Rumplestiltskin

Before anyone reached Harold Taylor they had to get past Florence Rising who already knew everything about them and had formed an opinion.

This opinion she told to Harold Taylor and the amazing thing was that he listened, always. In their twenty years together she had never made a mistake about anyone.

Harold did not like looking at Florence because she wasn’t pretty or tall enough and, when investors came through his doors, they expected major beauty.

He did not come to her desk and she did not come to his. They talked to each other on the intercom so he would not have to see her and she would not have to squint because of the sunlight piercing the glass on four sides of his office. She also had a touch of vertigo.

Harold took credit for her judgment, claiming in interviews that he could read people. He always had journalists write something so he could see their handwriting and pretend he knew everything from the way the letters slanted or dipped and rose. What he knew was what Florence had told him.

He was widely viewed as a business genius but all the decisions were based on whatever Florence Rising felt. She could read character, degree of honesty, intelligence, desperation, fear, and stirrings of love.

She was worth everything to Harold Taylor and he would never let her go. She had enough money to retire.

“Never,” Harold said. “Not as long as I live.”

This she might have taken as a challenge but for the fact that she loved Harold Taylor as a son. She knew all his secrets even the ones he did not know she knew.

Harold’s current wife had been a beauty queen. He was a man in love with tall physical beauty in every form—female, male, seventy story buildings, athletes, pageant swimsuit competitions, agency models, spires rising in desert countries and throughout his city which was New York.

He himself was almost good looking with his broad shoulders, narrow hips, intent gaze especially when evaluating a property, and eyes just the color of the back of a blue bird.

He was a tall man and most of the men he did business with were short men. All the women he knew well were almost of his height. Except Florence Rising, whose legs, beneath her desk, did not touch the floor, but rested on a needlepoint footstool she had brought into the office.

Florence allowed one of the tall women to bring him his morning tea and buttered poppy seed roll. The young woman bought them every day from the vendor on the corner of this building Harold Taylor built and owned.

The butter slid down his chin and onto his red tie.

“Florence, I need a tie. Who’s next?”

She told him about Mr. Simon and what he would say he wanted but what he really wanted and that she did not trust his intentions in the deal. She told him about Mr. Simon’s real net worth and what was shaky in the numbers and the problems with his volatile Latin mistress and the fact that he was a Jew and his golf handicap at the one golf club and the one city club that did not know he was Jewish but might have cared. Also his birth sign, which was Aries.

Florence believed in astrology and used it for everything. Harold thought it was nonsense. When Harold’s wife talked to Florence and got her opinion on things based on void moons and Mercury going retrograde, he could barely contain himself.

Mr. Simon was a surprise. He was six foot five inches tall and therefore looked down on Harold. Furthermore he was not who he said he was. Florence had made her first mistake. He did not survey the office with the usual awe and study the wall of fame or the obvious Picasso. He did not approach and appreciate the view. Instead he said to Harold Taylor:

“Do you want to know who you really are?”

Harold was about to push the hidden desk button for security.

Instead he looked up at the man who was wearing a dark shirt with his suit, already a problem. Florence knew he did not trust men in dark shirts.

“Yeah? Who am I according to you?”

“Let’s begin with your parents who are not your parents. Have you ever wondered why you don’t look like them or your sister?”

“I’m adopted? That is total bullshit.”

“Two people know who you really are and I am one of them. I will give you three guesses.”

“Time for you to leave. Florence!” he said into the intercom.

The man, whoever he was, had a slight limp as he was walking to the door. When he came in he had shown no trace of a limp.

“What happened? How did he get by you? Do I have to start worrying about you now, Florence? You did your usual research? Your astrology chart bullshit? What did he want? He didn’t even mention the deal you outlined. The memo was pure crap. I think he was one of your outer space visitors. It’s a good thing we have the scans and the metal detectors. Make sure he is out of the entire building and call Jeff right away. I want him and Sam on it.”

That evening as his wife Irina, whose off duty at home beauty was a perpetual shock and joy, was pouring his evening Coke Zero, Harold walked over to look out over his city. His reflected face did not match that of his parents, standing in evening clothes in the photograph to his left. He turned his face to the right and then to the left, then up and down with lowered chin as though he had never seen himself before.

“Do you think I look like my parents?”

“Not at all.”

“How about Margaret?”

“Not in the slightest,darling. What is this, all of a sudden?”

The most alluring little frown came over her face as he told her the story of the man in the dark shirt who had presented him with a new idea about his favorite subject: himself.

