“You have a daughter, don’t you, Mrs. Fitzgibbons. A teacher?”
“My daughter believes that glass pyramids have supernatural powers in them and that you can generate a sixth sense by listening to synthesizer music while chewing Sen-Sen. Barbara is so liberal that she cleans up behind her dog with her bare hands. If you so much as include her name in this article, I’ll close both your savings accounts. Do you have accounts here?”
“I do, he doesn’t,” answered the reporter, chuckling.
“You’re not a depositor?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons turned on the man with the camera and showed him a look that advertised better than anything so far the artistry of her cosmetician. Her face glowed like alabaster. She pouted.
“I’m not, but I’m going to be,” came his singsong reply.
“I should hope so. Julie,” she called, “get this gentleman an account application from René. The Golden Access application.”
“Could I get a shot of you leaning against your desk?” he said.
“Why not.” Already, Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s interview with the Telegram was pleasurable to all. She could feel their enthusiasm. They wanted her to be witty, to boast, be aggressive and outspoken. Mrs. Fitzgibbons came round the desk once more, leaned her buttocks against it, and continued with vivacity about the new administration, while the cameraman backed up to the door and took full-length shots.
“We’re going to promote like the devil, but we’re going to do it with taste. If you walk out of here with a toaster, it will be because you walked in with one. If our growth curve doesn’t take off for the moon,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, parroting words she had come across that morning in the Wall Street Journal while Bruce was blow-drying her hair, “if my quarterly projections aren’t met, I can promise you, heads will roll.” She waited for the reporter to get it down. “I’m here to double and treble our results. I’m not going to tolerate more of the same.”
“Mrs. Fitzgibbons,” the reporter interrupted, as before, “are you, in fact, the chief executive officer of this bank?”
“I am,” she said, decisively, at last.
“You are.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that is news,” he sang, while scribbling in his leather-bound pad.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s outrageous assertion, although thrown out impulsively, was not altogether impromptu; the idea had been flitting in and out of her brain for a few minutes, so that when the words actually left her mouth, she felt relief, a sense of having kicked a senseless obstacle from her path.
“Are you aware,” said he, “that you are the first woman to serve as chief executive officer of a bank in the entire area?”
“How could I not be?” she countered. “Mr. Zabac is a pioneer. The man is progressive. He knows what he wants, he knows what’s right, he’s not sexist, or small-minded, or parochial in any way. He wants the best he can get. I’m going to give him what he wants.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s invoking of Mr. Zabac was a conscious lie, the recognition of which only fueled her indignation; she was alive to the fact that she was seizing the post, and would deal with her enemies and detractors as they came to her.
“Will you be bringing in new blood?” asked the reporter.
“I’m the new blood!”
“Zabac retiring?”
“Louis will never retire. Behind the quiet facade, the man is a powerhouse. He’ll live to be a hundred. He’ll bury us all.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons couldn’t stop talking.
While she was revealing at some length the unpropitious fate that lay in store for the banks nearer at hand, that is, the chief competitors in town, Mr. Donachie, the guard, came to show off his new uniform.
“Those are the institutions,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was saying, “that are most imperiled by what is happening here today at Maple and Main.”
“Look, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” Mr. Donachie signaled from the doorway, then gestured with his chubby fingertips at the outfit he had just acquired. The effect was eye-catching. The black uniform he wore, and the glistening black cap that shaded his eyes, formed a faintly sinister picture that was ameliorated very little by Mr. Donachie’s swelling paunch or by the little brass American flag on his lapel. Mrs. Fitzgibbons didn’t pause to comment on Mr. Donachie’s satanic appearance, or even to look twice, as she was caught up in her own train of thought.
“They’re the ones that will feel the pinch,” she promised. “They’re the ones for whom insolvency could become more than just a word.”
Both the reporter and photographer were staring at Alec Donachie.
