The Sky Club by Terry Roberts

Author:Terry Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

30

“IS IT A SIN TO want to get rich?”

This from Uncle Frank. It was Saturday afternoon, and I’d followed him into his study, both of us knowing that we needed to talk. Mostly, that he needed me to talk and I needed him to listen.

I gave him the very same three pages that I’d given Davis and the Directors the day before. And as he seemed so distracted, I explained the four conclusions I’d reached. One, two, three, four: the city is propping up the bank and the bank is propping up the city.

“What’s he going to do?”

“He?”

He nodded in the general direction of Stratford Towers, the palace just up the hill. “Davis. What’s he going to do?”

It was odd the way he said it, as if Davis was now the bank, and he, Frank Morgan, had stepped away.

“Well, Uncle Frank, the mayor is going to spread good will and wring all the tax money he can out of the newly annexed parts of the city, and the bank is going to call in all the outstanding loans it can.”

Frank laughed with a strange bitterness. “Is he going to call in his own mortgage?” Again, he nodded up the hill at Stratford Towers. “Is he going to call in mine?”

I had absolutely no idea how to respond. “Uncle Frank, I don’t …”

And that’s when he said it. Is it a sin to want to get rich, Jo?

I knew what Papa would say. He would say, the higher you ride, the further you fall. But that didn’t sound like something that would console Frank.

“It’s all I ever wanted,” he went on. “I grew up poor, Jo. I mean my own father worked all of us on that place like we were his bond servants, and there still wasn’t enough to eat. Boys in the fields and girls in the house and barn. Six days a week. On Sunday, we were allowed to rest, but we couldn’t leave the place because he was afraid we’d run off.”

“Mama did run off from her family.”

He nodded. “First chance she got. When she was sixteen, she somehow got to know your papa on the sly, and on the day she left, the two of them had enough sense to get themselves legally married in Marshall before our father caught up with them.” He smiled. “It was the smartest thing she ever did. Took me two more years before I escaped, and when I did, I swore on the Bible that I would never again be hungry and that I would never be poor … Never.”

“You’re not poor now, Uncle Frank. Just look around you.” I had a sudden flash back to the day he’d driven us all out to look at Lake View Park. “It’s beautiful. You’re here, you’ve arrived. Think how amazed Mama would be if she could see you in this house.”

He nodded. “Yes, but can we keep it …? Let me ask you something, Jo. You’ve made your way at the bank. You’ve done far better than anyone, including me, thought you could.

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