Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I don’t know why you feel guilty.’

  ‘Don’t you? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t.’

  There was another pause. Then Effie said, ‘What about Robert?’

  ‘Robert? I’ve been writing to him, that’s all, and he’s been writing back. We’ve discussed investments in Europe, and investments on the US stock market.’

  ‘He lent money to Germany during the war. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course he lent money to Germany during the war. So did most of the private banks on Wall Street.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t happen to think that it was right. But, it was all a long time ago. Ten years ago! A lifetime! You can’t allow memories to stand in the way of business. Anyway, Robert’s my brother; my older brother.’

  ‘Robert is a calculating bully. You ought to know that by now. He won’t do you any good at all.’

  Dougal flapped his hand at her dismissively. ‘You’re being hysterical now, Effie. Just because you had an argument with Robert during the war.’

  ‘Dougal, what’s the matter with you?’ Effie demanded. ‘Look at you! You used to be so bright and active. You used to be such fun. I could always count on you to be understanding and energetic and thoughtful.’

  Dougal grunted, as if what Effie had said was funny. ‘I’ve grown older, Effie, that’s all. More responsible. Richer. Wiser.’

  ‘No,’ said Effie. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘Oh, yes it is,’ said Dougal. ‘And you’ve grown older, too, if you’d only realize it. Perhaps it’s time you stopped trying to behave like a nineteen-year-old flapper, and realised that you’re a middle-aged woman with a duty towards her family and a great deal of responsibility towards the bank she works for.’

  ‘I’m still quitting, whatever you say.’

  ‘Quit, go ahead. See if I care.’

  ‘I know very well that you don’t. That’s why I’m trying to find out what’s wrong with you.’

  Dougal puffed out his lips, and then shrugged. ‘I’m working too hard, that’s all, I should ease up a little.’

  ‘You’re not working hard at all. Dan Kress told me that you’ve been delegating almost everything. You spend most of your afternoons at the Côte D’Or Club on 50th Street, drinking bootleg liquor and messing around with cheap girls. If you’re not drunk you’re sniffing cocaine in the men’s room. Dan says he hasn’t been able to get a coherent decision out of you in months.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine, coming from you,’ said Dougal. ‘The lady banker who gave birth to a bastard, and messed around with a notorious gangster.’

  Effie stood up, and walked around Dougal’s desk. She stared at him for a moment, breathing deeply; and then she plucked the dark glasses from his face, and crushed them in her bare hand. ‘You,’ she said, ‘are a fat and ridiculous failure. I never thought that I’d ever see my own brother like this. Not Dougal. Not the brother who was always close to me, and always shared everything. You are the reason I’m quitting; and you alone. Not because I hate you, because I don’t, no matter what you say to me, but because I once loved you, and it’s unbearable to see someone you once loved reduced to a blabbering idiot.’

  Dougal looked up at her with his tiny, piggy eyes; and then pouted, and looked away. That’s the way you want it,’ he said.

  Effie said, ‘It isn’t the way I want it. Not at all. But sometimes, a body gets left with no more choices.’

  She left the office at nine o’clock. Instead of taking a taxi home, however, she went for a long walk in the snow, the collar of her dark mink coat turned up, her Russian fur cloche pulled down in case she was recognised. She walked as far as University Square, and stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue, her hands in her pockets, watching the snowflakes teeming down past the streetlamps.

  Kay was still awake when she got home, although she was very sleepy. Effie sat on the edge of her pink brocade-covered bed, in her pink-and-white bedroom, and leaned forward to kiss her. Kay said, ‘Your hands are cold.’

  ‘I went for a walk in the snow.’

  Kay frowned at her, and then kissed her hands, and chafed them, to warm them up. ‘You look sad,’ she said.

  Effie shook her head. ‘I’m not sad. It’s going to be Christmas soon.’

  Kay smiled. ‘I hope I can have the dollhouse I saw in Kleinberg’s.’

  ‘Maybe. You’ll have to write to Santa Claus.’

  ‘There isn’t a Santa Claus.’

