Rules of Civility (9 page)

SPRINGTIME

CHAPTER FIVE

To Have & to Haven't

It was an evening in late March.

My new apartment was a studio in a six-story walk-up on Eleventh Street between First and Second avenues. It looked out into a narrow court where the laundry lines were pulleyed between the windowsills. Despite the season, gray sheets floated five stories above the frozen ground like drab, unimaginative ghosts.

Across the court an old man in his underwear wandered back and forth in front of his window with a skillet. He must have been a janitor or a watchman because he was always frying meat fully dressed in the mornings and eggs in his skivvies at night. I poured myself a taste of gin and turned my undivided attention to a worn pack of cards.

On something of a whim, I had spent fifteen cents on a primer for contract bridge and it had quickly earned its keep. Any given Saturday, I could play from reveille to taps. I would deal out the deck at my little kitchen table and move from chair to chair so that I could play each of the four positions in turn. I invented a partner in the north seat—an aristocratic Brit whose reckless bidding complemented my cautious inexperience. Nothing pleased him more than to raise my bid injudiciously, forcing me to play a doubled game in a minor suit.

As if in response, the personalities of East and West began to assert themselves: On my left sat an old rabbi who remembered every card and on my right a retired Chicago mobster who remembered little, sized up well, and occasionally slammed through sheer force of will.

—Two hearts? I opened tentatively, having counted my points with care.

—Two spades, said the rabbi with a hint of admonition.

—Six hearts! shouted my partner, still arranging his cards.

—Pass.

—Pass.

When the telephone rang, we all looked up in surprise.

—I'll get it, I said.

The phone was teetering on a stack of Tolstoy's novels.

I assumed the caller was the young accountant who'd tried so hard to make me laugh at Fanelli's. Against my better judgment, I had let him write down my number—GRamercy 1-0923, the first private line that I had ever had. But when I picked up the receiver, it was Tinker Grey.

—Hi Katey.

—Hello Tinker.

I hadn't heard from Tinker or Eve in almost two months.

—What are you up to? he asked.

Under the circumstances, it was a cowardly sort of question.

—Two games short of a rubber. What are you up to?

He didn't answer. For a moment, he didn't say anything.

—Do you think you could come by tonight?

—Tinker . . .

—Katey, I don't know what's going on between you and Eve. But the last few weeks have been a tough run. The doctors said it was going to get worse before it got better; I don't think I really believed them, but it has. I need to go to the office tonight and I don't think she should be alone.

Outside, it began to sleet. I could see gray splotches forming on the sheets. Someone should have reeled them in while they still had the chance.

—Sure, I said. I can come.

—Thanks, Katey.

—You don't need to thank me.

—All right.

I looked at my watch. At this hour the Broadway train ran intermittently.

—I'll be there in forty minutes.

—Why don't you take a cab? I'll leave the fare with the doorman.

I dropped the receiver in its cradle.

—Double, sighed the rabbi.

Pass.

Pass.

Pass.

Those first few days after the crash, while Eve was still unconscious, Tinker led the vigil. A few of the girls from the boardinghouse took turns reading magazines in the waiting room, but Tinker rarely left her side. He had the doorman in his building deliver fresh clothes and he showered in the surgeon's locker.

On the third day, Eve's father arrived from Indiana. When he was at her bedside, you could tell that he was at a loss. Neither weeping nor praying came very naturally to him. He would have been better off if they had. Instead, he stared at his little girl's ravaged face and shook his head a few thousand times.

She came to on the fifth day. By the eighth she was more or less herself—or rather, a steely version of herself. She listened to the doctors with cold unaverting eyes. She adopted whatever technical language they used like
fracture
and
suture
and
ligature,
and she encouraged them to adopt her more descriptive terms like
hobbled
and
disfigured
. When she was nearly ready to leave the hospital, her father announced that he was taking her home to Indiana. She refused to go. Mr. Ross tried to reason with her; then he tried to plead. He said that she would regain her strength so much quicker at home; he pointed out that given the condition of her leg she wouldn't be able to climb the boardinghouse stairs; besides, her mother was expecting her. But Eve wasn't swayed; not by a word of it.

Tentatively, Tinker suggested to Mr. Ross that if Eve intended to convalesce in New York, she could do so in his apartment where there was an elevator, kitchen service, doormen, and an extra bedroom. Eve accepted Tinker's offer without a smile. If Mr. Ross thought the setup unacceptable, he didn't say so. He was beginning to understand that he no longer had a voice in his daughter's affairs.

The day before Eve was released, Mr. Ross went home to his wife empty-handed; but after kissing his daughter good-bye he signaled that he wanted to speak with me. I walked him to the elevator and there he thrust an envelope in my hand. He said it was something for me, to cover Eve's half of the rent for the rest of the year. I could tell from the thickness of the envelope that it was a lot of money. I tried to give it back to him, explaining that the boardinghouse was just going to stick me with another roommate. But Mr. Ross insisted. And then he disappeared behind the elevator doors. I watched the needle mark his descent to the lobby. Then I opened the envelope. It was fifty ten-dollar bills. It was probably the very same tens that Eve had sent back to him two years before, ensuring once and for all that these particular bills would never have to be spent by either of them.

I took the developments as a sign it was time to strike out on my own—especially since Mrs. Martingale had already warned me twice that if I didn't get all those boxes out of her basement, she was going to throw me out. So I used half of Mr. Ross's money to front six months' rent on a five-hundred-square-foot studio. The other half I stowed in the bottom of my uncle Roscoe's footlocker.

Eve intended to go straight from the hospital to Tinker's apartment, so it was my job to move her things. I packed them as best I could, folding the shirts and sweaters into perfect squares the way that she would. At Tinker's direction, I unpacked her bags in the master bedroom where I found the drawers and closets empty. Tinker had already moved his clothes to the maid's room at the other end of the hall.

 

The first week that Eve was in residence at the Beresford, I joined the two of them for dinner every night. We would sit in the little dining room off the kitchen and eat three-course meals that were prepared in the building's basement and served by jacketed staff. Seafood bisque followed by tenderloin and Brussels sprouts capped off with coffee and chocolate mousse.

When dinner was over, Eve was usually exhausted and I would help her to her room.

She would sit at the end of the bed and I would undress her. I would take off her right shoe and stocking. I would unzip her dress and pull it over her head being careful not to graze the little black stitches that tracked the side of her face. She would stare straight ahead, submissively. It took me three nights to realize that what she was staring at was the large mirror over the vanity. It was a stupid oversight. I apologized and said that I'd have Tinker remove the mirror. But she wouldn't let us touch it.

Once I had tucked her in, given her a kiss, and turned out the light, I would quietly close the door and return to the living room where Tinker anxiously awaited. We didn't have a drink. We didn't even sit down. In the few minutes before I went home, the two of us would whisper like parents about her progress:
She seems to be regaining her appetite. . . . Her color's coming back. . . . Her leg doesn't seem to be giving her so much discomfort....
Self-soothing phrases pattering like raindrops on a tent.