Ride a Cockhorse (9 page)

She would have said more, but Jeannine Mielke returned just then with their teacups and saucers. Besides, Mrs. Fitzgibbons thought it prudent to direct their discussion away from business matters for the moment, as the chairman was obviously distressed at having to demote Leonard Frye.

“What I would enjoy,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons remarked graciously, while watching with an absent eye as Miss Mielke poured the coffee carefully from the containers into the china teacups, “would be to drive out and see your gardens one of these days. What are they like in the fall?” She drew her chair forward and positioned herself by the side of his desk next to her teacup.

“A proper garden,” said Mr. Zabac, with pride, “is a treasure to the eye year-round.”

“I've heard that said,” she answered thoughtlessly, and dealt Mr. Zabac's secretary an icy, unfriendly smile. Jeannine was pouring the steaming coffee with maddening exactitude. Mrs. Fitzgibbons lost patience with her. “That's coffee, not nitroglycerin,” she said. “Pour it into the cup.”

No one in memory had spoken to Jeannine Mielke in so contemptuous a manner; the woman's proximity to Louis Zabac had long ago assured her inviolability; most employees trod softly in her presence. To Mrs. Fitzgibbons, however, who had herself always avoided contact with the quiet, officious woman, a new day had dawned. A new order was in place. Miss Mielke was a glorified clerk typist! But Mrs. Fitzgibbons concentrated on the little man in the Italian silk suit and turned to him.

“When would you like to show off your gardens? A Saturday would be convenient. I usually golf on Sundays.”

“You amaze me, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

“Golfing is good for business, even if,” she amended, “I'd like to see the country club golf course developed for some luxury housing.”

“It's a magnificent property,” Mr. Zabac agreed.

“Magnificent isn't the word. It's the most spectacular acreage this side of Tibet.”

“I'm afraid our local preservationists would raise an objection or two on that score.” Mr. Zabac spoke with sweet reasonableness, his hands folded properly before him. He was enjoying her company.

“Preservationists!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons ridiculed such interests. It pleased her to sit in the bank chairman's office, his anemic-looking secretary hanging on every word she said, and show her contempt for such civic-minded do-gooders as might wish to oppose the destruction for profit of a golf course. She could picture her own daughter picketing the site. “When the bulldozers come, they change their tune.”

Mr. Zabac laughed lightly at her wit, his bushy eyebrows bristling like two caterpillars.

“They see those steel treads churning up the grass and knocking over trees,” she said, “and the little woodchucks and field mice running for their lives, and that's enough to convince even the dumbest among them. I'll give them preservationists.”

The chairman and Mrs. Fitzgibbons reacted gaily to the comic picture she drew of environmental protesters fleeing tractors. When Miss Mielke departed the room, however, pulling the door silently shut behind her, the little man sat forward once again. He addressed his new vice president in his best businesslike manner.

“I hope, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, that you will not contemplate any impulsive moves, and, surely, that you will make no decisive steps without consulting me first.”

“Not to worry, I'm not like that.” She was stirring the sugar round and round with her spoon. “You do know that it's going to reflect well on all of us to have a woman as your chief home loan officer.”

“That,” he smiled, angelically, “was a factor, I must confess, in my deliberations, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, as well, of course, as your steadily improving record over the years with us. But I am happy to add that I was not nearly so convinced of the merits and rightness of my view yesterday as I am this morning, after hearing you out. I hadn't known you held such sound, strong views on the matters that we've taken up. But you seem,” he said, “to have anticipated me. You knew what I desired from the outset.”

“I knew what you needed.” She raised her teacup to her lips. “I was surprised you didn't call on me sooner.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons rattled on about how she had been taking the pulse of the bank every day and was confident that he would summon her sooner or later; but she was thinking about how she would dress on the day she drove out to see his gardens. Mr. Zabac's wife had been invalided several years earlier, and Mrs. Fitzgibbons could imagine the poor thing sitting up in bed as Mr. Zabac introduced the two of them, and of how frightened out of her skull the woman would be at the great sight of herself wrapped up in some splashy concoction of a dress, with her longish legs, and her breasts pushed out scarily.

