Trust

Futures is Mildred’s journal from her time at a Swiss psychiatric hospital as she was dying of cancer. The entries are undated and marked only by the time of day she wrote them. Although most of the entries are brief, they present a starkly different picture of her life with Bevel than presented in Bonds or My Life.

In fragments, Mildred recounts her life with Bevel. The first two years of their marriage were polite and passionless. This changes in 1922 when Mildred invests money Bevel gives her for philanthropy. Her returns are much higher than Bevel’s, prompting him to try, and fail, to replicate her strategy. They begin collaborating on investments: He teaches her the nuts and bolts, and she teaches him to think outside the box. For the first time in their marriage, they are happy. However, it quickly becomes clear that Mildred has more to teach Bevel than he her. Bevel doesn’t understand the investment algorithm Mildred develops and fails to generate her results without her. He continues to follow her directives, building his reputation as an investing genius; however, being the puppet to her hand makes him feel emasculated. Mildred continues to help him because she’s drawn to the intellectual challenge and success of investing; however, she resents Bevel for getting credit for her achievements.

In 1926, Mildred realizes she can exploit the lag of the stock ticker during high traffic (large waves of buying or selling) to arbitrage assets. She begins trading in huge blocks to create these lags so that she can resell them in a different market for a profit before the transactions appear on the ticker. She mentions to Bevel in passing how vulnerable the New York Stock Exchange is to illegal tampering: Someone could bribe one of the four ticker operators to share the quotes before entering them. Behind Mildred’s back, Bevel manages to do just this for a few months, vaulting him into the stratosphere of wealth and reputation. Mildred calls him a criminal, Bevel calls her jealous, and they don’t talk for two years.

For these two years without Mildred’s directive, Bevel pursues safe, uninspired investments. She focuses on music and philanthropy. In 1929, she sees that the market will crash before the end of the year. At the same time, she falls ill. Her illness reconciles Bevel to her. She keeps her diagnosis of terminal cancer from Bevel and resumes giving him investment advice. To circumvent his ego, she sometimes has to plant the seed of an idea in his head to trick him into crediting himself with its germinated form. Bevel doesn’t believe her prediction of the market crash; nonetheless, she begins selling positions and shorting the market.

Following the crash, Mildred’s cancer worsens to the point that she tells Bevel. She informs him that she’s already seen a host of doctors, that her diagnosis is terminal, and that there is nothing to do but take her to the hospital she’s selected in Switzerland. Bevel feels useless; Mildred regrets not allowing him to take charge to boost his self-esteem. Mildred tries to use their fortune to organize an economic recovery fund for the country but is too sick. Bevel makes a few donations in her name that mortify her in their smallness. She asks him not to use her name in his philanthropy again.

In her decline, Mildred continues directing Bevel’s investments as he travels back and forth between Zurich and the hospital. He credits the success of her directives to his intuition. She maintains correspondence with friends, including Vanner, who writes with New York gossip. Her days mainly consist of pain, spa treatments, and nature walks (for which she requires a wheelchair). She enjoys some of her time with Bevel—who tries to make her feel at home by doing things like hiring an orchestra to play her a private concert—but dislikes always having to manage his feelings.

One evening at the hospital, a little girl performs an impromptu musical number for the patients, enraging Mildred. The entertained looks of the audience remind her of the times as a child in Switzerland when her mother would bring her to parties to perform feats of memory and mathematics. Mildred would watch as the guests’ amusement turned to rage when they realized they couldn’t stump her.

The day after Mildred recollects these memories from childhood, she muses on the confessional nature of journals and wonders who the audience for her journal is: “Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist’s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one” (374). It feels good to resume journaling in the hospital after stopping for a long time.

Throughout her stay at the hospital, Mildred contemplates the similarity between the classical chime of the nearby church bells and the logic of the stock market. The chime follows the logic of retrograde symmetry: “D F♯ E A plants + grows the seed of A E F♯ D in the mind before the ear can hear it” (366)—an obvious call-and-response when she is capable of hearing more complex corollaries. The logic of this “fatal music” (366) resembles Bevel’s way of thinking about investing. Knowing both that he thinks in this way and that he dislikes following her investing directives, Mildred sometimes plants the seed of an idea that implies a resolution (D F♯ E A implies A E F♯ D) so that Bevel believes he’s thought of the resolution himself. Shorting the market in 1929 was like inverting the retrograde. While everyone, including Bevel, saw A E F♯ D in the market and thought D F♯ E A should follow, Mildred knew that in fact the inverse should follow: “G C B♭D” (399).

Mildred’s final days become a fragmented stream of consciousness in her journal. She finds solace in being surrounded by nature as she sinks into oblivion.