seriously was that I never felt I was living anywhere close to the way I could have. We had a lovely house near the lake, but in Wilmette, not Winnetka or Lake Forest. I drove a nice car, a Lexus, and Julie had an Audi. But there were no Ferraris or Lotuses in our garage. Not even a BMW Z3 to tool around in on the weekends. Yes, we did have our son in North Shore Country Day School, which was pricey. But it was a better fit for him than the public schools. And we did extend ourselves philanthropically, which led to invitations to join several cultural and educational boards. Certainly we enjoyed some benefit, though happily none that the IRS would say required us to reduce the amount of our gift we could deduct. I’m talking about dinner parties with interesting or well-connected people and black-tie social events that, frankly, Julie got much more out of than I did.
The day everything changed followed one such benefit. I forget what kind of human suffering it was for. Julie and I had set the alarm a little later than usual and over breakfast enjoyed a little conversation about whatever the Trib had on its front page. Then Julie motivated Rob out of bed as I suited up. We all left at the same time, Julie to drive Rob to school (he was a year shy of getting his driver’s license) and I to head down Sheridan Road to Lake Shore Drive, then eventually turn inland to the office building where I worked.
When I got to my desk, I did my e-mail, made a few calls, and worked on my in-box. At 10 a group of young men fresh from the best business schools pitched several of my partners and me on backing their startup company. They dressed in chinos and Façonnable shirts with the top two buttons open to show tanned, hairless chests.
By the time I arrived, the delegation had already been served four-dollar water, and its members had arrayed themselves at the big table so that the people from my firm would have to sit interspersed among them. In the trade this was known as boy-girl-boy-girl.
“Great to see you,” said the apparent leader. “John Durkin.”
“Hi, John. Bill Brewer.”
“Hi, Bill.”
“Thad Reiner.”
“Thad. Bill Brewer.”
“Bill.”
The purpose of the ritual was to imprint each new name in the cranial Contacts file.
“Sid Benz.”
“Sid. Bill Brewer.”
“Bill.”
Their proposition had some appeal, and after a short conference with my partners in the hall, we invited them to come back later in the week to give us more financial detail. We did not say it that way, of course, because dwelling on financials was passé. Instead, Brewer explained to them that we wanted “a little more granularity.” To which the leader of the fledgling company said, “Got it,” as if he had just solved a problem in linear programming.
Next I was off to lunch with an old friend who had made a bundle in computer consulting. According to the argot of the day, he “sold shovels,” which alluded to the strategy a risk-averse businessman might adopt during a gold rush. Caution notwithstanding, my friend had a catholic curiosity and a penetrating mind, which always led to interesting conversation. This day he reported that he had been reading about the Cambrian Explosion, a period in the evolution of life on Earth when suddenly an enormous profusion of new species emerged in the sea. His interest was not random, since the Cambrian Explosion had come to be a metaphor for the extraordinary multiplicity of new products and services offered up by Internet entrepreneurs.
“If we had been there,” he said, “I imagine we would have bet on the most complex, bright, and beautiful creatures. But do you know which had the greatest odds of survival? Slugs and worms. They did not fight the current. They let themselves be carried along.”
I told him he was just trying to justify sticking to the shovels.
“You do what you can,” he said, smiling as he picked up the check.
The moment I returned to the office, I realized something was happening. All the secretaries were away from their desks. The place was so silent it reminded me of the way the air in Abbeville felt just before a tornado. I went to my desk. The Bloomberg was drenched in blood.
Down. Down. Everything was down. Dot-com stocks and other tech-sector securities were taking the worst beating, but even the index funds and the blue chips were bleeding. It was a rout.
Late in the day Jim Bishop, the firm’s founding partner, called an all-hands meeting.
“Corrections get corrected,” he said, full of patrician confidence. “This, too, shall pass.”
Unfortunately, it did not. The market kept falling. Young entrepreneurs who had been worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper were suddenly worth no more than the recycle value of the paper. Companies that had been the market’s darlings sent out broadcast e-mails to their employees, informing them that their jobs no longer existed.
Partners’ draws at Bishop & Dodge went to zero as the firm attempted to preserve its capital. I was able to turn a few of the securities in my private account into cash so I could continue to pay the bills. Nothing else was liquid unless I was willing to lose a hundred dollars to get one. At some point my equity in the firm sank below the equity we had in our home.
Even though I would ordinarily have preferred to spare Julie, the situation was so grave that I had to talk to her. As I explained our circumstances, she looked at me with such trusting eyes that I thought the full import of the news was not penetrating.
Then she said, “Are we in trouble?”
“Everybody we know is,” I said.
In the weeks that followed, a feeling of utter helplessness came over me. I tried to take measures to economize, such as shopping for groceries armed with coupons from the Sunday paper. I cut them out in my office; there was not much else to do there. Meantime, I put feelers out to a number of commercial banks, hungering for a proper salary again, no matter how modest. I never received so much as an e-mail in reply.
All the while the memory of Grampa kept coming back to me, and eventually I decided I had to return to Abbeville.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the big old house where he had spent most of his life. The steps still creaked in the same places they had when I was a boy. The hall at the top was still a gallery of portraits. Large, ceremonial photographs looked down, the ones that had seemed to sit in judgment of me during my adolescent years. Over there were Grandma’s parents, looking fresh off the boat. Next to them Grampa and Grandma themselves, probably barely into their twenties, as relaxed as a neck brace. I went to the bedroom where I had always slept, hung my garment bag in the armoire, slipped off my shoes, and lay down on the big, white-painted iron bed. The feather mattress enveloped me. At some point I heard ticking from downstairs. My cousin must have thought to have someone come in and wind the heavy ceramic clock that had chimed every hour I had spent in Abbeville.
I quickly drifted off to sleep and dreamt of fleeing something I could not name. When I awakened, the crossing bells were calling the approach of a train. My legs slid off the bed. The whole house began to rumble, a tremor of the earth.
Tiny raindrops were gathering on the rattling window. I slipped my shoes back on, got my Gore-Tex jacket and a pair of rubber overshoes from my bag, and went downstairs. When I pulled the car up to the crossing, I looked down the tracks at the retreating lights of the caboose, port and starboard. The whistle fell as if being borne
