'The Prince', by Steve McBrearty
I was The Prince. Not a Medieval prince, or a Machiavellian prince, the prince of a diminutive mountainside monarchy, but an oh-so-American prince attending a commuter college in San Antonio, TX., and working afternoons as a file clerk, at a law firm there. The appellation began as a jest, one of the attorneys there comparing my hairstyle to that of a certain comic book character of the day, and that caught on among the staff. After initial aversion, I embraced the name. I revelled in hearing it. I came to understand that it embodied their vision for me, their expectations, their belief in my abilities and prospects for future success. The hairstyle wasn’t so much a political or cultural statement—though that was my cover—as an effort to modify, mollify, nullify the physical effects of a big nose and bad teeth and a face that fell distressingly short of the movie star ideal. It provided a kind of pleasing reset for my personality, an alter ego, almost. A buzz cut made me look like some golly gee whiz guy driving a tractor in a cornfield. A too-short haircut would drive me into seclusion for weeks. With the hair—from certain angles, under certain light—I might even be considered dashing.
In the law office, I was a young man of sagacity and sophistication, smart, witty, urbane. My opinions were valued. My observations were lauded in conversations in the hallways or around the coffee pot. They had high hopes for me there, higher than I had for myself. I was walking a fine line, of course, fearful that I would be revealed as the uncultured low-rent dufus I truly was. I lived still at home, a freshman at San Antonio College, sheepish, self-conscious that I was a college student living still at home. My entire existence might be capsulized as self-conscious, as I wallowed in a miasma of low self-esteem. So I welcomed their encomiums with relief and an astonished delight. Maybe I really could be something in life. I could be The Prince.
Resplendent in a double-breasted blue blazer—a high school graduation gift from a great aunt—and pastel-colored dress shirt, cuffed blue slacks, I burst through the austere, etched-glass entrance doorway of the Law Offices of O’Malley and Heck—Heck a retired judge who appeared sporadically, clanking through on his gold-knobbed cane—one splendid, early spring day. I had worked there since shortly after Christmas break, answering a want ad for aspiring attorneys in the college newspaper. Stepping inside with a dramatic flourish, I greeted the front desk secretary, Billie Thomason, greeted her fondly, tenderly, familiarly, like an old family friend, almost. Overplayed, undeniably, but our every interaction was theatrical.
Billie was middle-aged, matronly, bearing a midriff bulge, an old-style career secretary who had served at the O’Malley law firm for about a hundred years. She wore horn-rim eyeglasses on a string around her neck. She smiled as I approached, as she always did, laying her hands primly one atop the other on her typewriter, as if to honor me with a pause in her hectic workday. Then she used one hand to primp her hair, a short, stiff, permed, hair-sprayed coif, impenetrable, color indeterminate. It was the hairstyle of somebody hopelessly out of touch with the contemporary world. My entrance and our conversations with a kind of ritual now, a ceremony, almost a religious rite. I stood facing her desk as we exchanged pleasantries regarding our days thus far, her day at work and my day in classes. She seemed interested in my classes. Most of our conversations were routine, but sometimes we segued into confessional mode, divulging our secrets and our plans for life.
“So how were your classes today, Prince?” Billie said.
She imbued the word Prince with a certain delicate grandeur, as if I truly were a descendent of nobility.
“Economics was pretty lively,” I said.
I always tried to come up with something interesting, an anecdote or a clever observation, that would make Billie laugh or nod her head in approval. I liked making her laugh. I liked to impress her. I didn’t want to let her down.
“This one guy got in an argument with the professor, something about sunk costs v. amortization. I thought they might come to blows.”
That sounded dopey, coming out of my mouth—“come to blows.” Not sure why I said that. Possibly I thought somebody her age would appreciate the archaic word usage. She laughed—but only briefly. It wasn’t one of her hearty, affirming laughs. My story had fallen flat. The Prince hated when his stories bombed.
“How’s the day going here?” I said, trying to regroup.
“Oh, OK,” she said. “Same old same old.”
