“Well, Roosevelt’s going to have a field day with this. Jews against big business—right up his alley, never mind his fruitcake wife. What I want to know is, who’s putting up the money?”
“I don’t think it’s any one outfit,” Allen suggested. “There’s union money, the socialists. Look at the signs—secular Jewish groups, the Great War veterans, the Joint Distribution Committee, Jewish Agency.”
Foster shook his head. “Bolsheviks?”
“They’ve been very careful to steer clear of the Soviets. Rabbi Wise is a good politician. Besides, the Soviets are—”
“A big market for the Germans. This all of them? The whole parade? I heard Boston and San Francisco too.”
“Supposedly. London’s turn tomorrow. We had a cable warning about hard currency transfer problems—”
“I saw it. I just got off the phone with Schacht in Berlin. You think I’m hot? He’s apoplectic, I tell you.” Foster slammed the window shut. “He’s got hard currency reserves for two months, less if they have to start buying dollars to shore things up. The Reichsbank is damn near broke, never mind skipping bond payments.” He lowered himself into his chair.
“You think it could bring Hitler down?” Allen stood, keeping his distance; Foster radiated a tamped-down fury.
“A dollar is a dollar,” the elder Dulles replied. “Put enough of ’em in a row and, yes, a solid push could bring Hitler down. You’re the one who’s been to Berlin lately, you tell me.”
“Hitler’s hanging on by his fingernails. One good push …” Allen shrugged.
“Wonderful. More chaos. How does anybody expect to do business?” Foster idly flipped through the papers on his desk, patting the top of his head, one of his tics when stressed. “Well, I’ll tell you, they keep this up, never mind Palestine, the Zionists’ll have a Red Berlin on their hands. Interesting times, isn’t that the Chinese curse?” He looked at a wire photograph from the morning papers. “Look at that sign. ‘No more business as usual.’ They’re only hurting themselves.”
Having weathered the worst of the storm, Allen readied a strategic retreat. “The Jews have a point. They have to live somewhere.”
“Appears they’re living right here.” Foster gave a sardonic smile and raised page one of the Wall Street Journal. “More good news. Klinsmann gave an interview this morning, right off the boat. He’s having a child, by the sound of things.”
“I’ll bet he’s fit to be tied,” Allen agreed.
Foster lit his cigar and began to straighten his papers. “We’ll find out soon enough,” he said with a grim smile. “He was stuck in the traffic. Speaking of looking a boycott right in the eye.”
Allen took another step backwards, checking his watch. “I’ve got Peters from Standard Oil at two forty-five. What’s Klinsmann want?”
Foster had his cigar going again. “What everybody else wants in Germany these days, something for nothing.” He waved a letter at Allen, holding it up like a bad fish. “Look at this letter from the German bondholders’ association.”
Allen looked the letter over, then waited a long moment before replying. “I see. Not exactly a surprise, is it?”
Foster’s thin lips puckered, knitted with bile. “You know, for once in your life I wish you’d just come out and say what the devil you mean. ‘Not exactly a surprise.’ Jumping Jehoshaphat. Talking to you is like pinning a squid to the wall.”
“I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so what the hell,” Allen replied, his voice veneered with an imposed calm. “What’s the maturity date for that last batch, the Dillon, Read paper for the Hamburg electric company?”
“Ninety eighty-eight.” Foster was fighting off a lopsided grin: Allen could tell he had him now.
“Pity the bondholders. Hitler’s never going to pay, Fos. Not in a month of Sundays. What’s that line Keynes had? ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ He’s right. Beats an interest payment every time, death.”
Foster did one of his U-turns, standing again, the cigar smoking, raising a thin trail of blue-white behind his back. “We’ve got more immediate problems. Roosevelt’s bright boys are just dying to shut Wall Street as we know it down for good. You watch. The man’s a traitor to the property-owning class. Hyde Park aristocrat my eye, he’s a parlor socialist.” That irritation expended, Foster rapped on the glass, pointing. “Look at this knucklehead and his sign. ‘Don’t trade with Nazis.’ How can we control them if we don’t trade with them? You’d think every German’s a National Socialist.”