“Mortgage finance is my business. I’m committing us to growth. I intend to increase incoming deposits and the depth of our loan portfolio by more than thirty percent this year. Now, that’s going to hurt somebody. It’s got to. Let’s be realistic. Our capital-to-assets ratio is the envy of the region. We have the muscle.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons recalled a statement made by Mr. Brouillette in a recent conference. “For a year now, the spread between the cost of funds and the yield on loans has been under severe pressure. Those that can endure the pressure in the months ahead will survive, and over the long run will actually prosper at the expense of others. The day of reckoning”—Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt angry juices in her blood—“is coming fast for our competitors. I won’t mention their names, but I have the wherewithal to drive them into a corner!—and I have the will.”
Mr. Donachie had gone back to his post. The reporter was scratching furiously in his notebook. While being photographed, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was leaning against her desk, gesturing with her fist. The words bubbled forth with spontaneity.
“We’ve waited patiently for this day,” she said.
“You have known for some while, then,” the reporter prompted, “that you were to be named CEO.”
“We don’t jump impulsively. When the time is ripe, as it is now, we like nothing better than to take off the gloves. Our competitors are not cost-effective. They’re already headed into the red, and, believe me, it’s going to get much worse. They’re going to be dripping in the stuff! The red’ll be coming out their ears!” she exclaimed hotly, causing both newspapermen to glance up instinctively.
She had a vision at that moment of Mr. Curtin Schreffler, president of the nearby Citizens Savings Bank, a man of exquisite tailoring and a rather sniffy hauteur, being dragged out the front door of his bank by a couple of shirtsleeved, big-bellied city marshals and thrown into an unmarked sedan.
“It’s not going to help them to discover, today or tomorrow, what’s in store for them.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons ridiculed her enemies. “The people I speak for, and I speak for every prudent, honest-minded human being that lives and works in this valley, and every person, young and old, and the not so young and not so old, who are entitled to home ownership and a decent yield on their hard-earned money—the people I speak for are fed up with the shady dealings, the nosiness, the extra charges, the impoliteness, the inconsistency, the mathematical errors, the stupid late-night television advertising, the deaf and dumb tellers, the insensitivity”—Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in high gear and could have gone on like this all afternoon—“the rudeness, slovenliness, and incompetence that these local-yokel operators purvey”—she waited for the reporter to catch up—“as their ordinary day-to-day bilk-the-other-guy way of doing business.”
“Wow,” the photographer put in.
“I’m getting it,” said the reporter. “We’re fine, Mrs. Fitz.”
“I’m going to overrun them!” she said.
Until now, Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s oratorical skills had been just a memory, a winter’s evening in high school when she had suddenly taken the floor to dominate a debate. Julie and two or three others had collected outside the door, blinking in unison each time the camera flash went off. Mrs. Fitzgibbons had the wind up, her blood coursing with excitement.
“I’m not going around them, I’m going to roll over them.”
While speaking, she saw Mr. Neil Hooton go treading softly past her door. He peered
in at her suspiciously, then glanced away. Of all the officers at the bank, Mr. Hooton had always best satisfied Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s idea of what a successful banker ought to look like. A portly man with a headful of snowy hair, he wore little gold spectacles far down on his nose and had a taste for colorful suspenders and bow ties. Since her first days at the bank, she had admired him; she had sought his help and approval on a thousand occasions, even though his responsibilities as treasurer and director of the capital markets desk differed categorically from her own. Moreover, since the start of the monumental bull market that got under way in the summer of ’82, with the Dow averages surging higher and higher year after year, Mr. Hooton’s star had risen commensurately, to a point where it was generally recognized that any sort of emergency at the bank that might have incapacitated Mr. Zabac, as to require his staying at home, would have seen Neil Hooton mounting the marble staircase to take his place.
Later on, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons was showing the newspapermen out of her office, Mr. Hooton came back the other way. The stock market in New York was down significantly that Friday afternoon, and the man was pulling a long face. He strutted past her with an angry frown. Tiny pinpoints of paranoia assembled in Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s pupils, as she stared daggers at him. That quickly, the stoutish man had materialized as her most dangerous adversary. She stared fixedly in the direction of the treasurer’s office long after Mr. Hooton had passed from view.
