Ride a Cockhorse (18 page)

Once seated, Mrs. Fitzgibbons waved away the waiter at her side without looking at him. The attention of diners nearby gave her a very warm sensation inside. She actually felt herself to be the scintillating heart of the big, tastefully lighted dining room. She made a glittering appearance. Magnificently composed, the words flowed from her lips without the slightest hesitancy or any sign of mental deliberation.

“I'm not a psychiatrist,” she tossed out. “I can't tell you why people think the way they do, or, for that matter, what's so fascinating about me and what I'm doing, that they can't get enough of it.”

“People love a success story,” Bruce managed to interject.

“Well, of course, they do. I don't fault them for that. My secretary thrills to my successes as much as I do.”

“So do I,” said Bruce.

“Naturally,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “But I wasn't talking about people who stand to gain from what I do. Let's be honest. A good session of ass kissing makes sense if you stand to profit by it. I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about the brain-damaged, about the man in the street who can tell you Wade Boggs's batting average. He's the same boogums who comes in and tells me how to run my bank. Larry was like that.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's reference to her dead husband was a trifle perplexing to Bruce; he remained silent a moment.

“You must miss him,” he said.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons nodded idly. “I missed him for a while,” she said. “He had some unusual characteristics. For a year or so, I missed the way he could move around in the dark. Larry was a regular bat. He could actually see in the dark. Our bedroom wasn't just dark, it was pitch-black. Larry was brought up as an altar boy. For him, the precondition for love was total, absolute, leg-breaking darkness. Lovemaking was something that was supposed to take place under a log in a swamp. If you've ever seen my daughter, Barbara, you'd know what I mean.”

Patrons sitting nearby had been careful to conceal their interest in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's entertaining discourse. This remark ignited laughter on all sides.

“You know what I'm talking about,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons addressed herself cheerfully to a woman on her right, then turned at once to another on her left. “What disappointment on earth can equal it? That's why they have doctors and nurses there. If it was just me and the child, only one of us would have left the room alive.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons would have said more, but her attention was drawn elsewhere in the room. Those watching her saw a look of consternation on her face, as she straightened in her seat and directed a sudden fiery look at the back of a busboy working to clear one of the tables. “What is he doing here?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons demanded to know.

The busboy in question was wearing a mustard yellow vest with a white shirt and black bow tie; he was piling serving dishes, dinner plates, and half-drained teacups atop a tray, working quietly at his job. Sensing the attention of others, however, he turned round and saw the woman in the glittering silver-and-black dress glaring up at him. She was sitting not ten feet distant. Of all the people he had ever set eyes on, no one was as frightening or loathsome to his senses as she. The sight of Mrs. Fitzgibbons hypnotized him. The busboy in question was none other than Laurence De Maria.

“What is he doing here?” she said then in a big, angry voice. “Am I being made a fool of?” She turned to Bruce. “Is he going to dog me to my grave? This is the same blundering idiot that I fired last Wednesday. Now he's here. Where I go, he goes! What,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “is that boy doing here?”

The effect of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's vicious attack upon the balding busboy was mesmerizing. He leaned forward from the waist and gaped at her with his mouth open. Her face was alight with anger. Her eyes were wide. At that moment, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, by some standards, was perhaps technically insane.

“This is your living example of the very thing I've been talking about.” She vilified the De Maria brother in a harsh voice. “This is just the sort of oily, mealymouthed parasite — this reptile,” she went on, “this yellow little reptile — who comes sneaking out of his hole at the first sign of a crumb on the floor. He can't dress himself. He can't add up a column of figures. He has a vocabulary of about four hundred words. But when no one is looking, this little Latin bag of tricks will walk off with your silverware, your umbrella, your tables and chairs, and your life savings!”

As Mrs. Fitzgibbons lashed away at her ex-employee, she maintained a rigid posture and a very drained expression. The restaurant had fallen silent on all sides, especially as the target of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's wrath stood transfixed in horror before her. Laurence De Maria's fear passed description. He couldn't move.

Bruce endeavored to dissuade Mrs. Fitzgibbons from continuing; he set his fingers lightly on her hand but lacked the audacity to speak up. She turned to him.

“I threw him out,” she said. “I personally saw him to the street. What happens? He pops up someplace else.”

