The Rich Are Different (77 page)

‘Well, my schedule’s certainly crowded,’ I said, ‘but I do have a spare five minutes in three hours’ time. Maybe I can call you back then in the hope of finding you in a more sociable mood. Goodbye.’

‘Wait! Cornelius, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean you to take offence! Come and have a drink with me this evening.’

‘I’d rather take you out to dinner.’

‘Well, I – no, I guess I can cancel that. Yes, dinner would be lovely.’

I began to feel I was at last making progress.

We went to Pierre’s. The black marble columns in the vestibule had never seemed more erotic. Vivienne wore a midnight-blue gown with a neckline which ended within a gasp of the navel while I wore my best nonchalant expression and tried to stop shifting around in my chair. All food seemed unbearably irrelevant.

Finally I had the opportunity to say: ‘I have some very fine French brandy at home which I’ve been saving for a rainy day. Would you—’

She said she would. I could hardly restrain myself from rushing headlong into the Cadillac. Every wasted minute seemed a tragedy.

We were
waiting in the drawing-room for the butler to bring the brandy when she murmured: ‘I guess all your girls tell you what beautiful grey eyes you have. Maybe I should admire your mouth instead.’ And she trailed a finger lightly across my lips.

‘Forget my mouth,’ I said incoherently. ‘There are other more important parts of my anatomy.’

Two minutes later I was closing the door of my bedroom, tugging off our clothes and pulling her into bed with me.

There is something fundamentally absurd about the sexual act. When I learnt the facts of life during my ill-starred semester at school I simply could not believe that human beings were capable of such extraordinary posturing and even after I had a clearer idea of the pleasure involved it still seemed obscene that two people should be driven to such desperate intimacies. My numerous short-lived affairs had blunted this judgement but until that night I had continued to feel that my sexual encounters were divorced from the normality of my daily life. However, Vivienne changed my outlook by putting me at ease. Previously I had always feared I was laying myself open to ridicule by exhibiting such bizarre behaviour, but Vivienne taught me that sex was neither ridiculous nor bizarre, but as natural and logical as a mathematical progression.

I performed feats which I would have thought impossible for longer than I would have thought endurable. In between orgasms she would tell me how masculine I was until by dawn I wanted to relay her praise by bellowing it from the rooftops. At seven o’clock, an hour after I had sunk into an exhausted sleep, my valet glided into my room to wake me and promptly glided out again, but the closing door woke me and presently I prised open my eyelids, crawled out of bed and flung back the drapes. Beyond the wall the traffic was already droning on Fifth Avenue and below me in the garden the birds were chasing each other among the trees. The sky was a pale blue, the colour of peace and tranquillity, and far away downtown the great ticker of the New York Stock Exchange was silent and still.

It was the twenty-third of October, 1929. The vast prosperity roller-coaster of the nineteen-twenties, having crawled a month ago to the top of its highest glittering pinnacle, was pausing for one last halcyon moment before teetering over the brink into the abyss far below.

‘My God,’ I said to Vivienne. ‘I’d like to stay in bed with you all day.’

‘Then why don’t you, darling?’

‘No, I’ve got to go to work. The market’s been in bad shape this week and today’s the day the bankers have to flex their muscles to restore confidence.’

‘How wonderful it must be to be God!’ said Vivienne, pulling me on top of her as I fell back into bed. ‘Or do you feel more like Moses parting the Red Sea?’

Naturally neither of us dreamt that the investment bankers were soon to feel more like King Canute. I escorted Vivienne home in my favourite Cadillac, and went downtown with Sam.

We all
went downtown, all the bankers of Wall Street, the famous names and the nobodies, but no bands played, no flags waved, no one cheered as they might have cheered an army marching into battle. No one even knew a war had begun; everyone still thought in terms of unruly skirmishes, and besides there was no visible enemy, only the unregulated market soaring and plunging like quicksilver in a fragile glass, the shadowy laws of mass psychology which no one had ever bothered to understand, and the fickle crackle of paper riches which had no root in reality.

