Excerpts from The Hartford Atonement
Ted was fixing himself a gin and tonic. He slumped into a cushioned chair and took a long sip. His face sagged, but then he looked up: “I’m trying to imagine what the echo in the gym was like when that guy fired seventy rounds in twenty-five seconds.”
I acknowledged his curiosity with a nod. He took another sip and said, “You know, some billionaire financier should take over the damn gun companies. Fire management. Change the way they do business.”
“Would take a lot of money and a lot of risk.”
My son would light up with big ideas when he was drunk, like buying up the firearm manufacturers. We had talked about how Hartford is the historic heart of America’s firearm industry. He knew that several chief executives of nearby gun companies were members of the country club and were in my foursome a few times. Still, there may have been something in his idea. In my Wall Street career watching the economy and picking stocks, I’d studied correlations, like how job growth correlates to higher inflation or when a company hikes its quarterly dividend that correlates to a higher stock price. There was an undeniable correlation between the abundant manufacturing of assault rifles in the Connecticut River Valley—what I’d heard people call The Silicon Valley of firearms—and one of them getting into the hands of a local madman.
—
Kelly and I were worth $1.1 billion. We owned a 125-foot custom-built yacht, a majority stake in the country club, timberland in Maine, and big investments in downtown Hartford office buildings. I was proud of my extensive portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other securities. I’d been profiled in the New York Times and appeared as a talking head on CNBC television to offer my analysis of the markets. I knew influential people and could get nearly anyone short of the president onto the phone. Kelly and I had entertained the governor at our home and on our yacht, and I was close with the congressman who represented our district. I had enough cash to cover the cost of security guards at every school in Todd’s Chapel for a century. Yet as I stood next to Jack, I couldn’t dodge the irrefutable fact that everything I had, all my money and recognition, didn’t amount to a damn thing.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said before stepping out into the hallway. Across from Jack’s room, a nurse stood at the door and gestured to the bed inside, quietly speaking to an attendant with a wheeled gurney, “We need to get this body down to the morgue.” That drove home Jack’s perilous condition.
—
I stared at my plate for a few seconds, recalling a story I heard from a Jesuit professor in college about the guilt St. Augustine felt after he stole from an orchard. This pried open my own feelings of guilt. I faced Kelly squarely and shook my head. “It’s funny how you can reasonably excuse all of your previous behavior. When I was growing up, everyone thought I was a smart, pious boy. As an altar boy, the priests and nuns liked me. They encouraged me. Yet after serving at Sunday Mass, I jumped the fence to steal pears from Mrs. Downing’s yard. God would understand. I had just worked for him. These pears were like gold. But Mrs. Downing had been watching, and one Sunday, she caught me. From her door, she leveled a finger at me and shouted. ‘Emil, are you snitching my pears again?’ …..I made a fist and placed my thumb to my lower lip. “At work, I took advantage of situations on the exchange floor to scalp a thousand here, a thousand there, making the seed money for the wealth we enjoy today. My actions were unethical, maybe even illegal, but I saw it as acceptable Mob behavior among floor traders.
Her expression changed from apt listener to concern for me. “This isn’t about Jack or Ted. What is it?”
I came out with it. “I made more than $25 million investing in gun stocks. Buying these shares pushed up the market value of the gun companies. That gave them the cash to hire the best lobbyists in Washington. The NRA’s influence became colossal, and now guns are everywhere. I’ve been going over this for several hours now, and I can’t get past how this thoughtlessness helped perpetuate gun violence.”
—
I stopped in to see Rep. Sutter first. “I understand you’re from the Columbine generation. Attended high school in Oakley, not all that far from the Colorado border.”
“That’s right. I’ve visited Columbine High School in Littleton. I’ve also been to Aurora to see the movie house where the midnight rampage took place.”
“Before the killing at the state fair, you backed gun rights. But afterward, you said there’s no reason a civilian should own a gun designed for the battlefield. Changing your priorities because gun violence has touched your community is a powerful argument….Support Bixby’s bill.”
Sutter tapped the end of a pen on his desk blotter as if counting off a few seconds. He chose his words carefully. “My district in western Kansas is rural. Rural folks are more knowledgeable than many people think. They know I have an A rating from the NRA because I’ve affirmed gun rights. If I vote for that bill, no matter how watered-down Republicans make it, I’ll lose that rating. I might as well write my own political death warrant. My voters will elect whomever the NRA endorses, and it will no longer be me. The bill’s going to be defeated anyway. So why sacrifice myself?”
—
Rep. Bumgarner said, “If you knew our culture, our etiquette, you’d think differently about owning a gun. We pack ’em, and everybody feels safe. For those who hunt, it’s the cheapest way to keep your belly full. There are remedies that aren’t being used. Laws that exist that aren’t enforced—like mental health screenings. We should arm every teacher.”
