The Stockbroker’s Cleaning Woman
Should I come back?” The cleaning lady stood on the far side of the threshold with her janitorial cart and a vacuum cleaner. Judging by the disheveled pile of frizzy gray hair and sagging jowls, the amiable, self-contained woman looked to be in her late sixties.
Allen Edgemont looked up from the pile of stock and municipal bond reports that littered his desk. It was well past six o’clock and most everyone at the brokerage firm had gone home for the day. “I’m just about done here. You won’t bother me in the least.”
The older woman negotiated the metal cart into the carpeted office, unraveled the cord and set to work. Surveying a list of assets in the topmost portfolio, Allen didn’t like what he saw. The fledgling companies – a mishmash of start-up ventures – promised high yield without bothering to mention risk. Risk was always the central issue. No prudent investment adviser would recommend such a collection of unproven, fledgling businesses.
Ten years he had been counseling investors, and no one had ever lost his shirt. Not one! Some clients did better than others, but at the end of the day, there was never cause for panic, no horror stories or compulsion to go out on the ledge of the thirteenth floor because of an unanticipated blip in the Dow Jones.
Finishing with the vacuuming, the cleaning lady stooped over to empty the trash basket alongside his desk. She smiled faintly before retreating to the opposite end of the room where she ran a dust rag over the mahogany bookshelf. “What happened to the other girl?” Allen pushed the paperwork momentarily aside.
“Which one?”
“The red-haired chatterbox.”
“Quit on short notice. The young ones don’t tend to last long.”
Allen wasn’t the least bit surprised. If the pretty young thing had worked half as hard as she jibber-jabbered or toyed with her cell phone…
There were only two types of cleaners that the agency routinely sent: the PYT’s – transient, careless and easily distracted. Everything done by the seat-of-their-pants, they never lasted beyond a handful of weeks. Then there were the older women. Over the years, Allen witnessed a steady stream of Irish Catholics. Most came from the shabby, three-decker tenements in South Boston. With huge silver crosses dangling from their necks, they spoke in a singsong, lilting Irish brogue, proved hard workers, tight-lipped and honest to a fault.
The chocolaty-skinned Haitians tended to mix their devout, Christian beliefs with an amalgam of voodoo and atavistic rituals involving small animal sacrifice. Allen had learned this from a coworker who had a short-lived affair with one of the former cleaning women. The Hispanics were equally conscientious, subsisting in a parallel universe to which Allen was never privy. During his tenure, over a hundred had traipsed through the office complex, come and gone, and Allen had never learned a single name. He lowered his eyes and rubbed at the bristly, five o’clock shadow inching up his cheekbone and turned his attention back to the business at hand.
* * * * *
There had been an ugly incident when the investment counselor met with a husband and wife earlier in the day. The Foresters had arranged a retirement account a decade earlier and the portfolio was performing nicely. In fifteen years, Bob and Edith were on track to retire with a sizeable nest egg. There would have been no problem, if the Foresters hadn’t caught wind of the fact that a neighbor who invested with Allen’s firm around the same time had far outstripped the couple, compounding lavish profits into a small fortune.
“Why the hell can they walk away with all that goddamn money, while we poke along line a couple of ne’er-do-wells?” Bob seethed. In his early fifties, the husband was thin with a Vandyke beard and manic intensity that set Allen’s nerves on edge.
“Your friends,” Allen spoke in a placating tone, “put all their funds in volatile, high-risk investments.”
“Bullshit!” The husband spit the word in the broker’s face like a curse.
“We seldom recommend high-roller accounts,” Allen could feel his control over the situation deteriorating by the moment. “You need a cast iron stomach when dealing with that level of unpredictability.” Allen glanced at the wife, who had been glowering at him since arriving. Thin like her husband with a vapid temperament, clearly nothing Allen said was improving her disposition.
He leaned across the desk slicing the air with the palm of his hand and pleading for understanding. “For sure, people earn a ton of money, but they can also lose their shirt. It’s a crap shoot.” When there was no immediate response, he added, “On the bright side, both of you are on track to retire quite comfortably at sixty-five.”
“We want to retire now,” Edith shot back, “not fifteen freakin’ years from now!” “The Iversons,” the wife was quickly losing all semblance of control, “are retiring in June and they’re the same age as us.”
