Abbeville (2 page)

As I approached the stairs I stopped at the old bookcase with its
horizontal glass doors hinged at the top. When I was a boy it had held treasures: Zane Grey's stories for boys, sea tales, a copy of Dale Carnegie and
The Robe,
a number of Bibles, including one inscribed in German in 1851 by one of Grandma's forebears, a leather-bound history of Cobb County, circa 1920, with more than a dozen page numbers listed in the index behind Grampa's name. There was also a secret drawer at the bottom that had held a delegate ribbon from a Republican National Convention long ago, a member's badge from the Chicago Board of Trade, and a silver sheriff's star that at one time in these parts had certified Grampa as the law.

Now the old books were gone, replaced by a collection of
Reader's Digest
condensations. And when I opened the secret compartment, it was empty.

It had never occurred to me that one day I might be wiped out by the market the way Grampa had been. It used to annoy me when my mother would warn me not to get overextended. After all, I was an accomplished man. Trained in the best schools. And by the time the technology boom came along, I had already been in business long enough to have seen my share of ups and downs. In fact, I used to argue from good, University of Chicago financial theory that we needed more diversity in our firm's portfolio. But at some point money becomes a tsunami sweeping away everything, starting with theory. And the dot-com wave was bigger than anyone had ever seen.

A computer terminal on the credenza in my office kept me plugged directly into the swells. They called it a Bloomberg after the man who had started the company. Thanks to his machine, I had instantaneous access to every significant market on the planet. I'd programmed my Bloomberg to display the stocks our venture capital firm had seen through their initial public offering, plus the securities I owned outside the partnership.

I loved my Bloomberg. Sure, there were days when the screen shone
a little too red, its way of denoting a falling price. But the technology boom was creating wealth at such an astonishing rate that most days the screen glowed as blue as a harvest sky.

One of the reasons I did not take my mother's financial admonitions seriously was that I never felt I was living anywhere close to the way I could have. We had a lovely house near the lake, but in Wilmette, not Winnetka or Lake Forest. I drove a nice car, a Lexus, and Julie had an Audi. But there were no Ferraris or Lotuses in our garage. Not even a BMW Z3 to tool around in on the weekends. Yes, we did have our son in North Shore Country Day School, which was pricey. But it was a better fit for him than the public schools. And we did extend ourselves philanthropically, which led to invitations to join several cultural and educational boards. Certainly we enjoyed some benefit, though happily none that the IRS would say required us to reduce the amount of our gift we could deduct. I'm talking about dinner parties with interesting or well-connected people and black-tie social events that, frankly, Julie got much more out of than I did.

The day everything changed followed one such benefit. I forget what kind of human suffering it was for. Julie and I had set the alarm a little later than usual and over breakfast enjoyed a little conversation about whatever the
Trib
had on its front page. Then Julie motivated Rob out of bed as I suited up. We all left at the same time, Julie to drive Rob to school (he was a year shy of getting his driver's license) and I to head down Sheridan Road to Lake Shore Drive, then eventually turn inland to the office building where I worked.

When I got to my desk, I did my e-mail, made a few calls, and worked on my in-box. At 10 a group of young men fresh from the best business schools pitched several of my partners and me on backing their startup company. They dressed in chinos and Façonnable shirts with the top two buttons open to show tanned, hairless chests.

By the time I arrived, the delegation had already been served four-dollar water, and its members had arrayed themselves at the big table so that the people from my firm would have to sit interspersed among them. In the trade this was known as boy-girl-boy-girl.

“Great to see you,” said the apparent leader. “John Durkin.”

“Hi, John. Bill Brewer.”

“Hi, Bill.”

“Thad Reiner.”

“Thad. Bill Brewer.”

“Bill.”

The purpose of the ritual was to imprint each new name in the cranial Contacts file.

“Sid Benz.”

“Sid. Bill Brewer.”

“Bill.”

