As matters evolved, however, the man selected for the ritual firing was not nearly so willing to be separated from his job as she had anticipated. She started in on a genial enough tack, explaining to the one-armed gentleman that her new position required her to implement decisions that were not always in accordance with the dictates of her heart. As she explained this dolorous truth, her emotions began to move in sympathy with her words, until Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt a little saddened by what was coming. Yesterday, in firing Marshall Moriarty, the so-called Most Beautiful Man, she had rather enjoyed leading him hither and thither by the nose, first exciting hope, then apprehension, then hope anew, only to end it all with a sudden swing of the axe.
“You see,” she was explaining to Mr. Kane, preparatory to dismissing him, “we’re changing direction as an institution. That’s the key to everything that’s happening around here this week.”
As she went on, Mr. Kane showed no emotion whatever, but sat stonily in his chair, with the left sleeve of his suit jacket folded neatly into his side pocket, and an expression of wry scorn etched on his lips. As long as he remained thus, Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued to elaborate on her views. If necessary, she could have talked like this till the cows came home.
She swung back in her chair, gesturing languidly and tossing out clichés in a quietly boastful manner. “We’re a deposit-driven institution. We don’t originate loans until the funds are in. We keep our risks down. Now, because of that, our growth requires a dramatic infusion of new funds. That’s how I make sense here. That’s the single most revolutionary change to have taken place, you see. Because with me at the helm, we’re not going to sit on our hands any longer. We’re not just going to hope,” she flung out disdainfully, “that everybody out there will be nice to us and let us survive. That attitude was acceptable years ago. Today, we have a more challenging environment. I wouldn’t last a month,” she added, “if I were to conduct business as usual.”
Desmond Kane continued to regard her with the imperturbability of a gargoyle. She had never seen him in such an obstinate frame of mind, and guessed that he had divined his termination and was resolved to take the blow with stoic forbearance.
“You can’t imagine the kind of pressure that I put myself under, Desmond, in order to make the changes here that should have been made years ago. Believe me, it isn’t enough just to take the public by storm, to create a stampede of new business through my front doors. I have to consider a hundred and one other things.” Sometimes, when boasting like this, Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt a surge of excitement in her blood. She actually felt her body heating up. “I even have to watch the securities markets.” She threw her pencil onto her desk. “I’m sitting on eighty million dollars, and the future of it, and of everyone in this place, is riding on my back. It’s easy for a secretary or a teller,” she said, ridiculing Mr. Kane’s position and forty years of service at the bank, “to give me a day’s work in return for a day’s pay, and think nothing more of it. I’m the one who has to control costs.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons decided to give Mr. Kane a peek at the scary decision that trembled in the offing. “I’m the one who has to reduce expenses and streamline the staff.”
Hard as she tried, though, Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not get a rise out of the man. Moreover, the gray stony set of his face was beginning to get on her nerves. To worsen matters, there materialized in her mind’s eye an image of the ugly stump of Mr. Kane’s severed arm dangling uselessly inside his folded sleeve, a vision that revolted her.
To her relief, Julie Marcotte put through an important telephone call. It was from a top executive at the George Hitchings Corporation, a Hartford-based developer well known in banking circles along the Eastern seaboard. Mrs. Fitzgibbons loved this part of the job. She liked talking to highly placed executives, especially of powerful firms that had never solicited business from the bank before. The man on the line told her that Nate Solomon had spoken highly of her.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons leaned backward in her chair, with her breasts up in the air and the phone tilted prettily in her hand, as she addressed herself at first to the ceiling. While the consequence of her business call from the man at the Hitchings Corporation was fifty times as important as her dealing with the one-armed teller, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was conscious all the while that the picture she was presenting to Mr. Kane would point up to him his own insignificance; he would be able to relax now in the knowledge that her decision to get rid of him was based on considerations too lofty for him to comprehend.
“Nate is a gentleman,” she was saying. “It was grand of him to mention me. It’s quite true that we’re interested in proposals that originate outside our region. If the fundamentals are good, we’re ready to play.” She had turned and was staring abstractedly at Mr. Kane now, but gave no indication of seeing him. She was staring through him. “I expect to be in Worcester the next few days,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, fictitiously. “What I’d like to do is send down my assistant, Leonard Frye. He’s my nuts-and-bolts man, anyhow. If you could take an hour with him.”
“Sounds perfect,” said the other with an altogether agreeable air.
“Give him the lay of the thing to bring back to me. Would you do that?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons shivered over the excitement of executive power. “If I like it, and if a meeting is desirable to you, you and I could get together.”
By the time Mrs. Fitzgibbons had arranged a meeting for Mr. Frye in Hartford and had hung up, she had stopped feeling sorry for the doomed man sitting in front of her. She even concluded that Desmond Kane had treated her kindly over the years only in order to flatter himself by treating a loan officer as an equal. He had probably secretly despised her all along. Now that she had climbed to stratospheric heights and become superior to everyone, and could no longer gratify his vanity, he lapsed into a moody, churlish silence.
