Ride a Cockhorse

by Raymond Kennedy

Dolores was tying a silk kerchief about her throat. “Do you want him to score?” she asked bluntly, evidently reveling a little in her cool professionalism.

  “Whatever it takes,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “I want him primed for tomorrow night.”

  “That’s my specialty.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “It really is,” Dolores repeated, happy to cite her strengths. “I’ll have him climbing the wall.”

  “Didja hear that?” Eddie smacked his head with the palm of his hand.

  Long after Eddie Berdowsky and Dolores had gone out to the parking lot, Howard Brouillette continued to sit forward in his chair, sweating freely and rubbing the flats of his hands between his clenched knees. He shivered from time to time. No one paid him any mind, though. Soon Emily had found her voice again, and it was apparent that her feelings of adulation toward Mr. Brouillette’s call girl wife exceeded any rancor she might have felt over the fact that her name struck Mrs. Brouillette as being appropriate only for a piglet; and she joined Julie Marcotte in remarking on Howard Brouillette’s good luck in finding such an accomplished and exciting wife.

  “Isn’t she something else?” Julie observed.

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons nodded agreeably. “She’s very attractive. Your wife is very pretty, Howard.”

  “Thank you.” Howard’s eyes twinkled moistly behind the fogged lenses of his glasses, and he continued to scrape his feet mechanically back and forth under the table.

  Emily cupped her hands before her. “They stand up like this!” she said.

  “That’s vulgar,” Julie chided her.

  “You call that vulgar?” Emily retorted, not understanding. “If I were Mr. Hooton, I’d pay through the wazoo for something like that. He’ll be begging for mercy. That’s what I’d make him do. I’d make him beg for it. On his knees! He’d buy me diamonds and jewels until he was flat broke on his back, and I’d run over him with my five-speed Nissan Sentra!”

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons tried to speak up, but Emily interrupted her passionately. “I wish I were a man. I’d like to buy something like that for an hour or two.”

  Swiftly, Mrs. Fitzgibbons reached and dealt Emily a noisy clout on the ear. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’d I do?” Emily howled in pain and jerked backward.

  “Are you deaf?” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  “Mrs. Fitzgibbons was trying to talk,” Julie chimed in.

  “I was talking,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  Julie scolded Emily. “You’d better watch your mouth.”

  “But I didn’t mean it!” Emily clutched her ear.

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons was leaning forward with her hand in the air, contemplating the merits of a second slap. Emily cowered and held up her arm.

  “The Chief was talking,” Howard attested. At the sound of his voice, Emily burst into tears.

  “How was I to know if I didn’t hear her?” Emily whined.

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who had not struck anyone in years, not since childhood, appeared fully prepared to continue to do so now. She looked angry.

  “Please.” Bruce pleaded for an end to the fighting. “What’s going on?” The sudden violence at the table upset him.

  “I’ll never talk again!” Emily blurted tearfully.

  “You’d better not,” Julie said.

  “People who insult me go to the hospital,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  “I love you more than any of them!” Emily protested.

  “That’s probably true,” said Bruce, trying again to conciliate the dispute.

  “It is,” Emily cried.

  “Finish your dessert,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  “I’d do anything for you. You know I would. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do. I’d commit murder. I’d rob and kill. I’d chain-saw somebody.”

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued to point at Emily’s dessert, until Emily stopped talking and picked up her fork.

  NIGHT OF DIRE RECKONINGS

  FIFTEEN

  The tension at the bank the following morning was palpable from the moment Mrs. Fitzgibbons came darting in at the front door and knifed her way through the lines of customers at the windows. No one on the job was insensible to the cold electricity she generated. Her features were drawn and masklike. She looked like someone who had agonized for days over a question of great consequence. The fact that Mrs. Fitzgibbons had not slept more than four hours a night for more than a week contributed to her edginess. She couldn’t sit still at her desk for prolonged periods and often snapped at people in a way that intensified the spreading alarm, as when she interrupted Leonard Frye in mid-sentence and told him not to bore her with a detailed account of his Hartford business trip.

  “It seemed to me a success,” he protested politely.

