Ride a Cockhorse (23 page)

“You do that,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

However, the best example of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's want of prejudice in calling people onto the carpet and eliminating them from the bank, occurred in the case of Mr. Desmond Kane. When Mr. Kane's name showed up on the wheel, she felt a stab of remorse. Desmond was not only the senior teller in terms of his years of service, but was also the most elderly employee in the firm. A diffident, yellow-toothed man of advanced age, Desmond had suffered the loss of an arm in the fighting for the Philippines in World War II, and was always accorded an extra measure of respect by all. The choice threw Mrs. Fitzgibbons into a quandary. For as long as she could remember, she had felt a special warmth for Mr. Kane. During her first year at the bank, back in 1973, he was always there to help. In the days following Larry's death, no one anywhere had been kinder to her, or more solicitous over her loss than he. She knew from the start that she was going to fire him, however, as it would have been folly to corrupt the impersonal workings of fate by showing favoritism. Also, by now, Mrs. Fitzgibbons prided herself on her capacity to master inner weakness. In sum, she saw her own hurt feelings as a necessary part of the sacrifice that was required in exciting fear among her charges. It was in this maudlin state of mind that Mrs. Fitzgibbons sent Julie Marcotte with a little yellow summons to fetch Mr. Kane.

As matters evolved, however, the man selected for the ritual firing was not nearly so willing to be separated from his job as she had anticipated. She started in on a genial enough tack, explaining to the one-armed gentleman that her new position required her to implement decisions that were not always in accordance with the dictates of her heart. As she explained this dolorous truth, her emotions began to move in sympathy with her words, until Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt a little saddened by what was coming. Yesterday, in firing Marshall Moriarty, the so-called Most Beautiful Man, she had rather enjoyed leading him hither and thither by the nose, first exciting hope, then apprehension, then hope anew, only to end it all with a sudden swing of the axe.

“You see,” she was explaining to Mr. Kane, preparatory to dismissing him, “we're changing direction as an institution. That's the key to everything that's happening around here this week.”

As she went on, Mr. Kane showed no emotion whatever, but sat stonily in his chair, with the left sleeve of his suit jacket folded neatly into his side pocket, and an expression of wry scorn etched on his lips. As long as he remained thus, Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued to elaborate on her views. If necessary, she could have talked like this till the cows came home.

She swung back in her chair, gesturing languidly and tossing out clichés in a quietly boastful manner. “We're a deposit-driven institution. We don't originate loans until the funds are in. We keep our risks down. Now, because of that, our growth requires a dramatic infusion of new funds. That's how I make sense here. That's the single most revolutionary change to have taken place, you see. Because with me at the helm, we're not going to sit on our hands any longer. We're not just going to hope,” she flung out disdainfully, “that everybody out there will be nice to us and let us survive. That attitude was acceptable years ago. Today, we have a more challenging environment. I wouldn't last a month,” she added, “if I were to conduct business as usual.”

Desmond Kane continued to regard her with the imperturbability of a gargoyle. She had never seen him in such an obstinate frame of mind, and guessed that he had divined his termination and was resolved to take the blow with stoic forbearance.

“You can't imagine the kind of pressure that I put myself under, Desmond, in order to make the changes here that should have been made years ago. Believe me, it isn't enough just to take the public by storm, to create a stampede of new business through my front doors. I have to consider a hundred and one other things.” Sometimes, when boasting like this, Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt a surge of excitement in her blood. She actually felt her body heating up. “I even have to watch the securities markets.” She threw her pencil onto her desk. “I'm sitting on eighty million dollars, and the future of it, and of everyone in this place, is riding on my back. It's easy for a secretary or a teller,” she said, ridiculing Mr. Kane's position and forty years of service at the bank, “to give me a day's work in return for a day's pay, and think nothing more of it. I'm the one who has to control costs.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons decided to give Mr. Kane a peek at the scary decision that trembled in the offing. “I'm the one who has to reduce expenses and streamline the staff.”

