Rules of Civility Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  WINTERTIME

  CHAPTER ONE - The Old Long Since

  CHAPTER TWO - The Sun, the Moon & the Stars

  CHAPTER THREE - The Quick Brown Fox

  CHAPTER FOUR - Deus Ex Machina

  SPRINGTIME

  CHAPTER FIVE - To Have & to Haven’t

  CHAPTER SIX - The Cruelest Month

  CHAPTER SEVEN - The Lonesome Chandeliers

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Abandon Every Hope

  CHAPTER NINE - The Scimitar, the Sifter & the Wooden Leg

  CHAPTER TEN - The Tallest Building in Town

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - La Belle Époque

  SUMMERTIME

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Twenty Pounds Ought & Six

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Hurlyburly

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Honeymoon Bridge

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Pursuit of Perfection

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Fortunes of War

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Read All About It

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Now and Here

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - The Road to Kent

  FALL

  CHAPTER TWENTY - Hell Hath No Fury

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Tempest-Tost

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Neverland

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Now You See It

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Thy Kingdom Come

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Where He Lived and What He Lived For

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - A Ghost of Christmas Past

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Cetology, Inc., 2011

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Autumn in New York” by Vernon Duke. © Copyright 1934 by Kay Duke Music.

  Photograph credits

  Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

  Page 11: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.253.622.5), © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Page 57: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.253.612.3), © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Page 147: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.253.514.1), © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Page 249: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.253.606.3), © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Page 313: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1971 (1971.646.18), © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Towles, Amor.

  Rules of civility : a novel / Amor Towles.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51706-2

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Upper class—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Nineteen thirties—Fiction. 4. Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.O945R85 2011

  813’.6—dc22

  2011004118

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  FOR MAGGIE,

  MY COMET

  Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests.

  And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.

  —Matthew 22:8 – 14

  Preface

  On the night of October 4th, 1966, Val and I, both in late middle age, attended the opening of Many Are Called at the Museum of Modern Art—the first exhibit of the portraits taken by Walker Evans in the late 1930s on the New York City subways with a hidden camera.

  It was what the social columnists liked to refer to as “a superlative affair.” The men were in black tie, echoing the palette of the photographs, and the women wore brightly colored dresses hemmed at every length from the Achilles tendon to the top of the thigh. Champagne was being served off little round trays by young unemployed actors with flawless features and the grace of acrobats. Few of the guests were looking at the pictures. They were too busy enjoying themselves.

  A drunken young socialite in pursuit of a waiter stumbled and nearly knocked me to the floor. She wasn’t alone in her condition. At formal gatherings, somehow it had become acceptable, even stylish, to be drunk before eight.

  But perhaps that wasn’t so hard to understand. In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin—all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, the Communists were out there, somewhere, but with Joe McCarthy in the grave and no one on the Moon, for the time being the Russians just skulked across the pages of spy novels.

  So all of us were drunk to some degree. We launched ourselves into the evening like satellites and orbited the city two miles above the Earth, powered by failing foreign currencies and finely filtered spirits. We shouted over the dinner tables and slipped away into empty rooms with each other’s spouses, carousing with all the enthusiasm a
nd indiscretion of Greek gods. And in the morning, we woke at 6:30 on the dot, clearheaded and optimistic, ready to resume our places behind the stainless steel desks at the helm of the world.

  The spotlight that night wasn’t on the photographer. In his midsixties, withered by an indifference to food, unable to fill out his own tuxedo, Evans looked as sad and nondescript as a retiree from General Motors middle management. Occasionally, someone would interrupt his solitude to make a remark, but he spent whole quarters of an hour standing awkwardly in the corner like the ugliest girl at the dance.

  No, all eyes were not on Evans. Instead, they were trained on a thin-haired young author who had just made a sensation by penning a history of his mother’s infidelities. Flanked by his editor and a press agent, he was accepting compliments from a coterie of fans, looking like a sly newborn.

  Val took in the fawning circle with a curious gaze. He could make $10,000 in a day by setting in motion the merger of a Swiss department store chain with an American missile manufacturer, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure how a tattletale could cause such a stir.

  Always mindful of his surroundings, the press agent caught my eye and waved me over. I gave a quick wave back and took my husband’s arm.

  —Come on, sweetheart, I said. Let’s look at the pictures.

  We walked into the exhibition’s less crowded second room and began working our way around the walls at an unhurried pace. Virtually all of the pictures were horizontal portraits of one or two subway riders seated directly across from the photographer.

  Here was a sober young Harlemite in a gamely tilted bowler with a little French mustache.

  Here was a four-eyed forty-year-old with a fur-collared coat and a wide-brimmed hat looking every bit the gangster’s accountant.

  Here were two single girls from the perfume counter at Macy’s, solidly in their thirties, a little sour with the knowledge that their best years were behind them, riding with eyebrows plucked all the way to the Bronx.

  Here a him; there a her.

  Here the young; there the old.

  Here the dapper; there the drab.

