Rules of Civility (28 page)

When Wallace opened the door to his apartment, I curtsied.

—Ho, ho . . . ho, he said.

In the living room, carols were playing on the phonograph and a bottle of champagne was wreathed in evergreens. We toasted St. Nick and Jack Frost and rapid returns from bold adventures. Then we sat on the carpet with scissors and adhesive tape and went about our work.

As the Wolcotts were in the paper business, they had access to every kind of wrapping paper on earth: forest greens patterned with candy canes; velvety reds with pipe-smoking Santas in sleighs. But the family tradition was to wrap everything in a heavy white stock that was delivered to the house by the roll. Then they dressed the gifts with a different-colored ribbon for each member of the clan.

For ten-year-old Joel, I wrapped a miniature baseball field with a spring-released bat that knocked ball bearings around the bases—and then tied it with a ribbon of blue. I wrapped and finished in yellow ribbon a pair of stuffed lizards for fourteen-year-old Penelope, a Madame Curie in the making who frowned on most amusements, including candy. As the pile grew smaller, I kept an eye out for Little Wallace's gift. When we had gone shopping, Big Wallace had said he had something special in mind for his godson, but in taking a quick inventory, I couldn't identify it. The mystery was solved when, with the last of the presents wrapped, Wallace cut a small rectangle of paper and then took his father's black-dialed watch from his wrist.

With the job complete, we passed into the kitchen, where the air smelled of slow-roasting potatoes. After checking the oven, Wallace wrapped an apron around his waist and seared the lamb chops that I had carefully selected the day before. Then he removed the chops and deglazed the pan with mint jelly and cognac.

—Wallace, I asked as he handed me my plate, if I declared war on America, would you stay and fight with me?

 

When dinner was over, I helped Wallace carry the gifts to the back pantry. Lining the hallway were photographs of family members smiling in enviable locales. There were grandparents on a dock, an uncle on skis, sisters riding sidesaddle. At the time it seemed a little odd, this back hall gallery; but running into a similar setup in similar hallways over the years, I eventually came to see it as endearingly WASPy. Because it's an outward expression of that reserved sentimentality (for places as much as kin) that quietly permeates their version of existence. In Brighton Beach or on the Lower East Side, you were more apt to find a single portrait propped on a mantel behind dried flowers, a burning candle, and a generation of genuflection. In our households, nostalgia played a distant fiddle to acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by forebears on your behalf.

One of the pictures was of a few hundred boys in coat and tie.

—Is that St. George's?

—Yes. From my . . . senior year.

I leaned a little closer, trying to find Wallace. He pointed to a sweet, unassuming face, which I had already passed over. Wallace was just the sort who blends into the background of the school photo (or the greeting line at the cotillion) but who, with the passage of time, increasingly stands out against the lapses in character around him.

—This is the whole school? I asked after another moment of scanning the boys' faces.

—You're . . . looking for Tinker?

—Yes, I admitted.

—He's here.

Wallace pointed to the left side of the photograph where our mutual friend stood alone at the outskirts of the assembly. Given another minute, I would certainly have identified Tinker. He looked just as you'd expect him to look at the age of fourteen—his hair a little tussled, his jacket a little wrinkled, his eyes trained on the camera as if he were ready to spring.

Then Wallace smiled and moved his finger across the photograph to its opposite edge.

—And he's here.

Sure enough, at the far right of the assembly was another figure, slightly blurred, but unmistakably him.

In order to have the whole school in focus, Wallace explained, they used the old box cameras on stilts where an aperture is slowly pulled across a large negative, exposing one part of the assembly at a time. This allows someone on the far side to sprint behind the student body and appear in the photograph twice—but only if he times it well and runs like the devil. Every year a few freshmen tried the stunt, but Tinker was the only one Wallace remembered succeeding. And from the wide smile on the second Tinker's face, you sensed that he knew it.

Wallace and I had been reasonably true to our promise of leaving Tinker and Eve out of our conversations. But there was something nice for the both of us in seeing Tinker's Puckish self at play. We lingered, giving the stunt its due.

—Can I ask you something? I said after a moment.

—Sure.

—That night we all had dinner at the Beresford—when we were riding down in the elevator, Bucky made a crack about Tinker rising like a phoenix from the ashes.

—Bucky is . . . a bit of a boor.

—Even so. What was he talking about?

Wallace was silent.

—Is it that bad? I prodded.

Wallace smiled softly.

—No. It's . . . not bad, per se. Tinker came from an old Fall River family. But I gather his . . . father had a run of rotten luck. I think he . . . lost just about everything.

—In the Crash?

—No.

Wallace pointed to the photograph.

—It was around then, when Tinker was a freshman. I remember, because I was a . . . prefect. The trustees met to discuss what they should do given the . . . change in his circumstances.

—Did they give him a scholarship?

Wallace gave a slow shake of the head.

—They asked him to leave. He finished high school in Fall River and . . . put himself through Providence College. Then he got a job as a clerk at a . . . trust company and began working his way back up.

Born in the Back Bay, attended Brown, and worked at his grandfather's bank.
That had been my smug assessment of Tinker ten minutes after we'd met.