  ‘I know,’ said Effie. ‘That’s what I’m afraid we’re all going to find out.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Her affair with George Sabatini had been brief, baroque, and bitterly tragic. She hadn’t wept long for him; although her friend Margaret Shaw, the interior designer, to whose elegant summer home in New Hampshire she had retreated for three weeks after the murder, told her time and time again that she hadn’t wept enough.

  ‘You loved him, didn’t you?’ Margaret had demanded of Effie. ‘Then give your love all the tears it deserves.’

  Effie had said, ‘I’ve tried. But I just can’t cry any more.’

  The same was true of Dougal: she couldn’t cry for him any more either. He had so completely lost his confidence in himself, in his career, and in everybody around him. He was no better off than a patient in a hospital for the incurably ill, confused by anesthetics, incoherent with fear and agony, and hoping for one thing only: that he would die before the pain became too much to bear.

  Effie knew that her most urgent priorities now had to be herself, and Kay, and the protection of her own fortune. The week after her Tuesday-evening talk with Dougal, she visited her attorneys on Third Avenue, Schwab & Moorhouse, and began to arrange for the extrication of all her private capital from Watson’s New York, and from any company whose stock prices she knew from inside knowledge to be artificially inflated by bootleg loans.

  Sitting among Mr Moorhouse’s collection of rare indoor ferns, wearing a green day dress by Worth with a large green bow at the hip, and a hem that was outlined with scallops of seed-pearls, she said gently, ‘I think you’d better order a bottle of champagne before we start. Both of us are going to need it.’

  Mr Moorhouse was shocked and mystified by Effie’s decision to sell so much valuable stock. He sat behind his neat Morocco-topped desk with his fine white wavy hair shining in the sunlight and his little mouse-like hands scuttling from one piece of paper to another, and said, ‘You’re sure you really want to do this, Miss Watson? The market is rising so steadily right now. You’re going to be sacrificing millions of dollars if you dispose of your stockholdings just at this moment. They haven’t peaked out by any means, and there are no immediate signs that they will.’

  But Effie was adamant. At Watson’s New York, she had seen for herself how the stock market was being swollen like a hot-air balloon by money which simply didn’t exist. Stocks in major corporations were priced at three or four times their real value – and what was worse, they were being bought by small investors for down payments of only ten per cent, with the rest of the purchase price being met by brokers’ loans, which in turn were financed by private banks, and by some of the major corporations themselves.

  Effie wanted to sell Standard Oil stock; General Motors stock; Aluminium Company of America stock; Bethlehem Steel Corporation stock. Mr Moorhouse went a sharp white as he ran his pencil down the list of shares to be disposed of. He stood up, and then sat down again, and then stood up again and poured Effie a little more champagne, with a trembling hand. ‘You’ll excuse me,’ he said. ‘I have to talk for a moment to Mr Schwab.’

  Ten minutes later, a little pinker, he came back, sat down, and blinked at her. ‘Miss Watson,’ he said, ‘we really can’t recommend that you do this. This is a catastrophic decision. Perhaps you need to see a doctor. Perhaps two doctors. Get yourself a second opinion. Perhaps a short rest, and then we can all reconsider.’

  Effie sipped her champagne. ‘If you don’t
wish to complete these transactions for me, Mr Moorhouse, it will only take me a matter of hours to find somebody who will.’

  ‘Miss Watson, I don’t think you quite understand the implications of what you’re doing. You’re transferring almost all of your capital out of buoyant, energetic, hugely profitable mainstream stocks into safe investments, yes, but investments which by comparison are almost completely static. You have a list of realty you want to buy in California. Now, really, who wants to buy realty in California? You have farming-land here on your list and you know as well as I do that farm prices are desperately depressed. You want gold, and silver, and mining concessions, and even more real-estate, and art. You’ve got here, “paintings by Giotto, Martini, and Lorenzetti”. They sound like a firm of Italian sausage-makers.’

  He let his little hand run through his hair, and sighed. ‘Miss Watson, I don’t suppose you’ll lose very much money by investing in any of these things. I don’t know about the farmland; it depends on prices. About the art, well, art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake. But I really don’t think that we can help you. If it got around on Wall Street that we were responsible for dumping one of the biggest personal fortunes in the history of the United States, especially your personal fortune … well … you can imagine that people wouldn’t exactly be standing in line down the lobby to seek our services.’

