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The Shape of It, in Sum
South Bend's wealth record, taken whole, divides into what documents can size and what they cannot. The ledger of the founding speculation survives to the cent; the largest industrial estate survives because the federal government argued over it; the largest fortune of all survives in a bankruptcy court's summary of what its owner had once been worth. Against those stand the silences, which this section has printed as silences: no probate total for either Oliver, none for Coquillard, none for the banker Morris or his daughter, none for the lathe-building O'Briens. The losses are as well documented as the gains — a $40,000 defalcation and a mortgage satisfied in land, a president $350,000 in debt with his stock worthless, a great house sold for $20,000 in the Depression, a $38 million fortune discharged in bankruptcy six years before its owner's death. And the newest money is the least priced of all: a tire company sold for an undisclosed amount, a banking family's gifts announced without totals, a Forbes list on which no resident of the city has ever stood. What the record will support is what has been printed; the rest is stated as missing, in the entries where it is missing.