Rules of Civility (22 page)

The next day, I went to work at the Pembroke Press as Nathaniel Parish's assistant. When he offered me the job, he immediately tried to dissuade me from taking it. He said I'd find Pembroke forty years behind the times. That he wouldn't have enough work for me to do. That the pay was terrible. A job as his assistant, he concluded, would be a cul de sac.

How good were his predictions?

 

Pembroke
was
forty years behind the times. On my first day on the job I could tell that the editors at Pembroke were nothing like their younger counterparts around town. Not only did they have manners, they thought them worth preserving. They treated the opening of a door for a lady or the hand-scripted regret the way an archaeologist treats a fragment of pottery—with all the loving care that we normally reserve for things that matter. Terrance Taylor definitely wouldn't have hailed a cab away from you in the rain; Beekman Canon wouldn't have let the elevator door close as you approached; and Mr. Parish would never have raised his fork before you raised yours—he would sooner have starved.

They certainly weren't the sorts to hound out the “boldest” new voices, elbow their way into contracts and then mount a Times Square soapbox to advertise their authors' artistic bravery. They were English public school professors who had misread the map in the tube and haplessly gotten off at the World of Commerce stop.

 

Mr. Parish
did not
have enough work for me to do. Mr. Parish still received plenty of unsolicited manuscripts, but his reputation having outlived his enthusiasm for new fiction, they were generally sent home in the company of a polite regret—an apology from Mr. Parish for not being quite as active as he once was and his personal encouragement for the artist to persevere. At this stage, Mr. Parish avoided meetings and administrative responsibilities of all kinds and his circle of serious correspondents had dwindled to a reassuring handful of septuagenarians who alone could decipher each other's faltering script. The phone rarely rang and he didn't drink coffee. To make matters worse, within days of my starting, the calendar turned to July. Apparently, come summer the writers stopped writing, editors stopped editing and publishers stopped publishing—allowing everyone to extend their weekends at their family enclaves by the sea. Mail piled up on the desks and the plants in the lobby began to look as wilted as the academic poets who would occasionally appear unannounced and wait Job-like for an audience.

Luckily, when I asked Mr. Parish where I could file his correspondence, he said I needn't bother, making an oblique reference to his system. When I insisted he elaborate, he sheepishly looked toward a cardboard box in the corner. It seems that for over thirty years whenever Mr. Parish finished reading an important letter, that's where it was filed. When the box was full, it was carted off to storage and replaced with an empty. This, I explained, was not a system. So, with Mr. Parish's consent, I pulled a few boxes from the turn of the century and began building chronological correspondence files alphabetized by author, subcategorized by theme.

Though he had a house on Cape Cod, Mr. Parish had avoided going there ever since his wife died in 1936.
It's really just a shack
, he would say, referencing that self-imposed simplicity favored by New England Protestants who respect everything about wealth other than its uses. But in his wife's absence, the hooked rugs, wicker chairs and rain-gray shingles that for so long had been symbolic of the perfectly understated summer retreat had suddenly revealed themselves to be inherently sorrow-making.

So as I sorted through his old correspondence, I would often find him peering over my shoulder. Occasionally, he would even pluck a letter from the pile and retreat with it to his office. There, with the door securely closed, in the quiet of the afternoon, he could revisit the faded sentiments of faded friends, undisturbed by all but the occasional thud of an ax in the distance.

 

The pay
was
terrible. Terrible, of course, is something of a relative term and Mr. Parish actually never quantified what
he
meant by terrible. Under the genteel circumstance of cold potato soup, I certainly hadn't pried.

So on my first Friday when I went down to payroll to pick up my check, I was still in the dark. Looking around, I took heart from the fact that the other girls were chirpy and well dressed. But when I opened the envelope, I discovered that my new weekly rate was half of what I'd made at Quiggin & Hale. Half!

Oh my God
, I thought.
What have I done?

I took another look at the girls around me who with blasé smiles had begun chattering about where they intended to weekend and it hit me: Of course they were blasé—they didn't need the paycheck! That's the difference between being a secretary and an assistant. A secretary exchanges her labor for a living wage. But an assistant comes from a fine home, attends Smith College, and lands her position when her mother happens to be seated beside the publisher in chief at a dinner party.

But while Mr. Parish had been right on these three accounts, he couldn't have been more wrong about the job being a cul de sac.

 

As I stood in the payroll department licking my wounds, Susie Vanderwhile asked if I wanted to join a few of the other assistants for a splash.
Sure,
I thought.
Why not? What better reason for a drink than looming penury?

At Quiggin & Hale when you went out with the girls, you'd hoof around the corner to the local well, snipe about your day, speculate on interoffice pinching, and then head for the elevated insufficiently soused. But when we walked out of the Pembroke Press, Susie hailed a cab. We all hopped in and headed to the St. Regis Hotel, where Susie's brother Dicky, a floppy-banged gregarious sort freshly out of college, was waiting in the King Cole bar. In company were two of Dicky's classmates from Princeton and a roommate from prep school.

—Halloo Sis!

—Hello Dicky. You know Helen. This is Jenny and Katey.

Dicky rattled off introductions like a machine gun.

—Jenny TJ. TJ Helen. Helen Wellie. Wellie Katey. Roberto Roberto.

No one seemed to notice that I was the oldest person by a few years.

Dicky slapped his hands together.

