Rules of Civility (12 page)

—Okay, Hamilton, I said.

He closed the gate and pulled the lever, initiating our descent; and then he whistled a little tune to himself as he watched the floors pass.

After the Civil War the names of the founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson became plenty popular with his race. But here was the first Negro I'd ever met named after the death-by-dueling proponent of the central bank. When we reached the lobby, I stepped off the elevator and turned to ask him about that. But a bell rang and he gave a shrug. The great brass doors of the elevator quietly closed.

They were embossed with a dragon-crested shield inscribed with the motto of the Beresford: FRONTA NULLA FIDES. Place No Trust in Appearances.

I'll say.

Despite the fact that the groundhog had cast no shadow, winter laid siege on New York for another three weeks. The crocuses froze in Central Park; the songbirds, reaching the only sensible conclusion, doubled back to Brazil; and as for Mistah Tinkah, why the following Monday, he took Miss Evelyn to Palm Beach without so much as a word.

CHAPTER SIX

The Cruelest Month

One night in April, I was standing in the Wall Street stop of the IRT waiting to hoi polloi home. It had been twenty minutes since the previous train and the platform was crowded with hats and sighs and roughly folded afternoon editions. On the ground nearby was an overstuffed valise bound with string. But for the absence of children, it could have been a way station in a time of war.

A man who was squeezing past me knocked my elbow. He had brown hair and a cashmere coat. Like one out of keeping with the times, he turned to apologize. And for the briefest moment I thought it was Tinker.

But I should have known better.

Tinker Grey was nowhere near the Interborough Rapid Transit. At the end of their first week in Palm Beach, Eve had sent me a postcard from the Breakers Hotel where she and Tinker were holed up.
Sis, we miss you somethin' awful—
or so she wrote—and Tinker echoed the sentiment in the margin, wrapping little block letters around my address and up toward the stamp. On the picture, Eve had drawn an arrow pointing to their balcony overlooking the beach. She drew a sign stuck in the sand that read: NO JUMPING. The postscript read:
See you in a week.
But two weeks later, I got a postcard from the marina at Key West.

In the meantime, I took five thousand pages of dictation. I typed four hundred thousand words in language as gray as the weather. I sutured split infinitives and hoisted dangling modifiers and wore out the seat of my best flannel skirt. At night, alone at my kitchen table I ate peanut butter on toast, mastered the ruff and slough and waded into the novels of E. M. Forster just to see what all the fuss was about. In all, I saved fourteen dollars and fifty-seven cents.

My father would have been proud.

 

The gracious stranger maneuvered across the platform and took a position beside a mousy young woman who looked up at his approach and briefly met my gaze. It was Charlotte Sykes, the typing prodigy who sat to my left.

Charlotte had thick black eyebrows, but she also had delicate features and beautiful skin. She could have made a favorable impression on someone if she hadn't acted as though at any moment the city was going to step on her.

Tonight she was sporting a pillbox hat with a funereal chrysanthemum stitched to its crown. She lived somewhere on the Lower East Side and she seemed to be taking her cue from me as to how late one should work, because she often ended up on the platform a few minutes on my heels. Charlotte took a furtive look in my direction, obviously working up the courage to approach. Lest there be any doubt, I took
A Room with a View
from my purse and opened to Chapter VI. It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance:

The beating of flowers was drowned out by the brakes of a train. The refugees on the platform gathered their possessions and readied themselves to fight for passage. I let them push their way around me. When the station was this crowded you were generally better off waiting for the next train.

Strategically positioned across the platform, rush hour conductors in little green caps acted like cops at the scene of an accident, broadening their shoulders and preparing to push people forward or back as necessary. The doors opened and the crowd surged. The blue-black chrysanthemum on Charlotte's hat bobbed ahead like flotsam on the sea.

—Make room in there, shouted the conductors, shoving high and low alike.

A moment later the train was gone, leaving a smattering of wiser folk behind. I turned the page secure in my solitude.

—Katherine!

—Charlotte . . .

At the last minute, she must have doubled back, like a Cherokee scout.

—I didn't know you took this train, she said disingenuously.

—Every day.

She blushed sensing that she'd been caught in a fib. The blush brought badly needed color to her cheeks. She should have fibbed more often.

—Where do you live? she asked.

—On Eleventh Street.

Her face brightened.

—
We're nearly neighbors!
I live on Ludlow. A few blocks east of Bowery.

—I know where Ludlow is.

She smiled apologetically.

—Of course.

Charlotte was holding a large document with both hands in front of her waist, the way a schoolgirl holds her textbooks. From the thickness of it you could tell it was the draft of a merger agreement or an offering plan. Whatever it was, she shouldn't have had it with her.

I let the silence grow awkward.

Though apparently not awkward enough.

—Did you grow up in the neighborhood? she asked.

—I grew up in Brighton Beach.

—Jeepers, she said.

She was about to ask what Brighton Beach was like or which subway ran there or if I'd ever been to Coney Island, but a train came to my rescue. There were still only a scattering of people on the platform so the conductors ignored us. They smoked cigarettes with worldly indifference like soldiers in between assaults.

Charlotte took the seat beside me. On the bench facing us, there was a middle-aged chambermaid disinclined to raise her eyes. She wore an old burgundy coat over her black and white uniform and a pair of practical shoes. Above her head hung a poster from the Department of Health discouraging the practice of sneezing without a handkerchief.

—How long have you worked for Miss Markham? Charlotte asked. It was to Charlotte's credit that she said Miss Markham rather than Quiggin & Hale.

—Since 1934, I said.

—That must make you one of the senior girls!

