by Amor Towles
On this, the fifteenth of December at 3:00 P.M., it was warm and ascendant. For three nights, I’d been working with Mason on “The Secrets of Central Park West” until two or three in the morning, cabbing home for a few hours sleep, showering, changing, and then heading right back into the office without a moment for reflection—a pace which was suiting me just fine. But today, when he insisted I head home early, I found myself wandering down Fifth Avenue and up the cathedral’s steps.
At that time of day, there were 400 pews and 396 of them were empty. I took a seat and tried to let my mind wander; but it wouldn’t.
Eve, Hank, Wallace.
Suddenly, all the people of valor were gone. One by one, they had glittered and disappeared, leaving behind those who couldn’t free themselves from their wants: like Anne and Tinker and me.
—May I, someone asked genteelly.
I looked up a little annoyed that with all that space someone felt the need to crowd my pew. But it was Dicky.
—What are you doing here? I whispered.
—Repenting?
He slid in beside me and automatically put his hands on his knees like someone who had been well trained as a fidgety child.
—How did you find me? I asked.
He leaned to his right without taking his eyes off the altar.
—I stopped by your office so that I could run into you by chance. When your absence spoiled my plan, a rather tough cookie with cat’s-eye glasses suggested I might happen into one of the neighborhood churches instead. She said you occasionally visit them on your coffee break.
You had to give Alley credit. I had never told her that I liked to visit churches and she had never made reference to knowing. But giving Dicky that tip may well have been the first concrete sign that she and I were going to be friends for a long, long time.
—How did you know which church I was in? I asked.
—It stood to reason. Because you weren’t in the last three.
I gave Dicky’s hand a squeeze and said nothing.
Having studied the sanctuary, Dicky was now looking up into the recesses of the church’s ceiling.
—Are you familiar with Galileo? he asked.
—He discovered the world was round.
Dicky looked at me surprised.
—Really? Was that him? We’ve sure made hay with that discovery!
—Wasn’t that who you meant?
—I don’t know. What I recall about this Galileo fellow is that he was the one who figured that a pendulum takes the same amount of time to swing two feet or two inches. This, of course, solved the mystery of the grandfather clock. Anyway, apparently he discovered this by watching a chandelier swing back and forth from the ceiling of a church. He would measure the duration of the swings by taking his pulse.
—That’s amazing.
—Isn’t it? Just by sitting in church. Ever since I learned that as a boy, I’ve let my mind wander during sermons. But I haven’t had a single revelation.
I laughed.
—Shhh, he said.
A canon appeared from one of the side chapels. He knelt, crossed himself, ascended into the sanctuary, and began to light the candles on the altar, preparing for the four o’clock mass. He was dressed in a long black robe. Watching him, Dicky’s face lit up as if he had just had his long awaited revelation.
—You’re Catholic!
I laughed again.
—No. I’m not particularly religious, but I was born Russian Orthodox.
Dicky whistled. It was loud enough that the canon looked back.
—That sounds formidable, he said.
—I don’t know about that. But for Easter, we’d fast all day and eat all night.
Dicky seemed to consider this carefully.
—I think I could do that.
—I think you could.
We were silent for a while. Then he leaned a little to his right.
—I haven’t seen you in a few days.
—I know.
—Are you going to tell me what’s going on?
We looked at each other now.
—It’s a long story, Dicky.
—Let’s go outside.
We sat on the cold steps with our forearms on our knees and I told him an abbreviated version of the same story that I had told Bitsy at the Ritz.
With a little more distance, and maybe a little more self-consciousness, I found myself telling it as if it were a Broadway romp. I was making the most of the coincidences and the surprises: Meeting Anne at the track! Eve refusing the proposal! Stumbling on Anne and Tinker at Chinoiserie!
—But this is the funniest part, I said.
Then I told him about discovering Washington’s Rules of Civility and what a numbskull I had been in not realizing that it was Tinker’s playbook. For illustration, I rattled off a few of Washington’s maxims with a snappy delivery.
But, whether it was from being on the steps of a church in December or from wisecracking about the father of our country, the humor didn’t seem to be coming across. As I hit the final lines, my voice faltered.
—That didn’t seem so funny, after all, I said.
—No, said Dicky.
He was suddenly more serious than usual. He clasped his hands and looked down at the steps. He didn’t say anything. It began to scare me a little.
—Do you want to get out of here? I asked.
—No. That’s all right. Let’s stay a moment.
He was silent.
—What are you thinking? I pressed.
He began to tap his feet on the steps in an uncharacteristically unfidgety way.
—What am I thinking? he said to himself. What am I thinking?
Dicky breathed in and exhaled, getting ready.
—I am thinking that maybe you’re being a little hard on this Tinker fellow.
