by Amor Towles
But broken, confounded, relaxed, or relieved—however his voice sounded, it wasn’t coming from across the sea. It was as clear as a radio broadcast.
—Tinker, where are you?
He was alone at the Wolcotts’ camp in the Adirondacks. He had spent the week walking in the woods and rowing on the lake thinking about the past six months, but now he was worried that if he didn’t talk to someone he might go a little crazy. So he was wondering if I’d be interested in coming up for the day. Or I could take the train on Friday after work and spend the weekend. He said the house was amazing and the lake was lovely and
—Tinker, I said. You don’t have to give me reasons.
After hanging up the phone, I stood for a while looking out my window wondering if I should have told him no. In the doleful court behind my building a patchwork of windows was all that separated me from a hundred muted lives being led without mystery or menace or magic. In point of fact, I suppose I didn’t know Tinker Grey much better than I knew any of them; and yet, somehow, I felt like I’d known him all my life.
I crossed the room.
From a pile of British authors, I pulled out Great Expectations. There, tucked among the pages of the twentieth chapter was Tinker’s letter describing the little church across the sea, with its mariner’s widow, its berry-toting wrestler, its schoolgirls laughing like seagulls—and its implicit celebration of the commonplace. I tried to smooth the wrinkles in the tissuelike paper. Then I sat down and read it for the umpteenth time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Now and Here
The Wolcotts’ “camp” was a two-story mansion in the Arts & Crafts style. At one in the morning, it loomed from the shadows like an elegant beast come to the water’s edge to drink.
We went up the lazy wooden steps of the porch into a sprawling family room with a stone fireplace that you could stand in. The floors were knotty pine and they were covered with Navajo rugs woven in every imaginable shade of red. Sturdy wooden chairs were arranged in groups of two and four so that in high season the different generations of Wolcotts could play cards or read books or assemble jigsaw puzzles partly in private and partly in kin. All was cast in the warm yellow light of mica-shaded lamps. I remembered Wallace saying that though he spent just a few weeks a year in the Adirondacks, it always felt like home—and it wasn’t hard to see why. You could just imagine where the Christmas tree would go come December.
Tinker began giving an enthusiastic history of the place. He mentioned something about the Indians in the region and the aesthetic schooling of the architect. But I had started the day at six and put in ten hours at Gotham. So with the smell of smoke in the air and the rumble of thunder in the distance, my eyelids rose and fell like the bow of a boat on its mooring.
—I’m sorry, he said with a smile. I’m just excited to see you. We’ll catch up in the morning.
He grabbed my bag and led me up the stairs to the second floor, where the hallway was lined with doors. The house must have slept twenty or more.
—Why don’t you take this one, he said, stepping into a little room with a pair of twin beds.
He placed my bag on the bureau beside a porcelain washbasin. Though the old gas lamps on the wall glowed with electricity, he lit a kerosene lantern on the bedside table.
—There’s fresh water in the pitcher. I’m at the other end of the hall, if you need anything.
He gave me a squeeze of the hands and an I’m so glad you came. Then he retreated into the hall.
As I unpacked my things, I could hear him going back down the stairs to the family room, securing the front door, scattering the embers in the hearth, clicking off lights. Then, from the far end of the house there was the heavy thunk of a switch being thrown. The remote rumbling that I had thought was thunder ceased and all the lights in the house went out. Tinker’s steps bounded back up the stairs and headed down the opposite hall.
I undressed in the nineteenth-century lamplight. My shadow on the wall went through the motions of folding my blouse and brushing my hair. I put my book on the bedside table with no intention of reading it and climbed under the covers. The bed must have been built when Americans were smaller because my feet went straight to the baseboard. It was surprisingly cold, so I unfolded the patchwork quilt that graced the foot of the bed. Then I opened my book, after all.
Walking into Penn Station earlier that evening, I had realized I had nothing to read; so at a newsstand I surveyed the paperback fare (romance novels, westerns, adventure stories) and settled on an Agatha Christie. At the time, I hadn’t read many mystery novels. Call it snobbery. But once on the train, after staring out the window to my limit, I waded into Mrs. Christie’s world and was pleasantly surprised by how diverting it was. This particular crime was set on a British estate and the heroine was a foxhunting heiress who by page 45 had already had two brushes with disaster.
I turned to chapter eight. Several mildly suspicious people were having tea in a parlor. They were talking about a young local who had gone to fight in the Boer War and never returned. There were daylilies from a secret admirer in a vase on the piano. The whole scene was just remote enough in time and place that I had to go back to the beginning of the seventh paragraph a second time, then a third. After a fourth try, I turned down the wick and the room went dark.
With the heaviness of the quilt weighing on my chest, I could feel every beat of my heart—as if it was still keeping time, measuring the days like a metronome set somewhere on the finely graduated scale between impatience and serenity. For a while, I lay there listening to the house, to the wind outside, to the hoot of what must have been an owl. Then I finally fell asleep, listening for the footsteps that weren’t going to come.
