Rules of Civility (42 page)

—May I?

He studied me for a second as if I'd roused him from a dream-filled sleep. I could see now that he was as high as the Himalayas.

—I've seen you before, he said matter-of-factly.

—Really? From what distance?

—You were a friend of Hank's. I saw you at The Lean-To.

—Oh. Right.

I vaguely remembered him now as one of the WPA types who had sat at the adjacent table.

—Actually, I was kind of looking for Hank, I said. Is he here?

—Here? No . . .

He eyed me up and down. He rubbed his fingers across the stubble on his chin.

—I guess you aint heard.

—Heard what?

He studied me a moment more.

—He's gone.

—Gone?

—Gone for good.

For a moment I was startled. It was that strange sense of surprise that unsettles us, however briefly, in the face of the inevitable.

—When? I asked.

—A week or so.

—What happened?

—That's the twist. After spending months on the dole, he had a windfall. Not nickels, you understand. Real money. Second-chance money. Build yourself a house of bricks money. But Hank, he takes the whole wad and throws himself a riot.

The jackal looked around as if he'd suddenly remembered where he was. He waved his beer bottle at the room with distaste.

—Nothin like this.

The motion seemed to remind him that his bottle was empty. With a rattle, he dumped it in the sink. He took a new one from the icebox, closed the door and leaned back.

—Yeah, he continued. It was somethin. And Hank was ring-leadin the whole thing. He had a pocketful of twenties. He was sendin the boys out for tupelo honey and turpenteen. Dolin out the dough. Then around two in the morning he had everyone drag his paintings to the roof. He dumped em in a pile, doused em with gas and set em on fire.

The jackal smiled, for all of two seconds.

—Then he threw everybody out. And that's the last we saw of him.

He took a drink and shook his head.

—Was it morphine, I asked.

—Was what morphine?

—Did he overdose?

The jackal gave an abrupt laugh and looked at me like I was crazy.

—He
enlisted
.

—Enlisted?

—Joined up. His old outfit. The Thirteenth Field Artillery. Fort Bragg. Cumberland County.

In a bit of a stupor, I turned to go.

—Hey. Didn't you want a beer?

He took a bottle from the refrigerator and handed it to me. I don't know why I took it. I didn't want it anymore.

—See ya round, he said.

Then he leaned against the icebox and closed his eyes.

—Hey, I said rousing him again.

—Yeah?

—Do you know where it came from? The windfall, I mean.

—Sure. He sold a bunch of paintings.

—You've got to be kidding.

—I don't kid.

—If he could sell his paintings, why did he enlist? Why did he burn the rest of them?

—It weren't his paintings he sold. It was some Stuart Davises he come into.

 

When I opened the door to my apartment, it looked unlived-in. It wasn't empty. I had my fair share of possessions. But for the last few weeks, I had been sleeping at Dicky's, and slowly but surely the place had become orderly and clean. The sink and the garbage cans were empty. The floors were bare. The clothes lay folded in their drawers and the books waited patiently in their piles. It looked like the apartment of a widower a few weeks after he's died, when his children have thrown out the trash but have yet to divvy up the dross.

That night, Dicky and I were supposed to meet for a late supper. Luckily, I caught him before he'd headed out. I told him that I was back at my place and ready to pack it in. It was obvious enough that something had spoiled the evening for me, but he didn't ask what it was.

Dicky was probably the first man I'd dated who was so well raised that he couldn't bring himself to pry. And I must have acquired a taste for the trait—because he was far from the last.

I poured myself a gin that was sized to make my apartment seem less depressing and sat in my father's easy chair.

I think it had surprised the jackal a little that Hank had wasted his windfall on a party. But it wasn't hard to see where Hank was coming from. However newly minted the bills, you couldn't escape the fact that the money from the Stuart Davises was a redistribution of Anne Grandyn's wealth—and Tinker's integrity. Hank had no choice but to treat the money with disregard.

 

Time has a way of playing tricks on the mind. Looking back, a series of concurrent events can seem to stretch across a year while whole seasons can collapse into a single night.

Maybe time has played such tricks on me. But the way I remember it, I was sitting there thinking about Hank's riot when the telephone rang. It was Bitsy in a halting voice. She was calling with the news that Wallace Wolcott had been killed. Apparently, he'd been shot near Santa Teresa, where a band of Republicans were defending some little hillside town.

By the time I received the call, he was already three weeks gone. In those days, I guess it took a while for the bodies to be recovered and identified and for the news to travel home.

I thanked her for calling and lay the receiver in its cradle before she'd finished talking.

My glass was empty and I needed a drink, but I couldn't bring myself to pour one. Instead, I turned out the lights and sat on the floor with my back against the door.

St. Patrick's on Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street is a pretty powerful example of early nineteenth-century American Gothic. Made of white marble quarried from upstate New York, the walls must be four feet thick. The stained-glass windows were made by craftsmen from Chartres. Tiffany designed two of the altars and a Medici designed the third. And the Pietà in the southeast corner is twice the size of Michelangelo's. In fact, the whole place is so well made that as the Good Lord sees about His daily business, He can pass right over St. Patrick's, confident that those inside will take pretty good care of themselves.