He stopped tapping his feet and directed his attention across Fifth Avenue toward the deco-era statue of Atlas that holds up the heavens in front of Rockefeller Center. It was almost as if Dicky couldn’t quite look at me yet.
—So this Tinker fellow, he said—in the tone of one wishing to make sure that he’s got command of the facts—he was ousted from prep school when his father squandered his tuition. He goes to work and along the way he stumbles onto Lucrezia Borgia who lures him to New York with the promise of a foot in the door. You all meet by chance. And though he seems to have a thing for you, he ends up taking in your friend who’s been smashed up by a milk truck, until she brushes him off. Then his brother sort of brushes him off too. . . .
I found myself looking at the ground.
—Is that about it? Dicky asked sympathetically.
—Yes, I said.
—And before you knew all of this, all of this about Anne Grandyn and Fall River and railroad shares and what-have-you, you fell for the bloke.
—Yes.
—So I suppose the question now is—despite the rest of it—are you fallen for him still?
After meeting someone by chance and throwing off a few sparks, can there be any substance to the feeling that you’ve known each other your whole lives? After those first few hours of conversation, can you really be sure that your connection is so uncommon that it belongs outside the bounds of time and convention? And if so, won’t that someone have just as much capacity to upend as to perfect all your hours that follow?
So despite the rest of it, Dicky asked with supernatural remove, are you fallen for him still?
Don’t say it, Katey. For God’s sake, don’t admit it. Get off your ass and kiss this madcapper. Convince him never to discuss it again.
—Yes, I said.
Yes—that word that is supposed to be bliss. Yes, said Juliet. Yes, said Heloise. Yes, yes, yes, said Molly Bloom. The avowal, the affirmation, the sweet permission. But in the context of this conversation, it was poison.
I could almost feel something dying inside him. And what was dying was his self-confident, unquestioning, all-forgiving impression of me.
�
��Well, he said.
Above me, the black-winged angels circled like desert birds.
—. . . I don’t know if this friend of yours genuinely aspired to these Rules, or simply aped them so that he would be better received by his neighbors; but is there really any difference? I mean, Old George didn’t make them up. He was marking them down from somewhere and trying to make the most of himself. It strikes me as all rather impressive. I don’t think I could live up to more than five or six of them at a time.
We were both looking at the statue now with its exaggerated musculature. Though I’d been in St. Patrick’s a thousand times, it had never struck me until that moment how odd it was to have Atlas, of all people, standing on the other side of the avenue. He was situated so directly across from the cathedral that as you were walking out, his towering figure was framed by the doorway, almost as if he was waiting for you.
Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance. While back in the shadows of St. Patrick’s was the statue’s physical and spiritual antithesis, the Pietà—in which our Savior, having already sacrificed himself to God’s will, is represented broken, emaciated, laid out on Mary’s lap.
Here they resided, two worldviews separated only by Fifth Avenue, facing off until the end of time or the end of Manhattan, whichever came first.
I must have looked pretty miserable—because Dicky patted me on the knee.
—If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.
I suppose that Anne was right when she observed that at any given moment we’re all seeking someone’s forgiveness. Either way, as I was walking downtown, I knew whose I was seeking. And after telling people for months that I had no idea where he was, suddenly I knew exactly where to find him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Where He Lived and What He Lived For
Vitelli’s was on Gansevoort in the heart of the meatpacking district. Large black trucks crowded the curb at odd angles and the faint smell of soured blood rose from the cobblestones. In some infernal version of Noah’s ark, teamsters walked off the trucks onto the loading docks carrying carcasses of different species slung over their shoulders two by two: two calves, two pigs, two lambs. Butchers on break dressed in blood-spattered aprons smoked in the cold December air under the great steer-shaped neon sign that Hank had stylized in his painting. They watched me navigate the cobblestones in high-heel shoes with the same indifference that they watched the meat coming off the trucks.
A hophead in a woman’s coat was nodding on the stoop. His nose and chin were scabbed as if he’d broken a fall with his face. After a little prodding, he said that Hank lived in #7, saving me the social studies lesson of rapping on every door. The stairway was narrow and damp. Halfway up the first flight was an old Negro with a cane who could have ascended faster to heaven than he could to the fourth floor. I passed him and climbed to the second landing. The door was ajar.
Given all that had happened, I’d prepared myself to find Tinker at low ebb. Hell, at one point, I’d even hoped to find him that way. But standing there on the banks of his comeuppance, I wasn’t so sure I was ready for it.
—Hello? I ventured, easing the apartment door open.
The word apartment hardly applied. Lucky #7 was two hundred square feet. It had a squat iron bed with a gray mattress—the sort you’d expect to see in a prison cell or barracks. In the corner a coal stove sat by a small but-thank-God-for-it window. But for a few pairs of shoes and an empty gunnysack stowed under the bed, Hank’s belongings were gone. Tinker’s were on the floor against the wall: a leather suitcase, a flannel blanket tied in a roll, a small stack of books.
