by Amor Towles
For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise—that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.
EPILOGUE
Few Are Chosen
It was the last night of 1940 and the snow was blowing two knots shy of a blizzard. Within the hour there wouldn’t be a car moving in all Manhattan. They’d be buried like boulders under the snow. But for now, they crawled along with the weary determination of wayward pioneers.
Eight of us had stumbled out of a dance at the University Club that we hadn’t been invited to in the first place. The party had been on the second floor under the great palazzo ceilings. A thirty-piece orchestra dressed in white was ushering in 1941 in the brand-new and already outmoded style of Guy Lombardo. Unbeknownst to us, the party had an ulterior motive—to raise money for refugees from Estonia. When a latter-day Carry Nation stood alongside a dispossessed ambassador to rattle her tin can, we made for the door.
On the way out, Bitsy had somehow come into possession of a trumpet and, as she was making a pretty impressive show of the scales, the rest of us huddled under a street lamp to plan a course of action. A quick look at the roads and we could tell a taxi wouldn’t be coming to the rescue. Carter Hill said he knew of a perfect hideaway just around the corner where we could find food and drink, so under his direction we set off westward through the snow. None of the girls were dressed for the weather, but I had the good fortune of being tucked under one wing of Harrison Harcourt’s fur-collared coat.
Midway down the block, a rival party coming in the other direction pelted us with snowballs. Bitsy sounded the charge and we counterattacked. Taking cover behind a newsstand and a mailbox, we drove them off hooting like Indians, but when Jack “mistakenly” toppled Bitsy into a snowbank, the girls turned on the boys. It was as if our New Year’s resolution was to act like we were ten.
The thing of it is—1939 may have brought the beginning of the war in Europe, but in America it brought the end of the Depression. While they were annexing and appeasing, we were stoking the steel plants, reassembling the assembly lines, and readying ourselves to meet a worldwide demand for arms and ammunition. In December 1940, with France already fallen and the Luftwaffe bombarding London, back in America Irving Berlin was observing how the treetops glistened and children listened to hear those sleigh bells in the snow. That’s how far away we were from the Second World War.
Carter’s nearby hideaway ended up being a ten-block slog. As we turned onto Broadway, the wind howled down from Harlem blowing the snow against our backs. I had Harry’s coat cloaked over my head and was letting myself be steered by an elbow. So when we got to the front of the restaurant I didn’t even see what it looked like. Harry ushered me down the steps, pulled back his coat, and voila, I was in a sizable midblock joint serving Italian food, Italian wine, and Italian jazz, whatever that was.
Midnight had come and gone so the floor was covered with confetti. Most of the revelers who had spent the countdown in the restaurant had come and gone too.
We didn’t wait for their plates to be cleared. We just stomped our shoes, shook off the snow, and commandeered a table for eight opposite the bar. I sat next to Bitsy. Carter slipped into the chair on my right, leaving Harry to find a seat across the table. Jack picked up a wine bottle left by the prior patrons and squinted to see if there were remnants.
—We need wine, he said.
—Indeed we do, said Carter, catching a waiter’s eye. Maestro! Three bottles of Chianti!
The waiter, who had the big eyebrows and big hands of Bela Lugosi, opened the bottles with glum attention.
—Not exactly the jovial sort, Carter observed.
But it was hard to tell. Like so many Italians in New York in 1940, maybe his normal joviality was overshadowed by the unfortunate allegiances of the old country.
Carter volunteered to order a few plates for the table, and then made a reasonable stab at launching a conversation by asking people what was the best thing they did in 1940. It made me a little nostalgic for Dicky. No one could get a table talking nonsense like Dicky Vanderwhile.
As someone rattled on about a trip to Cuba (“the new Riviera”), Carter leaned toward me and whispered in my ear.
—What’s the worst thing you did in 1940?
A piece of bread sailed across the table and hit him on the head.
—Hey, Carter said, looking up.
The only way you could tell it was Harry was by his perfect repose and a slight upward turn of his lips. I considered giving him a wink; instead I threw the bread back. He acted aghast. I was about to do the same when a waiter handed me a piece of folded paper. It was an unsigned note scrawled in a rough hand.
SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT?
When I looked confused, the waiter pointed toward the bar. Seated on one of the stools was a stocky, good-looking soldier. He was grinning a little impolitely. Well groomed as he was, I almost didn’t recognize him. But, sure as the shore, it was unwavering Henry Grey.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Sometimes, it sure seems that’s what life intends. After all, it’s basically like a centrifuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns. Even if we wanted to retrace our steps and rekindle our old acquaintances, how could we possibly find the time?
