by Amor Towles
—That’s it.
—So what happened to her?
—Happened?
—You know. The scars.
—She was in a car accident.
—She must have been going pretty fast.
—We were hit from behind. She went through the windshield.
—You were in the accident too!
—That’s right.
—What if I were to say the name Billy Bowers. Mean anything to you?
—No. Should it?
—How about Geronimo Schaffer?
—No.
—Okay, Kathy. Can I call you Kathy?
—Anything but Kathy.
—Okay then, Kate. You seem smart.
—Thanks.
—It’s not the first time I’ve seen a girl end up like your friend.
—Drunk?
—Sometimes they get battered about. Sometimes it’s a broken nose. Sometimes . . .
He let his voice drift off for emphasis. I smiled.
—You’re way off the page on this one, Detective.
—Maybe. But a girl can get in over her head. I understand that. All she wants is to make a living. Like any of us. It’s not how she thought she was going to end up. But then who ends up like they thought they would? They call em dreams for a reason, right?
Finneran grunted in appreciation of Tilson’s turn of phrase.
When they brought me back to the front of the station house, Eve was there slumped on a bench. The matron stood by in full uniform. She helped me get Eve into the back of a cab while Tilson and Finneran looked on, hands in pockets. As we drove away, Eve with eyes closed began mimicking the sound of a trumpet.
—Evey. What’s going on?
She gave a girlish laugh.
—Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
Then she leaned on my shoulder and purred herself to sleep.
She looked done in, all right. I stroked her hair like she was a little kid. It was still wet from the precinct showers.
At Eleventh Street, I gave the cabby an extra buck to help me get her up the stairs. We dumped her on my bed with her legs dangling off the mattress. I called the apartment at the Beresford but no one answered. So I got a pot of warm water from the kitchen and washed her feet. Then I took off her dress and tucked her in bed in a camisole that cost more than my entire outfit, shoes included.
Back at the station house, after the desk sergeant got me to sign for Eve’s belongings, he had poured a single item from a large manila envelope. It fell on the desk with a delicate clunk. It was an engagement ring and it had a diamond you could skate on. From the second I picked it up, it made my palms sweat. So I took it from my pocket now and put it on the kitchen table. The flapper’s jacket, I threw that in the trash.
Looking at Eve asleep, I wondered what the hell was going on. How did she end up drunk in an alley? What happened to her shoes? And where was Tinker? Whatever their story, Eve was breathing easy now—for the moment forgetful, vulnerable, at peace.
It’s a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that’s why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they’re fast asleep.
In the morning as we drank coffee and ate fried eggs with Tabasco, Eve was her chipper self—telling me what a bore the south of France had been with its moldy buildings and crowded beaches and Wyss making a scene over every von This and von That. If it weren’t for the croissant and casinos, she said, she would have walked all the way home.
I let her chatter on for a while, but when she asked me how work was going, I pushed the ring across the table.
—Oh, she said. We’re talking about that.
—I think so.
She nodded a second and then shrugged.
—Tinker proposed.
—That’s great, Eve. Congrats.
She made a startled face.
—Are you kidding? For Christ’s sake, Katey. I didn’t accept.
Then she brought me up-to-date. It was just like Generous had said: Tinker had taken her out on the yawl with the bubbly and the chicken. After lunch they went for a swim, toweled off, then he got down on one knee and plucked the ring from the saltcellar. She turned him down on the spot. Actually, her exact words were: Why don’t you just drive me into another lamppost?
When Tinker presented the ring, she wouldn’t even touch it. He had to close it in her palm and insist she think it over. But she didn’t need to. She slept like a baby. Then she got up at dawn, stuffed an overnight bag, and slipped out the back door while Tinker was sound asleep.
Ambitious, determined, no-nonsense, whatever you wanted to call her, Eve never ceased to surprise. I thought of Eve six months earlier dressed in white, draped across the couch in Tinker’s apartment dissolving barbiturates in tepid gin. From that lotus-eating repose, she had roused herself to run the city ragged as the rest of us watched with varying degrees of admiration, envy, and contempt, convinced she was angling for a proposal. And all the time, she was laying in wait for everyone’s smug assessments like a cat in the barnyard grass.
—I wish you’d been there, she said with a nostalgic smile. You would’ve peed in your pants. I mean, he takes a week to engineer this song and dance and as soon as I tell him no, he sails his buddy’s yacht right into the ground. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He must have gone in and out of that cabin a hundred times looking for a flare gun. He trimmed the sails. Climbed the mast. He even got out and pushed.
—What were you doing?
—I just lay there on the deck with the rest of the champagne. I was listening to the whistle of the breeze, the flap of the sails, the lap of the waves.
Eve buttered a piece of toast as she recalled it, her expression almost dreamy.
—It was the first three hours of peace I’d had in half a year, she said. Then she stuck the knife in the butter like it was a banderilla in the back of a bull.
—The irony, of course, is that we don’t even like each other.
—Come on.
—You know what I mean. We’ve had some fun. But mostly, it’s he says po-tay-to and I say po-tah-to.
