Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  “You have to try on the pants, too, silly,” she said.

  Karl was still confused.

  “Not right here in the middle of the floor,” she said. “Just follow him.”

  The next hour was extraordinary. Luella chose suits and shirts for him to try on. She touched each of them all over, inspecting the weave and the stitching inside, before handing it to him so he could go into the little closet and place it, fresh from her hands, directly against his skin. Then he would come out and model for her how the shirt or suit or jacket looked on him, and sometimes she would actually touch it on him, the shoulders, the calf—even, praise God, the waist. What’s more, she did not seem the least hesitant about it. What kind of incredible women did they raise here?

  When they were finished shopping, Karl noticed in the mirror Luella looking at both sides of him.

  “You wouldn’t be reconsidering now, would you, Miss?” said the salesman.

  “Reconsidering?”

  “Bringing this one home.”

  “He does look nice, doesn’t he?” she said, and Karl felt like a stallion that had taken a ribbon.

  Luella signed the store ticket. Though Karl knew his uncle’s generosity would pay the bill, his gratitude went to her, and he said so.

  “You are a real gentleman,” she said. “Do you know that? For someone raised with goats.”

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL days his uncle tutored Karl in the firm’s basics.

  “My company deals in promises,” Uncle John explained. “Promises to sell a certain quantity of grain at a certain price on a specific date in the future. People buy and sell those promises until the day arrives. Then whoever has sold it last must fulfill the promise, either in grain or cash.”

  “What is the point?” said Karl.

  “The only way to control the future is to pay its price today,” said Uncle John.

  Within a few weeks he moved Karl from the office to the Board of Trade itself.

  The trading floor spread out over what seemed like an acre under high, grimy windows. Above it stood enormous clock-like devices. An attendant manned each, following the action on the floor and moving the dial’s single arm, clockwise on a rising market, counterclockwise on a decline.

  Karl’s first job was to take orders over the leased telegraph line that connected to Uncle John’s office down the street. When he received an order, Karl dispatched it via one of a half-dozen young toughs who ran them to the Schumpeter traders in the pits.

  Karl was amazed at how this stone-hard city transformed grain into an abstraction, but it was not as though the physical world did not intrude. A surfeit of rain moved the market, though no one on the trading floor suffered a drop of it falling on his shoulders. A military upheaval in Europe stampeded the market, though no one here heard a cannon.

  Every day as Karl walked home to the boardinghouse, he passed a little square where street-corner orators condemned everything Karl was learning how to do:

  “Who are the wolves who wager on our toil?” Predators speculating upon the very food in our children’s mouths. They buy and sell you as surely as slave masters. They stir great waves of panic, then mount the crests for gain.

  “There is nothing in this world that is not material. Love? Religion? The milk of human kindness? Money and class crush them.

  “But one day the contradictions will all lie bare before you. The workers of the world will come together in the great, inevitable surge of history. Class will battle class, and the weak shall rise up as one and bring the predators down!”

  The next day Karl told Luella about the man.

  “You should have seen him,” he said. “He had a head of hair out to here and a beard scragglier than any I saw in the woods. And the mouth on him. He doesn’t stop for a breath.”

  “Maybe he has a lot to say,” said Luella.

  Less than a week later, one of the regular traders fell seriously ill. Uncle John asked Karl if he was ready to take his place.

  “You have everything in your head that you need,” Uncle John said. “Now we must find out what’s in your belly.”

  That afternoon Karl pulled at his starched collar, cleared his throat, and asked Luella to dinner. She accepted immediately, and he wondered why he had waited so long.

  As afternoon wore into evening, his uncle left for some engagement or another, and the activity in the office slowed. Luella came to Karl’s desk, and side by side they looked out the window into LaSalle Street. The city lay before him as if it were his. Luella on his arm, he tipped his hat to one of the clerks and winked at the doorman, who got them a carriage and received a nice gratuity for his trouble.

  Karl had chosen a fancy place on the Gold Coast north of the river near where Uncle John lived—along with the Swifts and Armours and Potter Palmers and everyone else with a name. As soon as the two of them stepped into the restaurant, he realized he had made a mistake. Luella, who had always before appeared cosmopolitan in her bright white shirtwaist and black skirt, here seemed totally out of place. The preening little maître d’ did not even meet her eyes as he suggested that she leave her knitted shawl at the coat check in the tone he might have used to ask her to take off a pair of shit-smeared boots.

  “Are you all right?” Karl asked as they were led toward a dark, faraway corner of the restaurant.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “We could go somewhere else.”

  “Only if you think we should,” she said.

  “I don’t think any such thing,” he said.

  The restaurant was lighted by candles, which gave the lacy expanses of the ladies’ white gowns an antique glaze. The menu came in French. He knew a few words from Abbeville, but they weren’t the words that described this fare, so he had to seek the waiter’s help.

  “Why don’t I just bring you some sort of steak,” the waiter said.

  “And some corn,” said Karl.

  “Corn,” said the waiter. “Yes, of course.”

  When the waiter had gone, Karl arranged the napkin in his lap and surveyed the array of implements before him, which seemed extensive enough to perform surgery. Luella said nothing.