Julie was waiting patiently nearby for Mrs. Fitzgibbons to acknowledge her presence. Anita Stebbins was standing next to Julie.
“Mrs. Baskin doesn’t need Anita,” Julie said, unable to conceal the satisfaction she was experiencing at treating Mr. Frye’s former secretary as a basket case. Anita was gaping at Mrs. Fitzgibbons. The flash of resentment she had shown yesterday on being removed from her job had given place now to a helpless, simpering expression.
“Mrs. Baskin said I was overqualified.” Anita smiled ingratiatingly.
“Is that a fact?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was still smoldering inside over the spectacle of Mr. Hooton marching past like an important financier, so that the sudden opportunity to fire somebody presented itself as a cathartic relief; in fact, it aroused physical sensations in Mrs. Fitzgibbons that she would have been ashamed to describe.
“What are you qualified to do?” she asked harshly.
“I know word processing.”
“Come along, speak up. Tell me what you can do.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons snapped out the words with great impatience.
“I type seventy words a minute, I know word processing, I’ve helped Jacqueline Harvey do payroll—I’ve been secretary to Mr. Frye since May of eighty-six—and back in the summer of—”
“You’re superfluous staff!” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, unable to hold back a second longer. “I see no place for you here.”
“Please, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” Anita was a pretty, dark-haired girl, who had never made an enemy.
“You’re finished.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was implacable.
“But I understand the bank.”
“Well, you go understand another bank.” She dismissed Anita in an even bigger voice, her eyes widened in consternation at the girl daring to answer her back.
“But, why?” Anita implored to know.
“Hold on, now,” exclaimed Mr. Donachie, stepping suddenly out of nowhere into the breach between Mrs. Fitzgibbons and the secretary, raising his hands to signify the uselessness of further objections.
“Take her to her desk for her things,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.
“I don’t have a desk!” cried Anita.
Unfortunately for Miss Stebbins, this last protest produced a humorous effect. Marcel, the part-time boy from the mailroom, and Julie laughed, while others in the vicinity stifled their amused reactions. Only Mr. Donachie showed a sober countenance; with his head in the air and his eyes bulging with voluptuous satisfaction under the leather bill of his black hat, he led Anita away by the elbow.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons explained later to Julie the necessity of eliminating certain “elements” among the staff. “When the boss goes, his loyal flunkies are left unprotected. They have to go. That’s how it works. When you take over authority at the top, you have to lop off some heads. If the man before me had understood that, and had had the testicles to scare people, he’d still be here. He’d still be chief. Leonard has no fight in him.”
Julie followed Mrs. Fitzgibbons into her office. She remarked in a soft, thrilling voice on Mr. Frye. “He keeps staring at you,” she said.
“Of course he does. You’re surprised? He wants me to jump his bones.”
“Mrs. Fitzgibbons!” She raised her hand to her face.
“He depends on my good nature now. He works for me. He doesn’t want to be scolded or fired. He wants me to drive him out to the forest, to some leafy ditch, and show him that he’s attractive to me.”
Julie shrieked with delight over Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s outlandish cracks.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons chimed in at once. “Show him that I like his body!” she cried, and loosed a peal of laughter that could be heard in the street.
When Mrs. Fitzgibbons arrived home that Friday afternoon, her daughter and son-in-law were just pulling up to the curb in their gray compact. Eddie was behind the wheel. If Mrs. Fitzgibbons had had any admirers in the past three or four years, her son-in-law was one of them.
“Wow, look at your mom,” he said, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons strode up to her door in her poison green dress with her coat over her arm.
