Nobody's Fool

obvious fact that it was getting more expensive. Indeed, Miss Beryl was the only professional woman
among
these frightened Upper Main Street widows. Alive, their husbands had protected them from life’s falling limbs, but now their veteran’s benefits and meager Social Security did not stretch very far, and so they rented their second-floor flats out of necessity, though the rents they received often did little more than cover the repairs necessitated by the disintegration of hundred-year-old pipes, the overloading of antiquated electrical circuits, the falling of tree limbs. Tomake matters worse, taxes were skyrocketing, pressured upward by downstate speculators in real estate, many of whom seemed convinced that Bath and every other small town in the corridor between New York City and Montreal would appreciate dramatically during the eighties and nineties. It might not look it, but Bath had much to recommend it. Not only was the old Sans Souci, grandly restored, scheduled to reopen next summer, but a huge tract of boggy land between the village and the interstate was being considered for development of a theme park called The Ultimate Escape. Miss Beryl’s son, Clive Jr., for the last decade the president of the North Bath Savings and Loan, was leading a group of local investors to ensure that the theme park became a reality, and he subscribed enthusiastically to the view that because land was limited, the future was limitless. “In twenty years,” he was fond of saying, “there’s going to be no such thing as a bad location.”
    Miss Beryl did not argue, but neither did she share her son’s optimism. To her way of thinking there would always be bad locations, and unless she was gravely mistaken Clive Jr. would discover this by investing in them. Clive Jr. was a cynical optimist. He believed that people went broke for two reasons: stupidity and small thinking. Stupidity in others was a good thing, according to Clive Jr., because there was money to be made by it. Other people’s financial failures were opportunities, not cause for alarm. He liked to analyze failure after the fact, discover its source in small thinking, limited ambition, penny antes. He prided himself on having rescued the North Bath Savings and Loan from just such unhealthy notions. For years that institution had been edging by slender centimeters toward insolvency, the result of Clive Jr.’s predecessor, a deeply suspicious and pessimistic man from Maine who hated to loan people money. The fact that people came to him asking for money and often truly needing it suggested to him the likelihood of their not being able to repay it. He could see the need in their eyes, and he couldn’t imagine such need going away. He thought the institution’s money was safer in the vault than in their pockets. The man had actually died
in
the bank, on a Sunday, seated in his leather chair, his office door closed, as it always was, as if he suspected he might be petitioned even on a weekend night with the doors to the bank locked. He was discovered on Monday morning in a state of advanced rigor mortis not unlike, it was later remarked, the condition of the institution he oversaw.
    When Clive Jr. took over, things loosened up right away. The first thing he did was put down a new carpet in the lobby, the old one havingevolved several stages beyond threadbare except in the passageway that led to the CEO’s office, where there’d been little traffic. His goal for the decade was to increase tenfold the savings and loan’s assets, and he made known his intention to invest what money was left aggressively and even, when the situation seemed to call for it, to loan money out. After so many years of pessimism, Clive Jr. maintained, it was time for a little optimism. Furthermore, that was the mood of the nation.
    The only policy Clive Jr. shared with his late predecessor was his deep distrust of the residents of North Bath, whom both men considered shiftless. That’s the way his high school classmates had been, and they’d grown up shiftless, in Clive Jr.’s view. He preferred to deal with investors and borrowers from downstate, indeed from out of state, indeed from as far away as Texas, convinced that these were the future of Bath, just as they had been the salvation of Clifton Park and the other recently affluent Albany suburbs. “Downstate money is creeping up the Northway,” Clive Jr. told his