Clearing his throat, Allen shook his head. “Hitler thinks so. The Jews aside, of course.”
Foster was still tapping at the window glass; from the sound of it he hadn’t cut his fingernails recently. “Hitler’s a historical necessity. He’s about the only politician who can keep the factories running and the Reds out. You’ve said so yourself. You’ve read Eleanor’s last note, she says much the same thing.”
“That’s not my sense of her letters. I think the Brownshirts scare the hell out of her.”
“Come off it. Ellie can read a balance sheet as well as any man. She knows who’s buttering the German rye.” Foster stalked back to his chair and lowered his big body, the upholstery hissing as he settled.
There was someone in the hall, walking slowly past. When battling Foster, Allen couldn’t abide eavesdroppers. “I don’t see how you think we can continue to do business there, you know,” he said quietly. “Have you read Slater’s article in the Journal about the German law courts?”
“Now we’re getting to the nub, aren’t we?” Foster asked with some satisfaction, rocking back in his chair. “You do take a while, Allen, but eventually the veil drops. Yes, I read it. And I say Hitler’ll learn he needs the law to survive, just like every other politician.” Foster picked up a typescript. “Here’s my reply to Slater, for the next Foreign Affairs. ‘I believe Hitlerite Germany, the new Germany, is undergoing a rebalancing, in the wake of the old regimes, the old imperial powers. Hitler’s is a more vigorous national response to history. That the Germans have an import surplus should commit us more deeply to raising more capital to help redress it.’”
“You’ve used ‘more’ twice in one sentence.” Foster was staring at him. Allen felt the flush rise up his neck to his face. “You asked for straight talk?” Allen replied, his voice low. “What if Hitler nationalizes everything, the Ruhr, the mines, the auto parts plants, the chemical works? What the hell do we tell our clients then? ‘Sorry about that’? Those bond commissions made us rich. We better start cutting our clients a way out of this German business or we’ll end up practicing traffic law in Poughkeepsie.”
Foster, still rocking in his chair, considered his brother, minuscule squeaks punctuating the din from below. “Well, there’s a deep vein of philosophy.”
Allen gestured toward the door. “I’ve got a mountain of files to sort out for Peters, for the Standard Oil deal. Rockefeller’s man has got details on the brain.”
Foster stroked the lint on his jacket thoughtfully, still staring at Allen. He found a fragment of crisp burnt tobacco on his shirtfront and made a show of flicking it off before speaking again. “When you’re finished your little rebellion,” he said, stroking a leaky eye behind his glasses while fixing Allen with the other, “you might do well to remind Peters I reviewed the last two trust agreements for Standard Oil myself. For the details.”
Allen lowered his voice again, a slight smile masking the fresh flush of anger on his cheeks. “I will. I will at that.”
As Allen’s footfalls died away, Foster contented himself with the quiet of his spacious office, the sounds of the protesting crowds far away. He stared at his closed door and shook his head. Will wonders never cease? Allen had never, ever been so contrary before. Not once: never in all his years as Sullivan’s lead trustee to socialite biddies and scapegrace second wives. And now taking Peters on—that was a real change from the estate hackwork Foster could trust him to rough out with a dull pencil before Foster hi
mself weighed in with the scalpel. Well, Allie’s found his balls—and for once they’re not in his own hand.
Foster adjusted his glasses, straightened his legal pad before him, and began to draft one or two wrinkles that might keep Herr Doktor Ludwig Klinsmann, the king of German automotive bearings, on the side of the angels.
XIV
NOVEMBER 1933
Even the schoolchildren were surprised—all this whiteness and not even December.
They strode down new white pavement, chins buried in their scarves, leaving traceries of black in the untouched snowfall, their bookbags and hats and hair webbed with the fresh fall. Gusts of the clotted November snow tumbled across Sheridan Square, past the silent drinking men at the oil drum full of burning tree limbs, the pure white blanching its column of black wood smoke. “Another million unemployed by Christmas!” the Herald Tribune’s newsboy shouted against the wind on the corner. Eleanor’s footfalls filled in almost as fast as she walked, making for the gypsy tearoom around the corner from Grace Dunlop’s house.
