-- ——his spirits plunged even lower. One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I'm already going broke on a million dollars a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time -- —and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden -- —that was all! It came to $252,000 a year, none of it deductible, because it was a personal loan, not a mortgage. (The cooperative boards in Good Park Avenue Buildings like his didn't allow you to take out a mortgage on your apartment.) So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment's monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover's Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell's birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and the magician) and had cost less than $4,000. The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000; and there was little hope of reducing that, since Judy was, after all, a decorator and had to keep things up to par. The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that, including insurance payments (nearly a thousand a month, if averaged out), garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month)—the abysmal truth was that he had spent more than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there—but not nearly enough—;/ the worst happened! There was no getting out from under the $1.8 million loan, the crushing $21,000-a-month nut, without paying it off or selling the apartment and moving into one far smaller and more modest—an impossibility! There was no turning back! Once you had lived in a $2.6 million apartment on Park Avenue -- —it was impossible to live in a $1 million apartment! Naturally, there was no way to explain this to a living soul. Unless you were a complete fool, you couldn't even make the words come out of your mouth. Nevertheless—it was so! It was . . . an impossibility! [...]

"You come up here now, after all this time, and you tell me there are people with prison records on the board of directors of the Little Shepherd Day Care Center. You inform me of that fact."

"I'm not telling you, Reverend Bacon," said Fiske. "That's what the Human Resources Administration is telling us both."

"I want to tell you something. I want to remind you of something you told me. Who do we want to run the Little Shepherd Day Care Center? Do you remember? Do we want your Wellesley girls and your Vassar girls coming up here to take care of the children of Harlem? Do we want your social benefactors? Do we want your licensed civil-service bureaucrats? Your lifers from City Hall? Is that what we want? Is that what we want?"

Fiske felt compelled to answer. Obediently as a first-grader, he said, "No."

"No," said Reverend Bacon approvingly, "that is not what we want. What do we want? We want the people of Harlem looking after the children of Harlem. We're going to draw our strength . . . our strength . . . from our people and our own streets. I told you that a long time ago, in the earliest days. Do you remember? Do you remember that?"

"Yes," said Fiske, feeling more juvenile by the minute, and more helpless in the face of that steady gaze.

"Yes. Our own streets. Now, a young man grows up on the streets of Harlem, the chances are the police have a sheet on that young man. You understand? They have a sheet on that young man. I'm talking about a police record. So if you're saying to everybody who's ever been in jail and everybody coming out of jail and everybody on parole, if you're saying, 'You can't participate in the rebirth of Harlem, because we gave up on you soon as you got a record' ... see ... then you are not talking about the rebirth of Harlem. You're talking about some make-believe place, some magic kingdom. You're fooling yourself. You're not looking for a radical solution. You're wanting to play the same old game, you're wanting to see the same old faces. You're wanting to practice the same old colonialism. You understand? You understand what I'm saying?"

"None of it? How can that be?"

"This was seed money. We had to sow the seed. Some of it fell on fallow ground."

"Sow the seed? Reverend Bacon, surely you didn't advance these people their money before they did the work!"

"These are minority firms. People from the community. That was what we wanted. Am I not correct?"

"Yes. But surely you have not advanced— --"

"These are not firms with your 'lines of credit,' your 'computerized inventories,' your 'pre-staggered cash flows,' your 'convertible asset management,' your 'capital-sensitive liquidity ratios,' and all that. These are not firms with factors to go to, like they have in the garment industry, when bad luck knocks on the door with your 'unavoidable delays' . . . see . . . These are firms founded by people in the community. These are the tender shoots that sprout up from the seeds we sow—you, me, the Episcopal Church, the Gates of the Kingdom Church. Tender shoots . . . and you say, 'unavoidable delay.' That's not just a term, that's not just your red tape—that's a sentence of death. A sentence of death. That's saying 'Kindly drop dead.' So don't tell me I can just explain it to them. Unavoidable delay . . . Say, unavoidable death."

"Steam control. It's a capital investment. It's a very good one. You know what capital is? You think it's something you own, don't you. You think it's factories and machines and buildings and land and things you can sell and stocks and money and banks and corporations. You think it's something you own, because you always owned it. You owned all this land." He waved his arm back toward the bay window and the gloomy back yard and the three sycamore trees. "You owned all the land, and out there, out there in ... Kansas . . . and . . . Oklahoma . . . everybody just lined up, and they said, 'On the mark, get set, go!' and a whole lot of white people started running, and there was all this land, and all they had to do was get to it and stand on it, and they owned it, and their white skin was their deed of property ... see ... The red man, he was in the way, and he was eliminated. The yellow man, he could lay rails across it, but then he was shut up in Chinatown. And the black man, he was in chains the whole time anyway. And so you owned it all, and you still own it, and so you think capital is owning things. But you are mistaken. Capital is controlling things. Controlling things. You want land in Kansas? You want to exercise your white deed of property? First you got to control Kansas ... see ... Controlling things. I don't suppose you ever worked in a boiler room. I worked in a boiler room. People own the boilers, but that don't do 'em a bit of good unless they know how to control the steam ... see ... If you can't control ... the steam, then it's Powder Valley for you and your whole gang. If you ever see a steam boiler go out of control, then you see a whole lot of people running for their lives. And those people, they are not thinking about that boiler as a capital asset, they are not thinking about the return on their investment, they are not thinking about the escrow accounts and the audits and the prudent thing ... see ... They are saying, 'Great God almighty, I lost control,' and they are running for their lives. They're trying to save their very hides. [...] .Oh, conduct your audit! . . . But the time is coming when you will say: 'Thank God. Thank God! Thank God we entered the money on the books Reverend Bacon's way!' Because I'm the conservative, whether you know it or not. You don't know who's out there on those wild and hungry streets. I am your prudent broker on Judgment Day. Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, they're gonna blow, my friend, and on that day, how grateful you will be for your prudent broker . . . your prudent broker . . . who can control the steam. Oh yes. On that day, the owners of capital, how happy they will be to exchange what they own, how happy they will be to give up their very birt/irights, just to control that wild and hungry steam. No, you go on back down, and you say, 'Bishop, I've been uptown, and I'm here to tell you we made a good investment. We found a prudent broker. We're gonna occupy the high ground when it all comes down."

"Come to think of it," said Moody, "I never have seen a black waiter in a restaurant in New York, except for lunch counters. You really think Bacon is going to get anywhere?"

"Depends on what you mean by that."

"Well, what will happen?"

"I don't know," said Fiske, "but they want to be waiters at Leicester's about as much as you and I do. I kind of think they just might settle for a contribution to the Reverend Mr. Bacon's good works in Harlem, and then they'll move on to the next restaurant."

"Then it's just a payoff," said Moody.

"Well, that's the funny thing," said Fiske. "Things do change. I'm not sure he cares whether they change or not, but they change. Places he never heard of, and wouldn't care about if he had, they'll start hiring black waiters rather than wait for Buck and all those characters to turn up.