Ride a Cockhorse (22 page)

“I've never thought much about anything like that,” he confessed genuinely.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons came back in the same hushed accents as before. “Aren't you ambitious?”

“Oh, I'm very ambitious.”

“And don't you suppose I knew that? Of course, you are. Everyone wants to get ahead, to afford the good things in life, travel, expensive clothing, racy cars. You're no different.”

“Do you,” he asked, curiously, “flatter people?”

“I don't have to,” she remarked. “I run my firm.”

He sat staring at her. His hair glowed like a crown of gold.

“You're just starting out. You have to put yourself under somebody's wing.”

“Do you know,” the Sugrue youth answered very thoughtfully, after pondering the woman's advice, “I think that being nice to Mr. Pivack last year helped me to become the drum major.”

“Well, there you are. My point, exactly.”

Terry colored slightly. “I sort of knew I was doing it, too.”

“You should never be ashamed of success, or,” she added, “of how you went about getting it. We like that,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons added, speaking for executives in general. “We prefer employees who aren't ashamed to make themselves attractive and useful to us and who know exactly what they're doing when they butter up.”

Terry actually gushed a bit when he laughed over her last comment. “I can tell you right now who's going to be drum major next year! The Ireland Parish band is going to be led by a girl for the first time in its history!”

“Oh?”

“This redhead? Rita Crowson? She's a junior, and you should see her laying it on!” Terry clapped a hand to his head. “Every time Mr. Pivack turns around, Rita is right there, showing him everything she's got. And she's got everything. Rita,” he said, waving his hand, “has no shame at all. She's got a lock on the job.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons appeared interested. “Is she fucking him?”

Terry's face fell. “
Mr. Pivack?
” he cried.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons had just spotted a cart road a few yards back and instructed Matthew to turn about and drive back.

“Where are we going, Frankie?” Terry asked.

“I used to ice-skate in here as a girl,” she explained.

Matthew steered the long black automobile slowly in through a natural gateway formed by the burnished red leaves of overhanging sumacs, and up a bumpy incline. From the crest of the hill, not a hundred feet in from Jarvis Avenue, there stretched before them patches of cattails and the gleaming black waters of a stagnant marsh. In politeness to her driver, Mrs. Fitzgibbons suggested that Matthew get out and walk about for a while in the dusk.

In less than a minute, she was clutching the drum major's head to her abdomen and had commenced in a quiet voice to soothe him and to allay any anxiety he might feel over the matter at hand. In all her life, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had been sexually serviced in only the most traditional manner, a want of experience that she attributed to having had, in Larry, something of a wet blanket for a husband, as well as to her own uninterrupted fidelity. Mrs. Fitzgibbons had planted her right foot atop the front seat, and was encouraging Terry to acquaint himself with the long slice of white thigh she had thus revealed to view above the top of her stockings. “We're not going to be here all day, cupcake. This is a good time and place for you to begin. You don't make fifty thousand dollars a year by starting at the top.”

The drum major responded in a muffled, worried tone. He was showing himself surprisingly resistant to her urgings, and even shook his head once or twice, although continuing all the while to plant soft kisses on the exposed flesh of her thigh. “I just don't know,” he muttered, and shook his head.

At Essex and Maple, the bank director had by now concluded his talk with the publisher of the
Telegram
and hung up the phone; but within a minute, he was on it again, ringing up Mr. Curtin Schreffler at the Citizens Bank, a man he didn't even like very much. In the conversation that followed, the two bankers spoke with greater candor than either of them had used in addressing Mrs. Lindberg. As before, William Daviau alluded to the “hemorrhaging of funds,” but on this occasion talked also about “shrinking capital,” “balance sheets,” “bottom lines,” “capital standards,” “net worth,” and the like. On the other end of the line, Mr. Schreffler confessed to a point of special vulnerability at his bank; it concerned a multimillion dollar loan to a development company that had been shared by four different banks, including his own and Zabac's. The loan was in serious default. “If Zabac calls it in —” Mr. Schreffler suggested ominously.

