Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  “Mom, I have to talk to you.” I switched on the lamp on her night table. She’d bought a pair of these lamps when she and my father were first married; the base of the lamp was an extremely fat cherub—even as cherubs go—standing on grapes he somehow didn’t crush; he wore a lampshade on his head. “Mom, please wake up.”

  She put the crook of her arm over her eyes and said, “C’mon, Lin, baby. Don’t be a pain.” She’d gotten so thin that in the lamplight I could see the faint outline of the two bones in her forearm. “Two more minutes.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. The pillowcase was soiled with her hair cream and, I guess, her droolings; it hadn’t been changed since I’d changed it, the week before.

  “Mom, I have to talk with you,” I said. I was trying not to get angry. I’d heard her come in around five-thirty that morning, and now I could see she’d slept in her dress. From the streaks of dirt at the bottom of the sheet, she hadn’t even bothered to take off her shoes, although they’d fallen off during her sleep. One had dropped to the floor and another lay on what had been my father’s side of the bed.

  On the way down to the Municipal Building, I’d had a yen to splurge and take a cab to Queens, pick up my mother and bring her with me. Mom, put on your good navy dress with the white ruffle collar and come watch me get married! I’d say, and she’d leap out of bed, splash some water on her face and say, Oh, Linda, sweetie, you’ve made me so happy you wouldn’t believe it!

  “Go ’way,” she mumbled. “I got a lousy hangover.”

  “It’s five o’clock, Mom. In the afternoon.” This didn’t seem to make a big impression on her. “I have some wonderful news for you.” Slowly, she lifted her arm away from her eyes and squinted at me. “John and I got married today.”

  She couldn’t stop squinting, but she broke out into a huge smile. “Oh, Lin! A lawyer!” She reached out, squeezed my hand and wriggled around as if to sit up, but didn’t make much progress. Her hand was freezing. I picked up the blanket from the floor and put it around her, tucking it under her feet. Her big toe poked through a rip in her stocking. “When did you do it?”

  “Today.” I started to apologize: “We decided at the last minute,” but since she didn’t seem to notice she hadn’t been invited, I stopped.

  “Tell me everything. Did he get down on his knee and propose? That’s what Herm did. It was my sixteenth birthday, and he got down on his knee and said, ‘Will you be my birthday girl for ever and ever?’ Was your John romantic?”

  What could I tell her? That at our wedding lunch, right after the waiter poured champagne and we lifted our glasses but didn’t clink them because either John didn’t want everybody in the restaurant to know we were celebrating or because clinking glasses was simply not done, or naive or something, he’d told me to take off my ring before I got back to the office, since he hadn’t decided how to “present the situation.” Naturally, I’d be leaving in a week or two. “No, make that closer to three. It’s not going to be easy replacing you.” He smiled, for the waiter, returning with menus, as well as for me. After the waiter walked off, John added, “You’re a good secretary, Linda.”

  “A great secretary.”

  “And very modest.”

  “That too.”

  “It will take a few weeks to come up with someone even remotely suitable.”

  “And you’ll have to pay her more.”

  “Probably.”

  “So am I better at the typewriter or in bed?”

  He put down his champagne glass. “Come on,” he whispered, “let’s forget lunch. We can go back to the apartment and celebrate.” Not a chance. In fact, I told him, I had to take the rest of the afternoon off and get things set up for my mother. “Your mother?” he murmured. He couldn’t seem to remember I’d come from parents, not an employment agency.

  So after lunch I’d gone home to Ridgewood and stopped in to talk to Dr. Guber. He’d hugged me and said, “Hey, I knew the guy would marry you! Now relax, be a wife. I know a nice old maid, a practical nurse, over in Bushwick. She’ll live in and cook, clean, take care of your mother. Don’t worry,” he’d soothed me. “This girl’s got the constitution of an ox. For fifteen bucks a week, she’ll do everything. More than you could do, working all day.”

  I put my hand on my mother’s icy shoulder. “Mom, listen to me. I gave a key to Dr. Guber—”

  “That old fart?”

  “Mom, he’s going to give it to a girl from Bushwick, who’ll be coming in to clean and cook whatever you want and look after you. I’ll pay her, and I’m going to give you money every week. But you can’t spend it all in one day.”

