City of Dreams (45 page)

“And you can’t absorb it? What kind of reserve do you have?”

“It’s not the reserve, sir. It’s the confidence. You yourself told the newspapers that we would be all right if people just kept their money in the banks, but fear is running things now. I fear what happens Monday if news spreads that we’ve had a major default.”

“What are you foreclosing?”

“A theater on Fourteenth Street.”

Morgan sat back, the deck in his left hand, a single card in his right. “I am trying to arrange financing of some twenty-five million dollars to shore up our economy, and you are bothering me about a twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan to a
theater
?”

“To the depositors at West Side, it’s just as important.” Tim took a deep breath, and pressed on. “If the bottom of the pyramid collapses, the top must crash down.”

Morgan gave Tim Riley a long look and opened his mouth to speak.

And Frick pushed past Tim. “We’re ready in the study, Pierpont.”

Morgan put his cards on the table and stood.

But Tim held his ground in the doorway. “May I count on your help, sir?”

“Sign the theater over to me. You’ll have the cash to cover it on Monday.”

Tim wanted to embrace the old man. Instead, he said to Morgan’s broad back as it receded across the hallway, “We repaid you once, sir. We’ll repay you again. And the depositors of West Side will thank you, sir.”

“I always wanted to own a theater. Oh, and”—Morgan turned—“leave the bond.”

Tim Riley would have gone straight away to wake up Daniel Daly, but he knew that he was witnessing history. So he stayed. Besides, they were locked in.

At three in the morning, a hundred and twenty men crowded into the study with the roaring fire and the red damask walls. At four thirty, they had an agreement: they would form a pool to rescue the trusts, the brokerage, and in the process, the national economy. But parts of the plan would need the approval of President Roosevelt, who didn’t trust any of them. And all of them would need the approval of their boards.

Even the most powerful of men were answerable, thought Tim.

Still, Morgan wanted signatures that night. He said, “Your directors will be perfectly supportive, when they learn the alternative.” Then he waved his hand invitingly toward the document.

No one stepped forward, so Morgan went over to Edward King of the Union Trust and pointed to his desk. “There’s the place, King, and here’s the pen.” Morgan put a gold pen into King’s hand, and King became the John Hancock of the night.

At five o’clock, the library doors were unlocked, and the Riley brothers stepped out into the cold.

“Still dark.” Eddie looked up into the sky.

“Brighter than it was,” said Tim. “At the top of the pyramid and the bottom, too.”

E
DDIE WENT HOME
to bed.

Tim decided to go to the six o’clock Mass.

Though Sacred Heart parishioners were meant to keep holy the Sabbath, some had to work on Sundays or their families would starve. For them it was an early Mass or no Mass at all.

Tim sat in the half-full church, surrounded by familiar faces, by depositors, by friends, and he felt that for all his transgressions, he had done them a great service.

Then, as the Mass ended, he heard a pure, clear voice, singing the “Ave Maria” in the choir loft. He looked up and there was Doreen.

She caught up to him outside church. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. Her hair was loose and flowing to her shoulders. She said, “You’re up awful early.”

“I never went to bed.”

“Anyone I know?’

“J. P. Morgan.”

“That’s a relief. I thought maybe you’d found somebody else.” She slipped a hand into the crook of his elbow.

He hadn’t expected that. He almost pulled away, but instead, he turned west and walked to the corner. New York at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning in November was as quiet as it ever got. Ninth Avenue was deserted and still dark under the El.

“I know you usually go to the ten o’clock,” she said, “but I wasn’t takin’ a chance. How about some some bacon and eggs?”

“Whenever you start feeding me, I wonder what you’re after.”

She stopped in the street and turned toward him.

An uptown train was rumbling from Forty-second Street.

She glanced toward it, then she said, “I missed my monthlies.”

“Missed them?” After a sleepless night, Tim’s mind was not working as quickly as usual. “Missed—”

“My ma always said, ‘Where God closes a door, he opens a window.’ I guess you could say, ‘Where God closes a show, he opens a family.’”

“Family?” The word penetrated the sleepy fog in Tim’s head. Then dozens of questions and emotions surged through him.
When is it due? What happens to your career?
Even the unthinkable . . .
am I the father? Are you planning to have the baby
?

