurable. No one went home from Wall Street that night. Lights burned till dawn, and those who had already been working day and night for a week moved through the great corridors of finance like automatons.
Sam and I drank coffee all night in my office and dozed for half an hour shortly after the cleaning women left.
The sun rose. It was Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of October, 1929, and just as a dying patient often embraces death with relief so we mutely waited for the final convulsions of the market which had been the envy of the world.
Ten o’clock came. The big gong boomed in the great hall of the Stock Exchange, and the apocalypse began.
Huge blocks of stock cascaded onto the market like blood streaming from a fresh-killed corpse. The ticker reeled, stuttered, gasped for breath. Selling orders gushed onto the floor, inundating the drowning brokers. In half an hour the volume of trading had passed three million and by noon it had passed eight million, with no end in sight. The carnage mesmerized us all, and in the crowd around our ticker there was no conversation, only an occasional hysterical laugh or muffled sob.
I remember going out with Sam briefly at one o’clock and finding Wall Street once more jammed from end to end. I remember the faces, the gray stark haunted faces reflecting the horrors of unimaginable disasters. I remember the silence, broken only by the shuffle of feet. I remember the stooped shoulders, the bowed heads, the battered slouch of defeated men.
When the closing gong brought the insane day to an end the volume of trading closed at a record of sixteen and a half million shares and the ruin was complete. The corpse of the market choked Wall Street and in the foreign markets around the world the international crisis began.
“They should have closed the Exchange.”
“Morgan’s told them not to.”
“If Paul had been alive …”
The hideously unimportant bickering went on and on. No one could face up to what had happened. We were in shock. Lives had been ruined, a whole world had been washed away, and we were still arguing about whether Morgan’s should have forced the Stock Exchange to suspend trading.
The Rich Are Different Page 61
