by Peter Quinn
The room was clearing out. Bedford looked for Gould but didn’t see him. He had no idea when Gould had left. He had sensed the raw energy in the boy-man across from him. He had felt it in his handshake. Gould couldn’t be all that much younger than Bedford, but it was as if a millennium separated them. Bedford saw he had made the mistake all somebodies make, presuming that somebodiness was an indelible grace, and like most nobodies-turned-somebodies he had imagined that he still understood the appetites and aspirations that drove the nobodies. Gould’s touch, Gould’s eyes, Gould’s restlessness, punctured such illusion. Bedford knew: A whole new race of nobodies has arrived, is arriving, will arrive, hungrier than even those who had come before, more aware of the opportunities around them, boy-men with bigger plans and fewer scruples, ready to rewrite the rules whenever it was to their advantage. We dare not look behind us but steadfastly stare before. We are coming, coming, coming.
Bedford felt a loosening in his bowels. His stomach grumbled. His irregularity was becoming chronic. The cook didn’t help. Perhaps he shouldn’t wait until Sarah returned to replace her; perhaps he should do it now. He knew he wasn’t being quite fair. The disruptions he was suffering from weren’t entirely due to his cook’s lack of culinary skills. He broke wind loudly. He pulled the chain that hung above his right shoulder. Swoosh, the water came down from the tank above his head, surged around the bowl, and gurgled down the pipe. Bedford left the paper across his lap. He put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his fists. The floor filled his view, black tile laid next to white.
He had been playing faro on margin, using his debts as security on new debts, double or nothing, with only nominal payments required by the house. Sometimes Morrissey himself would come over put his arm around Bedford’s shoulder, a fraternal embrace that also demonstrated the iron strength in his arms. He told Bedford that no man’s bad luck lasted forever, that if you stayed at it, if you believed in luck, luck would return that belief. Morrissey loved to talk. The wheedling garrulity of the Irish, coachmen, servants, tradesmen, they were all skilled at creating an enshrouding fog of words, as though they were always trying to hide something. Bedford tried fervently to believe in his luck, but he kept losing.
“O ye of little faith,” Morrissey said to him. “You’re not trying hard enough to believe.”
“Luck is more than faith,” Bedford said. “Luck is the result of patiently striving to put the odds in one’s own favor. Luck is what happens when you have gained a position from which it’s possible to take advantage of the opportunities that circumstance may present.”
“That sounds too complicated for me,” Morrissey said. “I’m a man of simple faith. I’ll leave the higher reasoning to the likes of yourself.”
The chits mounted steadily, month after month of losses, until the night Morrissey put his arm around Bedford’s shoulder, the pressure slightly greater than usual, and offered not encouragement but an ultimatum. “Charlie,” he said, “we need for you to make a settlement of your account.”
Sarah was of the opinion that he drank too much. They hadn’t been married a year when one day she announced she was leaving for England in order “to renew acquaintances.” Bedford had no objections. The day she left, he found a pamphlet on his desk. The Drunkard’s Disciples; Or, Twelve Brief Notices of the Dissolution and Death of Once Happy Men. A slip of paper marked the sixth chapter: A Young Man of Promise, Bound for Prominence in the World’s Financial Matters, Is Dragged to Ruin By His Addiction to Rum, An Affliction that He Is Unable to Discern Until He Has Lost Everything, His Wealth, His Wife, His Friends, and Must Die Alone. Herein His Rise, His Fall; The Awfulness of a Discovery Made Too Late.
When Morrissey’s arm had fallen on his shoulder, the phrase had come back to him: The Awfulness of a Discovery Made Too Late. “Old Smoke” was what people called Morrissey behind his back. When he was a younger man, he had been in a barroom fight. A stove of red-hot coals had been knocked over. Morrissey’s opponent pinned him to the floor atop those coals. The smell of burning flesh filled the room. But Morrissey neither flinched nor screamed. He slowly worked his way out of the hold the man had on him, grinding the coals into his back in order to do so, and, once free, pummeled his antagonist into a bloody, lifeless lump, punching away as the remnants of his pants and shirt smoldered. The name “Old Smoke” invoked in Bedford an image of the Devil, the Great Tempter, leading the sinner to hell, usually through Drink. But Drink had never been his problem. Sarah’s father had been a drunk, one in a long line, a condition that the portrait painters had brushed out of the august faces on the walls, nothing more than a slight ruddiness on the nose and cheeks. Sarah saw drunkenness everywhere. But leaving no trace on the breath, never impairing speech or inducing a slight stagger, faro had escaped her view.