On this, the fifteenth of December at 3:00 P.M., it was warm and ascendant. For three nights, I'd been working with Mason on “The Secrets of Central Park West” until two or three in the morning, cabbing home for a few hours sleep, showering, changing, and then heading right back into the office without a moment for reflection—a pace which was suiting me just fine. But today, when he insisted I head home early, I found myself wandering down Fifth Avenue and up the cathedral's steps.

At that time of day, there were 400 pews and 396 of them were empty. I took a seat and tried to let my mind wander; but it wouldn't.

Eve, Hank, Wallace.

Suddenly, all the people of valor were gone. One by one, they had glittered and disappeared, leaving behind those who couldn't free themselves from their wants: like Anne and Tinker and me.

—May I, someone asked genteelly.

I looked up a little annoyed that with all that space someone felt the need to crowd my pew. But it was Dicky.

—What are you doing here? I whispered.

—Repenting?

He slid in beside me and automatically put his hands on his knees like someone who had been well trained as a fidgety child.

—How did you find me? I asked.

He leaned to his right without taking his eyes off the altar.

—I stopped by your office so that I could run into you by chance. When your absence spoiled my plan, a rather tough cookie with cat's-eye glasses suggested I might happen into one of the neighborhood churches instead. She said you occasionally visit them on your coffee break.

You had to give Alley credit. I had never told her that I liked to visit churches and she had never made reference to knowing. But giving Dicky that tip may well have been the first concrete sign that she and I were going to be friends for a long, long time.

—How did you know which church I was in? I asked.

—It stood to reason. Because you weren't in the last three.

I gave Dicky's hand a squeeze and said nothing.

Having studied the sanctuary, Dicky was now looking up into the recesses of the church's ceiling.

—Are you familiar with Galileo? he asked.

—He discovered the world was round.

Dicky looked at me surprised.

—Really? Was that him? We've sure made hay with that discovery!

—Wasn't that who you meant?

—I don't know. What I recall about this Galileo fellow is that he was the one who figured that a pendulum takes the same amount of time to swing two feet or two inches. This, of course, solved the mystery of the grandfather clock. Anyway, apparently he discovered this by watching a chandelier swing back and forth from the ceiling of a church. He would measure the duration of the swings by taking his pulse.

—That's amazing.

—Isn't it? Just by sitting in church. Ever since I learned that as a boy, I've let my mind wander during sermons. But I haven't had a single revelation.

I laughed.

—Shhh, he said.

A canon appeared from one of the side chapels. He knelt, crossed himself, ascended into the sanctuary, and began to light the candles on the altar, preparing for the four o'clock mass. He was dressed in a long black robe. Watching him, Dicky's face lit up as if he had just had his long awaited revelation.

—You're Catholic!

I laughed again.

—No. I'm not particularly religious, but I was born Russian Orthodox.

Dicky whistled. It was loud enough that the canon looked back.

—That sounds formidable, he said.

—I don't know about that. But for Easter, we'd fast all day and eat all night.

Dicky seemed to consider this carefully.

—I think I could do that.

—I think you could.

We were silent for a while. Then he leaned a little to his right.

—I haven't seen you in a few days.

—I know.

—Are you going to tell me what's going on?

We looked at each other now.

—It's a long story, Dicky.

—Let's go outside.

 

We sat on the cold steps with our forearms on our knees and I told him an abbreviated version of the same story that I had told Bitsy at the Ritz.

With a little more distance, and maybe a little more self-consciousness, I found myself telling it as if it were a Broadway romp. I was making the most of the coincidences and the surprises: Meeting Anne at the track! Eve refusing the proposal! Stumbling on Anne and Tinker at Chinoiserie!

—But this is the funniest part, I said.

Then I told him about discovering Washington's
Rules of Civility
and what a numbskull I had been in not realizing that it was Tinker's playbook. For illustration, I rattled off a few of Washington's maxims with a snappy delivery.

But, whether it was from being on the steps of a church in December or from wisecracking about the father of our country, the humor didn't seem to be coming across. As I hit the final lines, my voice faltered.

—That didn't seem so funny, after all, I said.

—No, said Dicky.

He was suddenly more serious than usual. He clasped his hands and looked down at the steps. He didn't say anything. It began to scare me a little.

—Do you want to get out of here? I asked.

—No. That's all right. Let's stay a moment.

He was silent.

—What are you thinking? I pressed.

He began to tap his feet on the steps in an uncharacteristically unfidgety way.

—What am I thinking? he said to himself. What am I thinking?

Dicky breathed in and exhaled, getting ready.

—I am thinking that maybe you're being a little hard on this Tinker fellow.

He stopped tapping his feet and directed his attention across Fifth Avenue toward the deco-era statue of Atlas that holds up the heavens in front of Rockefeller Center. It was almost as if Dicky couldn't quite look at me yet.

—So this Tinker fellow, he said—in the tone of one wishing to make sure that he's got command of the facts—he was ousted from prep school when his father squandered his tuition. He goes to work and along the way he stumbles onto Lucrezia Borgia who lures him to New York with the promise of a foot in the door. You all meet by chance. And though he seems to have a thing for you, he ends up taking in your friend who's been smashed up by a milk truck, until she brushes him off. Then his brother sort of brushes him off too. . . .