“I'll talk to Mr. Frye today,” the chairman concluded with a note of regret. “I'll convince him of the necessity of the step, the wiseness of it, and, at the same time, of his own secure role in the new arrangement. He will understand.”

“He'll have to.”

“Now, now,” said the chairman, smiling, exhibiting his even, godlike temperament, but revealing too his acceptance of her adamant remarks. “He's as solid as a rock, you know.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was holding her saucer in one hand, her teacup in the other. She responded with visible forbearance. “If you insist on keeping him, I won't argue.” Her open-mindedness on this point was as obvious as her soaring self-esteem. She wanted Mr. Zabac to know that she could accommodate him in the matter of her former boss, if only as a sop to the little man's softheartedness.

“Leonard can stay,” she said. That was final.

“Shall we discuss salary?” he asked.

“Later will do,” she said.

Few individuals, probably in all history, have felt such a surge of pure egoistic excitement over their accession to power as that experienced by Mrs. Fitzgibbons as she descended the narrow marble staircase and glanced out over the great sprawling emporium of the bank. The symmetry of its tasteful yellow-shaded lamps glowing amid the double row of great, mottled marble pillars, the long rank of gleaming brass window grilles, the mahogany rails, and grand churchlike windows—all of it—summoned to her senses an impression of grandeur consonant with her bounding fortunes. The usual collection of early-morning customers was milling about in lines at the windows, under the watchful eye of the security guard standing casually before the ornate brass doors. As Mrs. Fitzgibbons made her way through the maze of desks and lamps, all eyes were upon her; but she noted with satisfaction that everyone looked down quickly as she came hurrying by. She had already decided not to wait for the chairman sitting upstairs to notify her predecessor of his demotion, but pushed open the door of Leonard Frye's office and walked in.

For a split second, Mr. Frye didn't even recognize her. He had not yet seen her this morning and was as unprepared as Mr. Zabac had been for the dramatic transformation that Bruce had brought to pass. However, if the vision of Mrs. Fitzgibbons was a happy one for the loan officer in the blue suit, the pleasure was fleeting.

While Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in an ebullient mood, with her color up and her physical movements charged with energy, she was not in a frame of mind to waste words with her fallen superior. Within ten minutes, Mr. Frye was sitting out in the loan department at Mrs. Fitzgibbons's desk, looking shell-shocked, while his secretary, Anita Stebbins, went about the melancholy business of transferring the contents of both desks. The exchange of posts was meanwhile naturally invigorating to Mrs. Fitzgibbons. She was exultant. At the same time, though, her manic, rapid-fire behavior suggested forethought, as in the way she instantly called to her office Julie Marcotte, the department's receptionist and telephone operator, and promoted her on the spot.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was sitting behind her new desk, opening and shutting drawers, when Julie entered. “You're going to be my new secretary.”

The girl in question had betrayed on occasion a sycophantic streak that appealed to Mrs. Fitzgibbons, a trait that Julie had unwittingly reinforced not an hour earlier when she had gasped with admiration at Mrs. Fitzgibbons's new look. Mrs. Fitzgibbons didn't need to ponder it. The telephone girl had just the sort of polite, smiling, deferential manner that the new head of the home loan department associated with streamlined efficiency on the job.

“You'll be responsible to me.”

Startled by her stroke of good fortune, Julie's cheeks colored. She was thrilled.

“More responsibility,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “more work, and more money.”

Anita Stebbins was in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's new office at the moment and couldn't help blurting out, anxiously, “Where will I go?”

“Mr. Frye will not have a secretary of his own.” Reaching, Mrs. Fitzgibbons lifted an immense sheaf of papers from the bottom drawer of her desk and cast it into the wastebasket. She stood up. Anita Stebbins's fate at the Parish Bank was a nettlesome point. “Go work for Mrs. Baskin with the part-time clerks. And clear out your desk. You have to make room for Julie,” she said. “Julie, take down that hideous calendar and throw it out, and throw out that plant, and get rid of those two chairs. And put a brighter bulb in my desk lamp.”

