Ride a Cockhorse (35 page)

“Put him in my Honda,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “and drive him home to his wife. Dolores will drive the Buick.”

Eddie called back jubilantly, “He's no big banker now!”

As Mr. Hooton was thrust into the car, his naked buttocks gleamed momentarily, a sight that took Mrs. Fitzgibbons's fancy. “That man was going to be president.”

Julie opened the Buick door for her. Mrs. Fitzgibbons got in, and Dolores went round to take the wheel. Julie joined Mrs. Brouillette in the front seat. Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued to savor the ironies of it all, as Dolores pulled the sedan round into the narrow cart road and switched on the headlights. “He was going to get himself the biggest office,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons cracked, “that mankind has ever seen, with a desk in it the size of an airfield, and sit there, with a little four-inch erection on him, and run my organization.”

“The shoe's on the other foot now,” Julie piped.

“He hasn't a shoe on either foot,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, and Dolores laughed at that one.

“Mrs. Fitzgibbons is a woman who gets things done.” Dolores was clearly impressed with the new head of the Parish Bank, of her pragmatism and shock tactics. She spoke respectfully. “Some people need a good scare.”

During the drive back to the city, with the Honda close behind, and the snow coming down again in big, wet flakes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons grew jubilantly paranoid. She referred to Mr. Zabac as “that little Polish wonderwork with the manicured nails, who hides under his desk when I raise my voice.”

She was sitting in the middle of the back seat, with the Honda's headlights illuminating her silhouette. She boasted that no one save herself possessed the cold-blooded virtues that were necessary to carry the hour.

From the top of the Apremont Highway, the lights of the city below vanished and reappeared many times through breaks in the snow squalls. Mrs. Fitzgibbons's thinking was so jumbled by this time, she scarcely knew where she was.

“Name me one person,” she threw out in harsh accents, “who believed in me on the afternoon I went up to Zabac's office and seized power. Nobody! Not one living soul. Who but I would have known to bring in the newspapers? Who would have stuck at my side if somebody had rushed into my office that day and caved in my skull?”

Julie Marcotte looked round worriedly at Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who was gazing fixedly with bright, sparkling eyes at the road ahead.

“Who would have defended me? I didn't have one believer on the face of the earth. Leonard Frye?” She ridiculed the notion. “Felix Hohenberger? Jack Greaney? Why, if any one of them had a revolver in his desk, and the guts to use it, he'd have put a bullet in my head!”

Anxious to mitigate the frightening thrust of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's recital, Julie offered a plausible objection. “I don't think Jack Greaney would do you any harm.”

“Those are my altar boys!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons exulted. “I could mash them to a pulp.”

As Mrs. Fitzgibbons gloated over her triumphs and the severity of her treatment of enemies and critics, Dolores drove carefully through the city streets. The wipers were going. At each red light, Dolores slowed the Buick but did not stop, an illicit touch that added something sinister to the slow procession of the two cars. There was a great deal of shouting from inside the Honda, however, when they halted in front of Mr. Hooton's house on Princeton Street, and a second later Mr. Hooton was expelled into the open air.

Everyone reacted with revelry to the sight of Mr. Hooton waddling his way expeditiously across his frosty front lawn. The sight of his black footprints in the snow amused Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “You ought to wear shoes when you go out whoring,” she called after him.

The two cars remained in place for several long minutes after the banker had entered his house and closed the door behind him, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons wished to show her disdain for the public at large. The snow fell in thick handfuls over the walks and hedges along the street. Before signaling Dolores to drive on, Mrs. Fitzgibbons surveyed the quiet scene before her with the air of a military commander visiting a forward post. She told Julie to fetch Howard Brouillette from the other car. “I want to talk to him.”

To the surprise of all, Mrs. Fitzgibbons launched an attack upon Howard. Dolores drove slowly, as the Chief castigated her husband. Mrs. Fitzgibbons's agitation had been mounting worrisomely all day long, but it was only now, when she sat back rigidly in her seat, with cold blue flames in her eyes, and directed her venom with manic force at those closest to her, that her friends began to suspect the worst.

