“Just sign your name on that cute little dotted line”—my wife sounded like a wandering catch-basin cleaner—“and you get a check for two thousand dollars.”
Hector Berlioz was playing on her stereo, at a sufficient volume to wake up those peacefully sleeping in distant Mount Carmel Cemetery.
“I lost that much last week at the Exchange.” I was in no mood for Rosemarie’s daffy little games. It had been another brutal day at the Board of Trade. I was convinced now that Jim Clancy and a ring of his cronies were making sport of me, jerking me up and down—in the slang of the trader. I had yet to figure out how the game was being played and how I might defend myself against them. I did not want to be a trader. I ought to sell my seat and return to being an accountant—concentrate on my doctorate.
“This is the first of many contracts that will make you a lot more famous than the silly old Board of Trade, husband mine.” She jabbed a ballpoint pen at me. “Just sign here, please.”
I shook my head, blinked my eyes, and tried to focus on the long document in front of me. What mischief was she up to now?
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” My stomach knotted and unknotted as it had done all day every day for the last two months.
“You don’t have to understand.” She tapped the antique desk in her study with the top of her pen. “I’ll do the understanding, you do the signing.”
Pregnancy, even more than marriage, had lured out the natural goblin in Rosemarie. She was sick in the morning for exactly two days, which she took to be a sign that God had excused her from all purgatory in this life and in the next because she had to put up with me. She bounded more enthusiastically, laughed more boisterously, fought with me more cheerfully, and spent money more wildly. Before I knew it she had a closetful of maternity clothes, albeit inexpensive maternity clothes. She changed dresses three or four times a day just so she could examine her pregnancy in different colors and perspectives. She enrolled in Rosary College and returned to her voice lessons, the former (despite her dislike for nuns) to keep Peg company, the latter so she would sing pretty lullabies to “little April”—that our child would be a girl and would be named after her grandmother was a foregone conclusion I dared not dispute.
“No parading on the sand at Long Beach this summer.” I had looked up from my Daily News, in which I was searching (vainly) for some understanding of the day’s grain prices.
“I will too.” She lifted her nose into the air. “I want everyone to know that I’m not practicing birth control.”
In those days, to have a large family was to reaffirm your Catholicism. Big families were in fashion after the war, especially among Catholics. The children of such families almost always opted for much smaller families and chose to display their Catholicism in other ways. The country was making up for the low birth rates of the Depression, and Catholics, having finally climbed out of poverty, were doing so with special vigor.
I don’t think the birth control teaching was all that important even then. Most of the women who were bearing five or six children before they were thirty began to disregard the Church’s teaching around 1960.
Our marriage at that time was happy enough. The only problem was that Columbine was larger than life and Pierrot smaller than life. In Columbine’s world there were, for example, two volume levels for the radio and phonograph: loud and louder. Come to think of it, there were two styles in her life: forceful and more forceful.
I would ask her politely if she might possibly turn the radio down a little bit. She would promptly comply, with a faint nudge to the knob that created no difference in the volume that I could discern. “That doesn’t seem to make much difference, darling.”
“Maybe you ought”—she’d frown, as if worried about me—“to see a doctor about your hearing. You seem to have lost your ability to discriminate in volume.”
“Maybe I never had it.”
I liked to watch Ed Sullivan on our four-inch TV screen. She thought he was a jerk. So I didn’t watch him. She liked the news broadcasts because she thought there might be good news from Korea. I didn’t want to think about Korea. So we watched the news.
In a proper marriage, we would have had it out then and there and negotiated (a term my kids use routinely) compromises. I had no idea how to push back.
She was so vulnerable, despite her vigor, and so deeply in love with me—to my endless astonishment—that I thought noise, admittedly Bach or Mozart noise, was not important.
So I repressed my anger. It festered beneath the surface, as did a lot of other repressed complaints.
Loud music was a minor irritant compared to her occasional drinking bouts. It was impossible to reason with her when she was drunk; she’d scream obscenities and throw whatever object might be at hand—never hitting me. Rosemarie on a binge was a disgusting sight—foulmouthed, untidy, violent, spit drooling from her mouth, body odor filling the room, drunken laughter echoing through our vast house.