  “Summarize your views on paper. Prepare me a written report,” she told him. “If I like the terms, I’ll sign off on it. If I don’t, I won’t.” She scowled at him then from behind her desk. To talk to her former boss in such a peremptory fashion sent a stab of sexual excitement up and down her legs. She shivered at the pleasure of it. “Do your homework, Leonard. Don’t come to me unprepared. You’ve been in this business long enough to know that.”

  Her rudeness pained Mr. Frye. “It could be a feather in your cap,” he suggested softly.

  “Please, spare me the blandishments.” She patted her desk rhythmically then with the flat of her hand and repeated her instructions in the pedagogical style of a grade school teacher. “Type it on a sheet of paper and give it to my secretary.”

  Before departing, Mr. Frye lingered a moment, betraying his infatuation.

  “Go along back to your work,” she said. “You can beat off later.”

  This parting obscenity sent Mr. Frye twitching and blinking back to his desk. Mrs. Fitzgibbons couldn’t help herself. In no time, she was exacerbating the general nervousness of the place by railing on the telephone about the competitor banks in the area. Her rising voice penetrated the surrounding quiet. Jack Greaney, making his way to Julie’s desk, thought better of it and returned to his post.

  At the same time, no one was indifferent to the steady surge of new business. The number of interest-bearing checking accounts had practically doubled in a week. Savings deposits mounted by the hour. No one on the staff could question seriously the triumphs of their new chief. If her manner was chilling, it only nourished the impression of her invincibility. However, to aggravate matters, it was during this same morning that Mrs. Fitzgibbons learned about the graffiti someone had scribbled in the men’s room, a slanderous slogan to which she reacted with textbook paranoia. Mrs. Fitzgibbons summoned her guard and marched him straight in. There, above the porcelain urinals, was scrawled in black spray paint the legend: “Frankie Fitz Is a Fascist Pig!”

  After dispatching Alec to the basement, to get someone from maintenance to eradicate the hateful words, Mrs. Fitzgibbons retreated to her office. No matter how fair or generous she tried to be, there were always those gutter rats and back-stabbers creeping about with murder in their hearts. Her flesh went cold at the thought that someone in their midst could perpetrate such a sordid act.

  As it happened, though, the first extraordinary occurrence of the day did not originate with Mrs. Fitzgibbons. It started with a sudden shout from someone in the back offices. An instant later, Mr. Hooton was standing in the doorway of his office, waving a sheaf of papers in his hand and demanding an explanation. He was in a fury. The sight of the massively built man, his physical frame shaking with outrage, was not that of a displeased employee but of an infuriated boss. The shock of white hair on his head and his bushy white eyebrows made his face a brilliant red.

  “What in God’s name is this?” Mr. Hooton repeated himself in a belling, mooselike voice. He shook the paper in anger at the man sitting before him. The recipient of his thunderous demand was none other than Lionel Kim, his assistant.

  Mr. Hooton hollered anew: “What do I have in my hand?”

  Going quic
kly to her door, Mrs. Fitzgibbons forgot momentarily who she was and felt a stab of fright at the picture of Neil Hooton quivering in rage. No one at the bank had ever seen its like. Mr. Hooton, respected by all as the soul of smooth, managerial polish, stood forth in the doorway in an awesome light. Beneath his gaze, Mr. Lionel Kim cowered. He was speechless.

  “I told you market level!” Mr. Hooton continued shouting. “That was two hours ago! Now, this security transaction has gotten away from me. It’s down a point and an eighth!”

  Turning, and waving the sheaf of papers like a traffic cop, Mr. Hooton ordered Lionel Kim into his office. There, the hollering persisted for a full minute, and ended abruptly. “You can just look for another job,” he cried. “That’s what you can do for me. You can get out.”

  By dismissing the slender, delicate young man from his employ, Mr. Hooton could not have created greater resentment or primitive fear in Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s heart had he marched into her office and begun thrashing her with his fists. If there was one thing she had not anticipated, it was the possibility of Mr. Hooton stealing her fire. For several minutes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had reason to wonder if the stout man in the yellow suspenders might not intensify the drama even further by firing some more people. After all, he had the authority to do so in his own department. Like any strategist who has committed the classic blunder of expecting his enemy to behave in accordance with his own schemes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was left with her wings clipped. The man whom she reviled and dreaded most of all had disarmed her. The boldness of his act augured even worse things to come, being just the first step, that is, in an effort to usurp authority.