“No one thinks of me first,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons scolded Howard. “I pay you thousands and thousands of dollars above what you deserve, and then I
increase
that amount by thousands more, only to discover what?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's stomach felt very jiggy, as she leveled her invective at Mr. Brouillette in a manner that discouraged rebuttal. “That a secret communication took place today between another bank and my own—a discussion that was undertaken in secret—and what do you know about it? Nothing. There I am,” she ranted on, “sitting at my desk, tending to business, devoting myself to the well-being of all and sundry, and secret plans are being drawn up that will culminate in my lying in hell with my back broken.”

The sheer suddenness of her vituperative assault, especially in the wake of her attack upon Mr. Hooton, fostered a stunned silence in the car.

“I'm a trusting soul. I trust people. That's how I'm composed. I trusted my parents. I trusted my husband. I trust everyone. When I got married,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “I trusted the powers of nature to give me a partner that would provide, if nothing else, warm, intimate company on a winter's night. Someone to buck me up when the going got rough. All right, so I was disappointed. Not a lot, but enough to begin to question trust. I was going to be a mother, anyhow, and trusted the Creator to give me a decent, no-frills copy of what He's been doing with others for sixty-three million years. If what I got wasn't a factory reject, you tell me. Babies don't have to be Japanese to work.”

As Mrs. Fitzgibbons spoke, she had the sensation of her mind expanding and contracting, while Dolores, Julie, and Howard stole surreptitious looks at her.

“So, I'm surrounded by morons. There isn't one of you I couldn't lambaste to within an inch of your life.”

“I did learn something important,” Howard spoke up, to apprise Mrs. Fitzgibbons of an extraordinary piece of intelligence he had come upon that day. “The Citizens Bank is stuck with a note—”

In that instant, the rear of the Buick slewed about on the snowy pavement and narrowly missed a parked car. Mrs. Fitzgibbons sat up excitedly. Her mood altered at once. “Go faster,” she encouraged Dolores.

For the next ten minutes, Dolores raced the Buick through the downtown streets of Ireland Parish, with the Honda speeding along behind it. Emily, it turned out, was at the wheel of the rear car. Mrs. Fitzgibbons liked to drive fast and was laughing merrily and shouting as she exhorted the prostitute to ever riskier chances. “Do a U-turn! ... Go up the hill! ... Run the light! Up the hill!” At the corner of Maple and Sergeant streets, a woman with an umbrella stepped back quickly at the sight of the two cars hurtling into the intersection. “The puddle! The puddle!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons cried, and Dolores sent the big Buick in along the shoulder, spraying the woman from head to foot with gallons of muddy snow water.

The two cars ended up minutes later halted side by side at Maple and Main, stopped next to the low concrete barriers that prohibited automobile traffic from entering the brick-paved shopping district. Mrs. Fitzgibbons led the way in on foot, flinging invective as she went. Of her companions, only Eddie, clutching a beer can, was inebriated enough not to have anticipated something tragic. Near the ancient granite fountain in front of the city hall, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, while darting forward with some amusing word on her lips, lost her footing, and pitched head foremost onto the pavement. Falling, she sprained her arm. In a rage, she seized up something solid, a brick or a length of pipe, and rushed across the snowy outdoor mall with the object in her fist, and with a single blow, shattered the entire plate glass show window of the Walgreens pharmacy. The window exploded.

An hour after midnight, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was transferred by ambulance from the emergency room of the local hospital on Beech Street to the state installation some distance to the north in Smith's Ferry.

It was quite stormy by now, with a steady, snowy rain splashing down and the wind rocking the ambulance. The elms in the courtyard of the old Smith's Ferry institution groaned and swayed, as the driver turned in at the gate. One of the two emergency service workers opened a big umbrella, and with the two of them accompanying her, Mrs. Fitzgibbons climbed the front steps under her own power. Her right arm, throbbing painfully to the beat of her pulse, was supported under her coat by a sling. The caged overhead lights in the entranceway revealed Mrs. Fitzgibbons's exhausted state.

