Shining Through (22 page)

“Thank you,” I whispered, as he slipped it on my finger. It fit.

Well, maybe just a little loose.

“I now pronounce you man and wife.” The man waited, then he cleared his throat with a very fake “Ahem!” We kissed so it would be over and the next couple could start their life together.

Then I looked into John’s eyes. They were filled with tears.

“Mom.” I shook my mother gently. It was five in the afternoon of my wedding day. The air coming through the open windows had a crisp, almost sharp, bite. It was that short, false New York autumn that comes in September and blows away the heat of the summer for a few days. I was chilly in my blue dress. My mother’s shoulder was cold, which was not surprising, since her blanket had fallen to the floor.

SHINING THROUGH / 159

“Five more minutes,” she mumbled, and curled herself up into a shrimp shape.

“Mom, I have to talk to you.” I switched on the lamp on her night table. She’d bought a pair of these lamps when she and my father were first married; the base of the lamp was an extremely fat cherub—even as cherubs go—standing on grapes he somehow didn’t crush; he wore a lampshade on his head. “Mom, please wake up.”

She put the crook of her arm over her eyes and said, “C’mon, Lin, baby. Don’t be a pain.” She’d gotten so thin that in the lamplight I could see the faint outline of the two bones in her forearm. “Two more minutes.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. The pillowcase was soiled with her hair cream and, I guess, her droolings; it hadn’t been changed since I’d changed it, the week before.

“Mom, I have to talk with you,” I said. I was trying not to get angry. I’d heard her come in around five-thirty that morning, and now I could see she’d slept in her dress. From the streaks of dirt at the bottom of the sheet, she hadn’t even bothered to take off her shoes, although they’d fallen off during her sleep.

One had dropped to the floor and another lay on what had been my father’s side of the bed.

On the way down to the Municipal Building, I’d had a yen to splurge and take a cab to Queens, pick up my mother and bring her with me. Mom, put on your good navy dress with the white ruffle collar and come watch me get married! I’d say, and she’d leap out of bed, splash some water on her face and say, Oh, Linda, sweetie, you’ve made me so happy you wouldn’t believe it!

“Go ’way,” she mumbled. “I got a lousy hangover.”

“It’s five o’clock, Mom. In the afternoon.” This didn’t seem to make a big impression on her. “I have some wonderful news for you.” Slowly, she lifted her arm away from her eyes and squinted at me. “John and I got married today.”

She couldn’t stop squinting, but she broke out into a huge smile. “Oh, Lin! A lawyer!” She reached out, squeezed my hand and wriggled around as if to sit up, but didn’t make 160 / SUSAN ISAACS

much progress. Her hand was freezing. I picked up the blanket from the floor and put it around her, tucking it under her feet.

Her big toe poked through a rip in her stocking. “When did you do it?”

“Today.” I started to apologize: “We decided at the last minute,” but since she didn’t seem to notice she hadn’t been invited, I stopped.

“Tell me
everything
. Did he get down on his knee and propose? That’s what Herm did. It was my sixteenth birthday, and he got down on his knee and said, ‘Will you be my birthday girl for ever and ever?’ Was your John romantic?”

What could I tell her? That at our wedding lunch, right after the waiter poured champagne and we lifted our glasses but didn’t clink them because either John didn’t want everybody in the restaurant to know we were celebrating or because clinking glasses was simply not done, or naive or something, he’d told me to take off my ring before I got back to the office, since he hadn’t decided how to “present the situation.” Naturally, I’d be leaving in a week or two. “No, make that closer to three. It’s not going to be easy replacing you.” He smiled, for the waiter, returning with menus, as well as for me. After the waiter walked off, John added, “You’re a good secretary, Linda.”

“A great secretary.”

“And very modest.”

“That too.”

“It will take a few weeks to come up with someone even remotely suitable.”

“And you’ll have to pay her more.”

“Probably.”

“So am I better at the typewriter or in bed?”

He put down his champagne glass. “Come on,” he whispered,

“let’s forget lunch. We can go back to the apartment and celebrate.” Not a chance. In fact, I told him, I had to take the rest of the afternoon off and get things set up for my mother. “Your mother?” he murmured. He couldn’t seem to remember I’d come from parents, not an employment agency.

