Shining Through Read online

  “No. Nothing special,” John answered. What did I expect him to say? Take off your clothes? “I know I’ve given you too much.” When he smiled his eyes crinkled, so you couldn’t see their glorious dark blue, but the smile made his face glow; it made you feel you had your own sun to warm you.

  I popped back into English, where I sounded as well-bred as I had in German (that is to say, as far from being a Vanderbilt as a human being can get), but in which I felt much more comfortable. “Really, that’s okay, Mr. Berringer. I’ll try to get everything done by the end of the week.”

  Fat chance. We’d stopped being swamped six months earlier. Now we were drowning. The great thing about being one of the top Wall Street firms is you have the top clients: the biggest corporations and banks in the world. The bad thing is that before they pay you, you have to do work for them. Since John’s work was representing their interests in Europe, they all wanted ninety-seven times more work done than had ever been done before in the course of legal history.

  Half of them said, Get us (and our holdings) out of Germany. Now. The other half said, Hey, look at what those Nazis are spending! It costs a fortune to conquer Europe. Get us a piece of it. Now.

  “It would be great if you could catch up,” he said in English. “Oh, I forgot. Mr. Leland wants to borrow you this afternoon. He has a letter to go to Germany. Very simple. You can translate it yourself and send it off. Could you fit that in—without hating me forever?”

  “Yes, Mr. Berringer.”

  “And still be caught up by Friday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wonderful!” He looked up at me. “Miss Voss…”

  He stopped for a second, maybe to think what else he wanted. I didn’t care. I’d wait. While his mind was someplace else, I could study him. His mouth was open, just a little. What a mouth! Beautiful, not one of those thin, mean men’s mouths that look like an appendix scar. Full, but not too full. He’d be on top of me, roughing up my face with his, but then he’d bring his mouth over mine and—

  “Miss Voss.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Thanks. You can go back to your desk now.”

  My dream world was like all those European countries in the papers: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Albania. One minute beautiful. The next, destroyed.

  Listen, the Voice of Reason would probably butt in here, what you’re talking about isn’t love. It’s a crush: a common enough occurrence, n’est-ce pas? (The Voice of Reason sounds a lot like the executive secretaries, Vassar girls who work for the senior partners.) A working girl from Ridgewood, Queens…bright enough for what she is, but a suitable match for John Berringer, Esq., magna cum laude, Columbia College, editor in chief of the Columbia Law Review? How marrrvelously droll. (You get stuck in a booth in the ladies’ room a few times when the Vassar girls come in to powder their noses and you get to be an expert on how Voices of Reason talk.) Delightfully piquant. And a trifle touching too, this secretary’s dreams of “love” with a married man.

  Well, it may have been droll, but as I said to myself, over and over: Hey, this is love! Although not at first sight. I’d seen him for nearly ten years in the firm’s international department, from the time he was out of law school.

  We’d talked about John even then. He was ridiculously handsome, I told the girls, like a young movie star playing the Big Man on Campus role in one of those Cubby Cooper Goes to College—type movies. He was meant to be fifteen feet tall and black-and-white; he was too good to be real. I remember he’d worn white shirts so starched they could carry on a life of their own. He’d shared a secretary with three of the other young lawyers. When he had to write a letter in German, he dictated it to himself.

  Way back then, I was twenty-one years old and a secretary to one of the middle-level partners, P. Louis Tracy. You’d think there was something a little wrong with a guy who answers his phone, “Good ahfternoon. P. Louis Tracy.” There was: not his head, though; his heart. Nine years later, on the Fourth of July, 1939, P. Louis Tracy joined his wife at the bar of their country club after playing eighteen holes and dropped dead over his third Rob Roy.

  Even before P. Louis Tracy played his last hole, John had been made a partner—the only other member of the firm really fluent in German. Back then, the fact that he was about thirty times smarter than P. Lou hadn’t been a secret around Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley. But since, despite his brains, he was also about thirty years younger, he hadn’t been considered one of the important international partners. But suddenly he was; less than a week after July 4, John inherited P. Lou’s office, cases, percentage of the profits—and me.