After the binge she was so fragile and penitent that I was afraid to hurt her by argument.
“I won’t do it again, Chuck, I promise. That was positively the last time.”
“I don’t like to see you hurting yourself.”
“I don’t matter. You do.”
“If I could help—”
“I have to do it myself.” Quiet and firm. “If only I didn’t have such a weak will.”
“How can you do it alone?”
“How else can I stop drinking?” Some asperity, thunderclouds gathering. “I guess I’ll have to pray harder for more character. Please don’t make it harder for me.”
“I’d like to help.”
“I SAID I had to do it alone.” More tears.
Pierrot retreats in confusion. Blew it again. The results of his cowardice would haunt him in the years to come.
In that spring of 1951 Vince was in Korea, in combat at Heartbreak Ridge, as a bloody battle in that forgotten war was called. Peg needed someone on whose shoulder she could cry.
Ridgeway had counterattacked in late March and inflicted a massive defeat on the Chinese. He recaptured Seoul and drove the enemy back across most of their prewar border. There was talk of stalemate and negotiations, but it was still a dangerous war for Vince in the frontline foxholes.
That was the year of the film Quo Vadis (“Deborah Kerr in a negligee,” Rosemarie tittered, “no wonder you like it), of “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” and of the first hydrogen bomb test. It was the time of the national orgy of support for General MacArthur, whom Truman had fired. The millions who cheered for MacArthur in the streets didn’t seem to realize that he was the one who had prolonged the war.
The Board of Trade seemed at first to be pure terror, a mistake that would have no silver (even somewhat tarnished) linings. I felt that I did not belong there. I had neither the physiology nor the psychology for the daily gambling pool that was the wheat pit. I hesitated, I doubted, I thought, I worried. The good traders acted. They won some, they lost some, but—if they survived the first couple of years—they won more than they lost.
Cautious, careful, orderly man that I was (and am, despite what you may have read elsewhere), I did not belong in the tumultuous battles on which the successful traders seemed to thrive. I belonged rather in the quiet, reflective, subdued precincts of O’Hanlon and O’Halloran (the Double O’s, as the two little gnomes who were the senior partners in the firm had been dubbed by my fellow traders, who entrusted all their complicated tax problems—as they thought then—to the whispering gnomes).
I was there at the Board of Trade because I had promised my wife that I would give it a try. A curious attempt at a distant reconciliation with her father? Or did she want me to defeat him in the pit as I had in love?
The nuances of her ambivalence toward her father were beyond my understanding.
“How did Daddy seem today?” she would occasionally ask at the supper table.
“A little tired. He had a good day, I think. There’s talk around the Exchange of him investing in a hotel in Las Vegas.”
“Different kind of gambling, poor man.”
When the doctor confirmed her pregnancy, I suggested she call him and tell him.
“I don’t want to do that. You tell him tomorrow at work.”
His only comment was, “Well, I suppose that was inevitable.”
I lost heavily that day, unable to keep pace with a grain market that first slumped and then rebounded with unnatural vigor.
“What did Daddy say?”
I lied. “He beamed proudly and said I should congratulate you.”
She smiled happily. “I’m so glad he’s pleased.”
“He certainly seemed to be.”
Then, after a moment’s reflection, she looked at me strangely. “You are telling the truth?”
“About what?”
“About Daddy’s reaction.”
“He seemed very proud to be a grandfather.”
Maybe I should have told her the truth. Maybe I should also have told her that he was systematically taking away my capital, or to be more precise, her capital. Perhaps he was merely reclaiming that which he thought by right was his—the money out of which his wife had tricked him in her final revenge. Perhaps he thought I would be so addicted to the pit that I would commit all of Rosemarie’s money and even our elegant old home, of which she was so proud, in a last roll of the dice.
In that hope he was kidding himself. I was not a plunger, not a go-for-broke person. When the hundred thousand dollars Rosemarie had put in her investment account (to supplement the money my parents allegedly paid for my seat on the Exchange) was exhausted, I would wend my way back up LaSalle Street to the Double Os and the quiet life. And perhaps leave the economics department to enroll in the graduate school of business at the University. Or maybe, just maybe, continue in the economics Ph.D. program.
