Ride a Cockhorse (13 page)

“I don't know what to say to that.” The pitch of Terence Sugrue's voice rose with his mounting excitement.

“I'll do the talking, peppermint.”

“Don't you need protection, Frankie?”

“Not if Dr. Doodles is right.”

“Doodles?”

“Alvin Donnelly, my gynecologist,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “the dirtiest-minded physician since Freud himself. When I told him I hadn't ovulated for four months, he told me the cradle may be gone but the playpen is as good as new. He billed me sixty-five dollars for that. God Almighty,” she yelled, “this is exciting.”

“I love you, Frankie.”

“Keep still.” She was sweating now. Her breasts swung pendulously before him. She couldn't stop talking. “I'm going to buy you everything, beautiful things, argyle sweaters, dress shirts, cologne, jewelry. That's how I want you to look.” She had thrust him inside herself and was moving atop him with vigor. The look of romantic helplessness that blanched Terry's face was extreme. For a second, he didn't even look human. Mrs. Fitzgibbons lost control of what she was saying. The words came out in a spate of manic ebullience. “This is what you do. You're my boy! I'll take you away weekends. I'll buy you a car.” At one point, she actually whooped. Terence was moaning and staring at the ceiling. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was clutching him by the biceps. She was biting her lip. “This is life! This is the goods!” she shouted. “Up, boy—up, boy—up, boy!”

Nor were Mrs. Fitzgibbons's requirements anything close to satisfied in the first full hour of such exactions; at thirty-minute intervals thereafter, with Terry Sugrue blurting his love, she could be heard disporting herself upon him. (“You've been discovered! ...
Up
, boy!” etc.) It was no wonder that the comely boy fell at last into a magnificent slumber, sprawled picturesquely across Mrs. Fitzgibbons's bed in the lamplight, where he slept till morning.

To worsen matters, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in no frame of mind to comfort the young drum major when he awoke in a panic. The Saturday edition of the
Ireland Parish Telegram
, arriving at her front door, contained a complete transcript of her interview at the bank. When Mrs. Fitzgibbons saw it, she gave a triumphant shout. As she entered the room, she threw aside the front part of the newspaper and was holding up the “Local News” section, the front page of which was always produced in color on Saturday. The entire page was devoted to her. It centered upon a full-length shot of Mrs. Fitzgibbons standing importantly in front of her desk at the bank, looking incredibly resplendent in her poison green dress. She had not seen such a magnificent photograph of anyone in all her life.

Across the top of the page ran a full-length banner head in dark blue ink, which read:

A NEW REGIME FOR OUR OLDEST BANK

The effect on Mrs. Fitzgibbons was sensational. While Terry was hurrying into his clothes, worried sick at not having gone home the night before, she was exultant.

“I've got band!” he said. “Today is game day. My mother'll kill me!” He was practically in tears. “What am I doing here? What am I going to tell them?”

“I've done it! Let them try something now.” She read aloud the caption underneath the big six-by-eight-inch photo of herself in the paper. “ ‘Newly installed executive vice president of the Parish Bank speaks out on the need to run a tight ship in these perilous, fast-paced times.' ” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was so worked up over the full-page article that she threw the paper onto the bed, then immediately snatched it up again. “They'll never get me out,” she said. “Not this year, or next, or ever.”

She had never seen her words in print before. Her eye darted about the page, picking out subheads. “ ‘Calls Chairman a Prince!' ‘Woman with a Will!' ‘Fitzgibbons Throws Down Gauntlet!'

“This battle is over even before it started,” she said. “What a way to hit them! It's glorious. Look at the size of it. I didn't even leave them a leg to stand on.”

As the Sugrue boy rushed out to keep his appointment with the marching band, Mrs. Fitzgibbons called after him in joyous accents: “Wait till Louis Zabac claps eyes on this picture. If he's not forking off in ten minutes, he'll be beating up on his gimpy wife.”

Still, she was not insensible to the fact that she had overstepped herself on Friday and knew very well that Mr. Zabac might react with great annoyance. She had not lost her senses. The fact that he did not telephone her over the weekend to congratulate her on the great windfall of publicity that her article had won for the bank could be construed either as ominous or as an example of the little man's respect for the privacy of his second-in-command.

