The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  Ellie Van Shaick lay back on a divan. Bedford sat across from her. The room was small but well furnished. Halsey went over to the dresser, poured from an open bottle of champagne into three glasses, and handed them around. Bedford had paid occasional visits to the Trump but had never been upstairs “to see the Swan.” Looking at Van Shaick as she stretched out on the divan, her shapely ankles protruding from beneath her robe, he regretted his oversight.

  She raised her glass. “To luck,” she said.

  Halsey started to recount his triumph of earlier in the evening: the applause of the crowd, Morrissey’s attempt to appear unfazed.

  “Maybe Mr. Bedford brings you luck,” she said to Halsey. He scratched his head. “I never looked at it that way. Why, Charlie, from now on I ain’t goin’ nowhere without yer.”

  The room was warm and perfumed. They had more champagne. Halsey droned on, describing every bet he had made. Bedford noticed that Van Shaick was staring at him. He felt himself growing excited and tried to think of some way to dismiss Halsey. Halsey paused in his storytelling, and Van Shaick said, “Mr. Bedford, I believe we’ve met before.”

  “I wish it were so, Miss Van Shaick, but you are not a person I would forget.”

  “Time changes us.”

  “I could not imagine what change time wrought in you that I should not be able to conjure up some clue as to our meeting.”

  She saluted him with her glass.

  “Charlie,” Halsey said, “I didn’t know you were so well known among the ladies. I thought yer were one of them went home after work.”

  Bedford ignored him. Van Shaick said, “Do you recall a Christmas reception at the home of Robert Schuyler?”

  The day after Christmas, Robert Schuyler, the president of the New York and New Haven, the New York and Harlem, and the Illinois Central railroads, had annually held open house for the proprietors of the most prestigious investment houses, filled the rooms with food and drink, and invited his guests to bring their children or friends. One year, Stark had taken Bedford along. It was Bedford’s first time in one of the homes of the great families. He had never been amid such opulence.

  “Yes, I have a vivid memory of it.”

  “Do you remember talking for some time to Morris Van Shaick?”

  Bedford recalled the house and its trappings. In the entrance hall there was a full-length portrait of Philip Schuyler, Major General in the Continental Army, would-be conqueror of Canada, Hudson Valley patroon, a founder of the Republic. The servants still wore the livery of the General’s day, breeches and powdered wigs, and the house was filled with precious-looking crystal and china. Above the mantelpiece in the main parlor was the sword that Congress had presented to the General. But Bedford was terrible with names. He suspected such a talent was developed among those who grew up in large towns or cities and who from their earliest childhoods were required to keep track of the endless number of new people they were exposed to. Either that or, like Audley Ward, they were preoccupied with keeping track of bloodlines and social position. Bedford had grown up in a town where strangers were rarely encountered. He had no real interest in anyone’s ancestry. Often he even had difficulty remembering the names of clients or of other brokers. He would look at them as they talked and, while trying to recall their names, miss everything they said. It was a deficiency he had promised himself to work on correcting but had yet to do anything about. He decided not to lie.

  “To be honest, my only recollection is of the surroundings. I’d never been in such a place. I felt intimidated, in awe, and I let the man whose guest I was, Mr. Stark, do the talking.”

  Van Shaick looked saddened. A film of water covered her eyes. “At one time,” she said, “men used to boast about knowing my grandfather.”

  Bedford heard the hurt in her voice. It was obviously important to her that he remember her grandfather.

  “Yes, now that I give it some thought, I recall having a conversation with a very distinguished gentleman. I had forgotten his name, but it comes back to me now. Morris Van Shaick was your grandfather?”

  “Yes, and of all his grandchildren I was the favorite. He took me with him that day. I shall never forget it, nor you.”

  “Me?”

  “I thought you were the handsomest thing I had ever seen. The whole time Grandfather talked, I couldn’t take my eyes off you. When we left I told Grandfather you were the man I wanted to marry, and he gave a great laugh.”

