Abbeville (7 page)

Karl left his uncle's office in a daze, contradictions colliding within him. An opportunity of a lifetime, brigaded by cruelty. The sweetness of the city's freedom causing injustice and suffering. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, a newspaper hawker shouted the morning's headline. Another bank had failed. The markets had been getting more and more jittery.

As soon as he reached the floor of the Board of Trade, the clamor and immediacy drove contradiction into retreat. On the trading floor everyone wore linen jackets, wheat green in color for the traders, who had numbered badges pinned to their lapels. Along the perimeter of what they called the pits the traders stood elbow to elbow in a line, like cornstalks at the edge of a field. A pit consisted of concentric risers ascending perhaps four feet on the outside and descending an equal distance toward the center. Each pit specialized in a single commodity—wheat, corn, rye, and so on—and each section was devoted to a specific month—July wheat, September corn, November rye. Every trader had his special place on the risers. Through sharp trading you might force a man into the poorhouse, but as long as he was in the pit you would never take his trading space.

Whenever a large order came in to buy or sell at whatever price the market would bear, a telegraph clerk slapped the order onto the counter, making a sharp noise like a starter's gun. A runner snatched it and raced toward the pits. Woe betide anyone who got in the way.

As Karl donned his trader's jacket and badge for the first time, the
activity in the pit was so intense that at first he couldn't even locate the man who was to train him. Rumor had it that Sampson & Sons was trying to construct a corner in September corn. This meant they were buying heavily in an effort to take control of the supply and then ruthlessly drive up the price. When the price reached a peak they hoped to sell out at enormous profits.

The noise was furious. Men shouted and flung fingers into one another's faces. Karl found some daylight and moved through it. Behind him the crowd closed up again like water.

When he reached the top step, he finally spotted his man. Rather than go around and risk losing his target in the turbulence, Karl descended to the center of the maelstrom.

“Schumpeter & Co.!” he shouted. “Peter Mallory!”

His words were lost in the din.

Ducking outstretched arms, he reached the bottom. Down there the traders oriented themselves outward and upward, where the action was. As a result, the very center was empty and calm.

As he pushed upward again, the mob pushed back. Noise crashed over him.

“Well, there you are, sport,” said Mallory, who immediately caught something out of the corner of his eye, and, like a fisherman seeing the ring of a trout's rise, wheeled and cast. The quarry was a fat, balding fellow ten feet away. Mallory hit his mark, set the hook, and completed the trade, recording it both on the order sheet and on a card he kept in his breast pocket.

“Picked that off at three-quarters,” he said. “The market's already moved north of that.”

Karl looked up at the balcony where an attendant was turning the arm of the indicator.

“You really have to be alert,” Karl said.

Mallory looked past him. His arm flew up and in an instant he was writing again.

“By the time you see the market shift, it's too late,” he said. “You always have to run ahead of the current.”

Hour after hour Karl studied Mallory. Then at the end of the day the older man had Karl attempt a trade. But before he could consummate it, a bell sounded.

“You'll just have to wait till tomorrow to lose your virginity, sport,” Mallory said. “Do you want to have a drink? Or are you a temperance man like your uncle?”

Karl did not drink, but he did not want to say so. Mallory's face had a glow that indicated he didn't mind anyone knowing how he was inclined. They went to a stand-up place around the corner where Karl saw a dozen familiar faces in the mirror behind the bar, as expressionless as the bottles.

“Those are the bulls,” said Mallory. “They were counting on harvesting the fruits of their corner, but the price ended up within an eighth of where it started. They were expecting to get filthy rich, but they'll get filthy drunk instead. Sir, bring us two Pilsners. The lad here has just spent his first day dealing grain.”

They had left their linen jackets behind, and Mallory in his suit looked as though he could work at the Fair. A bright yellow silk handkerchief stood out against his gray double-breasted jacket like a beacon in a gathering fog.

One beer led to another, and then a third. Karl savored the taste of the fields in it.

“Tomorrow you will make money, sport,” Mallory said with an expansive wave of his hand. “Or else you will lose it.”

He lifted his glass and Karl touched it with his. The beer was edgy, and the bubbles stung his nose.

“I don't have much money to lose,” said Karl.

“Don't you worry about that,” said Mallory. “The funds will be the firm's, and I will be there to catch it if it starts sliding through your fingers.”

Later, when Karl got back to his room, he was exhausted but could not sleep. He blamed the muggy weather, what had happened to Luella, the bilious liquid backing up into his throat. At some point his head began to throb. The simple fact was that he could not wrest his mind from the swirling, addictive chaos of the trading floor.

The next day the opening bell approached, and Karl began to panic. Mallory wasn't there. When he finally did arrive, he looked more than a little ill.

“I don't imagine you went right home,” said Karl.

Mallory put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a box of matches with the silhouette of a can-can dancer and the name of a club.

“I guess I went there,” he said.

“What did your wife say?”

“I didn't wake her up to find out,” said Mallory.

Just then a runner brought an order. Mallory nodded him toward Karl.

“As you can see,” Mallory explained to the runner, “I am a mite under the weather. My understudy here will be at the tiller.”

For the next several hours Karl felt as if he were fighting to keep from capsizing. At some point, though, he began to get the sense of the waters. He filled so many orders he lost count of how much corn had moved through his hands. When the closing bell sounded and the dial above the trading floor stopped moving, his whole body felt as if it might collapse.

“Well, sport,” said Mallory, “by my count you've made your uncle two thousand dollars richer.”

“Two thousand dollars,” said Karl.

“Now let's go give ourselves a reward,” said Mallory.

This time Karl came a little closer to keeping up with his mentor at the bar, goaded on by a honky-tonk piano like nothing Karl had ever heard. Mallory wanted to take Karl to another place and introduce him to some can-can dancers, but Karl had a different idea.