Faro had been a form of relaxation from the uncertainties of wartime. After Lincoln’s election, Wall Street had been afflicted with neurasthenia. In retrospect, despite the night of festivity at the St. Nicholas Hotel, it seemed impossible that so immense and cataclysmic an event as the war could have taken any broker by surprise. Looking back, the portents of what was to come seemed unmistakable. Some bears had hunkered down the minute Lincoln was elected. Others had taken the firing on the federal supply ship Star of the West, which was bound for Fort Sumter, as the signal that war was inevitable. But in the end, Bedford had found it impossible to believe that men would choose the ruin and devastation of war over the amassing of profits, and he continued putting together the pieces he had picked up after the panic of ’57, fitting together what he envisioned as an impregnable financial empire. He speculated that the markets would go through a ten-year period of steady growth before the boom-time delusions would reappear and the wise bulls would begin to transmogrify into ever more cautious bears. He was still hard at work when the Secessionist barrage opened on Fort Sumter, the shells falling with deadly accuracy on the last remaining bulls, a direct hit on their magazines, men left groping amid the smoke and confusion. As the heroic commander of Fort Sumter had done, the directors of the Board walked calmly amid the shot and shells in order to reassure the troops. Steady, they said, it will all be over soon. Order will be returned. The world made right again. But when the smoke cleared, Bedford knew that the fort was done for. Southern merchants defaulted on three hundred million dollars in obligations. Over six thousand northern firms went bankrupt. The banking structure seemed to teeter on the brink of ruin.
The early days of the war were a blur. Bedford went for his usual breakfast at Old Tom’s. He found it hard to leave. The cavelike atmosphere was cool and secure. From where he sat, below street level, he could see the feet and legs of brokers and messengers as they flew past Old Tom’s windows, men running a footrace that seemed to grow more frenetic each day. The trading on the curb outside the Board resembled one of those famous minstrel-show walk-arounds, a crowd of men pushing and sidestepping, faces contorted, arms waving with rowdy gestures. A mob gathered outside the offices of the Journal of Commerce, which had been steady in its insistence that the South be allowed to depart in peace. They broke in, smashing windows and doors and draping a flag out a second-floor window. Bedford stood among the crowd. He recognized some brokers who he knew shared the same opinions as the Journal, but that no longer seemed to matter. They were looking for something on which to vent their confusion and frustration, and they went at their work with real enthusiasm. Afterward, they stood together in the street, on a carpet of torn and shredded copies of the Journal, and lustily sang “Hail Columbia.”
The summer was brutally hot, and, along with the news from Virginia, it drove men to the edge. Bull Run. One broker tried to make a joke out of it. “Next time we fight the Rebs,” he said, “we should look for a place called Bear Run.” Nobody laughed. Men strove to maintain their composure. The Board continued to try to conduct business as usual. Despite the burst of new businesses generated by the demands of what was obviously going to be a prolonged conflict, the Board stuck
to its practice of two auctions per day and rejected the notion of continuous trading. After the morning session, waiters brought around glasses of Saratoga water with spikes of Adirondack ice. Men drained the water and held the ice to their foreheads. From outside they could hear the roar of the curbstone brokers. Bedford’s representative on the Curb said he was too busy to handle Bedford’s business anymore. He suggested that maybe Jim Halsey would be available and promised to introduce him to Bedford.
Bedford disliked Halsey the minute he set eyes on him. Halsey was in his twenties. He had the thick upstate nasality of an apple-knocker. He kept his hat pushed back on his head, stood with his hands in his pockets, and rocked on his heels. A cocksure pose. He wore a tan jacket, green vest, and soft felt hat, the clothes of a clerk on holiday. Said he wanted 2 percent of all the business he handled.