  ‘Mr Moorhouse,’ said Effie, ‘are you going to do what I tell you?’

  ‘No ma’am,’ said Mr Moorhouse.

  Effie stood up. ‘In that case, you can send your final account to my office. I will let you know where to transfer my papers when I have made alternative arrangements.’

  Mr Moorhouse stood up, too, flustered and upset. ‘I don’t want to lose your business, Miss Watson, believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you; but you just have.’

  She went back to her apartment on Fifth Avenue that afternoon. She didn’t feel like returning to the bank. She had already sent Dougal a formal memorandum that she was quitting, to which he hadn’t yet formally replied. In fact, he kept talking to her as if she had changed her mind, as if she had seen how wrong she was, and decided to stay. He would wander in and out of her office, six or seven times a day, his dark glasses bound together with Band-Aids, and try to make facetious remarks about blood being thicker than money.

  Kay was playing the piano when she got home, a simple gavotte by Handel. Effie walked through the day-room, where the white and gold Steinway stood, and kissed Kay on the curly top of her head.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ she said.

  Kay said, ‘Miss Kremer says my timing’s just awful. Miss Kremer says the trouble with me is that I can’t count.’

  ‘I think that’s my trouble with me is that I can’t count.’

  ‘I think that’s my trouble, too,’ smiled Effie, and sat down to listen for a while. She was conscious that they made a picture there, mother and daughter, in a room draped with blue velvet and lace, and hung with Flemish watercolours, their reflections softly drowning in a floor of highly-polished oak parquet. The gavotte was stilted, elegant, and restful. Effie closed her eyes, and thought of nothing at all but happy memories.

  The telephone rang. Kitty went out to answer it, and then came into the day-room and said, ‘It’s for you, Miss Watson. A gentleman by the name of Mr Caldwell Brooks.’

  ‘Brooks? I’ve never heard of him. Did he say what he wanted?’

  ‘He said that he’s a business attorney; one of the partners of Byrd Brooks Stein, of Canal Street. That’s all he said.’

  Effie had read about Byrd Brooks Stein. They were reputed to be one of the sharpest new partnerships of bull-market business lawyers, experts in stockbroking law, sophisticated and fast-moving and very expensive; the young knights of the Coolidge era. She listened to Kay playing one more bar of her gavotte, and then she said, ‘All right, I’ll speak to him. Would you bring me a glass of white wine? The Pouilly-Fuissé.’

  She went out to the marble-topped hall-table, and picked up the telephone. ‘This is Effie Watson.’

  ‘Miss Watson? My name’s Caldwell Brooks. I’m really sorry for calling you like this, but I heard that you needed an attorney to dispose of some of your stock.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It gets around, Miss Watson. The Pavement thrives on rumours.’

  ‘You’re putting yourself up as a candidate, are you, Mr Brooks?’

  ‘That was the general idea. Perhaps I could come to your office and discuss it with you.’

  ‘What makes you think that you’re capable of handling an account like mine? We’re not talking about two or three millions; we’re talking in scores of millions.’

  ‘I know that, Miss Watson. It makes me go pale but it doesn’t make me faint.’

  Effie thought for a moment. Kitty was coming along the hallway with a tall flute glass of Pouilly-Fuissé on a silver try. Effie took the wine and thanked her.

  Caldwell Brooks said, ‘If it’s any reassurance, I personally handle the affairs of Mrs Ursula T. Hunt.’

  ‘Mrs Ursula T. Hunt is a gambler; not a banker.’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying, Miss Watson. But I think I have a particular talent for fitting my service to a client’s complete personal requirements. If you want to sell, we’ll sell. We’ll get the optimum possible prices, and we’ll reinvest your money securely and sensibly.’

  Effie drank a little wine. ‘You have a very sure line of patter, Mr Brooks.’

  ‘Not patter, Miss Watson. I never promise what I can’t deliver.’

