Shining Through (15 page)

He interrupted my thoughts. “I’ll need you for at least an—”

But then all of a sudden he just walked away. Like I hadn’t been there, like he hadn’t stopped to talk. He just strode down the hall toward his office, taking confident, there’s-only-me-in-the-world, senior-partner steps. I turned SHINING THROUGH / 105

around; then I saw what Mr. Leland had heard. It was Mr.

Conklin, an associate who would never make partner because he wore bow ties. It was spooky that Mr. Leland had
known
Mr.

Conklin was there; even when he’d been talking to me, acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world, he’d been listening, not trusting.

Mr. Conklin looked at me a little strangely: Why was a secretary standing alone in the middle of a corridor? And then I realized that was exactly what Mr. Leland had wanted him to see: a secretary. A secretary. Big deal.

Late in the afternoon, John came back from a meeting in the conference room. As he walked past my desk, his jacket sleeve touched my shoulder. Naturally, I was as cool as a cucumber; I jumped so that I nearly ripped out the
Kapital
to
Kartoffel
page of my German-English dictionary. He murmured, “In my office, please.”

This time I was all set with my pad. But John just put a small piece of paper, the kind torn out of a pocket diary, on the far edge of his desk near where I stood. I waited for some clue—a nod, a wink—but I got nothing. I didn’t exactly rush to reach for the paper, but since he didn’t yell, Hey, what do you think you’re doing? I picked it up. It said: Hebel’s, 325 East 87th Street.

When I looked up, he said, “Seven-thirty.” And when I looked back down at the paper, he added, “That’s all for now. Thanks.”

Unless you were a sauerkraut tycoon, there was no reason to like Hebel’s. It was one of those phony gemütlichkeit places in Yorkville where waiters from Saxony ran around in Bavarian lederhosen. Their pale, fat thighs looked like bratwurst. Beside the cardboard Wiener schnitzel on the plates they were toting were balls of potato mixed with sauerkraut, sprinkled with caraway seeds; they looked like bombs made to Luftwaffe specifications.

Hebel’s was a German restaurant strictly for Americans. It was always advertised in the papers, a place where some 106 / SUSAN ISAACS

tourist from Indiana would say, Gee, Mary Lou, let’s do something crazy and try this here Nazi food so we can tell the folks back home.

I sat alone at the table, ignoring the beer stein collection on the high shelf that ran around the restaurant. I made eyes, noses and mouths on the frosty outside of my water glass. John wasn’t there, even though it was ten to eight. So that’s when I started feeling sorry for myself again; if I’d had a hankie, I would have dabbed my eyes. I saw myself starring in a silent movie—the country girl led down the garden path by the city slicker: seduced, abandoned. There’d be a close-up, I’d blink a couple of times, my mouth would form a big, sad “O” and then the words would flash on the screen: Oh, the shame of it all!

That was so corny even I couldn’t stand it. Anyway, if I still needed to be pathetic, I could feel sorry for myself all the way home. It was time to go. John—who in all the years I worked for him had never been more than forty seconds late for anything—wasn’t going to show. So naturally, just as I pushed back my chair and stood up, my head crashed into his chin.

“God, oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said, with much too much heartiness for someone who’s just been clipped. “Fine.”

Slowly, we both lowered ourselves into our chairs. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

I wasn’t really ready to trust my voice, so I just shook my head. He moved his finger a tenth of an inch and a waiter leapt to the table, responding to John’s handsomeness, his authority—his rightness—with menus and a wide lackey’s smile.

The two of us got very busy for a few minutes examining the menus. You would have thought John was going over the toughest contract of his career, the way he was reading every word. I kept sneaking little looks at him. Hey, I wanted to ask, how come you were twenty minutes late? You left the office a half hour before I did. Where were you? He wasn’t SHINING THROUGH / 107

giving out anything, except, suddenly, a stare—right into my eyes. It made me nervous, but I could learn to live with it. His eyes, locked on mine, were something! Funny, but I never realized what beautiful eyelashes he had. They were light, but long, and they made thick shadows on his cheeks.

I tried to take in everything: the comb marks in his hair, the bulge of his knuckles. But then the waiter came, and John looked up.

“What would you like?” he asked me.