She was curled up on one of their gigantic sofas like a cat. Her long legs in black velvet jeans were folded on themselves. As usual, her bare toes were prettily painted. He walked over and kissed her shiny hair which was the color of a tarnished penny and smelled her usual fragrance which both excited and reassured him.

Three guesses. Or what? There had to be a threat or a reward for not answering or answering incorrectly. He was not going to pay some anonymous man a reward and he was not afraid. His children were safe and always guarded from a distance. Irina had a bodyguard.

He usually slept well but he had one of those tormented nights he had heard others describe and, in the morning, he called his mother who was in California.

As he told her the story of the man who came to his office, he could hear her deep breaths, then she hung up on him. He called back and, when there was no answer, he called his father who never took calls before ten in the morning and also did not answer. Florence had many numbers for yesterday’s man, none of them valid. Then as he tried his mother again, he saw he had a text the subject of which was “Name Game.”

Before he read it, he went to look at the twins, still holding his phone and sweating through his white silk pajamas.

One of them held a bear and the other was curled around a rabbit as they slept. They both looked like him, not Irina.

“What is your first guess?” said the text.

“It’s true,” said his mother as he was strangling his grapefruit half. “You came to us through Dr. Larry who told us you were sound and had brilliant healthy parents.”

“I am 43 years old, Ma. Aren’t you supposed to tell a child he’s adopted when he is five or six and read him all those books to make him feel better. Everyone grows up thinking they don’t belong in their families anyway.”

“I don’t know what to say, Harold. The time just passed.”

“And now a stranger comes to the office and gets by Florence and pretends to be somebody else and dangles this over me. Who am I? Who the eff am I? Now I have to guess who I am.”

“No, Harold. You are who you made yourself into, someone way beyond what your father and I could have created.”

“Is Margaret adopted too?”

“No.”

“This is the worst day of my life,” Harold said and threw his phone across the room where it skidded through the deep furry rug. He was supposed to take an ad in The Observer with his first guess. And, actually, why should he bother? Dr Larry had killed himself long ago, something he had been allowed to know when he was a child. He would never find out.

If his mother was ready to tell a child about beloved– “young, handsome, doctor Larry”—that’s how he liked to be known to his patients, some joke — killing himself why could she not tell him he was adopted?

“Do you have a name?” he asked his mother, calling back.

“Of course not, Harold. We have no records, no documents. That’s the way Dr. Larry wanted it and, when he went, he burned all his files first. Or shredded them or something so you and Margaret had no records at all for a while.”

“You mean when he killed himself, not when he ‘went.’ Why can’t you ever say what you really mean, mother?”

His day, which was extremely busy, was ruined already. He could not think. He glared at Florence as he came in. He had already told her what the man wanted.

“I don’t see the ‘or else…’ in this. Why should I bother with this guy? O.K. I’m adopted. I don’t know my real parents. I’m not going to spend time searching for some losers and playing a guessing game with a lunatic. We’ve got a lot to do today, who’s first?”

As he went through his day—the calls, the meetings, traveling from here to there, site to site, the people lined up outside his office he found himself highly agitated. He kept thinking of the limping man who knew his secrets. What was the use of his security, all the ex-FBI men on his team if they could not come up with some kind of answer. How much would he have to tell them? They must begin with young handsome dead Dr. Larry Shapiro and his missing records and finding the man from yesterday through Florence’s research on “Mr. Simon.”

And then Sam Collins walked into his office smiling, bringing with him the young woman who went for his poppy seed roll every morning. Yesterday she had ridden down from the 63^rd floor with a man who said into his phone, “Don’t worry…he’ll never guess Rising with the pediatrician.” Sam Collins had just seen the elevator tapes, found the young woman and heard her report.

Harold Taylor tried to smile. It would not take three guesses after all. He would not have to pay out any money. He was Harold, born Shapiro and Jewish, and Florence Rising was his mother. He did not know which was worse.

He opened his door and saw that Florence was not at her desk. He looked at the needlepoint footstool. It was covered with big ugly flowers and violated all his principles of newness and clean design.

He picked it up by one of its legs, holding it out from his body. He had an overcoat in his closet that he made a point of never wearing, even on the coldest days.

Harold wrapped his coat around the little stool and, cradling the bundle, walked to his private elevator. He waved off his guys, greeted the doorman, and left the building.

He walked the long block to the Avenue of the Americas and put his coat with the footstool inside in the first trash can he saw. He decided he would never tell Florence Rising that he knew.