A Dual Inheritance (26 page)

He was the only bachelor in the firm. The others all had wives and children and mortgages, while Ed’s only responsibility was to look in on his father now and then, to make sure he was still washing, eating, breathing. He followed enough companies in or near Boston that he could usually check in on him during one of these trips, and it never failed to amaze him how much the neighborhood had transformed. Ed could always tell when the high school was about to let out for the day, as the vendors along Blue Hill Avenue would suddenly rush to take their goods from the sidewalk stalls, head inside, and lower their metal grates. Once or twice Ed saw what happened if they didn’t take this precaution: overturned fruit carts, clothing thrown into the street. The avenue belonged to these furious kids now, and to be an old Jewish man living in Dorchester these days was to fully embrace one’s obstinacy. To hear his father (boastfully) tell it, groups of black youths, with knives in their pockets, dared him only to look at them wrong.

But as much as his father was apparently hated, he had also (and only
God knew how) managed to ingratiate himself to Mrs. Darrence, the black woman whom Ed employed to clean his father’s apartment. It wasn’t uncommon for Ed to stop by on a weekday afternoon and find his father and Mrs. Darrence watching a game show on television. Once, Ed found Mrs. Darrence’s kid there, too, jabbing his adolescent fist toward the TV in what had to have been the most informal boxing instruction Ed had ever seen. His father harshly criticized the boy over the noise of the game show, but neither Mrs. Darrence nor the boy seemed offended. Ed became accustomed to his father’s maid looking him over with undisguised disapproval, sucking in on her teeth if Ed—during one of his many stabs at conversation—raised his own voice to his own father in his own childhood home.

Ed of course wondered if Mrs. Darrence was getting more money from his father or if his father might even be
involved
with her. Ed sometimes walked into a room of angrily raised voices, but the content always proved to be the unforgivable shortcomings of others. Often others they’d seen at the supermarket. Or on the television. Ed had never heard such shouting. Despite the fact that her paycheck came from Ed, Mrs. Darrence did not hide her belief that Ed was an ungrateful ass.

He liked bringing people together and he realized he was good at it, focusing more and more on deal-making, beginning with his connections from those summers at Ordway Keller and calling them up—
What are you working on?
—sticking his nose in a few western corporations, and eventually investing in companies whose need for capital was critical. He got a thrill from being the touchstone for so many moving targets; sometimes he imagined the meetings were movie shoots and he was the director. Not that he wasn’t preoccupied by the numbers but, just as seriously, he considered the chemistry of the players: who was insecure, who was bombastic, who needed Ed’s lighter touch to set the deal in motion and bring the story to life.

Since deal-making sometimes involved dinners with wives and since
Ed didn’t have a wife or steady girlfriend, he often brought the best-looking date he could find to accompany him during these evenings, earning him what seemed to be a combination of some resentment and more than a little respect. Usually it was right before dessert that the wife to his right or left leaned in and charmingly inquired why he wasn’t married. Usually the wife in question was flirting or he told himself she was; either way, this question always made him feel as if he was a catch and that the state of his bachelorhood was troubling to someone other than himself—not that he would ever admit that this aspect of his life wasn’t exactly by design.

Since his first summer in New York, when Helen Ordway stripped him of every shred of confidence in his impulses and his judgment, Ed took out girl after girl, but never for long enough to find out what any of them was really like. He came to see his subsequent parade of dates like the reams of paper that covered his desk on any given day, even Saturdays, even Sundays, now that the nation, too, was having a fit of insecurity and stocks were truly sliding. Ed was coming to see that girls were like numbers, and numbers didn’t lie, but they also never represented the whole picture. It was the numbers he pursued harder now, taking the time to visit the companies, going past the statistics to meet the people behind them, investigating the complexities of what made a company undervalued or overvalued, and never taking any one person’s word. But with girls he stayed on the surface, hardly putting in the time. By the time one girl was reapplying lipstick beside him in a banquette, he was looking in her compact to see who might be reflected from one table over.
Onward and upward
, Hy liked to say.
Boy, do you have the life
.

