by Amor Towles
And that’s when the swinging door swung and in walked “Dennis.”
—My, oh my, said Woolly.
—What in God’s name is going on here? “Dennis” demanded, using one of those W questions for which he expected no answer.
Then the swinging door swung again and there was Sarah with an expression of anticipatory concern.
Stepping abruptly forward, “Dennis” picked up the bottle that was in front of Woolly and looked around the table.
—Château Margaux ’28! You drank four bottles of Château Margaux ’28?!
—We only drank one bottle, said Billy.
—That’s true, said Woolly. We poured the other three bottles down the drain.
But as soon as Woolly had said this, he realized he shouldn’t have. Because “Dennis” was suddenly as red as his Château Margaux.
—You poured them out!
Sarah, who had been standing quietly behind her husband holding open the door, now stepped into the room. This is where she would say what needed to be said, thought Woolly, the very thing that he would later wish he’d had the presence of mind to say himself. But when she stepped around “Dennis” and had the chance to take in the scene in its entirety, she picked up the napkin from beside Woolly’s plate, which, like all the others on the table, was stained with big red splotches of wine.
—Oh, Woolly, she said, ever so softly.
Ever so heartbreakingly softly.
Everyone was silent now. And for a moment, no one seemed to know where to look. Because they didn’t quite want to look at each other, or the bottles, or the napkins. But when “Dennis” put the empty bottle of Château Margaux on the table, it was as if a spell had been broken, and they all looked directly at Woolly, especially “Dennis.”
—Wallace Martin, he said, can I speak to you in private.
* * *
• • •
When Woolly followed his brother-in-law into the office, he could tell that a bad situation had just gotten worse. Because despite “Dennis” having made it perfectly clear that he did not like people going into his office when he wasn’t there, here was his telephone stuffed in the desk drawer with the cord hanging out.
—Sit down, “Dennis” said as he returned the phone to its proper spot with a bang.
Then he looked at Woolly for a good long minute, which was something that the people sitting behind desks often seemed to do. Having insisted upon speaking to you without further delay, they sit there for a good long minute without saying a word. But even a good long minute comes to an end.
—I suppose you’re wondering why your sister and I are here?
In fact, Woolly hadn’t thought to wonder that at all. But now that “Dennis” mentioned it, it did seem worthy of wondering, since the two of them were supposed to be spending the night in the city.
Well, it turned out that on Friday afternoon, Kaitlin had received a phone call from a young woman asking if Woolly was at her house. Then earlier today, a young man had appeared on Kaitlin’s doorstep with the very same question. Kaitlin couldn’t understand why people would be asking if Woolly was there, when he was supposed to be completing his sentence in Salina. Naturally enough, she became concerned, so she decided to call her sister. But when she dialed Sarah’s house and Woolly answered, not only had he hung up on her, he apparently had left the phone off the hook, because when Kaitlin kept calling back, all she got was a busy signal. This turn of events left Kaitlin little choice but to track Sarah and “Dennis” down—even though they were dining at the Wilsons.
When Woolly was a boy, punctuation had always struck him as something of an adversary—a hostile force that was committed to his defeat, whether through espionage, or by storming his beaches with overwhelming force. In seventh grade, when he had admitted this to the kind and patient Miss Penny, she explained that Woolly had it upside down. Punctuation, she said, was his ally, not his enemy. All those little marks—the period, the comma, the colon—were there to help him make sure that other people understood what he was trying to say. But apparently “Dennis” was so certain that what he had to say would be understood, he didn’t need any punctuation at all.
—After giving our apologies to our hosts and driving all the way home to Hastings what do we find but a pickup truck blocking the driveway a mess in the kitchen strangers in the dining room drinking our wine and the table linens my God the table linens that your grandmother gave your sister now soiled beyond repair because you have treated them like you treat everything else like you treat everyone else which is to say without the slightest respect
“Dennis” studied Woolly for a moment, as if he were genuinely trying to understand him, trying to take the full measure of the man.
—At the age of fifteen your family sends you to one of the finest schools in the country and you get yourself thrown out for a reason I cant even remember then its off to St Marks where you get kicked out again for burning down a goalpost of all things and when no reputable school is willing to give you a second look your mother convinces St Georges to take you in by invoking the memory of your uncle Wallace who not only excelled there as a student but eventually served on its board of trustees and when you get thrown out of there and find yourself not in front of a disciplinary committee but in front of a judge what does your family do but lie about your age so that you wont be tried as an adult and hire a lawyer from Sullivan and Cromwell no less who convinces the judge to send you to some special reformatory in Kansas where you can grow vegetables for a year but apparently you dont even have the backbone to see that inconvenience through to its conclusion
“Dennis” stopped for the weighty pause.
As Woolly well knew, the weighty pause was an essential part of speaking to someone in private. It was the signal for both the speaker and the listener that what was coming next was of the utmost importance.