  Presently, Mr. Hooton came bustling out of his office, only this time the target of his frustration was clearly Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself. He was vaporing away in a resonant voice, as he headed for the stairway leading up to Mr. Zabac’s office. “These dilettantes who don’t know bunkum!” he threw out. “Boiler room bimbos who don’t know a bank note from a Band-Aid—who learned what they know about finance down at the Holy Rosary sisters’ school on Mosher Street!”

  For a split second, the neon glow of the copy machine painted Mr. Hooton’s face green as he hurried by it. He continued spouting insults even as he shot past Julie’s desk and Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s open door. “Nobody takes advantage of me! Certainly not some psychoneurotic fish-snapper who’s headed for the deep end. That’s too laughable!” he shouted. “That’s downright funny! That makes me laugh.”

  Unlike those at the bank, such as Felix Hohenberger, who attributed the big man’s outburst to the pressures of the Wall Street crash, Mrs. Fitzgibbons knew better. His loss of control sprang from motives as desperate as her own. She knew what he wanted. He wanted to vilify and defame her. He wanted to drag her out of her office like a common criminal. He wanted to beat the life out of her. Mrs. Fitzgibbons snatched up her telephone and dialed the man upstairs. She was too late.

  Jeannine Mielke deflected her attempt with a curt, precise response. “The chairman is talking to Mr. Hooton and is refusing all calls, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons hung up and shouted to Julie. “Get me Howard!”

  By pure coincidence, though, just as Howard Brouillette came hurrying out of his office, an altercation of an entirely separate nature broke out in the bank. It took place in the open space in front of the tellers’ windows. Three or four individuals were grappling with one another. Mr. Donachie was one of them. Depositors standing in line looked on in disbelief as the bank guard strove both to subdue the others and to disentangle himself from the struggling mass. The melee was a gratuitous occurrence, it was later established, and had arisen from the attempt by a rather burly customer to regain the place in line he had temporarily relinquished, and by the active resistance of two others to this effort. It eventuated in a noisy, scuffling, swaying knot of four men, lurching first toward the windows, then across the marble floor in the opposite direction.

  If nothing else, the sudden crisis attested at once to Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s own courage in an emergency. While the other employees looked on helplessly, she, arriving on the scene with Howard Brouillette at her heels, immediately took charge. She shouted for Howard to protect Mr. Donachie’s revolver. “He’s armed! Get it from him,” she said.

  In fact, the violence and danger worked an instantaneous tonic on her spirits, as did the sight of Mr. Brouillette emerging from the struggle clutching in hand Alec Donachie’s immensely long, blue-black .38-caliber side arm. Had Howard Brouillette possessed any understanding of Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s mental state, it is doubtful that he would have handed her the weapon.

  The revolver in her hand looked like a cannon. “Who said banking was a dull business?” she exclaimed, to the delight and relief of those looking on. After Howard and Mr. Donachie had separated the other three men, Mrs. Fitzgibbons inspired a general outburst of laughter when she dealt Alec his pistol, saying, “This must be yours.”

  “You’re one of a kind, Frankie!” a customer piped in admiration. Every time she opened her mouth, it brought an animated reaction, as when Mr. Donachie asked her if he should call the police.

  “You are the police,” she said.

  “We love you, Mrs. Fitzgibbons,” said a young woman.

  Marcel Sullivan, the youth from the mailroom, was standing at her elbow. “You go back to work,” she told him.

  The boy was agog. “You were wonderful, Chief.”

  “What’s your name?” She liked the fact that the young man called her Chief. He put her in mind of Terry Sugrue.

  “I’m Marcel.”

  “Marcel what?”

  Everyone looked on with interest as Mrs. Fitzgibbons, the supreme executive officer, devoted a moment of her time to question an employee of the lowest echelon. Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s cheeks and eyes glowed in the aftermath of the violence.

  “Marcel Sullivan,” he replied.

