She stopped in the street and turned toward him.
An uptown train was rumbling from Forty-second Street.
She glanced toward it, then she said, “I missed my monthlies.”
“Missed them?” After a sleepless night, Tim’s mind was not working as quickly as usual. “Missed—”
“My ma always said, ‘Where God closes a door, he opens a window.’ I guess you could say, ‘Where God closes a show, he opens a family.’”
“Family?” The word penetrated the sleepy fog in Tim’s head. Then dozens of questions and emotions surged through him. When is it due? What happens to your career? Even the unthinkable . . . am I the father? Are you planning to have the baby?
But from the way she looked at him, with a mixture of hope, trepidation, and fresh seductiveness, getting rid of the baby was not something she had even considered.
The train roared over them, but her lips were moving.
When it passed he asked her, “What did you just say?”
“Sugar and salt. Sugar and salt and another pea in the pod.”
TIM WAS SO exhausted that once he fell asleep, he slept until five in the afternoon. When he awoke, the idea of Doreen Walsh as his wife seemed perfectly natural. So he spent the evening at the Walsh flat on Forty-eighth. Her mother made pot roast. They talked of the banns, of the wedding, and of the birth that they all knew was coming.
Tim left around midnight.
He wasn’t sleepy. So he decided to walk past the bank he had saved the night before. As he came down Ninth, he expected that all would be quiet. It was raining lightly. It was late. It was Sunday. All good reasons for quiet. But as he turned onto Forty-second Street, he saw dozens of men in the shadows beneath the gaslights, forming a line that began at the door to West Side Workingman’s.
Tim hurried ahead and looked for familiar faces and saw, “Eddie?”
“Evenin’, Tim,” said Eddie. Then he asked the man in front of him to hold his place.
“I do not like lines,” said the man, “but I will hold for you.”
Tim recognized Sadowski the anarchist, of all people. He gave Sadowski a look, then led Eddie away from the line. “What the hell is going on?”
“Word is out. Everybody knows your girlfriend’s show flopped. And the papers had us goin’ into Morgan’s library. So there’s talk you’re on the ropes.”
“You know we’re not, but . . . who are you holdin’ a place for?”
“Myself.”
“Jesus, Eddie. You were there last night. You saw what I saw. You should be tellin’ these people that it’s all right instead of joinin’ them.”
“What I saw last night,” said Eddie, “is nothin’ compared to what they fear tonight. And come mornin’, I fear that you’ll see a real run on your bank.”
Tim knew he had to stop this, or it didn’t matter what Morgan had promised. He jumped onto a wagon parked beneath a gaslight and shouted, “Listen to me, all of you! Your money’s safe! Go home!”
“Ahhh, you go home,” shouted someone in the line.
“Your money is safe!” cried Tim.
“That ain’t what we hear!” shouted someone else.
“You are a banker,” said Sadowski. “Why should men who labor believe you?”
“Because I am one of you. I’m—”
“Don’t say you’re our brother!” shouted Sadowski. “You’re a tool of rich men.”
“Don’t you say you’re our brother, either,” shouted someone who liked anarchists even less than bankers.
“Some day you will listen to the truth,” said Sadowski, “but for now, protect what little you have from these money-grubbers.”
“Ignore him!” shouted Tim. “We went into the Morgan Library because Morgan is going to guarantee our loans and cover our losses.”
“We’ll believe that when we read it in the papers,” said someone else.
So Tim snatched a late edition New York Post from someone in the line. He flipped from front to back, but found no mention of his bank and scarcely a mention of the plan that had emerged from the Morgan Library. Then he ran to Times Square, bought several more papers, but could find nothing in them that would persuade that ever-lengthening line that J. P. Morgan was backing West Side Workingman’s.
Tim Riley stayed all night. He told everyone who arrived to go home, that there was no cause for worry, that the assets of the bank were sound.
But the line kept growing longer, and the rain fell harder, and those who had umbrellas put them up, and those who didn’t made friends with those who did.
