Living Room (8 page)

There was laughter in the audience.

“It might even get some of you legislators up there,” she said, and the applause was loudest from the gallery as Shirley left the rostrum.

And so it came to pass that the playground was funded with private donations and, because of the simplicity of the concept, it was built in a fifth of the time it would have taken to put high rises up. The mayor of the city of New York announced with pleasure that in recognition of Shirley Hartman’s plan she would be given the city’s highest award, the Fiorello La Guardia Medallion.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK presented Shirley with the La Guardia Medallion in her office, not City Hall. “Look,” she had told the aide who called to make the arrangements, “down there it’ll just be another City Hall photograph. My office is across the street from St. Patrick’s. Why doesn’t he come up here one day when he’s got something going in midtown?”

The aide was uncertain, but the mayor took to the idea with enthusiasm. He arrived with an entourage of five, plus reporters from the
Times, Post, News,
A.P. and U.P.I., photographers and a Channel 5 news crew of four, but there was plenty of room for everyone.

“This,” said the mayor, “is one helluva office for a twenty-eight-year-old girl.”

“It’s a form of advertising,” said Shirley. “Besides, when I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, we had a very tight little apartment. I always wanted a big living room. I guess this is it. It’s the waste space that makes it marvelous.”

The TV people asked Shirley and the mayor to stand a little closer together
, asked everyone to keep quiet, then gave the signal to start.

“I am proud,” said the mayor, “to present the city’s highest civilian award, the La Guardia Medallion, to Shirley Hartman, first because of her imaginative plan for the constructive use of a devastated area, second for having become in a very short time one of the most creative female forces in her profession, and third for the sheer vivacity she exudes, which has helped transform the city of New York. This medal, which has previously been given to half a dozen men, now goes for the first time to a woman.”

Shirley, whose many public appearances did not greatly diminish the qualms she felt during the first moments of each new event, thought to say “Thank you” and be done with it. But it would seem uncharacteristic of her. She didn’t want to cop out, she wanted to take advantage of the moment.

“Your Honor,” she said, “I could accept this medal on behalf of all the underprivileged male executives in New York who can’t get a good secretary any more because of all of us females who are striking out into the professions that up until recently were barred to us.”

The mayor was smiling. Should she go on?

“Your Honor, the entrance to this city is guarded by a woman. When the Statue of Liberty was first set down on an island in the harbor, that lady was supposed to signify—especially to foreigners and new immigrants—that they were dropping anchor in the land of the free. In our own time what we have dropped is the whole ball of wax. Nothing is very free any more, not even the free offers in advertising.”

The mayor couldn’t help laughing.

“Maybe it is funny,” continued Shirley. “We devote as much energy to the pursuit of misery as the pursuit of happiness. We are one nation, easily divisible.”

“Shirley,” interrupted the mayor on camera, “you sound like you’re running for office.”

“Not a chance,” said Shirley, “I don’t want to live the way you do.” She was smiling. “But,” she continued, “I have some suggestions. The city budget never seems to get balanced. It’s not your fault, it’s been that way through many administrations. You see, men who do budgeting are mainly running businesses, and sometimes businesses succeed and sometimes they fail. Families can’t afford to fail. They can’t spend what they don’t have.
That’s why the sex that does most of its budgeting at home ought to be
given a crack at City Hall. For starters, you ought to think of appointing a woman as budget director.”

“I never thought of that,” said the mayor, the most noncommittal remark he could make for the public record.

“Also,” said Shirley, “I think you ought to put a woman in charge of your army.”

“What army?” said the mayor, blinking.

“The police. You’re always talking about the war against crime. Cops and robbers. I get you before you get me. I say put a woman in charge as police commissioner, and you’ll see the difference. In fact, when you yourself retire to higher office, I think the people of this city ought to elect not one of those feeble retreads without charisma who are elbowing each other for the job, but a woman, and then watch the middle class come flocking back to this town.”

The reporters and photographers, who always liked covering a Shirley Hartman assignment, were enjoying themselves. The camera still trained on her, Shirley added, “You see, even the reporters are laughing because they find the idea of women running things ridiculous.”

The TV people wanted one close-up shot of the medal. Then the presentation was over.

Shirley overheard the A.P. man saying to one of the other reporters, “She’s always good copy.” Then the mayor, his hand at her elbow, guided her away from them so that he could ask, “Hey, you really upstaged me. Who’s your speechwriter?”

“Yours wrote it for me in his spare time,” said Shirley. “He’s establishing contacts for the future.”

Interrupting them was the man from the
Post
.
“Miss Hartman, for the record, are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

“For the record, I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that either answer would incriminate me.”

The
Post
man wrote it down and Shirley hoped it didn’t get garbled in print.

The mayor blew her a kiss before ducking through the door, followed by his entourage and the reporters, while the TV people curled their wires up. In three minutes they were all gone.

*

In Westchester, in a stone house with a cathedral living room large enough to hold Shirley’s office several times over, a thirtyish, very tall man with the strange name of Al Chunin watched the Channel 5 news. He was about to turn it off, when the mayor came on, presenting the medal to Shirley Hartman. Arrangements had been made for Chunin to meet Shirley very soon.

At first he watched with amusement. Her vitality was attractive. She had charisma. But he found something irritating about the power drives of elected or self-elected public figures. Privacy was meant to be guarded.

