That reminded him. The wampum belt. He still had the damn thing on. He’d forgotten about it during the day. Well, it hadn’t brought him much luck. So far as he could tell, when the brokerage was closed, the houses sold, and all debts paid, he had maybe fifty thousand dollars left in the world. Better than bankruptcy.
Three hundred years of accumulated family fortune, gone. Lost in its entirety. Lost by me, he thought. He’d been the one, the only one in all those generations, to achieve that. He continued to smile out of the window, as he took a deep breath, but it was no good. His body gave a sudden start. The shame of it made him squirm in his seat. He wasn’t sure he could bear it.
Had Joe noticed his sudden movement from the driver’s seat? There was no sign that he had. A good man, Joe. Never asked questions. He’d be all right.
William sat silently and stared out at the river. He tried not to cry. After a while, they passed Grant’s Tomb.
Ahead of them now was a magnificent sight. The mighty American economy might be sinking, Wall Street might be in collapse, yet everywhere you looked in Manhattan these days, you saw these huge construction projects rising into the sky.
The suspension bridge nearing completion across the Hudson River was not just large, it was stupendous. Even the Brooklyn Bridge looked modest by comparison.
“You never married, Joe, did you?” he remarked to the chauffeur.
“No, sir.”
“Any family? Parents?”
“Both dead, sir. I have a brother in New Jersey.”
“That’s a fine bridge, Joe.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pull over when we get to it. I’m going to take a look.”
At the entrance to the bridge, Master put on his hat and got out, then strode toward the bridge. The suspension cables were all in place. There was a walkway running across, and they were already laying the road. He passed some workmen, then a fellow who looked like a foreman came out to meet him. Master gave him a friendly smile.
“You boys are doing a great job.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“We were talking about you the other day.” He could see the foreman wondering who exactly “we” might be. “You’re well ahead of schedule.”
“We are, sir. You’re …?”
“I’m Mr. Master,” William said firmly. “Like to take me out there? I’d be glad to have a look.”
The foreman hesitated just a moment, looked at the rich gentleman and, glancing toward the Rolls-Royce, evidently decided he’d better not take the chance of annoying him.
“This way, sir,” he said. “You have to be careful, though.”
As he stood on the walkway, William glanced northward. How mighty the river was, yet how unperturbed, as it quietly came down from the far-off states. How noble the stony cliffs of the Palisades looked. Yet how hard and immovable. Looking south, he gazed at the long line of Manhattan, at the distant towers of the Financial District and the open space of the harbor beyond.
So the family was back to the beginning now. Just him and the river.
William looked down at the water. If he was going to jump, now would be the time. Years ago, a fellow had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge on a bet. He hadn’t lived. Jumping off here would be a piece of cake, and not a bad way to go. With luck, the big river would swallow him up in its silence, and he’d never know anything more. Just walk out from his Rolls-Royce, as a gentleman should, and into oblivion. The family would manage all right. Better without him.
Or would they? Charlie would go on being Charlie. He’d be poor, but the way he lived, that would hardly make a difference. What about Rose, though? Rose with her foolish obsession with the Newport house, her dreams of marble halls and God knows what. How was she going to cope with the winding up of his affairs? Not well, evidently. He shook his head.
It took less courage to jump than it did to go home. But home he must go. He turned. The foreman, seeing him do so, came quickly over to accompany him back.
“You’ll be here for the opening, Mr. Master?” he asked politely.
“Oh, I expect so.”
He didn’t tell Rose until late that night. She was looking very handsome that evening, in a silk gown. She was wearing the pearl choker that she loved. He wished he had happy news to tell.
He said nothing at dinner, with the servants there. Nor did he tell her while they sat by the fire in the library afterward, in case she should become distraught and make a scene. He waited until they had retired and were completely alone.
Rose had a small boudoir just off their bedroom. She’d told her lady’s maid she wouldn’t need her, and she was sitting there alone, taking off her earrings. He stood beside her.
“I’ve bad news, Rose,” he said.
“I’m sorry, dear.”
“It’s very bad news. You have to prepare yourself.”
“I’m ready, dear. Have we lost all our money?”
“Yes.”
“Do we have anything left?”
“Maybe. Fifty thousand dollars. Something like that. The brokerage is finished. The houses have to go. This one included.” He needed to stop for a moment. She glanced up at him, and took his hand.
“It isn’t a surprise, you know. I’ve been expecting it.”
“You have?”
“I guessed you were in trouble. So many people are.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“What do you want to say?”
“I’m … I’m just so sorry.” He almost broke down, but he held himself together. “What’ll you do?”
“What’ll I do? Live with you, of course. However you like, wherever you like. That’s all I want.”
“But after all this …”
“We’ve had a wonderful life. Now we’ll have another wonderful life. Just different.”
“What’ll Charlie do?”
“Work,” she said, firmly.
“I just—” he began, but she stopped him.
“I want you to get into bed now,” she said.
It was a minute or two before she came from her boudoir. To his surprise, she wasn’t wearing a nightdress. She was quite naked, except for the pearl choker he’d given her. She was a middle-aged woman, but she’d kept her figure. The effect was wonderfully erotic. He gave a little gasp.