But then she paused, and her face seemed to sag, and she looked at me in a way I had never noticed before. Her upper lip trembled. She removed her glasses and held them in one hand. She leaned forward, as if to speak confidentially. I leaned forward to meet her halfway. Something was up.
“They’re trying to run me off,” she said.
“What?” I said. “Who?”
She put two fingers to her slips, shushing me.
“Mr. O’Malley,” she said, in a low voice. “Jack Robinson.”
“Mr. O’Malley?” I said. “Jack? Why would they do that?”
A hot flush of anger surged through me. The Prince was a man of empathy. The Prince was nothing if not empathetic. I puffed up my chest, wanting to help her, protect her, insulate her from all the harshness and insensitivity of the business world.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “You do so much here. You run the place, practically.”
Though I recalled murmurings of disapproval from the attorneys, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with her performance, her attitude, that she had gotten too big for her britches, that she was starting to coast. That she believed she really did run the place. The attorneys deplored effrontery. Her years of service, her loyalty, her institutional knowledge, all down the tube.
She took one of my hands in both of hers and kneaded softly, tenderly. Her hands smelled like the bottle of lotion she kept beside her on her desk. I thought I could see tears in her eyes.
“They don’t think I can handle the new technology,” she said. “They think I’m a dinosaur. They don’t think I can learn.”
“You can handle it,” I said. “You’re smart. You can learn.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I told them I just wanted to stick with my good old reliable IBM Selectric. I guess they didn’t like that. Oh well.”
She sighed. She patted my hand. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Have a good rest of the day,” she said.
“You, too,” I said. She gave me one final pat of closure on my hand.
I moved on down a corridor, unsettled now, shell-shocked by her revelation. I couldn’t imagine working here without Billie. Billie was like a second mom to me, a more worldly mom, more sophisticated and urbane. She flattered me with her approval and accolades. I ran into a wall leaving the lobby. My reverie was shattered when I heard Laura Baldwin shout out.
“Hey Prince!” she said, as I passed by the open doorway to her office.
She pronounced Prince with an ironic twist, as if there were quotation marks around the word, as if it were some stupid thing she didn’t understand but that she was required to say. Her Prince rather embarrassed me. She waved a hand, a come-hither hand, at me.
“Give me a hand here?”
“Sure thing!” I said, stepping adroitly into her office space.
vEmbarrassment aside, the Prince was all about service. The Prince wanted to please.
“Watcha need?”
“Can you move this little table here for me?” she said. “It’s blocking my way where I have it.”
“Can do,” I said. “This little table here?”
She nodded yes, while pivoting to punch a button on her machine and then remove a piece of paper from the hopper. I could see what Billie was talking about with the new technology. Laura was the new girl in the office—though a woman of maybe 50—stolen away from another law firm, and she had arrived with a zeal to pull the law firm along into a new era. An administrative assistant before the term was invented, she commandeered our spanking new IBM 360 machine like a fighter pilot manning the controls of an F-47 jet screaming across the sky at the speed of sound. The machine ahd streamlined office productivity, eliminating the painstaking task of typing standard legal documents from scratch each time and making corrections with white-out or sticky tape. Laura was so good, so fast, so efficient, that she was virtually immune from criticism. She could be drunk on the job and that would be A-OK.
“Pass her another beer,” one of the attorneys might say. “She’s on a roll.”
As it was, she stood poised with a cigarette dangling expertly from the corner of her mouth, tapping ash every now and then into a small ceramic dish atop her desk. She was constantly in motion, pressing buttons, loading bins with paper, unloading them, typing in machine gun-like bursts exceeding 100 WPM. There was a half-eaten sandwich lying in its wrapper beside the keyboard, there since lunchtime. Technically, she wore a dress, but it was a sack-like garment that she wore carelessly, like it was an actual sack, something to just throw over her body that would not hinder her movements. She stood in stocking feet, black pumps cast aside on the floor. Heavy makeup was plastered over a lined and weathered face. She spoke in a hoarse, whisky voice.
