Ride a Cockhorse (36 page)

“What does that mean to me?” he said.

“Well, they won't give you an inch. They haven't the depth to be as generous as they might have been in past years.”

“I didn't know that.”

“They're hard-pressed. They're looking to be taken over.”

Dr. Cauley sat back in his chair. His new estimation of the woman before him was mirrored in his face. “That's a fact?” he asked in surprise.

“It's known to us. It's more than a rumor.”

“Why, then,” he inquired, in innocence, “don't you folks take them over?”

“I may,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “An officer of mine is putting together a profile on them.”

The word
profile
had leaped unbidden from Mrs. Fitzgibbons's lips, even though she had never used the word in such a context before. She was reminded of the ease recently that she had experienced in making herself understood to others. She seemed to have been blessed with a gift for speech. This awareness was itself rather forceless, however, like a form dimly perceived on the horizon of the mind. She looked at him perplexedly.

“Am I medicated?” she said, finally.

“Well,” he answered, “certainly, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. You were given a small dosage. You took it with juice at breakfast. You don't remember?”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons nodded embarrassedly. She recalled the tablets in the paper cup. “I do,” she said.

Later, standing by the windows in the solarium at the end of the ward, to which she had retreated to avoid being pestered by the other patients—all women, pacing restlessly to and fro, chainsmoking, many talking obsessively to themselves—Mrs. Fitzgibbons spotted her daughter's car turning in at the front gate. The vision of Barbara's dirty gray hatchback, with its protruding headlights and slush-spattered grille, sent Mrs. Fitzgibbons's heart plummeting. For the first time, she was able to grasp the nature and implications of her circumstance, the shock of being incarcerated, the bleakness of what was to come.

At ten minutes past noon, Barbara came hurrying in, her big glasses sparkling. The first words out of her mouth were not consolatory.

“So, this is where it got you,” she said hotly. “With your fancy mascara and thousand-dollar bras.”

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons winced at her daughter's onslaught.

“Picked up in the street at two
A.M
. And didn't I know it was coming? Didn't I?” she wailed. “The big-shot la-di-da business executive who wouldn't even come to the telephone.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who had sometimes feared her daughter in the past, but never while imprisoned in a psychiatric ward, was sitting on a green plastic chair by the windows, trying to distill from her brain a mollifying response. She was long mystified by the combination in Barbara of a desire to safeguard various life forms in nature and a rancorous repressiveness toward others.

“Because of you,” Barbara carped away in a thin voice, while glancing over her shoulder to ascertain their privacy, “I don't even know my own husband. Anyone would swear he was in love with my own mother. I'm a laughingstock in the street. You've belittled me. You've desecrated the memory of my father. You've done everything conceivable to stain and pollute my life. And for what?”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's heart was thumping desperately as Barbara scolded.

“So that you, the big shot, could fire people at work. That's how Frankie Fitzgibbons gets her jollies. You're the talk of the city. People despise you! Whizzing around town in the back seat of a big Buick, and people like Eddie sucking up to it, just asking for it,
wanting
to be treated like dirt.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons objected softly. “It wasn't like that.”

“That's your secret. Spit on people and they'll beg for more. Well, it just isn't like that. Because some people know better.... You're off your clock!”

A nurse interposed. “Your mother,” she said, “will need toilet articles, a robe, slippers, underwear, that sort of thing. Did you bring anything?”

Barbara was too distracted to speak. Her lips drawn back in two thin lines, she stared blankly at the nurse.

“It's all right,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons spoke up to dismiss the importance of Barbara's role. “Other people will do that.”

Her reference to others, as to a devoted court, only fueled Barbara Berdowsky's bitterness, as, for many minutes without letup, she poured cold scorn on her mother's head.

“You won't even have a job now,” she said, digging in her vinyl bag for a tissue.

“I always had a job,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons replied with puzzlement.

“Please! Spare me!” Barbara mimicked her mother's most cutting manner. “After this farce? Who in their right mind would take you seriously? You're finished.”

“But that doesn't make sense.”

