Shining Through (3 page)

It was like eating inside a mahogany tree. Suddenly it was as if somebody yelled,
On your mark…Get set
…But instead of a gunshot, one enormous crinkle—the noise of ten or twelve sandwiches being ripped out of waxed paper.

“Why I even bother to mention this, girls, is beyond me,”

Gladys Slade began, her voice slightly muffled by Spam on white,

“but Mrs. Avenel called
four
times this morning!” Gladys put on her haughty, high-class voice: “‘Gladys, my deah,
do
hate to disturb you, but
would
you get my husband on the line for one
tiny
second.’” Gladys shook her head. “She probably wanted his permission to flush.” Her boss’s wife called at least ten times a day. We nodded in sympathy because our mouths were full, and huddled in our sweaters.

It was always cold in the room. We had to keep the windows open so the lawyers wouldn’t sniff out secretary-lunch smells and know we were eating in there.

Gladys was Queen of Lunch. Better, actually. Gladys Slade—with beginning-to-gray brown hair cut into what was meant to be a neat Dutchboy but frizzed into crazed SHINING THROUGH / 13

curlicues when the humidity was more than five percent, with hazel eyes a little too small and a little too close together—looked absolutely ordinary. Well, except for her nostrils: They were so immense she could have hidden two salamis up her nose. But she was a born leader.

Her being forty didn’t hurt, either. Gladys had been at the law firm longer than any other secretary, twenty-two years, and no one knew more about what was going on at Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley than she did. Someone—Shakespeare, George Washington—once said, Knowledge is power. She’d seen it all: Mr. Blair becoming under secretary of the Treasury, Mr.

VanderGraff going bald, Mr. Wadley dying of a stroke while waiting for the elevator. She hadn’t actually seen him die—no one had—but she was one of the first afterward, while he was still purple. Gladys knew everything. And not just the big stuff.

She knew who was doing what to whom, and probably how, when and where, but Gladys being Gladys, she never let on about the really sizzling stuff. She probably tuned it out; all Gladys thought about were clothes and hairdos and innuendos, not bodies. For her, life did not actually exist below the neck or under the vest.

But for good old-style gossip, she was better than anyone. My dears, she would begin, like we were whispering in a corner at a society cocktail party, did I tell you who the widow Carpenter brought with her to the reading of the late Mister’s will? Her

‘financial adviser’! With a pompadour! I thought Mr. Avenel would have a stroke, because she insisted…

Since I was Gladys’s closest friend, she turned to me first.

“What about Mr. B, Linda?” It was just a regular lunch question.

No one in the office, including Gladys, had a clue about what I felt for John. “Anything new?”

“Who has time for anything new?” I answered. “We’re going crazy trying to keep up with Europe.”

“What’s with Europe?” Wilma Gerhardt called from down the table. Her voice was so horribly nasal that every time she opened her mouth it was like listening to a bad 14 / SUSAN ISAACS

vaudevillian attempting a Brooklyn accent. God knows no one else from that borough ever made you cringe like that at the wrongness of the sound, worse than the
eeeeek
of chalk on a blackboard. But she was saved from total awfulness by a single grace: her looks. Wilma was a knockout. “You going to Gay Paree or something, Linda?” She patted her dazzling dark hair; she was the only girl in the office who wore an upsweep every single day. Luckily for her, she had plenty of time for hairdos.

Her typewriter was untouched by human hands.

“What’s with Europe?” I repeated. I had to lean past Helen Rogers—who as usual was dribbling onto the shelf made by her bust (this time the shelf was dotted with little yellow dabs of egg salad)—and past Anita Beane, who was nineteen, dewy and engaged. “Wilma, you ever read a newspaper?”

Gladys interrupted: “Linda, you’re not going to give us your Growing Nazi Shadow speech, are you?”

“I’m just asking Wilma a simple question.”

Wilma gave me a simple answer. “Why should I read a newspaper? The ink gets all over your hands!” For a second, Wilma was so thrilled by her brilliant, witty comeback that she forgot she was with the girls and actually broke into an acutely adorable giggle. It was a technique, like her eyelash-batting, she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted on women. She saved her talents for men, and they were talents not sneezed at; they’d helped get her a job eight or nine years earlier, in the pit of the Depression, while lots of inky-fingered readers of the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune
were stretching their hands high above their heads and taking swan dives off skyscrapers.