Our conversations were all brief, all surface, about work and TV shows she liked, and football—she was a Dallas Cowboys fan, who she called “my boys.” I never shared my inner thoughts or aspirations. She wouldn’t want to know. She wouldn’t have time for any of that, anyway. She had no time for philosophy or literature or art, either. She was good-natured, but her intensity level put her on a kind of hair trigger. I never learned her entire back story, but she talked about a grown daughter somewhere that she was supporting, an abusive ex-husband somewhere, a restraining order, on parole from prison. I think everybody at the law firm was fearful the ex-husband might burst in one day and shoot us all.
I lugged the table to the far side of the IBM 360 machine and stood expectantly, awaiting instructions.
“This good?” I said, after a moment.
“Perfect!” she said.
She gave a high-five with her free hand.
“What’s up today?” I said.
The Prince couldn’t help himself sometimes. The Prince craved acknowledgment and acceptance.
“Not much,” she said. “Mr. O’Malley’s on one of his tears.”
“What about?” I said.
I wondered if she had any scuttlebutt about Bille. I waited for an answer, but she had already turned away, pressing buttons, loading paper.
“Sorry!” she said. “Gotta get this Plaintiff’s Original Petition out the door by 4:00 this afternoon. Mr. O’Malley will shit a brick if I don’t make it.”
She took a bit of sandwich and then a puff of cigarette as I moved along.
I found myself accosted in the hallway by Jack Robinson, he firm’s most senior attorney after Mr. O’Malley, his trusted right-hand man. I carried the secret of Billie’s revelation about him like a spy with classified information. I searched Jack’s face for clues. He seemed oblivious.
“If it isn’t The Prince!” Jack said.
He imbued the pronunciation with a certain jocularity that permeated our entire relationship. Jack, after all, was the staff member who dubbed me The Prince. He owned the name. He could do with it whatever he wanted.
Jack was a stocky but slim-shouldered man, late 40s, maybe 50, with a strikingly patrician swoop of silvery hair and a five o’clock shadow of whiskers on prominent jowls, like Nixon. He was the “book man” in the office, researching case law and preparing briefs to file for Mr. O’Malley to argue in court. He placed his right hand on my shoulder and kneaded, kneaded forcefully, to the point of pain. Perhaps that was the point—pain. I just had to stand and take it. The Prince could be stoic if required to be.
Aside from this mildly sadistic streak, Jack was a good man, a decent man, a sharp-witted attorney, a superb supporting player, if never the lead. He accepted that role and was content with him. Everything with Jack was a joke, a gag, a wisecrack, based on one’s appearance or idiosyncrasy or personality quirk. He could zoom right in on your idiosyncrasies or personality quirks. But like many funny men, everything was comical until he no longer wanted it to be. When not being flippant, he was inquisitive, analytical, somber even. There was at times an air of melancholy about him, a sense of resignation, as if he didn’t fully embrace his role in the law firm, or in life. As if he weren’t fully content with his role. He had interests beyond the law. Before embarking on a legal career, he had aspired to writing mystery novels and aspired to writing them still—in some undetermined idyllic future. He seemed to find in me a kind of kindred spirit, a protégé of sorts, the one individual in the office he could share his devotion for literature and the arts with. He also found in me an ally in disapproving Mr. O’Malley’s lavish lifestyle, his effulgence and extravagance, his bombastic personality. While professing loyalty to “the boss”—it was a hell of a good living, after all, affording him a spacious home in the suburbs with a swimming pool and a Cadillac of his own, albeit a sports model, smaller than Mr. O’Malley’s—there was philosophical discord between them. Jack was a man of the golden mean. He wanted nothing more than to head home to his wife and children every evening and eat dinner and relax watching TV or reading a book. Barbecue out on the back porch. Sip on a cold bottled beer—but just one! Go for a dip in the pool. It was more complicated than that, of course, but that was it in a nutshell. He wanted to play the role of archetypal husband and provider, a man of stolidity and low-key consequence.