Suddenly, Barbara launched a scathing impersonation of Julie on the phone, in the way of ridiculing her mother's importance. “ ‘
Mrs. Fitzgibbons can't speak to you now. Mrs. Fitzgibbons is in conference. Mrs. Fitzgibbons is with the press
.' It was for this obscene charade,” Barbara said, “that I went to school, did my homework like a stupid little automaton, so that now, grown up, I would have you on my hands. What on earth did I do?” she cried out. “What will happen to me?”

By the time Bruce Clayton arrived on the fourth-floor ward at one o'clock, the start of the usual visiting hours, Barbara had left Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the solarium and was consulting with Dr. Salindra Singh, the Indian psychiatrist arriving on duty. The two of them were talking animatedly in Dr. Singh's glass-enclosed office behind the nurses' station. Barbara was pleading with the doctor in a loud voice. “She needs extensive care! I'll sign anything. Tell me what to do. This condition has been worsening by the week.”

If Mrs. Fitzgibbons's behavior seemed suggestible to the behavior of others, as to Dr. Cauley and Barbara, her response to Bruce was no exception. That is, she responded to his fawning behavior and loving solicitude with the nodding, easygoing air of an established superior.

“I let myself into your house,” he explained. He had in hand a shopping bag brimming over with articles of clothing and toiletries he had fetched from her bedroom.

“That was just the thing to do,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons replied. Not strangely, while in Bruce's presence, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's perception of her daughter as a rather frightening, narrow-minded zealot altered smoothly into that of a hysterical nullity. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was frowning in the direction of Dr. Singh's office.

“Your daughter seems very upset.”

“She's always been a little funny.”

“I brought you a pair of flat shoes.” Bruce was producing her belongings item by item from the bag. As he did so, Mrs. Fitzgibbons fell to studying him. He was crouched on his heels next to her chair. The look of his ears and the line of his hair awoke her loving instincts. She had the formless idea in mind that the category of her plight, its mystery and unknown prognosis, meant very little to him; he loved her. Her tongue lolled momentarily, and she shut and opened her eyes.

“That was wise,” she said.

“Stockings,” he went on, “brush, comb, some lotions.”

Within minutes, Bruce had helped Mrs. Fitzgibbons on with a black turtleneck, skirt, and shoes. He adjusted the sling about her forearm, and then set about brushing her hair. The picture of the two of them, Mrs. Fitzgibbons gazing calmly out the window to the dismal wintry courtyard, Bruce standing impeccably behind her, handsome and formal, working the hairbrush with hypnotic movements, was altogether arresting. That evening, with the arrival of others, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's anxieties were further abated. Although she had taken the Haldol tablets prescribed for her by Dr. Cauley at supper hour, and the medication left her feeling a little slumbrous, the eagerness and sedulous attention of her young followers revived her spirits. Bruce had given the word out that Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in good fettle and would appreciate the solicitude of her friends. Only Eddie was missing. Howard, Dolores, and Matthew brought flowers. Emily Krok presented her with a box of chocolates. Julie, the most imaginative that day, arrived on the ward carrying a big, floral-printed envelope containing a dozen photographs of Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself; these were black-and-white prints of the full-length shot of Mrs. Fitzgibbons standing handsomely in front of her desk, which was published a week earlier in the
Ireland Parish Telegram
and had generated such interest.

To the nurses and attendants on duty, there was no mistaking the fact that the woman in the black turtleneck, toward whom such obeisance was being paid, was a figure of consequence. The impression was fortified when she was observed signing three or four of the photographs for her guests, while speaking to all in a softly instructive fashion. They stood about her chair with their hands behind their backs, laughing with polite restraint at her witticisms, and sometimes calling her Chief. In fact, Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked quite fit; her coloring was good, her hair lustrous and neat. At one point, when Howard Brouillette indicated a need to speak to Mrs. Fitzgibbons in private, Dolores turned to the others, and with a wave of her cigarette, led them away to a respectful distance.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons listened in silence for the next several minutes, while Howard, perched on a plastic chair drawn up to her side, delivered his report. The sight of Mrs. Fitzgibbons staring blankly in the direction of Matthew and the others, and of Howard in his long white coat, clutching a signed photo in his hands and going on and on at her ear, did confer on Mrs. Fitzgibbons more the look of a historic personage than of a patient in the hundred-year-old institution. From time to time, she frowned; she listened with an imposing expression; she nodded, frowned, and nodded again. She did not look at Howard as he spoke.