—You think that’s the way he saw it?
—Only more so.
—Then why’d he propose?
She took a sip of her coffee and scowled at the cup.
—What do you say we liven these up?
—Suit yourself. But I’ve got work in thirty minutes.
She found a fifth of whiskey in a cabinet and Irished her cup. When she sat back down, she tried to change the subject.
—Where the hell did all the books come from?
—Not so fast, Sis. I’m serious. If the two of you were so po-tay-to po-tah-to, why did he propose?
She shrugged and put her coffee down.
—It was my mistake. I got pregnant and I told him so when we got to England. I should have kept my trap shut. If he was a pain in the neck when I came out of the hospital, you can just imagine what he was like after that.
Eve lit a cigarette. She tilted her head back and shot the smoke toward the ceiling. Then she shook her head.
—Watch out for boys who think they owe you something. They’ll drive you the craziest.
—So what are you going to do?
—With my life?
—No. With the baby.
—Oh. I took care of that in Paris. I just hadn’t got around to telling him. I was going to find some way to cushion it. But in the end, I had to let him have it.
We were quiet for a moment. I stood to clear the plates.
—I had no choice, Eve explained. He’d cornered me. We were a mile at sea.
I turned on the tap.
—Katey. If you start washing those dishes like my mother, I’m going to throw myself out the window.
I came back to my seat. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
—Do
n’t look so disappointed in me. I can’t bear it—not from you.
—You’re just catching me off guard.
—I can see that. But you’ve got to understand. I was brought up to raise children, pigs & corn and to thank the Good Lord for the privilege. But I’ve learned a thing or two since the accident. And I like it just fine on this side of the windshield.
It was like she’d said all along: She was willing to be under anything, as long as it wasn’t somebody’s thumb.
She tilted her head to study my expression more carefully.
—Are you going to be okay with this?
—Sure.
—I mean, I’m the fucking Catholic, right?
I laughed.
—Yeah. You’re the fucking Catholic.
She tamped out her cigarette and pulled back the lid on the pack. There was one more left. She lit it and threw the match over her shoulder; then she held it out to me like an Indian chief. I took a drag and handed it back. We were both silent, trading the tobacco.
—What are you going to do now? I finally asked.
—I don’t know. I’ve got the Beresford to myself for a bit, but I’m not going to stay. My parents have been hounding me to come home. Maybe I’ll pay them a visit.
—What’s Tinker going to do?
—He said he might go back to Europe.
—To fight the Fascists in Spain?
Eve looked at me in disbelief and then laughed.
—Shit, Sis. He’s going to fight the waves on the Côte d’Azur.
Three nights later, while I was undressing for bed, the telephone rang.
Ever since seeing Eve, I’d been expecting it—a call late at night, when New York was in shadows and the sun was rising a thousand miles away over a cobalt sea. It was a phone call that but for a patch of ice on Park Avenue might have come six months, or a lifetime, before. I felt my heart race a little. I slipped my shirt back over my head and answered the phone.
—Hello?
But it was a weary patrician voice.
—Is this Katherine?
—. . . Mr. Ross?
—I’m sorry to bother you so late, Katherine. I just wanted to find out if by any chance . . .
There was silence on the other end of the line. I could hear twenty years of upbringing and a few hundred miles of Indiana trying to contain his emotions.
—Mr. Ross?
—I’m sorry. I should explain. Apparently Eve’s relationship with this Tinker fellow has come to an end.
—Yes. I saw Eve a few days ago and she told me.
—Ah. Well. I . . . That is, Sarah and I . . . received a cable from her saying that she was coming home. But when we went to meet her train, she wasn’t there. At first, we thought we had simply missed her on the platform. But we couldn’t find her in the restaurant or the waiting room. So we went to the stationmaster to see if she was on the manifest. He didn’t want to tell us. It’s against their policy and what have you. But eventually, he confirmed that she had boarded the train in New York. So you see, it wasn’t that she wasn’t on the train. She just didn’t get off. It took us a few days to get the conductor on the phone. By that time he was in Denver headed back east. But he remembered her—because of the scar. And he said that when the train was approaching Chicago, she had paid to extend her ticket. To Los Angeles.
Mr. Ross was quiet for a moment, collecting himself.
—So you can see, Katherine, that we’re quite confused. I tried to reach Tinker, but it seems he’s gone abroad.
—Mr. Ross, I don’t know what to tell you.
—Katherine, I wouldn’t ask you to betray a confidence. If Eve doesn’t want us to know where she is, I accept that. She’s a grown woman. She’s free to chart her course. It’s just that we’re parents. You’ll understand one day. We don’t want to meddle. We just want to make sure that she’s all right.
—Mr. Ross, if I knew where Eve was, I’d tell you—even if she’d sworn me to silence.
Mr. Ross gave a truncated sigh, the more heartbreaking for its brevity.
