Ride a Cockhorse (19 page)

While Bruce worked on Mrs. Fitzgibbons in his salon, she enlightened him on the dynamics of power. She had often wondered herself how historic figures had been able to bear the constant trials and perils of leadership. Now she knew. “They don't have a choice,” she said. “I've learned more about history in the past three days than old Sister Stanislaus could have taught me in a lifetime.”

Bruce was working on her eyelids with a sponge applicator, imparting to each fluttery eyelid a layer of pale blue eye shadow. Unknown to Bruce, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was experiencing nervous spasms in her stomach. It didn't show, but her nerves were jangled. Every few minutes, her heart rate speeded up. In the full light of day, Mrs. Fitzgibbons did not expect some demented attacker to come rushing in from the mall and assault her on the spot; but gathering feelings of a paranoid nature had established themselves in her system.

“You can't turn back,” she said. “There's no place to hide. You can stay forever buried in the mass, as long as you keep quiet and grin and swallow what they feed you, but when you start to fight, you have to defend yourself around the clock every day of the year. And you can only do that by attacking and destroying your enemies.”

“By keeping up the pressure.”

“Exactly, darling. It's a never-ending struggle. If you stand still,” she said, “those behind you will smash the life out of you.”

Despite Mrs. Fitzgibbons's anxious state of mind, her magic was more than evident this morning. The three women who worked for Bruce crowded around her, all talking at once, praising her for her Monday evening television appearance. On Maple Street, as she went from the salon to the bank, people recognized her in the street. Moreover, the bank itself was even busier than it had been the day before. When Mrs. Fitzgibbons entered through the revolving doors — wearing a very dark, gun-metal blue leather coat she had appropriated from Bruce, with its epaulets and trim styling, which lent her a brisk, military look — the crowd inside was unprecedented in size. The people standing in line were also noisier than usual, as if they imagined themselves participating in something exciting, as in the sudden rise to prominence of one among their number. As she darted in among them, the highlighting around her cheekbones and temples shone to create a very determined expression. She ignored the felicitations thrown at her from all sides. There was a genuine aura about her. She radiated purpose. Everyone noticed it.

The first thing she did that morning was move her office. As a proper site for a chief officer, she selected the big conference room adjacent to Mr. Hooton's department at the rear of the bank. The elegance of the room, with its beamed ceiling and full mahogany paneling, reflected nicely, she thought, on her newly won authority. More important, being deep and spacious, it would produce a frightening effect on anyone called into it. The conference table was removed, and Mr. Klopfer, the head of maintenance, was instructed to position Mrs. Fitzgibbons's big desk in the far corner of the room. In this way, anyone summoned to her office would be required to march across twenty feet of open carpet just to reach her desk, a requirement that she guessed would abash the stoutest heart, especially if the summonee were then left standing in limbo for a while as she continued to busy herself with her desk work. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not insensible to such subtleties.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was a fountain of nervous energy this morning. While Mr. Klopfer and his assistant, Marshall Moriarty, relocated her desk, files, and personal effects, she was everywhere at once, and kept Julie on the run as well. Spotting Jack Greaney, Mrs. Fitzgibbons collared him on the floor and gave him a task that astonished him. She wanted a secret memorandum prepared, she said, on the subject of Laurence and Morris De Maria, a compilation that included everything that could be discovered about them.

Young Jack, who looked nervous whenever Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in his presence, listened in stupefaction as she gave him the law; she cited examples of what she wanted. “Who hired them, who their references were, where they worked before, whom they married, where they live, where they work now — all of it — in a confidential report to me. The whole putrid mess,” she said. “I'm going to get to the bottom of those two,” she added, setting a gloved finger in front of Jack's face.

“What did they do?” Jack was concerned to know the cause of the bank's enduring interest in them.

“What they did is a matter for the courts of law. I'm going to put them in jail, Jack. I'm going to put them away.”

Backed up against a glass cubicle, his face as white as a parsnip, Jack listened as the new senior vice president of the Parish Bank eyed him with a scary intensity.

