The door slammed. Sylvia burst into tears. "Oh, hell, " she said again. "Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, hell." She was sure she would never see him again.
She was sure, but she was wrong. One day a couple of weeks later, he waved to her as she came out of her block of flats. She'd never known she could feel joy and fear in the same heartbeat. "Ernie!" she called. "What is it?"
"You have your money in a bank," he said. That wasn't at all what she'd expected. "Which bank is it?"
"Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust," she answered automatically. "Why?"
"I thought I remembered that," Ernie said. "I saw the passbook on your coffee table. Take the money out. Take it all out. Take it out right away. The bank is going to fail. It will fail very soon."
Fear of a different sort shot through her. "God bless you," she whispered. "You're sure?"
"No, of course not," he snapped. "I came here because I was guessing. Why else would I come here?"
Sylvia flushed. "I was going somewhere else, but I'll head over there right now. Thank you, Ernie."
His face softened, just for a moment. "You're welcome. Writers find things out. I know someone who works for the bank. Who worked for the bank, I mean. He saw the writing on the wall. He quit. He said anywhere else in the world was better than to be there right now." He paused and nodded to Sylvia. "Nice to think I can do something for you, anyhow." Touching a finger to the brim of his sharp new fedora, Ernie hurried away. The crowd on the street swallowed him up.
Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust was only a few blocks away: the main reason Sylvia banked there. She ran almost the whole way. The lines didn't stretch out the door, as she'd seen at other banks in trouble. But she felt panic in the air when she went inside. Everyone was speaking in the low near-whispers people used when they tried to show they weren't afraid. She filled out a withdrawal slip and worked her way to the front of the line.
How many lines have I stood in? How many hours of my life have I wasted in them? Too many-I know that.
At last she stood before a teller's cage, with its frosted glass and iron grillwork. The young man looked very unhappy when he saw the slip. "You want to close out your entire account?" he said in that soft, no-I'm-not-afraid voice.
"That's right," Sylvia answered firmly. "You do have the money to cover it?"
The teller flinched. "Yes, we do. We certainly do. Of course we do."
"Well, then, kindly give it to me," Sylvia said.
"Yes, ma'am. Please wait here. I'll be back with it." The teller disappeared into the bowels of the bank.
Before he returned, an older man stepped into the cage and said, "Ma'am, I want to personally assure you, the Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust is sound."
"That's nice," Sylvia told him. "If it turns out you're right, maybe I'll put my money back in. If it turns out you're wrong, I'll have the money-if that teller ever gets back. How long is he going to take?"
He chose that moment to return. While the frowning older man looked on, he counted out bills and change for Sylvia. "Here you are, ma'am," he said. "Every penny that's owed you." He sounded as if he were doing her a favor by giving her back the money, and as if she hadn't done the bank a favor by depositing it there in the first place.
By the time she left, the lines did stretch out the door. "Did you get it?" someone called to her. She didn't answer; she didn't want to get mugged when people found out she was carrying cash. She just headed home, as fast as she could.
Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust closed its doors for good the next day.
AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold
XII
M ary McGregor went about her chores with a certain somber joy. That had nothing to do with how hard things were on the Manitoba farm where she'd spent her whole life. It had a great deal to do with how hard the market crash had hit the United States. She hardly cared what happened to her, so long as the United States got hurt.
And, by all the signs, the occupiers did hurt. Fewer green-gray U.S. Army motorcars rattled along the road to Rosenfeld that ran past the edge of the farm. Fewer U.S. soldiers prowled the streets of the local market town. And the Rosenfeld Register, published these days by an upstart from Minnesota who used occupation propaganda as filler, kept on weeping about how hard a time people south of the border were having.
None of which made things on the farm any easier, only somewhat easier to bear. Things on the farm were desperately hard, and all the harder because Julia had married Kenneth Marble and gone off to live with him. She came back to visit fairly often, usually bringing Beth Marble, Kenneth's mother, with her, and Kenneth himself stopped by every so often for a burst of work for which a man's strength came in handy. Things weren't the same, though, and Mary and her own mother both knew it.
"One of these days before too long, you'll meet somebody, too," Maude McGregor said over supper after a long, wearing day out in the fields. "You'll meet somebody, get married yourself, and move away. I'll probably have to sell this place and move in with you or Julia."
"I wouldn't do that!" Mary exclaimed.
Her mother smiled. "Of course you would. You should. That's the way the world works. Young folks do what they need to do, and older ones ride along with it as best they can. I don't see how we'd go on if things worked any different."
"It doesn't seem right. It isn't right," Mary said-she'd had that passionate certainty for as long as she'd been alive. After a moment, she went on, "If I ever marry anybody"-and the thought had crossed her mind more and more often since she'd passed her twentieth birthday-"he ought to come and live here and help us work this place. Then our children could go right on working it, years and years from now."
"The trouble with that, you know, is that Julia and Kenneth, and their children when they have them, have an interest in this land, too," her mother said.
"Julia doesn't seem very interested," Mary said. "She went off without so much as a backwards glance."
"Julia doesn't seem very interested now," her mother replied. "How she'll feel about things ten or twenty years from now-or how her husband and her children will feel-well, how can anybody know for sure?"
Thinking about what things might be like ten or twenty years from now still didn't seem natural to Mary. She tried to imagine herself at forty, but no picture formed in her mind. That lay too far in the future to mean anything to her now. She wondered if Julia still felt the same way. Maybe not-with a husband at hand, she had to be looking forward to having children.
How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who'd grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her… She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn't do it, after a while there wouldn't be any more people.
Sometimes that didn't seem such a bad idea.
Her mother went on, "A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don't have to worry about it any more."
"I'll take care of it," Mary promised. "I've noticed 'em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel."