Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

  When I had looked at Wallace’s watch it was almost two. Alley had agreed to cover me until our daily three o’clock with Mr. Tate. If I skipped dessert, I still had time to taxi back and switch into a longer skirt.

  —This looks very entre nous.

  Slipping into Wallace’s chair was the horse-riding, gun-toting Bitsy Houghton.

  —We don’t have more than a minute, Kate, she said conspiratorially. We’d better get to it. How do you know Wally?

  —I met him through Tinker Grey.

  —That good-looking banker? Isn’t he the one who got in the car wreck with his girl?

  —Yes. She’s an old friend of mine. Actually, we were all in it together. Bitsy looked impressed.

  —I’ve never been in a car wreck.

  Though from the way she said it, you got the sense she had been in other kinds of wrecks—like in an airplane or motorcycle or submarine.

  —So, she continued, is your friend as ambitious as the girls claim? (As ambitious as the girls claim?)

  —No more so than most, I said. But she has got spunk.

  —Well, they’ll hate her for that. Anyway. I dislike meddlers more than cats. But can I give you a tip?

  —Sure.

  —Wally is grander than Mount Rushmore, but he’s twice as shy. Don’t wait for him to smooch you first.

  And before I could speak, she was halfway across the room.

  The next night, as I was doubling myself on a four-heart bid, there was a knock at my door. It was Wallace with a bottle of wine in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He said he had just had dinner with his attorney in the neighborhood—an explanation that must have required a rather generous definition of neighborhood. I closed the door and we shared one of Wallace’s unawkward silences.

  —You’ve got a . . . lot of books, he said at last.

  —It’s a sickness.

  —Are you . . . seeing anyone for it?

  —I’m afraid it’s untreatable.

  He put his briefcase and the wine on my father’s easy chair and began circling the room with a tilted head.

  —Is this the . . . Dewey decimal system?

  —No. But it’s based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil and the other epics are there by the tub.

  Wallace wandered toward one of the windowsills and plucked Leaves of Grass off a teetering stack.

  —I take it the . . . transcendentalists do better in sunlight.

  —Exactly.

  —Do they need much water?

  —Not as much as you’d think. But lots of pruning.

  He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.

  —And the . . . mushrooms?

  —The Russians.

  —Ah.

  Wallace carefully returned Whitman to his perch. He wandered over to the card table and circled it the way one circles an architectural model.

  —Who’s winning?

  —Not me.

  Wallace took the chair opposite the dummy. I picked up the bottle.

  —Will you stay for a drink? I asked.

  —I’d . . . love to.

  The wine was older than me. When I came back to the table, he had taken up the south hand and was rearranging the cards.

  —Where’s the . . . bidding?

  —I just bid four hearts.

  —Did they double?

  I plucked the cards out of his hand and swept up the deck. We sat for a minute saying nothing and he drank to the bottom of his glass. I sensed that he was about to go. I tried to think of something captivating to say.

  —By any chance, he asked, do you know how to play honeymoon bridge?

  It was an ingenious little game. Wallace had played it with his grandfather on rainy days in the Adirondacks. Here’s how it works: You place the shuffled deck on the table. Your opponent draws the top card and then has two options: He can keep the card, look at the second one, and discard it facedown; or he can discard the first card and keep the second one. Then it’s your turn. The two of you go back and forth in this manner until the deck is exhausted, at which point you each hold thirteen cards, having discarded thirteen—giving the game an unusually elegant balance between intention and chance.

  As we played, we talked about Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, about the Dodgers and the Yankees. We had a lot of laughs. After I won a small slam in spades, I took Bitsy’s advice and leaned forward to kiss him on the mouth, but he was just about to say something and we ended up clacking our teeth. When I leaned back, he was trying to put a hand around my shoulder and he almost fell out of his chair.

  We both sat back and laughed. We laughed because somehow we suddenly knew exactly where we stood. Ever since the visit to the hunt club, a small uncertainty had buzzed between us. It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise. Until now.

  Maybe it was because we found being in each other’s company so effortless. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had clearly been in love with Bitsy Houghton since he was a kid (star-crossed romance being the spoiler that it is). Either way, we knew that our feelings for each other weren’t urgent, or impassioned, or prone to deception. They were friendly and fond and sincere.

  It was like the honeymoon bridge.

  The romantic interplay that we were having wasn’t the real game—it was a modified version of the game. It was a version invented for two friends so that they can get some practice and pass the time divertingly while they wait in the station for their train to arrive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Pursuit of Perfection

  August 26, 98°. As if by design, the glass of Mason Tate’s office was just thick enough so you could hear him raising his voice without gleaning the specifics. At this particular juncture, he was articulating some nuance of dissatisfaction to Vitters, the staff photographer, while pointing a commanding finger in the direction of New Jersey.