Having heard the disturbance while talking on the reservations phone by the front door, the maitre d' came at once and mercifully interposed himself between the glamorous lady and Mr. De Maria. Taking him by the arm, Mr. Liebeck guided his badly shaken busboy across the dining room of the Hofbrau House toward the kitchen. Satisfied by his removal, and vindicated in her objective, Mrs. Fitzgibbons directed herself to those about her.

“They think they can't be found,” she said, and smirked to signify the folly of criminal behavior. The dining room remained noticeably subdued, even though Mrs. Fitzgibbons appeared to regain her equanimity almost instantly. In fact, she changed the subject with startling swiftness, and for many minutes thereafter entertained Bruce with a catalog of amusing anecdotes about her daughter and son-in-law and the activities they pursued in the name of environmentalism. She sipped her wine and dined with obvious relish on her lobster thermidor, while remarking jocularly on the plight of baby seals, or on how spraying for Dutch elm disease was destroying the ozone layer. Her behavior was so airy and genial, in fact, that many, including Bruce, might well have wondered if Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not justified in the vicious attack they had all just witnessed. Orderliness is often its own justification.

Much later, however, in the parking lot behind the restaurant, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons led the way past a row of automobiles to Matthew's Buick, an incident transpired that had an enduring effect on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's outlook and policies thereafter. Out of nowhere, a figure materialized. There was a sound of running footsteps on the gravel, followed by a glimpse of something shapeless in violent motion on the near side of a bank of evergreens. In the space of a second or two, Laurence De Maria was rushing at the two of them from behind, waving a very long two-by-four plank high above his head. The actual blow, delivered with unrestricted force and a warlike scream, was intended to transfer Mrs. Fitzgibbons instantaneously to the land of her ancestors.

Bruce threw himself between them and flung up his arm. Had he not done so, the blow would certainly have fractured Mrs. Fitzgibbons's skull. As it was, his elbow deflected the seven-foot-long beam near its mid-point, and was followed by a cracking noise as the upper portion of the plank struck his forehead a glancing blow. Mrs. Fitzgibbons retreated in astonishment as Bruce and the gold-clad Laurence De Maria went down on the gravel in a twisting, grappling heap. “Save yourself!” Bruce was screaming at her, as he wrestled with the fifty-year-old busboy. “Run, Mrs. Fitzgibbons!”

Laurence De Maria was himself in a frenzy. “I'll kill the bitch! I'll kill the bitch! I'll kill the bitch!”

When the chef and a waiter came running through the darkness from the kitchen, Bruce had his opponent pinioned to the gravel with the two-by-four against his collarbone.

“Here we have an individual,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons explained to the police at the station house, “who can't do his job, is dismissed by his superior, and in less than a week, not seven days, sets out to kill her.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's cape swayed impressively as she moved about in front of the booking desk, discussing what had happened in a wonderfully lucid manner.

“I would be dead. That's a provable fact. If it wasn't for my young assistant, who put himself in the way, I'd be lying in a pool of blood. The latest victim of another senseless killing.”

“You were very fortunate.” Lieutenant Rollins sought earnestly to comfort her.

“Is that what you call it?” she snapped, by way of rebuttal. “I see nothing fortunate in being attacked by a twisted maniac who conceals himself in the bushes with a big piece of lumber in his hands just because somebody looked at him funny. If that's fortunate, I hope my good luck has run out forever.” She spoke bitterly while pacing. “Don't think this wasn't an education for me. This puts me on my guard. This was a day when the stock markets of the world were practically destroyed, but I didn't expect to be killed in the process.”

She returned to Bruce, who was sitting on a long, spindle-backed wooden bench, holding a bloodied handkerchief to his head. “I'm taking you to the hospital.”

“That won't be necessary. I'll drive you home, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” Bruce was very gratified by Mrs. Fitzgibbons's repeated allusions to his courage and loyalty. He had taken off his jacket and necktie; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His shirt front was badly torn.

Turning on her heel, Mrs. Fitzgibbons waved her gloves at Bruce. “This is another kind of human being altogether. I thank God,” she said, “for the day I found him.”

Laurence De Maria had already been arrested and locked up for the night. Before Mrs. Fitzgibbons left the police station, she made it clear to Patrick Rollins, the lieutenant on duty, that should Mr. De Maria come to grief during the night she would be the first to come forward and corroborate any convenient fiction concocted to justify his death. Mrs. Fitzgibbons's remarks elicited chuckles from the several cops in the room. During the ride home, while sitting back against the passenger door of Matthew's sedan, she enlarged on her sanguinary views. “He ought to be beaten to death in his cell,” she said.