  Halsey laughed. “There yer go, Charlie, Ellie’s grandpappy knew better than letting the likes of yer near his women.”

  “I was twelve at the time,” Van Shaick said. Halsey was standing over her. She reached up and patted his cheek. “Hardly a woman, my dear bumpkin, although in the rural precincts of our Republic female children may often be treated as such.”

  “Twelve!” Bedford said. “That explains the hesitancy of my memory. By God, the scene returns to me with some clarity!” He was surprised he still had no recollection at all of either of them. “Let’s see, it must have been 1854 or ’55.”

  “I think you’re trying to establish my age,” she said.

  “It was 1853,” he said, “yes, it had to have been. It was the Christmas before Schuyler left for England with two million dollars in notes he’d embezzled from friends, partners, and family.” Bedford had a clear memory of the day the news had struck that Schuyler had absconded. Stark had laughed until his face was so red it seemed ready to explode. “The little scamp,” Stark had said, “I always counted him a mouse, yet he’s proved himself a rat.”

  “Never heard of Robert Schuyler,” Halsey said.

  “He ruined my grandfather,” Van Schaick said. “The poor man had placed a great deal of trust in Robert Schuyler. He held on until the panic of ’57. Did the best he could until then, but he was never the same.”

  “Never heard of your grandfather, either.”

  “This city forgets the good with the bad; all are consigned to the same oblivion. Nothing matters but the present ability to pay, and once that disappears you are dead, gone, forgotten.”

  “Ain’t that the gospel truth.”

  It came back to Bedford now. The old man standing in a doorway a few days after the panic. A friendly rival of Stark’s. Morris Van Shaick. Poisoned himself. Bedford received a note from Van Schaick a day or so after his suicide. Something to do with the grave.

  “Your grandfather was a gentleman,” Bedford said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “He was. But after he died and the firm was in ruins, his so-called gentlemen friends turned their backs on my family. My father tried to keep the firm afloat. He was sure he could rely on Grandfather’s acquaintances for at least some measure of help until he got back on his feet, but none was forthcoming. The day after our house was taken from us, he left. We never saw nor heard from him again. My mother went to some of those same gentlemen and told them what had happened. They suggested she go to the almshouse. The almshouse!” Her eyes became as cold and merciless as the winter sea. She put her feet on the floor and sat up. “We moved to a boardinghouse on Washington Street, a place filled with immigrants. My mother took in laundry like a common Irish washerwoman, and her hands bled from the work. She didn’t last a year. My younger sister, Edwina, a girl of talent and true musical sensibility who had been planning to study in Europe, was reduced to playing stringed instruments at the lowest sort of affairs, for the worst riffraff you could imagine.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Miss Van Shaick,” Bedford said. “It is a tragic story, but if it is of any comfort, I would say this city is filled with such.”

  “It is not comfort, Mr. Bedford, although you are kind to try to offer some. But I have learned the lessons to be learned.” She reached into her pocket and took out the bank draft. “This is the first lesson. Always have a lot of it.” She put it back. “And this is the second.” She reached up and took hold of Halsey’s lapel and pulled him down to her. She kissed his lips and rubbed her hand over his c
hest. “Always have someone you can trust, someone reliable, preferably a good farm boy, a man of strong instincts and rough tastes, as far from being a gentleman as possible.”

  “I’ve been accused of being many things,” Halsey said, “but ain’t nobody accused me of being that.”

  There was a tapping at the door so gentle that at first Bedford didn’t hear it.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Mr. Bedford, sir, it’s Margaret.”

  He pulled the chain above him. The water rushed down.

  “What is it?”

  “Mr. Bedford, I was just closin’ up da house and wonderin’ to myself if you was all right in dere or maybe had fallen asleep or needed somethin’. You’ve been in dere a terrible long time.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.” He found it impossible to be harsh with the servants, to see them as part of some separate order of existence. He left that to Sarah. They were afraid of her. He noticed how attentive they were when she was in the house, and how that attentiveness waned when she was away. They would never knock on any bathroom door she might be behind, that was for sure. They would wait.