Their proposition had some appeal, and after a short conference with my partners in the hall, we invited them to come back later in the week to give us more financial detail. We did not say it that way, of course, because dwelling on financials was passé. Instead, Brewer explained to them that we wanted “a little more granularity.” To which the leader of the fledgling company said, “Got it,” as if he had just solved a problem in linear programming.

Next I was off to lunch with an old friend who had made a bundle in computer consulting. According to the argot of the day, he “sold shovels,” which alluded to the strategy a risk-averse businessman might adopt during a gold rush. Caution notwithstanding, my friend had a catholic curiosity and a penetrating mind, which always led to interesting conversation. This day he reported that he had been reading about the Cambrian Explosion, a period in the evolution of life on Earth when suddenly an enormous profusion of new species emerged
in the sea. His interest was not random, since the Cambrian Explosion had come to be a metaphor for the extraordinary multiplicity of new products and services offered up by Internet entrepreneurs.

“If we had been there,” he said, “I imagine we would have bet on the most complex, bright, and beautiful creatures. But do you know which had the greatest odds of survival? Slugs and worms. They did not fight the current. They let themselves be carried along.”

I told him he was just trying to justify sticking to the shovels.

“You do what you can,” he said, smiling as he picked up the check.

The moment I returned to the office, I realized something was happening. All the secretaries were away from their desks. The place was so silent it reminded me of the way the air in Abbeville felt just before a tornado. I went to my desk. The Bloomberg was drenched in blood.

Down. Down. Everything was down. Dot-com stocks and other tech-sector securities were taking the worst beating, but even the index funds and the blue chips were bleeding. It was a rout.

Late in the day Jim Bishop, the firm's founding partner, called an all-hands meeting.

“Corrections get corrected,” he said, full of patrician confidence. “This, too, shall pass.”

Unfortunately, it did not. The market kept falling. Young entrepreneurs who had been worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper were suddenly worth no more than the recycle value of the paper. Companies that had been the market's darlings sent out broadcast e-mails to their employees, informing them that their jobs no longer existed.

Partners' draws at Bishop & Dodge went to zero as the firm attempted to preserve its capital. I was able to turn a few of the securities in my private account into cash so I could continue to pay the bills. Nothing else was liquid unless I was willing to lose a hundred dollars
to get one. At some point my equity in the firm sank below the equity we had in our home.

Even though I would ordinarily have preferred to spare Julie, the situation was so grave that I had to talk to her. As I explained our circumstances, she looked at me with such trusting eyes that I thought the full import of the news was not penetrating.

Then she said, “Are we in trouble?”

“Everybody we know is,” I said.

In the weeks that followed, a feeling of utter helplessness came over me. I tried to take measures to economize, such as shopping for groceries armed with coupons from the Sunday paper. I cut them out in my office; there was not much else to do there. Meantime, I put feelers out to a number of commercial banks, hungering for a proper salary again, no matter how modest. I never received so much as an e-mail in reply.

All the while the memory of Grampa kept coming back to me, and eventually I decided I had to return to Abbeville.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the big old house where he had spent most of his life. The steps still creaked in the same places they had when I was a boy. The hall at the top was still a gallery of portraits. Large, ceremonial photographs looked down, the ones that had seemed to sit in judgment of me during my adolescent years. Over there were Grandma's parents, looking fresh off the boat. Next to them Grampa and Grandma themselves, probably barely into their twenties, as relaxed as a neck brace. I went to the bedroom where I had always slept, hung my garment bag in the armoire, slipped off my shoes, and lay down on the big, white-painted iron bed. The feather mattress enveloped me. At some point I heard ticking from downstairs. My cousin must have thought to have someone come in and wind the heavy ceramic clock that had chimed every hour I had spent in Abbeville.

I quickly drifted off to sleep and dreamt of fleeing something I could not name. When I awakened, the crossing bells were calling the approach of a train. My legs slid off the bed. The whole house began to rumble, a tremor of the earth.