She stood by the bed, reached back and slowly unfastened the choker. Then she handed it to him.
“This should fetch quite a bit.” She smiled.
He took it unwillingly. “I never want you to part with this,” he muttered.
“You’re all I need,” she said simply. “That’s what matters.” And as she got in beside him, she pulled him to her.
“I don’t think I can,” he said sadly.
“Shh,” she whispered, and pulled his head onto her breast. “I think you should weep, now. It’s time.”
It was several hours later, long after they had made love and her husband had fallen asleep, that Rose Vandyck Master lay very still and stared at the ceiling.
She was glad it was over, really. Eighteen months had passed since she’d first guessed her husband was in trouble, and it hadn’t been easy seeing him suffer. But there’d been nothing she could do except watch and wait.
She’d remembered how it had been, back in 1907. He’d nearly gone under during the panic then, and hadn’t been able to tell her. So when things started to get bad in the markets this time, she’d reckoned it would be the same. Month after month she’d waited. It was so obvious he was distressed—she knew him so well—but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her.
This time, anyway, she’d taken precautions. She couldn’t do much, but at least it was something. And he hadn’t suspected a thing.
The only question was, when should she tell him?
Not yet. Better wait until the dust had settled and the debts were paid. Strictly speaking, of course, if she concealed money from his creditors, it would be illegal. But she’d take that fence when she came to it. With luck h
e’d come out with something left. The main thing was, she’d been able to remove a chunk of money from him before he could lose it all in the brokerage.
Six hundred thousand dollars, to be precise. She had it safely stashed away, in five different bank accounts, in her own name. Not a cent of it spent.
It was fortunate really that he wasn’t that passionate about Newport. If he’d insisted on going up there, he’d have discovered at once that, apart from a few tarpaulins carefully pulled over bits of the house, there was nothing going on there at all. No architects, no builders, no marble. Nothing. She’d had workmen come from time to time, to give the appearance that something was going on, and the place was well screened by hedges. That, and a lot of talking, had been all that was needed.
Six hundred thousand. They’d be able to rent quite a decent apartment on Park Avenue. They had some beautiful things. They had friends, social debts to call in. While plenty of people with huge losses were vanishing from the social scene entirely, their own case would be different.
After all, they might be poor, but they were still old money.
Brooklyn
1953
THE FIRST THING one noticed about Sarah Adler was the pair of big tortoiseshell glasses on her narrow face. Charlie had also noticed, when she leaned forward, the little Jewish star pendant on a necklace that rested between the tops of her breasts. But now as he looked into those glasses, he saw that her eyes were not only intense, but a magical brown and flecked with wondrous lights.
Sarah Adler was twenty-four. And right now, as those brown eyes stared at Charlie Master across the table in the elegant St. Regis, she was wondering: How old is he? Fifty maybe? Twice her age, anyway. But he looked in pretty good shape.
And you had to admit, older men were much more interesting.
The St. Regis, on Fifth at Fifty-fifth, was not just a hotel. It was a palace. He’d taken her for a drink, first to the paneled bar, where Maxfield Parrish’s huge, luminous mural, Old King Cole, gave a rich glow to the whole room. She’d liked that. And then they had gone into the pillared dining room. Mr. Charles Master certainly knew how to treat a girl. And he talked well, too.
It was only three weeks since she’d taken the job at the gallery, even if it did pay peanuts. So when Mr. Master had walked in this morning with his incredible collection of photographs, and the gallery owner had told her to take care of it, she couldn’t believe her luck. And now they were sitting in the St. Regis, and she was enjoying one of the most interesting conversations she’d ever had in her life.
This man seemed to know everybody. He’d been friends with Eugene O’Neill and all the theater crowd back in the twenties, and he’d written plays himself. He’d heard the jazz greats in Harlem before they were famous, remembered Charlie Chaplin when he was still performing onstage. And now he’d just told her something even more amazing.
“You know Ernest Hemingway?” She worshipped Hemingway. “Where did you meet him? In Paris?”
“In Spain.”
“You mean you were in the Spanish Civil War?”
Sarah had only been seven years old when the Spanish Civil War began, but she had learned about it at school—and at home. At the Adler house in Brooklyn, the discussions had been endless. Of course, none of them supported the side that finally won. General Franco the fascist, with his authoritarian Catholics and monarchists, was everything the Adler family hated. “He’s no better than Hitler,” her father used to say. As for her mother, Esther Adler, who came from a family of liberals and trade unionists, she was ready to join the International Brigade and go to fight herself! Everyone was for the left.
Except for Uncle Herman. Her father’s brother was a thickset man who used to pride himself on his knowledge of European affairs. And whatever the subject, he always knew best. “Listen,” he’d declare, “Franco is an old-fashioned authoritarian. He’s a son of a bitch, okay? But he’s not a Nazi.”
Then her mother would berate him.
“And those Catholic monarchists of his? You know what the Spanish Inquisition did to the Jews?”
And soon there would be a furious argument.