  “You do work for me?” she queried in a high-pitched voice, her chin raised interrogatively. Everything in Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s bearing bespoke magnificence, but most especially the expression of condescending interest that pinched her lips and set her dark blue eyes aflare. Given her mood of exulting egoism, it was no wonder that the sight of Mr. Hooton returning down the back staircase from Mr. Zabac’s office promoted powerful feelings of contempt for him. With Howard darting along at her side, Mrs. Fitzgibbons went out of her way now to put herself in the path of Mr. Hooton. Howard was by now thoroughly allied to Mrs. Fitzgibbons in the politics of the bank, especially as his wife, Dolores, had, in fact, fulfilled her assignment of the night before.

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons flung her words out as soon as Mr. Hooton drew near: “Imagine entrusting your life savings to the likes of that!” she said. Howard laughed obediently at her side.

  Mr. Hooton stopped in his tracks, then approached her. A rosy flush invaded his jowls. He reached with stubby fingers and took off his little gold eyeglasses. They confronted one another eye to eye. Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked quite splendid in her supercilious attitude, as she stood smiling before him. She mocked him. “Did you report me to the headmaster?” she said. Not only did Howard Brouillette laugh, but Julie, approaching from her desk, laughed also.

  “Your days are numbered,” said Mr. Hooton. His face shook with anger. “I’ll be here when the men in the white coats come for you. You need psychiatric attention!” With that, Mr. Hooton marched past her, with his head high and his shoulders back. “Candidate for the loony bin!”

  Mrs. Fitzgibbons clicked her fingers rudely at Howard. “Get into my office.”

  Howard was shaking his head sycophantically. “That man must have a death wish,” he said, as he closed her office door behind him.

  In a sudden tantrum, Mrs. Fitzgibbons picked up a tall stack of papers from her desk, and with both hands threw it at the wall. A nervous shiver ran the length of her body. “He insults me to my face. I have him in my hands.”

  “He doesn’t understand who you are.” Howard’s moral descent was fram
ed in his sallow cheeks and sickly smile.

  “Mind you,” she went on, “this pillar of the community is embroiled with a prostitute, a big-titted, hundred-dollar-an-hour whore from Lyman Street who looks like she could blow up the Goodyear blimp all by herself—and she works for me.”

  Howard was enthralled; he was sweating. “Dolores is the best. She’ll do what’s expected of her.”

  “If she doesn’t,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons retorted without skipping a breath, “you’ll be working my rock-salt detail this winter. You’ll be shoveling my driveway. I’ll have you picked up. I’ll have you booked. You’ll go away, Howard.”

  Howard’s lemony complexion admitted points of a red hue at the cheekbones. “Dolores’s got him good, Chief. You’ll see.”

  “Call her up! Tell her to start the ball rolling.”

  “Hooton expects her to call him at three o’clock.”

  “Now!” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “I want him out of here.”

  While Howard Brouillette spoke softly on the telephone to his wife, Mrs. Fitzgibbons paced the carpet, giving outlet to her nerves. “By midnight tonight,” she vowed softly, “if somebody out there isn’t floating in the water, I will be. Because I’ll never stop now. Then we’ll see how this organization ought to be run. They’ll never get me out. They’ll carry me out.”

  Howard was clutching the receiver to his head with both hands. His octagonal eyeglasses sparkled in the lamplight above Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s desk. He was telling his wife what to do. “It’s more important than that,” he whispered. “My salary is riding on it, Dolores.”

  “Your head,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  “My head,” said Howard.

  “Tell her to talk dirty,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

  “Talk dirty to him,” Howard repeated dutifully, in a soft voice. “Do what you’re told. Get him out of here. That’s imperative. That’s from the Chief, Dolores. Make sure you’re in bed with him from five to seven. That’s the sine qua non.”

  Mrs. Brouillette must have sought clarification of her husband’s Latin locution, as he repeated his meanings. “That’s the most important part. Just telephone us at the old German Club.” Howard listened at length then, as Dolores repeated her instructions. He revealed a sudden vein of frustration, however. “It isn’t just fun, Dolores!” he cried into the phone. “Does everything have to be fun?” He smiled sickishly then at Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who stood by her desk, watching him. He lowered his voice in warning: “The Chief can put you away, Dolores. You know what that would mean. No more satin sheets, no ostrich boots. No champagne weekends. No new boat.”