The year 1938 had been one in which four people of great color and character had held welcome sway over my life. And here it was December 31, 1940, and I hadn’t seen a single one of them in over a year.
Dicky was forcibly uprooted in January 1939.
On the heels of the New York cotillion season, Mr. Vanderwhile finally became fed up with his son’s easy ways. So under the auspices of the recovering economy, he sent Dicky to Texas to work on an old friend’s oil rigs. Mr. Vanderwhile was convinced that this would make “quite an impression” on Dicky; and it did. Though not in the way Mr. Vanderwhile expected. His friend happened to have an ornery daughter who adopted Dicky as a dance partner when she was home for the Easter break. When she went back to school, Dicky sought to extract some promise of love, only to be rebuffed. While the weeks with Dicky had been great fun, she explained, in the long run she saw herself with someone a little more practical, down to earth, ambitious—that is, of course, someone a little more like her pa. Before long Dicky found himself working extra hours and applying to Harvard Business School.
He would get his degree in 1941, just six months before Pearl Harbor. From there, he enlisted, served with distinction in the Pacific, returned to marry his Texan, had three children, went to work in the State Department, and generally made a hash of everything that anyone had ever said of him.
Eve Ross, she just waltzed away.
The first I heard tell of her after she disappeared to Los Angeles was a clipping that Peaches gave me in March of 1939. It was a photograph from a gossip magazine and it showed a boisterous Olivia de Havilland pushing through a line of photographers outside the Tropicana on Sunset. She was on the arm of a young woman with a good figure, a sleeveless dress, and a scar on her cheek. The photograph was titled Gone with the Wind and the caption referred to the scarred woman as de Havilland’s “confidante.”
The next I heard of Evey was on the first of April, when I received a long-distance call at two in the morning. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. He said he was sorry for disturbing me, he knew it was late, but he had no alternative. A young woman had been discovered unconscious on the lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel and my telephone number had been found in her pocket.
I was stunned.
Then I heard Eve in the background.
—Did she bite?
—Of course she did, said the detective, betraying an Eng
lish accent. Like a trout to a fly.
—Give me that!
—Wait!
The two were wrestling for the phone.
—April fools, the man shouted.
Then the receiver was plucked away.
—Did we get you, Sis?
—Did you ever.
Evey howled with laughter.
It was good to hear. For half an hour, we back-and-forthed, bringing each other up-to-date and paying tribute to the fine times we’d had in New York City. But when I asked if she might be coming back east any time soon, she said as far as she was concerned, the Rockies weren’t high enough.
Wallace, of course, was stolen from the living.
But in one of life’s little ironies, of the four with whom I’d spent 1938, it was Wallace who maintained the greatest influence on my daily life. For in the spring of 1939, I received a second visit from the perspiring Niles Copperthwaite. This time he brought the extraordinary news that Wallace Wolcott had written me into his will. Specifically, he had directed that the dividends from a generation-skipping trust be diverted to me for the remainder of my life. This was to bring me an annual income of eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred dollars may not have been a fortune, not even in 1939, but it was enough to ensure that I could think twice before accepting the advances of any man; which, come to think of it, for a girl in Manhattan entering her late twenties, was fortune enough.
And Tinker Grey?
I didn’t know where Tinker was. But in a sense, I knew what had become of him. Having cut himself adrift, Tinker had finally found his way to unfettered terrain. Whether trekking the snows of the Yukon or sailing the seas of Polynesia, Tinker was where the view to the horizon was unimpeded, the crickets commanded the stillness, the present was paramount, and there was absolutely no need for the Rules of Civility.
Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? If so, then only at our peril. I crossed to the bar.
—Katey, right?
—Hello, Hank. You look well.
And he did. Better than anyone in their right mind would have expected. The demands of army life had filled out his features and his build. And the stripes on his crisp khaki uniform advertised the rank of sergeant.
I acknowledged his stripes with a figurative tip of the hat.
—Don’t bother, he said with an easy smile. They won’t last.
But I wasn’t so sure. He looked like the army had yet to see the best of him.
He nodded toward our table.
—I see you’ve found yourself a new circle of friends.
—Several.
—I’ll bet. I think I owe you one. Let me buy you a drink.
