“Sure, maybe the regulars will need some cheering up,” I offered.
She turned again to the paper, its stories of desperation luring her back.
“Get this: ‘Wall Street was a street of vanished hopes, of curiously silent apprehension and of a sort of paralyzed hypnosis yesterday. Men and women crowded the brokerage offices, even those who have been long since wiped out, and followed the figures on the tape,’” she continued. “‘Little groups gathered here and there to discuss the falling prices in hushed and awed tones. They were participating in the making of financial history. It was the consensus of bankers and brokers alike that no such scenes ever again will be witnessed by this generation.’”
I had to reach my father, to see if he’d been affected by any of this. I quickly got dressed and walked two blocks down to the pharmacy, where they had a phone booth inside.
“Number, please,” the operator said.
“Flatbush six-seven-two-seven.”
“Hold, please.”
I didn’t know what to expect. The last phone call with my motherhad been so awful, and the news might make things worse. What if they refused to talk to me and didn’t want me intruding on them?
After a moment my mother answered. Even her “Hello?” sounded distressed.
“Mother,” I said, “I heard about the stock market! How are you, how’s Papa holding up?”
“Oh, Olive. Not good, not good at all. He was gone all day and night yesterday. He’s in a terrible way, we all are.”
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“We had our life savings in the market,” she whispered, and then she began to cry.
There was a scraping noise in the background, as if chairs were being moved across the floor, then my father’s voice.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Olive,” my mother said.
“Let me talk to her,” he said. “Give me the phone.” I heard some shuffling as he took the receiver. “Olive?”
“Hi, yes, Papa.”
“It’s over, Olive, we’re through, finished. We lost everything. We’re ruined.”
“Surely not everything!”
“Just about. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” He sounded as if he might begin to cry, too. I’d never seen or heard my father cry. He’d worked so hard his whole life. “What are we going to do, Olive?”
It was a shock to hear my father, such a proud man, address me this way, as if he were looking to me for something like reassurance. The thought that I might ever provide it was astonishing.
“Papa,” I said, “I’m going to come home as soon as I can.”
“All right,” he said, breathing deeply, as if trying to calm himself down. “That’d be nice, Olive. It really would.”
I took a deep breath, too. Hearing him say those words meant the world to me; it was everything I needed to hear, after all the turmoil we’d been through. I only wished he weren’t in such a bad way.
“Come soon if you can,” he said quietly, as though he didn’t want my mother to hear what he was saying. “I’m going to be out of a job by the end of the week. We can’t stay here. We’ll have to move back to Minnesota.”
I walked back to the club in a state of panic. Everyone seemed to be rushing, and the sounds of the street clanged in my ears. But one thought rang louder than everything else: I couldn’t let Addie leave again. I reached into my handbag and took out a letter from Alberto, along with my ticket to Southampton. It had arrived just two days earlier. I was supposed to set sail for Europe in a week. How was this going to work? How was any of this going to work? I needed to make money in order to provide for her, and touring with Alberto was my very best chance at doing that, but that would mean being thousands of miles apart.
Apart from Addie.
I peered down at the ticket in my hands, as if to decipher its print, but the words meant nothing except for one additional, inescapable fact: it would take me away from Archie, too.
I shook my head to expel the thought—I could not think about him.