But he knew that Hy didn’t mean it. Ed knew that Hy’s idea of a great time was to stop at the nursery off the parkway and buy plants for his half-acre backyard in White Plains, where his beloved wife, Franny, let his two chubby girls draw with crayons on the walls. “I tell her—go on and let them. They’ll be artistic!” said Hy. “Because we won’t live in this house forever, am I right? I tell them that soon enough we’ll buy another house. And before we leave? We’ll repaint!”

Though lately even Hy’s confidence was wearing thin. Wall Street
was suffering, firms were reporting losses due to paperwork confusion, and Cantowitz, Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb (though doing respectably) were not exempt from danger, as they were dependent on a clearinghouse to process their paperwork and their clearinghouse wasn’t able to keep up with their needs. Apparently their little firm represented a disproportionate amount of business for their overloaded clearing broker, and Ed took it upon himself to meet with the head of the company, an old blowhard named McKay, whom he despised on sight and who treated Ed—over the course of a tense dinner—as if CBOR’s huge volume of activity was somehow suspicious, too aggressive, as if their very rapid rise was in itself an affront. And when Ed had the nerve to explain that the clearinghouse was stuck in the past and to say,
One day you will thank me for saying this: Invest NOW in the technology you so sorely need to keep up with the present, and you will own the future
, McKay asked for the check, nearly grabbing the waiter’s arm, he was in such a big hurry to leave.
So we need our paperwork processed regularly
, explained Ed.
Is this really too much to ask?

When, by the following month, their clearinghouse dumped them as clients, and when Ed’s personality was cited as the deciding factor, he spent one brutal and completely sleepless night in the office (leaving only to eat an enormous diner breakfast at six
A.M.
, watching the street come to life beyond the smudged window) and greeted Hy, Steve, and Marty as they came through the door, demanding they hear him out before making any calls.

“We can have our own processing facilities,” he blurted out. “We can do it in-house and save boatloads.”

“W-w-where,” demanded Marty.

“I ran the numbers. I’ve been over it all night. This is a good thing.”

“A good thing,” repeated Steve. “Pardon me, but a good thing, my ass. And you’re ignoring Marty’s excellent question,” said Steve. “Where, Ed? Where indeed?”

“We’ll need a bigger office,” Ed said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You didn’t think we’d stay here forever, did you?”

“I didn’t think we’d be dumped by our clearinghouse due to your
personality
. Did
you
?”

“Come on,” said Ed, “the clearinghouses are hopeless. You gotta trust me.”

Hy cleared his throat. Up until that moment, he’d been scarily silent. “We’ll bring in an expert,” he finally said. “We’ll double our daily business. Say goodbye to your home lives. Marty will be in charge.”

“Thank you,” said Ed. “Thank you, Hy.”

“The justice department is raising questions about the whole … overarching … fixed-rate fucking
system
,” said Hy. “The SEC will soon be up our ass anyway, we’re already under attack, and now
this
?” He loosened his tie. “I’m not speaking to you unless I have to.”

Ed was watching coverage of protests in D.C. when the phone rang one evening, and soon after answering he knew that the fever pitch of the teeming crowds plus the phone’s somehow particularly urgent ring would always be sealed in his memory. The governor of Ohio said something equating the protesting students with brown shirts and communists and vigilantes, and the networks were playing it again and again, and when Ed finally picked up—“Hello?”—there was Guy Ordway’s voice, deep and immediately recognizable, even though Ed hadn’t—up until that day—ever heard it over the telephone. His first awful thought was that something had happened to Helen. “Sir?” he asked foolishly. “Is everything all right?”

“We need to talk,” he said. As if it hadn’t been more than six years since they’d done so, since Ed had turned him down after summer number two and Ordway had refrained from shaking his hand after a particularly chilly goodbye.

“Are you watching the news?” asked Ed, prolonging the moment when he’d hear something truly terrible and understand why Ordway had called.

“No,” said Ordway. “This country is a disgrace.”

Only Ordway could somehow intrude upon his evening and then make such a statement sound as if Ed was personally responsible for the state of the fragmented nation.

“Sir,” said Ed, picking up a cushion and slamming it against the wall, “what do you want to talk about?”