But from the way she looked at him, with a mixture of hope, trepidation, and fresh seductiveness, getting rid of the baby was not something she had even considered.

The train roared over them, but her lips were moving.

When it passed he asked her, “What did you just say?”

“Sugar and salt. Sugar and salt and another pea in the pod.”

T
IM WAS SO
exhausted that once he fell asleep, he slept until five in the afternoon. When he awoke, the idea of Doreen Walsh as his wife seemed perfectly natural. So he spent the evening at the Walsh flat on Forty-eighth. Her mother made pot roast. They talked of the banns, of the wedding, and of the birth that they all knew was coming.

Tim left around midnight.

He wasn’t sleepy. So he decided to walk past the bank he had saved the night before. As he came down Ninth, he expected that all would be quiet. It was raining lightly. It was late. It was Sunday. All good reasons for quiet. But as he turned onto Forty-second Street, he saw dozens of men in the shadows beneath the gaslights, forming a line that began at the door to West Side Workingman’s.

Tim hurried ahead and looked for familiar faces and saw, “Eddie?”

“Evenin’, Tim,” said Eddie. Then he asked the man in front of him to hold his place.

“I do not like lines,” said the man, “but I will hold for you.”

Tim recognized Sadowski the anarchist, of all people. He gave Sadowski a look, then led Eddie away from the line. “What the hell is going on?”

“Word is out. Everybody knows your girlfriend’s show flopped. And the papers had us goin’ into Morgan’s library. So there’s talk you’re on the ropes.”

“You know we’re not, but . . . who are you holdin’ a place for?”

“Myself.”

“Jesus, Eddie. You were there last night. You saw what I saw. You should be tellin’ these people that it’s all right instead of joinin’ them.”

“What I saw last night,” said Eddie, “is nothin’ compared to what they fear tonight. And come mornin’, I fear that you’ll see a real run on your bank.”

Tim knew he had to stop this, or it didn’t matter what Morgan had promised. He jumped onto a wagon parked beneath a gaslight and shouted, “Listen to me, all of you! Your money’s safe! Go home!”

“Ahhh, you go home,” shouted someone in the line.

“Your money is safe!” cried Tim.

“That ain’t what we hear!” shouted someone else.

“You are a banker,” said Sadowski. “Why should men who labor believe you?”

“Because I am one of you. I’m—”

“Don’t say you’re our brother!” shouted Sadowski. “You’re a tool of rich men.”

“Don’t you say
you’re
our brother, either,” shouted someone who liked anarchists even less than bankers.

“Some day you will listen to the truth,” said Sadowski, “but for now, protect what little you have from these money-grubbers.”

“Ignore him!” shouted Tim. “We went into the Morgan Library because Morgan is going to guarantee our loans and cover our losses.”

“We’ll believe that when we read it in the papers,” said someone else.

So Tim snatched a late edition
New York Post
from someone in the line. He flipped from front to back, but found no mention of his bank and scarcely a mention of the plan that had emerged from the Morgan Library. Then he ran to Times Square, bought several more papers, but could find nothing in them that would persuade that ever-lengthening line that J. P. Morgan was backing West Side Workingman’s.

Tim Riley stayed all night. He told everyone who arrived to go home, that there was no cause for worry, that the assets of the bank were sound.

But the line kept growing longer, and the rain fell harder, and those who had umbrellas put them up, and those who didn’t made friends with those who did.

At eight o’clock, Daniel Daly came around the corner of Eighth Avenue, with his newspaper under his arm and his umbrella over his head, and he stopped at the sight of three hundred people lining Forty-second Street. His lips formed the words, “Sweet Jesus.”

Theodore Sadowski said, “Sweet Jesus was an anarchist.”

Tim pulled out his watch and looked at his brother. “I need you to do an errand.”

“An errand,” said Sadowski. “Every society has its hierarchy. And every family is a small society. There are order givers and errand boys. “

Eddie said, “I’m nobody’s errand boy.”

“But your brother is a banker,” said Sadowski. “That makes him your superior, in his own mind.”