He lingered with me there in the hallway, hand resting lightly on my shoulder now. I thought about him confiding in me his desire to leave O’Malley for his own firm, a quiet, sedate, low-conflict firm specializing and wills and trusts and other corporate law. That was his dream. He had resigned in his mind many times before. He couldn’t follow through. Like so many of us, so often, he stuck with the status quo.
“Guess I’d better get back to my critically-important filing duties,” I said, breaking the silence with a quip.
The Prince was big on quips. Jack smiled. He understood. He looked as though he wanted to tell me something, but he just patted me on the elbow instead.
“Go get ‘um, Tiger,” he said.
He looked at me wistfully, as if he wished he were back where I was in life.
“I will,” I said.
I walked away fast, itching to get into the filing room now, where I could relax, control my environment, let my mind wander freely. Too much drama today. The Prince deplored drama. The filing room was my home, my refuge, my safe place. It was a long, rectangular, windowless room on the interior of the suite, with gun metal colored filing cabinets lining two walls and a door at each end. There was a single Matisse print hung rather crookedly over one of the filing cabinets. I wondered often who had placed that there. I felt secluded in there, secure.
My main job was to file the manila case folders the were lying on the table in a stack. I also typed labels for new cases, maintained supplies, tidied up. This was my dream job, actually. It was all I could aspire to in a career. I could live a long and happy life in the file room, thoughts flitting about, plotting novels in my mind. I sipped coffee meditatively, staring at the wall.
My reverie was interrupted when Megan Fitzhugh slipped through the closed door behind me and touched me lightly on the shoulder. I jumped, coffee cup jiggling in my hand. She rarely touched me. Perhaps she had never touched me. I had always wanted to touch her.
“Hello, my Prince, how are things today?” she said.
Her Prince was a kind of high-spirited mocerky, a wry acknowledgement of my pretend status, her own exclusive joke. And my Prince, on top of it. She had never said that before. I tried coming up with an appropriate response, something that would impress her with my savvy and acument. But her surprise entrance had caught me flat-footed, and I felt embarrassed sitting there, as if discovered in some verboten activity. My innate perception of fraudulence was heightened in her presence. I tried to remember my hair. I hoped my hair looked good today.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Just my usual high-level filing activities.”
This was the best I could muster, on the spot. It seemed to be my standard line for today.
But she laughed, laughed loudly, heartily, louder than I believed warranted by the quality fo my humor. I pondered the meaning of her laugh. I loved her laugh. I loved everything about her, really. I couldn’t say anything about my affection for her, of course, there in the office. I was just the goofy kid Prince to her.
Megan was an intern at the firm, a pre-law major at Trinity University, which had a campus nearby. She was the only other young person in the office, two or three years older than me, a college junior, and we had established a level of rapport based on just that. She didn’t know I was in love with her. She wanted to save the world, of course, like all of us idealistic kids back then, her model the firebrand civil rights attorney, Bill Kunstler. The attorneys at the office didn’t know that, of course. They thought she just wanted to make a lot of money, like them.
I knew I had no chance with her. She was pretty, poised, strong-willed, confident. She knew what she wanted. All things that I was not. She had a boyfriend, anyway, who dropped by the office sometimes to see her. Gabe was his name, Gabe Macias, an older guy, an Air Force lifer stationed in one of the San Antonio bases, for now. Megan and Gabe lived together in an apartment near the base—nobody at the office knew that but me. He scared the crap out of me, if you want to know the truth. He seemed a bit unhinged, and I assumed that he knew all manner of lethal judo and karate moves that could kill me instantly with a thrust up a nostril. There was a tattoo of a bald eagle holding an American flag on one rather disturbingly muscular bicep. Megan seemed nervous around him, distracted, tryinng to please him in a too obvious, too public way. He seemed hard to please, though, intransigent, unmoved by her displays of affection. He was the kind of guy who poked you in the ribs after telling an obnoxious, off-color joke—wanting to make darn sure you laughed. I cleared out as soon as I could when he came around.
Megan stood near me, hovering over me seated at the table, half-turned toward her, awkwardly. Her proximity and her positioning made our exchange of banter seem portentous. Perhaps it was portentous. She traced her fingernails over my left forearm, an activity that rendered me virtually helpless. She leaned forward then, even closer. I could feel her breath, a sweet, soft confection of wintergreen gum or mints.