There are, broadly speaking, three ways of earning your keep in the commodity markets. The most extraordinary way is to see a long-term trend developing, say in oil between the early seventies and the middle eighties, and put your money behind your faith in that trend—with a considerable amount of laying off and hedging, against the possibility that you might be wrong (at least you do it that way if you have any sense). The second method is spotting a powerful short-run trend just before it happens, like the soybean price explosion in 1972 or the expansion of the grain markets at the start of the Korean War. The third technique is to ride up and down, a little bit ahead of the trends, in the daily and weekly fluctuation of the markets. If you sign on for either of the first two styles and have enough sense to know when to get out, you can become very wealthy indeed. But big surprises of substantial duration are in the nature of things infrequent, so most traders make their money on the minute daily fluctuations in which nerve, instinct, and gut feel were critically important in the early fifties. They still are even today, despite all the computer programs that are loaded into the PC that your serious trader keeps by his bedside so he can trade on the Singapore Exchange at 2 A.M. (Chicago time).
Every mature capitalist economy must have a commodity exchange so that farmers (and now businessmen and bankers) can hedge against the random ups and downs of their markets. Even the socialist economies, I argued in an article some fifteen years ago, have them to hedge in their black markets. The traders and their clients (politely called investors and not riverboat gamblers) absorb the risk from producers in return for the chance to speculate on their guesses/hunches/instincts/voices in the night (to which today one would add computer programs). There are a lot of things wrong with the way this works out in practice, as many things today, when we speculate not only on grain or animals or butter and eggs but on such ephemeral pieces of paper as eurodollars and T-bills and “derivatives,” as there were when I rode home on the Lake Street L a nauseated wreck, oblivious to the spring lace appearing along the streets of Oak Park. But despite the mistakes, the corruption, the injustices, the occasional downright dishonesty, you can’t do without commodity exchanges.
And while, God knows, they need to be regulated, there doesn’t seem to be a government in the world that has enough sense and intelligence to know how to regulate them.
In principle, you can make money by being a bull or a bear. In the former case you buy futures, betting that the market will go up and you can sell them for more than you have contracted to buy them for (with a very small part of the actual costs, a “margin”). In the latter case you sell futures on the hope that the market will decline and you will be able to purchase grain more cheaply than you have sold it and thus make a profit. Rarely does a trader hold on to a contract till delivery time. You might buy October wheat today and sell it tomorrow because the cost of a contract has gone up overnight and you will make a nice profit. If you hang on to the contract too long, the market might fall and you’d lose your profit and your investment and might have to find more money to cover the losses that exceed the original margin you have invested. That way you can make a lot and lose a lot. In a hurry.
I spoke of contracts being sold on the next day. In fact, it is quite normal to sell and buy and then sell again, all on the same day or in the same hour, as you bet, not on what a bushel of wheat will cost in October, but on what a contract for that bushel of wheat will cost in half an hour.
I was convinced that I lacked the temperament for such quick and potentially costly decisions. There was no time to reach for my idea notebook (which amused my wife immensely) or to order my thoughts on a pad of yellow paper. I was therefore a sitting duck for the vultures who hover around the pits, looking for newcomers whose flesh they can pick off their bones.
Jim Clancy, I would learn quickly, was a prime vulture, and the leader of the other vultures.
While those who live off the daily fluctuations of the market have to be bears and bulls alternately—and often at the same time as they hedge against their own hedging—the long-term propensity is to be, you should excuse the quote, bullish on America. Over the long haul, the American, even the trader—especially the trader—believes in expansion. With each year that the Great Depression (out of which the truly shrewd bears like Joseph Kennedy had made huge fortunes) receded into the past, fears of another monumental contraction faded. Generally this long-run bullishness has paid dividends, and rich ones at that, in the last half century. Occasionally even the wise traders, or those who think they are wise, ride the market up even when there is excellent reason to think that it is too inflated. Thus in the notorious Hunt family attempt to corner the silver market in the late nineteen seventies, anyone with common sense knew that a silver contract was worth between five and ten dollars at the most and not almost forty dollars. They also knew that, if it became necessary to change the rules of the exchanges in midstream to protect themselves from the Hunts, the men in power would do just that.