By now, however, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's frame of mind was such that she took pleasure in dwelling on the violent incident outside the Hofbrau House. The fact that someone had made an effort on her life was a fitting corollary to the magnitude of the events that day in which she had shown her mettle. It was agreeable to her self-esteem. Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked both excited and pale as she sat back with her cape spread over her lap.

Bruce winced from time to time at the extremity of her views. “The courts will know what to do with him,” he suggested amelioratively.

“Oh, I'd know what to do with him. I'd have someone take him down to the railroad yards and put a bullet in his head.
And
in his brother's head. And anyone else's who's mad enough to think that I'd take this lying down. This is what I get for being a soft touch. I go out to dinner with a friend,” she recited once more, almost verbatim, her earlier words, delineating the reasonableness of her position, “I want to relax and enjoy myself at the end of a strenuous day, and a busboy, a nobody, one of the feckless, anonymous millions, jumps out of nowhere and tries to assassinate me.” She gestured ironically and raised her voice. “Say, maybe this happens to everybody. Maybe I'm the deluded sap. People see you on television, they know you're somebody, and something clicks in their heads. You're not supposed to live anymore.”

“Thank God you weren't hurt.”

“Your personal aide jumps in the way at the last second and is beaten black and blue, left on the ground bleeding from the head, and it's the most ordinary thing in the world. People around here think nothing of it. In some parts of the world, they hang assassins on meat hooks. Here” — Mrs. Fitzgibbons made a face — “it's business as usual.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons slept that night in Bruce's peach-and-green canopied bed. Bruce expelled Matthew from the apartment in a rude, flagrant manner, then set about making her comfortable. At home, the full extent of Bruce's injuries was apparent. His left arm above the elbow was swollen and discolored. A cake of dried blood showed in his hair just above the ear. His knuckles were skinned red. Since he took such obvious pride in the badges of his bravery, however, Mrs. Fitzgibbons did not spoil him unduly. She compelled him to help her prepare herself for bed. Sitting back against enormous pillows, with a cup of herbal tea in hand and the bed sheet drawn above her breasts, it struck Mrs. Fitzgibbons that she had missed the late evening news broadcast on WKYN and was quick to point out Bruce's failing.

“I take him to dinner, I buy him the choicest wine in the place, and here I am,” she said, “at fifteen minutes to midnight, sitting here like an idiot, and I've missed myself on television.”

Her reproach injured Bruce. He sought to mollify her with reason. “I have the entire broadcast on tape, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” He stood by the bed with a pained expression.

“Is that what I asked you?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons stared fixedly before her at the pretty peach-and-green voile draperies hanging in delicate swags over the foot of the bed. An enjoyable feeling coursed through her veins as she pursed her lips sternly. Bruce remained speechless. She had never scolded him before. “Because if it is, I must be unbalanced,” she said.

After that, Mrs. Fitzgibbons remained silent for the longest time. She neither looked at Bruce nor spoke to him. She sat perfectly still, with a direful expression on her face, a picture in the flesh of the brooding tyrant.

Of those who knew her well, none but a handful would ever have doubted Mrs. Fitzgibbons's generous nature. She had possessed from birth a kindly, tolerant disposition. All her life, she had shown herself to be the sort of person who saw her own failings in the weakness and ineptitude of others, and was more apt to forgive than censure shortcomings. It figured in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's likability, even from her earliest days. As a schoolchild, she would have been about the last one present ever to ridicule or torment a pathetic classmate. She wasn't like that. If as a wife and mother, she had been secretly disappointed in the direction her life was taking, and to some degree even in the persons with whom she shared that life, she attributed it, as most do, to the unrealistic expectations that take root in the young and that naturally wilt as time goes by. If her successes in recent days seemed to involve a repudiation of her virtues, Mrs. Fitzgibbons saw it as nothing more than a response to circumstance. On Tuesday morning, the day following both the stock market panic and the murderous attack upon her at the Hofbrau House by an ex-member of her own staff, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was able to put into words some trenchant insights on the subject of her struggle. “You can have the loftiest ideals in the world,” she said, “plans that stand to benefit everybody — you can spend more than forty years preparing yourself — and the instant you stand up to show others the way, somebody clubs you on the head. You could be the Virgin Mary.”