IT WAS AFTER EIGHT at night before Finn received the brutal tally from the black ticker tape machine on the walnut desk, got a printout of lows on Thursday, lows on Monday, and lows for today, Tuesday, October 29, 1929.
For an hour he sat at his desk in the tomblike darkness, simply stunned.
Finally, he got up and walked four blocks to Commonwealth Commercial Partners.
The first thing Lionel did was pull out a bottle of his finest whisky.
“I was saving it for the day my daughter got married,” Lionel said. His girl was three. “I thought I was saving it for the best day. Now I know I was saving it for the worst.”
If ever there was a time for drinking, it was tonight.
“No clinking though,” said Finn. “It’s a funeral, not a celebration.”
“I’m sorry, Finn,” Lionel said after three glasses of whisky.
“I’m the one who is sorry,” Finn said. “Why did you listen to me?”
“Because you’ve always been right.”
Finn stared grimly into his empty glass. “We have to figure it out, Lionel. I can’t keep my bank doors closed. I can’t steal my customers’ money.”
“You’re not stealing it,” Lionel said. “You don’t have it.”
“A thief who spends the money is still a thief,” Finn said.
“You didn’t spend it. You lost it.”
“I spent it,” said Finn, sounding as dejected as he had ever felt in his life. “I took it, I invested it, smartly or so I thought, and I lost it. Investing is also spending, Lionel. Spending what isn’t yours.”
“You’re not buying a railroad with it, Finn!”
“Apparently not even one fucking share of a railroad,” said Finn.
No matter how you looked at it, Black Tuesday was the most ruinous day in Wall Street’s history. Sixteen million shares were traded in that single day, another record, dwarfing Monday’s nine million and the thirteen million traded the previous Thursday.
The Dow Jones began that Thursday at 305. It finished Monday at 260 and Tuesday at 230. Since the high of 381 on September 3, the NYSE industrials lost 40 percent of their total value. More than $30 billion was wiped off the companies’ worth in just two days.
There was a rally at the end of trading on Tuesday, as if the sellers were drained by the frenzy, and the bargain basement prices were finally attractive, just as Finn had said—but it was too little and much, much too late. The collapse was so sudden and extreme, it washed fortunes away. It crippled people and institutions. The good and the bad went down together.
Finn, Lionel, Walter, and Finn’s father, the honorable Judge Earl Evans, all went down with them.
Lionel managed to sell Earl’s Montgomery Ward stock for $22 a share, garnering $220,000 in total. Half of the shares had been bought with money borrowed from Lionel, the other half with Earl and Olivia’s life savings. But Earl Evans borrowed $450,000 to buy the shares, and now had a grand total of $220,000 with which to pay it back. Earl still owed Lionel $230,000, and he didn’t even know it. There had been no chance for Finn to speak to his father.
And so it also went across the bank’s accounts, across Finn’s accounts, and across Walter’s. By the time the liquidation was complete, and nearly every single share had been sold and every Adams Bank investment account closed, Finn managed to cover the margins and pay off some of the underlying debt. But just like Earl Evans, he had a red balance and no money left to satisfy it. And at the end of the day, he was still over a million dollars short to Lionel.
“You have to talk to Walter, Finn,” Lionel said at two in the morning, when they had analyzed the numbers for the thousandth time, checking and re-checking their arduous, mind-numbing math. “There’s no way around it.”
“I can’t talk to him. Vanessa told me he had a heart incident yesterday.”
“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” Lionel said, “but is he still breathing? If the answer is yes, you must tell him what’s happened. Because his name is on the title of the bank and the title to his house. What about your brother-in-law Adder? As I recall, he lives in a house that’s also in Walter’s name.”
“My brother-in-law has his own problems,” Finn said. “Last I heard, he was ready to jump into the Charles.”
“Perhaps it’s good then, that there’s gray ice over the Charles,” said Lionel. “I thought you told me he was conservative with his investments?”
“Apparently that was a pile of bullshit,” said Finn. “I can’t solve Adder right now. But why are you talking about our residential properties?”
“Because they must be sold or mortgaged, Finn,” said Lionel. “There is no other way out of this unholy mess. Even if you hock your house and every last one of Walter’s properties, you probably still won’t get to what you need. A million dollars is a lot of scratch. You’ll come close. The bank is an asset. You still have some depositors left, some outstanding loans? I see here on your books there’s a loan of three million dollars to some John Reade, secured with real estate. Is he good for it? As long as your customers keep paying you, the bank won’t lose value.” Lionel raised his eyes to the ceiling, mouthing please, Jesus. “And then you can keep paying me.”
“You want me to go to my father-in-law, who’s just had a heart attack, and tell him I need to mortgage his house, my house, and his bank for the stellar return of not breaking even?”
“You have another plan? I’m all ears, my friend.”
Finn slept on one of the couches in Lionel’s office in the same clothes he’d worn since Monday. Lionel found a dull razor for him in one of the washrooms, and Finn shaved, erratically. He looked worse now, all cut up with patches of facial growth peppering his ashen face as he shook hands with Lionel and left to go speak with Walter in person. He decided to walk to Back Bay—to clear his head, to prepare his words, to steel himself for Walter’s reaction when his father-in-law, in poor health, would learn of the hull of his family’s ship sinking beneath the sea.
It was gray out, cold and drizzly. Massachusetts Avenue in Back Bay was a long way from Congress and State. The leaves were almost gone, and the taupe-colored oaks waved the last of their brown flakes off the branches. Finn’s coat hung open. He wished it was colder. He wanted to sever his emotions, like limbs from frostbite. He desperately didn’t want to have this discussion with Walter. And afterward, Finn would have to face his own father to tell him that not only were his life savings gone but that he needed to mortgage his house to pay back the money he still owed to Lionel’s firm. Finn shuddered. It was hard to overstate how much he did not want to have this conversation with his terse and exacting father. He would rather face Walter twice, and he didn’t want to face Walter at all.