Tiny raindrops were gathering on the rattling window. I slipped my shoes back on, got my Gore-Tex jacket and a pair of rubber overshoes from my bag, and went downstairs. When I pulled the car up to the crossing, I looked down the tracks at the retreating lights of the caboose, port and starboard. The whistle fell as if being borne into the past.

As I drove by the church, I felt a little pang as I recalled the time I had broken a stained-glass window. Then the town fell away, and the flat, endless fields spread out on either side of me. At the rutted road to the cemetery I turned and bounced up a slight incline to what Grampa used to say was the highest point in Cobb County. He should have known, since he had been the one to fence it in when his father had donated the land.

It wasn't hard to locate my father's grave, even though I had not visited it often during the twenty years since we had buried him. He lay near the back fence with the extended family: the Schumpeters, the Vogels, and assorted others. This was my mother's choice. She wanted us all to be together in the end. When she talked about this to my father, his Irish came out. He said that being planted in Abbeville was fine with him; he was pretty sure he'd have nowhere better to go.

I had always changed the subject when my mother started going into her ultimate plans for Julie and me. But now I found it reassuring that our plots were in a trust my mother had established, so there would always be at least one asset left.

My father's gravestone was flat to the ground. In fact, it seemed a little sunken, perhaps the effect of the disturbed water table. Behind it
stood a small plastic American flag in a VFW holder with his World War II rank (sergeant) and dates of service (1940–1945). I got down on one knee and soon found myself speaking aloud.

“I tried my best,” I told him. “But everything is falling apart.”

Then a memory rose from the dead. From kindergarten we had drilled for nuclear war so much that it had become a wolf cried too often. But then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suddenly the beast was at the door. I was sure that soon I would hear the sirens pierce the air, and all I would be able to do would be to count down the seconds until all life expired.

In the midst of it my father came into my bedroom one night as I tried to go to sleep.

“It is probably hard for you to believe,” he said, “but I have known some of what you are feeling. A lot of things happen in this life of ours. Some are very personal. Some are so big it's no wonder folks attribute them to the devil or the wrath of God. This country has been through hell. Most of it probably seems long ago to you, but some of the worst happened not much before you were born. The Depression. Pearl Harbor. There were times that made me wonder how we'd ever get through. But we did. Or at least most of us did. Life does go on, George. It always does.”

With the Cold War over now, at least my son didn't have to live with the nightmare of death hurtling out of the sky. For my father, of course, it hadn't been a dream. When the kamikazes aimed their Zeros at his troop ship, he was as awake as a man can be.

I stood up at his grave. The drizzle had stopped, and the sun came heavily lidded beneath the far edge of the clouds near the horizon. Off to the right rose the monument with Grampa and Grandma's names on it, along with their dead infant son. It was imposing in such a small place; Grampa must have bought it when he was still flush. It had ample
room for his father's and mother's names, his brother's as well, Grampa's act of unconditional, unaccountable love for a man who had led him into disaster.

I stood before the monument for a time. The limestone angels had lost their faces to the wind and rain, the point of the obelisk gone as dull as a worn pencil. I tried getting down on my knees again, but this time no words came. I did not know where to begin.

T
HE DRY, GRAY EARTH CRACKED UNDER THE
blade. Every inch came hard. It would have been much easier to put in these fence posts in April, when the rain-dampened soil had been as black as night and the weeds had not yet woven their roots into a shield. But nobody had needed burying in the spring.

The young man looked over the patch of ground he was supposed to enclose. A generous amount, more than three acres, it seemed absurdly large for the purpose, especially since his father had given him posts—which seemed as big around as tree trunks—on which to string wire delineating exactly what he had donated and what he had not.

Old Rolf Schlagel was going to be mighty lonely up here. Eventually, of course, he'd have company. But the young man, in a collarless, hand-me-down Sunday shirt that had been worn to patches under his father's only suit, could not imagine it ever filling up.