Shining Through Read Free Page A

desk now.”

    10 / SUSAN ISAACS
    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 SHINING THROUGH / 11
    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