Shining Through (2 page)

I thought to myself: This guy is so full of it that it pours out in an endless, effortless stream. I knew that what he was saying meant absolutely nothing to him. But guess what? I still believed it.

He picked up the contracts and, of course, forgot me. That was the end of my excuse to stand close to him. I went back to my seat and picked up my pad.

I can see myself sitting there, like in a spotlight. Pretty. Really pretty if you bothered to look close, but if you didn’t—a secretary.

But in one way maybe I actually was different: I wasn’t just some girl worshiping her boss from afar, cherishing the very impossibleness of her dream. See, I was a true democrat; I honestly felt I deserved John.

He may have known the difference between an ode and a sonnet, but I had no doubt, even then, that I was as good as he was. If it hadn’t been for a few twists of fate, you could have seen our engagement announcement and my picture (with pearls) in the
New York Times
. And the reason you didn’t was just a few not-so-giant twists.

Twist one: John’s father’s family had made it out of Ger-6 / SUSAN ISAACS

many three or four generations before my father’s family did.

And so the Berringers had plenty of time to drop their lederhosen and lose their accents. To become real Americans.

Twist two: John Berringer did not seem to know I was alive.

Well, in a way he did. I mean, he wouldn’t have allowed a dead secretary to hang around his office. But although he was always charming—with the wide smile that showed both rows of teeth (perfect and white, but with one slightly crooked front tooth, to prove he was human, flawed) and the wink that said: This is our private joke, Linda—what he offered me was really no more than he gave the bookkeeper or the shoeshine boy: reflexive enchantment. I wasn’t really real to him in the way, say, lawyers were; I was less than a person but more than a typewriter.

And I don’t know if this was a twist or not, but John was all that Americans are supposed to be (Protestant), and I was only half. My mother’s family, the Johnstons, had been Americans—Brooklyn-Americans—for a hundred and fifty years. But my other half happened to be Jewish. Granted, John didn’t seem like the prejudiced type, but how many people are there in the world who jump for joy over a Jew? Not that he, or anyone else in the office, knew. I wasn’t an idiot. Wall Street law firms didn’t hire Jewish secretaries (to say nothing of lawyers), so since I didn’t look it, why volunteer? Besides, no one in my family had anything at all to do with being Jewish. So the couple of times people said, Um, what kind of a name is Voss? I’d look them right in the eye and tell them the truth: It’s German. Well, it was.

Oh, and finally, twist three or four (depending on how you count): There was a Mrs. John Berringer.

But still, I knew I deserved him.

If I’d gone to college, we could have had brilliant conversations.

If my great-great-grandfather Ludwig—or whatever his name was—had come to Manhattan around 1800 instead of hanging around a Berlin butcher shop flicking chickens, John would be getting me my coat instead of vice versa.

SHINING THROUGH / 7

If only John knew what I really was inside, he would love me.

I was positive. He would want to kiss me exactly the way I wanted to be kissed. He would get up, walk around to my chair, pull me up and hold me so tight against him that I would feel the itch of his worsted trousers through my skirt. Oh, Linda, he’d practically moan, and before I had time to say, Mr. Berringer! and try to push him away so he wouldn’t think I was cheap, his hands would be all over my—

Enough! I fought to keep those thoughts out of the office.

I was almost always hysterically busy, and I couldn’t allow myself to do what I really wanted to do: retreat into a world without houses or trees, without anything except me and John, a world of desire. But to tell the truth, taking dictation in two languages, typing, and filing tons of paper kept me from creating ten thousand different sizzling scenes of our coming together.

When you’ve got an inch-thick contract to type in German, and it’s seven o’clock at night and your boss wants it by seven-thirty, it doesn’t help to imagine his muscular, hairy thigh rubbing between yours. For real lust, you need leisure.

And another thing. I was usually too nervous around John to relax enough to let those thoughts rise up: nervous just being so near to him, nervous that I’d make some stupid slip of the tongue that would let him know the score. I could actually goof and call him John. Oh, God, less than a month before, I was saying, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Mr. Berringer, and I couldn’t believe it, but I almost said, I want to kiss you a Merry Christmas. Every time I thought of that I got the shivers.