“Hey,” she said. “Want to go someplace after work today? Get a drink mabye? Something to eat?”
I nearly slithered off my chair, gumby-style. Anxiety and exhilaration both bloomed in my chest, like a climbing vine. I reviewed my plans for the evening, which involved writing a paper for history class and studying for an Algebra exam. I swiftly shelved these plans.
“Sure thing,” I said. Adding meekly, as if this were a huge embarrassment: “I can’t get a drink, though. I’m not 21.”
She smiled. She smiled like somebody who had navigated situations exactly like this many times before. She was standing almost directly over me now, so that I peered up into her face. Her smiling, cheerful face.
“We can say we’re married,” she said.
Boy, did this remark ever get the old libido fired up. I pictured myself being married to her, kissing her, making love to her. The Prince had virtually no experience in this area. I seemed strapped to my chair, as if in some hyperbaric gravity chamber weighing me down at 7 G-Force. I seemed to be speaking in slow motion.
“Sounds good,” I said.
She smiled again, patting my wrist getnly.
I spent the remainder of the workday in a kind of hypnotic trance of anticipation, unable to file, unable to do anything but pace nervously. I pretended to be working when one of the attorneys popped in. At 5:30pm sharp, I slipped through a back door into the hallway and then raced 17 floors down to street level, feeling like somebody who just made a jailbreak. For some enigmatic reason, it seemed crucial that nobody in the office saw Megan and me leaving together. Mr. O’Malley, especially.
I found Megan standing on the banks of the Riverwalk, several blocks away. She waved as I approached. She was an Irish-American girl, and her Irish background seemed to have burst forth boldly tonight, like a time-lapse photo, and seeing her there waiting swept me away. Her strawberry-blonde hair was down, combed out sleek and lustrous, a clip on one side, fresh makeup applied. Her lips seemed redder, her cheeks flushed and ruddy. Maybe I had never seen her wear makeup before.
“Hello, Steve,” she said, in a low, lusty tone, and the pitch of her voice and the articulation of my given name triggered in me an acute convulsion of desire.
She could have instructed me to plunge into the water with my clothes on (or off) and I would have willingly obliged.
She took my arm then and we began to walk, strolling along unhurried and nonchalant, taking in the sights and sounds and aromas filtering through the air. The sounds of a jazz band drifted in from around the bend. A juggler performed atop a ledge. A tour boat cruised by. We seemed to draw approving glances from the passing crowd, identifying us as a couple, a sharp-looking, happy couple. I welcomed that illusion. I felt privileged to be with her, walking beside her. For the moment, I could dare feel that she was mine. I could have walked forever. She pulled us over to the outdoor entrance of a small French restaurant, a crowd milling about.
“How about this place?” Megan said.
“Looks good to me,” I said.
We could have been standing at a Taco Bell and I would say fine.
A smiling hostess led us up a wrought iron stairway to a balcony overlooking the riverbanks. It was a festive outlook from up there, with a broad vista of the busy scene down below. This was a charming little perch, an eyrie, our own private lair. We sat scooched together at a small round table, white tablecloth, facing the view. A waitress arrived, smiling also, and we ordered drinks from the menu—she didn’t question my age—and settled in, pointing out various aspects of the landscape below.
The drinks hit hard and fast on my empty stomach. I opened up. I opened up like I had never opened up before, speaking unrestrainedly of my life, pre-Prince, my insecurities, my family, my hopes and dreams. She opened up, too, telling me about her childhood as a military brat, moving every few years, never putting down roots, before finally landing in college here at Trinity U.
“I think I’ve found a home, finally,” she said.
“I always find military brats interesting,” I said.
This was the first time that thought had ever crossed my mind.
“You’re lucky,” she said.
She leaned over to talk directly into my face.
“You’re lucky you got to stay in one place your whole life. I was always having to make new friends all the time. I never could settle in.”