She gave him one last chance to show a spark of appreciation, a sign of his comprehending the wonders she was working here, and of the fact that his future was hers to enhance or mangle. She pivoted in her chair to face him head on. “My instincts tell me,” she said, smiling pleasantly, “that you don’t have a solid grip on the sort of changes I’m bringing about here.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons waited, but Mr. Kane made no reply. The wryness in his face was sculpted in granite.
“You wouldn’t know what a loan portfolio is,” she said, “let alone what it means to increase deposits by four percent in three days, or be able to boast a twenty-two percent return on average equity. How could you? You’ve been a teller here since the War of 1812.” She raised her voice, but not in anger. “You’re one of my tellers, Desmond. Your job is mechanical. It’s like being a piston or the exhaust pipe in a car. A piston,” she explained, “functions without regard to where the car is going, or how fast, or in what direction, or whether it’s moving at all. The car could be going over a cliff.”
“It probably is,” said Mr. Kane.
The unexpectedness of Mr. Kane’s voice arrested Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the midst of her metaphor, and even required her to think for a second about what he had said. She sat forward, laid her arms flat on the desk, and eyed him incredulously. Before she could respond, Mr. Kane spoke again.
“That’s what cliffs are for,” he said.
Some of the nearby staff workers who had seen Mr. Kane cross the floor and vanish into Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s enormous office like a sleepwalker entering an unexplored cave, had just begun to take heart in his prospects, when, out of the blue, Mrs. Fitzgibbons started to shout. The torrent of fury that erupted behind her door had no precedent in the hundred-year history of the venerable bank at Maple and Main. To exacerbate matters, Mr. Kane interrupted with more to say.
“I don’t think you’re doing that well,” he said.
On her feet, Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked about swiftly for some heavy object. She couldn’t credit her ears.
“I want to know why this is happening to me,” he added in a controlled manner. “I want an explanation.”
But by then,
Mrs. Fitzgibbons had drowned him out. Like many people born with native oratorical talent, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had a pair of lungs. When she got really angry, her voice actually dropped half an octave and took on a rasping hoarseness. It was deafening. “Get Mr. Donachie in here!” she hollered with incredible volume. “I want my guard!”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons ran across the room and flung open her door. Her voice filled the entire bank. “I WANT HIM IN HERE!”
The actual expulsion of the one-armed teller — to worsen matters — involved a brief physical altercation at the door of her office between himself and Alec Donachie. Mr. Kane thrust the bank guard aside and, showing his yellow teeth, commanded him to stay put. However, the deep, morbid desire in Mr. Donachie to throw himself into action for Mrs. Fitzgibbons, the woman responsible for uniforming him in his black police clothes and for elevating him to a position of respect, triggered a spontaneous reaction. In a twinkling, Mr. Donachie had twisted Desmond Kane’s surviving arm behind his back and was propelling him with force toward the back door of Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s colossal office, in the direction of the vestibule. He was clutching the collar of Desmond’s suit coat in his left fist while thrusting him before him. “Nobody sasses the Chief,” he said. “You’re gone, mister. You’re out of here!”
If there was one thing Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not brook, it was criticism. Alone in her office, she sat, heart beating. Her nerves were in riot, her pulse fluttering. The revelation that her firing policy had turned up, by chance, an actual detractor, someone who questioned and despised her, left her shaken. She felt sorry for herself. She showed Julie a suffering face. “This is what comes of being fair-minded.”
“Mr. Kane was very stupid to say what he did,” Julie said comfortingly to Mrs. Fitzgibbons.
“He’s lived off us for a hundred years. We gave him a pleasant corner to work in, benefits, holidays, a weekly paycheck, year after year, but when it’s time for him to go,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, practically in tears, “then the ugliness comes out. It was there all along, and now it comes out.”
“It was a disgusting thing to say,” said Julie.
“Here is a man,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, still pitying herself, “who can’t zip up his fly, but can sit in front of me, with an ugly look on his face, and question what I’m doing. Oh, and I was polite with him. I tried to show understanding. I kept my voice down. I called him Desmond. I was prepared to treat him like a human being. I would have given him compensation. He has the heart of a rat, and I was going to give him the world on a platter.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons accepted a pocket tissue from Julie and touched it to the corner of her eye. She was truly hurt. For a quarter hour thereafter, she struggled to make sense of the secret motives of subordinates.
“It was stupid of him,” said Julie.
“It wasn’t stupid,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “It was vicious.”
“It was the most vicious thing anyone could say,” Julie agreed. “I’d like to see something horrible happen to him.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons sniffled angrily and wiped her nose. “I swear to Jesus,” she said, “if anyone ever speaks to me that way again, I’ll have him beheaded.”
For the rest of the hour, Mrs. Fitzgibbons remained in a guarded state of mind. She experienced the odd sensation that her brain had actually contracted; that the scope of her thinking was somehow attenuated, like water jetting from a nozzle. She felt restive and menaced, and refused to take an entire sequence of phone calls. She closed her door and busied herself with her paperwork. It was no coincidence, therefore, when Mrs. Fitzgibbons later detected something suspicious in passing that aggravated her paranoia. She had just come to her door to give Julie a letter to type, when a young woman from Mrs. Wilson’s department went past Julie’s desk on her way to the rear vestibule. Mrs. Fitzgibbons caught a glimpse of something extraordinary under the half-open flap of the girl’s rumpled tote bag.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons accosted her on the spot. The young woman halted and looked about in bewilderment. She was a plain, stooped figure dressed in a woolen jumper and Indian-print blouse. Her sponge-soled shoes, which laced up like a man’s, accentuated the pigeon-toed posture of her feet.