Yet a lot of traders were badly hurt in the run-up—sophisticated traders and not just the poor suckers who grab the coattails of every exciting trend with a sure instinct for their own self-destruction.
The really shrewd traders and investors got out of silver early and made millions on the collapsing markets. But to sell against a trend that powerful requires not only shrewdness and sophistication but a naturally bearish personality.
Like mine.
If I had managed to bet in some systematic way in favor of the continued expansion of world grain demand occasioned by the Korean War, I could have survived my daily losses as the vultures manipulated prices up and down to amuse themselves while doing me in.
“This Korean ‘police action,’ as that dumb hat salesman from Missouri called it, is almost as good as war,” I heard one of them say after the closing bell had hushed the madness and he and his cronies were leaving for the bars just off LaSalle Street. “It has kept the Depression away for five more years.”
I reacted with the emotions of a brother-in-law and not of a trader. “The kids dying at Heartbreak Ridge might think differently.”
“Tough shit. I don’t notice you fighting the gooks.”
My instincts, notoriously inaccurate in most respects, said that the grain market was overvalued.
But what did I know about it?
Rosemarie was insistent about the contract she wanted me to sign “Please just sign this contract and then we can eat supper. April and I are both terribly hungry.”
“What kind of contract is it?” I stirred myself out of my lethargic fog. “Wheat or corn?”
“Pork bellies.” She jammed the pen into my hand.
I lifted my pen to sign, hesitated, and began to read the long, obscure, tedious document more carefully.
“It’s a book contract!” I rose from my consort’s easy chair in righteous anger.
“Regardless.” She smiled demurely. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This nice man from New York will publish your book for nothing and give you two thousand dollars, plus whatever royalties the book earns. I’ve had my new lawyer, Dan Murray, Ed’s father, look it over and he says it’s a good contract.” (Ed was flying a Phantom jet off a carrier on the Korean coast.)
“That’s nice.” I scratched my jaw dubiously.
“So all you have to do is sit back and collect the royalties—well, maybe write a teeny-weeny introduction.”
“I’m not a writer.” I tried to read the contract again.
“You’re a photographer, a great one, the man from New York says, so he must be right.”
“How did you get to know this man in New York?”
“Oh, that. Well”—she talked very rapidly—“a woman on the board at Marillac is married to a publisher and he knew this agent, Mr. Close, and Mr. Close knew this publisher and I sent him your German pictures and—”
“My German pictures!”
“Well, I thought I would begin with them.” She followed me as I paced up and down with anxious eyes. “There’s a lot more downstairs if this one is a success, which it certainly will be.”
“I do not intend to sell my pictures.”
“Why not?”
“They’re personal, a personal vision.”
“Not just archives?” She was mocking me now.
“Personal archives.”
“It’s the personal vision, the man from New York said, that makes the book so moving.”
“No.”
“Yes.” She didn’t sound too confident, however.
“I won’t do it, Rosemarie.” I slumped back into the leather chair and tossed the contract back on her desk. “I don’t want any part of the professional artist’s world. It’s worse than the Board of Trade.”
“How do you know?”
“From my father.”
“He’s a success, now isn’t he?”
“At designing buildings, not at painting. There’s not enough money in it to support a family, Rosemarie. It would be crazy.”
“Can’t you do it in the afternoons when you come home from the Exchange and after you’ve been to class? It’s better than drink or women. I have enough money to support a family.”
“I won’t live off your money.”
“Why not?” Her lips were tightening into an angry line.
I must be careful. There had not been a drinking episode since she suspected she was pregnant. I did not want to induce another.
“It’s just not right, Rosemarie, it wouldn’t be manly.”
A male chauvinist? What can I tell you? It was 1951, remember.
“Just one book,” she begged. “How would one book hurt?”
“I’d make a fool out of myself.”
