by Susan Isaacs
“If you’re so American,” Gladys suddenly said to me, “why did you bring German magazines to the office? And how come you know more about what’s happening over there than Roosevelt?”
“If I know more than Roosevelt, then we’re all going to be goose-stepping a year from now.” I turned and looked at her. “Listen, don’t you understand what’s going on over there?”
“I read the Mirror and the Journal-American.”
“So?”
“So I still can’t see why you get so…” She paused to find a word. “Upset.”
“Upset? Did the Mirror or the Journal happen to mention what those Nazi shit-heads did to Holland?”
“Linda!”
We both sat back and stared out at the bay; she wouldn’t look at me. The boats at the piers right in front of us—Little Muriel and Star of Brooklyn—bobbed on the gentle, lapping water. The Nazis were bombing Belgium, mopping up in Holland—murdering the few good men they hadn’t already slaughtered—and Gladys was reeling from shock because I’d called them shit-heads.
I couldn’t understand people. Gladys, the other girls at work, my neighbors. Why weren’t they angrier? I got hot under the collar just thinking about the excuses people had been making since the year before: Oh, Hitler had some good reasons for going into Czechoslovakia.
Come on. If you’re a German dictator with a problem, you throw a few chancellors together in a room and you figure something out. You don’t go rolling in with panzer divisions.
If you have a beef with someone, do you send in the Luftwaffe with a couple of tons of bombs, the way he did to Rotterdam, that son of a bitch?
“Do you really think he’ll go into France?” Gladys finally asked. Her voice was a little softer; maybe I was too hard on her. She was no dope, but she didn’t want any part of what was happening over there, so she’d simply put it out of her mind. Now, though, Americans were beginning to get troubled. Frightened, even. I could hear it—that tremor of fear, that Oh, no, I could get hurt—in Gladys’s voice. But why wasn’t she—why weren’t all of them—angry, like me?
“Of course he’ll go into France,” I said. “And all we can hope is that the French are tougher and smarter than I think they are.”
“What if he beats them?”
“Gladys, what do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“England.”
“No. Come on.”
Gladys got up and walked over to an ice cream cart. It was an old white icebox on two bicycle wheels, covered with decals of ice cream pops, cones, and sundaes in every gorgeous color possible. Usually, though, all the carts ever had was vanilla, so soft that by the time it got scooped into the cone and handed over to you, it was mush that flowed over your hand and down your arm.
What if I could really talk to John. I’d say, You know, two years ago, right around this time of year, I was sitting on a park bench in Ridgewood with my Grandma Olga. Such a smart lady, but she was still saying, “Hitler and his people. Trash.”
John would believe me. He’d know that when Hitler came into power, most of the German-speaking people in America, like Olga, viewed him as if he was some slobby fifth cousin who shows up at Christmas dinner, shoots off his mouth, and then drools into the Berliner Schlosspunsch; he wouldn’t be around long. But he was, and none of those smart German-speakers could explain it or understand it. So they said, Oh, well, what’s the real harm in it? When I’d explained the harm to Olga in 1935 she didn’t believe me. That day in 1938 in the park she’d said, “You’ll see, he’ll calm down, now that everyone takes him seriously.” I answered sharply: “No he won’t. And you-know-who he especially won’t calm down about.”
Olga didn’t say anything, dismissing my reminder; she may have been a Jew, but she wasn’t a Jew. Finally she said: “But even if you’re right, Linda, what can we do?”
What can we do? That kind of thinking would make John as crazy as it made me. We’d agree that what got us more than anything else was the effect of that maniac on everyone, not just on an old German lady. On big, strong, smart men. Listen to any of his speeches—not the few sentences before the radio switched over to the commentator and the Jell-O commercial—and just hear the German under the voice of the translator. I would turn to John and say, Listen, you know he is out of his mind with his rantings about Siegfried and a whole bunch of stupid Germanic gods—what’s he talking about? And his carrying on about inferior races. What was he? John would answer: The lowest of the low. He’d understand.
All you had to do was look at Hitler and you saw it—a flat, mean peasant face. But right from the beginning, all these big, strong, smart men fell apart the minute he challenged them. Old von Hindenburg, the cream of the crop, the best Germany had to offer: What does he do? He says, Here, Herr Hitler, take Germany. It’s yours. Take whatever you want.
