“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jessica said, drooping lugubriously.
During the first few weeks of Billy’s new job, the vast office next to Mrs. Force’s was empty. The Ikehorn Enterprises New York headquarters occupied three floors of the Pan Am Building and from the president’s office, thirty-nine floors above the street, all of Park Avenue unrolled into the dim distance of Harlem. Ellis Ikehorn was on a world tour of his various subsidiaries. His corporation, which Billy was only beginning to understand, reached into a circle of overlapping areas: land, industry, lumber, insurance, transportation, magazines, and building and loan companies. Linda Force talked to him several times every day by phone, sometimes for as long as an hour, and dictated a great quantity of letters to Billy after each conversation. Nevertheless, there was a feeling of a summertime lull in the offices in spite of the hundreds of employees moving busily about their tasks.
Billy was delighted when Mrs. Force asked her if she’d like to join her for lunch on a day when she didn’t have to eat at her desk while she patiently waited for one of the daily transatlantic phone calls. She was curious about her superior, a rounded, graying woman in her early fifties, who displayed no quirks of personality or dress but whose calm strength was obvious the minute you met her. Mrs. Force was commanding, in a beautifully unassertive way, Billy had observed. She had the vast, complicated business of Ikehorn Enterprises at her fingertips; she was on good-natured first-name terms with the presidents of all the Ikehorn companies; her word, in the absence of Ellis Ikehorn himself, was as final as his own, and as unquestioned. Here, certainly, was a woman at the top of the ladder.
“I’m a Katie Gibbs girl myself,” Linda Force told her after they ordered, smiling in memory. “Hell, wasn’t it?”
“Sheer hell,” Billy sighed, delighted to find her theories of how to succeed in business validated. “But worth it, wouldn’t you say?”
“Definitely. Of course one can’t give them all the credit There is just so much they can do.”
“Yes,” Billy breathed fervently.
Mrs. Force went on, musing. “When I think that all through college I couldn’t take shorthand—a crime, really.”
“What was your major in college?” Billy ventured.
“Prelaw at Barnard, with a heavy emphasis on business law, and I squeezed in some office management courses at CCNY during the summers,” Mrs. Force answered, sipping her ice tea. “Then I had a year at Columbia Law School before the money ran out. I’d been studying accounting during the summers, fortunately, so I was able to become a CPA without wasting too much time. As a matter of fact, it was during that last year that I went to Katie Gibbs, as a backup position.” She started on her chicken salad with gusto.
Billy was speechless. She had flunked algebra and geometry at Emery and was rocky on long division. Law—accounting—office management!
“Oh, it sounds a bit complicated now, but when you have to make a living—” Mrs. Force continued, looking encouragingly at Billy. “Why, twenty-five years ago I started just where you are today, as secretary to Mr. Ike-horn’s secretary.”
“But you’re his executive assistant!” Billy protested.
“Oh, that—that’s my title for—inspirational purposes I suppose. But in actual fact I’m just his secretary. Of course, I’m a super executive secretary, I don’t deny that. And it’s a marvelous job, but there is just no room in a business like this for a woman to go farther. After all, when you really think about it, what could I be? Plant manager? Board member? Chief counsel? I don’t have the proper training and I don’t have the ambition, frankly. Of course, without my law and accounting background I couldn’t have come this far.”
“Aren’t you being very modest?” Billy said, without much hope.
“Nonsense, my dear, just realistic,” Mrs. Force answered briskly. “By the way, Mr. Ikehorn’s coming back on Monday and I’m putting on two other girls to help me besides you. When he’s here the amount of work triples. You may not see much of him, but you’ll know he’s here.”
“I’m sure I will,” Billy said in a fiat voice. So she was one of three secretaries to the secretary of the boss, and trapped. It would be fatal to her employment record if she didn’t stick it out in her first job for at least one year, especially in such a prestigious company. Billy Winthrop, New York career girl, she thought ruefully. Well, at least it paid a living.