“Which is it?” Her eyes flashed dangerously. “Making a fool out of yourself or living off your wife?”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Rosemarie. I really do. But it’s only a hobby. I’m just not cut out for that kind of life.”
She looked like she was about to ask me what kind of life it was for which I was cut out. Instead she sighed and said, “Definitely no?”
“Definitely.”
“You’re the boss.” She folded up the contract. “They’re your pictures, not mine.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
“I don’t exactly,” she wavered, ready to launch another attack, and then thought better of it. “I don’t want to be a nagging wife.”
“You’ll never be that.”
Which was both true and not true. Rosemarie’s “ought tos” would never drive me up the wall. Not quite. She always knew when to stop a fraction of an inch short of being a scold.
“Let’s eat.” She led the way to the kitchen in which, to judge by the smell, we were going to eat spaghetti, our usual fare on the day our cook/maid was not around. (An extravagance I accepted because I had no choice: “Chuck, the poor woman needs the job.”) Rosemarie’s Italian food was excellent. Alas, it was all that she could produce. Well, you can get used to spaghetti once a week.
If you have to.
“By the way”—she heaped my plate with three times as much pasta as I could possibly consume—“Peg’s pregnant too. Honeymoon baby. They beat us in—what do you call it in the sailboat races?—elapsed time.”
How did she know about sailboat races?
She read the sports pages too. She read everything.
“How is she?”
“Sick, poor kid. And worried too. She had to leave Mass this morning before Communion. Father Raven told her she could eat bread when she gets up without breaking her fast because then it’s medicine. She didn’t want to.” Rosemarie made a wryly funny face. “Afraid that Father Raven might not have cleared it with God.”
I put down my fork. “Does Vince know?”
“She wrote him.”
We both were silent.
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
Rosemarie put her hand on mine. “He’ll be all right, I just know he will.”
“It’s a dumb war.”
“All wars are dumb.”
“Why is he there when I’m not?”
She squeezed my hand. “Maybe because I’m not nearly as strong a woman as your sister.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
I toyed with my fork. The Board of Trade was a jungle, but not as bad as Heartbreak Ridge.
“Eat,” she said, “you’re getting thin. People will say that terrible woman doesn’t feed you.”
“Plenty of good pasta.” I picked up the fork.
“I’m reading a book about French cooking; pretty soon we’ll have pasta only every other week.”
She could have said that she was asking me to risk less with my pictures than Vince was risking in Korea.
She didn’t. Maybe she knew that I would think it without her telling me.
The next day I actually made some money in the wheat pit. I had begun to figure out the signals Jim Clancy was using with his buddies and I crossed them up at the last second jumping off one of their artificial surges before they could pull the bottom out from under me.
“Got the bastards today,” John Kane, silver-haired Irishman with a handsome red face—he could have been a cop or an undertaker as well as a trader—said to me, “didn’t you, son?”
“Figured out their strategy.” I could hardly walk off the floor. “They’ll have another one tomorrow.”
“Some of them lost a little of their precious capital. Beat them a few more times and they’ll leave you alone. It’s hazing, you know, like those college fraternities. They don’t mean nothing by it. They do it to all the young fellows.”
“To see if you’re a man?” I asked bitterly.
“Well, that’s what Old Jim might say, and himself such an impressive specimen, if you take my meaning.”
“He’ll be back again tomorrow.”
“It’s a little bit more vicious than usual, I’ll admit that.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “But I like the cut of your jib, son. You know how to fight back.”
“I hope so.”
“You’ve got good eyes. Watch their faces. See the fear when they think they’re going to lose.”
“They make great pictures,” I agreed, “Old Jim more than most.”
“He’d break the camera.”
For the first time that year I noticed the early May signs of spring as I walked down East Avenue from the Ridgeland L station—ten blocks, but I needed the exercise. What a dope you are, Charles Cronin O’Malley, to permit a clique of evil old men to prevent you from enjoying spring and the springtime of your life.
“Made some money today, dearest,” I chirped as I strutted into her office.
If I had been smart, I would have noticed that the stereo was silent: a trap was being baited.
She was, as promised, poring over a French cookbook—in French, mind you—with a notebook on her lap.