—Rise and shine.
Tinker was standing in the doorway.
—What time is it? I asked.
—Eight.
—Is the house on fire?
—This is late for camp living.
He threw me a towel.
—I’ve got breakfast cooking. Come on down when you’re ready.
I got up and splashed water on my face. Looking out the window, you could tell it was going to be a cold, bright, cusp-of-fall kind of day. So I put on my best foxhunting heiress outfit and took my book in hand, assuming the morning would be spent before a fire.
In the hallway, family photos hung from floor to ceiling just like in Wallace’s apartment. It took me a few minutes, but I finally found pictures of Wallace as a boy: The first was an unfortunate snapshot of him at six in a French sailor’s suit; but the second was Wallace at ten or eleven in a birch bark canoe with his grandfather, showing off the catch of the day. From the expressions on their faces, you would have thought they were holding up the world by the gills.
Drawn by other photographs, I continued past the staircase to the western end of the hall. The very last room was the one that Tinker had claimed. He was sleeping in the bottom of a bunk bed! There was a book on his bedside table too. With Hercule Poirot whispering in my ear, I ventured quietly in and picked it up. It was Walden. A five of clubs marked the reader’s progress—though from the colors of the underlinings you could tell it was at least a second reading.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, , and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. . . .
The ghost of Henry David Thoreau frowned upon me, as well he should. I returned the book, tiptoed to the landing, and headed down the stairs.
I found Tinker in the kitchen frying ham and eggs in a big black skillet. Two places were set at a small kitchen table with a white enamel top. Somewhere in the house there must have been an oak table
for twelve, because this little one couldn’t handle more than a cook, a governess, and three of the Wolcotts’ grandchildren.
Tinker’s outfit was embarrassingly similar to my own—khaki pants and a white shirt—though he was wearing heavy leather boots. After serving up the plates, he poured the coffee and sat across from me. He looked well. His skin had lost the pampered tan of the Mediterranean, taking on a rougher hue, and his hair had curled with the humidity of summer. The fact that his beard was a week old was to his advantage—having outgrown the appearance of a hangover but having yet to reach that of a Hatfield or McCoy. His demeanor reflected that same unhurried state that I had heard on the phone. He grinned at me as I ate.
—What? I said finally.
—I was just trying to picture you as a redhead.
—Sorry, I laughed. My redhead days have come and gone.
—It’s my loss. What was it like?
—I think it brought out the Mata Hari in me.
—We’ll have to lure her back.
Once we’d finished, cleared, and cleaned, Tinker slapped his hands together.
—What do you say we go for a hike?
—I’m not the hiking sort.
—Oh, I think that’s exactly what you are. You just don’t know it yet. And the view of the lake from Pinyon Peak is breathtaking.
—I hope you’re not going to be this insufferably upbeat all weekend. Tinker laughed.
—There’s a risk of it.
—Besides, I said, I didn’t bring any boots.
—Ah! So that’s it, is it?
On the other side of the family room, he led me down a hall past a billiard room and swung open a door with a flourish. Inside was a muck room with slickers on pegs and hats on shelves and boots of all shapes and sizes lined along the baseboard. From Tinker’s expression you would have thought he was Ali Baba revealing the riches of the forty thieves.
A trail behind the house led through a grove of pines into a deeper wood of oaks or elms or some other towering American timber. For the first hour, it was a gradual incline and we walked shoulder to shoulder through the shade at an easy pace, conversing like friends from youth for whom every exchange is an extension of the last, regardless of the passage of time.
We talked about Wallace, echoing each other’s affection for him. We also talked about Eve. I told him about her escape to California, and with a friendly laugh he said the news was surprising right up until the moment you heard it. He said that Hollywood had no idea what it was in for, and that within the year Eve would be either a movie star or a studio chief.
To hear him talk about Eve’s future you wouldn’t have had an inkling of what had just transpired between them. You would have assumed they were old familiars with a fond and unspoiled camaraderie. And maybe that was just about right. Maybe for Tinker their relationship had been reset to January third. Maybe for him the last half a year had been snipped from the chain of events like a poorly scripted scene in a film.
As we walked farther, our conversation became intermittent like the sunlight through the woods. Squirrels scattered before us among the tree trunks and yellow-tailed birds zipped from branch to branch. The air smelled of sumac and sassafras and other sweet-sounding words. And I began to think that maybe Tinker was right: Maybe I was a hiker.
But the slope began to grow steep, then steeper, and steeper still until it was the pitch of a staircase. We were climbing single file in silence. An hour went by, maybe four. My boots became a size too small and my left heel felt like I had stepped on a frying pan. I fell twice, scuffing my foxhunting khakis, and I had long since sweat through my heiress’s shirt. I found myself wondering if I had enough self-control to ask How much farther? in a casual, disinterested, offhand sort of way. But then the trees started thinning and the grade mellowed, and suddenly we were on a rocky peak exposed to the open sky with a view to the horizon unmarked by man.