“You!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons brought her to a halt with a word and pointed to her door. “Go into my office.”
The color drained from the young woman’s face. She was frightened out of her wits. She preceded Mrs. Fitzgibbons stiff-leggedly across the endless expanse of carpet.
Before following, however, Mrs. Fitzgibbons stopped to say something to Julie; she was certain that if the girl were guilty and given an opportunity, she would attempt to conceal the evidence. When Mrs. Fitzgibbons went in and closed the door behind her, the girl in the jumper stood as quiet as death before her. She had closed the flap of her tote bag, though, and had shifted the weight of it behind her back.
“Where were you going?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons inquired with a factitious airiness. Her musical tone of voice was belied by a narrowing of her lips and the penetrating glaze of her eyes.
When the young woman opened her mouth to respond, she revealed a gap between her front teeth. “To the store,” she managed to croak out. “For a bottle of aspirin.”
“And what is your name?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons asked in that same frightening, melodious pitch.
The girl was quaking visibly. “I’m Emily Krok.”
After a little silence between them, Mrs. Fitzgibbons turned with a grim look and pointed her finger. “Empty your bag onto my desk.”
Emily Krok’s eyes shot up to the ceiling. “Oh God!”
“Go on,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons instructed her. “Do as you’re told. I know what you’re up to.”
In seconds, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had the object in hand, a little blue-and-white box containing a typewriter ribbon of the sort used by bank secretaries. The cellophane was still sealed. “Well, now,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, in a throatier tone, “you’re just a little thief.”
“Oh, please,” the girl brought out. In her distraction, she looked mindless. “I’ve never stolen anything.”
“You just stole from me.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons refuted the claim.
“I’ve never stolen before.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve been stealing all your life.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked the quailing girl up and down. “What do you do with this property of mine?”
“Please, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. It’s true. I swear it.” Emily begged to be understood. “I’ve never stolen before.”
“Where do you sell these?”
“Sell them?” Emily’s voice climbed in horror.
“The things you steal. The umbrellas that have been disappearing, the scarves, Mrs. Lawrence’s wallet, the stationery. You’re going to spill your guts out. I have you red-handed.” She flourished the blue-and-white box. “Have you ever been arrested?”
“God, no.”
“I want to know,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, insisting, “what you’ve stolen and how you dispose of it. Because I know who you are. You’re one of the ones who talk behind my back.” The thought of it set Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s temples aflame.
“Don’t have me arrested.” Emily’s voice broke, and she started to sob. “Don’t call the police. Do anything but that. I’m begging you.”
“You’re going to confess.”
“I’ll confess to anything if you don’t have me arrested. I’ll say anything. I’ll do anything.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not moved by the young woman’s pleadings, even though Emily Krok’s want of good looks was rendered even more apparent in her distress. The girl looked very wizened and misshapen, with her head jutting forth, as she pleaded.
“You can start by admitting that you’re a little kleptomaniac who can’t keep her grubby fingers off my property.”
Emily, true to her word, nodded miserably.
“Come along.”
“It’s true,” said Emily.
“If it isn’t bolted down,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons insisted, “you walk
off with it.”
“Yes.” Emily was clutching her head with one hand.
“You cheat and steal and tell lies about me behind my back.”
“No!” Emily replied. “I can’t bear this any longer. What am I going to do? Help me. What am I going to do?” Her balled fists shook now.
“Why, I’ve had you on report for a month.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons drew attention to a pile of folders on her desk, as to the dossiers of criminals. “You and a dozen others, including your own boss. Elizabeth Wilson talks about me. I have it on paper, in black and white. Tell me I’m lying.”
“You would never lie, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” Emily wiped her nose with the back of her fist.
“Then tell me what you heard.”
“It’s true, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. She talks about you.”
“You heard it with your own ears.”
Emily nodded, the tears shining on her eyelashes. “Mrs. Wilson said you were too big for your own boots. I heard her say it one morning to Mr. Barrett, when he brought her her Danish and coffee. She said that somebody would cut you down to size. She said you were crazy as a bedbug!” Seeing the look of shock on Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s face, Emily immediately excepted herself. “I couldn’t believe my ears!” she said. “I thought I was dreaming.”
“Then, it’s true.”
“It was something about the Christmas bonuses. How the officers were going to get less money this year. We all love you, Mrs. Fitzgibbons!” Emily saw her opening and broke out in a spate of passion. She was clasping her hands together fervently. “You should hear the way the girls talk about you in the rest room — about your hair and makeup, and the way you stand up for us, and how wonderful it is to have somebody tough in charge of the bank. We’d die for you! We really would. You should hear them.”
Ride a Cockhorse Page 18