Allen couldn’t believe his ears. Had the Foresters forgotten everything they originally discussed at their consultation and all the subsequent meetings over the ensuing years? “That was never the intent. We arranged your portfolio so - ”
“The Iversons just booked a European excursion to celebrate their new lease on life, and what do we have to show for it?” Edith brought him up short.
Allen stared warily at the woman. Edith Forester was plain with coarse features rendered even more distasteful by a sphinx-like affect. Allen couldn’t be sure if she had a bona fide brain of her own or simply regurgitated her husband’s infantile pronouncements with parrot-like precision.
‘Polly wanna cracker! Foresters wanna early retire!’
In a fury, Bob rose to his feet. “We’re finished here.” As the distraught couple drifted to the door, he suddenly wheeled about and wagged a finger menacingly in the direction of the investment counselor. “We’re through with you and your slipshod business practices, but I can guaranty that you haven’t heard the last of it. Hell no!” For dramatic effect, he slammed the door on the way out.
You haven’t heard the last of it.
Allen was mildly disoriented. He provided rock-solid advice and the Forester’s investments had burgeoned over the years. Greedy crackpots – that’s what they were - a couple of kooks, eccentrics, nincompoops. If Allen had been able to thinks just a tad bit quicker on his feet, he might have confided that the bulk of his own life savings was scattered about a similar collection of prudent bonds and mutual funds. But the Foresters didn’t want to hear that. They would have much preferred to join the Iverson on their exotic junket.
* * * * *
“What are you reading?” Allen asked.
“Excuse me?” The cleaning lady had finished with her work and was heading for the door.
“The book.” He gestured with his eyes at a dog-eared paperback protruding at a cockeyed angle from a handbag on the bottom shelf of the janitorial cart.
The woman plucked the book from the bag and handed it to the broker. “Just some light reading while I’m travelling on the bus to and from work.”
“The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy,” Allen read from the glossy jacket. “I wouldn’t necessarily call that light reading.”
She retrieved the book and, in response to his befuddled expression, added, “I taught high school English… thirty-five years.”
Allen’s lips curled in a muted smile. Old enough to be his mother, this anonymous cleaning woman had suddenly assumed a radically new persona. “What’s it about… the plot?”
“A wealthy Russian aristocrat wakes up one day with a nagging pain in his side, and things go steadily downhill from there.” She glanced absently about the room, checking to make sure that everything was sufficiently clean and tidy. “Once his family and business associates realize he’s dying, they write him off. No matter that he was politically influential, well-connected, rich and socially popular… none of that matters anymore.”
The older woman chuckled under her breath as though at some private joke. “At the wake, his widow intrigues with a local bureaucrat to increase Ivan’s pension and death benefits even though the poor slob isn’t even buried yet.”
“Sounds morbid as hell,” Allen observed.
“No just the opposite.” She shook her head emphatically. “Well, goodnight,” the woman said and slipped noiselessly out the door.
* * * * *
“You look tired,” Allen’s wife said, kissing her husband’s cheek when he finally wandered in the door a few minutes before nine. “Want anything to eat?”
“No, just coffee,” he replied. “I want to tell you what happened today.”
Allen told his wife, Cynthia, about his meeting with the Foresters, and after working himself into an emotional frenzy even mentioned the cleaning woman who read Russian literature while commuting to work. As he spoke in a plodding, pragmatic tone, Cynthia put the water on to boil and measured several tablespoons of coffee into a small French press. Once the liquid boiled, she poured it into a glass carafe and firmly pushed down on the plunger. “What a pair of buffoons,” she noted softly. “Mindless nincompoops!”
She poured the coffee and set a carton of cream in front of her husband. “Forget about the horrid Foresters. I’m more curious to know why a retired school teacher would be cleaning office complexes.”
Allen poured a dash of cream into his cup. “The woman’s husband took sick… colon cancer. Even with medical insurance, the endless bills drained their savings.”
“What a pity!” Cynthia sipped at her coffee. “The Foresters are indignant about waiting until retirement, while your cleaning woman, through no fault of her own, is forced to work in her old age.”
“Life sucks and then you die,” Allen offered irreverently.
The room fell silent, each caught up in their own, private reverie. As she was clearing the table bringing the cups to the sink, Cynthia observed, “You did the right thing by your clients. There’s nothing to worry about.”
