Rules of Civility (6 page)

The recruit fell to his knees in despair and the farm girl pulled his head to her stomach, smearing her blouse red with his rouge. No, the girl sang, I will not remember you by those things but by the heartbeat you hear in my womb.

Given the miscast performers and the amateurish makeup, you could almost laugh at the production—if it weren't for the grown men crying in the front row.

When the duet ended, the performers bowed three times to boisterous applause, and then ceded the stage to a group of young dancers in skimpy outfits and black sable hats. What commenced was a tribute to Cole Porter. It began with “Anything Goes” and then ran through a couple of refashioned hits including, “It's Delightful, It's Delicious, It's Delancey.”

Suddenly, the music stopped and the dancers froze. The lights went out. The audience held its breath.

When the spotlight came on again, it revealed the dancers in a kick line and the two middle-aged performers at center stage, he in a top hat and she in a sequined dress. The male lead pointed his cane at the band:

—Hyit it!

And the whole ensemble finaléd with “I Gyet a Keek Out of You
.
”

When I first dragged Eve to Chernoff's, she hated it. She didn't like Delancey Street or the alleyway entrance or the Chinamen at the sink. She didn't like the clientele—all facial hair and politics. She didn't even like the show. But boy, it grew on her. She came to love the fusion of glitter and sob stories. She loved the heartfelt has-beens who led the numbers and the toothy hope-to-bes who made up the chorus. She loved the sentimental revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries who shed their tears side by side. She even learned a few of the songs well enough to sing along when she'd had too much to drink. For Eve, I think an evening at Chernoff's became a little like sending her daddy's money home to Indiana.

And if Eve's intention had been to impress Tinker with a glimpse of an unfamiliar New York, it was working. For as the rootless nostalgia of the Cossack's song was swept aside to make room for Cole Porter's carefree lyrical wit and the long legs, short skirts and untested dreams of the dancers, Tinker looked like a kid without a ticket who's been waved through the turnstiles on opening day.

 

When we decided to call it a night, Eve and I paid. Naturally, Tinker objected, but we insisted.

—All right, he said stowing his billfold. But Friday night's on me.

—You're on, said Eve. What should we wear?

—Whatever you like.

—Nice, nicer or nicest?

Tinker smiled.

—Let's take a stab at nicest.

As Tinker and Eve waited at the table for our coats, I excused myself to take my turn in the powder room. It was crowded with the gangsters' dolled-up dates. Three deep at the sink, they had as much fake fur and makeup as the girls in the chorus and just as good a chance of making it to Hollywood.

On my way back, I bumped into old man Chernoff himself. He was standing at the end of the hallway watching the crowd.

—
Hello, Cinderella
, he said in Russian.
You're looking superlative.

—
You've got bad lighting.

He nodded toward our table, where Eve appeared to be convincing Tinker to join her in a shot.

—
Who's the young man? Yours or your friend's?

—A
little bit of both, I guess.

Chernoff smiled. He had two gold teeth.

—
That doesn't work for long, my slender one.

—Says you.

—Says the sun, the moon and the stars.

CHAPTER THREE

The Quick Brown Fox

There were twenty-six red lights in the mahogany panel over Miss Markham's door, each one identified by a letter of the alphabet. That was one light and one letter for each girl in the Quiggin & Hale secretarial pool. I was Q.

The twenty-six of us sat in five rows of five with the lead secretary, Pamela Petus (aka G), positioned alone in front like the drum majorette in a dull parade. Under Miss Markham's direction, the twenty-six of us did all correspondence, contract preparation, document duplication, and dictation for the firm. When Miss Markham received a request from one of the partners, she would consult her schedule (pronounced
shed-ju-wul
), identify the girl best suited to the task and press the corresponding button.

To an outsider, it might seem sensible that if a partner had a good rapport with one of the girls, then he should be able to staff her on a project—whether it be the triplication of a purchase agreement or the cataloging of a wife's indiscretions in a divorce suit. But such an arrangement did not seem sensible to Miss Markham. From her standpoint, it was essential that each task be met with optimal skill. While all the girls were capable secretaries, there were those who excelled at shorthand and those who had an unerring eye for the misuse of the comma. There was one girl who could put a hostile client at ease with the tone of her voice and another who could make the younger partners sit up straight simply by the controlled manner in which she delivered a folded note to a senior partner midmeeting. If excellence is to be expected, Miss Markham liked to observe, you can't ask the wrestlers to throw the javelins.

Case in point: Charlotte Sykes, the new girl who sat to my left. Nineteen years old with black hopeful eyes and alert little ears, Charlotte had made the tactical error of typing 100 words a minute her first day on the job. If you couldn't type 75 words a minute you couldn't work at Quiggin & Hale. But Charlotte was typing a good 15 words per minute over the mean performance of the pool. At 100 wpm, that's 48,000 words a day, 240,000 words a week and 12 million words a year. As a new recruit, Charlotte was probably making $15 a week, or the equivalent of less than one ten-thousandth of a cent for every word she typed. That was the funny thing about typing faster than 75 words a minute at Quiggin & Hale—from there, the faster you were typing, the less per word you were being paid.