Far below us, a mile wide and five miles long, the lake looked like a giant black reptile crawling across the wilds of New York.
—There, he said. You see?
And I could see. I could see why Tinker, feeling that his life was in disarray, had chosen to come here.
—Just as it looked to Natty Bumppo, I said, taking a seat on the hard stone.
Tinker smiled that I remembered who he had wanted to be for a day.
—Not far from it, he agreed, pulling sandwiches and a canteen from his knapsack.
Then he sat down a few feet away—at a gentleman’s distance.
As we ate, he reminisced about when his family had spent Julys in Maine and he and his brother had hiked the Appalachian Trail for days at a time—outfitted with the tent and compasses and jackknives that their mother had given them for Christmas and that they had waited six long months to put to use.
We still hadn’t spoken about St. George’s or the change in Tinker’s circumstances as a youth. I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. But when he talked about hiking in Maine with his brother, he was making it clear in his own way that those were halcyon days preceding less fortunate times.
When we finished lunch, I lay down with Tinker’s pack under my head and he broke sticks and tried to toss them onto a small bed of moss twenty feet in the distance, in the manner of a schoolboy for whom no walk home is without its world championship. His sleeves were rolled up and he had freckles on his forearms from exposure to the summer sun.
—So were you a Fenimore Cooper fan in general? I asked.
—Oh, I must have read Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer three different times. But then, I loved all the adventure books: Treasure Island . . . 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . . . The Call of the Wild . . .
—Robinson Crusoe.
He smiled.
—You know, I actually picked up Walden after you said you’d want to be marooned with it.
—What did you think? I asked.
—Well, at first I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. Four hundred pages of a man alone in a cabin philosophizing on human history, trying to strip life to its essentials . . .
—But what did you think in the end?
Tinker stopped breaking sticks and looked into the distance.
—In the end—I thought it was the greatest adventure of them all.
At around three, a bank of blue gray clouds appeared in the distance and the temperature began to drop. So Tinker gave me an Irish sweater from his pack and we headed back down the trail, trying to keep a few strides ahead of the weather. We had just gotten to the grove of trees when it began to sprinkle, and we were vaulting up the steps of the house with the first clap of thunder.
Tinker built a fire in the great fireplace and we settled down on the Navajo rug at the edge of the hearthstone. The warmth began to bring out the starburst blushes on his cheeks as he cooked pork and beans and coffee right over the embers. I pulled his sweater off over my head and the wet wool gave off a warm, earthy smell that recalled another hour. It took me a moment to realize it was that snowy night when we had snuck into the Capitol Theatre and I had found myself in the embrace of Tinker’s shearling coat.
As I was drinking a second cup of coffee, Tinker poked at the fire with a stick dislodging sparks.
—Tell me something that no one knows about you, I said.
He laughed, as if I was kidding; but then he seemed to think about it.
—All right, he said, turning a little toward me. You know that day we bumped into each other at that diner across from Trinity Church?
—Yes . . .
—I followed you there.
I slugged him in the shoulder like Fran would have.
—You did not!
—I know, he said. It’s terrible. But it’s true! Eve had mentioned the name of your firm, so just before noon I went across from your building and hid behind a newsstand to see if I could catch you going to lunch. I was waiting for forty minutes and it was freezing.
I laughed, remembering the bright red tips of his ears.
/> —What prompted you to do that?
—I couldn’t stop thinking about you.
—Blah, I said.
—No, I’m serious.
He looked at me with a gentle smile.
—Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you—that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets—from having made choices with . . . such poise and purpose. It stopped me in my tracks a little. And I just couldn’t wait to see it again.
By the time we went upstairs, having turned off the lights and scattered the embers, we both looked ready for a good night’s sleep. On the steps, our shadows swung back and forth with the movement of the lanterns in our hands. As we reached the landing, we bumped into each other and he apologized. We stood awkwardly for a second, then after giving me a friendly kiss, he went west and I went east. We closed our doors and undressed. We climbed into our little beds and read a few aimless pages before dousing our lights.
In the dark, as I pulled up the quilt I became conscious of the wind. Rolling down from Pinyon Peak it was shaking the trees and the windowpanes as if it too was restless for resolution.
There is an oft-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It’s a thrilling sentiment—one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides.
But there is another passage in Walden that has stayed with me as well. In it, Thoreau says that men mistakenly think of truth as being remote—behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the reckoning. When in fact, all these times and places and occasions are now and here. In a way, this celebration of the now and here seems to contradict the exhortation to follow one’s star. But it is equally persuasive. And oh so much more attainable.
