The Widow of Wall Street

by Randy Susan Meyers

  She stood, stretched, and tiptoed out, desperate for caffeine. It took but a few hours of her vigil to move from confused visitor to experienced member of the ward. The compassionate Jamaican nurse had showed her the coffee pot next to the head nurse’s office. The Irish resident, brogue intact, pointed her to custard and gelatin tucked in a hidden corner of the fridge. An intern slipped her packets of saltines. Over the course of a few hours, the petri dish of medical horror became a bubbling cauldron of kindnesses, staffed by overworked people, mainly women, swimming through waves of broken patients.

  Phoebe poured coffee, lightened it with chemical cream, and then carried the Styrofoam cup to her mother’s room, where she leaned back into the rigid orange chair.

  Time lagged. Everyone waited for something in hospitals: a doctor’s visit, a bedpan, a wound to heal. She rummaged deep into her pocketbook until reaching a stash of striped white-and-red peppermints. After unwrapping one and then sucking hard to rid her mouth of the flavor of hospital coffee, her mother’s eyes opened.

  “Wahta,” Lola croaked.

  Phoebe found the cup filled with crushed ice, mostly melted, and then held the straw to her mother’s lips.

  “How do you feel?” She worked to keep tears from her voice.

  “Where Daddy?” Tears fell down her mother’s bruised cheeks. “Hurt? Worse than me?”

  Phoebe hesitated.

  Her mother tried to turn her head, winced, and then remained still. “He die, right? I feel it.”

  Phoebe’s tears matched her mother’s. “I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’ll call Deb to come.”

  “Let Deb rest. You here.” Her words revealed missing teeth, gaps her father would have made perfect. She gestured for more water. Tears ran in an unstopped stream. Phoebe didn’t know whether to wipe them away.

  After three sips, her mother pushed away the cup. “Hurts. Red. My sweet Red. Always.”

  “I know,” Phoebe said.

  “No life without him.” Her mother touched the wetness on her face without wiping it away, almost caressing this proof of love.

  “You have us,” Phoebe said. “We need you.”

  Her mother ignored her words. “Where rings?”

  “Here.” She held up her right hand. “Deb and I take turns wearing them.”

  “And Daddy’s?”

  “Left hand,” she said, lifting it.

  “Good.” She tried to raise her neck but couldn’t. “Take off my necklace.”

  “Keep it on, Mom. If they have to operate, then I will.”

  “Want to see how it looks on you. Please.”

  Phoebe, trying to see through the tears, worked the worn gold chain clasp around to the front and undid it. She inched the necklace off carefully and held it in her hand. Her great-grandmother and then her grandmother had worn it before her mother.

  “Put it on.”

  Phoebe fastened the locket. The chain was thin, the pendant warm.

  “Take good care of that.” Her mother gasped in pain as she fell back.

  • • •

  Phoebe laced fingers with Deb as the limo sped them toward the final good-bye. Their parents were dead. They were orphans.

  Mount Lebanon. New Montefiore. St. Charles.

  Cemetery signs lining the Southern State Parkway out on Long Island chronicled the future of all passing by. Phoebe wanted to blindfold Kate and Noah, keep them walled off from jealous ghosts hovering overhead, seeking company.

  She’d been on this road before: Grandma, Aunt Nanny, Uncle Sid, they were all buried in Beth Moses.

  “Life goes by in a second.” Her mother snapped her fingers each time she said those words. “Boom, and you’re gone, yet every minute is so long. Your grandmother taught me that.”

  Boom. Phoebe had left Bellevue for a walk. When she returned, her mother had died—not lasting one night after learning of her husband’s death.

  Boom.

  What had been the lesson? Phoebe should have panned for more nuggets of ancestral wisdom. Maybe Grandma warned them to weather the long pain of the minutes because otherwise joy rushed away? Pay attention? Do good? Love your family? Hold them close before they disappear into the ground?