He said, “I want those letters to Frankfurt to get out today. I know it’s asking a lot…”

“Oh, it’s no problem, Mr. Berringer.”

He started to dictate again. His hands, holding the contract, shone in the circle of light made by the fancy modern desk lamp his wife had picked out. The lamp was long and skinny, like Alice in Wonderland’s neck, but with a bulb instead of a head at the end.

8 / SUSAN ISAACS

I sat up straighter. If nervousness wasn’t enough to keep steamy thoughts away, his cold, modern office could; it was the talk of the law firm. But because of who his wife was, the talk was very respectful: Oh, what sublime taste! She’d picked out everything for him. Black furniture so shiny, every time you lifted a pencil it looked as though another hand, trapped inside the desk, was doing the same thing. Ultra-ultramodern design. His carpet and chairs were somewhere between brown and gray, the color of new sidewalks. The walls were such a bright white that even if you worked forty-eight hours straight, you couldn’t doze off.

Like the office she’d designed, Nan Berringer had no soft edges: no lace around her neck. I’d only seen her twice, but both times she’d worn those severely plain, fantastically expensive dresses classy fashion magazines call simple. But if that makes her sound hard, she wasn’t. Even if you’re like Nan, aristocratic and intellectual, it’s hard to be hard at twenty-one. And besides, she was terrific-looking.

John stopped dictating and cleared his throat. “I have to be away from the office this afternoon. And probably tomorrow as well.” He sounded a little stiff, but that was because he was still talking German; sometimes when he finished dictating in it, he’d forget he was still speaking it. “I hope you will have time to finish all the work I have given you.” Was his accent great! Before law school, he’d spent three years at the universities in Cologne and Heidelberg. He spoke the language as if he’d been fraternity brothers with Goethe.

My accent was nowhere near so hotsy-totsy. It was pure
berlinerisch
, courtesy of my grandmother. People always say that
berlinerisch
is to German what cockney is to English. For all I know, they could be right; I never met a cockney. “Is there anything special you’d like me to do?”

“No. Nothing special,” John answered. What did I expect him to say? Take off your clothes? “I know I’ve given you too much.”

When he smiled his eyes crinkled, so you couldn’t see their glorious dark blue, but the smile made his face glow; it made you feel you had your own sun to warm you.

SHINING THROUGH / 9

I popped back into English, where I sounded as well-bred as I had in German (that is to say, as far from being a Vanderbilt as a human being can get), but in which I felt much more comfortable. “Really, that’s okay, Mr. Berringer. I’ll try to get everything done by the end of the week.”

Fat chance. We’d stopped being swamped six months earlier.

Now we were drowning. The great thing about being one of the top Wall Street firms is you have the top clients: the biggest corporations and banks in the world. The bad thing is that before they pay you, you have to do work for them. Since John’s work was representing their interests in Europe, they all wanted ninety-seven times more work done than had ever been done before in the course of legal history.

Half of them said, Get us (and our holdings) out of Germany.

Now. The other half said, Hey, look at what those Nazis are spending! It costs a fortune to conquer Europe. Get us a piece of it. Now.

“It would be great if you could catch up,” he said in English.

“Oh, I forgot. Mr. Leland wants to borrow you this afternoon.

He has a letter to go to Germany. Very simple. You can translate it yourself and send it off. Could you fit that in—without hating me forever?”

“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”

“And still be caught up by Friday?”

“Sure.”

“Wonderful!” He looked up at me. “Miss Voss…”

He stopped for a second, maybe to think what else he wanted.

I didn’t care. I’d wait. While his mind was someplace else, I could study him. His mouth was open, just a little. What a mouth! Beautiful, not one of those thin, mean men’s mouths that look like an appendix scar. Full, but not too full. He’d be on top of me, roughing up my face with his, but then he’d bring his mouth over mine and—

“Miss Voss.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Thanks. You can go back to your desk now.”

10 / SUSAN ISAACS

My dream world was like all those European countries in the papers: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Albania. One minute beautiful.

The next, destroyed.