“Two thousand dollars?” She cocked a critical blue eye at me. “Like you could have made yesterday.”
The contract was resting dead center on her desk, a pen next to it.
If the red-faced mick hadn’t spoken his few words of praise, I might not have been tempted.
As it was, I hesitated. “And after it fails, where does the next two thousand come from?”
“We wouldn’t even consider”—she turned up her pretty Irish nose in disgust—“two thousand the next time. There’s a wonderful little thing in the contract called an option. Your second collection will earn a five-thousand-dollar advance.”
“That’s crazy.” I shifted uneasily in her leather chair, purchased and positioned precisely for a weary husband coming from work to render an account of his stewardship.
“The man from New York, Mr. Close, says that your ‘Football Weekend’ portfolio would make a fine book.”
“Have you taken all my prints out of the cabinet downstairs?”
“Not the early ones.”
“Hey … come to think of it, how did you get into them in the first place. I lock the cabinet after every time I use the darkroom.”
“You don’t think, do you, husband mine”—she favored me with the wicked, crooked grin of which I was seeing a lot lately—“that I’d have a cabinet like that made without a spare key? I mean, what if you lost your key, with your disorderly habits and all?”
“How dare you!” I was now, belatedly, furious.
“I’m your wife. It comes with the body.”
“The bad with the good!” I was working myself into a rage.
“Suit yourself.”
“How many times do I have to say no before you understand that I mean no?”
“Three times.” She glared at me defiantly. “No more. So, O’Malley, you have one more shot and then I leave you alone.”
I leaped out of the leather chair, bent over the desk, and furiously scrawled my name on the bottom of the final page.
I was so angry that I didn’t think to put in “Cronin” or “C.”
“Satisfied?” I growled at her.
“Astonished.” She looked at the signature carefully. “I guess it’s valid. I’ll just sign my name, much prettier in both sound and appearance, and we’ll be two thousand dollars richer. There.”
“You didn’t think I’d do it?” Unaccountably, I was breathing heavily as though I were sexually aroused. In fact, I was not; that, I imagined, would come later.
“No, I didn’t,” she admitted, hugging me. “I’m so proud of you.”
“You have every intention”—I still was simmering—“of changing my life?”
“Isn’t that what wives are for?”
“Now let me ask you some questions about money.”
“Anything you want to know, husband dear.” She lowered her eyes modestly.
She had a surprisingly precise knowledge of her own financial affairs—money, property, investments. Her fortune was substantial, but not unlimited. “Satisfied?” she asked me when she’d finished.
“I have an accurate picture. I guess that finishes the agenda for this afternoon.”
“Not quite.” She rose from her judge’s chair and crossed to me, sitting on the edge of my assigned consort’s chair. “I’m not finished with you yet.”
“What else?” I had missed the wicked gleam in her eye.
“What do you think?” She unbuckled my belt.
“Rosemarie, do you want everything?”
“Exactly.” Her hand probed my loins. “Your pictures and your career and your body. Now don’t squirm while I undress you.”
“Gravy for the gander—”
“Is gravy for the goose. Precisely. I said hold still.”
“How can I when you’re teasing me that way?”
So I was appropriately rewarded for my twin acts of courage, signing the contract and asking about her money. I’m sure she viewed only the first as courageous. At the most.
Over supper she said, “I almost forgot. I had a letter from Polly Netteton today.”
“Who?!”
“Your good friend Captain Polly.”
“What did she want?”
“To answer my letter.”
“What did you write to her for?”
“To find out the details of why you were a hero in Bamberg.”
“I wasn’t a hero, damn it!”
“The good April would disapprove of that language. You told me the truth all right, Chuck, about the black market, but not the whole truth. Polly told me the whole truth. I could hardly believe you’d be so reckless.”
“Controlled recklessness. I didn’t take any chances that I didn’t have to take.”
“She also told me that you like caviar.”
I felt my face turn hot as I remembered the party at the Netteton’s apartment where I made a fool of myself by eating a pound of caviar.
“Woman has a big mouth. Why did you want to know all the details?”