Épernay was sixteen years ago. Eleanor’s old friend had run off to somewhere in the Deep South with a handsome heir to an Oklahoma oilfield named Peter whom nobody in their circle knew, moved to Argentina with him, and then came back ten years later, a child named India in tow. Grace had been widowed to a riding fall, she’d told her old classmates, sharing a suitcase full of photographs of life on the pampas to make up for the years incommunicado.
She hadn’t settled down since, the gossip ran; no one would ever tame Grace again, her friends all said. Never.
That marriage—on the train and off to the next experience—was pure Grace. She is, in short, everything I am not, Eleanor thought affectionately. The snow misted her spectacles as she opened the tearoom’s door.
There were two shivering men at the entrance, stamping their shoes in the snow, selling sunflower seeds and apples. “Nickel for a bag and a good Spy apple, ma’am,” the one with the thin brown scarf offered. Both men had been soaked through across the shoulders by the wet snow.
“I believe I will,” Eleanor replied, feeling for the coin in her purse.
“Thanks, ma’am. ‘A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind,’” said the second, tipping his cap.
“Shakespeare,” Eleanor observed. “And well chosen.”
“You’re a connoisseur, ma’am,” he said, replacing his cap and holding the door open, a silver bell tinkling. A rush of muggy air held all three of them for a moment.
“You’re actors, then, down on your luck?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s legit and I’m in vaudeville,” the apple-and-seed man replied. “We’re looking for a break. Tough, though.”
“Good luck to you,” she replied politely.
In the corner, her elbows set firmly on the table, prop for her remarkable face, sat Grace Dunlop, missing friend, once and perhaps future confidante, and, for several hot autumn weeks twenty years ago, the most adventurous thing Eleanor had done in her life, until she’d met David, the cuckoo in the Dulles family nest.
“Tell me about him, Ellie,” Grace ordered, after they had embraced in a flurry of familiarity that set Eleanor’s heart pounding. “What’s he like, this lover of yours? Come, come, out with it!”
Eleanor stirred her tea and tried to bear herself with something like nonchalance; the ladies at the next table were eavesdropping and she could feel her cheeks burning, lover not being a term in her vocabulary, public or private.
“Don’t you play coy with me, Miss Eleanor Dulles,” Grace commanded. “I can see right through your crusty Presbyterian soul. You’re in love, and no shame in that.”
“No,” Eleanor agreed, coloring. “Indeed not. Where to begin, then?”
“You could always start at the beginning, couldn’t you? Or is that too logical for your lovestruck head?” Grace suggested.
“Well, it’s old news, Grace. It’s been seven years since we met in Paris—”
“Paris!” Grace hooted, delighted. “Well, something drew you back, Ellie dear, to the city of lights. But I’ll shush,” she whispered dramatically, reaching across the table and holding on to Eleanor’s hands for a long moment. “Do go on.”
Eleanor retold her love story, pell-mell, for a good five minutes, the enthusiasm pouring out of her. “He was so open about his life,” she was saying, “even painfully so. Divorced, terrified he’d harmed his child, and guilty about the divorce as a Jew. But open, in a way American men so rarely are. That’s what I found so attractive about him: we could be friends. He was the first man I’ve met who is a good listener, I suppose that’s what it is.” Eleanor took a sip of her cool tea and found herself staring down at the tabletop, tight with embarrassment, awaiting the first blow from the worldly Grace.
“Well,” Grace said at last, “that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make, and that’s a fact.” She considered Eleanor thoughtfully, measuring her next words. “And just how romantic a romance is this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Eleanor, do you love the man or do you just like talking about him?”
Eleanor looked up at the big mirror on the far wall and let her eyes roam over the faces at the tea shop’s tables for a moment. “It’s—well, it’s a big thing for me to say, Grace,” she replied, lapsing into the formal, as she did when big things were to hand, “but, yes, I believe I love him. Truly.”
