With Lane collapsing under some kind of psychic strain, Wilder took up the slack. As far as the economy went, she had seen it all before. At sixty-two, she had weathered booms and busts all her life, from the Great Depression of 1873 through the Panic twenty years later. She knew—she had to have known—what was coming when the terrifying news of Black Tuesday hit the papers, describing its cataclysmic aftermath, the run on the banks, and the alarming (if fictitious) reports of investors jumping out of windows. In response, she did what she had always done. She got busy. In this atmosphere of
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