—Right then. What'll it be?

G&Ts were ordered for all. Then Dicky ran off to roust up club chairs from around the bar. He pushed them up to our table, ramming them into each other like the bumper cars at Coney Island.

Within minutes there was some story about how Roberto, under the influence of Bacchus and in the bad graces of Poseidon, had gone astray in the fog off Fisher's Island. He had steered his father's Bertram right into a concrete bulkhead, smashing it to smithereens.

—I thought I was a quarter mile offshore, Roberto explained, because I could hear a bell buoy off the port bow.

—Rather sadly, said Dicky, the bell buoy turned out to be the supper bell on the McElroys' veranda.

As Dicky spoke, he made animated and democratic eye contact with all the girls and he punctuated the details of his story with assurances of shared familiarity:

Yes, Dicky, we knew.

We knew the curmudgeonly old gent who stood behind the bar at Mory's in New Haven. We knew how dull was the crowd at Maidstone. We knew the Dobsons and the Robsons and
all
the Fenimores. We knew a jib from a jibe, and Palm Beach from Palm Springs. We knew the difference between a sole fork, a salad fork, and that special fork with the bent tines used for breaking the kernels of corn when it's served on the cob. We all knew each other
so
well. . . .

And therein lay the first of two unanticipated advantages of taking a job at the Pembroke Press: presumption. For a young woman the pay at Pembroke was so bad and the professional prospects so poor, it went without saying that you took the job because you could absolutely afford to do so.

—Who are you working with? one of the girls had asked in the cab.

—Nathaniel Parish.

—Oh! How terrific! How do you know him?

How did I know him? My father and he were at Harvard? Grandma and Mrs. Parish grew up summering in Kennebunkport? I spent the semester in Florence with his niece? Honey, you can take your pick.

Dicky was standing now. He took the imaginary steering wheel in hand. He screwed up his eyes and pointed to where the bell buoy tolled.

He gave the Virgil in perfect meter, iamb for iamb. Although, one suspected that Dicky's ability to quote classical verse stemmed less from a love of literature than from a rote education in prep school which time had yet the time to erase.

Jenny applauded and Dicky bowed, knocking a glass of gin into Roberto's lap.

—
Mon Dieu
, Roberto! Be a little more fleet of foot, man!

—Fleet of foot? You've ruined another pair of my khaki trousers.

—Come now. You've a lifetime supply.

—Whatever the state of my supply, I demand an apology.

—Then you shall have one!

Dicky pointed a finger in the air. He adopted the appropriate expression of sober contrition. He opened his mouth.

—Pencey!

We all turned to see what a Pencey was. It was another Ivy Leaguer coming through the door with a girl on each arm.

—Dicky Vanderwhile! Good God. What next.

Yes, Dicky was a genuine mixer. He took relative pride and absolute joy in weaving together the strands of his life so that when he gave them a good tug all the friends of friends of friends would come tumbling through the door. He's the sort that New York City was made for. If you latched yourself onto the likes of Dicky Vanderwhile, pretty soon you'd know
everyone
in New York; or at least everyone white, wealthy and under the age of twenty-five.

 

When the clock struck ten, at Dicky's instigation we trundled over to the Yale Club so that we could get a hamburger before the grill closed. Gathered around the old wooden tables, as we drank flat beer from water glasses, there were more wild-eyed anecdotes and witty exchanges. There were more familiar faces, more rapid-fire introductions, more assumptions, presumptions, resumptions.

—Yes, yes. We've met before, one of the new arrivals said when Dicky introduced me. We danced a lick at Billy Ebersley's.

I had been wrong in thinking that no one had noticed my age. Dicky had noticed and, apparently, he found it enticing. He began to leer at me across the table conspiratorially when anyone had anything the least sophomoric to say. He clearly believed too many of the stories he'd heard from school chums about summer escapades with older sisters' friends. While Roberto and Wellie drew straws to see which of their father's accounts would be charged, Dicky took the opportunity to drag up a chair.

—Tell me, Miss Kontent, where can we find you on the average Friday night?

He gestured toward his sister and some of the other girls at the table.

—Not with this sorority, I suspect.

—On the average Friday night, you'd find me at home.

—At home, eh? Please be more precise with your adverbial phrases. If you say
at home
with this crowd, we'll assume that you're living with your parents. Wellie there wears candy-striped pajamas and Roberto has model airplanes hanging from the ceiling over his bed.

—So do I.

—The pajamas or the airplanes?

—Both.

—I'd love to see them. So where is this home, precisely, where one can find you in candy stripes on a Friday night?

—Is this where one can find you on the average Friday night, Dicky?

—What's that?!

Dicky looked around the room in shock. Then he waved a dismissive hand.

—Certainly not. It's a bore. Geriatrics and rush chairmen.

He looked me in the eye.

—What do you say we get out of here? Let's take a turn through the Village.

—I couldn't steal you away from your friends.

—Oh, they'll be all right without me.

Dicky put a hand on my knee, discreetly.

—. . . And I'll be all right without them.

—You'd better throttle back, Dicky. You're steering straight for a bulkhead.

Dicky took his hand off my knee with enthusiasm, nodding his head in agreement.

—Righto! Time should be our ally, not our enemy.

He stood up knocking over his chair. He pointed a finger in the air and proclaimed to no one in particular:

—Let the evening end as it began: with a sense of mystery!