Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [127]
Given all that had happened, I’d prepared myself to find Tinker at low ebb. Hell, at one point, I’d even hoped to find him that way. But standing there on the banks of his comeuppance, I wasn’t so sure I was ready for it.
—Hello? I ventured, easing the apartment door open.
The word apartment hardly applied. Lucky #7 was two hundred square feet. It had a squat iron bed with a gray mattress—the sort you’d expect to see in a prison cell or barracks. In the corner a coal stove sat by a small but-thank-God-for-it window. But for a few pairs of shoes and an empty gunnysack stowed under the bed, Hank’s belongings were gone. Tinker’s were on the floor against the wall: a leather suitcase, a flannel blanket tied in a roll, a small stack of books.
—He aint in deh.
I turned to find the old Negro on the landing beside me.
—If you looking for Mr. Henry’s brotheh, he aint in deh.
The old Negro pointed his cane toward the ceiling.
—He on da roof.
On the roof. The very place where Hank had built the bonfire of his canvases—before he turned his back on New York City and his brother’s way of life.
I found Tinker sitting on a dormant chimney, his arms resting on his knees, his gaze cast downward to the Hudson River where the cold gray freighters were lined along the docks. From the back, he looked as if his life had just set sail on one.
—Hey, I said, stopping a few paces behind him.
At the sound of my voice, he turned and stood—and I could see in an instant that I was wrong again. Dressed in a black sweater, clean shaven and easy, Tinker wasn’t close to downcast.
—Katey! he said in pleasant surprise.
Instinctively, he took a step forward, but then stopped as if he’d caught himself—as if he suspected that he’d forfeited the right to the friendly embrace. Which in a way, he had. His smile took on an aspect of knowing contrition, signaling that he was ready to receive, or even welcome, another round of reprobation.
—They killed Wallace, I said, as if I’d just heard the news and couldn’t quite believe it.
—I know, he said.
And then I unraveled and his arms were around me.
We ended up spending an hour or two on the roof, sitting on the edge of a skylight. For a while, we just talked about Wallace. And then we were quiet. And then I apologized for how I had acted in the coffee shop, but Tinker shook his head. He said I’d been terrific that day, that I hadn’t missed a trick, that it was just what he had needed.
As we sat there, dusk was falling and the lights of the city were coming on one by one in ways that even Edison hadn’t imagined. They came on across the great patchwork of office buildings and along the cables of the bridges; then it was the street lamps and the theater marquees, the headlights of the cars and the beacons perched atop the radio towers—each individual lumen testifying to some unhesitant intemperate collective aspiration.
—Hank would spend hours on end up here, Tinker said. I used to try to get him to move, to take an apartment in the Village with a sink. But he wouldn’t budge. He said the Village was too bourgeois. But I think he stayed because of the view. It’s the same one we grew up with.
A freight horn blew and Tinker pointed to it as if it proved his point. I smiled and nodded.
. . .
—I guess I haven’t told you much about my life in Fall River, he said.
—No.
—How does that happen? How do you stop telling people where you’re from?
—By inches.
Tinker nodded and looked back over the piers.
—The irony is that I loved that part of my life—when we lived near the shipyards. It was a ragtag neighborhood, and when school let out, we’d all run down