Forms from the local hospital detailing her condition were handed over at the registration desk, and within minutes Mrs. Fitzgibbons was being wheeled in a chair along the main corridor to the elevators. In the ward upstairs, she was helped into a hospital smock. The room had immensely tall windows on either side, and the ceiling was streaked with a dull yellowish light from the sodium-vapor lamps in the yard below. The snowy rain thrashed against the windows. The occupants of the room were all asleep, as, in a matter of minutes, was she.

If there was a single hour in the course of that entire autumn when Mrs. Fitzgibbons appeared to revert to the genial, self-effacing woman whom people had always known her to be—that is, the polite, attractive lady at the home-mortgage desk—it would have been during the discussion she had that Saturday morning with the psychiatrist on duty. She was perfectly lucid. She sat where she was told, and smiled, and thanked the nurse's aide who gave her a heavy knitted cardigan to put on over her smock. She directed herself concentratedly on the doctor. Inwardly, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was frightened out of her wits.

Sometimes the cold wave of dread that swept over her actually caused her tongue to loll. She sat beside his desk, with her mouth open, trying to react with conscious sanity to the appalling thrust of his interrogation. The physician's questions ranged from general inquiries concerning the health of members of her family to specific inquiries on the state and regularity of her menses. Had she ever been violent? Was there any history of thyroid problems? Was she under stress at work?—had she ever been diagnosed as compulsive?—had she ever been abused?—how well did she sleep?—was there recent weight loss? The questions went on interminably. Was she allergic to any medications? Was she familiar with lithium? Was she depressed following her daughter's birth? Had she ever miscarried? Was her marriage a happy one?

“How old are you?” asked the psychiatrist, and he leafed back through the admission forms to locate her date of birth. He was a neat, clean-shaven individual, with a glassy head and long, pale hands.

“I'll be forty-six in December,” she said. Every answer that Mrs. Fitzgibbons supplied seemed to her a further confirmation of something dreadful in the offing.

“An episode such as you suffered last night, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, might be even more worrisome in someone younger than yourself, because it often proves a prelude to serious disturbances of a similar kind. Which is not to say that a total loss of control like that isn't a very grave concern.”

With her hands in her lap, Mrs. Fitzgibbons listened breathlessly as the doctor spoke.

“Frankly,” he said, “I'm surprised by your placidity this morning, and by the obvious tightness of your thinking. Symptoms of that sort don't usually get remitted overnight. Maybe you're a medical phenomenon.” A narrow smile split his face.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons breathed deeply now and again, and from time to time gave a long shudder. The name on the man's desk was Dr. Elton Cauley. His next remark also unsettled her.

“We've notified Barbara, your daughter,” he said, “about what happened, and where you are, and expect her to come in early this afternoon.”

Barbara's grim, bespectacled features appeared on the screen of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's mind. She put her fingers to her forehead.

“Have you been lonely lately?” Dr. Cauley went on exploratatively.

“No,” she said. “I have not.”

“You have been quite active, then.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you work long hours?”

“I do,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “yes.”

“What, exactly, do you do at the bank?” he asked, glancing at a form.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked at the paper in his hand. “I run it,” she said.

The odd crack of a smile that had parted Dr. Cauley's lips these past minutes vanished. “Really?”

To Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself, her response seemed no more significant nor less ordinary than any of her previous replies. “I'm chief executive officer,” she said. “I took over recently.”

Dr. Cauley was clearly impressed with that. “Jesus, that's wonderful,” he said.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons smiled modestly and reached behind her cardigan sweater to rub her arm, which was still supported in its sling. Her air of modesty and self-effacement would have been an asset to a figure in holy orders.

The doctor laughed with artifice. “I should ask you about my adjustable-rate mortgage,” he cracked. “I'm afraid I didn't read the small print.”

“Who holds your mortgage?” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, feeling a tiny stream of energy flowing into her nervous system.

“Citizens Bank.”

“Oh,” she said, and bit her lip. “They're undercapitalized.” She delivered this intelligence in the same earnest, almost diffident manner that had characterized her work for many years. This manner came naturally to Mrs. Fitzgibbons, and engendered trust. The doctor was looking at her with intent.