Hard as she tried, though, Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not get a rise out of the man. Moreover, the gray stony set of his face was beginning to get on her nerves. To worsen matters, there materialized in her mind's eye an image of the ugly stump of Mr. Kane's severed arm dangling uselessly inside his folded sleeve, a vision that revolted her.

To her relief, Julie Marcotte put through an important telephone call. It was from a top executive at the George Hitchings Corporation, a Hartford-based developer well known in banking circles along the Eastern seaboard. Mrs. Fitzgibbons loved this part of the job. She liked talking to highly placed executives, especially of powerful firms that had never solicited business from the bank before. The man on the line told her that Nate Solomon had spoken highly of her.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons leaned backward in her chair, with her breasts up in the air and the phone tilted prettily in her hand, as she addressed herself at first to the ceiling. While the consequence of her business call from the man at the Hitchings Corporation was fifty times as important as her dealing with the one-armed teller, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was conscious all the while that the picture she was presenting to Mr. Kane would point up to him his own insignificance; he would be able to relax now in the knowledge that her decision to get rid of him was based on considerations too lofty for him to comprehend.

“Nate is a gentleman,” she was saying. “It was grand of him to mention me. It's quite true that we're interested in proposals that originate outside our region. If the fundamentals are good, we're ready to play.” She had turned and was staring abstractedly at Mr. Kane now, but gave no indication of seeing him. She was staring through him. “I expect to be in Worcester the next few days,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, fictitiously. “What I'd like to do is send down my assistant, Leonard Frye. He's my nuts-and-bolts man, anyhow. If you could take an hour with him.”

“Sounds perfect,” said the other with an altogether agreeable air.

“Give him the lay of the thing to bring back to me. Would you do that?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons shivered over the excitement of executive power. “If I like it, and if a meeting is desirable to you, you and I could get together.”

By the time Mrs. Fitzgibbons had arranged a meeting for Mr. Frye in Hartford and had hung up, she had stopped feeling sorry for the doomed man sitting in front of her. She even concluded that Desmond Kane had treated her kindly over the years only in order to flatter himself by treating a loan officer as an equal. He had probably secretly despised her all along. Now that she had climbed to stratospheric heights and become superior to everyone, and could no longer gratify his vanity, he lapsed into a moody, churlish silence.

She gave him one last chance to show a spark of appreciation, a sign of his comprehending the wonders she was working here, and of the fact that his future was hers to enhance or mangle. She pivoted in her chair to face him head on. “My instincts tell me,” she said, smiling pleasantly, “that you don't have a solid grip on the sort of changes I'm bringing about here.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons waited, but Mr. Kane made no reply. The wryness in his face was sculpted in granite.

“You wouldn't know what a loan portfolio is,” she said, “let alone what it means to increase deposits by four percent in three days, or be able to boast a twenty-two percent return on average equity. How could you? You've been a teller here since the War of 1812.” She raised her voice, but not in anger. “You're one of my tellers, Desmond. Your job is mechanical. It's like being a piston or the exhaust pipe in a car. A piston,” she explained, “functions without regard to where the car is going, or how fast, or in what direction, or whether it's moving at all. The car could be going over a cliff.”

“It probably is,” said Mr. Kane.

The unexpectedness of Mr. Kane's voice arrested Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the midst of her metaphor, and even required her to think for a second about what he had said. She sat forward, laid her arms flat on the desk, and eyed him incredulously. Before she could respond, Mr. Kane spoke again.

“That's what cliffs are for,” he said.

Some of the nearby staff workers who had seen Mr. Kane cross the floor and vanish into Mrs. Fitzgibbons's enormous office like a sleepwalker entering an unexplored cave, had just begun to take heart in his prospects, when, out of the blue, Mrs. Fitzgibbons started to shout. The torrent of fury that erupted behind her door had no precedent in the hundred-year history of the venerable bank at Maple and Main. To exacerbate matters, Mr. Kane interrupted with more to say.

“I don't think you're doing that well,” he said.