At eight o’clock, Daniel Daly came around the corner of Eighth Avenue, with his newspaper under his arm and his umbrella over his head, and he stopped at the sight of three hundred people lining Forty-second Street. His lips formed the words, “Sweet Jesus.”
Theodore Sadowski said, “Sweet Jesus was an anarchist.”
Tim pulled out his watch and looked at his brother. “I need you to do an errand.”
“An errand,” said Sadowski. “Every society has its hierarchy. And every family is a small society. There are order givers and errand boys. “
Eddie said, “I’m nobody’s errand boy.”
“But your brother is a banker,” said Sadowski. “That makes him your superior, in his own mind.”
“That makes me responsible for the future of everyone in this line and half the people between Eighth Avenue and the river,” said Tim.
“That makes you an oppressor of the workingman,” said Sadowski.
Tim felt the blackjack in his pocket. He had put it there the night before, anticipating that he’d be going for a walk. He pulled it out now, snapped it up, then snapped it down. And Theodore Sadowski hit the sidewalk.
Eddie looked down at his brother-in-law. “An anarchist with a bank account. Like a dray horse with a college degree.”
Tim took Eddie by the arm and led him to the door of the bank.
As the guard let them in, someone shouted, “You better not be givin’ him special treatment! No seein’ to your brother’s deposit before you take care of ours!”
“We’ll see to all of your deposits,” said Tim.
It took ten minutes to collect the papers on the Variety Theater. Tim told his brother to go down to J. P. Morgan and Company, and exchange them for cash.
“The lawyers will go over it all later,” said Tim. “But now, it’s in your hands.” Then he gave Eddie the blackjack for protection and the money to hire a cab.
The doors of the West Side Workingmen’s opened at nine A.M. The bank run began in the time it took George Delahunt, a lawyer from Fifty-ninth Street, to grab a withdrawal slip, cross the floor, and place himself in front of a teller’s window.
By nine thirty, the cash reserves were down by fifteen percent.
The armed guard allowed one person into the bank at a time. Daniel Daly worked behind the counter and kept track of the dwindling cash. Tim Riley greeted each customer with Morgan’s quote to the papers: “If everyone would just keep their money in the banks, everything will be all right.”
Some people listened. Others laughed in his face.
And the rain fell as if it meant to rain all month.
By ten o’clock the reserve was falling as fast as the rain.
Tim Riley was beginning to wonder if there would be a riot. He had already arrived at the conclusion that he would have to leave his old neighborhood if the bank failed. He had damaged his reputation. Now it would be destroyed.
But at ten fifteen, an auto taxi skidded to a stop in front of the bank and Eddie Riley climbed out with two bags of cash containing twelve thousand five hundred dollars each. The words J. P. MORGAN & CO. were stenciled on the sides of each bag.
Eddie held them up, and Tim shouted, “If Pierpont Morgan believes in this bank, maybe you should, too.”
A few people cheered, about half of them went home, and that was just enough.
The run, and the rain, petered out around eleven. Later some
one actually made a deposit. When the doors closed at three o’clock, the tellers cheered.
Tim Riley went into his office and put his head in his hands.
Daniel Daly stood over him and smiled, the avuncular mentor yet again. “It’s the sign of a brave man that he learns, adapts, and rectifies his misfeasance.”
Tim raised his head. “I’m resigning.”
“Resigning?”
“You said banking is about confidence, not gossip. I’m marrying Doreen Walsh. She’s having my child. That will damage confidence and engender gossip.”
“You’re marrying Doreen the Chorine?” Daly dropped into the chair, looked out the window, then said, “I suppose resigning is a good idea.”
The full dark of November fell by four thirty. A few sporadic showers were still splattering down. The wet macadam of Forty-second Street reflected the street lamps and the headlights and the lanterns on the box cabs.
Tim walked west, wondering what he would do next. Then he remembered something his father had told him: a man who worked with his hands would never go hungry. So he would work with his hands if he had to.