Listen, the Voice of Reason would probably butt in here, what you’re talking about isn’t love. It’s a crush: a common enough occurrence,
n’est-ce pas?
(The Voice of Reason sounds a lot like the executive secretaries, Vassar girls who work for the senior partners.) A working girl from Ridgewood, Queens…bright enough for what she is, but a suitable match for John Berringer, Esq.,
magna cum laude
, Columbia College, editor in chief of the
Columbia Law Review?
How
marrrvelously
droll. (You get stuck in a booth in the ladies’ room a few times when the Vassar girls come in to powder their noses and you get to be an expert on how Voices of Reason talk.)
Delightfully
piquant. And a trifle touching too, this secretary’s dreams of “love” with a married man.

Well, it may have been droll, but as I said to myself, over and over: Hey, this is love! Although not at first sight. I’d seen him for nearly ten years in the firm’s international department, from the time he was out of law school.

We’d talked about John even then. He was ridiculously handsome, I told the girls, like a young movie star playing the Big Man on Campus role in one of those
Cubby Cooper Goes to
College
—type movies. He was meant to be fifteen feet tall and black-and-white; he was too good to be real. I remember he’d worn white shirts so starched they could carry on a life of their own. He’d shared a secretary with three of the other young lawyers. When he had to write a letter in German, he dictated it to himself.

Way back then, I was twenty-one years old and a secretary to one of the middle-level partners, P. Louis Tracy. You’d think there was something a little wrong with a guy who answers his phone, “Good ahfternoon. P. Louis Tracy.” There was: not his head, though; his heart. Nine years later, on the Fourth of July, 1939, P. Louis Tracy joined his wife at SHINING THROUGH / 11

the bar of their country club after playing eighteen holes and dropped dead over his third Rob Roy.

Even before P. Louis Tracy played his last hole, John had been made a partner—the only other member of the firm really fluent in German. Back then, the fact that he was about thirty times smarter than P. Lou hadn’t been a secret around Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley. But since, despite his brains, he was also about thirty years younger, he hadn’t been considered one of the important international partners. But suddenly he was; less than a week after July 4, John inherited P. Lou’s office, cases, percentage of the profits—and me.

At first I looked at John and thought: Another pretty face. In fact, the prettiest. I can live with that. It definitely beats working for a guy with four chins. Okay, he dictates like a snail, but at least he gets it right—doesn’t make me retype fifty thousand times. John Berringer was going to be a good boss. But fall for him? Not me. Even though he was supposed to have a brilliant legal mind, all I could see was the gleam of the surface: eyes, hair, teeth. John shone—for everybody: Hello. You’re wonderful.

I’m gorgeous. Life is grand.

But late one January afternoon, when the sky outside looked like a thick black velvet ribbon, I glanced across his desk and realized he was
beautiful
. Deep-down beautiful—and more.

Let’s face it. He was hot. Beneath his gloss, under his charm, he had it.
It
. John Berringer was one of those men on fire. It took a while for me to feel that heat beneath the cool impersonal brightness. But that afternoon, just watching his thumb flick the pages of a memorandum of law (dumb, but true), I suddenly
knew
.

Unfortunately, from the way he flew out of the office the second he finished work, it was obvious Mrs. John Berringer knew too. Knew, and was waiting, because she loved everything he had to offer.

12 / SUSAN ISAACS

On that last normal day, Hitler sent endless cables to his generals, Mussolini had several recorded temper tantrums, Neville Chamberlain took a long, silent walk, and the secretaries of Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley ate lunch. After all, this was America.

Like just about every other day, the partners strolled out to their clubs around twelve-thirty. At twelve-forty, making sure the elevators had time to empty out so the partners couldn’t see their stampede, the young lawyers—the associates—made a mad dash for their restaurants. Five minutes later, the Vassar girls tippytoed off to their tearoom, where they met other Vassar girls from other law firms, probably to talk about what they were always talking about, like what Schubert had been played at last night’s symphony concert and who the
really
top-drawer Prin-ceton men were.

Exactly two seconds after they left, the regular secretaries raced to the conference room—ten or twelve of us, with lunch bags, at that giant rectangular table in that giant wood-paneled room.