  “Who, me?” my mother asked, and tried to wink, although it didn’t work. Her cheek just twitched. “So tell me, honeybunch, what’s your name now?”

  “Berringer,” I said.

  “Write it down for me,” she said, “so I can tell all my friends.”

  I took a piece of paper and a pencil from my pocket and wrote “Linda Berringer” for the first time, and added John’s home phone number.

  “Here’s my phone number, Mom. And I’ll call you every day. But if you need anything, you call me.”

  “Listen, dollface, you did good.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You pregnant?” She gave me an inquisitive smile.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I figured. Linda, lovie, you’re one smart girl, hooking him before he could wiggle away to another rich one. I’m so proud of you.”

  Then, before she went back to sleep, she gave me a big hug and a kiss.

  It wasn’t until a few minutes after six, fighting the end of the crowd rushing down, that I pushed my way up the subway stairs on my way back to the office. I was wondering if, being a lawyer’s wife, I could have taken a taxi to see my mother. In John’s neighborhood, I’d seen rich ladies in suits and alligator shoes who stood on the corner of Park Avenue and raised one finger, and cabs pulled over and screeched on their brakes and drivers smiled.

  I was preoccupied, coming up and out of the subway, wondering how John would give me house money, whether I’d just find it under a pillow or if he’d hand me two or three or four twenties—whatever lawyers’ wives get—every other Friday, the day he got his check. And how was I supposed to know what it was for? I figured, okay, groceries, newspapers, a lipstick. Do lawyers’ wives say, Darling, I need an extra forty for a sweet little peau de soie at Tailored Woman? What if he forgot to give me anything? Was I supposed to remind him?

  Anyway, I was almost at the top of the steps, slipping my wedding ring off and putting it in my pocketbook, thinking that it was going to be pretty embarrassing, but I was going to have to ask John for a new winter coat because the old one not only was embarrassingly ratty, with an unsewable rip under the left arm, but wouldn’t button over my belly when the time came, when—not more than two seconds after I’d gotten up to the street—I slammed into Gladys Slade.

  “Excuse me,” she said. She was so busy being polite, she hadn’t seen me.

  Those were really her first words to me since we’d come to the understanding that she’d keep quiet. Of course, she included me in a “How are you?” if I was coming through the door with a group of the girls. To do anything else would be to call attention to the fact that I’d done something terrible that called for a boycott, and she was nervous enough about my “power” over John that she kept herself under tight control. Any “Hello” or “What’s new?” was just in self-defense.

  To tell the truth, the only reason I missed my friendship with Gladys was that on a lot of Sundays we went to the movies together; since I’d started seeing John seven days a week, I hadn’t been to a single movie. I’d missed Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940, and I was dying to see Laurence Olivier in Rebecca, even though Joan Fontaine was so whiny I always wished her leading man would smack her across the face and say, Shut up, you pain in the ass!

  Gladys was huddled in her office sweater, which s
he’d worn home because of the chill. It was a too-loose cardigan, the color of Wheatena. Suddenly, I felt cold and massaged my empty ring finger with my thumb. “How’ve you been, Gladys?”

  She nodded, and I guess only because I didn’t move out of the way, she said, “You weren’t at lunch today.”

  “Mr. Berringer”—I blushed—“had a conference over at Two Wall. He wanted me there.”

  “Well, I’m sure he was delighted to have you.”

  “Look, Gladys, I’m not going to say anything corny, like ‘Let’s be friends,’ but at least we could be civil to each other. We’ve known each other so long and…Why don’t we go out for a drink, maybe early next week?”

  “I can’t see any point to it.”

  “There is no point, really. Just to talk.” What I wanted to do, after John “presented the situation” of our marriage, was to sit down and tell Gladys before she heard it from the office grapevine. I felt I owed her that. Or maybe deep down I just wanted someone to talk to. Funny, I had nobody now.

  Gladys opened her pocketbook and made herself busy searching through her change purse to find a nickel for the subway. “What you’re obviously dying to talk about”—she spoke into her pocketbook—“I don’t want to know about.”