  Judging from a distance, most people probably assumed that Mason Tate was insufferable. Certainly, he seemed to care about his little glamour magazine to an irrational degree: That rumor is too well founded. This blue too cerulean. That comma too early. This colon too late. But it was precisely his nit-picking mania that lent a sense of purpose to the rest of us.

  With Tate at the helm, the work of Gotham wasn’t some vague agrarian battle with the seasons in which the outcomes of one’s efforts were held hostage to time and temperature; it wasn’t the drudgery of the firetrap seamstress needling the same loop over and over until it’s one’s sanity that’s being stitched into a seam; nor was it the life of the seafarer exposed to the elements for years at a time, returning like Odysseus older, weaker, nearly forgotten—unrecognizable to all but one’s dog. Ours was the work of the demolition expert. Having carefully studied the architecture of a building, we were to install an array of charges around its foundation set to go off in an orchestrated sequence such that the building would collapse under the weight of its own infrastructure—simultaneously inspiring gawkers with awe and clearing the way for something new.

  But in exchange for this heightened sense of purpose, you kept your hands on the wheel or got them whacked with a ruler.

  As Vitters sprinted back to the safety of his darkroom, Tate buzzed me three times in quick succession: Get. In. Here. I smoothed my skirt and picked up a steno pad. He turned from the drafting table looking especially imperious.

  —Does the color of my tie look more accommodating than usual?

  —No, Mr. Tate.

  —What about my new haircut. Does it seem more encouraging?

  —No, sir.

  —Is there anything about me today which would suggest that I want an unasked-for opinion more than I did yesterday?

  —Not in the least.

  —Well, that’s a relief.

  He turned back to the drafting table and leaned against it with both arms. On it were ten different candids of Bette Davis: Bette in a restaur
ant; Bette at a Yankees game; Bette strolling down Fifth Avenue, putting the window treatments to shame. He isolated four pictures that had been taken within minutes of each other. They showed Bette, her husband, and a younger couple seated in a booth at a supper club. On the table were full ashtrays and empty glasses. The only food left was a candle-lit slice of cake sitting in front of the starlet.

  Tate waved at the pictures.

  —Which is your favorite?

  One of them had been penciled by Vitters to suggest how the photo might be cropped. In it, the candle was freshly lit and the two couples smiled at the camera like smokers on a billboard. But in one from a little later in the evening, Bette offers the last bite of cake to the young man at her side as his wife looks on with the narrowed eyes of a Harpy.

  I pulled it from the pile.

  Mr. Tate nodded sympathetically.

  —It’s funny about photography, isn’t it? The entire medium is founded on the instant. If you allow the shutter to be open for even a few seconds, the image goes black. We think of our lives as a sequence of actions, an accumulation of accomplishments, a fluid articulation of style and opinion. And yet, in that one sixteenth of a second, a photograph can wreak such havoc.

  He looked at his watch and waved me toward a chair.

  —I’ve got ten minutes. Take a letter.

  It was addressed to Davis’s agent. It referenced Mr. Tate’s respect for the actress and his fondness for her husband and the lovely birthday dinner they must have had at El Morocco. After an aside about an upcoming contract negotiation with Warner Brothers and a parenthetical about the little seaside town where he thought he saw Davis in the off-season, he requested an interview. He told me to leave the letter on his desk, grabbed his briefcase, and left for a vacation that apparently no one else had earned. Maybe Mr. Tate was still irked at Vitters, or maybe it was our faulty air-conditioning; whatever the reason, the letter was a paragraph too long, a verb too insistent, and an adjective too obvious.

  When Alley and I came out of the building fifteen minutes later, it was so hot even she didn’t want a slice of cake. We wished each other well and parted company at the corner. Then it was back to the girls’ room at the automat, where this time I donned a black velvet dress and a bright red ribbon for my hair.

  That first night Wallace and I played cards in my apartment, he confessed that he had been seeing his attorney in order to put his assets in trust. Why? Because on the twenty-seventh of August, he was going to Spain to join up with the Republican forces.

  And he wasn’t kidding.

  I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised. All sorts of interesting young men were joining the fray—some spurred by fashion, some by a love of risk, most by a healthy dose of misplaced idealism. For Wallace, there was also the small matter of having been given too much.

  Born in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with an Adirondack summer house and hunting plantation waiting in the wings, Wallace had gone to his father’s prep school, his father’s college, and taken over the family business when his father had died—inheriting not only his father’s desk and car but the secretary and driver that went with them. To his credit, Wallace doubled the business, he established a scholarship in his grandfather’s name, he earned the respect of his peers. But all the while, he suspected that the life he was living so reliably was not his own. Those seven years he had just spent becoming a captain of industry and a deacon of the church were his father’s fifties. His reckless twenties had eluded him altogether.