“Yes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons!”

“And tell Jack Greaney I want to see him.”

“I'll send him right in, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” Julie was breathless over her sudden promotion to private secretary and was exhibiting the contagious effects of her superior's high-speed way of doing things. She started out the door at once but came back momentarily, blushing still with disbelief. “I'm so happy to work for you, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

“And something else,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons pointed a finger at the retreating back of Anita Stebbins, who was carrying Mr. Frye's personal effects to him in a cardboard box, “if I ever catch that girl, or anyone else, for that matter, in my office, you'll go to the wall.”

Julie's eyes gleamed brightly with happiness. “Don't worry.”

“I won't.”

“No one will set foot in your office while I'm here.”

“And don't put through any calls to me without telling me first who's calling.”

“I understand.” Julie faltered, then came back a step or two into Mrs. Fitzgibbons's office. “You know,” she hesitated, “I can't type very well, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, or work a computer.”

“Did I ask you if you could?”

After having just demolished Mr. Frye with news of his humiliating reversal, it gratified Mrs. Fitzgibbons to be able to make somebody happy, as Julie Marcotte was right this instant. She sat down in her comfortable leather-backed chair and gazed about the old-fashioned office, with its mahogany paneling and spacious dimensions. If Mrs. Fitzgibbons had given any thought whatever to the question of her authority over the tellers—which authority she had certainly not obtained from the president upstairs, nor which her predecessor had ever been permitted to exercise—the only form it took was her spontaneous rejection of its opposite.

“You wanted to see me, Frankie?” Jack Greaney, the head teller, who poked his head in at the door, was a slender young redhead, with a toothy smile and an amiable, ingratiating spirit, who had never made an enemy in his life. To Mrs. Fitzgibbons's mind, he had always seemed like an overgrown altar boy. Jack was light-complexioned, freckled, and lanky. He usually wore a bow tie, and he smiled from morning till night.

While she chafed at the idea of being called Frankie, Mrs. Fitzgibbons let it pass. She addressed him instead in the manner she would employ with all of them in the future. “Sit down, Jack,” she enjoined him in a friendly tone. “I want to talk to you.”

In fourteen years at the bank, she had never spoken thus to anyone on the staff, not even the handymen or the boy who worked afternoons in the mailroom.

Jack Greaney was grinning broadly, if sheepishly, with pink lights in his cheeks, as he sat. “Congratulations on your promotion!”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons waved aside the young redhead's felicitations.

Like everyone else, Jack Greaney was fairly astonished by the changes that had come over the woman sitting behind Leonard Frye's desk. It was as if she had generated a new personality; loquacious, where she had been soft-spoken and reticent; bold and very self-assured, where she had previously been unassuming; and most noticeable, quite beautiful, in her hair, makeup, and attire, the reverse of the woman he was used to seeing every day. In the moments to come, the look of astonishment that invaded Jack Greaney's features, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons instructed him in the method by which the two De Maria brothers were to be fired from their jobs at closing time, was so unimproveable that a camera would have recorded little more than an open mouth imprinted on a white plane.

“He's firing them?” Jack, referring to Mr. Zabac, was clearly taken off balance by the news.

“You needn't inquire where it's coming from,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, feeling a rush of enjoyable spirits radiating upward within her, as Jack reacted appropriately to her dictum. He sat in his shirtsleeves on the edge of his chair, grimacing toothily.

“Both of them?” he said.

“You'll use Mr. Donachie. Have him on hand while they're collecting their things, and see the two of them personally out the back vestibule to the street. I want you to do that for me,” she added unnecessarily, in a flash of vanity.

“But what did they do?” Jack countered.

She ignored the question. “The others can take notice that we won't be coddling idiots here any longer.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons stressed the noun. “This is not a thrift shop, or some fly-by-night motel. We're going to be marching to a new drummer.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons allowed the young fellow to digest her meanings and to gaze a moment longer on her sober, immobile face before completing her thought. “This is a bank!” she said.