  I should have felt angry, but all I could think of was how embarrassed…no, embarrassment was nothing compared to what Gladys was going to feel when she heard about me and John. Look, I wanted to reassure her, I’m never going to tell him how you talk about all the partners, especially not how you talked about him, how you went on and on about how gorgeous he was and said, “Can you imagine what he must look like in tennis clothes?”

  She found her nickel. I stepped aside. “I’ll let you go, then,” I said.

  But she wasn’t quite ready. “I think I ought to warn you,” Gladys said, “that your little interlude may be coming to an end.” She stopped. She waited for me to beg her to go on. I didn’t. “Mrs. Avenel is having a dinner party Saturday for all the partners. She’s hired a butler to pass around the hors d’oeuvres. Mr. Berringer had been invited, and Mrs. Avenel had arranged for a very eligible girl to be his dinner partner, but…”

  Her long, dramatic pause was so overly long and dramatic that I finally lost patience. I knew she was out to hurt me again, and I couldn’t be hurt. Well, not by her, anyway. “But what, Gladys?”

  “He called Mrs. Avenel this morning and told her”—she gave a long, supercilious sniff—“he’d met someone and was getting married!”

  I asked softly, “Did he say if he was still going to the party?”

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I heard you. Is he going?”

  “Yes, he’s going.” Her tone turned into a sneer. “With his fiancée.”

  No, I was dying to say. With his wife.

  Right after we’d finally turned out the lights, I’d asked John when I could wear my ring to the office. “Oh,” he’d murmured. I waited. “Whenever,” he finally said. “When you went to your mother’s, I spoke to Ed about our…and your leaving.”

  “Did you tell him I was—”

  “No.” He turned his pillow over and, before he went off to sleep, added, “Stop worrying. He said it was fine with him.”

  Well, it was the day after my wedding and it wasn’t fine. I was standing in front of Mr. Leland’s desk because he hadn’t asked me to sit down, and I was being yelled at by a man who was able to yell without raising his voice.

  “Did it occur to you at any point, Mrs. Berringer, that you had responsibilities to someone other than yourself?” Edward Leland was furious. “Did you ever consider that apart from the damned nuisance of engaging another bilingual secretary, it usually takes a minimum of ten weeks to get someone security clearance for the sort of work you’ve been doing? You’re cleared for secret work. Do you think we can pick some German-speaking stenographer off the streets of Yorkville and dictate our codes to her? It could take weeks, months even, to find someone whom we can even approach for an FBI check.

  “You know how things are heating up here. You know that the volume of this…this sort of work has increased a hundredfold. What am I supposed to do if I have a message to send tomorrow? Or three or four weeks from now?” I couldn’t get an answer past the lump in my throat. “Send it down to Washington for fifty idiot bureaucrats to pass from hand to hand before they translate?” His face darkened. “Ask your husband to type it up?”

  “Please, I’ll be glad to—”

  “To what, Mrs. Berringer?”

  “To do whatever I can.”

  “You’re a married woman.”

  “No matter what your wedding night is like, you don’t forget shorthand.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that.

  Neither could Mr. Leland. “I don’t need clever retorts. I need a secretary with security clearance.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I assumed—obviously wrongheadedly—that you realized that despite the seeming simplicity of the letters I’ve been dictating, they serve a purpose.”

  “Mr. Leland,” I began. But then I started crying. Not just a few cute tears. Real, true weeping. I covered my face with my hands, and as I did, my pad and pencil dropped.

  “For God’s sake!” he said. And then he added, “Oh, sit down.” I sat. “Here.” He leaned forward and put his handkerchief right in front of me on the desk. I hated using it, because I thought: How am I going to get this back to him? but I used it anyway; my nose was running. Except for my sobbing, it was absolutely quiet, and I think I finally spoke only because I didn’t want him to fill the silence by telling me to get a grip on myself or, worse, that he was sorry he’d upset me.

  I took one last sniffle and looked up at him. “Mr. Leland, I’m sorry to be carrying on like this.” Nothing resembling an emotion showed on his face. “I’d like to explain things.”

  “That is not necessary, Mrs. Berringer.”

  “I think it is.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “I know you think I’m inconsiderate, and you’re right. I didn’t consider that I was working for you too. I didn’t consider it for a minute. You know why? I was carrying on with Mr. Berringer—”

  “This really isn’t necessary.”