  But not for much longer.

  In a single stroke, he was going to shed every aspect of his life that was sensible, familiar, and secure. And in the month before he left, rather than review the disadvantages of his decision with friends and family, he opted for the company of an amiable stranger.

  We were both working long hours, so midweek we would meet Bitsy and Jack for a late supper and a few rounds of bridge. Née Van Heuys, Bitsy was Pennsylvania landed-wealth and she was tougher and shrewder than she needed to be given her looks. What solidified our relationship was her discovery that I had a head for cards. By the second date, we were playing the boys for money and fronting them points. Then when the night was over, Wallace would give me a friendly kiss at the curb, put me in a cab, and we’d head home to our respective apartments for a good night’s sleep. But the weekends, Wallace and I spent those side by side celebrating the doldrums of Manhattan.

  On any given Saturday, if there was a party on the water in Westport or Oyster Bay, Wallace Wolcott was probably invited. But the first time he spread a selection of invitations on the table for my consideration, I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. Pressed, he admitted that these sprawling affairs made him feel a little out of place. Lord knows, if they made him feel out of place, I wasn’t going to be much help. So we regretted. We told the Hamlins and the Kirklands and the Gibsons that we would not be able to attend.

  Instead, on Saturday afternoons we ran Wallace’s errands in the Bentley: To Brooks Brothers, Michael, to pick up the new khaki shirts; to Twenty-third Street to get the pistols cleaned; then on to Brentano’s for a Spanish phrase book.

  Olé!

  Maybe it was my exposure to Mason Tate, but as we tackled these simple tasks, I found I had a burgeoning taste for flawlessness. Just a few weeks before, no detail of my life had been big enough to merit my attention. The Chinese laundress could have ironed a hole in my skirt and I would have tossed a nickel on the drum, thanked her kindly, and worn it to the church social. After all, where I came from the mission was to pay as little as one could without stealing, so on those rare occasions when you got home and discovered you had the unbruised melon, you had good reason to suspect you didn’t deserve it.

  But Wallace deserved it. At least, as far as I was concerned.

  So, if the color of a new sweater clashed with the color of his eyes, I sent it back. If the first four shaving soaps smelled too flowery, I told the girl at Bergdorf’s to bring four more. And if the porterhouse steak wasn’t thick enough, I stood right there at the counter and watched Mr. Ottomanelli swing his cleaver until he got it right. Taking care of someone else’s life—that may have been what Wallace Wolcott was running away from, but I found it suited me just fine. Then, with our errands behind us (having “earned” it), we’d cocktail at an empty hotel bar, dine at a nice restaurant without a reservation, and stroll back up Fifth Avenue to his apartment, where we could trade novels and divvy up Hershey bars.

  One night in early August while having a late supper at the Grove—where the potted ficus were hung with little white lights—Wallace observed wistfully that he wouldn’t be home for Christmas.

  Apparently, Christmas was a big holiday for the Wolcotts. On Christmas Eve, three generations spent the night at the Adirondack camp, and while they attended the midnight service, Mrs. Wolcott would put a pair of matching pajamas on every pillow. So in the morning, they all came down to the freshly cut spruce in matching red and white stripes or a tartan plaid. Wallace didn’t particularly enjoy shopping for himself, but he took pride in finding that perfect gift for his nephews and nieces, especially his young namesake, Wallace Martin. But this year he wasn’t going to make it back in time.

  —Why don’t we shop for them now? I suggested. We can wrap the gifts, tag them with a Don’t Open Til Xmas, and drop them off at your mother’s.

  —Better yet, I could give them to . . . my attorney. With instructions to deliver on Christmas Eve.

  —Better yet.

  So we shoved aside our plates and sketched a plan of action identifying each recipient, their relation to Wallace, their age, their character, and a potential gift. In addition to Wallace’s sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews, the list included Wallace’s secretary, the chauffeur Michael, and a few others to whom he felt indebted. It was like a cheat sheet on the entire Wolcott family. What the girls in Oyster Bay wouldn’t have paid to get a look at it.

  We spent a weekend shopping, then two n
ights before Wallace was to set sail, we planned a dinner for two at his apartment so we could wrap. As I looked through my closet that morning, my first thought was to wear my polka-dot dress. But somehow, it didn’t seem to strike the right note. So I dug in the back of the closet and found a black velvet dress that I hadn’t worn in a century. Then I rummaged in my sewing kit for a length of ribbon as red as a poinsettia.

  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.