by Howard Fast
Mark entered the office as he was speaking. “Did you hear about it, Danny? Who’s that?”
“Klendheim,” as he put down the telephone. “He wants margin money.”
“How much?”
“About twenty thousand from me, eleven thousand from you.”
Mark closed his eyes and calculated. “My God, that doesn’t seem possible. That’s about one third of our investment.”
“You’ll cover, won’t you?”
“I don’t know if we should.” Walking over to the stock ticker that was feeding its white ribbon onto the floor, Mark stared at the tape. “I just don’t know if we should, Danny. If this is what I think it is, maybe we should just take the loss. It’s less than a hundred thousand between us–”
“Less? God damn it, that’s a hell of a lot of cabbage!”
“And if it keeps plunging, we could double that. Danny, what did L and L close at yesterday?”
“Fifty-six and a quarter.”
“It’s on the tape at thirty-four.”
Dan walked over and stared at the figures. “Where does that leave us?” he asked.
“That doesn’t matter. The fifty-one percent of the company stock we own has no margin. We own it outright. If it goes down to twenty cents a share, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to us. Not now.” He managed an uneasy smile. “It might give Jean a headache or two. The Seldon Bank has sixteen million dollars pledged against that stock.”
“I thought the mortgage was on the property.”
“And the stock, Danny. It’s all lumped together.”
“What about our own stock?”
“What do you think?” Mark asked him.
“Whatever you say.”
“All right. I think we ought to take the loss and let go.”
Dan was reading the tape. “Here’s L and L again–thirty dollars even.”
“I’ll tell Polly to reach Klendheim and sell us out,” Mark said. The phone was ringing again. Dan picked it up as Mark left his office. It was Sarah Levy. “Danny,” she said, “I’ve been listening on the radio and I’m worried about Mark. I don’t want him to get too excited over this. I don’t care about any money we lose.”
“It’s all right, Sarah,” he said. “It’s just a few dollars of our own money, and Mark couldn’t seem to care less. It doesn’t affect the company in one way or another.”
For some months now, Mark had been suggesting to Sarah that they sell the big house at Sausalito and move into one of the new apartment houses in San Francisco. She resisted this. If she had to live with memories, they were here in the old house. She would go to Martha’s room and sit there for hours, evoking the image of her daughter. She would handle Martha’s clothes, which she had refused to part with. Sometimes she would play Martha’s jazz records on the squeaky old Victrola that stood in her room. She had never listened to jazz or understood it or been particularly fond of it, yet she derived a sort of comfort out of listening to the recordings. She found an old diary of Martha’s, kept during her thirteenth and fourteenth years. Toward the end of the diary, she found the following entry:
“Today Danny was here and he picked me up in his arms and kissed me. I am absolutely in love with him. He is only sixteen years older than I am. I dream about him a lot. In the best dream, he left that stinky wife of his and asked papa if he could marry me. Papa got very mad but mama said it would be all right. She said it would give her a chance to have a big wedding outside on the lawn. The bad part of the dream came when he never showed up for the wedding at all. His wife came instead.”
Sarah found herself laughing and weeping over that. Still a few months short of her fiftieth birthday, she had become old almost overnight. Her blond hair had turned white. She had few resources. She read English with difficulty and she had no taste for novels. The things she had once so enjoyed doing, knitting, sewing, cooking, no longer interested her. She still kept the big old Spanish Colonial house spotlessly clean, but she took no pride and no joy in it. She had never taken too much interest in the garden, leaving it to the gardener, but since Martha’s death, she spent more and more hours there. There were some sixty rosebushes in an ornamental circle, and they had been neglected. She began to spray them and clip them and cultivate them. It was there, one afternoon, on her knees loosening dirt with a trowel, that Rabbi Blum found her. He was filled with admiration for the flowers. “A good gardener works with love. You’re a good gardener, Sarah.” She protested about the trip. “I come slowly,” he told her. “Actually, I have nothing to do. I have reached the age where being alive is my only vocation. It gives me an affinity with vegetables and flowers.”
They sat in the kitchen, drinking tea. “Do you know,” Sarah said to him, “the worst thing I have to endure is that people will not talk to me about Martha. They avoid the subject. Even Mark will not talk about her, and that’s what I want to talk about more than anything else. Is that wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong. People are afraid of death. There are people who can’t talk about death or think about it. But with Mark, maybe it’s too painful. When you get to be my age, Sarah, the separation narrows. It’s like an old friend.”
“Not a friend.”
“Why not? There’s a beginning and there’s an end. That’s not a very profound philosophy, but that’s the way it was made. And in between roses grow and bloom and die, and when a bud dies, it’s not just and we become angry and hopeless. But the idea of justice is something we put together, not God.”
“And what does He put together, a madhouse?”
“That has occurred to me. On the other hand, even a cup of tea has its own good taste.”