  “I know, but please listen, anyway. I got pregnant, Mr. Leland.” His black eyes widened, not because he was surprised; I’m sure he wasn’t. He was surprised I was talking about it. “I know it’s something people don’t discuss in polite company—but I’m not such polite company. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve already figured out Mr…. that John didn’t marry me for my money or my great mind. He married me because he had to.

  “So you’re right,” I went on. “I was a wreck and I didn’t think about anyone beyond myself. Well, I thought about my mother. She’s a drunk and she’s not in the best of health and I support her. But maybe you already know that from the FBI or whoever checked me.”

  “Yes, I know about it,” he said softly.

  “So all I can do is apologize and say this conversation is probably as uncomfortable for you as it is for me, but I want to set the record straight. Like you guys say, there were extenuating circumstances.”

  “I understand.”

  “But just because I got myself in trouble…”

  “Go on.”

  “It doesn’t mean I can’t work. Okay, maybe I can’t come to the office during the day, but I could come in real early or real late. I don’t want to louse you up. I know…well, I don’t know, but I figure what you’re doing is very important, so until you find someone else, I’d like to do whatever I can.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll be able to manage without you.”

  That was it. Like the sergeants say in all the army movies: Dismissed! I picked up my pad and pencil from the floor and took that long, familiar walk across his office rug again. When I was halfway to the door, Edward Leland called out: “Mrs. Berringer.” I turned and faced him. His soft handkerchief was balled up in my fist.r />
  “Yes, Mr. Leland?”

  “Whatever happens…” For the first time since I’d known him, he hesitated. “You’re all right. Don’t ever sell yourself short.”

  12

  Henry and Florence Avenel lived somewhere in West-chester, in an important-looking white house with pillars that would have been perfect for Thomas Jefferson or Scarlett O’Hara but seemed a little much for a bulgy-eyed corporate lawyer who looked like a toad in a striped tie. So the house was grand, although a couple of steps down from palatial, but whoever the Avenels had bought it from had obviously gone bust—probably in ’29—and, before giving up the last of their mint julep dreams, had sold off most of the ole plantation. Just as you drove up and were about to go Ooh! you saw another, newer, smaller, semi-Tara on the left and an English Tudor squeezing in on the right. If someone in the Tudor had sneezed, it was so close—separated just by a border of trees shaped like lollipops—Florence Avenel might have said Gesundheit!

  Mrs. Avenel was not only polite; she was wildly enthusiastic. “John!” she gushed, as we came through the door. “This must be Linda! John, she’s lovely! Beyond lovely! Like Jean Harlow brought back to life!” I bore as much resemblance to the movie star as she bore to Minnie Mouse: barely any, but enough to comment on if you were truly desperate for something to say. “But she’s so much finer-looking than Harlow, of course.” She had to say that, naturally. She wasn’t going to risk telling her husband’s partner that his new wife was a ringer for a world-famous platinum-blond slut. “Congratulations, John!”

  Then she beamed at me, not failing to take in my midsection, which, I’d made sure, was covered by the long, boxy jacket of the black faille dinner suit I’d bought. (I’d known purple and low-cut were wrong, but was less sure what was right. So I’d come out of the kitchen after finishing the dinner dishes and asked John if I could have some money for a dress for the Avenels’. He’d gone to his wallet and handed me two fifty-dollar bills and said, Is this enough? The hundred dollars had made me mute, but I’d nodded yes, it was enough. The next day, I marched into Saks Fifth Avenue and looked around until I found the perfect salesgirl; she looked like one of the executive secretaries: a Vassar type with a tight mouth and a tighter behind. I told her: I’m going to a Saturday night dinner party with a bunch of Wall Street lawyers. What’ve you got? She’d raised both eyebrows but picked out the suit and a soft gray silk blouse to go with it, and told me, Wear pearl earrings. Ha, but I’d worn my hair down to cover my ears. When I walked out of the bedroom, all dressed and ready to go, John looked flabbergasted. Like Mrs. Avenel, he’d probably been expecting red sequins and chewing gum. He was caught so off guard by my lack of bad taste that he mumbled, Oh. You look beautiful.)