* * * * *
Tuesday morning, Phil Smithers, the regional accounts manager, called Allen into his office. He opened a cabinet on the far wall, revealing a private stash of whiskies and pricey liquors. “Like a drink?”
Not much of a drinker, the regional accounts manager only brought out the heavy artillery when an employee was being promoted or sent packing on short notice. Allen passed on the drink. The Manager reached for a bottle of apricot brandy but thought better of it and abruptly closed the door. “A formal complaint was lodged against you,” he opened the conversation in a mellow, unassuming tone. “The Foresters… they’re closing out their accounts with us and taking their business elsewhere.”
“I’m not surprised,” Allen countered.
“You made him a ton of money over the years. The guy’s a horse’s ass… an unappreciative jerk!”
“He needed an alchemist not a financial planner.”
Phil Smithers cracked a broad grin. “Someone to turn base metal into gold bullion.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.” The accounts manager returned to the cabinet and poured himself three fingers of the aromatic brandy along with a separate glass which he handed to Allen. “Drink up!” He raised the shot glass to his lips and threw the fruity liquor down his gullet. “Good riddance to the horse’s ass!”
* * * * *
“I ain’t botherin’ yah, am I?”
The following Tuesday, a slinky, twenty-something blonde with a nose ring and Apple cell phone dangling from her hip pocket stuck her head in the doorway.
“No, not in the least,” Allen looked up from his work. “Where’s the older woman who usually cleans the office?”
“Dunno… they don’t tell us diddlysquat at the office, just where to go and what to do.”
Allen turned his attention back to an assortment of new investment opportunities arranged in tidy piles on a table that abutted his desk. There was a fledgling coffee plantation in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia. The country had gone to hell under the rule of Joseph Mugabe, the dictatorial thug who took over after the African National Congress victory. Why would anybody risk hard-earned money on a start-up venture in an unstable, the third world banana republic?
Next was an injectable treatment for liver disease. But Allen had no great love of salves, pills or potions. Biotech stocks were notoriously risky. Between eight-five and ninety percent of all new experimental drugs failed. When pharmaceuticals underperformed, they virtually lost all of their value. The stocks looked great at face value, but the risk was absurdly high. Promises of exorbitant profits lured greedy fools like the Foresters into a proverbial spider’s web of disastrous consequences. The likelihood of dying in a plane crash was 205,552 to one, while the probability of blowing one’s life savings in a pharmaceutical start-up venture was astronomical.
Another case in point: a health care franchise in Providence, Rhode Island was touting its expertise in parenteral feeding and inhalation therapy procedures, all cutting edge stuff. The venture sounded safe enough at face value, but the Rhode Island Department of Health was extremely heavy-handed with the home care industry. They had a ‘Certificate of Need’ law that allowed the state to figuratively shut the spigo, choking the number of business in any given health care specialty.
Allen was sure that the law violated federal anti-trust law, but businesses were powerless and had no recourse where the Mafia mentality prevailed. Worse yet, the market was saturated with similar medical endeavors, each nibbling away a slice of the ever-diminishing economic pie. One bad investment could wreck havoc. Just look at Eastman Kodak and Woolworth, a pair of extinct corporate behemoths from a previous era. No, Allen Edgemont would not recommend any health care franchise in Rhode Island, the tiniest state, regardless on the potential return on investment.
* * * * *
The previous week, Allen experienced a rather peculiar tête-à-tête with the enigmatic, former English teacher. Hardly a word passed between them from the time she arrived to clean the office to when she was preparing to leave. “What’s your name?” Allen asked.
“Rosemary… my friends call me Rosy.”
“I’m Allen.” He rose and offered his hand. The woman gawked at him with a muddled expression, trying to decipher his intent. “About that Tolstoy tale… you never told me how the story ended.”
“Actually,” she corrected, “the lengthy piece is more novella than short story.”
“Yes, yes.” Allen wasn’t even remotely interested in parsing literary minutia. “The fellow becomes ill… friends and family desert him. Where’s the plot go from there?”
The woman cocked her head to one side, organizing her thoughts. “Tolstoy was a brilliant writer, who structured his stories with infinite care. The reader must understand what went before… the back story, in order to properly appreciate the denouement.”
“The what?”
“Resolution.”