When Ellis Ikehorn entered his domain on Monday morning it was, Billy observed, something like Napoleon making a triumphant return from a successful campaign. The population of the office did all but stand up and give three cheers; he was followed by a procession of field marshals carrying heavy briefcases filled, unquestionably, with booty, and the big corner office immediately took on the qualities of a command post. Billy imagined, dourly that she could almost hear the sound of trumpets.
She was briefly introduced to Ellis Ikehorn by Mrs. Force as he left the building for lunch, and as she rose to greet him, she had the impression of meeting a westerner, not a New Yorker, a tall, deeply tanned man with thick, white hair worn in a crew cut, who looked a little like an American Indian because of his hooded eyes, his hawk nose, and the deep lines that ran to his wide, taut mouth.
Later that day, between letters, Ellis Ikehorn casually asked Mrs. Force, “Who’s the new girl?”
“Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop. Katie Gibbs.”
“Winthrop? What kind of Winthrop?”
“The Boston, Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts Bay Colony kind. Her father is Dr. Josiah Winthrop.”
“Jesus. What’s a girl like that doing in your typing pool, Lindy? Her father’s one of the top men in antibiotic research in the country. Don’t we fund the research he does? I’m sure we do.”
“Among many others, yes. His daughter’s here for the reason the rest of us are. She has to earn a living. No family money she told me, and you ought to know that even if her father has a research chair he can’t make more than twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand a year. That money you give goes for equipment and lab costs, not salaries.”
Ikehorn looked at her quizzically. She was earning thirty-five thousand a year with some stock options and worth every penny of it. Leave it to Lindy to know everyone’s salary.
“Did you make my appointment with the doctor?”
“Tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. He wasn’t too happy about the hour.”
“Tough.”
“Ellis, you’re a fucking medical miracle,” said Dr. Dan Dorman, the most eminent specialist in internal medicine east of Hong Kong.
“How so?”
“It’s not often I get the chance to see a man close to sixty with the body of a forty-year-old and the brain of a two-year-old child.”
“How so?”
“We’ve checked everything twice since you were in the other day. We did every lab test and X ray known to science, plus a few I invented as I went along. I gave you a going over that wouldn’t have missed an enlarged pore. There is no reason whatsoever for you to feel lousy.”
“Yup. But I do.”
“I believe you. You haven’t had a checkup in five years in spite of my requests. If you didn’t feel lousy you wouldn’t be here.”
“So what’s wrong? Think I’m senile?”
“I said the mind of a two-year-old because you treat yourself with a monumental lack of niceness—the ‘terrible twos’ they call them.”
“Do they now?”
“At two a child has tantrums when he can’t get what he wants; he’s physically active every hour of the day, messing in everything he sees; he sleeps only when he falls down with exhaustion; he eats only when he’s starving, and he drives everyone around him crazy.”
“Anything else?”
“For several months of his life he doesn’t have much fun because he’s so busy butting his head against obstacles. Fortunately for the human race, sometime around two and a half he starts to get more sense.”
“Cut the preliminary cr
ap, Dan. Spit it out.”
“Ellis, you have to stop treating yourself this way. You’re OK physically but mentally you’re working on a heart attack.”
“You mean cut down on work?”
“That’s too obvious, Ellis. Don’t play doctor with me. I caught your act years ago. How long since you’ve had a good time?”
“I always have a good time.”
“Which is why you feel lousy, I guess. What about fun?”
“Fun? Kids have fun, Dan. Don’t be an idiot. What are you going to tell me? Golf? Shit! Art collecting? Shit! Backgammon? Double shit! Politics, flying my own plane, deep-sea fishing, raising purebred horses, bird watching, becoming a patron of the ballet? Come off it, Doctor. I’m not too old to do anything the fuck I want to, but culture and sport aren’t among my aspirations.”
“How about pussy?”
“You shock me, Dan.”
“Like hell I do. There are only two things you’ve ever enjoyed Ellis since I’ve had the honor of being your doctor: business and pussy. How much time do you give to pussy these days, Ellis?”
