VANESSA WANTED EVERYTHING TO be normal for Thanksgiving, insisted on it, but Finn didn’t see how that was possible. No one was feeling thankful or celebratory or normal.
And then—finally something to be thankful for! Wretched weather descended upon Boston, making it icy and dangerous to use the roads. Walter and Lucy stayed home in Back Bay with Eleanor and Monty, “for health and safety reasons.” Earl and Olivia walked to Finn’s from their home a few blocks away on Hancock Street. Finn had not seen his father since three weeks earlier when he had to tell Earl that his savings had been wiped out.
Earl and Olivia ate, chatted politely, played with the children, and then begged off early, citing increasing cold and thickening ice on the roads and pathways. Earl and Finn did not have a private word alone. That was for the best. Finn walked his parents home, his mother clutching his and his father’s arms to stop herself from slipping on the steep and icy Beacon Hill streets.
“Are you eating better?” Olivia asked. “You’re still dropping weight.”
“I’m fine, Mother.”
“He’s fine, Olivia,” Earl said. “He’s a grown man. He can decide for himself how much he eats.”
Olivia persisted as if her husband the judge hadn’t spoken. “Has Isabelle started bringing you your dinner?”
“Yes! How did you—”
“Who do you think arranged that? Well, she suggested it, but I thought it was a splendid idea.”
“Huh,” said Finn, tightening his hold on his mother’s arm, and staring straight ahead.
On Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, Eleanor came crashing into Vanessa’s house, wailing and wringing her hands.
Adder had vanished.
In the middle of the night, already up and dressed, he had pulled out a packed suitcase and said to Eleanor, “I’m leaving you two thousand dollars in cash on the counter. If anyone asks, you don’t know where I went.”
“But I don’t know!” said Eleanor. “Where are you going?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Adder. “For your safety I can’t.”
“My safety or yours?”
“Tell them nothing.”
“But I know nothing!” she cried.
“Better that way.” And Adder fled, leaving behind his wife and son.
Finn didn’t know where Adder had gone, but he well knew why. Adder had naked shorted millions of dollars at the end of Black Tuesday, betting his clients’ money—without their permission—that the market would continue to slide, and he would make a fortune. But the market rallied 30 points, and Adder had until October 31 to pay back three and a half million dollars.
Instead—with the Feds breathing down his throat for the multiple felonies he had committed—Adder Day became a ghost on Halloween. For nearly a month, he never left the house, didn’t answer the phone, didn’t open his mail, didn’t talk to Finn or Walter, didn’t go with his wife to Back Bay for Thanksgiving. He brooded and packed. And then up and left.
Vanessa stood frozen. She didn’t know how to comfort her sister, Finn saw that. But it was her utter non-response to Eleanor’s crisis that baffled him. All Vanessa said was, “Would you like a cup of tea, Ellie, or something to eat? You look famished.”
This was Vanessa’s way, even with Finn—composed but silent. He kept waiting for her to ask him about his work, about Lionel or his wife Babs, with whom she had been moderately good friends once, or to talk to him about what was happening in their country, the sudden wreck followed by a slow-motion derailment. It wasn’t like the radio and the papers weren’t on full throttle about the Crash and Mellon and Hoover and railroad stocks. Not Vanessa. And because the families no longer visited for a pleasant parlay in the parlor room on Sunday afternoons, Vanessa couldn’t overhear even accidentally the disaster that was unfolding outside her well-appointed home.
She was always amiable, loving, solicitous, just as she was now with overwrought Eleanor. Vanessa would ask if Finn was all right, or hungry or tired. But she never said, “Finn, my love, the Earth’s Holocaust has swept over our nation but tell me, I implore you, has it passed by my daddy’s livelihood, has it spared our small happy life on Beacon Hill?”
Only in the expression of the young Ukrainian woman who brought him dinner at night did Finn catch a fleeting glimpse of the thing he ached for: some understanding of his condition, some commiseration. Pity, maybe. He reckoned that must have been projection on his part. For how could she understand? What could she know about the plague of fear and hopelessness that infected Finn like a maiming sickness?
But sometimes when Isabelle sat in the corner of his darkened office, barely animate, listening to his heavy breathing, a curled-up body of formless compassion, Finn believed with all his heart that words were unnecessary to convey to her what it felt like to have the only life you knew vanish before your disbelieving eyes, a smokeless vapor.
On New Year’s Eve, 1929, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, gave an interview to the New York Times after returning from a Christmas holiday spent sunning himself on his yacht in the Bahamas. In the interview, he lauded the country’s swift recovery, its continued emphasis on employment, the purchasing power of the middle class, and retail sales holding up through December. He prophesied a rosy outlook for 1930. Interest rates for new business endeavors remained low. Credit was ample and readily available. Oh, sure, he said, there might be some small pockets of sectional unemployment in the winter months, but come spring, he foresaw prosperity and revival. “The nation has made steady progress!” Nothing ahead but blue skies and sunny days.
The American Federation of Labor seconded Mellon’s rosy sentiments. Obviously, there had been some slackening of demand for new vehicles. Thus, automobile production was downgraded. Detroit was forecast to build a million fewer cars in 1930 than in 1929. This would inevitably result in less demand for steel, and therefore a decrease in steel production. And sure, employment might be a little low (not unemployment high but employment low), but it would improve as the year continued. The main thing in avoiding a recession, both Mellon and the AFL concurred, was to maintain wages and employment. “To reduce expense, companies might need to look elsewhere than wage reduction and redundancies.” And yes, stock prices remained low, but continued demand for new products would stimulate production and increase the companies’ value, thus increasing share prices. Confidence is at a high, echoed the president of the largest labor union in America and the Secretary of the United States Treasury. Not at an all-time high. But definitely a high.
And then, the hedge.
“Of course, predicting the future,” Mellon said, “cannot be done with any certainty.” Complex forces were at work. “But there is no reason for pessimism,” he added. “No reason at all.”