Ride a Cockhorse (21 page)

“The man sold out at the bottom. And it's going to get worse. The market will rally, and he'll be left with his pants down.”

Mr. Zabac nodded unhappily. “It's rallying now.”

“
I
have to take the heat!” she said arrogantly. “I'll have to answer for him, you know.”

Mr. Zabac realized that she had not heard his remark. In her brief, two-day tenure as chief executive officer, her temper had already become something to be avoided or appeased. Like many others, Mr. Zabac chose not to upset her. When she saw the way he was trying to mollify her, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's nipples actually tingled. The thought of suddenly pulling Mr. Zabac out of his chair and throwing him down onto the floor set her smiling. The daylight pouring in through the big window illuminated her features in a compelling manner.

“Well,” the chairman faltered, “he might have been a little cowed by events yesterday, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. I wouldn't gainsay you on that point.”

To Mr. Zabac's surprise, she burst out laughing. Her eyes were fixed steadily upon him. She was joyous at the little gentleman's diplomacy. “Louis, you're the end!” Her laughter filled the room. “If you aren't the living picture of the successful banker. I swear, you should be in the movies!” Her voice dripped with affectionate sarcasm, as she lifted her cup of coffee to her lips. “I can understand why your employees love you too much. You have a good word for everyone. You wouldn't harm a fly. Now,” she said, “I can see why you've given me my head. You want someone who'll get the job done.”

“You are wrong, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

“Oh, I'm sure you don't know it,” she countered.

“Believe me, it was not my intention, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, that you should effect any dramatic changes that I would not willingly carry out myself.”

“Don't agitate yourself,” she teased him, and widened her eyes playfully. “Nobody is going to be taken out to the cloakroom! I'm not going to spank anyone.”

“The reason I asked you up here,” Mr. Zabac continued, “concerns a complaint I've received from a rival institution.” He held up his small hands. “I'm not chastising you. We're on the same side, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. But Mr. Curtin Schreffler, the president of Citizens, found some of your remarks provocative.”

“Did he?” she cried. She flushed angrily.

“I only tell you,” Mr. Zabac was quick to placate her, “as it's my duty to apprise you of such information as it comes to hand. If persons of consequence out there take offense over your views, or the way you utter them, I feel it's wise to inform you.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons had turned and was staring intensely out the big semicircular window at the city hall. “I'm going to grind him into a powder,” she swore quietly.

At these words, a thorn of fear entered Mr. Zabac's heart. His face showed it. Mrs. Fitzgibbons had begun to scare him.

“I'll hang him up by his heels,” she said. She pictured in her mind the man in question. “Here we have an Ivy League fancy Dan, who dresses like a French gigolo, who went away to school to avoid being contaminated by the rest of us, whose father died of some foul, unspecified disease and left him an entire bank to get off on, and he finds me objectionable.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons truly could not abide criticism these days. “I'll pin him to the wall. I'll bankrupt him. I can't believe what I'm hearing.”

When Mrs. Fitzgibbons stood up to leave, Mr. Zabac followed her to the door. He thanked her for coming. She didn't answer him. At the top of the stairs, however, the sight of the big bank sprawled beneath her, with its pretty geometric arrangement of yellow-shaded lamps and dark, mottled columns, restored her sense of well-being. Descending the steps, her heart beat proudly, as she contemplated the view of scores of workers toiling diligently at their tasks. Felix Hohenberger kept his head down when she went past his desk. Mrs. Fitzgibbons liked that, the tacit understanding that his behavior toward her bore directly upon the economic welfare of his family. Not a second later, Laura Stathis, a girl from payroll, blanched in fear at the sight of Mrs. Fitzgibbons coming straight toward her, turned on a dime, and hurried away in the opposite direction. Such, Mrs. Fitzgibbons concluded, were the salutary effects of an administration that was not incapable of making up its mind.