“Enough.”
“How much exactly?”
“You sound exactly like a pimp. Since Doris died—I guess two, maybe three times a week when it’s around. Less if it’s not easily available. Maybe once a week, maybe not at all for a week or so—or two—when I’m really getting things done. I’d like to see how much time you’d have for pussy during an eighteen-hour day, Dan.”
“You just proved me right. Ellis, you’d better start acting sensible. Get yourself a regular woman who doesn’t give you heartburn. Begin to treat yourself like a human being. Be good to yourself for once in your life. You’ve got all the money in the world, but you don’t have all the time in the world. It’s a waste of breath to tell you to take it easy, but I can say indulge yourself.”
“Indulge myself?”
“Look, Ellis, how the fuck do I know what you want? Maybe you’d like to buy the Taj Mahal and walk around polishing the marble. Maybe you want to get dead as fast as you can. So go around the world a dozen times and forget what a pair of boobs feels like. Who knows what you really want to do with the last part of your life? But whatever it is. you’d better start thinking about it.”
“You’ve made your point, Dan. I’ll give it some thought. The body of a forty-year-old man, you said?”
“That’s just a medical opinion.”
“Which is what I came to you for. Not the other stuff, you closet shrink. In just about six years I’ll be eligible for Medicare and I’ll get rid of you then. You talk too much.” Both men got up and walked to the door of the doctor’s consulting room, their arms affectionately over each other’s shoulders. Dan Dorman was one of the few men in the world Ellis trusted completely.
Billy and Jessica had established a ritual: One night a week they had dinner together, come what may. Otherwise, they risked missing each other entirely for weeks at a time because of their complicated social lives.
“What’s Ikehorn like, Billy?”
“I’ve only seen him for a few minutes at a time really—it’s hard to be sure, but I think, I’m almost certain, that he used to be a ten.”
“Used to be?”
“Jessie, the man’s almost sixty. I mean, after all.”
“Hmmmmm. Jewish, isn’t he?”
“The Walt Street Journal thinks so. Fortune doesn’t. The Journal also thinks he’s worth about two hundred million dollars and Fortune thinks it’s more like one hundred fifty million. Nobody really knows. He hasn’t given an interview in twenty years, and he keeps six people busy full time in our P.R. department keeping his name out of the media, refusing requests to speak, that sort of thing.”
“But what do you think?”
“He’s a little like a non-Jewish Robert Oppenheimer.”
“Ah-ha!”
“Or else like a Jewish Nelson Rockefeller, only taller.”
“Gracious!”
“Maybe a non-Jewish Lew Wasserman.”
“Goodness!”
“On the other hand—”
“Don’t stop!”
“Quite a lot—don’t laugh, Jessie!—like a Jewish Gary Cooper.” Jessica stared at her, goggle-eyed. That was the best combination she could imagine if she lived to be a hundred.
“All in all, he’s rather devastating. God, Jessie, you’re hyperventilating! Pull yourself together, girl.”
“Tell me everything you know. Where’s he from? How did he get started? Tell!”
“I’ve been doing a little quiet research. All anyone knows is that he started in an old factory in Nebraska with a sick company. Where it came from or what he was doing in Nebraska is a mystery. He made the sick company well and bought another sick company. When that company got well he bought another—not as sick a one that time. Finally, it got to the point where the canning company bought the bottling company, which bought the trucking company, which bought the insurance company, and the insurance company bought the magazine company because it owned the lumber company that provided the paper for the printing presses, which he also bought. Or maybe it was vice versa. That’s just the beginning. You know.”
“I didn’t really, but I do now. Thanks awfully.”
“Well you did ask!”
