Shining Through Read Free Page B

offer.

    12 / SUSAN ISAACS
    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 Prin-ceton 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 SHINING THROUGH / 13
    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 hidden 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.