“That makes me responsible for the future of everyone in this line and half the people between Eighth Avenue and the river,” said Tim.

“That makes you an oppressor of the workingman,” said Sadowski.

Tim felt the blackjack in his pocket. He had put it there the night before, anticipating that he’d be going for a walk. He pulled it out now, snapped it up, then snapped it down. And Theodore Sadowski hit the sidewalk.

Eddie looked down at his brother-in-law. “An anarchist with a bank account. Like a dray horse with a college degree.”

Tim took Eddie by the arm and led him to the door of the bank.

As the guard let them in, someone shouted, “You better not be givin’ him special treatment! No seein’ to your brother’s deposit before you take care of ours!”

“We’ll see to all of your deposits,” said Tim.

It took ten minutes to collect the papers on the Variety Theater. Tim told his brother to go down to J. P. Morgan and Company, and exchange them for cash.

“The lawyers will go over it all later,” said Tim. “But now, it’s in your hands.” Then he gave Eddie the blackjack for protection and the money to hire a cab.

The doors of the West Side Workingmen’s opened at nine
A.M
. The bank run began in the time it took George Delahunt, a lawyer from Fifty-ninth Street, to grab a withdrawal slip, cross the floor, and place himself in front of a teller’s window.

By nine thirty, the cash reserves were down by fifteen percent.

The armed guard allowed one person into the bank at a time. Daniel Daly worked behind the counter and kept track of the dwindling cash. Tim Riley greeted each customer with Morgan’s quote to the papers: “If everyone would just keep their money in the banks, everything will be all right.”

Some people listened. Others laughed in his face.

And the rain fell as if it meant to rain all month.

By ten o’clock the reserve was falling as fast as the rain.

Tim Riley was beginning to wonder if there would be a riot. He had already arrived at the conclusion that he would have to leave his old neighborhood if the bank failed. He had damaged his reputation. Now it would be destroyed.

But at ten fifteen, an auto taxi skidded to a stop in front of the bank and Eddie Riley climbed out with two bags of cash containing twelve thousand five hundred dollars each. The words
J. P. MORGAN & CO
. were stenciled on the sides of each bag.

Eddie held them up, and Tim shouted, “If Pierpont Morgan believes in this bank, maybe you should, too.”

A few people cheered, about half of them went home, and that was just enough.

The run, and the rain, petered out around eleven. Later someone actually made a deposit. When the doors closed at three o’clock, the tellers cheered.

Tim Riley went into his office and put his head in his hands.

Daniel Daly stood over him and smiled, the avuncular mentor yet again. “It’s the sign of a brave man that he learns, adapts, and rectifies his
mis
feasance.”

Tim raised his head. “I’m resigning.”

“Resigning?”

“You said banking is about confidence, not gossip. I’m marrying Doreen Walsh. She’s having my child. That will damage confidence and engender gossip.”

“You’re marrying Doreen the Chorine?” Daly dropped into the chair, looked out the window, then said, “I suppose resigning is a good idea.”

The full dark of November fell by four thirty. A few sporadic showers were still splattering down. The wet macadam of Forty-second Street reflected the street lamps and the headlights and the lanterns on the box cabs.

Tim walked west, wondering what he would do next. Then he remembered something his father had told him: a man who worked with his hands would never go hungry. So he would work with his hands if he had to.

At the corner of Ninth, he heard someone shouting. A small group had gathered around a man on a soapbox.

It was Theodore Sadowski: “Come to Union Square tonight. Hear Emma Goldman open your eyes to all that you saw on this street today . . . the lies of little bankers . . . the paternalism of big bankers . . . the indifference of a system that oppresses you. All will be laid bare.”

A few people were listening. A few were heckling. And one was standing in a doorway in a peacoat with the collar turned up: It was Eddie.

“What are you listening to him for?” asked Tim.

Eddie shrugged. “Sometimes he makes sense, especially on a day when we have to ask the malefactors of great wealth to save our asses.”

“At least our asses were saved.”

Sadowski was shouting, “Once you have heard her, you will want to attack the nearest police station! You will join the cause of direct action.”

“Oh,” said Eddie. “Congratulations. I knew you’d marry Doreen sooner or later.”