“Gee, well…I’m not…uh…Whatever you’re having.” My shining hour.

I was so nervous I didn’t even hear John order, but two minutes later the waiter brought out two plates of stew; it had probably been simmering since the day of von Hindenburg’s funeral. The way it was heaped on the plate, this was the cook’s last chance to get rid of it. They must have been shouting with glee in the kitchen.

The waiter opened a bottle of wine. I couldn’t believe it!
Wine
.

I sipped (I once read in
Look
: “Ann Harding delicately sips champagne by her swimming pool”), which was a plus, because so did he, because that was obviously what you were supposed to do. Both of us studied the mound of food in our plates with passionate concentration.

Don’t think I didn’t try to start a conversation. “Have you been here before?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. He did give me one of his better smiles, but he wasn’t talking.

That’s when I remembered the advice the sob sisters give to girls. Never ask a question that has yes or no for an answer. Instead, ask him about his interests. I already knew two of his favorites. The law. And the interest he’d shown me the night before. Both of them were great icebreakers. What’s your favorite international trade agreement? And how about: That thing with your tongue—did you ever try it on Nan?

John poured himself more wine.

108 / SUSAN ISAACS

Part of me wanted to stay with him forever. Another part was so sure it belonged in Queens, it was all I could do not to bolt and run like hell for the subway.

The awful thing at a time like that is you actually
feel
your eyes, your cheeks, the little valleys between your fingers. You’re so miserable with your own wrongness, everything about you feels homely, clumsy. You’re afraid to eat—not because of the lousy food, but because you know you’ll dribble gravy down your chin. And the
worst
thing is to know it’s more than just a matter of not being able to make light conversation. You have real questions you can never, ever ask: Are you embarrassed? Are you ashamed?

Are you going to fire me? Or wait a few months—so I won’t think it’s because of what I did with you—and then fire me?

Now that you’re not drunk…did you like it?

Did you really mean it when you said I was beautiful?

Are we going to do it again?

If we do, you don’t want me to call you Mr. Berringer. Do you? And I can’t call you John. Should I just not call you anything?

Is this your way of saying thanks and goodbye? (My mother would say, No, Linda, dollface. A man of his caliber would give you at least perfume—and I
don’t
mean just eau de cologne.) But if this is the big kiss-off, I thought in that silence, then what about me? I know—as you often dictate—it is not germane to the matter at hand, but if these are our final moments, if I have nothing more to hope for, then how can I bear the rest of my life? If this gloppy stew now and, later, memoranda of law at some other firm and watching Hitler consume the world are my present and my future, then why—

It was weird, but just then, at my saddest, I began to feel lighter. Better. And of all reasons, because I remembered I was also working for the tan, scary Mr. Leland. Spy stuff. It made me a little excited. I started wondering how Mr. Leland would explain his new color to his friends. Mountain SHINING THROUGH / 109

climbing, Chip. Bit of a windburn, Dick. Deep-sea fishing. Golf.

Polo. Tennis, Bob. The rich have a million opportunities to change color.

“Linda.” I jumped, even though John’s voice was so soft it barely made a sound. My imagination had been sneaking around, following Mr. Leland to Denmark.

“Yes?”

“It’s getting late. Let’s move on.”

“Move on?” I repeated, not quite daring to get what he meant.

He didn’t explain. One hand signaled the waiter for a check.

The other hand moved under the table. Hidden by the cloth, it showed me specifically what he had in mind.

8

A
ll those nights I had been working—legitimately working—I had never really given a second thought to my mother. Sure, we weren’t having dinner together anymore, but all dinner was for her was pushing a hamburger around her plate, giving it exercise; I ate, we talked.

So when my nights with John began, when I began coming home at what my Grandma Olga would have called a disgraceful hour, I didn’t think it could make any difference. Work didn’t end until eight or nine at night, and then we went to his apartment, and then…so what if I was getting home in the hour before dawn? My mother wouldn’t know. She never toddled in before daylight. How could she possibly miss me? Ten o’clock, midnight or four-thirty: it was all the same to her.

And even if she had known, I wouldn’t hear any motherly shrieks of dismay. She’d squeeze my hand, kiss me, encourage me: Linda, sweetie, stay overnight! Buy yourself a black brassiere and it’ll pay off—in spades! He’ll be taking you to a furrier by August!