And before Hindenburg bellied up, all you had to do was read the paper to realize what Hitler and his group were: garbage. The worst kind of garbage, because they weren’t just out-of-control animals or petty criminals. They were twisted, and so filled with hate that one or two nights’ rampage wasn’t enough to wear them out. Nothing would ever be enough for them, and I knew it and anyone with half a brain knew it, and what I wanted to know was why, damn it. Look at all the best men in Germany, the best men all over the world, and tell me why their guts turned to calf’s-foot jelly over the Nazis—over garbage.
If men can’t be men, who do they expect to be brave? Women?
John would say, Don’t worry. There are men like me…. We’ll take care of it.
Gladys came back empty-handed from the ice cream wagon. “They were out of strawberry,” she said.
“Too bad.” Maybe I’d sounded too sarcastic. Why should I be mad at Gladys because she wasn’t mad at Hitler? Neither one of us had a life so full of wonderful moments that we could afford to throw away a perfect Sunday where passersby might smile at us, where a strange man might tip his hat. We needed whatever pleasure we could find—including strawberry. “You want to look for a candy store or something?”
“No.” She sat down beside me. “I don’t want to give up the bench.” She waited for a second and asked her inevitable next question: “Anything new with Mr. B?”
“Nothing.”
“He hasn’t said anything?”
“Not a peep.”
“No”—she gave me a significant stare—“signs?”
“Not even a twitch. But you know beneath all those Charlie Charming smiles he’s not the most emotional guy in the world.”
“Linda, do you honestly think he cares she’s gone?”
“He’s got to care. I mean, forget the marriage stuff—you know, man and wife. Who does he have to talk to?”
Gladys nodded. And then I thought, Who do I have to talk to? Not about Mr. Leland’s dead wife or Mr. Avenel’s unfortunately live one, but about the world. If I could actually talk to John, not just imagine conversations…He knows so much. We could discuss—
“Oh, look! There’s another cart down there, past the big boat,” Gladys said. “You want anything?” I shook my head. “Let me see if they have strawberry. I’ll be right back.”
Gladys hurried off to the right. From the left, a group of day fishermen in mashed-down sports hats clomped by, carrying their catch on strings; the flounders, still wet, dribbled along the sidewalk. Then one of the men opened his mouth wide and held up his string of fish over it and—while the others gave off loud, manly ho-ho-hos—let the fish water drip down his throat.
I wanted so much to talk, to be able to ask John why—forgetting Germany for a minute—why all the little countries and England and France could say, Okay, Adolf, old buddy, it’s all yours. What was wrong with them? Were they terrified by a couple of torchlight parades? By rifles? Did Franklin Delano Roosevelt go belly-up to the Ku Klux Klan? No! So why did they just give in to the Nazis?
Gladys was coming back with a broad smile and a strawberry ice cream cone. Her Sun
day was a success. We’d talk about John and Nan and the mysterious Quentin. We’d look out at the water some more, then close our eyes and once again put back our heads for a few minutes. When we’d open our eyes, the sky would be a gorgeous blue.
Whenever I thought of Europe, I imagined its skies clouded and dismal, like just before a storm. But it had to be spring there too.
Then I thought about Gladys and her ice cream cone, the fishermen, and all the people strolling along Sheepshead Bay in their flowered dresses and seersucker slacks. And what I was really dying to ask John—because he would know, he would care—was, Are we any different? Would we have the guts? Or will it turn dark here too?
But talking to him, kissing him…Forget it. It still was all a dream.
6
The file room had Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley’s records starting from 1916, and the air was sour, as if some major case—the 1927 General Motors litigation—had sprouted mold years before. But although it smelled, at least it was private—at the end of a long, narrow tiled hallway, so you could hear the tap of footsteps ten yards off. And you had the absolute peace of mind of knowing the footsteps were made by a secretary. Guaranteed: Since the signing of the Magna Carta, no lawyer has ever retrieved his own files.