But that's not how Charlotte saw it. Like an adventuress trying to complete the first solo flight across the Hudson River, she hoped to type as fast as was humanly possible. And as a result, whenever a case surfaced requiring a few thousand pages of duplication, you could bet that the next light that clicked on over Miss Markham's door would be the one under the F.

Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you're proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.

 

But on Wednesday, the fifth of January at 4:05 P.M., as I was transcribing a deposition, the light that clicked on was mine.

Slipcovering my typewriter (as we'd been taught to do for even the briefest of interruptions), I stood, smoothed my skirt, picked up a steno pad and crossed the pool to Miss Markham's office. It was a paneled room with the half door of a cabaret coat check. She had a small but ornate desk with a tooled leather top, the sort at which Napoleon must have sat when quilling directives from the field.

When I entered, she looked up briefly from her work.

—There is a call for you, Katherine. From a paralegal at Camden & Clay.

—Thank you.

—Keep in mind that you work for Quiggin & Hale, not for Camden & Clay. Don't let them slough their work off on you.

—Yes, Miss Markham.

—Oh, and Katherine, one more thing. I understand that there was a good deal of last-minute work on the Dixon Ticonderoga merger.

—Yes. Mr. Barnett said it was important that the transaction be completed before year-end. For tax reasons, I believe. And there were a few eleventh-hour emendations.

—Well. I don't like my girls working so late during Christmas week. Just the same, Mr. Barnett appreciated your seeing it through. As did I.

—Thank you, Miss Markham.

She released me with a wave of the pen.

Stepping back into the secretarial pool, I went to the little telephone table at the front of the room. The phone was made available to the girls should a partner or a counterparty need to communicate a revision. The law firm of Camden & Clay was one of the largest litigators in the city. Though they weren't directly involved in any of my matters, they tended to have a hand in everything.

I picked up the receiver.

—This is Katherine Kontent.

—Hey Sis!

I looked out over the pool where twenty-five of twenty-six typewriters were hard at work. They were clacking so loudly you could barely hear yourself think, which I suppose was the point. I lowered my voice anyway.

—Your hair better be on fire, friend. I've got a deposition due in an hour.

—How's it coming?

—I'm three misdirections and a whopper behind.

—What's the name of that bank where Tinker works?

—I don't know. Why?

—We don't have a plan for tomorrow night.

—He's taking us to some highbrow place, somewhere uptown. He's picking us up sometime around eight.

—Zowie. Someplace, somewhere, sometime. How'd you get all that?

I paused.

How
did
I get all that?

It was one hell of a question.

On the corner of Broadway and Exchange Place across the street from Trinity Church there was a little diner with a soda pop clock on the wall and a hasher named Max who even cooked his oatmeal on the griddle. Polar in winter, oppressive in July and five blocks out of my way, it was one of my favorite spots in town—because I could always get the crooked little booth-for-two by the window.

Sitting in that seat, in the span of a sandwich you could pay witness to the pilgrimage of New York's devoted. Hailing from every corner of Europe, donned in every shade of gray, they turned their backs on the Statue of Liberty and marched instinctively up Broadway, leaning with pluck into a cautionary wind, gripping identical hats to identical haircuts, happy to count themselves among the indistinguishable. With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or
Götterdämmerung
), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.

Or so I was thinking, when a man without a hat emerged from the crowd and rapped on the glass.

Trip of a heartbeat, it was Tinker Grey.

The tips of his ears were as red as an elf's and he was sporting a grin like he'd caught me in the act. Behind the glass, he began talking enthusiastically—but inaudibly. I waved him in.

—So, is this it? he asked as he slid into the booth.

—Is this what?

—Is this where you go when you want to be alone!

—Oh, I laughed. Not exactly.

He snapped his fingers in mock disappointment. Then, announcing he was famished, he looked around the place with groundless appreciation. He picked up the menu and reviewed it for all of four seconds. He was in the irrepressible good humor of one who's found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground and has yet to tell a soul.

When the waitress appeared I ordered a BLT; Tinker leapt straight into uncharted territory, ordering Max's eponymous sandwich which the menu defined as unparalleled, world famous
and
legendary. When Tinker asked if I'd ever had it, I told him I'd always found the description a little too long on adjectives and a little too short on specifics.

—So, do you work nearby? he asked, when the waitress retreated.

—Just a short walk.

. . .

—Didn't Eve say it was a law firm?

—That's right. It's an old Wall Street practice.

. . .

—Do you like it?

—It's a little stodgy, but I suppose that's predictable.

Tinker smiled.

—You're a little long on adjectives and short on specifics yourself.

—Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.

—I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.

 

Fortune favoring the bold, Max's special sandwich turned out to be a grilled cheese stuffed with corn beef and coleslaw. Within ten minutes it was gone and a slice of cheesecake had been plopped down in its place.

—What a great spot! Tinker said for the fifth time.

—So what's it like being a banker? I asked as he attacked his dessert.

For starters, he confided, you could barely call it banking. He was really more of a broker. The bank served a group of wealthy families with large stakes in private companies controlling everything from steel plants to silver mines, and when they were seeking liquidity, his role was to help them find an appropriate buyer, discreetly.