Ride a Cockhorse (32 page)

To Mrs. Fitzgibbons, the sight of the tall, gray-haired lady trembling before her was a complete vindication of her willingness to deal resolutely with people who plotted behind her back. “Where are your friends now?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was shouting, and waving a balled fist, as a spastic shiver of excitement darted the length of her body. She seized Elizabeth Wilson's telephone receiver from its cradle and threw it onto the desk. “Call them up! Tell them what's happening!” she taunted.

“I'd like to clock her one,” said Emily, taking in hand a heavy Swingline staple gun. Seeing that, Mrs. Wilson pleaded anew not to be hurt.

“Your guard is here,” Julie said.

Indeed, at that moment, Mr. Donachie was peeping into the office. Mrs. Fitzgibbons did not look round at him, however. She was beginning by now to exult in the ease with which she was demolishing her detractors. It showed in her face. “This one couldn't keep her nose clean,” she said. “It isn't enough for her to come in and mind her p's and q's. Not this one. This dried-out apricot wanted to see me on a slab.” The contempt for the shaken woman rose in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's system like something indigestible. “Get her out of my sight.”

Mrs. Wilson appeared all but ossified by now, managing barely to turn her head.

Emily pointed the staple gun. “Look at her! She can't move her feet.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons nodded sternly to her guard, and moments later, from one end of the bank to the other, the staff stared in awe as Alec Donachie marched a stupefied Mrs. Wilson across the great hall of the bank to the front doors.

Even before the woman was gone, however, Julie and Emily were circulating among the employees with an announcement that Mrs. Fitzgibbons intended to address the entire staff.

“I'm not going to bore you to death with a long speech,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons started in without delay, in a voice that carried impressively from the locked front doors to the farthest reaches of the main floor. Marcel Sullivan had fetched a wooden chair for Mrs. Fitzgibbons; and no one who was present that day would not have conceded that the new chief executive formed an impressive picture standing upon it. The lights from above shone attractively on the collar and epaulets of her leather coat. Mrs. Fitzgibbons moved her torso decisively as she spoke, turning left and right, and pointing a gloved finger. The scores of faces looking up at her filled her with a warm, egoistic sense of personal accomplishment.

After the last employees had collected at the edges of the attentive throng, Mrs. Fitzgibbons lifted her face significantly, and the assembly grew still.

“This afternoon,” she enunciated, in a clear, businesslike tone, “I completed the first phase of the new management. You were all here, and you know what happened. There's no need for me to talk myself blue in the face about the deceit and disloyalty of people who have been dismissed. I'll tell you what you need to know. It's enough to say that we are all the better off for the permanent removal of those who couldn't accept the changes that were inevitable under my administration, and who went skulking behind my back looking for ways to undermine me.”

She noticed as she spoke that most of the bank's loan officers and middle management had unconsciously gravitated toward one another on the left side of the assembly, and that she instinctively was directing herself to the larger body of workers standing in the middle and on the right, the tellers, clerks, maintenance men, secretaries, and such.

“We're not going to face the future in a state of chaos. If I have to go out of town for three or four days, I can't be required to come rushing back each time to reestablish my authority. I want you to know that Mrs. Fitzgibbons knows how to take care of herself. I know it, and most of you know it. If you don't know it,” she added pleasantly, and smiled, “you soon will.”

This last quip brought a ripple of appreciative laughter from the people gathered directly in front of Mrs. Fitzgibbons and to her right.

