Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [104]
And you better believe I remembered how subtle a partner Tinker had been in the Adirondacks—how clever; how inventive; how he had surprised me; how he had folded me; reversed me; explored me. Sweet Jesus. I wasn’t even close to being born yesterday, but not for one minute had I let myself dwell on the obvious—that he had learned all of that from someone else; someone a little more bold, a little more experienced, a little less subject to shame.
And all the time, the outward appearance so artfully maintained was that of a gentleman: well mannered, well spoken, well dressed—well honed.
I got up and went to my purse. I pulled out the little volume of Washingtonia that fate had dropped in my lap. I opened it and began skimming through young George’s aspirations:
Suddenly, I could see this for what it was too. For Tinker Grey, this little book wasn’t a series of moral aspirations—it was a primer on social advancement. A do-it-yourself charm school. A sort of How to Win Friends and Influence People 150 years ahead of its time.
I shook my head like a midwestern grandma.
What a rube Katherine Kontent had been.
Teddy to Tinker, Eve to Evelyn, Katya to Kate: In New York City, these sorts of alterations come free of charge—or so I had thought to myself as the year began. But what circumstances should have brought to mind were the two versions of The Thief of Baghdad.
In the original version, an impoverished Douglas Fairbanks, enamored of the caliph’s daughter, disguises himself as a prince to gain access to the palace. While in the Technicolor remake, the lead played a prince who, bored by the pomp of the throne, disguises himself as a peasant so that he can sample the splendors of the bazaar.
Masquerades such as these don’t require much imagination to initiate or comprehend; they happen every day. But to assume that they will enhance one’s chances at a happy ending, this requires the one suspension of disbelief that the two versions of The Thief of Baghdad share: that carpets can fly.
The telephone rang.
—Yeah?
—Katey.
I had to laugh.
—Guess what I have in front of me?
—Katey.
—Go ahead and guess. You’ll never believe it.
. . .
—The Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour! Remember those? Wait. Let me find one.
I fumbled with the phone.
—Here we go! Mock not nor Jest at any thing of Importance. That’s a good one. Or how about this? Number Sixty-six: Be not forward but friendly and Courteous. Why, that’s you in spades!
—Katey.
I hung up. I sat back down and began reading Mr. Washington’s list a little more closely. You had to give that precocious colonial kid credit. Some of them made a lot of sense.
The phone began ringing again. It rang and rang and rang and then fell silent.
As an adolescent, I had mixed feelings about my long legs. Like the legs on a newborn foal they seemed engineered for collapse. Billy Bogadoni, who lived around the corner with his eight siblings, used to call me Cricket, and he didn’t mean it in the complimentary sense. But as it goes with such things, I eventually grew into my legs and ultimately prized them. I found I liked being taller than the other girls. By seventeen, I was taller than Billy Bogadoni. When I first moved into Mrs. Martingale’s she used to say in her saccharine manner that I really shouldn’t wear heels because boys didn’t like to dance with girls who were taller than them. Perhaps because of those very remarks, my heels were half an inch higher when I left Mrs. Martingale’s than when I’d arrived.
Well, here was another advantage of being long-legged. I could lean back in my father’s easy chair, extend my foot with my toes pointed forward, and tip my new coffee table so that the telephone slid overboard like a deck chair on the Titanic.
I read on without interruption. As I have mentioned before, there were 110, which might have led you to believe the list was a little