Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  From the hillside behind, there was applause for a good, fair point.

  From across the net came no noises of contention.

  But his lovely girl looked right at Barnaby and knew him for what he was.

  At the Sooner First City Bank, Peterpotter and TJ had mortgaged all their car lots to the limit in a boom-drunk Oklahoma City and then spent everything on a handful of mineral rights that were at the speculative height of boom prices. They took the mineral rights to New York along with geologists’ reports, and hit pay dirt at Chase Manhattan.

  Folks who didn’t have a half-dozen car lots to leverage, or who preferred not to bother, also went to Sooner First City, which until a few years before had run a quiet, single-branch retail trade just outside Driscoll Hills between an old cafeteria and a vast, newish parking lot from a mall that had yet to fully expand. The cafeteria was where a certain brand of elderly and prosperous ladies, once their junior-league duties were well in the past, had for a few generations, mother following daughter, gone to lunch.

  The cafeteria had a real name, but the men around Sooner First City had been calling it the Old Ladies since Sooner First City had been bought by a squad of new-breed bankers who were frustrated by the glacial ways of downtown institutions and were determined to keep as much of the oil boom money as possible inside the state. Some of the bank’s most active trade came from children of the cafeteria’s elderly well-to-do; in fact a good deal of that trade was leveraged off those rich old ladies’ money. The new bankers themselves never ate lunch at the cafeteria, or the Old Ladies as they called it, but in apparently no time at all the new incarnation of Sooner First City had become known as the Old Ladies Bank.

  To be pointed out in the right circles (actually, almost any circles in those days) as an executive of the Old Ladies Bank came to be a very fine thing. The Mercedes sedans that the bank kept strung out in the parking lot to a width greater than the building itself all had license plates that read a staid sfc for Sooner First City, but the private Porsches had plates like olb rah and olb go and olb $.

  Barnaby, needless to say, was delighted when Peterpotter and TJ introduced him to the bank. He was not entirely at home with some of the trappings, the occasional boots and the string ties, but he was so thoroughly at home with the spirit of the place that when he walked in there, he felt like his own world had won. Because as small as the actual building was, this was a real bank in the busy heart of a very real, very substantial industry. It was enough to make him feel sorry for his father.

  There was so much business that officers took turns writing loans out of the custodian’s closet off the one stairwell, flushing out millions of dollars of high-interest paper while squatting beside the mop bucket and scribbling on their knees. The loans by now were not even just to dental corporations going into the oil business; there were guitar players starting thoroughbred horse farms, and there were movie syndicates by the dozen, and never never never any review of business plans. It was like one of those hilariously forgiving, third-rate boarding schools for stupid and misbehaving rich children, a school entirely of undeserved A+s, the sort of school Barnaby was always surprised to have missed. If you went upstairs at the Old Ladies Bank you could hear the laughter echoing from downstairs, and if you were downstairs you could hear the laughter shouting out above. The only place a discouraging word might ever be heard was on the stairway if someone thought you were cutting into the express line for the custodian’s closet. But the line moved fast. And at the end of every happy day, the day’s loans were all bundled and repriced for profit and shipped upstream to Continental Illinois and to a couple of regional Michigan banks where the bundles were, as far as Barnaby could tell, received and paid for with delirious appreciation.

  In a reflective moment, it occurred to Barnaby to go take a look at those upstream banks and see if that was where his angle lay, but, no, he knew he was at the source of things right where he stood. He could have gotten a considerable loan himself on the basis of his laundered clothes and the testimony by Peterpotter and TJ as to his prowess in a food fight, but the interest rate was not cheap, and he did not have a feel for the future of llama ranching, and most of all he always did prefer to use other people’s credit. Still, when on his fourth evening in town he went to the Old Ladies Bank mid-quarterly celebration, and the president, the young guru of Oklahoma’s go-go bankers, made an entrance naked but for a baseball hat with wings that flapped, then for just a moment Barnaby thought llama ranching might be the thing. Since it was after hours, he joined in the exuberance of the party, and the moment of weakness passed, and he watched the quiet exit of two Morgan Bankers he recognized from New York. No surprise that those assholes couldn’t get into the feel of things. He watched a woman from Chase Manhattan, who must have chased directly after TJ and Peterpotter, try to prove she could play in the mud with anybody if there was a chance of stealing a little action from the Michigan regionals. He watched a Seattle banker who had come with his own winged hat and was already taking off clothes well beyond his necktie.

