by Amor Towles
Yes, my thoughts turned to Tinker and to Eve—but they turned to Wallace Wolcott and Dicky Vanderwhile and to Anne Grandyn too. And to those turns of the kaleidoscope that gave color and shape to the passage of my 1938.
Standing at my husband’s side, I found myself intent on keeping the memories of the year to myself.
It wasn’t that any of them were so scandalous that they would have shocked Val or threatened the harmony of our marriage—on the contrary, if I had shared them Val would probably have been even more endeared to me. But I didn’t want to share them. Because I didn’t want to dilute them.
Above all else, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to step out of the glare of my own circumstances. I wanted to go get a drink in a hotel bar. Or better yet, take a taxi down to the Village for the first time in how many years....
Yes, Tinker looked poor in that picture. He looked poor and hungry and without prospects. But he looked young and vibrant too; and strangely alive.
Suddenly, it was as if the faces on the wall were watching me. The ghosts on the subway, tired and alone, were studying my face, taking in those traces of compromise that give aging human features their unique sense of pathos.
Then Val surprised me.
—Let’s go, he said.
I looked up and he smiled.
—Come on. We’ll come back some morning when it isn’t so busy.
—Okay.
It was crowded in the middle of the gallery so we kept to the periphery, walking past the pictures. The faces flickered by like the faces of prisoners looking through those little square openings in maximum security cells. They followed me with their gaze as if to say: Where do you think you’re going? And then just before we reached the exit one of them stopped me in my tracks.
A wry smile formed on my face.
—What is it? asked Val.
—It’s him again.
On the wall between two portraits of older women, there was a second portrait of Tinker. Tinker in a cashmere coat, clean shaven, a crisp Windsor knot poking over the collar of a custom-made shirt.
Val dragged me forward by the hand until we were a foot from the picture.
—You mean the same one from before?
—Yes.
—It couldn’t be.
Val doubled back to the first portrait. Across the room I could see him studying the dirtier face with care, looking for distinguishing marks. He came back and took up his place a foot from the man in the cashmere coat.
—Incredible, he said. It’s the very same fellow!
—Please step back from the art, a security guard said.
We stepped back.
—If you didn’t know, you’d think they were two different men entirely.
—Yes, I said. You’re right.
—Well, he certainly got back on his feet!
Val was suddenly in a good mood. The journey from threadbare to cashmere restored his natural sense of optimism.
—No, I said. This is the earlier picture.
—What’s that?
—The other picture was after this one. It was 1939.
I pointed to the tag.
—This was taken in 1938.
You couldn’t blame Val for making the mistake. It was natural to assume that this was the later picture—and not simply because it was hung later in the show. In the 1938 picture Tinker not only looked better off, he looked older too: His face was fuller, and it had a suggestion of pragmatic world-weariness, as if a string of successes had towed along an ugly truth or two. While the picture taken a year later looked more like the portrait of a peacetime twenty-year-old: vibrant and fearless and naïve.
Val felt embarrassed for Tinker.
—Oh, he said. I’m sorry.
He took my arm again and shook his head for Tinker as for us all.
—Riches to rags, he said, tenderly.
—No, I said. Not exactly.
NEW YORK CITY, 1969
WINTERTIME
CHAPTER ONE
The Old Long Since
It was the last night of 1937.
With no better plans or prospects, my roommate Eve had dragged me back to The Hotspot, a wishfully named nightclub in Greenwich Village that was four feet underground.
From a look around the club, you couldn’t tell that it was New Year’s Eve. There were no hats or streamers; no paper trumpets. At the back of the club, looming over a small empty dance floor, a jazz quartet was playing loved-me-and-left-me standards without a vocalist. The saxophonist, a mournful giant with skin as black as motor oil, had apparently lost his way in the labyrinth of one of his long, lonely solos. While the bass player, a coffee-and-cream mulatto with a small deferential mustache, was being careful not to hurry him. Boom, boom, boom, he went, at half the pace of a heartbeat.
The spare clientele were almost as downbeat as the band. No one was in their finery. There were a few couples here and there, but no romance. Anyone in love or money was around the corner at Café Society dancing to swing. In another twenty years all the world would be sitting in basement clubs like this one, listening to antisocial soloists explore their inner malaise; but on the last night of 1937, if you were watching a quartet it was because you couldn’t afford to see the whole ensemble, or because you had no good reason to ring in the new year.
We found it all very comforting.
We didn’t really understand what we were listening to, but we could tell that it had its advantages. It wasn’t going to raise our hopes or spoil them. It had a semblance of rhythm and a surfeit of sincerity. It was just enough of an excuse to get us out of our room and we treated it accordingly, both of us wearing comfortable flats and a simple black dress. Though under her little number, I noted that Eve was wearing the best of her stolen lingerie.
Eve Ross . . .
Eve was one of those surprising beauties from the American Midwest.
