FINN COULDN’T PUT OFF the conversation with Vanessa any longer.
As he was leaving, Walter had shaken his hand and said, “How’s my daughter taking this?” And when Finn didn’t have a response, Walter said with an astonished exhale, “You haven’t told her? You poor bastard.”
And now it was weeks later. He had to do it. There was no way out. After he came home from a twelve-hour day at the docks, he first went upstairs to his girls’ room and lay down on the floor with them for a few minutes, letting them climb all over him. Then he went downstairs to the kitchen to get the plate Isabelle had prepared for him, which was waiting for him warm on the stove. He ate silently, exchanged a grunt, a nod, a shake, and a double Sully whisky with her, and finally trudged upstairs, where Vanessa, already in her nightclothes, was diligently wiping the bottoms of her perfume bottles.
“Hello there, darling,” she said, offering her cheek to him. “Your day was so long. You must be tired. Ready for bed? You go on while I finish up here.” When he kissed her, she frowned slightly. “Is that liquor on your breath?” She studied him.
“Of course not,” Finn said, moving away. “It’s Coca-Cola and a throat lozenge.” Without undressing, Finn sat down on the long ottoman at the foot of their bed. “I need to talk to you, Vee.”
She glanced at his face and shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, no. I’m so tired. I too have had a long day. Maybe tomorrow.”
“No, Vanessa,” Finn said. “It can’t wait.”
“I’m not up to a conversation right now, Finn.”
“I’m getting up at six tomorrow,” he said. “Do you want me to wake you, and we can talk then?”
“How about tomorrow night after you come home?”
“Are we haggling about when we can speak?” He shook his head.
“Well, I can’t talk when it’s convenient only for you, Finn,” Vanessa said, peevishly. “It must also be convenient for me.”
“Right now is convenient.”
“Right now I’m tired.”
Finn was done negotiating future communications. Besides, he knew it was a ruse; it was Vanessa’s way of not talking about it. Tomorrow morning she wouldn’t wake up, or she would wake up with a headache or stomachache. Tomorrow night, she would complain of another hard day. On and on.
“Vanessa, we lost the bank,” Finn said, taking a page out of Isabelle’s book and just coming out with it.
“What do you mean, lost it?”
“Sixteen months ago we lost our money in the Crash. I mortgaged our properties, hoping to stave off foreclosure. Many people, me included, believed investors would come back to the market to buy at record low prices. But it didn’t happen. The opposite happened. We lost almost all our customers. They took their money and left. And the rest have been struggling and out of work and unable to repay their loans. The rainy day has turned into a rainy year—and then some. Our customers did not come back, and the market didn’t come back because the economy didn’t come back—and it doesn’t look like it’s coming back any time soon.”
Vanessa interrupted him. “What do you mean we lost the bank?”
“I mean we lost our business. The bank has stopped making money and we had to close our doors. We had too few customers. We have no assets, only liabilities. Massachusetts National is going to auction it for parts or absorb it into their own business.” It was painful to put it in terms so stark.
Vanessa kept shaking and shaking her blonde head. “It can’t be,” she said. “You can’t close my father’s bank. He has money. He can lend us . . .”
Finn stared at Vanessa with sympathy. “I know it’s hard to deal with.”
“Does Daddy know anything about what you’re saying?” she cried out.
“You think I could close your father’s bank without talking to him? Of course he knows—everything.”
She fiddled with her hands, driving the nails into her fingertips. “Shawmut didn’t close.”
“Different clients, different lending practices, different business model, different outcome. Four other banks closed in Boston before Christmas, not just us.”
“Christmas?” Vanessa said. “But it’s February.”
“That’s true.”
“So where have you been, if you weren’t going to work?”
“I have been going to work. I’ve been doing other things.”
“Like what?”
“Driving a truck,” Finn said. “Making deliveries. Working the docks, loading and unloading merchant ships. All of it has brought in a few dollars, but nothing even close to what we need to pay the expenses on four homes.” He didn’t want to tell her how hard it was to find even inadequate work on the pitiless streets.
“Why can’t you get a job at another bank?”
“Because there are ten thousand bankers looking for work and two hundred positions. Because no one is quitting, and no one is hiring. And they don’t want to hire me, when they think—rightly or wrongly—I couldn’t manage the bank I had.”
“Is there no other work you can do?” she cried.
“I’ve done that work,” said Finn. “It floated us for months.”
Vanessa looked faint. “It’s that Lucas . . .”
“It’s not Lucas’s fault we’re broke, no matter how much I’d like it to be. But Vanessa . . .” He didn’t know how to say the next part, she already looked so white. “There’s more.”
“Darling, this is about all I can handle.”
Finn plowed on. “My father said he will sell his house, and he and my mother will come to live with us here.”
Vanessa made a strangled sound, like a trapped animal. “Absolutely not,” she said.