  Though taken more than twenty-five years earlier, the photographs had never been shown publicly. Evans apparently had some sort of concern for his subjects’ privacy. This may sound strange (or even a little self-important) when you consider that he had photographed them in such a public place. But seeing their faces lined along on the wall, you could understand Evans’s reluctance. For, in fact, the pictures captured a certain naked humanity. Lost in thought, masked by the anonymity of their commute, unaware of the camera that was trained so directly upon them, many of these subjects had unknowingly allowed their inner selves to be seen.

  Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You’ve carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are—cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The superego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into an ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

  It happens to all of us. It’s just a question of how many stops it takes. Two for some. Three for others. Sixty-eighth Street. Fifty-ninth. Fifty-first. Grand Central. What a relief it was, those few minutes with our guard let down and our gaze inexact, finding the one true solace that human isolation allows.

  How satisfying this photographic survey must have seemed to the uninitiated. All the young attorneys and the junior bankers and the spunky society girls who were making their way through the galleries must have looked at the pictures and thought: What a tour de force. What an artistic achievement. Here at last are the faces of humanity!

  But for those of us who were young at the time, the subjects looked like ghosts.

  The 1930s . . .

  What a grueling decade that was.

  I was sixteen when the Depression began, just old enough to have had all my dreams and expectations duped by the effortless glamour of the twenties. It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach Manhattan a lesson.

  After the Crash, you couldn’t hear the bodies hitting the pavement, but there was a sort of communal gasp and then a stillness that fell over the city like snow. The lights flickered. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quietly for the door.

  Then the prevailing winds shifted from west to east, blowing the dust of the Okies all the way back to Forty-second Street. It came in billowing clouds and settled over the newspaper stands and park benches, shrouding the blessed and the damned just like the ashes in Pompeii. Suddenly, we had our own Joads—ill clothed and beleaguered, trudging along the alleyways past the oil drum fires, past the shanties and flophouses, under the spans of the bridges, moving slowly but methodically toward inner Californias which were just as abject and unredeeming as the real thing. Poverty and powerlessness. Hunger and hopelessness. At least until the omen of war began to brighten our step.

  Yes, the hidden camera portraits of Walker Evans from 1938 to 1941 represented humanity, but a particular strain of humanity—a chastened one.

  A few paces ahead of us, a young woman was enjoying the exhibit. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. Every picture seemed to pleasantly surprise her—as if she was in the portrait gallery of a castle where all the faces seemed majestic and remote. Her skin was flushed with an ignorant beauty that filled me with envy.

  The faces weren’t remote for me. The chastened expressions, the unrequited stares, they were all too familiar. It was like that experience of walking into a hotel lobby in another city where the clothes and the mannerisms of the clientele are so similar to your own that you’re just bound to run into someone you don’t want to see.

  And, in a way, that’s what happened.

  —It’s Tinker Grey, I said, as Val was moving on to the next picture.

  He came back to my side to take a second look at this portrait of a twenty-eight-year-old man, ill shaven, in a threadbare coat.

  Twenty pounds underweight, he had almost lost the blush on his cheeks, and his face was visibly dirty. But his eyes were bright and alert and trained straight ahead with the slightest hint of a smile on his lips, as if it was he who was studying the photographer. As if it was he who was studying us. Staring across three decades, across a canyon of encounters, looking like a visitation. And looking every bit himself.

  —Tinker Grey, repeated Val with vague recognition. I think my brother knew a Grey who was a banker. . . .

  —Yes, I said. That’s the one.

  Val studied the picture more closely now, showing the polite interest that a distant connection who’s fallen on hard times deserves. But a question or two must have presented itself regarding how well I knew the man.

  —Extraordinary, Val said simply; and ever so slightly, he furrowed his brow.

  By the summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled. It was time enough, as the poet said, to murder and create—or at least, to have warranted the dropping of a question on one’s plate.

  But Val counted few backward-looking habits as virtues; and in regards to the mysteries of my past, as in regards to so much else, he was a gentleman first.

  Nonetheless, I made a concession.

  —He was an acquaintance of mine as well, I said. In my circle of friends for a time. But I haven’t heard his name since before the war.

  Val’s brow relaxed.
>
  Perhaps he was comforted by the deceptive simplicity of these little facts. He eyed the picture with more measure and a brief shake of the head, which simultaneously gave the coincidence its due and affirmed how unfair the Depression had been.

  —Extraordinary, he said again, though more sympathetically. He slipped his arm under mine and gently moved me on.

  We spent the required minute in front of the next picture. Then the next and the next. But now the faces were passing by like the faces of strangers ascending an opposite escalator. I was barely taking them in.

  Seeing Tinker’s smile . . .

  After all these years, I was unprepared for it. It made me feel sprung upon.

  Maybe it was just complacency—that sweet unfounded complacency of a well-heeled Manhattan middle age—but walking through the doors of that museum, I would have testified under oath that my life had achieved a perfect equilibrium. It was a marriage of two minds, of two metropolitan spirits tilting as gently and inescapably toward the future as paper whites tilt toward the sun.

  And yet, I found my thoughts reaching into the past. Turning their backs on all the hard-wrought perfections of the hour, they were searching for the sweet uncertainties of a bygone year and for all its chance encounters—encounters which in the moment had seemed so haphazard and effervescent but which with time took on some semblance of fate.