“If Mrs. Fitzgibbons calls it in!” Mr. Daviau corrected him angrily.

“That's what I mean,” the other admitted. “We have to think about that in the background. If this outflow continues, even for a few days, she's going to be dictating terms!”

“Goddamned fascist!” said Mr. Daviau. His cheeks shook with anger.

“Although I doubt she knows what she's doing.”

“Are you a moron?” In his frustration, Mr. Daviau lashed out at Curtin Schreffler on the phone. “Are you simple? Do you suppose that Louis Zabac doesn't know that he's loosed this fast-talking populist hotshot in the midst of a nationwide financial crisis? Is that what you're pretending to dismiss?” The volume of the director's voice in the big, dusk-lit room reverberated round the pale figures of his seated associates with godlike resonance. “They don't know what they're doing?” he cried.

“It seems too sinister.”

“You poor little lamb. She's a demagogue!” he said. “The woman's a rabble-rouser. She works on people's fears. She plays to the balcony. Who do you suppose is behind her? Where did she come from? Who's behind her, if it isn't himself? Donald Duck? Use your brain. He turned her loose!”

“I can't believe that.” Curtin Schreffler had not been raised to suspect villainy in the hearts of his neighbors; of the two, he remained the more placid. “I believe it's a fluke. It's just a two-day panic. The market has made people jumpy.”

“Then why,” Mr. Daviau demanded to know, “aren't their depositors coming to us?”

“They are,” the other replied feebly.

“How many?”

“Several,” said Mr. Schreffler.

“Four?” Mr. Daviau was clearly in an ugly mood. As the conversation flagged, his expression darkened further. His eyes protruded unnaturally in the failing light. “Three?”

“Well, I'm not at liberty to divulge statistics, but —”

“
Statistics?
You call that a statistic?”

“It will be better tomorrow. Mrs. Fitzgibbons has had her hour in the sun.”

“She wants blood,” said the South Valley director, invoking the sort of sanguinary vocabulary relished by Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself.

“Mr. Daviau,” the other man protested.

“Now, I see it. It wasn't till I spoke to you that I realized that.” Mr. Daviau's voice was oily with sarcasm. “You've made it clear to me. Everybody's going to the sacrificial altar. That, finally, is what she's all about. She's out for blood.” He addressed the persons sitting nervously about him: “Everything is going to be better tomorrow. Curtin Schreffler says so. She has his collar size, the name of his florist, and a jug of formaldehyde under her desk, but everything is going to be all right tomorrow.”

Mr. Daviau returned the receiver to its cradle without a word of farewell to the president of Citizens Bank. A spectral figure nearby spoke up. It was a woman's voice. “Somebody should call Zabac,” she said. “It can't hurt.”

By then, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had already departed the marsh with Matthew behind the wheel once more. They were tooling north along a dark stretch of Jarvis Avenue. Ever since Matthew had gotten back into the car, he had been more than scrupulous not to glance into the back seat, as he had good reason to suspect what was going on. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was sitting up just as before, but the young drum major could not be seen. She was holding his head between her legs.

At one point, it had been necessary for Mrs. Fitzgibbons to show the youth a flash of temper. He had not witnessed her anger before. “Listen!” she broke out. The resistance of a blushing, high school pretty boy who was on the make with an important banker exhausted her patience. “I'm not asking for the world!” That was when she seized and clutched his head to her loins. “Stop grousing and crybabying. Get busy! I want my bubble!” she shouted. “I want it now.”

She could not tell for sure, but it seemed once or twice that the unwilling youth was sobbing softly while ministering to her needs. Even after Matthew had started up the car, she continued to express bewilderment over his distaste for the task.

“It's not a horror show,” she complained, as she began to undulate and rock her hips. She stared with a glazed, hypnotic expression out the windshield at the yellow stripe unfurling on the asphalt ahead. She had Terence's head clamped comfortably below her. Matthew sat like a robot at the wheel. He was driving very slowly. “Nobody's going to snap your picture. This is what grown-ups do for one another. Listen to him. He's in pure clover, and he's sniffling like a baby.”