“I kind of figured what you’d do in such a situation. And you did. So I wonder why you don’t do the same thing at the Exchange?”
“Oh,” I murmured. “You want me to act like I did in Bamberg?”
“I’m sure you could and you’d beat my daddy and those other terrible men and make a lot of money.”
“Maybe,” I admitted.
Somehow the possibility appealed to me.
The next morning on the Lake Street L, I calculated how much my potential capital (including Rosemarie’s money), against margin calls, would be if I protected the house and enough money for the education of three or four children. I had no intention of doing anything reckless, no conscious intention at any rate.
If I were to pursue the photography game, I could not continue working at the Board of Trade. The two occupations were quite incompatible, I told myself. Obviously I couldn’t earn a living with a camera. However, the Double O’s still liked my neat ledger sheets. (If my handwriting wasn’t as pretty as my wife’s, it was notably more legible.) Their offer of half-time work was always open.
I might well try that for a while. Until I proved to the damned beautiful, sexy bitch with whom I slept that I was not a great artist.
Right?
After I had failed at the career she was forcing on me, I could work full-time at the firm and maybe continue my education in night school. Fine. Everything neat and orderly?
The young redhead doth protest too much, you say?
Didn’t he sign that contract in an awful hurry?
Tell me about it.
On the front page of the Tribune that morning there was a story that General Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, was considering a presidential race on the Republican ticket. Already Henry Cabot Lodge (whom the Trib despised) was reported to gathering a staff which would help the General deny (the Trib’s word) the nomination to Senator Robert Taft, who, most Washington Republicans were saying, was “entitled” to it.
The war was settling down to a stalemate and there were rumors of peace negotiations. They could drag on for a long time. But I thought that Eisenhower might end the war more quickly than Harry Truman, if only because he might be in a position to threaten to use the bomb against the North Koreans and the Chinese.
Vince’s year would be up before the presidential election, so it wouldn’t make any difference to him.
It might make a difference to other young men, however.
Those were my only reactions to the possibility of Ike’s running. The Republicans, I thought, can’t win with one of their own, not even against Truman. So they’re about to nominate a man who has been a Democrat most of his life.
Maybe Colonel McCormick of the Trib had a right to be angry.
I had not thought of the possible impact of the story on the grain market.
Everyone else had. Peace, even a ceasefire or negotiations, would depress the price of wheat. The market in October wheat took a nosedive that morning, which is what I’d figured it would, especially because I was convinced that it was overvalued and had been for weeks. I stood by watching in disbelief the folly of men earning a living by betting on war and peace.
A wild and reckless scheme began to waken in my head. I wouldn’t do it, of course. Wasn’t I the timid and cautious accountant?
Me, Charles C. O’Malley, Scaramouche?
Me with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad?
“Not trading?” John Kane asked me.
“Today’s crazy,” I responded.
“On days like this, fortunes can be made and lost.”
As the closing bell approached, the price of October wheat soared back to its high of the previous day. That made no more sense than the fall earlier in the day. The war would end within the year, no matter who was nominated or elected. The market was far too high. It had been too high even at the day’s low. Why couldn’t everyone see that?
Probably because they were more concerned about the game than the real world outside the game, same as they imagined that world affected the game.
Jim Clancy was buying grain like it was about to disappear from the face of the earth. He was stupid after all, wasn’t he?
In a few weeks everyone would know the grain market was too high. Why did I know it before the others?
I pondered that one. I wasn’t smarter than they were, was I?
Yeah, maybe I was. Or perhaps only not as dumb as they were.
Enter Scaramouche, sword in hand. I sold every possible contract for October wheat that I could afford, given the potential capital I had calculated while on the L train. I was, after all, a natural “bear,” was I not?
It was an angry, irrational, clownish decision.
I rode home on the train exhilarated. I had taken a long-term position. I would not have to range through that jungle every day. If my wife’s wealth was wiped out, that was her fault for trusting me with it. We’d still have the house and money for college for the kids.
After my crazy adventure with the camera was ended, we could live normal lives like normal people.
Did I believe that?
I did return to the Chicago Board of Trade the next day.
With my camera.