  “I don’t know why they say this is such a great place,” he said.

  “You really don’t, do you,” Luella said. She reached over and took his hand where it lay next to a rank of spoons. “It’s because people like me don’t come here.”

  They ate as quickly as they could and left. She gave her address to the carriage driver, who headed south and west into precincts of the city Karl had never traveled before. There were sweatshops and small restaurants and greengrocers and block upon block of three-story tenements. At some point he got a whiff of what smelled like the farm, and he wondered if they could already have reached the city’s outskirts. Soon it was stronger than any farm he had ever known.

  “That’s the stockyards,” she said. “You get used to it.”

  She leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

  “Here,” she said.

  The carriage rolled to a stop. The horse twitched. Karl jumped down onto the rutted street and came around to help her, but by the time he got there she was already on the way to the rickety steps of her flat.

  “I’m sorry,” Karl said.

  “You didn’t know,” Luella said. “I should have.”

  Through the window of the tenement across the street somebody was shouting in a language Karl had never heard.

  “Will you be all right?”

  She smiled, put her hand to his cheek, and gave him the slightest, sweetest kiss on the lips.

  “Next time,” he said, “I’ll be smarter about where we go.”

  “Next time,” she said, “you will be smarter about who you go with.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said.

  “I won’t have to,” she said. “Others will.”

  In the morning his uncle called him into his office before Karl left for the Board of Trade and his maiden descent into the
pits. Karl brought with him a small notebook in which to record his uncle’s instructions.

  “You were with that girl Luella last night,” said Uncle John.

  “Yes, sir,” Karl said.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “She’s very nice.”

  “Have you seen her here this morning?” said his uncle.

  “I was a little worried,” said Karl.

  “There is no place for sentiment in business,” his uncle said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know why you haven’t seen Luella?” his uncle asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “She has become much too familiar,” said Uncle John. “I had to let her go.”

  “But I was the one who wanted for us to go out,” said Karl. “I am the one you should blame.”

  “Business and sentiment, lad,” said his uncle. “You must keep them scrupulously separate. When you don’t, someone always gets hurt.”

  Karl left his uncle’s office in a daze, contradictions colliding within him. An opportunity of a lifetime, brigaded by cruelty. The sweetness of the city’s freedom causing injustice and suffering. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, a newspaper hawker shouted the morning’s headline. Another bank had failed. The markets had been getting more and more jittery.

  As soon as he reached the floor of the Board of Trade, the clamor and immediacy drove contradiction into retreat. On the trading floor everyone wore linen jackets, wheat green in color for the traders, who had numbered badges pinned to their lapels. Along the perimeter of what they called the pits the traders stood elbow to elbow in a line, like cornstalks at the edge of a field. A pit consisted of concentric risers ascending perhaps four feet on the outside and descending an equal distance toward the center. Each pit specialized in a single commodity—wheat, corn, rye, and so on—and each section was devoted to a specific month—July wheat, September corn, November rye. Every trader had his special place on the risers. Through sharp trading you might force a man into the poorhouse, but as long as he was in the pit you would never take his trading space.

  Whenever a large order came in to buy or sell at whatever price the market would bear, a telegraph clerk slapped the order onto the counter, making a sharp noise like a starter’s gun. A runner snatched it and raced toward the pits. Woe betide anyone who got in the way.

  As Karl donned his trader’s jacket and badge for the first time, the activity in the pit was so intense that at first he couldn’t even locate the man who was to train him. Rumor had it that Sampson & Sons was trying to construct a corner in September corn. This meant they were buying heavily in an effort to take control of the supply and then ruthlessly drive up the price. When the price reached a peak they hoped to sell out at enormous profits.

  The noise was furious. Men shouted and flung fingers into one another’s faces. Karl found some daylight and moved through it. Behind him the crowd closed up again like water.

  When he reached the top step, he finally spotted his man. Rather than go around and risk losing his target in the turbulence, Karl descended to the center of the maelstrom.

  “Schumpeter & Co.!” he shouted. “Peter Mallory!”

  His words were lost in the din.

  Ducking outstretched arms, he reached the bottom. Down there the traders oriented themselves outward and upward, where the action was. As a result, the very center was empty and calm.

  As he pushed upward again, the mob pushed back. Noise crashed over him.

  “Well, there you are, sport,” said Mallory, who immediately caught something out of the corner of his eye, and, like a fisherman seeing the ring of a trout’s rise, wheeled and cast. The quarry was a fat, balding fellow ten feet away. Mallory hit his mark, set the hook, and completed the trade, recording it both on the order sheet and on a card he kept in his breast pocket.

  “Picked that off at three-quarters,” he said. “The market’s already moved north of that.”

  Karl looked up at the balcony where an attendant was turning the arm of the indicator.

  “You really have to be alert,” Karl said.

  Mallory looked past him. His arm flew up and in an instant he was writing again.

  “By the time you see the market shift, it’s too late,” he said. “You always have to run ahead of the current.”