“I want to know who they lunched with while they were here, who their closest friends were, their neighbors, their doctors, their children, their wives' maiden names, their parents, everything in the book.”

“But we don't have information like that,” he countered helplessly.

“Because if you don't do that for me,” she went on, “you'll be a stock clerk at K mart. You'll be working for the sanitation department. You'll be peddling your body down at Race and Main to little Puerto Rican men with mustaches. I'll fire you, Jack.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked genuinely scary, very even-eyed and soft-voiced, as she enunciated her threat. “You were their superior. Your neck is on the line.”

By this time, even the more indifferent, workaday employees of the bank were convinced that Mrs. Fitzgibbons's administration presaged a dynamic new era in the history of the bank. Depositors opened new accounts in impressive numbers. Mr. Zabac came to work a little earlier than usual and betrayed a certain bounce in his footstep at the sight of the continuing press of new business, as he mounted the stairs with his usual stiff-backed, godlike dignity. Ensconced in her new office, Mrs. Fitzgibbons took congratulatory calls one after the other, only interrupting herself long enough to get Leonard Frye on the line to approve three separate home loan applications he had sent to her desk. Twice, while coming and going outside her office, she encountered Neil Hooton; she ignored him both times, sweeping past him with a regal, impatient expression. The stock market was in pieces. She showed him her contempt, while remaining mindful in her heart of the man's hatred of her and of the need to ruin him at her earliest convenience.

Her most enjoyable communication that morning came from a man named Nahum Solomon, a highly placed loan officer at the Shawmut Bank in Boston, who called to wish Mrs. Fitzgibbons the best of luck in her new post. He had seen an Associated Press article that morning in the
Boston Globe
, he said, which included her photo and an account of her promotion to the senior position. Then, in the way of greeting Mrs. Fitzgibbons to the greater banking community, Mr. Solomon inquired if Mrs. Fitzgibbons might be interested in joining what he referred to airily as “a little consortium of banks” being assembled to finance a modest, very low risk, state-sponsored industrial park in the Worcester area.

“Not only am I interested,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, sitting back in her chair, savoring the first deserts of her P.R. wizardry, “but I'm positively delighted you thought to call me.”

Julie had started into the office, but Mrs. Fitzgibbons waved her out with a brisk cut of her arm.

Nahum Solomon had a deep, wonderfully prepossessing voice that was fashioned by nature to make small of big things. “Then I think we'll do business,” he crooned pleasantly.

“I'm sure we will.” She revolved in her chair and compressed her lips thoughtfully. “In effect,” she explained, with self-importance, “this is my first full day in charge of operations here. I'm not too busy to talk, Mr. Solomon —”

“Call me Nate.”

“I'm Frankie,” she said. “I'm not too busy to talk, Nate, but I couldn't come out Worcester way this week.”

“It's a real plum,” added the other softly, under his breath. “You'll like it.”

“We'll make medicine on it, I'm sure.”

“I'll send a car for you one day soon.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons brushed a thread from her skirt. “Let's try next Monday.”

“Monday noon would be choice,” said he.

“You were a grand sport to call me.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked about at her magnificent office. “When I get something that's too big for us to handle, I'll know who to telephone.”

“I'm always here.”

“Till Monday,” she said.

Life had never seemed so bountiful. After hanging up, Mrs. Fitzgibbons sent Julie to the news dealer in the rear vestibule for several copies of the
Globe
. Julie was back in a twinkling; her cheeks were pink with excitement as she spread open the paper on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's desk. Right off, Mrs. Fitzgibbons sent a copy upstairs to Mr. Zabac, then settled back to read, and reread, the glowing, condensed version of her appointment as chief executive officer. The article concluded with the words, “Mrs. Fitzgibbons is one of a small but stellar handful of women to attain executive control of a New England bank.”

This last development, coming atop so many others, filled Mrs. Fitzgibbons with such a sense of pride in herself that she couldn't control the urge to act out her feelings of personal triumph, as by giving somebody nearby a good dressing down.

