Abbeville (16 page)

“I guess I decided that if Rob told you that Erin had spoken to him about hurting herself, I would want to know,” Goldman said.

He looked away. It took me a moment before I understood what he was telling me.

“What exactly did she tell you?” I said.

“Like I said, it's hard to know how serious anything is at this age,” he said. “But if I held it in and something happened to Rob, I would never forgive myself.”

“Did she say how it came up?” I said.

“They won't give you a straight answer, you know,” he said. “They'll dance around everything that is important, then give you a blow-by-blow about how some girl dissed them in the lunch line.”

“Solly,” I pleaded.

“She said he told her yesterday that sometimes he thinks everybody would be better off if he were dead,” Goldman said.

I heard the words, but I had a hard time connecting them to my
son. I could not imagine what our lives would be worth if Rob took his. Suddenly I found myself in tears.

“I'm sorry,” I said, standing to leave.

“You're going to need help, George,” he said. “Listen to me because I know. I haven't told anybody else, but with Erin it was bulimia. Luckily we caught it early. You can beat this thing, George. Just don't be proud and try to go it alone.”

“There's not much chance of pride,” I said.

When I returned to my office, all I could do was sit at my desk and stare out the window at the empty sky. I had no idea how to reach Rob. I would, of course, insist that he see someone, but I couldn't make him open up or recognize his worth any more than I could make the Bloomberg swing from red to blue.

“Mr. Bailey?”

I looked up and saw the receptionist in the doorway. Now that we had let all the secretaries go, she was handling everyone's phone.

“Your wife is on the line,” she said.

I wasn't ready to talk to Julie yet.

“I'll call her back,” I said.

“She said it was urgent,” the receptionist said. “It's not my place, but I think you'd better pick up the phone.”

When I did, she turned and left. I didn't even have a chance to say hello before Julie started in.

“I just don't know what to do anymore,” she said.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“The school just called,” she said. “Rob never showed up for class this morning. I don't get it. This is the school where he wants desperately to stay.”

“I'll come right home,” I said. “I'll find him.”

“You probably have other things,” she said. “We can deal with this tonight.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

I had made the drive north thousands of times, usually crawling up the Kennedy and Edens Expressways in the rush-hour snarl. Now at midday I was able to keep the speedometer at sixty nearly the whole way. As the billboards and warehouses of the city yielded to the lawns and trees of the suburbs, I asked myself over and over again: When a little boy is so totally lost, how can his father hope to find him?

First I drove to the school. Even on the North Shore, where so little changed over the generations and social rank was handed down like a title of nobility, Country Day was a place out of time. It always made me think of what Chautauqua must have been like. I got out of the car and walked the empty grounds. But I knew; Rob would not have hovered.

I cruised the streets of Wilmette in lengthening radii from Green Bay Road, looking, looking. Even if Rob had been nearby he would have hidden the moment he saw the car. After a couple hours of searching, I drove to Gilson Park along the beach. There I parked and gazed out over the fathomless gray lake.

I don't know how long I had been there when in my peripheral vision I detected movement. I turned and saw a shadow walking in the distance among the trees. As it came closer, I told myself not to be foolish; it wasn't him. And yet the gait was familiar, the defeated slouch. He emerged from the trees a hundred yards from the car. I prayed he would not see me and bolt.

He stepped up onto the rocks at the edge of the lake. This was not the place he would choose to end his life, was it? He was too much of a swimmer. He stood motionless, giving no hint of his intention or even whether he had enough emotional energy to have one, just staring out over the rolling waves.

When I got out of the car, I was careful not to make any noise the waves would not cover. I circled back into the trees and came up to
Rob from behind. When I was ten feet away, I scuffed my feet a couple of times so as not to startle him. He turned, and a look of panic pulled at his face. He spun away from me back toward the lake.

“Don't, son,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” he said to the water.

“Looking for answers,” I said, “same as you.”

He turned to me with a different face. It was exasperation, and I welcomed it.

“Who says that's what I'm doing?” he said.

“Why else do people come to the beach when it's too cold to swim?” I said.

“You know about school, don't you,” he said.

“You must have realized they would call,” I said.

“I'm really fucking up big time here,” he said.

“You're not going to hear that from me,” I said. “There's trouble all over. We're both trying to find our way through it.”

“It isn't the same,” he said.

“Don't you think I know that?” I said. “I didn't have me as a father, and you don't have me as a son. We're different people. But that doesn't mean we can't try to help each other.”

I thought for a moment that he was going to come forward. Everything in me wanted to take him in my arms the way I had done when he was little and crying afraid. But he did not move.

“I'll take a ride home,” he said.

W
HEN THE MARKET CRASHED IN
1929, Abbeville barely noticed. The crops had all been harvested and, through Karl's magic, paid for. The proceeds were safe in Karl's bank. The only stock anyone owned ate feed and shat.

As winter came on, though, folks started to talk. The news in the
Trib
kept getting grimmer. President Hoover was talking about balancing the budget as a way out of the Panic. Congress was slapping tariffs on foreign products, and Europe was responding in kind against American grain.

Banks failed in Chicago, then in Kankakee. The farmers planted in the spring, even though prices were so low that some said it might be smarter to rest the land a year. Then the prices fell even further, and Karl's magic lost its power. Deposits dried up. Requests for credit increased. Farmers would have defaulted on loans if Karl hadn't extended terms. To be able to do this, he had to start sending excuses in lieu of payment to his corresponding banks.

Still, Karl as much as possible kept doing business as usual. His uncle had taught him to stand firm and wait for the tide to turn. After all, Karl was a man of substance; his credit was still good. He kept up appearances, kept bringing new implements onto the lot, because the antidote to panic was confidence.