At the corner of Ninth, he heard someone shouting. A small group had gathered around a man on a soapbox.
It was Theodore Sadowski: “Come to Union Square tonight. Hear Emma Goldman open your eyes to all that you saw on this street today . . . the lies of little bankers . . . the paternalism of big bankers . . . the indifference of a system that oppresses you. All will be laid bare.”
A few people were listening. A few were heckling. And one was standing in a doorway in a peacoat with the collar turned up: It was Eddie.
“What are you listening to him for?” asked Tim.
Eddie shrugged. “Sometimes he makes sense, especially on a day when we have to ask the malefactors of great wealth to save our asses.”
“At least our asses were saved.”
Sadowski was shouting, “Once you have heard her, you will want to attack the nearest police station! You will join the cause of direct action.”
“Oh,” said Eddie. “Congratulations. I knew you’d marry Doreen sooner or later.”
“Thanks,” said Tim, and he walked home through the rain.
Doreen was waiting for him when he got there.
He smelled beef stew.
“I cooked it myself,” she said.
And he was glad to be home
iv.
So dreams ended. But life went on. And years passed . . . thirteen to be exact.
On a cool September night in 1920, Tim Riley sat in the parlor of the Forty-seventh Street brownstone that he had converted to a two-family. A fire crackled on the grate. His son Richie sat at the big rolltop desk in the corner and did his homework.
Above the desk was a photograph of Doreen in a military-style cape with a doughboy’s overseas cap perched jauntily on her head. It was not a costume. She had lasted as a wife and mother for ten years. Then came the war, and the cry for soldiers, and the cry to entertain them. When old Charley Gibbs tracked her down and told her he was forming a vaudeville troupe that was heading to Europe, Tim told her to go. He said it would be good for her and good for the soldiers, too.
Now she lay in a small cemetery near a place called Chateau Thierry, the victim of a slick road and a Model T speeding to the next show.
It had only been in the last few months that the boy had begun to talk about his mother and ask about his parents’ youth.
So one morning, as he rode the subway to Wall Street, Tim had decided to leave a written record of his days for the auburn-haired boy who had inherited his father’s mathematical skills and his mother’s singing voice. Besides, anyone who had lived forty-one years in New York had seen changes worth writing about. Skyscrapers, subways, Broadway. No place seemed to change more quickly, and yet somehow it always stayed the same.
So Tim had filled four notebooks for his son. He wrote about his mother and her sewing. He wrote of his father, who could have been “the best tank-bottom man in New York,” but preferred to start his own demolition business. He described his meetings with J. P. Morgan, including the famous night at the library. He tiptoed around the McGillicuddy massacre. He told the story of The Big Cavalcade of 1907 so that the outcome—a happy marriage and a son named Richard Daniel Riley—made the disappointments of his parents worthwhile.
Tim still had much to write about, like the day he went back to work as an accountant for Morgan and Company, or the 1918 afternoon when he looked out the windows of 23 Wall Street at thousands of people packed from Broadway to Water Street, all to hear movie star Douglas Fairbanks shouting through a megaphone, urging them to buy bonds. That was democracy in action, thought Tim, the money of a democratic nation put to work to win the Great War.
He also had to write about the anarchists, the enemies of democracy in action.
They had been conducting a war of terror in America for thirty years, a war with governments, capitalists, and the social order itself. They had plotted to set off a bomb under a magistrate’s bench in the Tombs prison. They had tried to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because church hierarchy was as abhorrent as any other. They had sent thirty bombs through the mail to kill politicians and industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller. They would have included J. P. Morgan, too, except that nature had already done the job. The bombs were discovered, but for one that blew off the hands of a Negro housemaid. So much for social justice.
Eddie’s brother-in-law, the anarchist Theodore Sadowski, had been in and out of the country, in and out jail, and had lately shown up again in Hell’s Kitchen, railing against the treatment of two Italians immigrants from Massachusetts named Sacco and Vanzetti. But the family did not speak so much of him. The Sadowskis could not understand his hatred of a country that had given them such opportunity.