It was all so peaceful, the autumn sunlight falling in the dark canyons of Wall Street and shining on the spire of Trinity Church, and long afterwards I thought that this eerie peace was one of the most terrifying characteristics of the Crash. People can grasp the actuality of a hurricane, an earthquake or a great fire; they can grasp the realities of war; but what they find hard to grasp is the magnitude of a disaster which arrives on a pale pretty peaceful day in a silence broken only by the sinister tip-tapping of the ticker-tape.

‘The market’s still a little sickly, I see,’ said Lewis, pausing by the ticker in the great hall at noon. ‘I thought we were going to see a recovery today after this week’s heavy selling.’

‘Let’s just hope the market doesn’t take a turn for the worse,’ said Martin Cookson, whom Steve had long since nicknamed Cassandra.

I was just reassuring a client that afternoon that we were seeing only another ‘technical correction’ of the market when Sam burst into the room. As soon as I’d hung up he said: ‘All hell’s breaking loose on the floor of the Exchange.’

Rushing down to the great hall we joined the crowd in front of the ticker and saw the prices start to plunge before the gong sounded to end trading for the day.

‘It’ll rally tomorrow, of course,’ said Lewis as we held an emergency partners’ meeting. Later I told Sam I hoped Lewis had arranged to have the words engraved on his tombstone.

Someone agreed with Lewis by pointing out that the day’s trading had been no heavier than the previous Monday’s, although Martin argued that on Monday two and a half million shares hadn’t changed hands in the last hour of trading. There was much useless discussion about what we should do, but in the end we could only come to the obvious conclusion that we should present a calm soothing front to the world by uttering as many expressions of confidence as possible.

‘Excuse me,’ I said in the humble voice I kept for partners’ meetings, ‘but suppose no one believes us?’

Everyone looked at me as if I had uttered a blasphemy.

‘Not believe us?’

‘My dear boy!’

‘Of course you’re very young …’

‘I think you forget, Cornelius,’ said Lewis grandly, ‘that we’re the gods of Wall Street! If we say something is so, then of course it will be so.’

I wasn’t the only one with doubts. With uncharacteristic emotion Martin
exclaimed: ‘But can’t you fellows see what’s happening? We’re already locked into a classic chain reaction downwards – the decline in prices leading to calls for more collateral from margin customers, the inability of the customers to meet the calls leading to the forced sales of their holdings, those sales leading to a further decline, the further decline leading to still more calls—’

‘Bullshit!’ said Clay Linden angrily. ‘All we’re seeing now is the shaking out of the lunatic fringe which attempts to speculate on margin. Monday was a bad day but yesterday was fine. Today was terrible, I agree, but Lewis is right – tomorrow will be better again. We’ve had our crash. Now for God’s sake let’s pull ourselves together and muster the guts to go on.’

I wondered whom to believe. I was inclined to back Martin who had a first-class brain, but brilliant people are notorious for losing touch with reality. With increasing alarm I wondered what was going to happen next.

The dawn came. The sky was gunmetal grey. Wall Street exuded a miasma of uneasiness, and everyone headed automatically for the nearest ticker.

As soon as trading opened large blocks of shares in Kennecott and General Motors hit the floor, and almost immediately the ticker began to lag behind. By eleven the traders on the floor of the Exchange were berserk; the ticker had fallen so far behind that it no longer reflected what was happening, and only the bond ticker, hammering directly from the floor of the Exchange, told us that everyone was struggling to unload. The telephone and telegraph screamed hysteria from one end of America to the other. People said it was the end, the day of judgement. It was as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis.

Everything was falling. United States Steel crashed through 200, sinking like a cement block. Radio, General Electric, Westinghouse – no meteors ever plunged to earth faster than the great stocks plummeted to disaster on the twenty-fourth of October, 1929.

The telephone lines were clogged by this time. Communications broke down, and in the resulting confusion the panic swept to new heights. Then the people began to arrive, and all roads led to Wall Street as the silent crowds streamed compulsively downtown.

When Sam and I went out we found the people were standing neatly in rows on the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building, not talking, not moving, just waiting as if for a saviour they knew would never come. They were like row after row of big black birds, subhuman, as frightening in their disorientation as the victims of some mass-executed lobotomy, and the atmosphere of fear hung over the Street as thickly as fumes over some suppurating factory.