  Hour after hour Karl studied Mallory. Then at the end of the day the older man had Karl attempt a trade. But before he could consummate it, a bell sounded.

  “You’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to lose your virginity, sport,” Mallory said. “Do you want to have a drink? Or are you a temperance man like your uncle?”

  Karl did not drink, but he did not want to say so. Mallory’s face had a glow that indicated he didn’t mind anyone knowing how he was inclined. They went to a stand-up place around the corner where Karl saw a dozen familiar faces in the mirror behind the bar, as expressionless as the bottles.

  “Those are the bulls,” said Mallory. “They were counting on harvesting the fruits of their corner, but the price ended up within an eighth of where it started. They were expecting to get filthy rich, but they’ll get filthy drunk instead. Sir, bring us two Pilsners. The lad here has just spent his first day dealing grain.”

  They had left their linen jackets behind, and Mallory in his suit looked as though he could work at the Fair. A bright yellow silk handkerchief stood out against his gray double-breasted jacket like a beacon in a gathering fog.

  One beer led to another, and then a third. Karl savored the taste of the fields in it.

  “Tomorrow you will make money, sport,” Mallory said with an expansive wave of his hand. “Or else you will lose it.”

  He lifted his glass and Karl touched it with his. The beer was edgy, and the bubbles stung his nose.

  “I don’t have much money to lose,” said Karl.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” said Mallory. “The funds will be the firm’s, and I will be there to catch it if it starts sliding through your fingers.”

  Later, when Karl got back to his room, he was exhausted but could not sleep. He blamed the muggy weather, what had happened to Luella, the bilious liquid backing up into his throat. At some point his head began to throb. The simple fact was that he could not wrest his mind from the swirling, addictive chaos of the trading floor.

  The next day the opening bell approached, and Karl began to panic. Mallory wasn’t there. When he finally did arrive, he looked more than a little ill.

  “I don’t imagine you went right home,” said Karl.

  Mallory put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a box of matches with the silhouette of a can-can dancer and the name of a club.

  “I guess I went there,” he said.

  “What did your wife say?”

  “I didn’t wake her up to find out,” said Mallory.

  Just then a runner brought an order. Mallory nodded him toward Karl.

  “As you can see,” Mallory explained to the runner, “I am a mite under the weather. My understudy here will be at the tiller.”

  For the next several hours Karl felt as if he were fighting to keep from capsizing. At some point, though, he began to get the sense of the waters. He filled so many orders he lost count of how much corn had moved through his hands. When the closing bell sounded and the dial above the trading floor stopped moving, his whole body felt as if it might collapse.

  “Well, sport,” said Mallory, “by my count you’ve made your uncle two thousand dollars richer.”

  “Two thousand dollars,” said Karl.

  “Now let’s go give ourselves a reward,” said Mallory.

  This time Karl came a little closer to keeping up with his mentor at the bar, goaded on by a honky-tonk piano like nothing Karl had ever heard. Mallory wanted to take Karl to another place and introduce him to some can-can dancers, but Karl had a different idea.

  He got his mentor into a carriage, then hailed one for himself. He did not know Luella’s address, so he offered to direct from
up front.

  “I’ve driven a lot of buggies,” he confided.

  “Ay,” said the driver, “and I’ve driven a lot of drunks.”

  Row after row of tenements lined the street, which teemed with vendors. The clamor was like an open-air version of the corn pit, if you could call the fetid air open. He tried to focus on individual buildings, but they were all a wobbly blur.

  “Slow down, please,” he shouted. The driver grumbled but complied. This made Karl’s eyes somewhat more useful, but still he could not tell one tenement from another.

  Suddenly a gang of street urchins surrounded the carriage, forcing it to come to a stop. Hands stretched out to Karl. Cries of “Mister! Mister! Mister!” Then he felt a hand reaching into the pocket of his coat. Somehow he found the agility to seize it.

  The other boys scattered. A policeman across the way cast a wary eye in the direction of the scuffle, as if to determine who was assaulting whom. The boy wriggled and twisted, but Karl’s hand had not lost the strength of the forest.

  “I’ll turn you over to that officer there,” he said, which set the boy off again. “Unless you can help me, that is.”

  “Shit on that,” said the boy. “I don’t do the nasty for nobody.”

  “Show me where Luella Grundy lives and I’ll let you go,” said Karl.

  The boy looked at Karl with all the city’s dangerous knowledge in his twelve-year-old eyes.

  “Gimme a nickel?” he said.

  “If you stick with me until I see her,” Karl said.

  “Hey, nothin’ doin’,” said the boy. “What if she ain’t there?”

  “So what’ll it be, lad?” said Karl. “Me or the law?”

  The boy squirmed again for a moment, then stopped. Karl helped him into the carriage.

  “Where to now, mister?” said the driver.

  “Wherever the boy says,” said Karl.

  “Two blocks down, then a block north,” said the boy.

  The driver snapped the horse into action. The policeman watched them pass—man and boy—and shook his head.

  When they reached the place, Karl half recognized it, but in his present state he wasn’t sure. He held out the nickel to draw the boy up the front steps and into the vestibule.