Monday morning, while Bruce Clayton worked on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's face and hair, she sought to anticipate the various lines of approach that the chairman might take. To begin with, she rejected the more extreme possibilities. He would neither dismiss her out of hand, nor accept her seizure of authority without some protest or struggle. In effect, she had presented him with a
fait accompli
; all that was required was for her to stand up to him, to stand on her decisions and show resolve. If he fired her, he would make himself the laughingstock of the city and of the local banking community. If he scolded her severely for taking too much on herself and insisted that she quietly back down, she would refuse, but not without hearing him out and offering him reasonable reassurances, reasonably voiced, that the grand spread in Saturday's newspaper was just a foretokening of the exemplary good work that she would do and upon which she should be judged. If, however, Mr. Zabac took the harder line and began to upbraid and threaten her—which was the bleakest and ugliest of the alternatives—then she would take him head on. She would give him a piece of her mind! By raising her voice to him in such a way as to prefigure her getting up and walking out, he would be completely outflanked. To allow Mrs. Fitzgibbons to resign her post was precisely the same as firing her; and that he could not do.

“What time is it?” she said.

“It's after ten,” said Bruce.

“Finish me!” she commanded. Bruce enjoyed being talked to like that.

“I am trying,” he argued, politely.

“I've been here for an hour.”

Over the weekend, Bruce had mounted Mrs. Fitzgibbons's big colorful newspaper article in a Victorian walnut frame, and had hung it in a prominent setting between mirrors in his salon. He fussed sedulously at her side. He was crazy about her. Mrs. Fitzgibbons accepted his bowing and scraping with a voluptuous, stern-faced air of self-importance which left her feeling very safe and warm inside.

“On Saturdays and Sundays,” he said, “I'll do you at home.”

When Mrs. Fitzgibbons came sailing into the bank at ten-twenty, darting in at the front door past Mr. Donachie, the tails of her raincoat flying, the bank was unusually busy. The level of activity was brisker than on most Mondays. Had it been the third of the month, when depositors lined up in droves with their government checks, she might have seen the cause of it; but today was the nineteenth. All eight teller windows were open, and the line of patrons sprawled about the floor like a snake. Mrs. Fitzgibbons made a circuit to her right, going round them, and made directly for her office. Before Julie could put her boss's coat away, she apprised Mrs. Fitzgibbons of important developments taking place elsewhere.

“Have you heard the news?” Julie said. “The stock market is crashing!”

“What are you talking about?”

Julie took Mrs. Fitzgibbons's coat to the closet in her office. “They're all talking about it. It's fallen hundreds of points.”

To ascertain what was going on at the windows, Mrs. Fitzgibbons got Jack Greaney on the line. Jack assured her that nothing of a ruinous or extraordinary nature was taking place.

“Well, what on earth is happening?”

“Nothing,” Jack answered on the phone. “We're just doing business. It is very busy,” he allowed.

“They're not withdrawing?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons had never lived through a financial panic, nor ever suspected anything like a bank run, but the atmosphere was electric. She experienced a stab of paranoia.

“Not at all,” Jack replied. “In fact, we've opened a significant number of new accounts.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons stepped to the door of her office with the phone to her ear and looked across the loan department and the tops of a row of glass cubicles to where Jack was standing. He had the phone to his ear and was looking back at her.

“What new accounts?” she demanded.

“Just that, new accounts,” came his muttered reply.

Ever since the previous week, when she fired the De Marias, Mrs. Fitzgibbons noticed, the slender redhead, Jack, had shown her a timid face whenever they met. In previous years, by contrast, there was no person in all the bank who had been more outgoing and amiable toward her than Jack Greaney. Mrs. Fitzgibbons guessed he was scared stiff.

In his next breath, Jack cleared up some of the mystery. “I think,” he offered, softly, “it has to do with your article in the paper. It's bringing in a lot of business.”