“Because I'm not going to be replaced! I'm not your congressman. I'm not going to be voted out of office. If you oppose me,” she said, “I'll know what to do with you. You could be a hundred and ten years old. You could be the imperial wizard of your local peewee league. If you abuse your trust, and go stealing off,” she said, “to secret lunches, to plan my ruination—and I don't care if you're some slaphappy, psychotic automobile-loan woman with a rat's nest of gray hair on your head who's used to being bowed and kowtowed to—I'll look for you, I'll catch you,” recited Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “and I'll break your bones.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was interrupted by a second outburst of laughter, more enthusiastic than the first, initiated in large part by Marcel Sullivan and several young women from the clerical pool standing about him. Mrs. Fitzgibbons reacted with a toss of her head. “Mrs. Fitzgibbons is not your kid sister. She's not your mother, or your aunt, or the girl in the bathing suit next door. She is nobody other than the chief executive officer of this bank. That's not a mysterious proposition. It's not a twenty-letter word for something else. It's a statement of fact. And nobody,” she added, rapidly, “downstairs or upstairs, living or dead, alone or with the help of others, is going to change that fact.”

Several employees, located here and there in the crowd, hung on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's words with fixed, uncritical smiles attached to their lips. The bolder her words, the more startling was the effect it produced. Deborah Schwartzwald, standing in the rear, manifested on her pale, upturned face a similarly uncritical look of fanatical devotion; her lips were parted, her eyes locked on Mrs. Fitzgibbons. When those about her laughed, Deborah chimed in at once, laughing heartily, but without so much as blinking her eyes. She was mesmerized.

“Lately,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons argued, “you may have noticed that we have experienced a surge in business. There are people who seem to forget that that's why we're here. We are not here to while away the hours of a pleasant October day. We're here to gather funds. So, if suddenly,” she said, “we see the chart on our demand deposits going up like something from the national space program, and certain selfish, avaricious people out there want to cripple or remove from power the person who's responsible for this sudden boom—and I am the one responsible for it—obviously somebody is going to come to grief.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons raised her face to the glow of the dome above and revolved from the waist one way and then the other. Turning to her left and looking down on some of her more highly placed officers, such as Felix Hohenberger and Connie McElligot, she surveyed their faces in silence for a long moment while simultaneously pouting, as though daring anyone to register an objection. Without exception, the parties in question blushed, fidgeted, and looked away, especially when the silent glare of attention drew the interest of all the other workers, as well. Then she spotted Julie Marcotte making her way toward her through the throng. Julie was coming from the telephone in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's office, and bearing in hand a sheet of paper. Mrs. Fitzgibbons paused in her speech as Julie handed it to her.

On the face of it, the sheet of paper was an old letter, a September circular addressed to all banks in the region from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. But on the back of the paper Julie had scribbled in pencil the essence of a telephone call from Dolores Brouillette.

While Mrs. Fitzgibbons perused the message, the assembled staff looked on with an air of suspense, as though the document, handed up in this way, must have had a critical bearing on all of them.

The handwritten note read: “
Mrs. B. and Mr. H. at the Showboat. Drinks till dark. All O.K. No hitches
.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons crumpled the sheet and thrust it smugly into the pocket of her coat, and with no visible lapse went on.

“At first, there were only rumors,” she was saying, as she turned to the matter of recent actions. “That's how it begins. Certain persons smiling behind their hands, snickering, cracking jokes, believing that what's new isn't going to last. One day, somebody else is going to take over, and, naturally, we'll revert to the same sleepy operation we used to be. Somebody else,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's voice grew huskier with irony, “will take over, and
reduce
our bonuses, and bring back that same collection of deadheads that fought me tooth and nail, and there go our promotions, our salary increases, our extended annual vacations, and we'll be the same old leaderless outfit we were—run by fat cats sitting behind closed doors who only wake themselves up to vote themselves big bonuses the end of every year—while the rest of us wait an eternity or two for someone else to stand up to them!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons raised a gloved hand to forestall the sympathetic reaction she sensed mounting. Again, the irony thickened in her voice.

“But they were just rumors. Just the whisperings of the malcontents. Of people who favored the old way of doing things, or who were beholden to those that were. I knew it was happening.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons made a face to suggest the pathos of conspiracy in the face of wisdom and superior force. “I was kept abreast of it all. People loyal to me came to me and told me what was brewing. I could point you out, the loyal ones. Never mind!” she gloated. “I bided my time. I waited. I saw it the day I increased your bonuses! And, believe me,” she added rapidly, “nobody on God's green earth is going to rescind them! That's why I'm here!”