  The next day, out of a need to feel he was doing research, he insisted Ada come to the Old Ladies cafeteria with him for lunch.

  Ada loathed the Old Ladies and told him so in no uncertain terms and then said she would come with him anyway because it was a mother-in-law’s duty.

  “Have the foie gras,” she said with a gleeful sneer as they pushed their trays past ranks of pot pies and biscuits.

  But Barnaby liked pot pies.

  More, he liked meatloaf. He liked tapioca and elderly women and rigorous mysteries of decorum. He liked the faint smells of fossilized wax and of somebody else’s hard work. It was all enough to make him feel cared for and safely again within one of the institutions that had guarded the perimeters of his youth. Yes, instead of a lawn there were Cadillacs pulled up to the long, tinted picture window, and beyond the Cadillacs was all the two-story, plastic and stucco offal of a commercial thoroughfare, but this was Oklahoma after all, and the prices in the cafeteria, to say the least, were terrific.

  Had he been a young Oklahoma entrepreneur, Barnaby could have found reasons to eat his every meal at the Old Ladies.

  Had he been a common thief of a different variety than his own training made possible, he might have known how to quickly remove all the rings that weighted so many of the fingers in the place, and then he could have retired. Because there were jeweled clusters four and five to every customer’s hand in the place except for his own large, modest hands, and except for Ada’s almost equally large, equally modest hands.

  Prompted to consider Ada’s hands in this fashion, as she carried her tray away from the register, Barnaby recognized that Ada was in fact admirably large all over, substantial rather than fat, with a considerable bosom swelling her torso out between the regions of her chest and her stomach, there under the front of her white silk blouse and her timeless suit jacket. And today, on a questionable errand of business in alien territory, much as Barnaby found himself comforted by the cafeteria, so too he was comforted by the discovery that—what with his own high-riding stomach and her low-riding bosom—Ada’s shape could be akin to his own buoyant shape.

  Next to his sometimes erratic posture, her good posture was less akin. Her posture and the severe elegance of her cheekbones and even the nakedness of her hands (which had a sterner meaning than his own ringless hands) mitigated against comfort in a way that his father’s presence might also have mitigated, but still Ada’s shape was like an old friend. Certainly Barnaby was more comfortable with Ada than he would have been with the other matrons, whose swollen and very particularly colored heads of hair were flora incognita for Barnaby.

  “I may forgive you for bringing me to lunch here,” Ada said when they’d sat, “but it won’t be anytime soon.”

  She said it, and her spine was rigid, and her mouth was turned down in displeasure, but her delivery was more readable in person than over the phone. The shape of her body, a shape Barnaby knew, was p
oised for adventure despite the accomplished charade of sufferance. She was in fact pleased enough with the displeasure around her mouth to show it to Barnaby a second time. She was a grown woman, a woman old enough to be his mother, a woman with real dignity, and she was not about to become giggly at the good fortune of lunch in a cafeteria, but Barnaby had an eye trained for detecting inclinations to fun in real cynics. Barnaby knew Ada was glad to be out with him, and that made Barnaby feel as gallant and expansive as if it were a date.

  He grinned at her with his expansive gallantry and with an understanding that he was the only man in the place, and she said, “Never try to charm in a cafeteria,” and turned haughtily away. She smiled despite herself when he laughed, but her smile went at some coyly distant prospect which only she could have identified.

  “I thought this was the place to be,” he said, removing his plates and tools from his tray as Ada had done and admiring the gravy in his mashed potatoes.

  “The best place to have lunch would have been my kitchen table,” she said, still looking away, but now clearly looking in order to see who among her acquaintances and enemies in the room had noticed that she was at lunch with an attentive younger man.