  Phoebe squeezed Jake’s hand, grateful that he had known her parents for so long. He’d become flesh of her flesh, as her parents had with each other. Her mother touched her father often. Despite her sardonic nature and cutting words, she never stinted on showing Daddy love. The knowledge came in a torrent of memories. Squeezing her father’s shoulder as she left the table at Peter Luger Steak House so recently. Leaning over and kissing the bald spot on top of his head, ruffling the bits of red hair remaining, still earning his nickname.

  Her parents were gone.

  The previous night, she and Deb had sorted through family pictures, making posters for the service and then holding objects you don’t realize are the most precious until death do you part. The small blue and white delft box where her mother put her rings each night. The scrolled brass mail station in the hallway.

  Death taught you that souls lived in the ephemera once surrounding the ones you loved. Families fighting over ancient decks of cards and leaking teapots struggled to be keepers of the past. Now she understood. Possessions mattered because they held your history.

  They walked slowly from the limousine to the family gravesite, a spectral lawn with room for a hundred graves. Would she and Jake rest someday with her parents, or would he insist on majesty? Phoebe feared a lonely place of grandeur where she’d be alone with him until the children joined them.

  Deb reached for her. They walked together clutching embroidered black handkerchiefs from their mother’s drawer. Talismanic bits of her parents shielded them during the finality of burial. Phoebe wore the gold locket, Deb the wedding and engagement rings.

  The men’s and boys’ black silk yarmulkes flapped against hairpins in the early December wind. The older women—her aunt Ruth, and many of her mother’s friends—had pinned lace circles on their hair. They clutched black coats close as they huddled, a clutch of widows. Those with living husbands stood straight and a step behind, rejecting death, seeming unwilling to taunt the spirits.

  Jake took her hand as they reached the gravesite opened for two boxes. Noah took her other hand. Kate leaned her head on Jake’s shoulder.

  Part 4

  * * *

  It Falls Apart

  CHAPTER 22

  Jake

  September 2008

  “How about some cupcakes with your coffee?” Jake faked a grin at the accountants. The two had been sent from the US Securities and Exchange Commission—otherwise known as the SEC—the goddamned federal overlords of money. “The best you’ll ever taste. We bring in a few dozen from the Cupcake Project every day. It’s my wife’s company, by the way.”

  “The Cupcake Project belongs to your wife?” This was the young one of the duo, a woman who looked as though cupcake tasting were her second job.

  Jake held his hand to his heart. “Love of my life. The softie of the family. All the profits go to Mira House, a community center on the Lower East Side. She’s been working there since college.”

  “I read about that business.” The balding accountant’s stern expression broke into a vague look of admiration. “So, your wife started it?”

  “Yup. We moved back to Manhattan a few years ago so she could oversee opening the store downtown. Right near Mira House. She’s the bleeding heart, and I’m the head of stone.” Jake leaned forward as though to tell them a secret. “Of course, everyone’s a soft touch for their wife, right? It’s not common knowledge, but I helped with the start-up costs.”

  Jake made sure to sound self-deprecating, letting them know he was severely lowballing his contribution to the Cupcake Project. “The connection? It’s not a secret, but I don’t spread that around. Phoebe gets full credit for this one.”

  He left the room and called his secretary. “Connie, bring a tray to the conference room. Stat. Pile up enough cu
pcakes to stun an elephant. Add bagels, coffee, tea, and anything else you can think of.”

  He raced up the stairs to the thirty-seventh floor.

  The damned SEC had unearthed accusations from years ago, and today he might pay that overdue bill.

  Jake might be the only man on Wall Street who’d been helped by 9/11—not something of which he was proud, just a truth. Hell, Jake lost friends. Solomon’s sister died. Jake closed JPE so the entire company could attend the funeral.

  Never would he wish that death and destruction on a soul—hell, he’d donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to helping victims’ families—but in a strange shift of historical winds, 9/11 had blown away a sword of Damocles dangling over Jake’s head. Earlier in the year, a small industry publication, Funds Upfront, had called Jake’s lack of volatility almost impossible when paired with his constant incredibly high returns. Unnamed sources in the hedge fund world—and fuck them all roundly—were “baffled by the performance in Jake Pierce’s fund.”

