Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [3]
Then the prevailing winds shifted from west to east, blowing the dust of the Okies all the way back to Forty-second Street. It came in billowing clouds and settled over the newspaper stands and park benches, shrouding the blessed and the damned just like the ashes in Pompeii. Suddenly, we had our own Joads—ill clothed and beleaguered, trudging along the alleyways past the oil drum fires, past the shanties and flophouses, under the spans of the bridges, moving slowly but methodically toward inner Californias which were just as abject and unredeeming as the real thing. Poverty and powerlessness. Hunger and hopelessness. At least until the omen of war began to brighten our step.
Yes, the hidden camera portraits of Walker Evans from 1938 to 1941 represented humanity, but a particular strain of humanity—a chastened one.
A few paces ahead of us, a young woman was enjoying the exhibit. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. Every picture seemed to pleasantly surprise her—as if she was in the portrait gallery of a castle where all the faces seemed majestic and remote. Her skin was flushed with an ignorant beauty that filled me with envy.
The faces weren’t remote for me. The chastened expressions, the unrequited stares, they were all too familiar. It was like that experience of walking into a hotel lobby in another city where the clothes and the mannerisms of the clientele are so similar to your own that you’re just bound to run into someone you don’t want to see.
And, in a way, that’s what happened.
—It’s Tinker Grey, I said, as Val was moving on to the next picture.
He came back to my side to take a second look at this portrait of a twenty-eight-year-old man, ill shaven, in a threadbare coat.
Twenty pounds underweight, he had almost lost the blush on his cheeks, and his face was visibly dirty. But his eyes were bright and alert and trained straight ahead with the slightest hint of a smile on his lips, as if it was he who was studying the photographer. As if it was he who was studying us. Staring across three decades, across a canyon of encounters, looking like a visitation. And looking every bit himself.
—Tinker Grey, repeated Val with vague recognition. I think my brother knew a Grey who was a banker. . . .
—Yes, I said. That’s the one.
Val studied the picture more closely now, showing the polite interest that a distant connection who’s fallen on hard times deserves. But a question or two must have presented itself regarding how well I knew the man.
—Extraordinary, Val said simply; and ever so slightly, he furrowed his brow.
By the summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled. It was time enough, as the poet said, to murder and create—or at least, to have warranted the dropping of a question on one’s plate.
But Val counted few backward-looking habits as virtues; and in regards to the mysteries of my past, as in regards to so much else, he was a gentleman first.
Nonetheless, I made a concession.
—He was an acquaintance of mine as well, I said. In my circle of friends for a time. But I haven’t heard his name since before the war.
Val’s brow relaxed.
Perhaps he was comforted by the deceptive simplicity of these little facts. He eyed the picture with more measure and a brief shake of the head, which simultaneously gave the coincidence its due and affirmed how unfair the Depression had been.
—Extraordinary, he said again, though more sympathetically. He slipped his arm under mine and gently moved me on.
We spent the required minute in front of the next picture. Then the next and the next. But now the faces were passing by like the faces of strangers ascending an opposite escalator. I was barely taking them in.
Seeing Tinker’s smile . . .
After all these years, I was unprepared for it. It made me feel sprung upon.
Maybe it was just complacency