—I gather from Sarah that if you return to Salina they will let you complete your sentence in a matter of months so that you can apply to college and go on with your life but the one thing that has become abundantly clear Wallace is that you do not yet value an education and the best way for someone to learn the value of an education is to spend a few years doing a job which doesnt require one so with that in mind tomorrow I will be reaching out to a friend of mine at the stock exchange who is always looking for a few young men to serve as runners and maybe he will have a little more success than the rest of us in teaching you what it means to earn your keep
And right then Woolly knew for certain what he should have known the night before—as he stood in such high spirits among the wildflowers and the knee-high grass—that he was never going to visit the Statue of Liberty.
Emmett
When Mr. Whitney finished speaking to Woolly, he had gone upstairs to his bedroom, followed a few minutes later by his wife. Saying he wanted to check on the progress of the stars, Woolly had gone out the front door, followed a few minutes later by Duchess, who wanted to make sure that he was all right. And Sally, she had gone upstairs in order to get Billy settled. Which left Emmett alone in the kitchen with the mess.
And Emmett was glad of it.
When Mr. Whitney had come through the dining-room door, Emmett’s emotions had switched in the instant from merriment to shame. What had they been thinking, the five of them? Carousing in another man’s house, drinking his wine and staining his wife’s linens in pursuit of a childish game. Adding to the sting of embarrassment was the sudden memory of Parker and Packer in their Pullman car with their food thrown about and the half-empty bottle of gin on its side. How quickly Emmett had judged those two; condemned them for the spoiled and callous manner in which they treated their surroundings.
So Emmett did not begrudge Mr. Whitney his anger. He had every right to be angry. To be insulted. To be outraged. The surprise for Emmett had been in Mrs. Whitney’s response, in how gracious she had been, te
lling them in her gentle way when Woolly and Mr. Whitney had left the room, that it was all right, that it was just some napkins and a few bottles of wine, insisting—without a suggestion of resentment—that they leave everything for the housekeeper, then telling them in which rooms they could sleep and in which closets they could find extra blankets and pillows and towels. Gracious was the only word for it. A graciousness that compounded the sense of Emmett’s shame.
That’s why he was glad to find himself alone, glad to have the chance to clear the dining-room table and set about cleaning the dishes as some small act of penance.
* * *
• • •
Emmett had just finished washing the plates and was moving on to the glasses when Sally returned.
—He’s asleep, she said.
—Thanks.
Without saying another word, Sally took up a dish towel and began drying the plates as he washed the crystal; then she dried the crystal as he washed the pots. And it was a comfort to be doing this work, to be doing this work in Sally’s company without either of them feeling the need to speak.
Emmett could tell that Sally was as ashamed as he was, and there was comfort in that too. Not the comfort of knowing that someone else was feeling a similar sting of rebuke. Rather, the comfort of knowing one’s sense of right and wrong was shared by another, and thus was somehow more true.
TWO
Duchess
When it came to vaudeville, it was all about the setup. That was as true for the comedians as it was for the jugglers and magicians. The members of the audience entered the theater with their own preferences, their own prejudices, their own sets of expectations. So, without the audience members realizing it, the performer needed to remove those and replace them with a new set of expectations—a set of expectations that he was in a better position to anticipate, manipulate, and ultimately satisfy.
Take Mandrake the Magnificent. Manny wasn’t what you’d call a great magician. In the first half of his act, he’d produce a bouquet of flowers out of his sleeve, or colored ribbons out of his ears, or a nickel out of thin air—basically the stuff you’d see at a ten-year-old’s birthday party. But like Kazantikis, what Manny lacked in the front of his act, he made up for in the finale.
One difference between Mandrake and most of his peers was that rather than having some leggy blonde at his side, he had a large white cockatoo named Lucinda. Many years before while traveling in the Amazon—Manny would explain to the audience—he had discovered a baby bird that had fallen from her nest to the forest floor. After nursing the chick back to health, he had raised her to adulthood and they had been together ever since. Over the course of the act, Lucinda would perch on her gilded stand and assist by holding a set of keys in her claws or rapping three times on a deck of cards with her beak.
But when the act was winding up, Manny would announce that he was going to attempt a trick he had never performed before. A stagehand would wheel out a pedestal on which sat a black enamel chest illustrated with a big red dragon. On a recent trip to the Orient, Manny would say, he had discovered the object in a flea market. The moment he saw it, he recognized it for what it was: a Mandarin’s Box. Manny knew only a bit of Chinese, but the old man who was selling the curiosity not only confirmed Manny’s suspicions, he went on to teach Manny the magic words that made it work.
Tonight, Manny would announce, for the first time anywhere in the Americas, I will use the Mandarin’s Box to make my trusted cockatoo vanish and reappear right before your eyes.
Gently, Manny would place Lucinda in the chest and shut the doors. Closing his eyes, he would utter an incantation in a Chinese of his own invention, while tapping the chest with his wand. When he reopened the doors, the bird was gone.