SHINING THROUGH / 161

So after lunch I’d gone home to Ridgewood and stopped in to talk to Dr. Guber. He’d hugged me and said, “Hey, I knew the guy would marry you! Now relax, be a wife. I know a nice old maid, a practical nurse, over in Bushwick. She’ll live in and cook, clean, take care of your mother. Don’t worry,” he’d soothed me. “This girl’s got the constitution of an ox. For fifteen bucks a week, she’ll do everything. More than you could do, working all day.”

I put my hand on my mother’s icy shoulder. “Mom, listen to me. I gave a key to Dr. Guber—”

“That old fart?”

“Mom, he’s going to give it to a girl from Bushwick, who’ll be coming in to clean and cook whatever you want and look after you. I’ll pay her, and I’m going to give you money every week. But you can’t spend it all in one day.”

“Who,
me?
” my mother asked, and tried to wink, although it didn’t work. Her cheek just twitched. “So tell me, honeybunch, what’s your name now?”

“Berringer,” I said.

“Write it down for me,” she said, “so I can tell all my friends.”

I took a piece of paper and a pencil from my pocket and wrote

“Linda Berringer” for the first time, and added John’s home phone number.

“Here’s my phone number, Mom. And I’ll call you every day.

But if you need anything, you call me.”

“Listen, dollface, you did good.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You pregnant?” She gave me an inquisitive smile.

“Yes.”

“That’s what I figured. Linda, lovie, you’re one smart girl, hooking him before he could wiggle away to another rich one.

I’m
so
proud of you.”

Then, before she went back to sleep, she gave me a big hug and a kiss.

It wasn’t until a few minutes after six, fighting the end of the crowd rushing down, that I pushed my way up the sub-162 / SUSAN ISAACS

way stairs on my way back to the office. I was wondering if, being a lawyer’s wife, I could have taken a taxi to see my mother. In John’s neighborhood, I’d seen rich ladies in suits and alligator shoes who stood on the corner of Park Avenue and raised one finger, and cabs pulled over and screeched on their brakes and drivers smiled.

I was preoccupied, coming up and out of the subway, wondering how John would give me house money, whether I’d just find it under a pillow or if he’d hand me two or three or four twenties—whatever lawyers’ wives get—every other Friday, the day he got his check. And how was I supposed to know what it was for? I figured, okay, groceries, newspapers, a lipstick. Do lawyers’ wives say, Darling, I need an extra forty for a sweet little peau de soie at Tailored Woman? What if he forgot to give me anything? Was I supposed to remind him?

Anyway, I was almost at the top of the steps, slipping my wedding ring off and putting it in my pocketbook, thinking that it was going to be pretty embarrassing, but I was going to have to ask John for a new winter coat because the old one not only was embarrassingly ratty, with an unsewable rip under the left arm, but wouldn’t button over my belly when the time came, when—not more than two seconds after I’d gotten up to the street—I slammed into Gladys Slade.

“Excuse me,” she said. She was so busy being polite, she hadn’t seen me.

Those were really her first words to me since we’d come to the understanding that she’d keep quiet. Of course, she included me in a “How are you?” if I was coming through the door with a group of the girls. To do anything else would be to call attention to the fact that I’d done something terrible that called for a boycott, and she was nervous enough about my “power” over John that she kept herself under tight control. Any “Hello” or

“What’s new?” was just in self-defense.

To tell the truth, the only reason I missed my friendship with Gladys was that on a lot of Sundays we went to the movies together; since I’d started seeing John seven days a SHINING THROUGH / 163

week, I hadn’t been to a single movie. I’d missed Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell in
Broadway Melody of 1940
, and I was dying to see Laurence Olivier in
Rebecca
, even though Joan Fontaine was so whiny I always wished her leading man would smack her across the face and say, Shut up, you pain in the ass!

Gladys was huddled in her office sweater, which she’d worn home because of the chill. It was a too-loose cardigan, the color of Wheatena. Suddenly, I felt cold and massaged my empty ring finger with my thumb. “How’ve you been, Gladys?”

She nodded, and I guess only because I didn’t move out of the way, she said, “You weren’t at lunch today.”

“Mr. Berringer”—I blushed—“had a conference over at Two Wall. He wanted me there.”