I took a second look at the photo of this boy with his curly hair and friendly smile and for the first time in months, I wanted to see him. Not to hash anything out. I didn't need to talk about Eve or what had or hadn't or might have happened. I just wanted a second shot at a first impression—to have him walk into The Hotspot and sit at the neighboring table and watch the band—so that when the soloist began to bray and Tinker gave me that bewildered smile, I could take him in without assumptions. For this little piece of information from Wallace told me something that I should have known all along—that as Tinker and I had come of age, we hadn't been on opposite sides of a threshold; we'd been standing side by side.

Wallace looked back and forth across the photograph with a probing gaze—as if the very moment that it had been taken was when Mr. Grey had lost the last of the family fortune—and the two Tinkers on either side of the assembly represented the end of one life and the beginning of another.

—Most people remember the phoenix for being born from the ashes, he said. But they forget its other feature.

—What's that? I asked.

—That it lives five hundred years.

The next day, Wallace shipped out.

Well, not exactly.

In 1917, they “shipped out.” Young men in pressed uniforms with fair hair and red cheeks gathered in battalions on the docks of the Brooklyn shipyards. With their duffel bags on their shoulders, they marched up the gangplanks of the great gray cruisers gamely singing choruses of “Over There, Over There.” And when the whistle finally blew, they competed to hang over the railings so that they could blow kisses at their sweethearts or wave to their mothers, who presciently wept in the background.

But if you were a well-to-do young man in 1938 off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, there wasn't much fare to fan. You bought a first-class ticket on the
Queen Mary
and showed up on the docks after a leisurely lunch. Passing among the tourists who were already thumbing through phrase books, you politely made your way up the gangplank and headed to your cabin on the upper deck where your luggage, which had been sent ahead, was being carefully unpacked by a steward.

Ever since the League of Nations prohibited the volunteering of extra-nationals in the conflict, it had been bad form to discuss that you were headed there while you dined at the captain's table (seated in between the Philadelphia Morgans and the Breezewood sisters in the company of their aunt). You certainly couldn't say it to the immigration officials in Southampton. Instead, you'd say you were on your way to Paris to see some school chums and purchase a painting or two. Then you'd take the train to Dover, the boat to Calais, and a car to the south of France, where you could either hike over the Pyrenees or hire a fishing trawler to run you down the coast.

—See you Mike, Wallace said at the gangplank.

—Good luck, Mr. Wolcott.

When he turned to me, I observed that I wouldn't know what to do with my Saturdays anymore.

—Maybe I could run some errands for your mother? I suggested.

—Kate, he said. You shouldn't . . . be running someone's errands. Not mine. Not my mother's. Not Mason Tate's.

 

When Michael and I were driving back from the dock, it was pretty mournful in the car—for the both of us. As we crossed the bridge into Manhattan I broke the silence.

—Do you think he'll be careful, Michael?

—Being that it's a war, Miss, that would sort of defeat the purpose.

—Yes. I suppose it would.

Through the windows of the car, I saw city hall float past. In Chinatown, miniature old women crowded around street carts laden with ungodly fish.

—Shall I take you home, Miss?

—Yes, Michael.

—To Eleventh Street?

It was sweet of him to ask. If I had given Wallace's address, I think he would have taken me there. After pulling up to the curb, he would have opened the door to the backseat, Billy would have opened the door to the building, and Jackson would have brought me in the elevator up to the eleventh floor, where for a few weeks more I could fend off my future. But with a pile of presents waiting patiently in a law firm's file room, Michael would soon be covering the brown Bentley in tarpaulin even as John and Tony dismantled the Remington and the Colt and stowed them in a locker. Maybe it was time for my brush with perfection to be dismantled and stowed away too.

 

On the Thursday after Wallace left, I wandered over to Fifth Avenue after work to see the windows at Bergdorf's. A few days before, I'd noticed that they'd been curtained for the installation of the new displays.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, I always looked forward to the unveiling of the new seasons at Bergdorf's. Standing before the windows, you felt like a tsarina receiving one of those jeweled eggs in which an elaborate scene in miniature has been painstakingly assembled. With one eye closed you spy inside, losing all sense of time as you marvel at every transporting detail.

And
transporting
was the right word. For the Bergdorf's windows weren't advertising unsold inventory at 30% off. They were designed to change the lives of women up and down the avenue—offering envy to some, self-satisfaction to others, but a glimpse of possibility to all. And for the Fall season of 1938, my Fifth Avenue Fabergé did not disappoint.

The theme of the windows was fairy tales, drawing on the well-known works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; but in each set piece the “princess” had been replaced with the figure of a man, and the “prince” with one of us.

In the first window, a young lord with raven hair and flawless skin lay in state under a flowering arbor, his delicate hands folded on his chest. But at his side stood a dashing young woman (in a red bolero jacket by Schiaperelli), her hair cut short for battle, her sword tucked neatly through her belt, and the reins of her faithful horse in hand. With an expression at once worldly and compassionate she looked down upon the prince in no apparent rush to rouse him with a kiss.

In the next window, with the renaissance trickery of an opera set, one hundred marble steps descended from a palace door to a cobbled court, where four mice hid in the shadow of a pumpkin. On the periphery, the diminishing figure of a golden-haired stepson turned the corner at a sprint, while front and center knelt a princess (in a fitted black dress by Chanel) looking with determination at a Derby shoe made of glass. From her expression you could just tell that she was ready to call her kingdom into action—from the footmen to the chamberlains—and have them scour the countryside from dawn to dusk for the boy who fit that shoe.