It was a case of the wish made real. When Mrs. Fitzgibbons came darting out of the bank that afternoon, full of confidence in her ability to work her will upon others, to mold and shape events according to a plan that was no more complicated than telling other people what to do, her quick string of achievements was already producing real shock waves in the banking community. Not ten streets away, an emergency meeting was in session on the third floor of the South Valley Bank. In all of its seventy-seven years of doing business, a span of time that had included some very trying years, the South Valley had never experienced anything on record as puzzling as what had happened these past two days. Deposit dollars were being withdrawn at an alarming rate.

That morning, when Mrs. Fitzgibbons had mentioned to Bruce her intention to play some golf this afternoon with Terry (her “boyfriend”), Bruce offered her the use of Matthew's Buick. The car was to be parked at the curb, with the keys over the visor. However, when Mrs. Fitzgibbons came out onto Maple Street, she found Matthew himself standing on the tree belt by his car. In fact, the instant he spotted her, he turned and opened the back door for her. Mrs. Fitzgibbons's reaction to this gracious touch illustrated the ease with which she was able to accommodate the solicitude of lesser beings. “Why, thank you, Matthew. What a wonderful surprise,” she exclaimed, as she swept past him and entered the rear of the car. “I'm going to the country club.”

As Matthew guided his automobile through the late-afternoon traffic, Mrs. Fitzgibbons took notice of the spotless interior of the car, with its plush upholstery and freshly vacuumed carpet. She sat back with her coat open, her legs crossed, and a severe but not angry look on her face. Stopped briefly for the traffic light at Essex Street, she was completely unmindful of the fact that they were halted directly in front of the South Valley Bank, nor had she a clue that an emergency meeting was convened upstairs, in which her name was being repeated with dismaying frequency.

While the officers and directors of the South Valley Bank were careful that afternoon not to invoke the language of panic, the seriousness of the matter did inspire some telling phrases. No one at the conference table demurred, for example, when William Daviau, one of the directors, characterized what was happening downstairs as “a temporary hemorrhaging of funds.” Nor would the leadership of other neighboring banks have objected to it. These were financial institutions of a size that could not withstand such an onslaught. In truth, the flight of funds was taking place on a near-ruinous scale. With nothing more to explain her advent than a single full-page newspaper article and seven minutes on the evening news, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had befallen these little sister institutions like an early winter storm.

As in all such developments, change worked a reciprocal effect upon its agent. That is to say, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's triumphs not only left her feeling successively more important, and did nothing to slake her thirst for further victories, but caused her to depreciate all other people at a proportionate rate. She had never been the sort of human being to deprecate a person for living in conditions that they could not overcome, especially a youngster of eighteen, but when Matthew Dean stopped the car outside Terence Sugrue's house on the corner of Nonotuck and Spring, and Mrs. Fitzgibbons winced at the sight of the derelict clapboard structure (with a rusted refrigerator parked on the front porch and wild vines and shrubberies running riot everywhere), her subsequent view of the Sugrue boy was severely abbreviated. She saw him as a vain, “back street” sort of boy, someone to be good-timed and discarded at her convenience.

This view was strengthened for her by the way the young drum major looked about in awe at the inside of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's chauffeured Buick. He turned pink with embarrassment at the luxurious setting, not to mention the look of Mrs. Fitzgibbons sitting in the opposite corner with her legs crossed.

“Matthew, forget about the country club,” she said. “Drive me up to Jarvis Avenue.”

“Right you are,” he said.

Terry was sitting on the edge of the seat, blushing uncomfortably at the way Mrs. Fitzgibbons ordered the man behind the wheel to comply with her desires. He blushed, too, at the overtly concupiscent look that she turned upon him, examining him up and down.

“We'll drive around some of the back roads up there and have a little talk,” she said to Terry. She was staring at him now with open sensuality, but without having moved a muscle. “The joy of being young,” she said, “is that you can butter up people without annihilating your self-respect.”

For the most part, Terry was perplexed by her words. Matthew stole looks at the two of them in the rearview mirror, while driving along slowly under the twilit trees.