  Bedford placed the newspaper on his lap. Should have gone to meet Halsey at the Trump. No use hiding. Sooner or later it would all have to be faced. He reminded himself again: Don’t panic. He glanced down at the paper. The obituary notices. He wasn’t tired. His stomach rumbled once more. Although his taste for food hadn’t diminished, his insides were a ruin.

  In the early autumn of the first year of the war, he had closed the office for several days. Had sat by himself at his desk for an entire day. He had remembered the contempt he had felt for the victims of ’57. How pathetic they had seemed at the time, how weak, their eyes blazing with fear, like trapped animals. He had imagined that their weakness and fearfulness had led them to destruction. They had chosen to ignore the brute nature of the struggle they were involved in, and as a consequence the struggle devoured them. Sitting there in his empty office, Bedford had come to understand that perhaps their fear was the outcome of their ruin, not its origin.

  On his second day alone, Bedford had done a mental inventory. He had played his instincts and bet that the country would walk to the very edge of civil war but recoil from the abyss. However foolish they had come to seem, his instincts had been widely shared. But others had hedged their bets, especially after Lincoln’s election. They had liquidated investments, invested in gold and foreign assets.

  When war came, his losses had been devastating. As he recovered from the shock, he decided to approach the matter more rationally, not suppressing his instincts but tempering them with a reasoned judgment as to what lay ahead. The war, he calculated, could last only a year. At the end of that time, the North would have either crushed the South or realized that such a victory could not be achieved and negotiated a peace. In the meanwhile, the withdrawal of southern investments, the absence of cotton for northern mills, the destruction of shipping, the loss of crops, the possible sacking of border cities and ports, and a halt to railroad construction would all leave the economy in a shambles.

  In the evening, Ward and Bedford dined together at home.

  “The war will ruin the economy,” Bedford said.

  “Quite so.”

  “It is a clear lesson of history?”

  “I thought history didn’t interest you.”

  “I am asking a question.”

  “Ah, history always tells us several things. For example, in the case of war, history tells us the economic energies of a nation can be either vitiated or invigorated.”

  “Depending on whether it wins or loses?”

  “In history, nothing is so simple.”

  “Could you get to the point?”

  “Well, in the case of war with another country or power, a nation may well find that the requirements of its military efforts strengthen its commercial prowess no matter what the outcome. Britain lost its struggle with the American colonies, but the exercise of fighting such a distant war stimulated its productive capacities.”

  “And you believe this war could do the same for us?”

  “This isn’t simply war, Charles, a struggle such as Britain fought against Napoléon, waged by both sides on the territory of other nations. Nor is it of the type the English and the Dutch fought, waged mostly on distant seas. Nor the kind of pique-nique we had with the Mexicans. This is civil war, and civil wars are ipso facto destructive for all involved. The French civil war lasted for half a century and ruined the country. The English civil war lasted nearly a decade and left scars that have perhaps never healed.”

  “Those were religious wars, were they not?”

  “Charles, you know more than you let on. Yes, religion was one of the issues, and one might well understand the decline of the Gaul and the rise of the Saxon by recognizing that in France it was the Catholic forces that triumphed, but in Britain the Protestant. Yet whatever the issues, the universal results of civil wars are the same, and were pointed out very nicely by Gibbon in his summation of the struggle that brought Constantine to the imperial throne. The first is a ruinous expense of blood and treasure. The second, an oppressive escalation in taxation. I don’t see any reason to believe that we shall escape such a fate, do you?”

