Rules of Civility (21 page)

Authors: Amor Towles

BOOK: Rules of Civility

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Uncle Roscoe smiled sentimentally at the memory of what my father had done. Looking back, he said he wasn't sure it made all that much sense, but it was a fine story nonetheless.

I guess that Sunday, I thought a lot about my father and my uncle Roscoe. I thought about them arriving on the freighter out of St. Petersburg in their early twenties without knowing a word of English and going straight to see the Brooklyn Bridgeâthe largest tightrope in the world. I thought about the meek and the merciful; about the blessed and the bold.

The next morning, I woke at the crack of dawn. I showered and dressed. I brushed my teeth. Then I went to the quintessential offices of Quiggin & Hale and quit.

JUNE 27

Entering the suite with the bookseller's bag in hand, he laid the room key quietly on the front table. Down the hall he could see the bedroom door was still closed, so he went into the large sunlit living room.

Hanging over the arm of the high-back chair was the half-read copy of the previous day's
Herald.
On the coffee table was the bowl of fruit missing an apple and the towering arrangement of flowers. All were precisely where they had been in the smaller room on the second floor.

The previous night, after his meeting in the City, he had gone to a little spot he liked in Kensington where Eve was to meet him for dinner. He had arrived on time and ordered a whiskey and soda assuming she would be a few minutes late. But near the bottom of his second glass, he began to worry. Could she have gotten lost? Had she forgotten the name of the restaurant or the time they were to meet? He considered going back to the hotel, but what if she was already en route? As he was weighing what he should do, the hostess approached with the phone.

It was Claridge's. For the first time in ten years, the manager explained somberly, the hotel's lift had malfunctioned. Miss Ross had been trapped between floors for thirty minutes. But she was unharmed and on her way.

Despite his assurances that it wasn't necessary, the manager insisted that he and Eve be moved to a finer room.

When Eve arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes later, she wasn't in the least put out by the mishap. She had enjoyed herself immensely. Aside from the elevator boy, who did top-notch impressions of Hollywood gangsters and carried a flask of Irish whiskey on his hip, the only other passenger on the ill-fated descent had been Lady Ramsay, the white-haired wife of a peer who, when pressed, could do a few Hollywood impressions of her own.

When they returned to the hotel after dinner, there was a handwritten note
waiting, inviting them to a party the next night at Lord & Lady Ramsay's residence on Grosvenor Square. Then the hotel manager ushered them to their new suite on the fifth floor.

All of their belongings had been expertly moved. The clothes had been hung in the paired closets in the same arrangementâjackets to the left, shirts to the right. His safety razor was standing in its glass on the sink. Even the casually laid itemsâlike the little welcoming card from Anne that had accompanied the flowersâhad been left purposefully askew, as if tossed on the table.

It was the sort of attention to detail that one might expect to find at the scene of a perfect crime.

He went to the bedroom and quietly opened the door.

The bed was empty.

Eve was in the window seat with a glamour magazine. She was mostly dressed, wearing a pair of light blue slacks and a spring shirt. Her hair hung loosely above her shoulders and her feet were bare. She was smoking a cigarette and tapping the ashes out the window.

âTop of the morning, she said.

He gave her a kiss.

âDid you sleep well?

âLike lead.

There was no tray on the bed or on the coffee table.

âHave you had breakfast? he asked.

She held up her cigarette.

âYou must be starving!

He picked up the phone.

âI know how to call room service, sweetie.

He put the phone back in its cradle.

âAlready out and about? she asked.

âI didn't want to disturb you. I had breakfast downstairs and then went for a walk.

âWhat'd you buy?

He didn't know what she was referring to.

She pointed.

He'd forgotten that he still had the bookseller's bag in his hand.

âA Baedeker's, he said. I thought we might see some of the sights later.

âI'm afraid the sights are going to have to get in line. I'm having my hair done at eleven. Nails at noon. And at four the hotel is sending up tea with an expert in royal etiquette!

Eve raised her eyebrows and gave a smile. A lesson in royal etiquette was just the sort of thing that appealed to her sense of humor. He must have looked like he was going to spoil the fun.

âYou don't have to stick around, she said. Why don't you get a head start on the museums? Or better yet, why don't you go get yourself those shoes that Bucky was talking about? Didn't you say that if the meetings went well, you'd treat yourself to a pair?

It was true. He had said that to Bucky; and the meetings had gone well. After all, he had the whole concession and the world had no choice but to beat a path to his door.

As he rode the lift downstairs, he told himself that if the doorman didn't know the address of the shop, he wouldn't go. But, of course, the doorman knew exactly where the shop was; and in his tone he made it clear that for a Claridge's guest there was really no other shoemaker's address worth knowing.

The first time down St. James's, he walked right past the shop. He still wasn't accustomed to the British style of purveying. In New York, the Shoemaker to the King would have taken up a city block. It would have had a neon sign that blinked in three colors. Here, the shop was the width of a newspaper stand and cluttered. That was a mark in its favor.