What a scene that must have been: Having gotten up at dawn to make the journey to Chicago, the Rosses probably drove with the radio off, exchanging only the occasional word—not because they were some cliché of a married couple that time has turned into strangers but because in that closest of emotional alignments they were dwelling in the bitter-turned-sweet sense that their daughter, prone to self-reliance, bruised by New York, was at long last coming home. Through the revolving doors they walked, dressed as for a Sunday service, making their way through the democratic melee of the arriving and departing, a little anxious but on the whole exhilarated to be fulfilling this mission essential not simply to their parenthood but to their species. How devastating it must have been—that first inkling that their daughter wasn’t going to be there, after all.
Meanwhile, in another railway station over a thousand miles away—one filled with color and light, its architecture reflecting the optimistic modern style of the West rather than the brooding industry of America’s great nineteenth-century depots—Eve would disembark. Without a trunk to pick up from the porter, she would limp out onto a palm-lined street with no particular destination in mind, looking like a starlet from a rougher, more unforgiving land.
I felt a great wave of sympathy for Mr. Ross.
—I’m considering hiring a Pinkerton to look for her, he said, obviously unsure of whether this was the appropriate step. Does she know anybody in Los Angeles?
—No, Mr. Ross. I don’t think she knows a soul in California.
But if Mr. Ross were to hire a detective, I thought to myself, then I’d have some advice for him. I’d tell him to go to all the hock shops within ten blocks of the train station looking for a skateable engagement ring and a chandelier earring missing its pair—because that’s where the future of Evelyn Ross had just commenced.
The next night, Mr. Ross called again. This time, he didn’t ask any questions. He was calling to give me an update: Earlier that day he had talked to a few of the girls at Mrs. Martingale’s—none of them had heard from Eve. He had contacted the Missing Persons Bureau in L.A., but as soon as they learned that Eve was of age and had bought her ticket, they explained that she did not meet the legal definition of missing. To comfort Mrs. Ross, he had also checked the hospitals and emergency rooms.
How was Mrs. Ross bearing up? She was like someone in mourning, only worse. When a mother loses a daughter, she grieves over the future that her daughter will never have, but she can take solace in memories of close-knit days. But when your daughter runs away, it is the fond memories that have been laid to rest; and your daughter’s future, alive and well, recedes from you like a wave drawing out to sea.
The third time Mr. Ross called, he didn’t have much of an update. He said that while going through some of Eve’s letters (in search of mentioned friends who might be of help) he had come across the one in which Eve described meeting me for the first time: Last night, I spilled a plate of noodles on one of the girls; and she’s turned out to be a real jim dandy. Mr. Ross and I shared a good laugh over it.
—I had forgotten that Eve was in a single when she first moved in, he said. When did you two become roommates?
And I could see the problem I had gotten myself into.
Mr. Ross was in mourning too, but he had to be strong for his wife. So he was looking for someone he could reminisce with, someone who knew Eve well but who was safely in the distance. And I fit the bill just perfectly.
I didn’t want to be uncharitable, and having this little chat wasn’t such an inconvenience, but how many chats would follow? For all I knew, he was a slow mender. Or worse, he was someone who would savor his grief rather than let it go. How was I going to extricate myself when the time came? I wasn’t going to stop answering my phone. Was I going to have to start sounding mildly rude, until he got the message?
When the phone rang a few nights later, I adopted the voice of a girl with one hand on her key chai
n and the other through the sleeve of her coat.
—Hello!
—Katey?
. . .
—Tinker?
—For a second I thought I had the wrong number, he said. It’s good to hear your voice.
. . .
—I saw Eve, I said.
. . .
—I thought you might have.
He gave a halfhearted laugh.
—I’ve sure made a hash of it in 1938.
—You and the rest of the world.
—No. I get special credit for this one. Since the first week of January, every decision I’ve made has been wrong. I think Eve has been fed up with me for months.
As a rueful parable, he told me how in France he had taken to going to bed early and rising with the sun for a swim. Dawn was so beautiful, he said, and in such a different way from the sunset, that he had asked Eve to watch it with him. In response, she started wearing eyeshades and slept every day until lunch. Then, on the last night, when Tinker was climbing into bed, she went off to a casino by herself and played roulette until five in the morning—coming up the drive, shoes in hand, just in time to join him on the beach.
Tinker related this as if it was somewhat embarrassing for the both of them; but I didn’t see it that way. Whatever the limitations of Tinker and Eve’s relationship, however expedient or imperfect or tenuous it had been, neither of them had reason to be humbled by that little tale. As far as I was concerned, the notion of Tinker rising alone for a sunrise that he wanted to share, and of Eve showing up at the very last minute from the other side of a night on the town, spoke to the very best in both of them.
In each of the various phone conversations that I had imagined having with Tinker, he had sounded different. In one he had sounded broken. In another confounded. In another contrite. But in all of them he had sounded unsettled, having come full speed through a ringer of his own design. Yet, now that I had him on the phone, he didn’t sound unsettled at all. Though obviously chastened, Tinker’s voice was also even and at ease. It had an ineffable almost enviable quality to it. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of relief. He sounded like one who is sitting on the curb in a strange city in the aftermath of a hotel fire, having nearly lost nothing but his life.