  He agreed to meet with the writer after the article had come out, Jake’s avuncular smile showing how little the suppositions of ghosts concerned him. He ticked off his accomplishments: early automation and computerization programs, infrastructure, management, retaining staff—everything but the fucking enamel on his teeth that helped him legally and stunningly second-guess the market.

  Two weeks later, a different reporter had written about the issues with a sharper pen. This author—some bitch who couldn’t be more than twenty-five—questioned how his Club accounts returned a steady 15-plus percent for more than a decade, theorizing that the JPE brokerage “eased and supported his under-the-radar Pierce Fund,” and then wove a scenario on how he might have done this.

  When asked to go on record for the woman’s article he said, “Each and every word is ridiculous on all counts and also impossible. Any member of my firm will tell you there’s an iron curtain between my brokerage and my private fund. Those who’ve supposedly ‘reverse engineered’ my methods couldn’t reproduce my profit? Well, let me say this: I sure as heck wouldn’t invest with them.”

  But the bitch reporter wanted to hang him. She had ended her smear job by quoting from some supposed investment manager whose client inherited Club-invested assets: “When I called, trying to figure out his game, Pierce would only say, ‘It’s nobody’s business what goes on. It’s a private fund.’ Honestly? It made me uneasy. I couldn’t understand his reasoning on how they were up or down in any given period. In the end, I advised my client to leave.”

  After the article, his biggest feeder fund, those Wasp fucks Cook and Baylor, had called with concerns. Charlie’s genius boys had cooked up some perfect design of a supposed “real-time” computer program to assuage them. The Cook and Baylor assholes came in, watched the show, and were convinced—because people were idiots at heart—but by then, rumors had floated to the SEC.

  In a stroke of what-the-fuck luck, before the whispers built a head of steam, terrorists had brought down the World Trade Center with two hijacked airliners, flown another jet into the Pentagon, and crashed a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field. Nobody cared about covering him anymore.

  Jake unlocked the door to the Club offices. Laughter greeted him. His staff, these geniuses in charge of keeping the fund afloat, played catch with a huge stack of ledger pages.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  Gita-Rae, the last person he expected to act foolish, tossed the papers to Nanci. Charlie stood smoking, shaking his head at the scene.

  “Hold it, boss,” he said. “They’re cooling down the paper.”

  “And aging it,” Gita-Rae added. “We can’t give fresh-off-the-computer paper to the SEC.”

  “Your office, Charlie.” Jake nodded down the hall with a quick jerk. He was telling, not asking. When they got there, he slammed the door and backed up against the steel file cabinets.

  “What the fuck?” Jake, who’d last smoked in 1968, had an urge to bum a cigarette. “Do you think this is some kind of fucking joke?”

  Charlie stared with dead eyes. “They’ve been working nonstop for two weeks, including two weekends. They’re just blowing off steam while they age the report. We can hardly give the SEC perfect paper if it’s supposed to be old reports.”

  Jake composed himself. “How does it look?”

  “Our job is to show them we weren’t front-running, right? Well, we have enough to bury them in proof.”

  The previous month, in Jake’s first meeting with the man and woman from the auditing arm of the SEC, he’d asked what it was they were seeking.

  “What do you think we’re looking for?” the guy had retorted as though guest starring on Law & Order: Accounting Division.

  Jake set the bait. “I assume you’re looking for front-running.” Front-running was this year’s crime du jour, as brokers ran wild using information from their analysis department before sharing the data with clients.

  The SEC hound neither confirmed nor denied Jake’s supposition, but his expression told Jake he’d hit the right road.

  “I can guarantee you, nothing like that goes on here,” Jake said. “I’d stake my family, my honor, and my bank account on that.”

  Which was 100 percent true. Why the fuck would he need to use analysis for trades he never made? Sometimes he wished he were front-running, back-running—anything but juggling billions of pure lies.