  At first I looked at John and thought: Another pretty face. In fact, the prettiest. I can live with that. It definitely beats working for a guy with four chins. Okay, he dictates like a snail, but at least he gets it right—doesn’t make me retype fifty thousand times. John Berringer was going to be a good boss. But fall for him? Not me. Even though he was supposed to have a brilliant legal mind, all I could see was the gleam of the surface: eyes, hair, teeth. John shone—for everybody: Hello. You’re wonderful. I’m gorgeous. Life is grand.

  But late one January afternoon, when the sky outside looked like a thick black velvet ribbon, I glanced across his desk and realized he was beautiful. Deep-down beautiful—and more.

  Let’s face it. He was hot. Beneath his gloss, under his charm, he had it. It. John Berringer was one of those men on fire. It took a while for me to feel that heat beneath the cool impersonal brightness. But that afternoon, just watching his thumb flick the pages of a memorandum of law (dumb, but true), I suddenly knew.

  Unfortunately, from the way he flew out of the office the second he finished work, it was obvious Mrs. John Berringer knew too. Knew, and was waiting, because she loved everything he had to offer.

  On that last normal day, Hitler sent endless cables to his generals, Mussolini had several recorded temper tantrums, Neville Chamberlain took a long, silent walk, and the secretaries of Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley ate lunch. After all, this was America.

  Like just about every other day, the partners strolled out to their clubs around twelve-thirty. At twelve-forty, making sure the elevators had time to empty out so the partners couldn’t see their stampede, the young lawyers—the associates—made a mad dash for their restaurants. Five minutes later, the Vassar girls tippytoed off to their tearoom, where they met other Vassar girls from other law firms, probably to talk about what they were always talking about, like what Schubert had been played at last night’s symphony concert and who the really top-drawer Princeton men were.

  Exactly two seconds after they left, the regular secretaries raced to the conference room—ten or twelve of us, with lunch bags, at that giant rectangular table in that giant wood-paneled room. It was like eating inside a mahogany tree. Suddenly it was as if somebody yelled, On your mark…Get set…But instead of a gunshot, one enormous crinkle—the noise of ten or twelve sandwiches being ripped out of waxed paper.

  “Why I even bother to mention this, girls, is beyond me,” Gladys Slade began, her voice slightly muffled by Spam on white, “but Mrs. Avenel called four times this morning!” Gladys put on her haughty, high-class voice: “‘Gladys, my deah, do hate to disturb you, but would you get my husband on the line for one tiny second.’” Gladys shook her head. “She probably wanted his permission to flush.” Her boss’s wife called at least ten times a day. We nodded in sympathy because our mouths were full, and huddled in our sweaters.

  It was always cold in the room. We had to keep the windows open so the lawyers wouldn’t sniff out secretary-lunch smells and know we were eating in there.

  Gladys was Queen of Lunch. Better, actually. Gladys Slade—with beginning-to-gray brown hair cut into what was meant to be a neat Dutchboy but frizzed into crazed curlicues when the humidity was more than five percent, with hazel eyes a little too small and a little too close together—looked absolutely ordinary. Well, except for her nostrils: They were so immense she could have h
idden two salamis up her nose. But she was a born leader.

  Her being forty didn’t hurt, either. Gladys had been at the law firm longer than any other secretary, twenty-two years, and no one knew more about what was going on at Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley than she did. Someone—Shakespeare, George Washington—once said, Knowledge is power. She’d seen it all: Mr. Blair becoming under secretary of the Treasury, Mr. VanderGraff going bald, Mr. Wadley dying of a stroke while waiting for the elevator. She hadn’t actually seen him die—no one had—but she was one of the first afterward, while he was still purple. Gladys knew everything. And not just the big stuff. She knew who was doing what to whom, and probably how, when and where, but Gladys being Gladys, she never let on about the really sizzling stuff. She probably tuned it out; all Gladys thought about were clothes and hairdos and innuendos, not bodies. For her, life did not actually exist below the neck or under the vest.

