Free Shining Through by Susan Isaacs Page B

take a gander at the regal posture. You could see why John loved her.
    It wasn’t only the way she looked. It was Nan herself. She wasn’t just a pretty twenty-one-year-old matron. Oh, sure, she was that, but she was more. Smart. It didn’t only show in her eyes, like with most people. Everything about Nan was smart: the size steps she took, the way she carried her purse. Smart in a way I would never be. If I could have been anything in the world, I would have been Nan Leland Berringer.
    And I thought: God, what a loss. How he must miss her.
    Then I got up and trailed her.
    I was definitely no intellectual, but I wasn’t the class dunce, either. I figured if anyone caught me tippytoeing ten feet behind Mrs. Berringer, they’d think John had sent me SHINING THROUGH / 55
    to spy on her, and that wouldn’t be so terrific for either him or me.
    So I snuck into the supply closet and came out with a couple of boxes of typing paper, enough pencils to last till 1947 and two bottles of ink; then I didn’t even waste my time looking where Nan had gone. Instead, I sauntered by Gladys’s desk.
    There’s that old joke about the three major means of communications: telephone, telegraph, tell a woman. The comedian had probably worked at Blair, VanderGraff and knew Gladys.
    She was on the edge of her chair, talking a mile a minute to Lenore Stevenson, the bookkeeper, who everyone called Lenny, and I don’t think it was just a nickname. Lenny looked like a man in a skirt. A big man, and she had a pair of hands that would have looked great on a Giants pitcher, plus a cigarette voice that came pretty close to being as deep as Mr. Leland’s.
    “Lin- da ,” Gladys said, “come here.”
    “Yeah,” Lenny echoed, “come here.” She was huge, but strong—not fat: a rhinoceros, but a gentle one. She was shy—she ate lunch alone with her ledgers, never with us in the conference room—and she hardly talked, except to Gladys, whom she practically worshiped. But Lenny had a good heart and was always doing sweet things, like slipping me my pay envelope Thursday night instead of Friday morning.
    I rested my supplies on Gladys’s desk. “I can’t talk. I got to go and kill myself, because that’s the only way I won’t die from overwork.” I sighed, putting a little quaver in it—“Boy oh boy”—and picked up my stuff.
    “You must stay,” Gladys said, in her Queen of England voice.
    “I ‘must’ stay? You going to pull out a silver teapot and pour?”
    “Stay, Linda,” Lenny said.
    “I can’t.”
    Gladys added, “We’ll make it worth your while.”

    56 / SUSAN ISAACS
    Lenny nodded and crossed her arms. Gladys swiveled her head around, looking for lurkers; when it came to gossip, she trusted no one. Then she nodded at Lenny, like Go ahead.
    “I was down by Mr. Leland’s office—” Bookkeepers could go where secretaries fear to tread.
    “And guess who just happened to dance into Mr. L’s office?”
    Gladys butted in.
    “The Rockettes,” I said.
    “Linda, be serious,” Gladys hissed.
    “Okay, I’m serious.”
    “Mrs. Berringer!” Gladys said.
    “Mr. Leland’s daughter,” Lenny added.
    “Thanks, Len.”
    “Yeah, sure, right,” Lenny rumbled. “Anyway, guess what she told her father?”
    “They invited you in to join them? You got an engraved invitation?”
    “Aw, Linda, you’re a card!”
    “How come you got to listen in, Lenny?”
    “She didn’t get the door closed fast enough.”
    “What did she say?” I demanded. Ever since my drink with Gladys, I stopped pretending I wasn’t curious; I’d come to realize that when you’re trying hard to be something you’re not, people think you’re phonier than you are.
    Lenny raised her eyebrows and looked upward, like the secret was between her and Him…and Gladys too, because the next second, Lenny looked straight at her. And Gladys was almost jumping out of her chair, like she had taken a double dose of Castoria. “Tell her,” Gladys bubbled.