Bedford laughed. “Do I look like a yokel?” he said.
“Gaze around,” Halsey said. He opened his arms to the milling mob of curbstone traders. Some of them looked as if they had come directly from a county fair. “It’s the yokels who seem to be raking in the gelt.”
Bedford declined Halsey’s services. He would see him occasionally on the street, and Halsey would give him a loud hello. Bedford had sustained substantial losses in the post–Fort Sumter turmoil. He held his own in the months that followed, but he felt unnerved, off balance, and it left him tired and depressed. He had thought he had taken the measure of the market, had understood its mechanisms, had discovered the physical laws it ran by, then the thing he hadn’t counted on happened, war, and he groped to find a new set of laws. As he left his office at the end of one particularly unsuccessful day, he bumped into Halsey. For once, the man’s brashness seemed diminished. Without being asked, Halsey volunteered that the day’s business had gone badly for him also. Bedford offered him a ride in his coach, and Halsey said he was going to Morrissey’s. When they reached there, Halsey got out of the coach and held the door open.
“Come with me,” he said.
“No thanks, I have work waiting for me at home.”
“To Lucifer with work. It can wait.”
“It can’t.”
Halsey leaned into the coach. He cupped his hand next to his mouth and said in a soft voice, “It’s a whore, ain’t it? That’s who yer so anxious to see. Where yer going to? Greene Street? Or are yer off to Mrs. Woods? Can’t blame yer. Whores are about the only thing can settle a man’s nerves after a day like today.”
Bedford didn’t smile. “You’re delaying me,” he said.
Halsey rocked on his heels and kept his hand on the door. “Thing about faro is it’s less work than plowing a whore, more fun than watching rats, and gives yer better odds than yer ever gonna find on Wall Street. Come on, worse can happen is I’ll drop a bundle and you’ll get to gloat. Might stop yer from feeling sorry for yerself.”
Bedford reached over to grab the door. Halsey took hold of his wrist. “Ain’t no fun in losing money less you got somebody to watch yer do it.” For an instant Bedford felt a twinge of sympathy for Halsey.
“For Christ’s sake,” Bedford said, “let go of my wrist. It will give me pleasure to watch you go to ruin.”
Bedford followed Halsey into the House of Morrissey. Halsey purchased a handful of copper chips from an attractive woman in a décolleté gown who sat in a wooden booth behind an iron grille. Each chip was stamped “$100.” It was early, and the place was nearly empty. The curtains, rugs, and wallpaper had a faded, dingy look; the walls and ceilings were discolored by the residues of ammonia and sulfur given off by the gaslight, which although left at a low level burned from dusk to dawn, as long as men believed their luck would change or hold out. Halsey went directly to an empty faro table and stood in front of the green cloth, its surface enameled with a representation of a full suit of spades. He wiped his hands on his trousers, blew on a hundred-dollar chip, and put it on the 4. The dealer stood before a pack of playing cards laid faceup in a dealing box. He drew the top card and laid it off to his right. It was the “soda” card, and out of play. The next card out of the box was a “loser,” and lay next to the box. The following card, facing up, was a “winner.”
Halsey’s bet stayed on the 4. The first card, the “soda,” was a 7. The second card, the “loser,” was a 3. The card still in the box, the “winner,” was a jack. Halsey left his bet. He wouldn’t lose unless a 4 came out a “loser.” On the next draw, a 4 was the card on top. He won. He put a copper on the queen and then another copper on the first one to signal that he was playing the queen to show up a “loser.” He left it there for two turns. On the third deal, the second card out was a queen. He had bet on a “loser” and won.
Bedford didn’t play, but Halsey gave him a sheet so that he could record each card as it came out and was retired. Bedford watched Halsey simultaneously play some cards as “losers,” others as “winners,” his bets spreading across the table, chips laid between cards and in the corners of cards, each marking a bet split to cover two or more cards. Bedford lost track of the permutations. He stopped trying to grasp the subtleties of Halsey’s maneuvers and surrendered to the beauty of the game, the soft green cloth, the copper disks, the steady flow of the cards out of the box, the small snap they made as the dealer drew them out, the constant motion of hands, the reshuffling of the cards, a reel of black and white. As the game went on, trays of champagne came by, and Bedford drank as much as was offered. A crowd gathered to watch Halsey. When his earnings reached $10,000, they applauded. Morrissey himself appeared. The room was filled with people and conversation, and in the background was the constant snap of cards being dealt. The gaslights flickered softly, and as the time passed the surroundings no longer seemed faded and threadbare but rich and sumptuous.