Struggling back to the bank we found all work had been dislocated, and in the crowd riveted to the ticker someone said messages were flashing secretly back and forth between us and the leader of the investment banks, the great House of Morgan at Twenty-Three Wall. Lamont of Morgan’s was to confer with the great commercial bankers in an attempt
to form a multi-million-dollar pool to shore up the market, and at half past one Richard Whitney, the Morgan broker, strode into the Stock Exchange not to sell but to buy.

The market, still terminally ill, rallied bravely as the House of Morgan held its hand and stroked its fevered brow.

‘Morgan’s best bedside manner!’ snorted Clay.

‘Only Lamont could have described the greatest disaster in the history of Wall Street as a little distress selling!’ scoffed Lewis, criticizing Lamont for employing the same tactics he himself had advocated twenty-four hours earlier.

The truth was we were all jealous of Morgan’s. Naturally we were proud that the investment bankers had come to the rescue but it had been a dreadful day, we were all exhausted and we wanted some of the Morgan limelight to cheer us up. Everyone spent much time telling each other that if Paul had lived he would have led the bankers’ consortium and then the House of Van Zale would have been the financial saviour of mankind. Everyone also expressed relief that the Crash had finally arrived. It had been terrible – disastrous – catastrophic – but it was over. It was as if we had been toiling through some arduous pregnancy, survived a hideous childbirth and produced a monster. All we now had to do was shove it out of sight in an institution and pick up the threads of normal life again.

‘Whichever way you look at the situation,’ said Clay, ‘the news has to improve. We’ve hit rock bottom. There’s nowhere else to go but up.’

I noticed that Martin kept very quiet but I supposed he was merely wrestling with the desire to say ‘I told you so’ as often as possible to anyone who would listen.

Everyone spent the next two days insisting that everything was fine. There was a lot of selling but prices were steady and President Hoover was booming soothing platitudes from the White House. It was not until the close of trading on Saturday that Sam and I heard the bankers’ consortium had disposed of Whitney’s emergency purchases in order to recoup as much of their pool as possible.

At the close of trading on Saturday prices once more began to fall.

‘But that’s impossible!’ I said stupefied to Sam. ‘If we’ve hit rock bottom how can we sink any lower?’

‘Maybe things will pick up on Monday.’

We looked at each other. That was when we both knew the Crash wasn’t over and that the worst was still to come.

The next day was Sunday. God was probably much entertained when everyone went to church. Sam and I squeezed into the back of Trinity and spent an hour wedged against a pillar but it was so crowded we never did manage to get down on our knees to pray. When the service was over we went to the bank.

Wall Street was alive. People were working all day to catch up on the enormous volume of paperwork the Crash had produced, and we too worked till dusk. When we went home we didn’t know what to do. I wanted
to see Vivienne but my head was full of figures and for once sex seemed unimportant. Sam tried to drink but couldn’t finish his highball, and when he went to the phonograph I saw him look at his record of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ for a long moment before putting it away in the closet.

On Monday the brokers, bleary-eyed after working throughout the weekend to post their records and go over their customers’ accounts, assembled for the next pulverizing round of trading.

The market, very sick now, began to fade and even the House of Morgan had no more palliatives to offer. Prices plunged point after point in a steady haemorrhage of liquidation, and instead of the decorum which should attend the bedside of a dying patient there was a seizure of frenzied activity. Clerks and messengers scurried mindlessly along the Street, bankers held futile conferences, the brokers spun dizzily through their distorted routines like a colony of mad ants. Once more the ticker dropped far behind; once more Wall Street began to drown in a sea of paperwork as trading intensified and the breakneck volume of business became unendurable. No one went home from Wall Street that night. Lights burned till dawn, and those who had already been working day and night for a week moved through the great corridors of finance like automatons.

Sam and I drank coffee all night in my office and dozed for half an hour shortly after the cleaning women left.

The sun rose. It was Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of October, 1929, and just as a dying patient often embraces death with relief so we mutely waited for the final convulsions of the market which had been the envy of the world.