  ‘All right,’ said Effie. ‘Why don’t you come round to my house this afternoon? I’m at home until four. We’ll talk about it over tea.’

  ‘That would be a considerable pleasure, Miss Watson. I’ll be there at three o’clock prompt.’

  Effie took a shower: and changed into a soft clinging afternoon dress of very pale blue silk, trimmed with blue velvet. She sat at her dressing-table smoking a cigarette while Kitty brushed her hair out for her.

  ‘You don’t seem so happy, Miss Effie,’ said Kitty.

  Effie attempted a smile. ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘No, you don’t. Ever since you thought of leaving that bank, you’ve been real down-in-the-mouth.’

  ‘I haven’t actually left under the happiest of circumstances.’

  ‘Your Mr Dougal still bad?’

  Effie nodded. ‘He seems to be worse every day. Physically and mentally. I don’t know what he’s trying to do to himself.’

  Kitty laid down the brush and comb, and leaned forward on the dressing-table so that she could see how Effie’s hair was shaped at the front. ‘I had an uncle like that once. Lost his job in a carpenter’s shop because he accidently sawed off two of his fingers. After that he went to wrack and ruin. Drank himself senseless with wood-spirit, sniffed and smoked every single darn thing he could find. Glue, custard-powder, disinfectants, even some dry Italian cheese once, in case it could make him happy.’

  Effie said, ‘I can never really understand what the matter is with Dougal. He should have left Mariella years ago; or she should have left him. But neither of them seem to be able to, and I don’t know why. Each of them says “I can’t.”’

  Kitty teased Effie’s fringe a little, and pulled one of her philosophical Lil Hardin faces. ‘When somebody says to me that they can’t, that usually means that they simply won’t. But if I were you, I wouldn’t even worry too much about Mr Dougal any more. You let him be. If he’s got a fate to find, you let him find it on his own.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s capable of doing even that,’ said Effie, watching herself in the mirror as she blew out cigarette smoke. ‘He’s asked our older brother Robert to come over and join him in some kind of financial partnership. He always used to argue with Robert, you know, bitterly. When they were younger, they used to tear at each other all the time like wild dogs. Dougal wouldn’t have come to America at all if it hadn’t been for Robert, chasing him out of Scotland. An
d now he wants to go into partnership with him.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Kitty. I guess brothers are brothers.’

  ‘Not these two brothers.’

  ‘You can’t butt in, Miss Effie, even with your kin. You can’t tell anybody what to do with their life, no matter how much you want to. You know that, even better than me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Effie. ‘I suppose I do.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Kitty showed Caldwell Brooks into the library when he arrived. Then she hurried into the day-room, where Effie was listening to Kay as she practised her scales, and said, ‘He’s waiting for you now, Miss Effie. And I promise you something, he’s dreadfully tall!’

  Effie, with composure, said, ‘Very well, Kitty. Kay, you can finish for today now. Kitty – do you have any of that maple-walnut ice-cream left over from dinner the other night? I’m sure Kay deserves more than just a small spoonful. Maybe some hot-chocolate sauce, too.’

  ‘Miss Kay, you’re going to get eff-ay-tee,’ smiled Kitty.

  Effie went into the library, and discovered, with something of a start that Kitty had been quite right. Caldwell Brooks was standing by the fireplace leafing through an autographed copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt – given to Effie after she and Mrs Lewis at last had decided on a social truce – and he was, indeed, dreadfully tall, six-feet-two in his two-toned business shoes. He was very good-looking, though; in a smart, easy, collegiate style, with short, brushed-back hair, a sharp nose, and humorous brown eyes. He wore a well-cut suit in dove grey, with a black and white hound-stooth vest and a black tie with a Harvard crest on it. He carefully laid down the book on the mantelpiece, and held out his hand.

  ‘Miss Watson. I’ve often seen you; but I’ve never been able to manage an introduction until now. I’m honoured. And thank you for inviting me here.’

  ‘Would you care for some tea?’ asked Effie.

  ‘I don’t drink tea; but I’d love a glass of mineral water, if that’s possible.’