—He aint in deh.
I turned to find the old Negro on the landing beside me.
—If you looking for Mr. Henry’s brotheh, he aint in deh.
The old Negro pointed his cane toward the ceiling.
—He on da roof.
On the roof. The very place where Hank had built the bonfire of his canvases—before he turned his back on New York City and his brother’s way of life.
I found Tinker sitting on a dormant chimney, his arms resting on his knees, his gaze cast downward to the Hudson River where the cold gray freighters were lined along the docks. From the back, he looked as if his life had just set sail on one.
—Hey, I said, stopping a few paces behind him.
At the sound of my voice, he turned and stood—and I could see in an instant that I was wrong again. Dressed in a black sweater, clean shaven and easy, Tinker wasn’t close to downcast.
—Katey! he said in pleasant surprise.
Instinctively, he took a step forward, but then stopped as if he’d caught himself—as if he suspected that he’d forfeited the right to the friendly embrace. Which in a way, he had. His smile took on an aspect of knowing contrition, signaling that he was ready to receive, or even welcome, another round of reprobation.
—They killed Wallace, I said, as if I’d just heard the news and couldn’t quite believe it.
—I know, he said.
And then I unraveled and his arms were around me.
We ended up spending an hour or two on the roof, sitting on the edge of a skylight. For a while, we just talked about Wallace. And then we were quiet. And then I apologized for how I had acted in the coffee shop, but Tinker shook his head. He said I’d been terrific that day, that I hadn’t missed a trick, that it was just what he had needed.
As we sat there, dusk was falling and the lights of the city were coming on one by one in ways that even Edison hadn’t imagined. They came on across the great patchwork of office buildings and along the cables of the bridges; then it was the street lamps and the theater marquees, the headlights of the cars and the beacons perched atop the radio towers—each individual lumen testifying to some unhesitant intemperate collective aspiration.
—Hank would spend hours on end up here, Tinker said. I used to try to get him to move, to take an apartment in the Village with a sink. But he wouldn’t budge. He said the Village was too bourgeois. But I think he stayed because of the view. It’s the same one we grew up with.
A freight horn blew and Tinker pointed to it as if it proved his point. I smiled and nodded.
. . .
—I guess I haven’t told you much about my life in Fall River, he said.
—No.
—How does that happen? How do you stop telling people where you’re from?
—By inches.
Tinker nodded and looked back over the piers.
—The irony is that I loved that part of my life—when we lived near the shipyards. It was a ragtag neighborhood, and when school let out, we’d all run down to the docks. We didn’t know the batting averages; but we knew Morse code and the flags of the big shipping lines and we’d watch the crews coming down the gangplanks with their duffels over their shoulders. That’s what we all wanted to be when we grew up: merchant marines. We wanted to set sail on a freighter and make landfall in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Peru.
You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability—this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president. But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever.
When it grew dark, we retreated to Hank’s room. In the staircase, Tinker asked if I wanted to get a bite. I said I wasn’t hungry and he looked relieved. I think we’d both had our fill of restaurants for the year.
Without any chairs on hand, we made do sitting face-to-face on two overturned produce crates: HALLELUJAH ONIONS and AVIATOR LIMES.
—How are things going at the magazine? he asked,
enthusiastically.
Up in the Adirondacks, I had told him about Alley and Mason Tate and the search for our first cover story. So now I told him my idea of interviewing the doormen and some of the scuttle we’d dredged up. As I was describing it, for the first time I felt a little squeamish. Somehow, the whole notion seemed more unseemly here in Hank’s flophouse than it had in the back of Mason Tate’s limousine.
But Tinker loved it. Not in the way that Mason loved it. Not because it was going to peel the New York potato. Tinker just loved the ingenuity of it, the human comedy of it—that all those secrets of adultery and illegitimacy and ill-gotten gains—secrets which had been so closely kept—had all the time been floating freely across the surface of the city unheeded, just like the little boats that boys fold from the headlines and sail across the ponds in Central Park. But most of all, Tinker loved that I had come up with the idea.
—We deserve it, he said with a laugh and a shake of the head, classing himself among the secret keepers.
—You certainly do.
When we both stopped laughing, I began telling him some funny story we’d learned from an elevator boy, but he cut me off.
—I encouraged her, Katey.
I met his gaze.
—From the minute I met Anne, I encouraged her to take me on. I knew exactly what she could do for me. And what it would cost.
—That wasn’t the worst of it, Tinker.
—I know. I know. I should have told you at the coffee shop; or upstate. I should have told you everything the night we met.
At some point, Tinker noticed that my arms were wrapped around my torso.
—You’re freezing, he said. I’m such an idiot.
He leapt up and looked around the room. He unfurled his blanket and put it over my shoulders.
