Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

  I made him tell some of the tall tales from the old days like when he and my father stole the constable’s dog and stuck him on the train to Siberia; or when they set out to see the traveling tightrope walkers and were found twenty miles from town, headed in the wrong direction; or when they arrived in New York in 1895 and went straight to see the Brooklyn Bridge. I had heard these stories time and again, of course, which was sort of the point. But then he told me one that I had never heard before, which was also from their first days in America.

  By that point, New York already had its fair share of Russians. There were Ukrainians and Georgians and Muscovites. Jews and Gentiles. So in a few neighborhoods, the shop signs were in Russian and the ruble was as widely accepted as the dollar. On Second Avenue, Uncle Roscoe recalled, you could buy vatrushka every bit as good as what you’d find on the Nevsky Prospekt. But a few days after they arrived, having paid a month’s rent, my father asked Roscoe for all the Russian currency he had left. He combined the bills with his own and then he burned them in a soup pot.

  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 Bridge—the 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 arrangement—jackets to the left, shirts to the right. His safety razor was standing in its glass on the sink. Even the casually laid items—like the little welcoming card from Anne that had accompanied the flowers—had 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.

  —Top of the morning, she said.

  He gave her a kiss.

  —Did you sleep well?

  —Like lead.

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

  —Have you had breakfast? he asked.

  She held up her cigarette.

  —You must be starving!

  He picked up the phone.

  —I know how to call room service, sweetie.

  He put the phone back in its cradle.

  —Already out and about? she asked.

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

  —What’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.

  —A Baedeker’s, he said. I thought we might see some of the sights later.

  —I’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.

  —You 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 window—just 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.

  —Lovely day, the Brit said.

  —Yes, 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 dif
ferent 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 hour—in 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 one—at 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.

  —Excuse me, I asked. Are you Martin Durk?

  —Certainly not!

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

  —Martin Durk is half my age.

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

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

  —Paris? I said in distress.

  —According to the society pages.

  —But 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.

  —You read Russian? he asked.

  —Yes.

  —What do you think of the play?

  —So far, I like it.

  —You 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.

  —Oh, 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.

  —Young 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.

  —I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.

  —You most certainly should.

  —I’m Katey.

  —Nathaniel Parish.

  (Aghast.)

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

  He smiled.

  —No. 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.

  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 corre
spondence 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.