“Who was that young man with Emile Klopfer?” she demanded of Julie. “The assistant from the maintenance department who helped to move my desk? What's his name?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt better already. The instant she made up her mind to do something, the anxious tightening in her chest began to dissipate.

“Oh, him,” said Julie, amused at the individual in question. “That's Marshall Moriarty.” She laughed. “He's the one they call the Most Beautiful Man.”

“They?”

“The women in the ladies lounge. They talk about him. He comes to work at seven, they say, wearing a suit and necktie and carrying his work clothes in a briefcase, and then changes into them.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons knew the man by sight very well and had noticed herself how neat and immaculate he was and how he bore himself with exquisite posture and a smiling, diffident expression. Marshall was the only maintenance worker who troubled to wear a necktie with his blue shirt, and was, as Julie implied, noticeable for his handsomeness. Mrs. Fitzgibbons snatched up a yellow pad, scratched Marshall Moriarty's name on it, and signed it with a flourish of her initials. She dealt it to Julie. “Get him,” she said.

When Julie came back, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was on the phone with her daughter. Barbara had heard from a friend in the police department about the “incident” in the parking lot of the Hofbrau House. “People hate your guts!” Barbara was scolding her mother mercilessly. “You're shaming me to death. I can't live here anymore. I dread being seen in public. You're behaving like a maniac.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons hung up on her daughter and told Julie to get a dictation pad. While Marshall Moriarty stood in her doorway with the yellow slip of paper in his hand, Mrs. Fitzgibbons dictated her latest new policy idea to Julie. It concerned the Christmas bonuses, which were to be disbursed in a few weeks. The idea came to her on impulse. She searched her mind for the best wording. “This year's holiday bonuses,” the memo began, “will aggregate a 5% increase over last year's total disbursement” — Mrs. Fitzgibbons paused while Julie wrote — “but will entail a 10% increase for all employees other than officers, without exception.”

The restructuring of the year-end bonuses was such, the memo made clear, that the senior officers were going to take it on the chin.

Marshall Moriarty accepted Mrs. Fitzgibbons's invitation to pull up a little chair in front of her desk and make himself comfortable. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was leaning forward on her elbows with her hands folded, following the young maintenance assistant's movements. She wore a pretty expression, a benign candor. She was feeling a lot better, relaxed inside and composed, now that she had someone in front of her upon whom to train her subsiding anxieties.

Before speaking, Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked him up and down with a favoring eye, from his starchy blue shirt and necktie, and pressed jeans, down to his gleaming black shoes. She noted his manicured nails and marveled at his ability to keep himself in such an impeccable state. Most arresting of all, however, was the shape and clean-carved angularity of Marshall Moriarty's head, not to say the profusion of curly golden hair crowning it. Mrs. Fitzgibbons recognized the justice in the epithet given him by the women of the bank,
viz
., the Most Beautiful Man.

“Would you mind closing the door?” she said, and then waited as he got up and marched all the way across the carpeted floor and then all the way back again.

“You and I haven't had an opportunity to talk.” She disengaged her chin from her hands and sat back in her leather chair. She was toying with a yellow pencil while examining her perfectly shaped nails. Whatever was keeping the handsome young man a maintenance assistant, it was already clear to Mrs. Fitzgibbons, had to be mental.

She did not, therefore, bandy words, but struck at the heart of the matter. “Tell me about your schooling. You're not, I take it, college-educated?”

Because of his size, which was that of a professional athlete, and the absurd smallness of the chair on which he sat, Marshall Moriarty appeared suspended in space in front of her desk. He shook his head incredulously.

“I have never gone to college.”

“High school?” Her voice climbed inquisitively. “What high school did you attend, Marshall?”

“I was a member of the class of 1970 at Ireland Parish High School.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons reacted with amazement. “How old
are
you?” she cried.

“I was thirty-six in July.”

“You look ten years younger. What on earth do you eat? Baby foods? I thought you were a boy.”