Читать книгу The Bones of Plenty - Lois Phillips Hudson - Страница 12

By the time the President got around to making a speech on the radio about the banks, a good many of them had already reopened. He called his talk a “fireside chat,” and the image was not reassuring to George. “Chat” was an effete word, used either by women putting on airs or by wealthy people of either sex who had the time to waste in small talk while they sat around in parlors that bulged with bay windows hung in velvet and lace. A fireplace was an expensive luxury which added to the cost of heating a house by inviting down the chimney every prowling wind. The fireplace that came to George’s mind was accoutered with hundreds of dollars’ worth of brass, polished by some ill-paid servant. And over the mantel was an oil portrait of the Wall Street grandfather who made the fortune by speculating in Western land or by other questionable means.

“It is safer to keep your money in the reopened bank than under the mattress,” the President said.

“What money?” George cried to Rachel. “Another rich man in the White House. Oh, how they love to tell us how they know all about being poor. ‘You ah fahmahs. I am a fahmah, too!’ Oh, yes, he’s a farmer too! What a nice little farmhouse he has there at Hyde Park!”

George sat at his own fireside, a bearable distance from the plump round stove that blistered the air in a six-foot radius, and helplessly cursed Harry Goodman while the President urged the people to bring their money back to the banks. But George predicted that putting the bankers back in control of the country might not go so smoothly as the President thought it would, and sure enough, there was quite a piece in the paper just a few days later. He read it aloud to Rachel after supper, yelling out into the kitchen over the noise she made doing the dishes.

“Look here what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I told you there was going to be bloodshed. Unless I miss my guess this is just the beginning. Fellow here—a state bank examiner—W. C. Ernest, his name was, was looking over the Citizens’ State Bank. Paper says he telephoned the State Bank Commissioner to come and take over the bank. Then it says, ‘As Mr. Ernest replaced the receiver of the instrument and turned to speak to the bank president, he was shot in the head and died instantly.’ Well, I tell you, it’ll get so the government don’t dare send out anybody on jobs like that any more. Or anyhow they won’t be able to find anybody that’ll go! You know how that fellow from Bismarck roared in and out of here when he came to clean out Harry’s bank. He knew his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here! Who cares? Might as well hang as starve. You wait. It can’t help but start pretty soon.”

Most of the time Rachel believed he was only relieving his feelings by talking this way. But once in a while he worried her. “Who do you think is going to start it?” she called in.

“How should I know?” he said irritably. “Who ever knows who starts a revolution? It just starts, that’s all. Maybe the coal miners. Maybe the veterans … Hah! How do you like this? Right on the same page with this other story. President said he got ten thousand telegrams ‘applauding his bank policy.’ Well, that’s a little late for W. C. Ernest, isn’t it? I wonder if Roosevelt has heard about him yet.”