She gestured impatiently as Marcel and those about him applauded.

“I'll share this thought with you,” she cried. “If I were hatching a conspiracy, if I wanted to destroy a good person, I wouldn't do it over lunch down at Schermerhorn's Sea House. I wouldn't tell every Tom, Dick, and Harry about it. I'd watch my step! But never mind,” she repeated and shrugged, showing her audience the patience of the just. “I waited. I gave them rope. I knew who they were. Every facet of the thing, every conversation, every meeting, was reported to me.” With sudden inspiration, Mrs. Fitzgibbons pulled the crumpled letter from the pocket of her coat, and flourished it.

She laughed cheerily. “They were going to circulate a letter of protest. Look! Imagine the idiocy. This is it. This is the document. Look here.” She ogled the paper at close range, and set her fingertip upon it. “They had begun signing their names to it. This work of genius was the total outcome of days upon days of their conspiracy to topple me. They were going to circulate it to other officers, to one and all, to put an end to me for good, and to the work I've done.”

The people gazing up at Mrs. Fitzgibbons, with the exception of a grave handful, laughed in sympathy then, and glanced gaily at one another, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons ridiculed her invisible opponents. “If simplicity were brilliance,” she said, “this plan was as ingenious as anything yet devised by man. An officer would receive this paper, unfold it, read the ugly things it says about me, sign his name to it—take out his pen and carefully write his signature upon it—then fold it up, and pass it along in secret to the next unhappy officer, and that figure would sign
his
name to it.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was now holding the letter open in both hands and staring at it in an attitude of great incredulity. She rapped the paper with her knuckles. “It was so simple. They must have wondered why they hadn't thought of it sooner. I should send this to the Smithsonian Institute.” The excitement of standing two feet higher than her assembled listeners, combined with the facility of her tongue and growing sympathy of her audience, encouraged her to deepen her attack upon the minority standing to her left. She changed her appearance now. She put on the unhappy face of the disappointed tyrant.

“They would all sign it,” she said, “and it would go on that way, as other fools would sign their names to it, until I—being of an agreeable nature—would quietly clean out my desk and go tiptoeing out. These are conspirators!” She waved the paper in triumph. “These are the people who detest me. These are the people who refer to the clerks, secretaries, and tellers as peons.” She waved the sheet of paper illustratively. “ ‘The peons,' they say, ‘are getting everything!' Officers of this bank—whose jobs depend from week to week upon my happiness with them, people whose families depend on a regular income—were going to affix their names to this piece of paper. Two of them actually signed it.”

Lifting the letter, she turned sideways and pointed to the signature on the bottom of the innocuous bank-board letter. “This one,” she said, pointing, “didn't seem to realize what it was she helped to create or what she was signing, because I just had her thrown out the front door! ... I eliminated her!”

“That bitch,” Emily spoke up from the first row.

The staff appeared a trifle relieved to discover the motive behind Mrs. Fitzgibbons's action that afternoon in Mrs. Wilson's private office. Many nodded and muttered approval. Clasping the letter before her, she carefully folded and creased it, while studying the effects of her revelation upon the expanse of upturned faces.

“We're not here to carp and complain,” she said. “We're here to demolish the competition! There are institutions out there that have been competing with us since the Flood, but have no idea what's in store for them. You know who they are. You know who I'm talking about. They hate our insides.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons balled her fist. “I could smash them at will! I could move upon them this afternoon. They loathe and fear us. Why? Because we're bigger than they are, and better, and getting bigger and better by the hour. Where do you think the surge in business is coming from? The moon?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's eye went in turn from Mr. Donachie, to Deborah Schwartzwald at the rear, to the tellers on her right. “They're bleeding to death!”

Pauline Smith, the most elderly employee, shouted happily, “Take them over!”

“One of them is insolvent this instant.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's egoism gave a harsh thrill to her voice. “And I'm turning up the heat!”