“Just business,” he said wearily. “I’ll pick you up at your office tomorrow at six.”

“You don’t even know where—”

“Six,” said Ordway, and he hung up, leaving Ed to feel a strange combination of relief mixed with disappointment and curiosity. He watched a replay of a clip from just days ago: Nixon defending his decision to invade Cambodia. The president trained his beady eyes at the camera; every now and then he consulted a piece of paper, held between two steady hands.

On the following unseasonably hot spring day, the kind of disorienting weather that creates instant drama, Ed was in the office by eight-thirty and Hy was already there; the phones were ringing. Ordway Keller was going under. One of the oldest firms in America, underwriter of many of the largest and most reputable companies in the country, exquisitely jump-started by Mr. Guy Ordway in the 1950s—its problems were now insurmountable. Evidently they’d had their own paperwork disasters along with the rest of Wall Street, and—according to Hy’s various sources—by the time Ordway finally agreed to implement anything close to a modern computer system, the bedrock was so shattered that the firm had lost more than five million dollars at the start of the year. Unbeknownst to Ed, the office had already drastically shrunk, and still they’d continued hemorrhaging money at an alarming pace.

As Hy spat out the information as fast as he could speak, at first Ed was simply relieved. He was relieved not to have stayed in that death trap, and he spent a good couple of minutes inwardly praising his instincts. But the more he heard—over the phone from others, and every several minutes from a very keyed-up Hy—the more he realized that
since Wall Street firms were affiliations and the New York Stock Exchange was essentially one gigantic affiliation, if a weak link was a big weak link, the whole system could potentially collapse. And since any special trust set up for such disasters had to already be pretty depleted during such a fragile time, it alone could never cushion the fall of such a giant as Ordway Keller.

“They’d found a way out,” declared Hy, who was holding an enormous cheese Danish in one hand and a phone in the other. When he hung up the phone, he hung on to the uneaten Danish. “You’ll never believe this,” he told Ed, at the end of a particularly long phone call.

“Out with it.”

“There’s a group of Texans who agreed to put cash into Ordway Keller in exchange for a huge interest rate and stock options. Everything was all set, but then one of these guys—real hard-nosed type, I guess—began to suspect Ordway Keller was misrepresenting how bad the situation was and he flew up, arrived at Ordway Keller, and wouldn’t budge until Ordway showed him the most recent results, which were basically clouded up with all kinds of crap. This guy—”

“Named?”

“Zimmerman.”

Ed raised his brow.

“Nah—he’s probably a Kraut. Anyway, this guy is enraged. Not budging. Wants to sue Ordway Keller on top of everything, even though, at this point, there’s at least thirteen million of theirs all mixed up in Ordway Keller. He’s on a rampage. Uncovering all kinds of missing assets and debits and, oh my God, what a fucking mess.”

“That’s why he called me,” said Ed. The sun was blazing in through the window so brightly, he had to turn away.

“What are you talking about?”

“Ordway,” said Ed, suddenly needing to sit down. “Ordway called me last night. We’re robust,” he said, nearly shaking with astonishment. “We’re clean.”

“Are you fucking kidding? For a merger? We’re unknown.”

“Not to him.” Ed grinned. “Remember I turned down his offer, and
it was a good offer. I bet you he knows all about us. I bet you he’s been following us from the start.”

“That,” said Steve, “and—let’s be honest—the more-prominent firms probably turned him down.”

Holding the Danish with great and unmistakable authority—as if he were Moses with the Ten Commandments—Hy Bechstein smiled before finally taking a huge bite. His mouth was full, but Ed heard his every word. “I am so fucking happy.”

Early August, seven years after his first summer working at Ordway Keller, Ed sat with Hy, Steve, and Marty across from Guy Ordway and more than one hundred of his subordinated lenders, including the furiously white-haired, red-faced Donald Zimmerman, at the Metropolitan Club on East 60th. The building was imposing, the room was frigidly air-conditioned, and there was a lovely breakfast spread that even Hy did not touch. Ed and his partners had learned their nickname among this crowd, most of whom had never before heard of their firm: