The Immigrants (51 page)

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buying heavily. The same thing’s happening in Chicago and in New York. Pop talked to Clement at the National City Bank in New York, and back there Mitchell and Wiggen and Lamont are putting together a consortium of their own. So don’t get nervous.”

Dan put down the phone and switched on the ticker tape. But he hardly had a chance to glance at it before the telephone was ringing again. It was Klendheim, his broker: “I need twenty-one thousand five hundred from you, Dan, and eleven thousand from Mark. To cover your margins.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Do you know what’s happening on Wall Street?”

“Give us an hour.”

“No more than that. For Christ’s sake, Dan, I got thirty customers in the same fix. We’ve got to have the money.”

“Look, my office hasn’t opened. No one’s here. The moment my secretary comes in, I’ll send her over with a check.”

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 in vestment.”

“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 thou sand between us—”

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“Less? God damn it, that’s a hell of a lot of cab bage!”

“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 out right. 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 head ache or two. The Seldon Bank has sixteen million dol lars 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 wor ried 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.”

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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 refused to part with. Sometimes she would play Mar tha’s jazz records on the squeaky old Victrola that stood in her room. She had never listened to jazz or under stood 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 thir teenth and fourteenth years. Toward the end of the di ary, 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 or namental circle, and they had been neglected. She be gan to spray them and clip

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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 any thing 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 be come 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 reserva tions 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

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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 eter nity 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 news papers told him nothing he desired to know. In the din ing 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 misan thropic. 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 fit fully. 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 gener-ated more money. And now, somehow, it had stopped. A ship that for years had been overbooked was now empty—and so quickly, so

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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 heads 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. Al ready that day was being called “Black Thursday.” What then of today, Tuesday, October 30?

“Stock prices,” he read, “virtually collapsed yester day, 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 eight billion and nine billion dollars yesterday…Banking support, which would have been impressive and suc cessful under ordinary circumstances, was swept vio lently 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

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hand
, he was thinking,
I’ve had my run. What does it amount to?
He had no answers. There had always been ques tions 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 car riages 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 un familiar 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 an ticipate 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 con versation with Jean was brief and to the point. “I sup pose I have caused you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort,” he said to her.

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“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 prop erty, had become increasingly nervous. The whole situa tion 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.