  But for good old-style gossip, she was better than anyone. My dears, she would begin, like we were whispering in a corner at a society cocktail party, did I tell you who the widow Carpenter brought with her to the reading of the late Mister’s will? Her ‘financial adviser’! With a pompadour! I thought Mr. Avenel would have a stroke, because she insisted…

  Since I was Gladys’s closest friend, she turned to me first. “What about Mr. B, Linda?” It was just a regular lunch question. No one in the office, including Gladys, had a clue about what I felt for John. “Anything new?”

  “Who has time for anything new?” I answered. “We’re going crazy trying to keep up with Europe.”

  “What’s with Europe?” Wilma Gerhardt called from down the table. Her voice was so horribly nasal that every time she opened her mouth it was like listening to a bad vaudevillian attempting a Brooklyn accent. God knows no one else from that borough ever made you cringe like that at the wrongness of the sound, worse than the eeeeek of chalk on a blackboard. But she was saved from total awfulness by a single grace: her looks. Wilma was a knockout. “You going to Gay Paree or something, Linda?” She patted her dazzling dark hair; she was the only girl in the office who wore an upsweep every single day. Luckily for her, she had plenty of time for hairdos. Her typewriter was untouched by human hands.

  “What’s with Europe?” I repeated. I had to lean past Helen Rogers—who as usual was dribbling onto the shelf made by her bust (this time the shelf was dotted with little yellow dabs of egg salad)—and past Anita Beane, who was nineteen, dewy and engaged. “Wilma, you ever read a newspaper?”

  Gladys interrupted: “Linda, you’re not going to give us your Growing Nazi Shadow speech, are you?”

  “I’m just asking Wilma a simple question.”

  Wilma gave me a simple answer. “Why should I read a newspaper? The ink gets all over your hands!” For a second, Wilma was so thrilled by her brilliant, witty comeback that she forgot she was with the girls and actually broke into an acutely adorable giggle. It was a technique, like her eyelash-batting, she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted on women. She saved her talents for men, and they were talents not sneezed at; they’d helped get her a job eight or nine years earlier, in the pit of the Depression, while lots of inky-fingered readers of the New York Times and the Herald Tribune were stretching their hands high above their heads and taking swan dives off skyscrapers.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Adolf Hitler?” I demanded.

  “So is Mr. Berringer dictating letters to him?” Under the Brooklyn accent, her voice had a nasty edge. She could be tolerant of homely girls like Rose Guthrie in Trusts and Estates, who looked like Winston Churchill (or, more accurately, Winston Churchill’s bulldog), but anyone who had a chance of attracting a man’s attention—like me—was a threat.

  I’d always been intrigued by Wilma. Her entire life was dedicated to men and to getting them. She made no pretense that she cared about who the mayor was, or what Gladys had thought of Gone With the Wind. She never looked beyond her own cleavage. Did she choose to be that way? Or did it come naturally? Was her selfishness just self-protection, a byproduct of hard times?

  Sometimes I wished I could be like her, absolutely, contentedly selfish, not having to smile, not being forced to listen to Helen Rogers go into her umpteenth recounting of her Uncle Gus’s brother-in-law’s funeral, where they’d botched up the makeup on the late lamented, and it formed globules under the heat of the lights, so it looked as if the guy in the satin-lined box was sweating. Helen would recount: “His wife screamed, ‘Mickey! Mickey! You’re hot!’ And they had to grab her because she fished out her hankie and was going to—”

  Wilma had turned to Helen one day and snapped, mean and hard, “Hey, shut up with that vomity funeral crap, would ya?” And Helen had. What would it feel like, being free to say something like that?

  Gladys’s theory was that Wilma could say anything she wanted to; all she had to do was show up at the office. Her job, her life, would always be safe. Why? Because she had someone to protect her. See, she and her boss were friendly.

  I agreed. Very friendly. Only for a very special kind of friend would an influential partner in a major law firm sneak in early in the morning to do his own typing. (Helen had once come in early and caught him typing a letter on the firm letterhead with two fingers, very slowly.) You got to figure, I’d told Gladys, that Mr. Post was catching the 5:37 A.M. from Garden City just to catch up on his correspondence. He was no spring chicken, either. Another few months of the ebony-haired Wilma by night and the 5:37 by day, and we’d be chipping in for a wreath and writing letters: Dear Mrs. Post, I’m only a secretary at Blair, VanderGraff, but I was so sorry to hear about Mr. Post’s sudden demise. His late hours were a measure of his devotion…

  “What does Mr. Berringer write?” Wilma kept going. “‘Dear Adolf: How are you? I am fine.’”