“Well, it’s the only game in town, you take it from me,” Grace said fervently. “I’ve made my own quest for the grail too, darling. I still believe in it, and then some. You remember when I decided to marry Peter and trundle off to that Argentine cattle ranch of his? Never regretted a minute of it, Ellie, down to the moment I held him in my arms as he died. You find true love in your life, darling, and you hang on to it like it had teeth to bite you back, ’cause that old demon may never come your way again. And that’s my advice to you.”
“Well, the arithmetic was starting to weigh me down, Grace,” Eleanor said. “I was beginning to think there was nothing in the stars for me—past thirty, no children, trying to make my way in a man’s profession … Oh, my word, Grace, I haven’t asked after your child! How is India?”
“Very bonny, thank you. She’s thriving, going to a lovely little school uptown, costs me a fortune, but she loves it. She has Peter’s eyes and my hair and is quite the cleverboots. Leads me a merry chase. And go on, Ellie, you can ask,” Grace said with a laugh. “I am not without admirers, you know.”
Eleanor smiled. “Well, I’m glad. Anything serious?”
“Well, yes, actually, there’s a very special someone, someone quite unexpected,” Grace said, a musing half smile softening her. “I met Bert at the kind of political meeting you wouldn’t be seen dead at, Ellie. Communists, every man jack of ’em.”
“Well, this conversation is taking an exciting turn, isn’t it?” Eleanor observed. “Are you a Communist now?” she asked, on the verge of a laugh. “Forgive me, that was crass.”
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Grace replied easily, “and the work is exciting, as exciting for me as I’m sure the war work in France was for us both, except it’s here, right in this neighborhood, in the streets of New York, for the political survival of the least of the least. Gave away my money—your shiny bright investment advice made me eight thousand dollars in five years, Ellie, and every penny of it I gave away—that’s what I’m doing. What Bert and I are doing,” she said, correcting herself. “You’d be excited too, if you knew Bert. I think you’d see why I’m so in love.”
“What does he do, Grace?”
“Bert Crawford, aged thirty-one, born Boston, Mass., occupation schoolteacher and member of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.,” replied Grace, now sitting quite still, like a schoolgirl reciting Latin conjugations, “is a she, Ellie. Roberta Louise found me and I found her and we’re utterly in love,” Grace said quietly. Then she waited, her eyes steady on her old friend.
Eleanor was s
truck dumb. The first thing that surfaced in her was the moment Grace had told her at Bryn Mawr that they were over, in that way—not the word she’d used, but Eleanor, heartbroken, had blocked all sound as Grace spoke. In a gentle way, of course, but that gentleness only lit up all the more the scalded nerves of her heart.
“I’m so happy for you, dear,” Eleanor said, letting a brave smile rise. “After so much pain and sorrow.”
“I’m still so bourgeois about it all, Ellie, still afraid my friends will cut me dead. My family has, without a penny. I’ve just Grandpa’s trust fund left—thank God the Dutch know how to build a tropical railroad, darling.” Her hands came up from her lap and she took hold of Eleanor’s again, something desperate in her grasp. “I never thought I could love another human being again after Peter died, Ellie dear,” she confessed, her eyes full. “But I can. I do.”
Grace attracts damage, Eleanor decided, in the most beautiful way possible. She left the sweltering tearoom as soon as she decently could, one of Grace’s perfect kisses singeing her cheek all the way to Penn Station.
XV
JANUARY 1934
Three floors to go and no breath at all to climb, Eleanor thought, her legs oddly light and weak. Outside David’s brownstone, the cold deepened as the city night closed in. Breathless, she’d stopped in the overheated stairwell to rest against the third-floor railing. Eleanor folded herself heavily into a chair nestled next to a much-dripped-upon scaffolding. Musser, the building supervisor, a pudgy, florid man in painters’ coveralls and a porkpie hat, stepped out from his shadowed doorway. “Hello there, Miss Dulles,” he growled. “You okay?”
“Just a little short of breath, Mr. Musser,” Eleanor replied. “This heat, I think.”
The super pointed skyward. “Professor’s out. You want some ice water?”
Eleanor slipped off her gloves and dropped them in her purse. She felt feverish. “No, thanks. I’ll just let myself in and have a lie-down.”
The Witness Tree Page 12