Ellis Ikehorn, to his amusement, found himself actually considering Dan Dorman’s advice. Every once in a while, in the middle of a conference or a phone call, one phrase of the many the doctor had used kept coming back to him, “the last part of your life.” It wasn’t one of the lines that Dan had laid special emphasis on, yet, more than anything else he had said, it illuminated reality. Ikehorn had never been interested in birthdays, but, at almost sixty, he reflected, they seem to start to mount up, whether they interest you or not. In principle he had nothing against the idea of indulging himself. He just didn’t know where to start. His wife, Doris, dead ten years before, had learned to indulge herself as soon as he started making real money, if you could call keeping forty rare Persian cats in fabulous luxury self-indulgence. Personally, Ikehorn had found it both messy and pathetic, a poor substitute for the children they didn’t have. But she was happy and busy all day with their snit-fits and ailments and eventual lyings-in, which she insisted on managing herself, attended by two vets, “just in case.” Ellis resolved to keep an eye out for opportunities to indulge himself. It was like finding a new company to buy: First you had to know what you were looking for and eventually it was bound to turn up.
In the middle of one night Billy was suddenly awakened by a bundle of Jessica landing on her bed, shaking her out of her sleep.
“Billy, Billy darling—it’s happened. I’ve found a ten and he’s the most heavenly man in the world and we’re going to get married!”
“Who is he? When did you meet him? Oh, stop crying, Jessie, stop it right away and tell me everything.”
“But you know all about it, Billy. It’s David of course. Who else could possibly be so wonderful?”
“Jessie, David is Jewish.”
“Well, of course he’s Jewish—I don’t sleep with any other men.”
“But you said—”
“I was an idiot. I thought I could keep it all under control. Ha! But I didn’t know David then. Oh, I’m so terribly happy, Billy, I just don’t believe it.”
“And how about Mumsie. How’s she going to like it?”
“She won’t feel nearly as bad about it as his mother will. Didn’t I ever tell you that David’s father is the senior partner of the second-biggest investment banking firm in New York? I didn’t always pay attention to your advice about staying away from German Jews, thank heavens. My mother will bear up very well indeed and my father will be the most indecently relieved man in Rhode Island. After all, I’m twenty-four, Billy, and Pa has been harboring this idea that I’ve been leading a life of sin.”
“He must have a dirty mind. A nice girl like you!” As Jessica shook her head happily over her suspicious parent, Billy remembered so
mething, “But how will you bring up your children? Jewish or Episcopalian?”
“That’s the one thing I can’t figure out. See, they’ll know everybody, so how will they be able to get away with anything? Well, let them figure it out—by the time they’re old enough there’ll probably be another way.”
“Oh, Jessie, what will I do without you?”
Ellis Ikehorn was waiting impatiently for Linda Force. She hadn’t appeared for work that morning and they were late in leaving for Barbados where he was going to meet the heads of two of his Brazilian lumber companies. Damn it, it was after nine, and he had three phone calls stacked up already.
Billy knocked timidly on the door of his office. She had never been inside since his return. When he gave dictation, he gave it directly to Mrs. Force, who passed it on to the three girls in the office next to her own.
“Excuse me, Mr. Ikehorn, Mrs. Force just called in on my line because yours were all tied up. She says she thinks she’s got the flu. She woke up this morning and feels too sick to even get out of bed. She said not to worry, her maid was there to take care of her, and she was terribly sorry to let you down.”
“Jesus, I’ll get Dorman to go over right away. The day Lindy can’t get out of bed! She probably has double pneumonia. OK, get your hat and coat while I call Dorman. Don’t forget your notebook. Do you have to call anyone to let them know you’re leaving for Barbados?”
“What, go with you? Like this?”
“Naturally. You can buy what you need when we get to Barbados.” The tall, tan man with the white crew cut turned impatiently to the telephone. “Oh, collar one of the other girls on your way out. She’s got to stay at Lindy’s desk and take messages. I’ll call in as soon as we arrive. Come on, we’re late.”
“Yes, Mr. Ikehorn.”
As they sped out to the airport where the Ikehorn Enterprises Learjet was waiting, Billy sat nervously next to her employer as he steadily dictated letter after letter. A warm spot was quickly developing in her heart for the late Katharine Gibbs.
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