Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [23]
—Right, she said, dumping her napkin on her plate. Let’s beat it.
When we stood up from the table we were all feeling the good graces of the second martini. At the door, Tinker thanked the maitre d’ and apologized in German for our having to rush. In a show of forgiveness, Eve accepted my flapper’s jacket from the coat-check girl, leaving me to don her fur-collared twenty-first birthday present.
Outside, the drizzle had stopped, the sky had cleared and the air was bracing. After a quick conference, we decided to head back to Chernoff’s to see the second show.
—We may miss curfew, I noted, as I climbed in back.
—If we do, Eve asked turning to Tinker, can we bunk at your place?
—Of course.
Though the evening had started a little roughly, in the end our camaraderie had served us another good turn. Sitting in front, Eve reached back and placed a hand on my knee. Tinker dialed the radio to a swing tune. No one said anything as we turned onto Park Avenue and headed downtown.
At Fifty-first Street we passed Saint Bartholomew’s, the great domed church built by the Vanderbilts. Conveniently, they had dropped it on a spot where every Sunday morning they could see Grand Central Station over the pastor’s shoulder as they complimented his sermon. Like other royals of the gilded age, the Vanderbilts’ roots reached back three generations to an indentured servant. Hailing from the town of De Bilt, he had sailed from Holland to New York in steerage, and when he stepped off the boat he was known simply as Jan from De Bilt—until Cornelius built his fortune and classed up the moniker.
But you don’t have to own a railroad to shorten or lengthen your name.
Teddy to Tinker.
Eve to Evelyn.
Katya to Kate.
In New York City, these sorts of alterations come free of charge.
As the car crossed Forty-ninth Street, we could all feel the wheels slip a little beneath us. The road ahead shimmered with what looked like puddles but which, with the cessation of rain, had frozen into patches of ice. Tinker downshifted and regained control. He slowed to turn, thinking perhaps that Third Avenue would be better. And that’s when the milk truck hit us. We never even saw it. It was coming down Park Avenue at fifty miles an hour loaded for deliveries. When we decelerated, it tried to stop, hit the ice and smashed us squarely from behind. The coupé launched like a rocket and vaulted across Forty-seventh Street into a cast-iron lamppost on the median.
When I came to, I found myself upside down, pinned between the gearshift and the dash. The air was cold. The driver-side door was thrown open and I could see Tinker lying by the curb. The passenger door was closed; but Eve was gone.
I untangled myself and crawled from the car. It hurt when I inhaled, as if I’d broken a rib. Tinker was standing now, stumbling toward Eve. Shot through the windshield, she was huddled on the ground.
Out of nowhere an ambulance appeared and there were two young men in white jackets with a stretcher, looking like something out of a newsreel on the Spanish civil war.
—She’s alive, one said to the other.
They hoisted her onto the stretcher.
Her face was as raw as a cut of meat.
I couldn’t help myself. I turned away.
Tinker couldn’t help himself either. He fixed his eyes on Eve and wouldn’t avert them until the doors of the surgery swung shut.
JANUARY 8
When he came out of the hospital, a line of taxis waited at the curb as if it was a hotel. He was surprised to find it already dark. He wondered what time it was.
The driver in the front cab nodded in his direction. He shook his head.
A woman in a fur coat came out of the hospital and jumped in the back of the taxi that he hadn’t taken. As she closed the door she leaned forward to rattle off an address. The woman’s cab pulled away and the other cabs advanced. For a moment, her urgency struck him as out of place. But then, just because we have good reasons to rush to a hospital doesn’t mean we don’t have good reasons to rush away again.
How many times