We moved even closer together, bumping legs under the table, “accidentally,” intentionally. The rest of the world was reduced to a kind of background to our conversation, a prop. I felt close to her, close in a way I had never felt close to anybody before, certainly not an attractive young female. The parameters of my life expanded exponentially, new possibilities opening up. We sat staring earnestly at each other as we spoke, and I felt what I could identify only as a surge of love. I had never been in love with anyone before. I took her hand lying on the table, and we sat there transfixed, when the waitress returned for another drink order.
She unloaded on her boyfriend Gabe, then, the Air Force guy, dissecting him with a kind of confidential glee, relating tales of his hot temper and his obstinacy and his conservative political bent. I refrained from piling on, listening with a circumspect glee. Was it possible—was she saying that she really preferred me?
When we parted, in the parking garage back where we worked, we kissed, and kissed again, and I held her close to me, damp and fragrant, and for those fleeing moments my existence seemed entirely justified. The kisses seemed a form of understanding, a pledge, a promise of further commitment. I drove home in a stupor of jubilation and spent the evening lying on my back in my bedroom, watching the ceiling fan twirl round and round. I understood now—I had outgrown my childhood home. I might be living in an apartment with Megan soon.
I was apprehensive driving into work the following afternoon, wondering how we would conduct ourselves in our new, altered relationship. Should I pull her to me for a kiss in the privacy of the filling room? Would her boyfriend kill me? I had spent all day in class thinking about her, reviewing our activities from the night before. I didn’t know where we’d go from here. I’d go anywhere she wanted to go. Nothing was off the table. I had prepared an opening statement, an opening monologue, almost. I tried on five different shirts before selecting the shirt I wanted to wear for her.
Megan’s desk was deserted when I stopped by. I didn’t see any of her usual things lying about, her hairbrush, her handbag with the peace and love log, the bracelets she sometimes removed and laid on the desk beside her typewriter. I wandered through the office space, checking various nooks and crannies for signs of her, lingering in the hallways outside the restrooms. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well today. I didn’t feel all that wonderful myself, with the drinks last night and nothing at all to eat. Maybe she was sitting in on a deposition off site. Finally, I moseyed over to the front desk to ask Billie, as casually as possible, if she knew where Megan was today. I was careful to omit any clues about what had happened between us last night, that I was in love with her, that I would run away with her if she said the word,
“Hey, where’s Megan at today?” I said. “I haven’t seen her around.”
“You don’t know?” Billie said.
She laid her hands on her desk, one beside the other, a bit more officiously than before. The positioning of her hands seemed somehow ominous.
“I thought you two told each other everything.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her words sent a foreboding of doom through me then.
“I haven’t heard anything.”
I was melting down as I stood.
“She left. She quit. She left a note in Mr. O’Malley’s mailbox early this morning. Gabe’s being transferred. They’re eloping to Las Vegas.”
“Eloping to Las Vegas,” I said.
My face not doubt betrayed my crush emotions.
“Oh, man.”
Billie touched me lightly on the wrist. She knew, of course. She knew how I felt about Megan. She knew everything. A tear trickled down one cheek. Billie handed me a tissue to wipe it away. She always had a tissue handy. She stood and reached out to me, pulling me toward her in an awkward hug.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon in a deep, melancholy silence, trying to come to grips with Megan’s absence and what it would mean for my life moving forward. The filing room echoed like a tomb. The muted voices of people passing outside seemed to isolate me further. I drove home that evening in a funk of emptiness I had never experienced before.
The Prince felt like a tragic figure now, a jilted lover cast adrift in a callous, uncaring world. The Prince was done. The Prince was over.
Steven McBrearty grew up in San Antonio, TX., in one of those large, rollicking Catholic families so prevalent at the time. On any given day, there might be games of pitch and catch in the hallway or tackle football in the back bedroom. He moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where he earned a B.A. in English literature. He remains living in Austin still. He has two grown children and four lovely grandchildren.
He has published three collections of short stories and more than 40 individual stories and humorous essays. Several of his pieces have earned honors recognition. This is his second publication in Sybil.