On the twenty-sixth of October, Frank Anderson called Dan and informed him that two thirds of the reservations for the next sailing of the President Jackson had been canceled. The following day, Dan left for New York. The train trip to Chicago appeared to him to be endless, crawling, boring, and infuriating; he was locked into his compartment with the world coming apart at the seams. The two days on the train became an eternity in some ridiculous limbo that had nothing to do with reality. He read the papers from cover to cover, first the San Francisco papers, then those picked up at Salt Lake City–his anger increasing because the so-called newspapers told him nothing he desired to know. In the dining car, he became the object of the kind of inoffensive and meaningless conversation that strangers at a dinner table offer to other strangers; but he had no feeling for chatter, and he found himself being curt and misanthropic. In the lounge car, a woman in her thirties with tired good looks sat down beside him and introduced herself. He fled back to his compartment, wretched and depressed. After this, the plane from Chicago was at least a diversion; and in New York, sitting with the men who ran the North Atlantic division of the shipping line, he tried to quiet the sudden panic and disorientation of otherwise sane and sober businessmen.
It was not a good day, and he slept poorly and fitfully. He had finished the meeting with a decision to cancel the sailing, balancing one loss against another and accepting the lesser of the two, and lying in bed that night, in his hotel room at the Plaza, he tried to grasp what was happening. For years, he had played the fascinating and exciting game of putting together a small empire. He had never been overly concerned with the financial technicalities of the process. Feng Wo and Mark had attended to that. His role had been to devise, to scheme, to invent, to bull and bluff his way through, to dream and imagine and impress people with his excitement and his vitality, and there was always money and more money, once he had learned that a million dollars was easier to come by than a dollar bill if you were broke; and the money generated more money. And now, somehow, it had stopped. A ship that for years had been overbooked was now empty–and so quickly, so incredibly quickly. The empire was coming apart as if it were held together with paste.
He ate breakfast alone in the dining room in the Plaza, a tall, wide-set, handsome man in his middle years, impeccably groomed. Women turned their hea
ds to look at him. His looks were an asset he had carried through the years, granted to him and never evoking much thought on his part. If you looked like Dan Lavette, the doors of the world opened easily.
He sipped his coffee and read the story on the front page of the New York Times, realizing that what had happened the previous Thursday was only prelude. Already that day was being called “Black Thursday.” What then of today, Tuesday, October 30?
“Stock prices,” he read, “virtually collapsed yesterday, swept downward in the most disastrous trading day in the stock market’s history. Billions of dollars in open market values were wiped out as prices crumbled under the pressure of liquidation of securities which had to be sold at any price . . . Efforts to estimate yesterday’s market losses in dollars are futile because of the vast number of securities quoted over the counter and on out-of-town exchanges on which no calculations are possible. However, it was estimated that 880 issues, on the New York Stock Exchange, lost between $8,000,000,000 and $9,000,000,000 yesterday . . . Banking support, which would have been impressive and successful under ordinary circumstances, was swept violently aside, as block after block of stock, tremendous in proportions, deluged the market . . .”
He finished his breakfast, signed the check, left the hotel, and walked across 59th Street, trying to resolve in his mind the rather extraordinary fact that he didn’t give a damn. Where did his personal involvement cease to have meaning? He didn’t know. On the one hand, he said to himself, These are your people, the wealthy, the comfortable, the powerful, the doers and the movers; and downtown, just a few miles from here, something is happening that is destroying them. On the other hand, he was thinking, I’ve had my run. What does it amount to? He had no answers. There had always been questions without any answers.
He crossed the street and walked into Central Park. The sun was shining, the cool October breeze blowing. Women wheeled prams, and the old, horse-drawn carriages lumbered by. He walked to the carousel and stood there for a while, recalling all the times he and May Ling had planned a trip to New York; and then he wondered why the thought of his two legitimate children only now entered his mind. What kind of a bastard are you? he asked himself. It was not by any means an unfamiliar question. Thomas and Barbara were only hours away. Why didn’t he want to see them? God Almighty, he thought, what has happened to a man who can’t bring himself to face his own children. Yet he could anticipate the situation very clearly. Barbara would look at him, coolly, distantly, her distaste poorly concealed, answering his questions, perhaps dutifully kissing him on his cheek, perhaps not. Thomas would put it into words. “So you finally decided to see me.”
“Ah, the hell with it,” he said to himself. He looked at his watch. Frank Anderson had begged him to stay a few days more. They wanted to be coddled. They wanted to be told that everything was all right, that Dan Lavette would see to it that their paychecks continued and that the world was not coming to an end. But there was nothing of any importance that he could do here. There were only two things that brought him any real peace: being on a boat and being on an airplane. He walked back to the hotel, packed, and checked out.
Dan moved into a small suite at the Fairmont. His conversation with Jean was brief and to the point. “I suppose I have caused you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort,” he said to her.
“That’s an odd virtue, Dan.”
“Anyway, I can’t go on living in this house. I don’t know how to explain it any better.”
“All right. You’ve always had freedom of action. Do you want a divorce?”
“Right now, a community property fight would blow everything sky-high. I’d rather wait.”
“But you do want a divorce?”
“Don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter to me. But that’s something you wouldn’t understand and I don’t intend to explain myself.”
A few months later, the situation in Hawaii came to a head. For a month, the hotel had been almost empty, and the Noels, who held a large mortgage on the property, had become increasingly nervous. The whole situation was incredible. Since November, the hotel had dropped from ninety percent occupancy to an uneasy ten percent. When Mark raised the issue with Dan, they were already five days late in their interest payment on the mortgage.
