Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [114]
—How would we find them?
—We could run an ad in the papers offering high pay for doormen and elevator boys with at least one year’s experience at five of the most exclusive apartment buildings in the city.
Mason Tate looked out his window. He produced a chocolate bar from his jacket pocket. He broke off two squares and began chewing slowly, methodically, as if his goal was to grind the flavor out of them.
—If I let you place this ad, you really think you would find something of interest?
—I’d stake a month’s pay on it, I said coolly.
He nodded his head.
—Make it your career and you’ve got a deal.
On Friday, I walked to work a little early.
The advertisement had run for three days in the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Post Dispatch instructing applicants to come to the Condé Nast building today at 9:00 A.M. Word of my “wager” with Tate had circulated quickly, and a few of the boys in the bullpen had taken to whistling taps whenever I passed. Under the circumstances, you could hardly blame them.
At the time, the buildings along Fifth Avenue still looked like they had sprung from the ground overnight—disappearing into the clouds like beanstalks.
In 1936, the great French architect Le Corbusier published a little book called When the Cathedrals Were White detailing his first trip to New York. In it, he describes the thrill of seeing the city for the first time. Like Walt Whitman he sings of the humanity and the tempo, but he also sings of skyscrapers and elevators and air-conditioning, of polished steel and reflective glass. New York has such courage and enthusiasm, he writes, that everything can be begun again, sent back to the building yard and made into something still greater....
After reading that book, when you walked along Fifth Avenue and you looked up at those towers, you felt like any one of them might lead you to the hen that laid the golden eggs.
But earlier that summer, another visitor who came to the city had a slightly different take. He was a young man named John William Warde. Around 11:30 in the morning, he climbed out on a ledge of the seventeenth floor of the Gotham Hotel. He was promptly observed and a sizable crowd assembled below. Men paused, hanging their coats over their shoulders on the hook of their fingers. Women fanned themselves with their hats. Newspaper reporters gathered quotations and the police kept the sidewalk clear, sensing that at any moment . . .
But Warde just stood there on the ledge trying the patience of the reporters, the police, and the populous alike, prompting skeptics in the crowd to say that he neither had the courage to live with nor end his misery. At least, that’s what they said until he jumped at 10:38 P.M.
So I guess the New York City skyline inspires a little of that too.
The Condé Nast lobby was still empty, promising a quick and anonymous ascent. But as I crossed to the elevator bank, Tony at the security desk waved me over.
—Hey Tony. What’s up?
He gestured with his head to the side of the lobby. On a chrome-and-leather bench sat two ragged men, hats in hand. Unshaven and downcast, they looked like the god-forgotten sorts who listen to sermons in the Bowery missions just to get the soup. They looked like they wouldn’t know skinny if it was wrapped in cellophane and sold at the five-and-dime. What sort of groveling, I wondered, would I have to do to convince Miss Markham to take me back?
—They were waiting outside when we opened up, Tony said, adding out of the side of his mouth: The one on the left there sort of smells.
—Thanks Tony. I’ll take them up with me.
—Okay, Miss K. Sure thing. But what do you want me to do with the rest?
—The rest?
Tony stepped from around his desk and opened the stairwell door. It was crowded with men of every size and shape. Some, like the two on the bench, looked like they had ridden into Manhattan on the back of a freight car, but there were others who looked more like British man-servants in retirement. There were Irish, Italians, and Negroes looking sly or sophisticated, brutish