“Why not help Bixby improve those laws? Force gunsmiths to market guns thoughtfully rather than promote assault weapons as a way to demonstrate one’s manhood.”
Bumgarner ceased fingering his beard and pointed at me. “You think too much of what’s possible. America is overrated. It’s too violent, too racist, too greedy. People are unreliable. But guns! Now guns are reliable. Owning a gun gives supporters of gun rights something that people fighting for abortion rights and transgender equality don’t have. We have militias in every state. We’re past the tipping point for taking away our guns. I will tell you, if pushed too far, we can mount an insurrection. Try it, and the federal government will become irrelevant. You ever thought of that?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “That can’t happen.”
“No? Texans don’t think like you.” He dipped his chin to his neck, deepened his voice to accentuate its grave tone, pointed to the door, and tried to belittle me: “Young man, my aide will show you out.”
—
Rep. Clayton Jeffries said, “I’m against any restrictions on hardware available to the law-biding citizen.”
“What about Sam’s bill?”
“I’m against it. Canceling the federal liability shield gives the insurance industry too much power. Without that shield, no insurance executive in his right mind will sell a gun manufacturing outfit a liability policy. Without insurance, you have no industry. We’d have to create a new federal insurance program like we did in the 1950s for the nuclear energy industry when it was thought to be too dangerous to calculate the investment risks. Back then, the big Hartford carriers wanted no part of it. But nuclear held promise, so Washington devised a federal backstop. If Sam’s bill becomes law, a similar plan for gunsmiths will be essential.”
Rep Sager said, “If Washington devised a federal insurance program, Congress would want a degree of control over the gunsmiths.”
Jeffries responded, “Exactly! That’s the crux of the matter. The gun companies would be at the mercy of meddlers rather than the market.” He looked to Bixby. “Nothing—not even if a red state senator’s wife was shot dead at the Kennedy Center—will get this approved. I’m sorry, Sam, but your chances are slim to none.”
—
After dinner one night, I stepped from the table to the bathroom to wash. My dad evidently didn’t think I could hear him. He told my mother: “The time is coming when we have to close the store.”
“When must we decide?” she asked.
“One more year. We should make our plans.” He added in a regretful tone: “I can find work in a butcher shop somewhere.”
“We’ll get by,” I heard my mother say. The supper dishes clinked as she washed them. Then silence. I poked my head out of the bathroom. My father was still at the table, his hands gripping a glass of burgundy wine. My mother was looking at him. “I’ll find work at one of the West Hartford supermarkets.” In a rising and proud voice, she added, “Our holiday table will be as abundant as before.”
I returned to the kitchen thinking maybe my presence would console my father. His eyes were clouded and perspiration darkened his face like morning dew on stone. He looked up. “Emil, pursue a career that is lucrative. We haven’t said this to you or to your brother or your sister. I say it now. Money is important.”
After he went out, I sat with my mother. She didn’t have to repeat her husband’s words. Smoke rose from her cigarette. She looked at me. “True, money would solve your father’s problems. But never think money is the answer to every problem.” She crushed her cigarette in an ashtray and said in a voice inflected with her view of real-world practicality. “We should pray you win the lottery.”
I obtained an MBA and decided to work where the big money was, on Wall Street.
—
We were told again by Dr. Bertrand to wait for my grandson to come around. Driving home, I wondered about the doctor’s approach. I understood he couldn’t make false promises and assure a positive outcome. But surely telling us to hope had its limitations. At a red light, I looked out and wondered what it was about the word ‘hope’ that touches the brain and the heart. I remembered a line in Scripture that teaches the afflicted that their sufferings produce an endurance and character that engenders hope. Okay, I got it. But I doubted if there was a lesson on hope in the medical textbooks, even though doctors relied on hope like a stethoscope. Doctors didn’t convey hope with a right to pursue legal recourse if it failed to deliver. It wasn’t offered with a timeframe. If it were, then Wall Street analysts would study the predictions markets and ponder the prophecies of war and famine and assign hope an interest rate, and before trading on it, investors and money managers would have to weigh its duration risk. In everyone’s life, every morning is filled with hope that things will be better than the day before. Hope lifts the spirits of patients and their families, but it too often vanishes into eternity.
–
Bixby paused to gather his strength, and when he spoke again I saw the power of a nineteenth-century New England preacher thundering condemnation from a pulpit. In an eloquent roar he said, “In every country, to take a life is a crime. To every people, it is evil. The religions of the world teach us that it is a sin. Why, then, are our politics so conflicted over it?”
As the House clerk began the roll-call vote, our group ceased murmuring, but it was not still, for so fixed were our senses on the proceedings that I felt a throbbing of our collective conscience. Our eyes watched the electronic tally board on the wall across from the gallery.