But however humble the appearance, according to Bucky there was nothing more extravagant than a John Lobb shoe. The duke of Windsor got his shoes there. Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin got their shoes there. It was the very pinnacle of cobbling. The final say in the great winnowing of commerce. At John Lobb, they didn't just make shoes. They actually stuck your foot in plaster and kept the cast in storage so that whenever you wanted, they could make you another perfect pair.

A plaster cast, he thought to himself as he stared through the windowâjust like they made of a dead poet's face or of a dinosaur's bones.

A tall Brit in a white suit came out of the shop and lit a cigarette. Well bred, well educated, well dressed, he too seemed the product of a great winnowing.

In an instant, the Brit had gone through a similar calculus and nodded to him as an equal.

âLovely day, the Brit said.

âYes, he agreed and lingered for a moment, knowing instinctively that if he did, the Brit was bound to offer him a cigarette.

In St. James's Park, he sat on an old painted bench and savored the smoke. The tobacco was noticeably different from an American blend, a fact which was at once a disappointment and a pleasure.

While the park was sunlit and lovely, it was surprisingly empty. It must have been an in-between hourâin between the march to work and the break for lunch. He felt lucky to have happened there.

Across the lawn, a young mother chased her six-year-old out of a tulip row. Dozing on a neighboring bench, an old man was about to spill a bag of nuts on the ground as a council of squirrels gathered wisely at his feet. Over a cherry tree shedding the last of its blossoms passed a cloud in the shape of an Italian automobile.

When he put out his cigarette, it didn't seem right to toss it on the ground. So he wrapped the butt in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. Then he opened the bookseller's bag, took out the book and started at the beginning:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond. . . .

SUMMERTIME

CHAPTER TWELVE

Twenty Pounds Ought & Six

Nathaniel Parish was a senior fiction editor at the Pembroke Press and something of a fixture. With a pitch-perfect ear for the nineteenth-century narrative sentence and a religious conviction that the novel should illuminate, he had been an early champion of the Russians and originated authoritative translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into English. Some say that he traveled all the way to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's country homestead, just to discuss an ambiguous sentence in the closing paragraph of
Anna Karenina
. Parish had been a correspondent of Chekov's, a mentor of Wharton's, a friend to Santayana and James. But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by oneâat peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.

I had seen Parish a few times when I had gone to meet Evey after work. He had wispy eyebrows and hazel eyes; in summer he wore seersucker and in winter an old gray raincoat. Like other aging, awkward academic sorts, he had come to a point when young ladies gave him anxiety. When he left his office at lunch he would virtually run to the elevator. Eve and the other girls would torture him by blocking his way with their literary queries and tight-fitting sweaters. In self-defense, he would wave both arms and invent improbable excuses
(I'm late for a meeting with Steinbeck!)
. Then he would go to the Gilded Lily, the long-in-tooth restaurant where every day he lunched alone.

That's where I found him, the day I quit my job. He had just taken his seat at his usual table. After perusing the menu unnecessarily, he ordered soup and half a sandwich. Then, before turning to the book that was sitting beside his plate, he did what any of us would do: He surveyed the restaurant with a relaxed smile, satisfied that his food was ordered, his hour was empty, and all was well with the world. That's when I approached him, a copy of
Vishniovy Sad
in hand.

âExcuse me, I asked. Are you Martin Durk?

âCertainly not!

The old editor's retort was so emphatic, it even caught
him
off guard. By way of apology, he added:

âMartin Durk is half my age.

âI'm so sorry. I'm meeting him for lunch, but I don't know what he looks like.

âWell, he's a few inches taller than I am with a full head of hair. But I'm afraid that he's in Paris.

âParis? I said in distress.

âAccording to the society pages.

âBut I'm here for an interview. . . .

I fumbled and dropped my book. Mr. Parish leaned out of his chair to retrieve it. When he handed it back, he studied me a little more closely.

âYou read Russian? he asked.

âYes.

âWhat do you think of the play?

âSo far, I like it.

âYou don't find it dated? What with all that fuss over the end of agrarian aristocracy? I should think it very old-fashioned to sympathize with the plight of the Ranevskayas.

âOh, I think you're wrong. I think we all have some parcel of the past which is falling into disrepair or being sold off piece by piece. It's just that for most of us, it isn't an orchard; it's the way we've thought about something, or someone.

Mr. Parish smiled and handed me back the book.

âYoung lady, Mr. Durk has no doubt done you a service by failing to keep his appointment. I'm afraid your sensibilities would be wasted on him.

âI guess I'll take that as a compliment.

âYou most certainly should.

âI'm Katey.

âNathaniel Parish.

(Aghast.)

âYou must think me a fool. Going on about the meaning of a Chekov play. How mortifying.

He smiled.

âNo. It was the pinnacle of my day.

As if on cue, a bowl of vichyssoise was put on the table. I looked down at the soup and gave it my best Oliver Twist.