“And,” Finn continued, because there was no point in stopping now, “your father and mother have sold their house and are also going to be staying with us.”
Vanessa jerked against the dresser, and the bottles of perfume she’d been cleaning crashed to the carpet.
“Eleanor and Monty too.” Finn bent down to pick up the fallen bottles. Vanessa staggered to the bench. Now it was his turn to stand at the dresser with the perfumes in his hands. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“Finn, we can’t!”
“It’s the only way, Vee,” Finn said, deciding it wasn’t a good time to admit to his wife that even all that would not be enough unless he got some real paying work. What were they going to do when the money ran out? All too soon, a whole new kind of bottomless reckoning might come, one that would make four families living under one roof seem like heaven.
“Your father is still working, isn’t he?” Vanessa said in a shrill sharp voice. “Why can’t he help us? You bought him his house!”
“Yes, and we mortgaged it to help us, and now we sold it to help us.” Finn turned his ashamed face away. “And he’s no longer working. He’s had to retire.”
“It’s not your fault your father’s decided to retire at a time like this!”
“It is my fault.”
“Finn, I can’t do it, I’m serious,” Vanessa said. “I can’t live with my parents and my sister and your parents.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t.” Her voice was barely audible.
“You got somewhere else to go, Vee?” Finn said. “Let’s pack up the girls and get there in a hurry. But barring that, there’s only one way out, and that’s through it.”
“Why can’t you borrow from the central bank like you did in the past?”
Vanessa knew just enough not to understand the most fundamental things. “Vanessa, please listen to me. I have always tried to protect you from the ups and downs of my work. We can’t save the bank. It’s finished. I’m not coming to you to discuss what’s already happened. I’m coming to you to tell you what’s going to happen.”
“But things will pick up, right?” she said. “Remember 1921 when we first got married? There was a panic then too.”
“You are right, darling,” Finn said, sounding like he was sure things would never pick up again, “but right now we’re still in the thick of it.”
“There must be something else we can do!” she cried.
“I’ve done it.” Finn squeezed his hands together.
“They can’t come here!”
“Vanessa, I can’t pay four mortgages and four sets of property taxes. I can’t pay the electric, water, coal, the phone bills, the Beacon Hill and Back Bay garbage collection on four homes! We don’t have a business anymore. If we don’t sell the other three homes, soon I won’t be able to pay for the little food we do eat.” Finn breathed heavily for both of them because he saw that Vanessa was barely breathing at all.
“What about our car?”
“Sold long ago.”
“You sold our car?”
“Why do you sound upset? You never went anywhere in it.”
“Ah—what about our house in Truro?” Vanessa said in the self-satisfied tone of someone who thought she’d solved things.
“Sold back in September, Vanessa.”
“You sold our house in Truro? And never told me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Finn said.
Husband and wife stared at each other.
“What about my father’s ski lodge in Vermont?”
“We sold it.”
“What about his mews in Lothbury?”
“We sold it.”
In a weak voice she said, “So what’s left?”
“We’ve sold everything we have and everything we own,” said Finn. “Their homes are next. And our home is next after that.”
“We don’t need that much heating! We have our fireplaces.”
“Unless I’m going out to the Boston Common and chopping down trees, firewood also costs money.”
“What about our staff? They cost money too, don’t they?”
Finn took a breath. “I’ve had to let them all go, Vee,” he said.
“You didn’t! What about Isabelle?”
“We can’t afford her either,” said Finn. “I let her go too . . .”
“No!” Vanessa screeched in a near-hysterical voice.
Finn raised his hands to comfort her. “Isabelle refused to go. She said she would work for us for free, for room and board.”
“Isabelle will work for free?”
“Has been, since last October.”
They eyed each other despairingly from across the room.
“What do you want me to say, Finn?”
“What do you want to say?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Then say absolutely nothing,” Finn said. “Now that you know what’s happening, it will be easier for me.”
“Anything to make it easier for you, darling.”
Finn was quiet. “Why the tone?”
“I can’t modulate every single word out of my mouth.” She sounded like a wounded bird. “Oh, goodness! Isn’t there something you can do so everybody in Boston doesn’t have to come live in my house?”
He saw her graceful face twisted with anxiety, her shoulders narrowed, her arms knotted at her chest. Finn did what he always did when he saw she couldn’t handle the stress and was on the verge of a nervous episode that could last for weeks. He backed off and tried to soothe her.
“Don’t worry, Vee,” he said. “Please don’t worry, darling. Come here.” When she didn’t, he went to her and embraced her. She shook with emotion. Her arms stayed at her sides. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, kissing her head. “We just need to live in the foxhole for a few months. It’s a new year, business will pick up. I’ll get a new job that pays well, and everything will be fine.”
In the smallest voice he’d ever heard from her, Vanessa said, “And what if business won’t pick up? Will it still be fine?”