  Her kitchen table might or might not have been what Ada would actually have chosen, but it was absolutely what Barnaby’s father would have chosen, and Barnaby wondered if Ada and his father were not a good, if ever unrealized, match.

  And abruptly now Ada brought her attention back to her plate and dug eagerly into her shepherd’s pie, a dish she had chosen, as she’d made clear in the line, for its lesser degree of repugnance than other possibilities.

  She chewed and swallowed and turned to glare at Barnaby, and said, “Terrible,” and dug in for another mouthful.

  Leaving alone the wax beans in one quadrant of his own plate, Barnaby tried his meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy all in one bite, and found them to be exquisite. He wondered if Michel might consider a meatloaf special on, say, Thursdays.

  He wondered, marveled, at the hands at the other tables.

  “The meatloaf,” he said, “is very good, and the hands in this place are astonishing.”

  Really. Around the room, every hand’s glittering elderly fingers were so separated by stones and bands that they looked like skeletal demonstrations in the Museum of Natural History. To swim with those fingers would have been like paddling with a fork.

  But no one in the room looked like a swimmer, and more power to them for that. Rather than swimmers, they were talkers, and from every side of Ada and himself came repeated echoes of the name Old Ladies Bank. What with those ripe echoes and all the jewels and Barnaby’s own chemistry, there was a powdered, brown-gravied reek of greed in the air, a scent distinct from but very much related to what you could smell in La Cote on many afternoons. Barnaby knew that Michel would not be keen on the connection, but Barnaby was; it had become central to his faith in humanity that wherever he went he found the world to be of a piece.

  “Ada,” he said. “Do you have any money in the Old Ladies Bank?”

  And as soon as he said that, he was aware of radar at near tables coming alert to a mention of the namesake institution.

  “Certainly not,” Ada said. “And I don’t plan to.” Then she laid down her fork and beamed at Barnaby. “Are you going to ask me to put my money in there? Oh, I’m so glad. I’m the only person I know who hasn’t been asked.”

  Barnaby held up his hands and shook his head and said, “No, no,” aware as he did so of the radar at the near tables now withdrawing interest.

  Ada sighed largely, mostly in pretense, and said, “Just as well. I couldn’t have done it anyhow.”

  And the near radars went off entirely.

  But Barnaby’s radar, irrational as always, turned on.

  He knew that Ada’s father had been a respected banker in the state, and he knew that Ada had some common sense. He knew that she didn’t have any go-go children in town managing her money. She had a liberal trust the doctor had established at one of the responsible banks downtown. There was no reason she would have put anything in the Old Ladies Bank, or borrowed there, or anything else there.

  Yet Barnaby asked Ada quietly, beneath the cover of alien radar, “Why couldn’t you have put your money in the Old Ladies Bank?”

  And Ada answered him quietly, earnestly, without irony.

  Win would later suggest that here was the first of Ada’s strokes, but it didn’t seem so at the time.

  Ada said, “In early days when we lived out in Wesley and Dad was the good banker in town, several men he knew came to him and asked him to join with them in an oil venture. They had good geology reports and they were good men. Dad knew them all and liked them. He said at the time that if he were ever going to speculate, this would be it. But it was a speculation. He would have had to put up some money of his own, and perhaps even bank money if things went bad. His name as a banker would have been a kind of guarantee on a speculation, and that wasn’t how he thought a banker’s name ought to be understood. And so he didn’t do it. He believed they would hit oil, but he didn’t do it.

  He had a young family, and he believed in responsible behavior. He turned those men down, and they got somebody else to go in with them.”

  “And?” Barnaby said.

  “And so I would never be involved with a bank everybody talked about. Nobody talked about Dad’s banks. Dad wasn’t a go-goer. People trusted him. I wouldn’t for a minute trust anything with a nickname like Old Ladies Bank.”

  “No,” Barnaby said. “But what happened? Did they hit oil?”