—Not by a long shot.

We were quiet for a few seconds. I thought maybe she was finally getting the message. Instead she launched into a monologue.

—Isn't Miss Markham something else? I've never met anyone like her. She is just
so
impressive. Did you know that she speaks French? I heard her speaking it with one of the partners. I swear, she can see the draft of a letter once and remember it word for word.

Charlotte was suddenly chattering at twice her usual pace. I couldn't tell if it was nerves or an effort to say as much as possible before the train arrived at her stop.

—. . . But then all the people at Q&H are just
so
especially nice. Even the partners! I was in Mr. Quiggin's office just the other day to get some things signed. Have you been in his office? Why, of course you have. You know how he has that fish tank just filled with fish. Well, there was this one little fish that was the most amazing shade of blue and its nose was pressed against the glass. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Even though Miss Markham tells us not to let our eyes wander around the partners' offices. But when Mr. Quiggin finished he came right around his desk and told me the Latin names of each and every one of those fish!

As Charlotte was speeding along, the chambermaid across the aisle had raised her gaze. She was staring at Charlotte and listening as if she had stood in front of such a fish tank one day not long ago, when she too had had delicate features and beautiful skin, when her eyes were hopeful and wide and the world had seemed splendid and fair.

The train arrived at Canal Street and the doors opened. Charlotte was talking so fast she didn't notice.

—Isn't this your stop?

Charlotte jumped. She gave a sweet, mousy wave and disappeared.

It was only when the doors closed that I saw the merger agreement on the bench beside me. Clipped to the front was a note
FROM THE DESK OF THOMAS HARPER, ESQ,
with the name of a Camden & Clay attorney scrolled in Harper's prep school cursive. Presumably, he had sloughed off the delivery of this draft on Charlotte by applying a little schoolboy charm. It wouldn't have taken much. She was born to be charmed. Or intimidated. Either way, it showed a solid lack of judgment on both their parts. But if New York was a many-cogged machine, then lack of judgment was the grease that kept the gears turning smoothly for the rest of us. They'd both end up getting what they deserved one way or another. I lay the agreement back on the bench.

We were still stalled at the station. On the platform a few commuters had gathered in front of the closed doors looking hopefully through the glass like Mr. Quiggin's fish. I redirected my gaze across the aisle and found the chambermaid staring at me. With her doleful eyes, she looked down at the forgotten document. It wouldn't be the both of them who got what they deserved, she seemed to be saying. That charming boy with his fine enunciation and floppy bangs, they'll let him talk his way out of it. And little miss wide eyes, she'll pay the price for the both of them.

The doors opened again and the commuters piled on board.

—Shit, I said.

I grabbed the agreement and got an arm between the doors just before they closed.

—Come on, sweet stuff, said a conductor.

—Sweet your own stuff, I replied.

I headed up the east side stair and began working my way toward Ludlow looking among the wide-brimmed hats and the Brylcreemed hair for a bobbing black chrysanthemum. If I didn't catch her in five blocks, I told myself, this agreement was going to merge with an ash can.

I found her on the corner of Canal and Christie.

She was standing in front of Schotts & Sons—kosher purveyors of all things pickled. She wasn't shopping. She was talking to a diminutive old woman with black eyes in a familiarly funereal dress. The old woman had this evening's lox wrapped in yesterday's news.

—Excuse me.

Charlotte looked up. An expression of surprise turned to a girlish smile.

—Katherine!

She gestured to the old woman at her side.

—This is my grandmother.

(No kidding.)

—Nice to meet you, I said.

Charlotte said something to the old lady in Yiddish, presumably explaining that we worked together.

—You left this on the train, I said.

The smile left Charlotte's face. She took the document in hand.

—Oh. What an oversight. How can I thank you.

—Forget it.

She paused for a second and then gave in to that worst of compulsions:

—Mr. Harper has a meeting first thing tomorrow with an important client, but this revision needs to be at Camden & Clay by nine so he asked if on my way to the office I could—

—In addition to a Harvard degree, Mr. Harper has a trust fund.

Charlotte looked at me with bovine bewilderment.

—These will hold him in good stead should he ever be dismissed.

Charlotte's grandmother looked at my hands. Charlotte looked at my shoes.

In the summer the Schottses rolled their barrels of pickles and herring and watermelon rind right onto the sidewalk, sloshing a vinegary brine on the paving stones. Eight months later you could still smell it.

The old woman said something to Charlotte.

—My grandmother is asking if you would join us for dinner.

—I'm afraid I'm previously committed.

Charlotte translated, unnecessarily.

From Canal Street, I still had fifteen blocks to go, which was about ten too short to warrant another subway fare. So in the language of the neighborhood, I schlepped. At every intersection I looked to my left and right. Hester Street, Grand Street, Broome Street, Spring. Prince Street, First Street, Second Street, Third. Each block looked like a dead end from a different country. Tucked among the tenements you could see the shops of other Fathers & Sons selling the reformulated fare of
their
home countries—their sausages or cheeses, their smoked or salted fish wrapped in Italian or Ukrainian newsprint to be trundled home by their own unvanquishable grandmothers. Looking up, you could see the rows of two-room flats where three generations gathered nightly for a supper bracketed by religious devotions as saccharine and peculiar as their after-dinner liqueurs.

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaflike, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

At Astor Place, I stopped to buy the evening edition of the
Times
at a curbside newsstand. The front page offered a modified map of Europe, graced with a gentle dotted line to reflect a shifting frontier. The old man behind the counter had the white overgrown eyebrows and kindhearted expression of an absentminded country uncle. It made you wonder what he was doing there.