On her feet, Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked about swiftly for some heavy object. She couldn't credit her ears.

“I want to know why this is happening to me,” he added in a controlled manner. “I want an explanation.”

But by then, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had drowned him out. Like many people born with native oratorical talent, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had a pair of lungs. When she got really angry, her voice actually dropped half an octave and took on a rasping hoarseness. It was deafening. “
Get Mr. Donachie in here!
” she hollered with incredible volume. “
I want my guard!
”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons ran across the room and flung open her door. Her voice filled the entire bank. “I WANT HIM IN HERE!”

The actual expulsion of the one-armed teller — to worsen matters — involved a brief physical altercation at the door of her office between himself and Alec Donachie. Mr. Kane thrust the bank guard aside and, showing his yellow teeth, commanded him to stay put. However, the deep, morbid desire in Mr. Donachie to throw himself into action for Mrs. Fitzgibbons, the woman responsible for uniforming him in his black police clothes and for elevating him to a position of respect, triggered a spontaneous reaction. In a twinkling, Mr. Donachie had twisted Desmond Kane's surviving arm behind his back and was propelling him with force toward the back door of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's colossal office, in the direction of the vestibule. He was clutching the collar of Desmond's suit coat in his left fist while thrusting him before him. “Nobody sasses the Chief,” he said. “You're gone, mister. You're out of here!”

If there was one thing Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not brook, it was criticism. Alone in her office, she sat, heart beating. Her nerves were in riot, her pulse fluttering. The revelation that her firing policy had turned up, by chance, an actual detractor, someone who questioned and despised her, left her shaken. She felt sorry for herself. She showed Julie a suffering face. “This is what comes of being fair-minded.”

“Mr. Kane was very stupid to say what he did,” Julie said comfortingly to Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

“He's lived off us for a hundred years. We gave him a pleasant corner to work in, benefits, holidays, a weekly paycheck, year after year, but when it's time for him to go,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, practically in tears, “then the ugliness comes out. It was there all along, and now it comes out.”

“It was a disgusting thing to say,” said Julie.

“Here is a man,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, still pitying herself, “who can't zip up his fly, but can sit in front of me, with an ugly look on his face, and question what I'm doing. Oh, and I was polite with him. I tried to show understanding. I kept my voice down. I called him Desmond. I was prepared to treat him like a human being. I would have given him compensation. He has the heart of a rat, and I was going to give him the world on a platter.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons accepted a pocket tissue from Julie and touched it to the corner of her eye. She was truly hurt. For a quarter hour thereafter, she struggled to make sense of the secret motives of subordinates.

“It was stupid of him,” said Julie.

“It wasn't stupid,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “It was vicious.”

“It was the most vicious thing anyone could say,” Julie agreed. “I'd like to see something horrible happen to him.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons sniffled angrily and wiped her nose. “I swear to Jesus,” she said, “if anyone ever speaks to me that way again, I'll have him beheaded.”

For the rest of the hour, Mrs. Fitzgibbons remained in a guarded state of mind. She experienced the odd sensation that her brain had actually contracted; that the scope of her thinking was somehow attenuated, like water jetting from a nozzle. She felt restive and menaced, and refused to take an entire sequence of phone calls. She closed her door and busied herself with her paperwork. It was no coincidence, therefore, when Mrs. Fitzgibbons later detected something suspicious in passing that aggravated her paranoia. She had just come to her door to give Julie a letter to type, when a young woman from Mrs. Wilson's department went past Julie's desk on her way to the rear vestibule. Mrs. Fitzgibbons caught a glimpse of something extraordinary under the half-open flap of the girl's rumpled tote bag.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons accosted her on the spot. The young woman halted and looked about in bewilderment. She was a plain, stooped figure dressed in a woolen jumper and Indian-print blouse. Her sponge-soled shoes, which laced up like a man's, accentuated the pigeon-toed posture of her feet.

“You!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons brought her to a halt with a word and pointed to her door. “Go into my office.”