He ordered beer for himself and a martini for me, as if he’d known all along that that was my drink. We clinked glasses and wished each other a Happy 1941.
—Have you seen my brother around?
—No, I admitted. I haven’t seen him in two years.
—Yeah. I suppose that makes some sense.
—Have you heard from him?
—On and off. When I get leave, sometimes I come up to New York and we get together.
I wasn’t expecting that.
I took a drink of my gin.
He eyed me with a sly smile.
—You’re surprised, he said.
—I didn’t know that he was in New York.
—Where would he be?
—I don’t know. I just figured that when he quit, he’d left town.
—No. He stuck around. He got a job working on the Hell’s Kitchen docks for a while. After that, he drifted around the boroughs and we lost touch. Then last spring I ran into him on the street in Red Hook.
—Where was he living? I asked.
—I’m not sure. One of the flophouses by the Navy Yards, I suppose.
We were both silent for a moment.
—How was he? I asked.
—You know. A little scruffy. A little lean.
—No. I mean how was he?
—Oh, Hank said with a smile. You mean how was he on the inside.
Hank didn’t need to consider.
—He was happy.
The snows of the Yukon . . . the seas of Polynesia . . . the footpaths of the Mohicans . . . These were the sorts of terrain that I had imagined Tinker wandering for the last two years. And all the time, he had been right here in New York City.
Why had I assumed that Tinker was so far afield? I’d like to say it was because the unsettled landscapes of London and Stevenson and Cooper had suited his romantic sensibility since he was a boy. But as soon as Hank said that Tinker was in New York, I knew that I had pictured him far afield because it was easier for me to accept his willingness to leave, if it was to travel alone in the wilds.
So it was with mixed feelings that I received this news. Picturing Tinker wandering among the crowds of Manhattan, poor in all but spirit, I felt regret and envy; but a touch of pride too; and a little bit of hope.
For wasn’t it just a matter of time before we crossed each other’s path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn’t Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide?
So in the days that followed, I kept an eye out. I looked for his figure on the street corners and in the coffee shops. I imagined coming home and having him emerge once more from the doorway across the street.
But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly, but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd. Swept along by the currents of my own ambitions and commitments, my daily life laid the groundwork for the grace of forgetting—until, that is, I finally ran into him, after all, in the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.
Val and I took a taxi back to our apartment on Fifth Avenue. The cook had left us a little dinner on the stove, so we warmed it and opened a Bordeaux and ate standing in the kitchen.
I suppose that for most, the image of a husband and wife eating reheated food at their counter at nine o’clock would lack a certain romance; but for Valentine and me, who dined out formally so often, eating alone on our feet in our own kitchen was the highlight of the week.
As Val rinsed the plates, I walked down the hallway toward our bedroom. Along the wall were photographs hung from floor to ceiling. Normally, I ignored them as I passed, but on this night I found myself considering them one by one.
Unlike the photographs on Wallace’s walls, these were not from four generations. They were all from the last twenty years. The earliest was of Val and me at a black-tie affair in 1947 looking a little awkward. A mutual acquaintance had just tried to introduce us, but Val had cut him short, explaining that we had already met—on Long Island in 1938—when he had given me a ride into the city to the tune of “Autumn in New York.”
Among the photographs of friends, and of vacations in Paris and Venice and London, were a few with a professional bent: There was the cover of the February 1955 issue of Gotham—the first that I was to edit, and there was a picture of Val shaking the hand of a president. But my favorite was the picture of the two of us at our wedding with our arms around old Mr. Hollingsworth, his wife already gone and he soon to follow.
Having poured the last of the wine, Val found me in the hall surveying the photographs.
—Something tells me you’re going to stay up a little longer, he said, handing me my glass. Do you want company?
—No. You go ahead. I won’t be long.
With a wink and a smile, he tapped a picture taken on the beach in Southampton shortly after I had cut my hair an inch too short. Then he gave me a kiss and went into the bedroom. I went back to the living room and out onto the terrace. The air was cool and the lights of the city shimmered. The little planes no longer circled the Empire State Building, but it was still a view that practically conjugated hope: I have hoped; I am hoping; I will hope.
I lit a cigarette and then I threw the match over my shoulder for good luck thinking: Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out.
It is a bit o
f a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time—by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?
In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.
Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended.
Life doesn’t have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you’re presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course—that’s by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn’t come without a price.
I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.