“This thing will turn around,” he said, “like they always have before.”

Fritz came to him tapped out. He was going to lose everything if he couldn't get his hands on some cash fast. Karl looked at his brother for a moment, then went to the vault.

“Don't I need to sign something?” Fritz asked as Karl handed him the money.

“You're my brother,” Karl said.

Despite the burden of his own debt, he walked across the prairie to work every morning as jauntily as if he had something to gain from it. Then one day just before breakfast Cristina called to him from the parlor. Across the tracks it looked as if all of Abbeville was lined up at the bank.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I'm going to finish my breakfast and coffee,” he said. “Then I'm going to give you a kiss.”

“Is there enough money for all of them?” she asked.

“I'll stop by Rose's,” he said. “I think she's fallen ill.”

“Why, I saw her at the church just last night,” said Cristina. “She was fine.”

“She deserves some time off,” he said.

Betty, home from boarding school on a break, came down the stairs.

“Did you say Mrs. Stroeger is ill?” she said. “Should I bake her a cake?”

“You can't take on the whole Panic, Karl,” said Cristina.

He buttered his toast and used it to push the last of the scrambled eggs onto his fork.

“I'm mighty slow at counting money,” he said. “You've seen me. One bill at a time.”

“It will take forever,” Cristina said.

“That it will,” said Karl.

He appeared at the bank a few minutes before opening time, wearing his newest suit. Cristina went with him, carrying in one hand a basket containing every cinnamon bun they had found in the store. From the other swung a canister of coffee to keep everyone warm.

“It will make them able to wait longer,” she said when he told her how to prepare.

“It will show that we're not afraid of their waiting,” he said.

When he reached the bank, the crowd at the door parted.

“Looks like opening day at the county fair,” Karl said.

“You know why we're here,” said Robert Schlagel, who was in arrears three months on the debit side for a tractor. What he had on deposit wouldn't have paid for much more than the cinnamon buns.

“We hate to have to do it,” said George Loeb. He looked as if he might weep.

Karl took each customer inside, one by one. Cristina waited outside as the crowd strained to look through the windows to see what was happening. Small talk was difficult, but she tried. Occasionally peals of laughter would come from inside and a minute later a customer would emerge, grinning over the thin fold of greenbacks in his hand.

“He's a good one, all right. I have half a mind to give this back,” said Will Hoenig.

“Nobody's ever accused you of having half a mind, Will,” said Bernard Lampere.

“Go ahead, Hoenig,” said Prideaux. “It will just mean more for us.”

“You can have mine, too, Prideaux,” said old Henry Mueller. “I'm leaving.”

The day wore on. The buns and coffee ran out. Karl took longer and longer with each customer. The crowd became surly and grew in number. People from all over Cobb County had heard that they had better hightail it to Abbeville or risk losing everything.

“There ain't enough to go around, you watch,” said Prideaux. “That's why he's dawdling so. Remember, everybody, I warned you.”

Suddenly Harley Ansel pushed his way to the front of the line, all the authority of the law behind him. He had kept a stake in Karl's bank, and Karl had always wondered why. The county prosecutor entered the door as Robert Hesse came out empty-handed.

“I let it ride,” Hesse said. “For all Karl has done, it's the least we can do.”

Ansel looked over his shoulder at Hesse as he said it and shook his head. Within a matter of minutes he was back outside.

“The bank's busted,” he shouted.

“You busted it,” said Hesse.

Karl came to the door as the prosecutor strode away.

“Thank you for your patience,” he said. “But Harley is right.”

“He's going to have something more to say about all this,” said Hesse.

“Yes,” said Karl, “I suppose he will.”

T
O GET TO
C
HICAGO
K
ARL HOPPED A FREIGHT
that had stopped in Abbeville to switch two empty boxcars onto the siding next to the elevator. In the past he had always flagged down a streamliner. But that was when he could pay.

He climbed into a boxcar and slid its door nearly shut. The last time he had ridden this way had been leaving Verdun. The train began to move. Click-click. A cold draft came through the planking, but here there was no stench of the trenches to blow away. The smell was not mankind's shame but earth's pride: good, golden grain.

The only shame in the boxcar was Karl's own. He sat down and drew his knees up to conserve the warmth that was still in his belly from the big breakfast Cristina had set out for him when he had come upstairs from stoking the furnace. Next to him he placed the sack that held the sandwich she had made for his lunch and an old jar full of apple juice she had pressed in the summer. As for sustenance for what might be a night on the streets of Chicago, Karl could only hope he could prevail on Uncle John for some change.

But it wasn't money he had come for. At first he had even hesitated to write and ask for an audience. What he was looking for was an idea, a strategy, an approach, anything to push against the gravity that was pulling down everything around him. He was not sure he would be able to explain this to Uncle John. But in the end embarrassment was just one more luxury he could no longer afford, and so he sent the letter. It took five weeks before he received a reply. “I will entertain a visit,” was all Uncle John had written.

Meanwhile, Harley Ansel had surfaced with a pocketful of subpoenas.

“He's not my kin anymore,” said Ansel's uncle, Henry Mueller. “He should be talking to all the men you carried on your back. It's a wonder you haven't broken it.”

At times Karl did ache under the weight. He shifted his position on the boxcar floor and felt the icy stiffness in his hips and knees. He was too old for trouble.

“You saved everybody's money,” Cristina said one blue night at the dinner table.

It was true, as far as it went. He had found a buyer for all the bank's assets but the building. The bargain he drove held the depositors harmless. In return, he did not take a penny out of the deal.

“I have not paid my debts,” he told Cristina. “The banks that lent to me lost everything but what they might salvage from a pauper's auction.”