Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [35]
The doors opened again and the commuters piled on board.
—Shit, I said.
I grabbed the agreement and got an arm between the doors just before they closed.
—Come on, sweet stuff, said a conductor.
—Sweet your own stuff, I replied.
I headed up the east side stair and began working my way toward Ludlow looking among the wide-brimmed hats and the Brylcreemed hair for a bobbing black chrysanthemum. If I didn’t catch her in five blocks, I told myself, this agreement was going to merge with an ash can.
I found her on the corner of Canal and Christie.
She was standing in front of Schotts & Sons—kosher purveyors of all things pickled. She wasn’t shopping. She was talking to a diminutive old woman with black eyes in a familiarly funereal dress. The old woman had this evening’s lox wrapped in yesterday’s news.
—Excuse me.
Charlotte looked up. An expression of surprise turned to a girlish smile.
—Katherine!
She gestured to the old woman at her side.
—This is my grandmother.
(No kidding.)
—Nice to meet you, I said.
Charlotte said something to the old lady in Yiddish, presumably explaining that we worked together.
—You left this on the train, I said.
The smile left Charlotte’s face. She took the document in hand.
—Oh. What an oversight. How can I thank you.
—Forget it.
She paused for a second and then gave in to that worst of compulsions:
—Mr. Harper has a meeting first thing tomorrow with an important client, but this revision needs to be at Camden & Clay by nine so he asked if on my way to the office I could—
—In addition to a Harvard degree, Mr. Harper has a trust fund.
Charlotte looked at me with bovine bewilderment.
—These will hold him in good stead should he ever be dismissed.
Charlotte’s grandmother looked at my hands. Charlotte looked at my shoes.
In the summer the Schottses rolled their barrels of pickles and herring and watermelon rind right onto the sidewalk, sloshing a vinegary brine on the paving stones. Eight months later you could still smell it.
The old woman said something to Charlotte.
—My grandmother is asking if you would join us for dinner.
—I’m afraid I’m previously committed.
Charlotte translated, unnecessarily.
From Canal Street, I still had fifteen blocks to go, which was about ten too short to warrant another subway fare. So in the language of the neighborhood, I schlepped. At every intersection I looked to my left and right. Hester Street, Grand Street, Broome Street, Spring. Prince Street, First Street, Second Street, Third. Each block looked like a dead end from a different country. Tucked among the tenements you could see the shops of other Fathers & Sons selling the reformulated fare of their home countries—their sausages or cheeses, their smoked or salted fish wrapped in Italian or Ukrainian newsprint to be trundled home by their own unvanquishable grandmothers. Looking up, you could see the rows of two-room flats where three generations gathered nightly for a supper bracketed by religious devotions as saccharine and peculiar as their after-dinner liqueurs.
If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaflike, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.
At Astor Place, I stopped to buy the evening edition of the Times at a curbside newsstand. The front page offered a modified map of Europe, graced with a gentle dotted line to reflect a shifting frontier. The old man behind the counter had the white overgrown eyebrows and kindhearted expression of an absentminded country uncle. It made you wonder what he was doing there.
—Nice night, he said, presumably referencing what little he could see of it reflected