Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [59]
At the end of the alley I saw something that looked very much like a Rolls-Royce slowing to a stop.
—Two eleven Central Park West, I said.
The Beresford.
A few minutes later, I was in the backseat of the Dorans’ Rolls-Royce being driven up Eighth Avenue. Mr. Doran insisted that I sit in the middle. He had my hat carefully propped on his knees. Mrs. Doran had the driver turn on the radio and the three of us had a gay old time.
When Pete the doorman opened the car door, he gave me a confused look, but the Dorans didn’t notice. There were kisses all around and promises to meet again. I waved as the Rolls pulled away from the curb. A little awkwardly, Pete cleared his throat.
—I’m sorry Miss Kontent, but I’m afraid that Mr. Grey and Miss Ross are in Europe.
—Yes, Pete. I know.
When I boarded the downtown train, it was crowded with faces of every color and clothes of every cut. Shuttling back and forth between Greenwich Village and Harlem with two stops in the theater district, the Broadway local on Saturday night was one of the city’s most democratic. The buttoned-down were tucked snugly among the zootsuited and the worse-for-wear.
At Columbus Circle, a lanky man in overalls boarded the train. With long arms and stubble on his chin, he looked like a past-his-prime pitcher from the farm leagues. It took me a moment to realize it was the same country type who had knocked the purse out of my hands the day before on the IRT. Rather than take an empty seat, he stood in the middle of the car.
The doors closed, the train got under way and he produced a little yellow book from his overall pocket. He opened it to a dog-eared page and began reading loudly in a voice that must have been uprooted from Appalachia. It took me a passage or two to realize that he was reading from the Sermon on the Mount.
—And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
To his credit, the preacher wasn’t holding on to a strap. As the car rocked back and forth, he was keeping steady by gripping the sides of his righteous little book. One got the sense that he could read the Gospels all the way to Bay Ridge and back without losing his footing.
—Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
The preacher was doing an admirable job. He was speaking clearly and with feeling. He captured the poetry of the King James version and he punched every they like his life depended on it, in celebration of this central paradox of Christianity—that the weak and weary would be the ones who would walk away with it all.
But on the Broadway local on a Saturday night, all you had to do was look around you to see that this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.
Shortly after my father died, my uncle Roscoe took me to dinner at his favorite tavern near the seaport. A stevedore, he was a bighearted lumbering sort, the kind of man who would have been better off at sea—that world without women or children or social graces, with plenty of work and unspoken codes of camaraderie. It certainly didn’t come very naturally to him to take his newly orphaned nineteen-year-old niece for a meal; so I guess I’ll never forget it.
By then I already had a job and a room at Mrs. Martingale’s, so he didn’t have to worry about me. He just wanted to make sure I was okay and see if I needed anything. Then he was happy to carve up his pork chop in silence. But I wouldn’t let him.
I made him tell some of the tall tales from the old days like when he and my father stole the constable’s dog and stuck him on the train to Siberia; or when they set out to see the traveling tightrope walkers and were found twenty miles from town, headed in the wrong direction; or when they arrived in New York in 1895 and went straight to see the Brooklyn Bridge. I had heard these stories time