So, with the silver-framed photograph of Vestal and Biddy under his arm, Neil walked out of the bank, a Negro out of a job.

The final payment on his house was due, but this would be only a couple of hundred dollars, and he had a bank-balance of $1127.79, and a loyal wife.

He was sure about the bank-balance.

Chapter 43

Vestal, as the heir of a thousand Beehouses, had no more experience with the men of her family looking for work than with their turning into Chippewas and Hottentots. But she had been fifteen years old in the Panic of 1929, and she could remember quite respectable men, graduates of Yale and Dartmouth, who had lost brokerage houses and courageously gone on facing life on incomes of less than ten thousand a year.

She was not worried about Neil’s lack of income. It was only a question of whether he would accept a position, probably at a better salary, in the Blue Ox National Bank, or favor the smaller Merchants & Miners.

Nor, except when he was a schoolboy and had borrowed a lawnmower from Uncle Emery Saxinar and set up in the jobbing-gardener business (over the summer he got three lawns to do, at thirty-five cents apiece, but there was no future in it, because he squandered his gains on black-and-white sodas), had Neil himself ever looked for work. His appointment to the Second National, after college, had come as naturally as the wrist-watch that was his father’s Commencement gift.

He did not understand that the world simply does not care what happens to cautious rebels, once they have ceased to play the safe game of Pruttery. It does not persecute them; it merely sends out word that it is not at home, when they call to say that they are starving.

Neil would not gratify the Blue Ox National by offering to join it, not he, for he disapproved of the Havocks. No, he would go help out the Merchants & Miners and his mousy teller friend, Mr. Topman. But Vestal said that he must do it grandly; he must take the car. No, no, she was only going to the women’s club for a little bridge, and she could just as well take the bus.

He breezed into the brown diminutiveness of the Merchants & Miners, but Mr. Topman, behind the bars, jerked back as though Neil were known to bite. He reluctantly took Neil to the bank’s president, who once had praised his tennis at a Heather Club tournament but could not quite recall him now, and mumbled, “Sorry, doesn’t seem to be any kind of opening.”

Less confidently—less and less confidently—Neil went on to the other banks, to a brokerage house, to Scott Zago’s Northern Insurance Brokerage.