In New York it becomes so easy to assume that the city’s most alluring women have flown in from Paris or Milan. But they’re just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I—like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs. Every morning in early spring one of them skips off her porch with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane ready to flag down the first Greyhound headed to Manhattan—this city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured and, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size.
One of the great advantages that the midwestern girls had was that you couldn’t tell them apart. You can always tell a rich New York girl from a poor one. And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that’s what accents and manners are there for. But to the native New Yorker, the midwestern girls all looked and sounded the same. Sure, the girls from the various classes were raised in different houses and went to different schools, but they shared enough midwestern humility that the gradations of their wealth and privilege were obscure to us. Or maybe their differences (readily apparent in Des Moines) were just dwarfed by the scale of our socioeconomic strata—that thousand-layered glacial formation that spans from an ash can on the Bowery to a penthouse in paradise. Either way, to us they all looked like hayseeds: unblemished, wide-eyed, and God-fearing, if not exactly free of sin.
Eve hailed from somewhere at the upper end of Indiana’s economic scale. Her father was driven to the office in a company car and she ate biscuits for breakfast cut in the pantry by a Negro named Sadie. She had gone to a two-year finishing school and had spent a summer in Switzerland pretending to study French. But if you walked into a bar and met her for the first time, you wouldn’t be able to tell if she was a corn-fed fortune hunter or a millionairess on a tear. All you could tell for sure was that she was a bona fide beauty. And that made the getting to know her so much less complicated.
She was indisputably a natural blonde. Her shoulder-length hair, which
was sandy in summer, turned golden in the fall as if in sympathy with the wheat fields back home. She had fine features and blue eyes and pinpoint dimples so perfectly defined that it seemed like there must be a small steel cable fastened to the center of each inner cheek which grew taut when she smiled. True, she was only five foot five, but she knew how to dance in two-inch heels—and she knew how to kick them off as soon as she sat in your lap.
To her credit, Eve was making an honest go of it in New York. She had arrived in 1936 with enough of her father’s money to get a single at Mrs. Martingale’s boardinghouse and enough of his influence to land a job as a marketing assistant at the Pembroke Press—promoting all of the books that she’d avoided so assiduously in school.
Her second night at the boardinghouse, while taking a seat at the table she tipped her plate and her spaghetti plopped right in my lap. Mrs. Martingale said the best thing for the stain was to soak it in white wine. So she got a bottle of cooking Chablis from the kitchen and sent us off to the bathroom. We sprinkled a little of the wine on my skirt and drank the rest of it sitting on the floor with our backs to the door.
As soon as Eve got her first paycheck, she gave up her single and stopped drafting checks on her father’s account. After a few months of Eve’s self-reliance, Daddy sent along an envelope with fifty ten-dollar bills and a sweet note about how proud he was. She sent the money back like it was infected with TB.
—I’m willing to be under anything, she said, as long as it isn’t somebody’s thumb.
So together we pinched. We ate every scrap at the boardinghouse breakfast and starved ourselves at lunch. We shared our clothes with the girls on the floor. We cut each other’s hair. On Friday nights, we let boys that we had no intention of kissing buy us drinks, and in exchange for dinner we kissed a few that we had no intention of kissing twice. On the occasional rainy Wednesday, when Bendel’s was crowded with the wives of the well-to-do, Eve would put on her best skirt and jacket, ride the elevator to the second floor, and stuff silk stockings into her panties. And when we were late with the rent, she did her part: She stood at Mrs. Martingale’s door and shed the unsalted tears of the Great Lakes.
That New Year’s, we started the evening with a plan of stretching three dollars as far as it would go. We weren’t going to bother ourselves with boys. More than a few had had their chance with us in 1937, and we had no intention of squandering the last hours of the year on latecomers. We were going to perch in this low-rent bar where the music was taken seriously enough that two good-looking girls wouldn’t be bothered and where the gin was cheap enough that we could each have one martini an hour. We intended to smoke a little more than polite society allowed. And once midnight had passed without ceremony, we were going to a Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue where the late night special was coffee, eggs, and toast for fifteen cents.
But a little after nine-thirty, we drank eleven o’clock’s gin. And at ten, we drank the eggs and toast. We had four nickels between us and we hadn’t had a bite to eat. It was time to start improvising.
Eve was busy making eyes at the bass player. It was a hobby of hers. She liked to bat her lashes at the musicians while they performed and ask them for cigarettes in between sets. This bass player was certainly attractive in an unusual way, as most Creoles are, but he was so enraptured by his own music that he was making eyes at the tin ceiling. It was going to take an act of God for Eve to get his attention. I tried to get her to make eyes at the bartender, but she wasn’t in a mood to reason. She just lit a cigarette and threw the match over her shoulder for good luck. Pretty soon, I thought to myself, we were going to have to find ourselves a Good Samaritan or we’d be staring at the tin ceiling too.