  Bedford didn’t. He abandoned the market and decided to wait until it reached bottom before he reentered. The country seemed to sink into a depression, just as he thought it would. For a few weeks, the atmosphere on the Street was quiet, almost tranquil. But slowly at first, then with astounding rapidity, the war turned into the single greatest engine for production in the nation’s history. Contracts for rifles, wagons, uniforms, boots, corn, ammunition, artillery, and ships poured out of Washington. In the East, the factories ran all day and all night. In the West, the railroads expanded across the newly laid track, and the trains ladened with grain and meat and lumber came puffing eastward. Government bonds were issued in massive amounts, an unprecedented flood, and hawked with an unheard-of urgency and success by Jay Cooke and his ubiquitous agents. More and more business was done on margin, the buyer putting up a small part of the purchase price of a stock. The pace of business swirled and gathered like the gush of a spring thaw, a roaring volume of water that grows stronger and stronger until it obliterates the river-banks, pouring down the valley, carrying all before it. A new Deluge, different from the last. A new day. New exchanges sprang up for trading stock and they were filled with new faces, men even younger-looking than Halsey. These newcomers trotted through the streets—nobody seemed to walk anymore—waving papers, shouting at the top of their lungs. Many of them followed only one stock, in rails, or canals, or petroleum, or banks. They seemed not to know that anything else existed, nor to care. Bedford found them crude, impudent, and contemptible, but he realized they were becoming masters of the market.

  Old Tom’s was deserted. The colored waiters stood around solemnly, with their white towels draped over their arms. Bedford knew them all by sight but had never exchanged more than pleasantries. He wondered if they resented the war for bringing in a new order that was depriving them of their livelihood. For the first time in all the years he had been going there, he made an effort to engage them in conversation. They were polite but distant. He gave up after a few tries. He ordered another coffee with brandy. One thing was for sure: The war had disproved Stark’s theory of the relationship between a full stomach and a successful broker. That notion was being trampled into the earth by a thundering horde that barely had time to eat. In place of the colored peddlers who had wandered the district selling hot corn or oysters, coffee stands sprang up, sidewalk booths that offered quick food and drink, which was devoured by men who blew on their coffee as they gulped it and consumed a roll in two mouthfuls.

  In the first winter of the war, the administration made its initial issue of “greenbacks,” paper currency backed by neither gold nor silver but only by the good word of the government. A whole new speculative game wa
s born. Everyone on the Street instantaneously understood the rules. If the North were to lose the war, the greenbacks would be worthless, and the demand for gold would become insatiable, its price skyrocketing. But if the North won and could redeem the greenbacks in specie, the opposite would be true: In relation to paper, gold prices would drop. Within a few weeks of the greenbacks’ appearance, there was an intense competition for exclusive rights to telegraph lines, and some of the roofs around the district sprouted rookeries for carrier pigeons. The race was on for news of the campaigns in the West and along the James, news of Union victories deflating the rise in gold prices, rumors of defeats inflating it again.

  After several months in which a number of brokers bet openly on the defeat of the Union, gold sales were banned from the Board’s activities. But Gilpin’s News Room opened across from the Board in Lord’s Court, and the gold business was carried on with an even greater intensity. Brokers fled Lord’s Court and dashed in and out of the News Room. The trading was so heavy that it also supported another gold exchange, farther down on William Street. The Coal Hole was located in a poorly lit, badly ventilated basement. There was a steady traffic through its doors all day. Bedford avoided the News Room altogether, and on the one visit he made to the Coal Hole, he stood in the back. With its haze of tobacco smoke hanging over everything and the constant clatter of voices, it reminded him of a concert saloon. There was a raised platform at the far end with a long blackboard mounted to the wall, on which a line of clerks entered and erased the ever-changing prices of trades. Men jostled and pushed to see what was happening. A fistfight broke out, and one man was knocked, unconscious, to the floor. The trading never stopped. In a corner of the room was the slight figure of Jay Gould. Men were running up to him and then scurrying away. As Bedford watched, he realized Gould was conducting a network of trades throughout the room, dispatching runners in every direction, sending and receiving bids, keeping track of it all in his head.