“You think the people fighting Franco are American liberals, like you? Let me tell you, Esther, half these people are Trotskyists and anarchists. Okay? They want to turn the place into Stalin’s Russia. You really think that’s a good idea? No!” Uncle Herman would suddenly shout when his brother tried to interrupt him. “I want to know if she really thinks that’s such a great idea.”
“Your uncle just likes to argue,” her mother would tell Sarah, afterward. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
But when he was alone with Sarah, Uncle Herman would give her candy and tell her stories in the gentlest voice, so she knew he was good and kind. It was just that he liked to argue.
Sadly, those were the only memories Sarah had of her Uncle Herman. The Spanish Civil War was still in progress when he’d gone away to Europe—though not to fight in Spain. Maybe his fate would have been different if he had gone there.
For Uncle Herman had never returned. It was a subject her father couldn’t bear to speak about. So the family never mentioned the poor man now.
“I was a journalist,” said Charlie. “For the Hearst newspapers. I drank with Hemingway a few times, that’s all.”
Sarah laughed out loud.
“You’re mocking me,” he said.
“No. I’m impressed. What was Hemingway like?”
“Good company. I liked him better than Dos Passos or George Orwell.”
“Dos Passos? Orwell? Oh my God, that must have been amazing.”
“True. But civil wars are ugly. Bloody.”
“Hemingway was wounded.”
“So was I, actually.”
“Really? How?”
“There was a man down, quite near where I was reporting. You could hear him screaming. They had a stretcher, but only one bearer.” He shrugged. “I helped out. Took some shrapnel on the way back.” He grinned. “There’s a piece still in my leg, which speaks to me sometimes.”
“You have a scar?”
“Of course.”
“But you saved a man.”
“He didn’t make it.”
Charlie Master had a mustache. It was flecked with gray. She couldn’t decide if it reminded her more of Hemingway or Tennessee Williams. It looked good, anyway. He’d mentioned he had a son. Did he have a wife?
“So what did you do in the Second War?” she asked. “Did you fight in Europe?”
“Newport.”
“Newport, Rhode Island?”
“Has one of the finest deep-water harbors in the country. The British used it during the War of Independence. There was a lot of activity there, especially in ’43 and ’44. Coastal defenses, naval schools, you name it. I was in the Coast Guard.” He smiled. “A return to childhood for me, really. We used to have a cottage there.”
“Like, one of those palaces, you mean?”
“No, but it was pretty spacious. After my father lost all his money in the crash, the Newport and city houses were both sold. My parents had to move to an apartment on Park Avenue.”
She’d already figured that Charlie Master was some kind of blue blood. He had that soft way of speaking. But to move to Park Avenue because you were poor? This was another world.
“You really knew hardship in the Depression,” she laughed, then regretted her sarcasm.
He gave her a wry look.
“It sounds kind of foolish, doesn’t it? But believe me,” he continued more seriously, “at the start of the Depression, it was only a step from considerable wealth to total poverty. There were lines around the block for every job. Wall Street brokers, I mean people you knew, were selling apples on the street. I remember walking with my father once, and he looked at one of those fellows, and he said, ‘A couple of percentage points, Charlie, and that would have been me.’”
“You believe that?”
“Oh, absolutely. When my fat
her’s brokerage failed, we could have been bankrupt, completely finished. Did you ever see Central Park during the early years of the Depression? People put up shacks there, little shanty towns, because they had nowhere to live. One day, my father found one of his friends there. He brought him home, and he lived with us for months. I remember him sleeping on a couch. So, we were lucky but, believe me, we knew it.” He nodded thoughtfully. “What about your family? How did you get by?”
“My crazy family? In my father’s family, one of the children always got an education. So that was my father. He became a dentist. Even in the Depression, people needed to get their teeth fixed. We got by.”
“That was good.”
“Not so good. My father didn’t want to be a dentist. He wanted to be a concert pianist. He still keeps a piano in his waiting room, and he practices while he’s waiting for his patients.”
“Is he a fine pianist?”
“Yes. But he’s a terrible dentist—my mother would never let him fix our teeth.”
Sarah didn’t really want to talk about her family, though. She wanted to hear more about his life. So they talked about the thirties for some time. It was just so interesting. And she found she could make him laugh.
Finally, she had to go back to the gallery. Their next meeting was arranged for the following month, so she supposed she wouldn’t see him until then. But just as they were parting, he remarked: “There’s a new show at the Betty Parsons Gallery next week. Do you go to openings?”
“Yes,” she said, taken by surprise.
“Oh, well, maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Could be.”
I’ll be there, all right, she thought. Though she still hadn’t found out if he was married. But then, there were things he didn’t know about her, either.
On Saturday, Charlie took the ferry to Staten Island. It was a fine October day, so he quite enjoyed the ride. He took it every other weekend, usually, to collect little Gorham.
It hadn’t been his idea to give his son the name. Julie had wanted him named after her grandfather, and his own mother had approved. “I think it’s nice to carry the name of an ancestor who signed the Constitution,” she had declared. Old money, and all that.
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