Without warning the woman’s expression, which initially seemed congenial soured, and Allen had the distinct impression that she preferred not to say anything more. “Yes, I’m listening,” he prodded.
“It was a loveless marriage.” The cleaning woman sat down folding her rough and reddened hands in her ample lap. “When the wife became moody and difficult during her first pregnancy, the husband couldn’t handle it. He retreated into his work and cards.”
“He was a gambler?”
“No. He just played bridge. A man of few if any vices, he was likeable, smart, good humored, well-balanced, sociable and witty.”
“And successful in business.”
“Well, yes, of course.” “But then in his mid-forties the illness appears and there’s no way out… no escape from the inevitable.” Without warning the cleaning woman hastily rose to her feet and announced in a soft-spoken, unhurried manner, “I’m leaving now.”
Allen waved a hand fitfully in the air. “But you never explained how the story plays itself out.”
A bittersweet smile flitted across her placid features and once again the cleaning lady morphed into educator. “Tolstoy, the master storyteller, intended that his stories be comprehended in one’s heart of hearts. My telling you accomplishes nothing. It’s too easy. You don’t profit by being hand-fed a collection of skimpy details.” Without saying another word, she left the room, closing the door behind her.
* * * * *
“Is that a book or a paperweight?” Having brushed her teeth, Cynthia entered the bedroom prepared for bed.
“Not to worry,” Allen tossed the heavy book aside and smiled sheepishly at his wife. “It’s the collected short works of Tolstoy, but I’m only reading one story.”
Cynthia slipped under the covers next to him. “The one the cleaning woman brought in her handbag?”
He nodded and turned his attention back to the book.
“Is it any good?”
“I’ve only read a handful of pages,” he qualified. “It’s very subtle… much more involved than I imagined, so I have to go back and reread certain passages several times in order to get the gist of things.”
In the morning Cynthia stirred and made a motion to rise but her husband grabbed her arm. “Why did God put us here?”
The woman yawned and stretched her limbs. “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with the book you were reading last night.” When there was no response, she added, “You’re an avowed agnostic. I don’t understand where this is coming from.”
“Just because I don’t believe in Biblical deities doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge a higher power,” Allen protested. “Why did God put us here?”
Cynthia rolled over, nuzzling his ear with her lips. “God put us here to be happy.”
“Anything else you care to add?”
“No, that’s the whole shebang.” Feeling his fingers relax, Cynthia slipped off the side of the bed, wriggled her toes into a pair of fleece-lined bedroom slippers and shuffled off to start her day.
* * * * *
A week later when the cleaning lady arrived, Allen watched intently as she shook the waste paper basket into the refuse bag dangling from the metal cart. A torn envelope fluttered to the carpeted floor. She teased the paper off the rug, depositing it in the plastic bag. “I missed you last week, Rosy.”
“My son in Florida had a baby girl and I went to visit.”
“Congratulations!” Allen stood up and gestured with a fluttering of the wrist that she sit alongside his desk. “That’s enough work for today.”
The woman seemed confused by the cavalier remark. “I still need to vacuum and dust.”
“The carpet’s clean enough and furniture can easily go another week without showing dust.” Again he gestured toward the plush chair. “Gerasim, the servant,” he began in a herky-jerky, stilted speech that evened out as he gained momentum, “is key to understanding the author’s intent.”
“You read the story!”
“Gerasim is different from that other character… that government official who begrudgingly attends the dreary wake and then rushes off to his club for drinks and entertainment. No one is deeply affected by Ivan’s illness except Gerasim, the lowly servant.”
“A Christ-like figure, to be sure,” Rosy confirmed. “All the great European writers had their fictional messiahs.” She spoke in a measured, unhurried tone. “Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was one such divinely-inspired creature, but she only emerges a saintly soul at the far end of the novel. Many readers unfortunately miss the analogy.”
Noise began bubbling up in the hallway. Phil Smithers had just finished a late-night training session with new staff, who were still lingering near the elevator. Allen went and closed the door, muting the momentary distraction.
“And of course,” Rosy picked up the thread of her previous point, “Count Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is also an enlightened soul.”
“Grasim bends down on his hands and knees,” Allen redirected her attention back to the original topic, “and lets Ivan rest his legs on the servant’s back so his master can gain temporary relief from the excruciating pain, which – ”