And that’s when he came into the club.
Eve saw him first. She was looking back from the stage to make some remark and she spied him over my shoulder. She gave me a kick in the shin and nodded in his direction. I shifted my chair.
He was terrific looking. An upright five foot ten, dressed in black tie with a coat draped over his arm, he had brown hair and royal blue eyes and a small star-shaped blush at the center of each cheek. You could just picture his forebear at the helm of the Mayflower—with a gaze trained brightly on the horizon and hair a little curly from the salt sea air.
—Dibs, said Eve.
From the vantage point of the doorway, he let his eyes adjust to the half-light and then surveyed the crowd. It was obvious that he had come to meet someone, and his expression registered the slightest disappointment once he realized that they weren’t there. When he sat at the table next to us, he gave the room another going over and then, in a single motion, signaled the waitress and draped his coat over the back of a chair.
It was a beautiful coat. The color of the cashmere was similar to camel hair, only paler, like the color of the bass player’s skin, and it was spotless, as if he had just come straight from the tailor’s. It had to have cost five hundred dollars. Maybe more. Eve couldn’t take her eyes off of it.
The waitress came over like a cat to the corner of a couch. For a second, I thought she was going to arch her back and exercise her claws on his shirt. When she took his order, she backed up a little and bent at the waist so that he could see down her blouse. He didn’t seem to notice.
In a tone at once friendly and polite, showing the waitress a little more deference than she was due, he asked for a glass of scotch. Then he sat back and began to take in the scene. But as his gaze shifted from the bar to the band, out of the corner of his eye he saw Eve. She was still staring at the coat. He blushed. He’d been so preoccupied with looking over the room and signaling the waitress, he hadn’t realized that the chair he’d draped his coat over was at our table.
—I’m so sorry, he said. How rude of me.
He stood up and reached over to retrieve it.
—No, no. Not at all, we said. No one’s sitting there. It’s fine.
He paused.
—Are you sure?
—As sure as the shore, said Eve.
The waitress reappeared with the scotch. When she turned to go he asked her to wait a moment and then offered to buy us a round—one last good turn in the old year, as he put it.
We could tell already that this one was as expensive, as finely made and as clean as his coat. He had that certain confidence in his bearing, that democratic interest in his surroundings, and that understated presumption of friendliness that are only found in young men who have been raised in the company of money and manners. It didn’t occur to people like this that they might be unwelcome in a new environment—and as a result, they rarely were.
When a man on his own buys a round for two good-looking girls, you might expect him to make conversation no matter whom he’s waiting for. But our smartly dressed Samaritan didn’t make any with us. Having raised his glass once in our direction with a friendly nod, he began nursing his whiskey and turned his attention to the band.
After two songs, it began to make Eve fidget. She kept glancing over, expecting him to say something. Anything. Once, they made eye contact and he smiled politely. I could tell that when this song was over she was going to start a conversation of her own even if she had to knock her gin into his lap to do it. But she didn’t get the chance.
When the song ended, for the first time in an hour the saxophonist spoke. In a deep-timbred, could’ve-been-a-preacher kind of voice he went into a long explanation about the next number. It was a new composition. It was dedicated to a Tin Pan Alley pianist named Silver Tooth Hawkins who died at thirty-two. It had something to do with Africa. It was called “Tincannibal.”
With his tightly laced spats he tapped out a rhythm and the drummer brushed it up on the snare. The bass and piano players joined in. The saxophonist listened to his partners, nodding his head to the beat. He eased in with a perky little melody that sort of cantered within the corral of the tempo. Then he began to bray as if he’d been spooked and in a flash he was over the fence.
Our neighbor looked lik
e a tourist getting directions from a gendarme. Happening to make eye contact with me, he made a bewildered face for my benefit. I laughed and he laughed back.
—Is there a melody in there? he asked.
I edged my chair a little closer, as if I hadn’t quite heard him. I leaned at an angle five degrees less acute than the waitress had.
—What’s that?
—I was wondering if there’s a melody in there.
—It just went out for a smoke. It’ll be back in a minute. But I take it that you don’t come here for the music.
—Is it obvious? he asked with a sheepish smile. I’m actually looking for my brother. He’s the jazz fan.
From across the table I could hear Eve’s eyelashes flittering. A cashmere coat and a New Year’s date with a sibling. What more did a girl need to know?
—Would you like to join us while you wait? she asked.
—Oh. I wouldn’t want to impose.
(Now there was a word we didn’t hear every day.)
—You wouldn’t be imposing, Eve chastened.
We made a little room for him at the table and he slid up in his chair.
—Theodore Grey.
—Theodore! Eve exclaimed. Even Roosevelt went by Teddy.
Theodore laughed.
—My friends call me Tinker.
Couldn’t you just have guessed it? How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps—the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.
—I’m Evelyn Ross, Evey said, taking her given name for a spin. And this is Katey Kontent.