Halsey kept playing. He lost a part of his winnings before he finally cashed in but was still left with over $8,500. Bedford felt the urge to have a go but suppressed it. He had had too much champagne, and had too little grasp of the game. After they left Morrissey’s, Halsey suggested they stop at the Trumpeter Swan, a concert saloon generally known as the Trump. Halsey told Bedford to have the driver drop them on Clinton Place, at an alleyway that led to the rear of the Trump. Halsey knew the pug stationed at the back door, who let them in without a word. Bedford followed Halsey up a flight of stairs, where Halsey knocked on a door. A tall black-haired woman in a purple robe opened it. Bedford was stunned by how beautiful she was. Halsey embraced her, kissed her lips and neck, and drew back her robe to kiss her breasts. She pushed him away. “What’s got you so excited?” she said.
He put his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. “I’ve been bucking the tiger, riding high on his back, and rode the monster into the dust.” He took out of his pocket the bank draft from Morrissey, unfolded it, and stuck it between her breasts. She retrieved it, glanced at it, and put it into the pocket of her robe. Now she embraced Halsey. He looked over his shoulder at Bedford. “I forget that an introduction is in order,” Halsey said. “Charlie Bedford, I want you to meet the Trumpeter Swan herself, the eyeball attraction of the metropolis, the nonpareil of every gawking Cyclops in the city of New York, Miss Eleanor Van Shaick.”
She formed her arm into a V, her milk-white hand hanging limply at the end. She obviously intended it be kissed, not shaken, and Bedford obliged.
“It’s a great pleasure,” he said. Behind her, hanging on the door, Bedford noticed a floor-length cape of white feathers.
“Ellie keeps this place afloat,” Halsey said. “What has the Trump got to recommend it over any other concert saloon except for the Swan herself?”
Bedford had heard of the Trumpeter Swan’s “special attraction,” the lure that distinguished the Swan from the city’s other saloons. Especially popular with soldiers, the “attraction” was located in a small chamber on the second floor surrounded on three sides by eight closet-size booths, each containing a peephole. Several times an evening, for a fee ranging from three dollars to ten, depending on h
ow wealthy or eager the customer seemed, invitations were given to enjoy the view from one of those booths. A waiter girl would lean over and whisper, “How’d ya like to see the Trumpeter Swan herself?” In a while she would return and escort the patron to a rear staircase. At the top she would lead him into a booth and pull the curtain shut behind him. There he’d sit alone for several minutes, staring at an empty porcelain bathtub on lion’s paws, with nothing but a chair beside it. Finally two Negro boys in turbans and baggy pants would enter with a barrel labeled CHAMPAGNE and pour its contents into the tub. After they left there would be another pause before the door opened again and a tall, gainly, black-haired woman entered: the Trumpeter Swan herself! She wore a cape of white feathers that she slowly removed to reveal her nakedness. She walked around the tub, stopping at various points to bend over and stir the water—or champagne—with her hand. She stepped into the tub and, after a quick dip, got out, stood, and rubbed her body with a soft white towel, fondling her breasts, drying each nipple between her fingers, bringing the towel down between her legs and pulling it back and forth. Once dry, she put her cape back on and was gone.
The Negro boys pulled back the curtains, and one by one the booths’ occupants went downstairs into the crowd without ever seeing their fellow viewers. Occasionally, one of the Trump’s regulars darted up the stairs during the time between baths and rubbed a piece of charcoal around a peephole. At first, the management had threatened to find those responsible and have them thrashed, but with the war and the proliferation of soldiers, it became a house joke to let some officer sneak back downstairs, his eye circled in black, and be asked by half the house, “How’d ya like the bird?”