Barbara was repelled at once, however, by Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s glamorous looks. She ridiculed her mother at the first opportunity. “What on earth have you done to yourself? Have you gone insane? You look like a high-class tramp.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons did not put her key into the lock, but paused at the door with an expression of wry forbearance. At close range, the beauty of her face and her dark, almost navy-blue eyes had magnetized Eddie Berdowsky. She looked taller than usual, too, and her hair glowed lustrously.
“What a change,” Eddie said. “You look super, Frankie. Look at her dress.”
“I have a date,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “I can’t talk now.”
Barbara’s gray gooseberry eyes, magnified unnaturally behind her big shiny glasses, shone with alarm. “What is she talking about?”
In fact, Barbara and her husband looked no more impressive in Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s presence than a pair of domestics reporting for work. Eddie was still wearing his faded blue uniform shirt from the electronic-game company where he worked, a long-sleeved shirt with the crisscross emblem of a baseball bat and hockey stick stitched on the pocket. Barbara wore a shapeless floral dress, a cardigan, and walking shoes with brown-and-white laces. They followed Mrs. Fitzgibbons indoors.
“I’ve been promoted at the bank, and I have a dinner engagement,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “Why don’t the two of you go off to the Gulf of Mexico and save some endangered birds?”
“What a comic!” Eddie loved his mother-in-law.
Ignoring them, Mrs. Fitzgibbons went into her bedroom to change. She was scheduled to pick up Terry at six o’clock. She spoke to Eddie and her daughter through the partially closed door, remaining out of sight. When the phone rang, and Barbara went to answer it, Mrs. Fitzgibbons pulled open the door. Eddie couldn’t credit his eyes.
Mrs. Fitzgibbons was wearing only her shoes and underclothes. “Was that the telephone?” she said.
Eddie stared up at her from the sofa with a sickly smile on his lips. She had changed into a pink brassiere; she was removing a skirt from a hanger. Eddie was speechless. Barbara never wore brassieres. She called such things “harnesses.” Women, Barbara said, were not draft animals. Moreover, Barbara was not built like her mother.
At length, Eddie spoke up. He was sitting forward with his legs apart, his elbows on his knees. “We came with news. Barbara thinks she’s pregnant.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons stopped toying with the hanger. “Please,” she said with disdain, “spare me.”
“She does, Frankie.”
Reaching, Mrs. Fitzgibbons closed the door between them. “Make sense,” she said.
“It’s true. That’s why we’re here. It’s ten to one, Frankie. Barbara thought you’d be thrilled. Hey, I thought so, too.”
Eddie had come now to her door and was speaking through it in an intimate tone. “Who are you dating?” he asked quietly. He was staring at the doorjamb suspensefully. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
When Barbara came back from the foyer, Eddie was pressed against Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s bedroom door, smiling crazily. “I told her about the baby,” he said.
“And?”
“I think she was not thrilled.”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons emerged then in a new gray angora sweater and black skirt. She was clasping a bracelet onto her wrist.
Barbara watched her mother with a grim, thin-lipped expression. “Someone named Terry is on the phone,” she said.
“Tell us about your new job, Frankie.” Eddie hovered close to Mrs. Fitzgibbons. He turned to Barbara. “Your mom has a date tonight.”
“What’s this about a baby?” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.
“Is that all you have to say?” Barbara’s anger was transparent. “Why aren’t you ever home lately?”
“You can’t even take care of yourselves.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons eyed the mirror behind the sofa. “Look at the two of you.”
“We thought you might help us now to get a mortgage,” Eddie said. He glanced at Barbara, whose face was an angry mask. “The way we talked about it—you know—”
Mrs. Fitzgibbons looked at them with genuine amazement. “You what?”
“You know,” Eddie blushed, and made a wreathing movement with his hand, “at the bank.”
Without pausing, Mrs. Fitzgibbons invoked the businesslike tone of one transposing a polite conversation to a less frivolous level of discourse. “You two are barking up the wrong tree. I run a business. We don’t show favoritism,” she said. “This is mortgage financing. This is not Monopoly. You have to have money. You have to be creditworthy.”
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