“Well, I’m sure he was delighted to have you.”

“Look, Gladys, I’m not going to say anything corny, like ‘Let’s be friends,’ but at least we could be civil to each other. We’ve known each other so long and…Why don’t we go out for a drink, maybe early next week?”

“I can’t see any point to it.”

“There is no point, really. Just to talk.” What I wanted to do, after John “presented the situation” of our marriage, was to sit down and tell Gladys before she heard it from the office grapevine. I felt I owed her that. Or maybe deep down I just wanted someone to talk to. Funny, I had nobody now.

Gladys opened her pocketbook and made herself busy searching through her change purse to find a nickel for the subway. “What you’re obviously dying to talk about”—she spoke into her pocketbook—“I don’t want to know about.”

I should have felt angry, but all I could think of was how embarrassed…no, embarrassment was nothing compared to what Gladys was going to feel when she heard about me and John. Look, I wanted to reassure her, I’m never going to tell him how you talk about all the partners, especially not how you talked about him, how you went on and on about how gorgeous he was and said, “Can you
imagine
what he must look like in tennis clothes?”

164 / SUSAN ISAACS

She found her nickel. I stepped aside. “I’ll let you go, then,”

I said.

But she wasn’t quite ready. “I think I ought to warn you,”

Gladys said, “that your little interlude may be coming to an end.”

She stopped. She waited for me to beg her to go on. I didn’t.

“Mrs. Avenel is having a dinner party Saturday for all the partners. She’s hired a butler to pass around the hors d’oeuvres. Mr.

Berringer had been invited, and Mrs. Avenel had arranged for a
very
eligible girl to be his dinner partner, but…”

Her long, dramatic pause was so overly long and dramatic that I finally lost patience. I knew she was out to hurt me again, and I couldn’t be hurt. Well, not by her, anyway. “But what, Gladys?”

“He called Mrs. Avenel this morning and told her”—she gave a long, supercilious sniff—“he’d met someone and was
getting
married!
”

I asked softly, “Did he say if he was still going to the party?”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you. Is he going?”

“
Yes
, he’s going.” Her tone turned into a sneer. “With his fiancée.”

No, I was dying to say. With his wife.

Right after we’d finally turned out the lights, I’d asked John when I could wear my ring to the office. “Oh,” he’d murmured.

I waited. “Whenever,” he finally said. “When you went to your mother’s, I spoke to Ed about our…and your leaving.”

“Did you tell him I was—”

“
No
.” He turned his pillow over and, before he went off to sleep, added, “Stop worrying. He said it was fine with him.”

Well, it was the day after my wedding and it wasn’t fine. I was standing in front of Mr. Leland’s desk because he hadn’t asked me to sit down, and I was being yelled at by a man who was able to yell without raising his voice.

“Did it occur to you at any point, Mrs. Berringer, that you SHINING THROUGH / 165

had responsibilities to someone other than yourself?” Edward Leland was furious. “Did you ever consider that apart from the damned nuisance of engaging another bilingual secretary, it usually takes a minimum of ten weeks to get someone security clearance for the sort of work you’ve been doing? You’re cleared for secret work. Do you think we can pick some German-speaking stenographer off the streets of Yorkville and dictate our codes to her? It could take weeks,
months
even, to find someone whom we can even approach for an FBI check.

“You know how things are heating up here. You know that the volume of this…this sort of work has increased a hundred-fold. What am I supposed to do if I have a message to send tomorrow? Or three or four weeks from now?” I couldn’t get an answer past the lump in my throat. “Send it down to Washington for fifty idiot bureaucrats to pass from hand to hand before they translate?” His face darkened. “Ask your husband to type it up?”

“Please, I’ll be glad to—”

“To what, Mrs. Berringer?”

“To do whatever I can.”

“You’re a married woman.”

“No matter what your wedding night is like, you don’t forget shorthand.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that.

Neither could Mr. Leland. “I don’t need clever retorts. I need a secretary with security clearance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I assumed—obviously wrongheadedly—that you realized that despite the seeming simplicity of the letters I’ve been dictating, they serve a purpose.”

“Mr. Leland,” I began. But then I started crying. Not just a few cute tears. Real, true weeping. I covered my face with my hands, and as I did, my pad and pencil dropped.