The Groaning Board

she had the not so ridiculous feeling that if she
didn’t show, neither would the workmen. Perhaps by showing up every day and
letting them see her, she could make it happen faster. Sure, Wetzon, think again.
    “Are you ready for this?” Darlene
asked.
    “Shoot it to me, Darlene,” Wetzon
said.
    “Loeb Dawkins took Abe Gershman off
the hoot and ; holler because he sounded too Jewish.”
    Abe Gershman was the national sales
manager of Loeb Dawkins. It was Gershman’s job to conduct the sales meetings
from New York that were piped across the country into every branch office on
what was affectionately known as “the hoot and holler.”
    The national sales manager at a
brokerage firm played the role of super-coach, telling brokers what the firm
wanted i them to push, to buy and sell.
    “Too Jewish?” Wetzon said. “Too New York, obviously.”
    “He sounded like a garmento,” Darlene
said. “I guess it doesn’t play well in Dubuque.”
    “I guess it doesn’t play well with
all those Waspy types in the offices of Mather & Company that Loeb
Dawkins bought last year. They’ll likely get some lukewarm cup of tea to do
it.”
    “Dwight Whitcomb.”
    “Perfect.” Dwight Whitcomb was as
bland as you could get on the Street. He’d been carried along because his
father still owned an obscene amount of Loeb Dawkins stock. “Maybe I’ll give
Abe a call,” Wetzon said.
    “I’ve already talked with him.”
Darlene’s eyes blinked rapidly over her mask. “He sends you his best.”
    “How nice.” Wetzon had to work on
being as bland as Dwight Whitcomb.
    “I knew you’d understand,” Darlene
said.
    Oh, I do, I do, Wetzon thought. “And
does Abe want to do anything?”
    “Not yet. I suggested he meet us for
a drink—”
    “He’ll be hard to place, Darlene. No
book. He’d have to be a branch office manager and that’s a real comedown from
where he is now. We can think about it.” Brokers who became managers with the
big wire houses gave up their books. A dangerous thing to do in this climate. A
broker’s lists of clients and their accounts were kept in black looseleaf
books. They were the most valuable asset a broker had. Managers were fungible.
A book gave you clout. Without a book you were nothing.
    The phone rang and Darlene quickly
adjourned to her tiny office to answer it.
    Max, Smith and Wetzon’s receptionist
and part-time cold caller, wouldn’t be in before eleven. A retired accountant
in gum-soled shoes, Max was a thorough, if anal, worker. He never got pulled
into Smith’s—or Darlene’s—magnetic field of lunacy.
    Wetzon glanced around at the wreckage
of their office, the room she and Smith had shared now for over ten years.
Eventually, Darlene would have a portion of this room, and Smith and Wetzon
would be upstairs in a brand-new office on the parlor floor. The space their
ex-tenant, the rare-book dealer, had occupied until January.
    Wetzon would miss this room with its
windows that looked out on their garden. Of course, it would still be their
garden, but Smith was having a deck built overlooking it. An outside staircase
would travel down. Smith and Wetzon was becoming Smith’s longtime dream: a
duplex. The peons would work below, as they should.
    Removing the plastic draped over her
chair, Wetzon saw that the plaster dust had penetrated everything. Suspect
sheets containing the biographical data from interviews of stockbrokers were
coated with a fine white film. With a tissue, she dusted off her chair and
sneezed. A mini dust storm took flight over her telephone.
    When Smith had called her that
morning to say she was going up to her house in Westport, leaving Wetzon to cope
with the mess in the office, Wetzon hadn’t mentioned The Groaning Board IPO.
Smith loved inside information, particularly if she thought she could make some
money on it. Wetzon should probably have called A. T. Barron and exchanged
envelopes, but she was curious. She could torture Smith with it later, after
she talked to Laura Lee Day.
    The IPO market certainly had heated
up this year. Even old, privately held companies like Estee Lauder were making
the move into some portion of public ownership. The move was attractive to
owners as they entered middle age because they could cash out.
    “Hi, darlin’, what’s cookin’?” Laura
Lee’s soft, upbeat Southern tones spilled from the phone.
    “What’s cookin’, darlin’? Why, The
Groaning Board, sweetheart,” Wetzon said.
    Silence followed, growing