  “Oh, it was a big strike. It became a well-known field. Plenty of the rings in here came from that field. But that never bothered Dad a bit. And now all these women’s children and grandchildren are depositing and borrowing and everything elsing with that go-go bank as fast as they can. And making money hand over fist, so they say. Well, I don’t care. Dad wouldn’t have had anything to do with it, and neither will I.”

  And with that it all came clear.

  Yes.

  Barnaby’s father would have approved of Ada’s sentiments and of her story. Barnaby’s father would have approved of Ada’s father. Personal responsibility, professional integrity, discipline, good sense, right behavior. That was where Barnaby’s father lived.

  And now his father’s actual voice rang out.

  His father’s voice entered the Old Ladies cafeteria and said firmly to Barnaby, “Sell short.”

  What?

  Was that something he would ever hear from his father? Barnaby’s father had never sold short in his life, would have understood shorting as speculation in misfortune, a moral wrong: promising to deliver, at a given price on a given date, a stock or commodity you didn’t have and then hoping to buy it more cheaply than the given price before the delivery date came around. It was a sensible enough way to gamble for pessimistic souls, for people who recognized down markets and wanted to take advantage. But that wasn’t Barnaby. Barnaby’s whole nature, and the business he’d built upon that nature, went to the other possibilities, to the gay balloons of heliumed inflation, to a market going up.

  Which was why he had been looking at the obvious and not seeing the obvious strategy.

  Which was why Ada’s story, and his father’s approval of the story’s conduct, came through like advice from on high.

  And the timbre of the voice in which that advice was delivered was absolutely his father’s.

  “Sell short.”

  Sell short.

  “Put your money on catastrophe. The world will not long tolerate an Old Ladies Bank.”

  Yes, that was his father, biblical in moments of urgency. So struck was Barnaby that he said aloud, “Yes, Daddy. Thank you.”

  When he looked back and remembered, maybe Win was right. Maybe that was the day someone might absolutely have known Ada had begun to have her strokes. Because she simply nodded as Barnaby talked aloud to an absent father between bites of tapioca. Before that,
she had told her story of fortune missed in early-day Wesley without any ironic remorse. And Win subsequently let him know that the story of the oil field was an old chestnut always told with irony and remorse. But that was Win. And all of it was only in recollection anyway.

  In the actual moment there arose the occupation of so much else.

  Even if the price of oil held where it was, there would be a shake-out around the Old Ladies Bank, and it wouldn’t be a small shake-out. Even if the price of oil went above the current astronomical levels, the Michigan banks would feel any failure of the Old Ladies Bank. Continental Illinois would feel it, judging from what Barnaby had seen in just four days.

  But the price of oil might not hold.

  It would not hold.

  And here the helium flooded into Barnaby’s lungs and from there into the world, so that the world floated free of every dismay and out to the blue sky above a summer ocean.

  The price of oil was going to collapse.

  Inspiration, revelation, genius, grace of God. Triggered by advice from his father. Here it was.

  Barnaby pressed the fish-eyed pebbles of the Old Ladies gluey tapioca between his tongue and the roof of his mouth and knew.

  The price of oil.

  No, Barnaby had not just remembered seeing hard data no one else had seen. No, he did not know the Saudi oil Prince what’s-his-name. Though Tom Livermore knew him, and what good had it yet done Livermore? Well, that was off the point. The point was that Barnaby simply knew, knew with every fiber of his own being, knew cosmically, knew beyond all data and insider tip-off. Barnaby knew oil was going down in the way only he could most certainly know, in the way which answered and sprang from his own essence. Foolishness. The Morgan Bankers left when the go-go guru appeared in only a baseball hat with wings because the Morgan Bankers were prigs who got frightened by naked people. Well, Barnaby had no quarrel with naked people, but now he saw the other truth. Those wings on that hat, even if the go-go guru could make them flap, were not enough to keep anyone suspended aloft. The foolishness in and around the Old Ladies Bank had transcended itself; that was what sweet Peterpotter and TJ had been trying to tell him from the start, and when foolishness transcended itself, it had to fall back to earth just like anything else, and it had to fall on its own foolish terms. That was the key. Where did the greatest, most foolish splatter of the Old Ladies Bank foolishness lie?