All at once, the realization of what was transpiring dawned on her. The grand full-page article in the
Telegram
had produced an unexpected wave of new patronage. The sudden awareness of what she had done, especially as she had not anticipated anything of the sort, produced an intoxicating effect, which was evident at once in the angry thrill of her voice. “
Get over here!
” she said to him.

Jack's explanation was correct. Mrs. Fitzgibbons determined that fast. Almost all the new depositors had seen the Saturday news story.

“There's a lot of talk among the tellers,” Jack added, as though to explain his own initial uncertainty over the brisk pickup in business at the windows, “about what's happening on the New York Stock Exchange this morning.”

“You tell those hunchbacks to concentrate on what they're doing.” She handed her scarf to Julie.

“They're all working hard, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. They really are. I have my eye on them.”

Jack didn't even blink at Mrs. Fitzgibbons's rude language, and for the first time stopped addressing the new vice president as “Frankie,” as he had been accustomed to doing for years. Mrs. Fitzgibbons noted the change with satisfaction.

“You tell them to keep their mouths shut and tend to business.”

“I will,” said Jack.

“You do that.”

She could have enjoyed talking to Jack like this for an hour or two but was even more excited by the press of new depositors milling about out front. With Jack Greaney following her, she strode out to the windows. Her appearance on the floor this time removed any last doubt. People standing in line pointed at her. She saw it herself. She smiled back at them. An elderly woman in a frayed red coat reached out and clasped Mrs. Fitzgibbons by the elbow. “Good for you, dear,” she smiled toothlessly. “I'm proud of you.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons stopped at once and turned her attention to the grinning well-wisher. The woman's complexion was doughy, and her eyes sparkled like two sapphires in the wrinkles of her good-natured face. Compared to the little lady in the red coat at her side, Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked like a designer's idea of a high-powered, up-to-the-minute woman of affairs. By this time, everyone standing in line was beaming at the two of them. Even the tellers paused in their transactions to look out at Mrs. Fitzgibbons and the little woman holding her arm. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not so puffed up by her recent ascendancy, or by the manic pressures bubbling inside her, to have lost her lifelong natural cheerfulness. She knew exactly what to do.

“You come with me,” she commanded the woman, and led her out of the line with a show of ceremony. “I'm taking you straight to the window,” she said.

As she did so, several customers spoke up enthusiastically. “Congratulations, Frankie! Proud of you!”

“These aren't the most decent people in the world for nothing,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons explained, waving at all assembled. “Everyone will wait one extra minute while you go first.”

The thin, bony woman in the red coat grinned foxily at the others as Mrs. Fitzgibbons paraded her to the front of the line and on from there to the first available window. She glanced at the woman's deposit slip as she passed it under the grille and announced to the teller in an official tone:

“Gertrude Bollenbach is here on business.”

The happy effect on all was predictable. As Mrs. Fitzgibbons strode back past the admiring throng, the triumph of her public relations coup in the newspaper, not to say of the imagination and boldness she had shown in stealing a march on everyone, on friends and adversaries alike, seemed reflected in their faces. Who could have blamed her if she tossed her head as she walked?

“That's the new president.”

“We love you, Frankie!” someone called.

“She's some looker.”

“You were there,” cracked another.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was feeling so buoyant that she actually snapped her fingers at Julie on entering her office. “In here, girl.”

There was much to be done. To begin with, Mrs. Fitzgibbons determined beyond a doubt that a disaster of historic proportions was unfolding by the minute in the nation's security markets. Word from the back office was that Mr. Hooton, along with Lionel Kim, his young Taiwanese assistant, were glued in horror to their computer screens, watching as the flow of luminous digits reflected enormous blocks of common stock changing hands at plummeting prices. Panic was setting in. Mrs. Fitzgibbons could scarcely credit the fortuitousness of it all. The little bombshell she had dropped on Friday, by appointing herself chief executive officer of the bank, had become, all at once, like a tiny twinkling light in a fire storm spreading across the country. Although the debacle in the markets did not affect her directly, she was very pumped up. She couldn't sit still. Twice she dispatched Julie to the back of the bank to report on conditions in the treasurer's office, and twice she telephoned Jeannine Mielke upstairs, asking if Mr. Zabac had come in.