“Haven’t you ever heard of Adolf Hitler?” I demanded.

“So is Mr. Berringer dictating letters to him?” Under the Brooklyn accent, her voice had a nasty edge. She could be tolerant of homely girls like Rose Guthrie in Trusts and Estates, who looked like Winston Churchill (or, more accurately, Winston Churchill’s bulldog), but anyone who had a chance of attracting a man’s attention—like me—was a threat.

SHINING THROUGH / 15

I’d always been intrigued by Wilma. Her entire life was dedicated to men and to getting them. She made no pretense that she cared about who the mayor was, or what Gladys had thought of
Gone With the Wind
. She never looked beyond her own cleavage. Did she choose to be that way? Or did it come naturally? Was her selfishness just self-protection, a byproduct of hard times?

Sometimes I wished I could be like her, absolutely, contentedly selfish, not having to smile, not being forced to listen to Helen Rogers go into her umpteenth recounting of her Uncle Gus’s brother-in-law’s funeral, where they’d botched up the makeup on the late lamented, and it formed globules under the heat of the lights, so it looked as if the guy in the satin-lined box was sweating. Helen would recount: “His wife
screamed
, ‘Mickey!

Mickey! You’re hot!’ And they had to grab her because she fished out her hankie and was going to—”

Wilma had turned to Helen one day and snapped, mean and hard, “Hey, shut up with that vomity funeral crap, would ya?”

And Helen had. What would it feel like, being free to say something like that?

Gladys’s theory was that Wilma could say anything she wanted to; all she had to do was show up at the office. Her job, her life, would always be safe. Why? Because she had someone to protect her. See, she and her boss were friendly.

I agreed. Very friendly. Only for a very special kind of friend would an influential partner in a major law firm sneak in early in the morning to do his own typing. (Helen had once come in early and caught him typing a letter on the firm letterhead with two fingers,
very
slowly.) You got to figure, I’d told Gladys, that Mr. Post was catching the 5:37 A.M. from Garden City just to catch up on his correspondence. He was no spring chicken, either. Another few months of the ebony-haired Wilma by night and the 5:37 by day, and we’d be chipping in for a wreath and writing letters: Dear Mrs. Post, I’m only a secretary at Blair, VanderGraff, but I was so sorry to hear about Mr. Post’s sudden demise. His late hours were a measure of his devotion…

16 / SUSAN ISAACS

“What does Mr. Berringer write?” Wilma kept going. “‘Dear Adolf: How are you? I am fine.’”

She would have babbled on, but Gladys turned to her: “Can it, Wilma.”

That’s all Gladys said, but it worked. Even Wilma showed deference to Gladys. She mumbled, “You can it,” but it wasn’t a challenge; her words had no heart. She just took a vicious bite of what actually looked like a steak sandwich (old Mr. Post kept her in protein) and chewed ostentatiously, as if to say, I got something to bite into, not like you girls with your crappy cream cheese.

Gladys turned back to me. “Anything new?” she asked once more. “I am
desperate
for gossip, Linda.”

“Well, nothing scintillating,” I began. “Mrs. Berringer called late yesterday. Didn’t even want to speak to him. Just left a message that she was having cocktails with her museum committee and wouldn’t be home for supper.”

“Dinner, Linda,” Gladys corrected. “Where’s your class?

Ditchdiggers eat supper. Attorneys dine.”

“Okay, she wouldn’t be home to dine.”

Very daintily, Helen Rogers picked her egg salad droppings off her bosom as she asked, “You think the lovebirds had a fight?

Her just leaving messages, I mean.”

“All married couples fight,” Gladys pronounced.

I noticed Anita Beane flashing a fast look down the table to Fay Landon. They were the only engaged girls, and the look said, Would you listen to these old maids pretending to be marriage experts? But naturally, being nineteen and twenty-one and not complete fools, they didn’t challenge Gladys. What did they have to gain? By June, they’d be married, and free from Blair, VanderGraff forever.

“Mrs. Berringer went to Smith College. Right, Linda?” Gladys asked me. I nodded and took a bite of my meat loaf sandwich, which would more accurately be described as a bread-crumb loaf sandwich, the price of meat being what it was. “Smith College sounds so average,” Gladys explained to the group, “but it’s
the
poshest. Every year, they have one or two graduates who become duchesses or…earls’ wives

SHINING THROUGH / 17

or…Anyway, it’s
much
better than Vassar. Now describe Mrs.