Mr. Zabac, he explained, who was attending a conference on Cape Cod, had learned about the firing of Mrs. Wilson and was fit to be tied. Julie had found this out through Deborah Schwartzwald, a friend of Patricia Quirk, Mrs. Wilson's secretary. Patricia Quirk had sworn Deborah Schwartzwald to silence because she lived in mortal fear, she said, of Mrs. Fitzgibbons, but Deborah wanted Mrs. Fitzgibbons notified at once, and would like Julie please to tell Mrs. Fitzgibbons what she, Deborah, had done for the cause.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons nodded sagaciously.

Mr. Zabac would be returning home on Monday instead of Tuesday. This information came from the horse's mouth, Howard said, and was absolutely reliable. Patricia Quirk had telephoned Jeannine Mielke at home today, instructing the latter to send the car service to Barnes Airport at noon Monday, a day earlier than planned. “Patricia Quirk is in this up to her neck,” Howard said.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons grunted portentously but said nothing.

Dolores and the others stood as before, in the middle of the bright, expansive room, speaking subduedly among themselves.

“We spread the word,” Howard went on, “that you had had a nasty fall and sprained your wrist, that the hospital was overcrowded, and you were sent elsewhere for treatment.”

She nodded once more. She was gazing down at the dark fringe of trees that lay beyond the courtyard and driveway, beyond which lay the river.

“As for Hooton,” Howard said, “I warned him last night that if he went to work Monday, I'd call the police.”

Mr. Brouillette's views struck Mrs. Fitzgibbons as consonant with good sense. “Well, you should,” she said. Her recollection of the dramatic undertaking of the night before was not particularly troublesome to her. “He's lucky not to be in jail.”

“After what he did to my wife,” Howard added for good measure. He scraped his feet back and forth on the floor. “He was lucky it was you who caught him, and not someone vindictive.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's tranquilized thoughts harmonized with the other's sentiment, requiring just a modicum of mental energy. She allowed the remark to pass.

“The best news”—Howard pulled forward in his chair—“is that the Citizens Bank has a multimillion dollar note with the Mannox Apremont Development Company. It goes back three years, and the Mannox Company is taking a bath. This is not hearsay. Hooton mentioned it last night to Dolores. He was very, very excited about it, he said.”

“It gave him a hard-on?”

Howard colored. “That's what she said, yes. It made him hard. He said it was his trump card. But that's not the best part. The Mannox Apremont Company—”

“We hold a note of theirs.”

“That's the best part. Yes, we do. It's older and smaller and precedes theirs, and if you call it in, everything will come down.”

For all her haziness of thought, Mrs. Fitzgibbons perceived the implications readily enough. “If I—”

“Exactly,” said Howard. “Mannox will go under, and Citizens will be reduced to begging. They won't be able to go on. They'll be headed straight for receivership.”

“Who told Hooton?”

“It came straight from the man himself.”

“What man?” Straightening herself, Mrs. Fitzgibbons recovered something of her nervous irritability.

“The president of the place. Curtin Schreffler.”

“Schreffler!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons turned this way and that, agitatedly, in her chair. Her exclamation had silenced the room. At such times, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's voice resonated with oratorical power. “Curtin Schreffler? With his Cuban heels and silver-headed umbrella? He didn't approach me?” She extended her good fist and appeared to be sighting along it. “I'll stand him on his patent-leather head,” she promised.

In a setting where sudden commotions and flare-ups were the order of the day, somehow the commotion centering upon the ward's latest inhabitant evoked a more concerned reaction. Two nurses came running. By ten o'clock that evening, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, further medicated, lay deeply asleep in her bed. She created another minor crisis the next morning when she refused to take her prescribed dosage. She didn't want any pills, she said. Her refusal did not stem from any conscious resistance to the drug itself, or from any awareness of a need to clarify her mind. She was too drugged already to frame any such plan or rationale. The resistance was deeper, more psychotic: the pills in the cup were a poisonous yellow in color, and the cold rain striking the windows held evil omens. Later on, though, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's resistance to ministrations was more comprehensible; Matthew called her on the pay phone to inform her that she could not be held against her will at that (or any state) hospital for more than three days without a court order.