So, on that September night, Tim was writing and his son was doing his geometry proofs. Tim heard the snap of a pencil and glanced up as the boy rummaged for another.
“Check the middle drawer.” Tim flipped him the key.
The boy opened it, pulled out a few pencils, and said, “Hey, Pa, what are these?”
The last two bonds. Another story for a father to tell his son. So Tim told it. “Somewhere your grandfather hid a mahogany box containing another nineteen thousand five hundred dollars worth of them.”
“And he didn’t tell you where?”
“He gave me clues.” Tim described his father’s talk about clouds, rain, water, and money. But he could not talk about the death of his father, even then. So that night, he wrote about it. He wrote about his father lying on the steps, the white X drawn on the tread, and his father’s last word, “eyes,” and about that last moment, when his father seemed to be squinting into the future.
Before bed, Tim took a bit of air up on the roof. He liked it up there, looking across Hell’s Kitchen at the jumble of chimneys and fire escapes and the water tanks on the newer, taller buildings in the distance. It wasn’t a world of perfection. But it worked. And he had helped, in his small way, to make it work.
Knowing that was almost as profound as a prayer before bed.
Like a lot of people who wrote, Tim slept with his notebook beside him. An hour or so after he had fallen asleep, he woke, fumbled for a pencil, and scrawled something he thought was eloquent: Rainwater O’Day. X marks the . . . spiffle.
THE DAY DAWNED clear and bright, crisp and blue. In a city where clouds of industry and commerce always seemed to darken the sky, this was what Tim called September perfection.
He cooked bacon and eggs for himself and the boy. Then they walked out together. He gave Richard a pat on the back and told him to study hard. He never sent his boy off without a pat on the back. Then Richard turned toward Sacred Heart School, taught by an order called the Irish Christian Brothers, mostly tough New Yorkers who had answered a call.
Tim headed for the subway. He read the paper on the way downtown. There was more about Sacco and Vanzetti, but he didn’t really
care about them. When he thought about Massachusetts, he thought about a gift from the Boston Red Sox named Babe Ruth. Fifty-one homers and still counting. What a hitter.
At eight thirty, Tim arrived at the canopied entrance to J. P. Morgan & Co. It was a new building, but it still sat at the most prominent financial intersection in the world, the corner of Wall and Broad, across from the subtreasury and Washington’s statue. It was September 16. The quarterly reports were due in two weeks, and Tim was the assistant chief accountant. So he worked hard all morning and had lunch at his desk. But while he ate his cheese sandwich, he opened his notebook.
And he saw the cryptic notes he had written in the night. Rainwater O’Day. X marks the . . . he couldn’t read the last word. It looked like spiffle.
He was puzzling over that when the telephone rang.
“Accounting.”
“Timmy, is that you?” It was Eddie, who worked now for the McManus machine.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something funny goin’ on. Polly just called me, said that her brother Teddy borrowed some money from her today.”
“So what else is new?”
“He told her he wanted all that she had in the cookie jar and under the rug, and if she gave it up, she’d never see him again.”
“If that’s a promise,” said Tim, “I’ll give him a few bucks myself.”
Eddie didn’t laugh. “Then, a little while ago, she was cleaning up his room and she found a tourist map of New York.”
“He’s no tourist.”
“He’d drawn a route from Hell’s Kitchen to Little Italy, where he made an X, then down to Wall Street, where he made another X, right across the street from you.”
Tim could hear the noon bell chiming at Trinity Church. He glanced at his watch, as he always did when he heard the bells. Right on time.
Eddie said, “Polly saw him ride off in a wagon pulled by a dark bay horse. I think that stupid Litvak is in business with the dago anarchists. I think—”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Just look out the window. If you see the son of a bitch, tell him to go home. His father’s scared to death that he’ll do something stupid and get them all deported.”
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