I waited, alone, peering up at the shelves sagging under the weight of old cartons of dead cases. Then Gladys slipped in and, three seconds later, Lenny Stevenson. Lenny came in on an angle; she really wasn’t that huge, but her mental picture of her own bigness ruled her whole life. And while it was true that no one would ever slip and call her dainty, she wasn’t King Kong. Still, she maneuvered as if anticipating the doorway would not be wide enough to hold her. “Hiya,” she said quickly. She wasn’t much for elaborate greetings. Then she gave Gladys an am-I-supposed-to-talk look.
“I’ll tell her,” Gladys said. Lenny sighed with relief at getting off the social-chitchat hook, a sound that in the funnies is written “Whew!” Meanwhile, Gladys patted her hair and blotted her lips together, as if cameras were about to roll and capture this earth-shaking announcement. “Linda, we found out who Quentin is!”
“Oh, come on!”
Gladys made a big dramatic deal of cleaning the clip-onto-the-nose glasses she wore for close work; they hung from a rust-colored ribbon around her neck. “We did some detecting,” she said finally. She tapped Lenny gently on the arm. “Go ahead, Lenore. Tell her.”
“Uh,” Lenny began. She paused. She swallowed. “Um…you know Dahlmaier Brothers?” Lenny asked. “The investment banking firm?”
“We represent them,” Gladys informed me.
“I know.”
“Anyway,” Lenny went on, “they had a question about our billing. I was looking at their letter and saying, Those financiers can’t even add; no wonder there was a Depression—when all of a sudden something catches my eye. Guess what?”
“What?” I asked.
“On the top of the stationery, on the left-hand side, there were all these names. Nicholas Dahlmaier, Reynolds Dahlmaier—”
“Quentin Dahlmaier,” I said.
“You knew!” Lenny exclaimed. She wasn’t really dumb; she just didn’t understand people. I think her size as well as her lack of any quality that might be called feminine had made her pull away from the world of women and men; she wasn’t fish and wasn’t fowl, so she hid in her ledgers, so much so that she couldn’t even join in the easy give-and-take of everyday talk. When you said, Hi, Lenny, how are you? you could actually see her think before she answered.
“Go on, Lenny,” Gladys urged.
“Wait a second,” I interrupted. “Quentin’s not the most common name in the world, but there’s got to be more than one in the entire borough of Manhattan. It’s probably—”
“Linda, would you please?” Gladys demanded grandly, like she was Bette Davis in a very-great-lady role. Then she nodded—graciously—at Lenny, a do-go-on nod.
So Lenny went on. “Anyway, I saw this name, Quentin, and I figured what do I got to lose? So I called up the bookkeeper over there to explain the billing—and I got chatty with her.”
“I told her to,” Gladys explained to me.
You’d think Lenny would have been insulted, with Gladys coming right out and saying she was running the show. But Lenny wasn’t. She was gazing down at Gladys’s plain, big-nostriled, I-know-everything face with so much respect it was almost adoration. Lenny could have been a nun (a king-sized nun) staring at a little statue of the Virgin Mary.
“Right,” Lenny agreed. “I said everything that Gladys told me. I said to the bookkeeper, Gee, the name Quentin Dahlmaier is so familiar. Where do I know it from? Was he in the paper or something? And she says to me, Well, there was a story about him in the Times or the Trib when he gave all that money to the Philharmonic. So I told her, Yeah, that must be it, the Philharmonic. And then she says to me, What did I think about his picture, wasn’t he distinguished-looking? And so I said, You know, it’s hard to tell from a newspaper picture.”
“Good work, Len,” I said.
Lenny grinned. She had too much of everything; her smile was so vast it looked as if she had sixty-four teeth.
“She said he’s very good-looking for an older man, so I asked her how old he was, and she said she thinks about forty—”
“Then that can’t be him,” I interrupted, “because Nan’s just twenty-one and—”
This time I was interrupted, by Gladys. “Mr. Berringer’s what? Thirty-four, thirty-five?”
“Thirty-five,” I said.
“So? What’s five more years to a girl like that? Go ahead, Lenny.”
“Anyway, she said he’s filthy rich—all the Dahlmaiers are filthy rich—and that he had a winter house in Palm Beach and a summer house in Southampton on Long Island, but—”
“Listen to this ‘but,’” Gladys said breathlessly.