  She would have babbled on, but Gladys turned to her: “Can it, Wilma.”

  That’s all Gladys said, but it worked. Even Wilma showed deference to Gladys. She mumbled, “You can it,” but it wasn’t a challenge; her words had no heart. She just took a vicious bite of what actually looked like a steak sandwich (old Mr. Post kept her in protein) and chewed ostentatiously, as if to say, I got something to bite into, not like you girls with your crappy cream cheese.

  Gladys turned back to me. “Anything new?” she asked once more. “I am desperate for gossip, Linda.”

  “Well, nothing scintillating,” I began. “Mrs. Berringer called late yesterday. Didn’t even want to speak to him. Just left a message that she was having cocktails with her museum committee and wouldn’t be home for supper.”

  “Dinner, Linda,” Gladys corrected. “Where’s your class? Ditchdiggers eat supper. Attorneys dine.”

  “Okay, she wouldn’t be home to dine.”

  Very daintily, Helen Rogers picked her egg salad droppings off her bosom as she asked, “You think the lovebirds had a fight? Her just leaving messages, I mean.”

  “All married couples fight,” Gladys pronounced.

  I noticed Anita Beane flashing a fast look down the table to Fay Landon. They were the only engaged girls, and the look said, Would you listen to these old maids pretending to be marriage experts? But naturally, being nineteen and twenty-one and not complete fools, they didn’t challenge Gladys. What did they have to gain? By June, they’d be married, and free from Blair, VanderGraff forever.

  “Mrs. Berringer went to Smith College. Right, Linda?” Gladys asked me. I nodded and took a bite of my meat loaf sandwich, which would more accurately be described as a bread-crumb loaf sandwich, the price of meat being what it was. “Smith College sounds so average,” Gladys explained to the group, “but it’s the poshest. Every year, they have one or two graduates who become duchesses or…earls’ wives or…Anyway, it’s much better than Vassar. Now describe Mrs. Berringer, Linda.” Gladys was bossy, but she was fun. Well, not a bundle of laughs herself, but at least she was able to find fun for us—in the lives of lawyers. “Every single minuscule detail,” she added. “Give us t
he works.”

  Everyone leaned forward. There were a lot of reasons why everyone in the room was interested—no, fascinated—with Mrs. John Berringer.

  All that attention on me—and on that tender topic—made me a little nervous. I had to put my sandwich down; I was squeezing it so hard, pretty soon I’d have a fistful of mush. Questions would arise: What’s with Linda? She was talking about Mr. Berringer and she squished her sandwich…. Oh!

  “You girls know what I know,” I said, fast. “And what I know is that Mrs. B must really be something. Mr. Berringer would do anything to make her happy.” Everyone nodded. They loved it. “He spent six hundred dollars on some oil painting she fell in love with at an art gallery. He gave me a certified check, sent me over to this art gallery, to some skinny guy with one of those nipped-in-waist suits, and the guy there says, ‘Oh, for Mrs. Berringer. So young, but such a discerning eye.’”

  When I went to the gallery that day, all I could think was John was buying her a birthday present that cost half what I earned every year. And he was taking her out to dinner besides. I knew; I’d made the reservations.

  Helen Rogers said, “Six hundred dollars for a picture! Can you beat that?”

  “For art,” I said.

  “Was it pretty?”

  “How should I know?” I answered. “Did I go to Smith College? It was modern. Mostly red squiggles with a little black—like old chopped meat.”

  “Linda,” Gladys said, “at least pretend you have some taste.”

  “For that much money I’d get emerald earrings,” Wilma said. She massaged the lobe of her ear. I had a feeling Mr. Post was going to buy her a present in the near future. “Not the dangle kind. You can’t wear those during the day. Just give me big, fat emeralds that go right smack on your ear.”

  “I’d take a mouton jacket,” someone else called out. “And with the change…”