  • • •

  The SEC flunkies bought the bullshit, studying the oversized paper as though he’d handed them the Magna Carta. They’d come expecting nefarious schemes, but the idea that the two years’ worth of trading records they requested could be manufactured from whole cloth never made their radar. The Club was the purloined letter of Wall Street. Had they asked for the records from the NASD—the National Association of Securities Dealers—it would be game over.

  Jake dripped with sweat under his suit by the time the bald guy and the fat woman left. Minutes after shaking hands and sending them off with cupcakes, joking about bribery by cupcake—ha, ha—he locked himself in his office. He pulled the shades and removed his jacket. As he walked to his large private bathroom, he unbuttoned his shirt with trembling hands.

  His teeth chattered from pent-up fear; he was amazed the accountants couldn’t read hidden panic on the nimbus surrounding him. Before getting into the shower, he splashed icy water on his face until it anesthetized his skin. Anxiety pounded through his chest. Every sound became the SEC returning after unearthing some oddity as it reexamined his numbers.

  Who the fuck knew what Solomon and Charlie had told Gita-Rae to enter in the bullshit reports. Nanci didn’t exactly have a sharp mind; her fingers were nimble on the keyboard, but not infallible by a long shot.

  Jake turned the shower as hot as he could take it, washing sweat out of his hair and then using a rough loofah to scrub at the electric currents of fear flowing through his veins and itching at his skin. Leaning against the glass walls, he broke apart and slid to the tiled floor, his gasps muffled by the pounding hot water.

  Once calmed, he closed the taps and stepped out. He’d give up a year of sex for one fucking Xanax.

  He wanted out.

  Phoebe asked him so often that her words had begun to scrape his soul: “When is enough, enough, Jake?”

  When he insisted on buying the penthouse apartment in Manhattan, he thought she’d divorce him. Phoebe wanted him to close shop, promising that she’d turn the Cupcake Project over to Eva and Mira House. “Let’s enjoy life, enjoy our money!”

  “Kate and Noah would love to be in charge,” she told him repeatedly.

  All true.

  Phoebe would never believe they wouldn’t have enough money to retire—even if he liquidated every account, their houses, the boats, and damned watches.

  Even if he believed finessing the Club closing was possible, the hopelessness of buying out member accounts held him prisoner, especially now. Everyone was demanding cash these days, looking to liq
uidate, terrified by the recent plunges in the market beginning with last year’s Black Monday. Nobody wanted to ride the waves, stick it out. They all wanted the equivalent of mattresses to hide their money under.

  “Jesus, Phoebe,” he wanted to say, “getting out is my damned dream.”

  Every day, he wrote numbers in pencil, playing the same game: How much to make it right? The magic formula tantalized him and was always out of reach. There had to be a way. Sure, you heard about all the people who got caught, but he’d bet that more than one guy pulled it off.

  The Club was his albatross, a blind, sucking maw of need. Every penny withdrawn meant bringing in another penny. He did nothing but shovel money into the monster’s mouth.

  Numbers marched across the pad.

  The Club’s cash accounts were dangerously low.

  Which put him back on the fucking roller coaster to get more clients, because, for sure, tomorrow morning the telephone would ring with more people wanting to empty their accounts.

  Nothing had changed since the days when Eli Rosenberg and his putzy cousins pulled out their money.

  On the desk were the books he’d carried from the Bronx. He opened Registration and Regulation of Brokers and Dealers to a random page.

  “We have seen that the effect of subordinating a liability pursuant to a satisfactory subordination agreement is to permit such indebtedness to be treated as part of capital for purposes of the rule.”

  Close to gibberish, that’s how it read to Jake now.

  Jake skated on the thinnest of knowledge these days. Years of spouting bullshit, along with turning over all operation of their legit business—the brokerage—had knocked out all stores of real information. He spent his days as a babbling brook of words meaning nothing, and yet nobody questioned him. How long before everyone saw he was a naked emperor? Jake almost hoped the SEC would find him out, allowing him to release his hold on the bulging bag of lies he carried everywhere.

  Any day now, he’d burn his ledger.