But then one Saturday afternoon, I glanced at my mother and actually felt that shiver of recognition they write about in serious
Saturday Evening Post
short stories. My mother had become a sick old lady.

Not that she acted it. “Baby doll,” she cooed, as we walked past the German bakery on Metropolitan Avenue, with its basket of shellacked pumpernickels. We were walking arm-in-arm, like fifteen-year-old best friends. “I can’t 110

SHINING THROUGH / 111

stand
the suspense anymore. So he gave you dinner, right?” I nodded, and then—fast—managed to grab her around the waist, just in time to keep her from falling. There hadn’t been a curb or a stray pebble; for the third time that day, she’d stumbled over nothing. “Okay, dinner, which is very nice,
especially
with the wine. I mean, it’s a real gent who orders wine. The small fries with a couple of bucks in their pocket are always shoutin’,

‘Waiter, champagne.’ Not Johnny…What’s his last name?” A car backfired.

“Berringer.”

“Oh, yeah, right. You know, I
like
B names. Anyway, Linda, lamb, what I want to ask you is this….”

She looked me right in the eye. The whites around her huge, gentle brown eyes were a dull yellow and shot through with red veins.

Despite her white summer dress, scoop-necked, sleeveless, splotched with its pattern of pink and purple daisies, there was nothing even remotely young about my mother anymore. Her skin had turned from luminous to waxy; it was sickness, not just a drunk’s pallor. It was such an awful shock.

Of course, she didn’t notice how I felt. She just babbled on.

“Did Johnny give you anything else?”

“Like a present?”

“Lin
da
, you know what I mean, and I do
not
mean a box of chocolate creams. Did he…did you do it?”

My mother’s voice was not exactly well-modulated, and we were just passing Hugo’s Dry Cleaners, where there was actually a line outside; half the neighborhood were bringing in their wool coats and blankets. “Shhh!” I hissed. Ridgewood was mainly German, plus a little Irish, a little Polish. It liked a few steins at the beer garden, potluck suppers at church, and well-swept front stoops. It did not like public discussions about doing it.

“Don’t ‘shhh’ me. I wasn’t talking
that
loud,” she whispered.

Some whisper: more like foghorn on an empty ocean.

Just then, a middle-aged couple with matching gray hair, carrying their itchy winter coats, passed by on their way to 112 / SUSAN ISAACS

Hugo’s. My mother ignored the woman, but wiggled her fingers—a cute little “hi” gesture—and then winked at the man.

Some wink. It was like she was an act at the Palace and wanted to make sure some guy in the last row, balcony, didn’t miss it.

Well, no one missed it. The man went absolutely white but kept walking. His wife whined through her nose, “Walter, who is that?
Walter
.”

I pulled her along. “Walter?” I demanded.

“Gee, I thought his name was Arthur,” my mother said vaguely.

“Who is he?”

“He hangs out at Fritz’s.”

“What does he do?”

“He could drink you and me under the table. Now listen, sweetie, you and Johnny. Are you and him making beautiful music together? Oh, don’t give me a sour puss. It’s not such a terrible question.”

“I know, Mom.”

“That’s not an answer.” She wasn’t
that
dumb a blonde.

It wasn’t an answer, and why not give her one? She wouldn’t be shocked by anything I could admit to. A woman who could not remember the name of a man she’d had sex with but could probably describe the color and texture of the upholstery of his Chevrolet—that was not a woman who would gasp at the thought of her thirty-one-year-old daughter lying on top of clean sheets underneath a lawyer between Park and Lexington avenues.

“We’re getting along fine, Mom.”

“Tell me
exactly
what he looks like.”

All her attention was a little overwhelming. In my whole life, she had never shown so much interest before; but then, I’d never done anything so interesting. But here we were, a thirty-one-year-old legal secretary with pinned-back hair and sensible shoes, and a forty-seven-year-old drunk with brown age spots dotting her temples, gossiping about guys.

“He has blond hair, light, like ours, but not as full. You know, it’s the kind that flops when he walks fast. And he has dark blue eyes. His nose is regular, but—”