“How much do we owe them?” Dan wanted to know.
“Not a hell of a lot–twenty-five thousand for this payment.”
“We’ve got it. Pay it.”
“And then what? The way the hotel stands, we’re losing forty thousand dollars a month. We’ve junked the sailing schedules. The ships are tied up, and we’re still meeting a payroll. We’ve got a tax bill of forty-two thousand on the undeveloped land, and that’s three days overdue, and we’ve got twelve planes on order. There’s two million in escrow on the planes, and we’re flying to Los Angeles at less than twenty-five percent capacity. Dan, we’re not even making the gasoline costs. Without the store and its cash flow, we’d be in over our heads.”
“The whole fuckin’ empire,” Dan said. “What happened?”
“That’s what they’re all asking. You’ve got to have money to ride a ship or a plane–and our customers have had the shit scared out of them. It’s falling apart.”
“I think we ought to start selling land,” Dan said. “We’ve got at least a thousand acres of the best damn property on the Peninsula. We paid more than a million for it, and the price doubled a year after we bought it. So we sell?”
“To whom?” Mark asked sourly. “Would you buy an acre of land today?”
“There’s still money. It hasn’t disappeared.”
“There’s still that damn hotel in Hawaii. I think you ought to go there and talk to the Noels.”
It was a very different trip without May Ling. He booked passage on Whittier’s ship, Oahu, and the voyage took forever. Day after day, he paced the deck like a caged animal. He regretted that he had allowed Mark to talk him into this, and when finally he arrived in Honolulu, the Noels proved to be absolutely unyielding.
“Dan,” Christopher Noel said to him, “you’re asking the impossible.” They had been removed from the world, but the world had intruded. They sat on the velvet green lawn in front of Noel’s sprawling bungalow, the cool trade wind gently blowing, the sea thundering in across the sand, out of space and time but not unconnected with something called the New York Stock Exchange. “We took one hell of a beating in New York, and now you’re asking us to ride the mortage without interest. We’ve got half a million dollars tied up in that hotel and the two hundred acres of Waikiki Beach. We can’t throw it away.”
“Just give the world a chance to breathe. This is panic,” Dan insisted, “and panic burns itself out. You know what we’ve got. We’ve got the richest and the goddamn strongest country on the face of the earth.”
“We’re an island, Dan. If we don’t survive, we sink into the sea. Who the hell gives a damn about Hawaii? We do. No one else.”
“Now look,” Dan said, “the hotel’s only part of the problem. We own the ships–and without our ships the hotel wouldn’t exist. We believed in this and we created it together. We brought you the people. Don’t pull the stopper on us now.”
“Dan, you’ve canceled your sailing schedules. Why don’t you face this?”
“For a few weeks, yes. I’m leveling with you. We’re pinched. We built an airline–one of the pioneers in the industry. That may not mean anything to you now, but someday airlines will connect these islands with the mainland–a few hours, not days. And god damn it to hell, if you can’t ride a dream, where are we?”
“You want a free ride, Dan, and we can’t afford it.”
“Will you give me time to get back and discuss this with Mark?”
“Dan, it’s a lousy twenty-five thousand dollars. You’re running a multimillion-dollar empire, and here we are arguing about a few thousand dollars. What does that say?”
“It says that we
’re short of cash. That’s all it says.”
“All right,” Noel agreed. “Another two weeks.”
Listening dispiritedly to Dan’s report of the Hawaiian journey, Mark asked, “Two weeks from now or from when you left him? Ah, it really doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because in two weeks or ten weeks, nothing is going to change. Do you know what that ass Hoover is doing? Promoting the sale of apples. You’re out of a job, get a crate of apples and sell them on the street. At a nickel an apple, you’re elevating the nation’s health. In less than a year, we’ve descended to the level of lunatics.”
“What about Hawaii?” Dan persisted.
“You tell me.”
“Suppose we send them twenty-five thousand. That gives us another six months.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Mark exploded, “where is your head? In one month of operation, we drop more than twenty-five thousand. That goddamn hotel can bankrupt us. It’s over. Can’t you understand that? We dropped a hundred thousand dollars in the market because you don’t throw good money after bad. People are not going to Hawaii. They’re not going to Europe. They’re not going to fly on the damned airplanes. It’s over.”
Dan stared at Mark and watched his face crumble as he covered it with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’ve been coming apart since Martha died. I’m sorry.”
“It’s O.K.,” Dan said gently.
“Where do I come off talking to you like that?”
“It’s O.K., old sport,” Dan said. “I’ve got a skin like a rhinoceros, you know that. If you don’t yell, I don’t hear.”
“We’ve been together twenty years. We never had a fight before.”
“So we needed one. I know how you feel. If I wasn’t fat and middle-aged, I’d go out and get drunk and bust up a saloon.”
Mark shook his head. “We can’t afford that anymore, Danny.”
“Right. It costs too much. You know something, I never felt like such a total horse’s ass as I did out there in the Islands pleading with Chris Noel. Two words would have been enough.”
