Final Option

cousin Tim were in a kind of emotional shock, blocking out the world in the hopes of regaining an inner equilibrium.
    “So there’s nothing here that looks like it’s connected with what happened?” asked Barton, finally, like someone straining to see through the fog.
    “Nothing. But that doesn’t mean something won’t turn up later. Carl Savage is over at the Merc right now going through your father’s trades on the other exchange.”
    “Dad had seats everywhere, the Merc, the NYFE, the COMEX, even the smaller exchanges like the Mid-America, but he only traded customer accounts there. When he traded his own account, he preferred to trade what he knew best—wheat, corn and soybeans—always at the CBOT.”
    “Savage says that the brokerage customers will pull their accounts as soon as they learn of your father’s death. He wants you to come in and call the trades.“
    “Me?” cried Barton Jr. “No way. I’m not a businessman.”
    “It would be only temporary, until another arrangement could be made.”
    “I’ve got my own work to do—classes to teach, my research. I have to give mid-terms next week. I can’t just drop everything because of this.”
    “I’m sorry to be pushing you, especially today of all days. But the markets will open as usual tomorrow morning.”
    “You sound just like Kurlander,” snapped Barton, springing angrily to his feet. “Dumping all of this on me whether I like it or not. If I’d wanted to go into the futures business I would have gone into it. I don’t care about the money. I like my life the way it is. I don’t want that kind of responsibility.”
    “So if you won’t do it, who should I get to direct the show?” I asked, the way you’d talk to a small child who was insisting on something unreasonable. “Carl Savage says he doesn’t want the responsibility either. His job is basically making sure the orders get filled, seeing that there are no slip ups between the brokers, the runners, and the traders.” In a deliberate ploy, I turned to Tim.
    Do you think you can carry the ball until we find a ^ore permanent solution?” I demanded.
    Tim half rose to his feet, blushing and stammering in Panic.
    “N-n-no. Not me. I’m really just an errand boy. I tried trading once, a couple of years ago. The only thing I was good at was losing money.”
    “Everybody else at Hexter Commodities is in sales,” I bore on, relentlessly making my point. “They’re just brokers—guys who call dentists in Dubuque and convince them there’s a fortune to be made trading futures, I’m sorry if I sound like Kurlander, but when you come right down to it—your father left it to you.”
    “And I don’t want it,” Barton Jr. bitterly replied.
    “Look at this,” I said picking up the top page of the Clearinghouse printout. “One hundred and seventy-four contracts to buy eight hundred seventy thousand bushels of January wheat at fifteen thousand dollars a contract That’s a commitment of two million six hundred and ten thousand dollars in just one market. If the price drops by just five cents, that’s a four hundred and thirty thousand dollar loss. Now you tell me. Who do you want making these decisions?”
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    Living in Hyde Park is one of my continuing acts of rebellion against my family. Here, in the neighborhood that surrounds the University of Chicago, Nobel prize winners, students, and scholars from all over the world go about their business alongside bookies, policemen, petty thieves, welfare cheats, and the adherents of resuscitated African religions. Within its boundaries there are quadrangles of medieval splendor, squat and squalid public housing blocks, mansions, and museums. Here complex drugs are developed in high-tech laboratories while junkies ply the rougher end of the pharmaceutical trade in vacant lots.
    I share an apartment with Claudia Stein, a friend from college who is a surgical resident at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Like all the buildings on our stretch of Hyde Park Blvd., ours was built in the ‘20s and meant to be grand. The rooms are huge with twelve-foot ceilings and the kind of architectural detail that makes yuppie rehabbers swoon. The people who come after us, no doubt, will do it justice—put in a new kitchen, strip the woodwork, redo the floors and make them shine. In the meantime, Claudia and I have just plunked down our odd assortment of hand-me-down furniture and called it home.
    I let myself in and headed