Against his reasoned judgment, Shirley Hartman’s brashness lured him.

Al Chunin clicked the set off, the picture of Shirley and the mayor turning into a rapidly retreating dot of white light. In front of the blank screen, he thought,
we will see.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHIRLEY THOUGHT HER FATHER might
like to
have the medal, a conversation piece for parental pride. She’d give it to him the next time she took the long trip up to the Bronx for a visit. In the meantime, she slipped the medal next to the paper clips in the center drawer of her desk. Within days, a junkie lifted it along with Shirley’s gold-filled pen and her dictating machine. “It is only fitting,” she told the newspapers, “that the city’s highest civilian medal should be ripped off. When we have a woman in City Hall…”

*

Shirley’s office was thirty-three feet long. The wall-width drapes, when pulled open each morning, revealed St. Patrick’s Gothic stone across the street. A six-foot palm, watered weekly by Shirley’s secretary, arched its green fronds in all directions. The thick gold carpet always had one vacuum trace, the cleaner’s mark to prove that he had been there.

Shirley’s desk was a large half oval so that four or five people could pull their chairs close to it. She didn’t like scattered visitors about the room, it made her feel as if she were speaking in a small auditorium. “The rest of the room,” Shirley would say, “is for pacing, and for effect.”

Behind her desk, Shirley was quick, friendly and naive—expecting everyone to be ambitious and competent.

The eye of a visitor would inevitably light on the terra-cotta vase on her desk, in which, whatever the bouquet, there was centered a bird of paradise, orange-black, beautiful, expensive, replaced always the moment it began to wilt, part of her new contract. “Arthur,” she had said to Crouch, “now that we’ve got the money straightened out, I want the furniture and fixtures allowance to provide for a fresh bouquet each week, whatever flowers the season has to offer that mix well, but in the center it’s got to have a bird of paradise.”

“You don’t need that in your contract, Shirley,” Arthur had said. “If it would make your office a happier place to work, I’ll see that it gets put there.”

“What happens if you got hit by a truck—that subject comes up at board meetings once a year, doesn’t it?—I want your key man insurance to cover the bird of paradise.”

To satisfy her, Arthur put in the corporate files a letter to his successor suggesting that the tradition of a bird of paradise for Shirley Hartman be maintained in the event of his death. Arthur thought of it as a feminine whim, an expression he would never have dared to use in her presence. She was his most talented employee and he would have bought her a Rolls or a bidet for her private bathroom if she had asked for it.

Though the other employees of Armon, Caiden, Crouch had had time enough to get used to Shirley’s presence among them, she sometimes detected a glance that reminded her of Charlotte and the kids in the schoolyard. Her confreres played walk-on parts season after season in a hit show of which Shirley was clearly the star.

She needed to talk to a friend. Not fellow employees, not Mary,
not Jack, someone who—she thought
of Hester Fedder, her roommate at Barnard. The penciled phone number was smudged but legible. Nobody by that name there. She checked with Mary. Mary had not kept track of Hester.

Her work went in spasms, a manic week followed by a weekend-long depression. She took the knot in her gut to a doctor, who found nothing wrong.

She yearned for the time when she and Hester would lie on beds on the opposite side of the room, stare at the ceiling and exchange confidences. She needed somebody to talk to.

The physician who found nothing gave her the name of Dr. Gunther Koch.

The magazines in his waiting room were old copies of
Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary,
the
Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Koch, when he appeared, was gray-maned, his face a welter of crinkles, his accent faintly European. German? Viennese? Weren’t they all?

When they were seated face-to-face in his paneled study, Koch said, “What can I do for you?”

She didn’t know.

“Why are you here?”

She didn’t know. Then she remembered the knot in her gut. He said, “That is not why you are here. What are you thinking of, now, this second while you are not paying attention?”

She thought him abrupt, his directness rude, and told him so. He smiled, and gently asked her again to tell him what she had been thinking.

And so it began, three times a week in Dr. Koch’s haven, no longer face to face but lying down, hearing his sigh behind her, his questions so gently put yet opening fistulas in her memory as she, seemingly at random, recounted her mother’s death, the year in bed, her fear of the mob at school, her shock at realizing that in the cyclone of her career she needed friends.

“Some husbands and wives are friends. A few.”

“You’re cynical.”

“No,” said Koch, “I try to be exact. We can lie to others if it makes life easier, but to ourselves it does no good. You feel…”

She waited for the words.

“A success in business, a failure in friendship. If you could switch, would you be a failure in business, and have many friends?”

After a moment, she said “No.”

“You are right. One has few friends. The rest are acquaintances. You do not have the skill to be a bumbler in business. You are what you are.”

“I work like a maniac.”

“That will change.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Again the sigh. “Experience,” he said.

In time, the knot didn’t come back. When she thought of a friend, she thought of Gunther Koch. And told him so.

“Shirley,” he said. “This is your last hour for a while. If you get in trouble, you can always come back.”

“You’re firing me.”

“You need to cut loose from here. Now.”

It was only after they shook hands that he said, “One cannot run a life like a popularity contest. Who does? Politicians? Could you be a politician?”

“Never.”

“Come have tea some time. No charge. As a friend.”

*

For a week she consciously tamed her wit, kept all conversation bland, lanced nobody, bored herself.
The hell with that,
she thought,
parole is over.