Downtown at the South Valley Bank, as the hour of dusk drew a gray light through the city streets, Mr. William Daviau was put through on the telephone to Alita Lindberg, the publisher of the local newspaper. Mrs. Lindberg's replies to the bank director's complaints about her coverage of Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the Saturday issue of the
Telegram
were obviously rehearsed, a certain indication that he was not the first banking official to lodge a grievance that day. However, the earnestness in Mrs. Lindberg's prepared responses took account of the obvious gravity of the situation. According to Mr. Daviau, who was very angry, the
Ireland Parish
Telegram
was responsible for what he elegantly termed “an increasing destabilization of the local economy.”

Alita Lindberg reminded him that on the occasion of South Valley's seventy-fifth anniversary, in the summer of 1985, the
Telegram
had given the South Valley Bank an enormous three-page spread, including photographs of the original limestone bank building, its founders and present officers, and several shots of its current facility and branch locations. Mr. Daviau was not appeased.

“I don't think you realize what you've done. You people have created a situation that must be rectified. You've inflicted some serious damage out here.”

“Personally,” the publisher responded, “I don't even know Mrs. Fitzgibbons. I know literally nothing about her. All I know is that our reportage has been fair and accurate.”

“By boasting and innuendo, she's made the rest of us sound like a pack of rank amateurs, whereas, in fact, it's she,” he insisted hotly, “who is the amateur. The article you printed was nothing more than a vehicle for a big-talking publicity hound!”

“Mr. Daviau.”

“She has no background in banking. No schooling in it. No true experience. She's just a woman shooting off her mouth — appealing to a vulgar streak in your readers. She's a home loan officer.”

“No,” said Mrs. Lindberg, chafing at the man's sexist remarks, “you are wrong. Mrs. Fitzgibbons is, in fact, the chief executive officer of the biggest bank in this city. And she certainly is news. What are you proposing? That I blackball her?”

“I know beyond a doubt,” said he, “that every one of our several local savings institutions is suddenly under pressure. If it weren't for what's going on in the stock market, and the worry it's causing to people out there, this would not be happening.”

“That's open to question.”

“The developments are coincident, Alita. How can you deny it?”

“If they are, Mr. Daviau,” she paused to emphasize the formality of her reply, “you can't blame me. If they are not, then you must blame yourselves. The article stands.” Abruptly, she terminated the discussion. She gave Mr. Daviau her last word. “There will be no retractions, no amendments, no apologies. I will, however, if you wish, send my city desk man himself, Sherman Resnic, to your offices tomorrow morning. What's more, I will print the interview in full. I will print your objections to the Saturday article word for word. I should caution, however,” she advised, “that a vitriolic attack on Mrs. Fitzgibbons, especially if it makes small of her being a woman, or so much as suggests that her position is inconsistent with one's expectations of a person of her sex, could produce results that would be” — Alita Lindberg hesitated a split second to find the word she wanted — “would be retrograde to your desire.”

“It's obvious, Mrs. Lindberg,” he came right back, “that you really don't appreciate the extent or possible permanent effects of the damage that's taking place.”

William Daviau had no wish to end the conversation in progress. His fellow officials sat round the conference table, staring at him, as he strove to make the publisher see the peril and injustice in it all. No one present had even thought to get up and switch on the lights, even though a cool, wan glow had spread throughout the room; the water glasses on the table and the folders and scattered sheets of paper took on a cold aspect. The people sitting in the room seemed to be losing substance at the rate that their endeavors were losing force.

A mile to the west, on a lonely stretch of Jarvis Avenue, far from the bitter telephone dispute taking place downtown, Matthew was driving along slowly, as instructed. The back seat of the sedan was cast in a twilit gloom. The leafless trees at roadside moved slowly past. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was querying Terence on his future, employing honeyed tones.

“Would you like to go into banking?” she asked in a softly melodious way.

Not used to thinking seriously about his future, he presented an abstract countenance. He seemed unaware that Mrs. Fitzgibbons's skirt had ridden up on her thighs; the sides of her gun-metal leather coat were thrown wide.