After bowing for a round of applause, Manny would ask for silence, explaining that the spell to make the bird reappear was far more complicated than the one that made it vanish. Taking a deep breath, he would double up on his oriental mumbo jumbo, working it to a suitable pitch. Then opening his eyes, he would point his wand. Seemingly from nowhere, a ball of fire would explode and engulf the chest, prompting the audience to gasp and Manny to take two steps back. But once the smoke had cleared, there was the Mandarin’s Box without so much as a scratch. Stepping forward, tentatively, Manny would open the doors of the chest . . . reach his hands inside . . . and withdraw a platter on which sat a perfectly roasted bird surrounded by all the fixings.
For a moment, the magician and audience would share the silence of the stunned. Then raising his gaze from the platter, Manny would look out into the theater and say: Oops.
How that would bring down the house.
* * *
• • •
So. Here’s what happened on Sunday, the twentieth of June. . . .
Having woken at the crack of dawn, at Woolly’s insistence we packed our bags, tiptoed down the back stairs, and slipped out the door without making a sound.
After putting the Caddy in neutral and rolling her out of the drive, we fired her up, put her in gear, and half an hour later were sailing up the Taconic State Parkway like Ali Baba on his magic carpet.
What cars were on the road all seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, so we were making good time, passing through Lagrangeville by seven o’clock and Albany by eight.
After being given the business by his brother-in-law, Woolly had tossed and turned for most of the night and woken up looking as low as I’d ever seen him, so when I saw a blue steeple on the horizon, I put on the blinker.
Being back in the bright orange booth seemed to lift his spirits. Though he didn’t seem as interested in his place mat, he ate almost half of his pancakes and all of my bacon.
Not long after we passed Lake George, Woolly had me turn off the highway and we began winding our way through the great bucolic wilderness that makes up ninety percent of New York’s landmass and none of its reputation. With the townships getting farther apart and the trees getting closer to the road, Woolly almost seemed himself, humming along with the commercials even though the radio wasn’t on. It must have been about eleven when he sat up on the edge of his seat and pointed to a break in the woods.
—You take that next right.
Turning onto a dirt road, we began winding our way through a forest of the tallest trees that I had ever seen.
To be perfectly honest, when Woolly had first told me about the hundred and fifty grand that was stashed in a safe at the family’s camp, I had my doubts. I just couldn’t seem to picture all that money sitting in some log cabin in the woods. But when we emerged from the trees, rising before us was a house that looked like a hunting lodge owned by the Rockefellers.
When Woolly saw it, he breathed an even bigger sigh of relief than I did, as if he’d had his own doubts. Like maybe the whole place had been a figment of his imagination.
—Welcome home, I said.
And he gave me his first smile of the day.
When we got out of the car, I followed Woolly around to the front of the house and across the lawn to where a giant body of water shimmered in the sun.
—The lake, Woolly said.
With the trees coming right down to the shoreline, there wasn’t another residence in sight.
—How many houses are on this lake? I asked.
—One . . . ? he asked back.
—Right, I said.
Then he began giving me the lay of the land.
—The dock, he said pointing to the dock.
And the boathouse, he said pointing to the boathouse. And the flagpole, he said pointing to the flagpole.
—The caretaker hasn’t been here yet, he observed with another sigh of relief.
—How can you tell?
—Because the raft isn’t on the lake and the rowboats aren’t at the dock.
Turning, we took a moment to appreciate the house, which looked down
over the water like it had been there since the beginning of America. And maybe it had.
—Perhaps we should get our things . . . ? Woolly suggested.
—Allow me!
Hopping to it like a bellboy at the Ritz, I skipped over to the car and opened the trunk. Setting aside the Louisville Slugger, I took out our book bags, then followed Woolly to the narrow end of the house, where two lines of white-painted stones led to a door.
On the top of the stoop were four overturned flowerpots. No doubt when the raft was on the lake and the rowboats at the dock, they would be planted with whatever sort of flower that WASPs found to be ornamental without being showy.
After peeking under three of the pots, Woolly retrieved a key and unlocked the door. Then showing a decidedly un-Woolly presence of mind, he put the key back where he’d found it before letting us inside.
First, we entered a little room in which cubbyholes, hooks, and baskets held an orderly arrangement of everything you’d need for the great outdoors: coats and hats, rods and reels, bows and arrows. In front of a glass cabinet showcasing four rifles were several large white chairs stacked one on top of the other, having been hauled in from their picturesque spots on the lawn.
—The mudroom, Woolly said.
As if mud had ever found its way onto the shoe of a Wolcott!
Over the gun cabinet there was a big green sign like the one in the barracks at Salina, painted with its own rules and regulations. Most everywhere else on the wall—hanging right up to the ceiling—were dark-red boards in the shape of chevrons with lists painted in white.
—The winners, Woolly explained.
—Of what?
—The tournaments we used to have on the Fourth of July.
Woolly pointed from one to another.
—Riflery, archery, the swim race, the canoe race, the twenty-yard dash.