“He’s planning on going away the whole summer. The bookkeeper said usually he just goes to Europe for one month—to Monte Carlo for two weeks and then either Ireland or Scotland, but now with the war—”
“Terrible how it louses up people’s vacations,” I said. Gladys actually nodded, so I went on: “But listen, just because he’s taking an extra month off doesn’t mean he’s going on a honeymoon. I bet you it turns out he’s married.”
“Well, you bet wrong, because he’s divorced,” Gladys said.
Lenny added, “She told me, Mr. Quentin’s divorced, you know, so I said, Oh, yeah, I’d heard about it.”
“Just because he’s divorced…” I protested. This all fit my dream world so well, it was so perfect—from the debonair name Quentin all the way to the Palm Beach house, which I just knew had to be cream with a red tile roof—I couldn’t believe it. “Rich people’s marriages break up all the time. They have nothing else to do and they’re bored, so a divorce is like going to the most emotional movie in the world—except it’s starring them.”
Gladys rolled her eyes the way the comedians used to do in vaudeville skits when they got stuck with a real dumb hopeless case. “Tell her what else, Len.”
“See, I was kidding around with this bookkeeper about this Quentin Dahlmaier being a catch—”
“And guess what?” Gladys interrupted.
“The bookkeeper said, Not anymore he’s not. At least she doesn’t think so. There’s all sorts of talk around Dahlmaier Brothers that Mr. Quentin is getting married, and his secretary told her—the bookkeeper—that he’s on the phone two or three hours a day with a lady in Reno, but even his secretary doesn’t know her name because Mr. Quentin told her, ‘Just get me connected and I’ll take care of the rest.’ Like he didn’t want anyone, even his private secretary, to know the lady’s name. So anyway, I said, Gee, did the secretary happen to say where the lady’s staying in Reno? I got a cousin in Reno.”
“Good work, Len!” I said. “Did she know where?”
Lenny grinned. “The Bar None Ranch!”
“Now do you want to hear what I found out?” Gladys de
manded.
I smiled. The two of them weren’t exactly Mata Hari, but they weren’t bad. “Sure.”
“I went over to Marian Mulligan’s desk to borrow her staple remover and said, Oh, by the way, when you sent all the papers to Mrs. Berringer in Reno, do you happen to remember the address? My cousin’s boss has a sister who’s going to get a divorce. And believe me, Marian didn’t have to look it up.”
“The Bar None Ranch,” I said.
“How many almost-divorced ladies establishing residency in Nevada at the Bar None Ranch in Reno are going to marry men named Quentin?”
“What do you think, Linda?” Lenny asked.
“Great detective work!” I rested my elbow on a dusty carton. “God, Quentin Dahlmaier.”
“And Mrs. Quentin Dahlmaier,” Gladys added.
I smiled again, an even bigger one. If Nan was going to change her mind, she had a week and a half. And with good old filthy-rich, Philharmonic-loving Quentin on the phone with her two or three hours a day, she probably wouldn’t want to.
It finally happened about two weeks later, in, of all places, the Blue Elephant, the bar all the secretaries went to. Any decent place with that name would have had lots of pudgy blue elephants pasted up on the wall, or girl and boy elephants on the ladies’ and men’s rooms, or blue swizzle sticks. But all the Blue Elephant had was an elephant painted on the mirror over the bar, and a pretty crummy painting too; most of the elephant’s rear end had flaked off—probably into the bourbon.
Not that it bothered the drinkers at the bar. Though it was a Tuesday night, all the stools were filled. Despite the dark, I could get a pretty good idea of them from my table. Sad silhouettes: middle-aged associates never tapped for partner, brokers so down on their luck they couldn’t even find a potential customer to buy a drink for.
The rest of the Blue Elephant, the cocktail lounge, was where the law firm secretaries went to sit in peace and quiet. The drinks weren’t too expensive, and you didn’t have to put up with who-do-you-think-you-are-coming-here stares, like in the fancier places. Also, the guys at the Blue Elephant bar were serious drinkers, almost always too far gone to think about girls, much less make a pass.