Later, after Matthew had turned back down the mountain road in the dark, and Mrs. Fitzgibbons had begun undergoing rhythmic spasms that sent shudders up and down her body, she naturally gave off talking. But for the moment, she even included Matthew in her discourse.

“This is what came of their famous sexual revolution. This is what these youngsters learned. This is what all the shouting was about.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons had changed position. She had her knees up, her ankles lying crisscrossed on the small of Terence Sugrue's back. “They know as much about sex as the mother of Jesus.”

“You're right about that,” said Matthew.

“Of course, I am.” She kneaded and caressed the drum major's golden head in rhythm with the thrust and retraction of her hips. “This little majorette is the envy of six states. Do you know what I could do for a boy like this?”

“It staggers the mind.”

“Anything I wanted. I could send him to college if I wanted. I could send him to work for Nate Solomon at the Shawmut Bank in Boston. I could hire him as my personal assistant and pay him a tidy fortune! I could do that at a stroke of the pen.”

“He doesn't understand that.”

“I could talk myself blue in the face. With a vibrator, you throw a switch and it comes on. You don't have to climb a mountain. The beauty of using a human being is in their gratitude and eagerness. You'd think he was on the rack. I'm giving him pure honey. You'd think it was cyanide. It's enough to paralyze a crow.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons laughed gaily as she rearranged his head beneath her hands. “I pick him up in my car. I take him in the back seat with me. We go out to the woods. I'm in the midst of a busy time, signing off on sixty different deals, taking a hundred phone calls, keeping a hundred employees honest, reaming them, docking their time, firing them, running up and down stairs — and he — who has no future, not a prayer — hasn't sense enough to suck a lollipop. This is what I'm saddled with.
Come on!
” she cried. “Do me. Yes. That's more like it. That's better. That's good! Come on! Come on!”

From the mountainside, the city of Ireland Parish lay stretched out below, with spangles of countless lights scattered about the dark like something luminous that had been shattered at a blow.

Struck dumb by the unexpected fury of the onslaught taking place behind him, Matthew stared in blank embarrassment and trepidation at the road ahead, as it curved downward between two walls of black trees.

“It takes work,” she was saying. “You've got to give. I'm coming, come on! This is your night!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons reiterated this last phrase then, over and over, for a full minute — “This is your night!” — until it attained a hypnotic cadence that transformed the interior of the Buick into something almost strange to man.

Unknown to all, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had instituted a policy conceived to protect her new powers from the usual jealousies and intrigues that attend a new regime. Her intention was to strike fear in the hearts of all by firing people on a purely capricious basis. The instrument of chance that she seized upon was the old-fashioned metal index wheel on her desk, a cylinder of small manila cards, containing the name, job description, and nearest telephone extension number of every soul in her employ.

On Wednesday morning, after toying with the wheel on her desk for two or three minutes, while on the telephone to one of the bank's accountants, Mrs. Fitzgibbons set the wheel spinning in earnest. Her fingernail came to rest on the card of a branch office employee whom she had never heard of. That was unfortunate, and explained why Mrs. Fitzgibbons fired two people that day in the span of twenty minutes; for the need to act in a vigorous way also required confronting the poor soul in person. In less than a minute, Julie had Betty Hurley, the branch manager on the line, and Mrs. Fitzgibbons was instructing her what to do.

“You have an employee named Simmons?”

“Carol Ann?” said Mrs. Hurley. “Yes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. Carol Ann is at the South Street branch today.” Mrs. Hurley's breathless politeness was all but palpable on the line. “Is something wrong? She's filling in for Doug MacDonald for the rest of the week.”

“She won't be here the rest of the week,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “You'll discharge her this afternoon at five o'clock. You'll say nothing to anyone about it. No one is to know until she's gone.”

“I see.” The woman's voice was a bare whisper. Clearly, she could not fathom the cause of the action, but wise enough to know by Mrs. Fitzgibbons's tone of voice and her much-rumored volatility not to press for an explanation. Mrs. Hurley acquiesced without protest. “I'll let her go at five sharp.”