Berringer, Linda.” Gladys was bossy, but she was fun. Well, not a bundle of laughs herself, but at least she was able to find fun for us—in the lives of lawyers. “Every single minuscule detail,”

she added. “Give us the works.”

Everyone leaned forward. There were a lot of reasons why everyone in the room was interested—no, fascinated—with Mrs.

John Berringer.

All that attention on me—and on that tender topic—made me a little nervous. I had to put my sandwich down; I was squeezing it so hard, pretty soon I’d have a fistful of mush. Questions would arise: What’s with Linda? She was talking about Mr.

Berringer and she squished her sandwich…. Oh!

“You girls know what I know,” I said, fast. “And what I know is that Mrs. B must really be something. Mr. Berringer would do
anything
to make her happy.” Everyone nodded. They loved it. “He spent
six hundred dollars
on some oil painting she fell in love with at an art gallery. He gave me a certified check, sent me over to this art gallery, to some skinny guy with one of those nipped-in-waist suits, and the guy there says, ‘Oh, for Mrs. Berringer. So young, but such a discerning eye.’”

When I went to the gallery that day, all I could think was John was buying her a birthday present that cost half what I earned every year. And he was taking her out to dinner besides. I knew; I’d made the reservations.

Helen Rogers said, “Six hundred dollars for a picture! Can you beat that?”

“For
art
,” I said.

“Was it pretty?”

“How should I know?” I answered. “Did I go to Smith College? It was modern. Mostly red squiggles with a little black—like old chopped meat.”

“Linda,” Gladys said, “at least
pretend
you have some taste.”

“For that much money I’d get emerald earrings,” Wilma said.

She massaged the lobe of her ear. I had a feeling Mr. Post was going to buy her a present in the near future. “Not 18 / SUSAN ISAACS

the dangle kind. You can’t wear those during the day. Just give me big, fat emeralds that go right smack on your ear.”

“I’d take a mouton jacket,” someone else called out. “And with the change…”

Anita Beane twisted her engagement ring round and round and said, “I’d buy a house for me and Herbie.”

“I hate to say it, Anita,” Gladys said, “but you can’t buy a house for six hundred dollars.” She was tired of hearing about Herbie, who worked as an assistant in a beauty parlor in Washington Heights and had another year to go before he could be called Mr. Herbert. “You’ll have to move in with his parents.

But you’ll save up.”

Then Gladys opened her thermos of coffee with the pads of her fingers. It was the ladylike way, but there’d also been an article—“How to Avoid Nail Tragedy”—in the
Mirror
the day before. She took her time pouring, and that was a signal for all the others: free-play time. Ten or twelve soprano voices started squeaking at once.

But over all of them I heard Gladys, talking in a voice just meant for me: “I don’t know, Linda. Sometimes when a man does too much for his wife, she gets to not appreciating him.

Sometimes…” Gladys deliberately drowned her voice in her coffee. Then she turned—fast—to Winnie Curtis, at the farthest seat down the table, and called out: “Doesn’t Mr. Nugent look like Ronald Colman with pockmarks?”

Edward Leland’s face looked wrong. But he was so close to being normal-looking, you were dying to get up close and examine precisely how off his face was. But of course, you didn’t get anywhere near Edward Leland. He was the most senior of the senior partners.

He was a genuine war hero too. In 1917, he’d taken his rifle, crawled on his belly through a forest in France, and mowed down a platoon of German soldiers. He’d saved his men. He might have gone on, gotten more Germans, or gotten killed, but he crawled over a mine. His face and his shoulder had been blown up.

SHINING THROUGH / 19

There were so many rumors in the office about how many operations he’d had to get put back together, it was impossible to ever know the truth. The only thing we did know was that half his face was flatter than the other half, as though one or two pieces were still missing. Someone swore he had lots of little scars, but I couldn’t see any. What I could see—what nobody could miss—was that the left half of his face was paralyzed. It didn’t move; it didn’t show expression. He was very scary.

As the cold afternoon light slanted through the big window behind his desk, Mr. Leland’s heavy black brows, like twin awnings, cast shadows; you couldn’t see what was in his eyes, although I had no doubt it was strictly cold, hard business. I was on loan because he had a letter to send to Germany. I’d been on loan before, but never to Edward Leland.