He got his mentor into a carriage, then hailed one for himself. He did not know Luella's address, so he offered to direct from up front.

“I've driven a lot of buggies,” he confided.

“Ay,” said the driver, “and I've driven a lot of drunks.”

Row after row of tenements lined the street, which teemed with vendors. The clamor was like an open-air version of the corn pit, if you could call the fetid air open. He tried to focus on individual buildings, but they were all a wobbly blur.

“Slow down, please,” he shouted. The driver grumbled but complied. This made Karl's eyes somewhat more useful, but still he could not tell one tenement from another.

Suddenly a gang of street urchins surrounded the carriage, forcing it to come to a stop. Hands stretched out to Karl. Cries of “Mister! Mister! Mister!” Then he felt a hand reaching into the pocket of his coat. Somehow he found the agility to seize it.

The other boys scattered. A policeman across the way cast a wary eye in the direction of the scuffle, as if to determine who was assaulting whom. The boy wriggled and twisted, but Karl's hand had not lost the strength of the forest.

“I'll turn you over to that officer there,” he said, which set the boy off again. “Unless you can help me, that is.”

“Shit on that,” said the boy. “I don't do the nasty for nobody.”

“Show me where Luella Grundy lives and I'll let you go,” said Karl.

The boy looked at Karl with all the city's dangerous knowledge in his twelve-year-old eyes.

“Gimme a nickel?” he said.

“If you stick with me until I see her,” Karl said.

“Hey, nothin' doin',” said the boy. “What if she ain't there?”

“So what'll it be, lad?” said Karl. “Me or the law?”

The boy squirmed again for a moment, then stopped. Karl helped him into the carriage.

“Where to now, mister?” said the driver.

“Wherever the boy says,” said Karl.

“Two blocks down, then a block north,” said the boy.

The driver snapped the horse into action. The policeman watched them pass—man and boy—and shook his head.

When they reached the place, Karl half recognized it, but in his present state he wasn't sure. He held out the nickel to draw the boy up the front steps and into the vestibule.

“This is the difference in the price of a bushel I bought this morning and the one I sold this afternoon,” he said. The boy looked at him as if he were speaking in tongues.

Luella's full name was on one of the doors. He had expected to see her father's. He knocked, heard footsteps, then the door swung open.

“Here,” he said to the boy and flipped a coin into the air. The boy snatched it at the top of its arc and bolted. It was not his fault that Luella was already closing the door.

“Please,” Karl said. “Hear what I have to say.”

He found himself speaking to a single eye.

“I had no idea this was going to happen to you,” he said. “I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't listen. I'm a farm boy. I don't know about these things. All I do know is that you were kind to me. And
that I liked you. And that I was lonely. And that it seemed possible you were, too.”

She came into the hall with him, closing the door partway behind her until her back braced against it.

“I'm not mad at you,” she said.

“What will you do?”

“Find another job. I have skills, you know.”

He wasn't exactly sure just now what he knew and what he didn't.

“I'm afraid that I have had something to drink,” he confessed.

“I can see that,” she said.

“I was in the pit today,” he said. “Trading. I made a lot of money.”

“That's what people do there,” she said. “It's a very selfish place. Everybody doing things only for themselves.”

She looked at him in a way that made him feel he was losing her.

“You do something for me, Luella,” he said.

“And you know how to flatter a girl,” she said. “Did you learn that on that farm of yours?”

“I don't want to be a farmer,” he said.

She looked at him strangely, almost sad. Then she turned.

“Wait,” he said. “What did I do?”

“One day and the money already has you,” she said.

“It isn't like that,” he said. “Here, take it. I don't care about the money.”

He lifted her hand and turned it palm up so he could empty his pocket into it. There was enough for her to live on for weeks.

“What is this for?” she asked.

“For what happened to you,” he said, closing her hand on the bills.

She turned again and opened the big old door.

“Please don't think ill of me,” he said.

“Are you going to come in or not?” she said, stepping back to make
way for him. Behind her was a single room with a couch and bureau and neatly made bed.

“Where are your parents?” he said.

“I've been on my own since I was fifteen,” she said.

“Are you sure it is all right?” he said from the doorway.

“It will be just fine,” she said.

E
MIL
S
CHUMPETER WAS NOT A LETTER
writer. About the only time he felt the need was to offer condolences upon someone's passing or to scold Sears, Roebuck. Then he would spend countless hours worrying the language, which never seemed less like his first than when he dipped his pen into the black void of an inkwell. It took a lot to get Emil to confront that abyss.

So when Karl found on his bed a letter in his father's Saxon hand, he broke the seal with trembling fingers. But instead of heralding death or illness or telling him to come home, it announced that Cristina Vogel had left for Chicago to spend the summer as a seamstress, staying with her mother's sister, who had escaped Abbeville at nineteen to marry a man more than half again her age. His father thoughtfully included the address.

The news was welcome, but not without complication, coming as closely as it did upon Karl's evening at Luella's flat. And oh, what an extraordinary evening it had been. Luella had been more openly affectionate with him than anyone in Abbeville would have dared. When
they'd parted, disheveled, Luella had thanked him for having more discipline than she. Still, things had happened under her caresses that before had only happened to him in dreams. He said he would, of course, do the honorable thing. She seemed to find that amusing and sent him on his way.

After receiving the letter Karl went directly to the place where Cristina was staying. The man who answered his knock wore a white dress shirt without its collar and a pair of bright red silk suspenders that secured his pants loosely over his belly like a cartoon barrel around a poor man's middle.

“No solicitors,” the man said.

“I've come to call on Cristina Vogel,” Karl said.

“Oh, you have, have you? I don't wonder that she already has begun to attract the bees. Unfortunately, you will have to fly honeyless back to your hive.”