Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [63]
—You most certainly should.
—I’m Katey.
—Nathaniel Parish.
(Aghast.)
—You must think me a fool. Going on about the meaning of a Chekov play. How mortifying.
He smiled.
—No. It was the pinnacle of my day.
As if on cue, a bowl of vichyssoise was put on the table. I looked down at the soup and gave it my best Oliver Twist.
The next day, I went to work at the Pembroke Press as Nathaniel Parish’s assistant. When he offered me the job, he immediately tried to dissuade me from taking it. He said I’d find Pembroke forty years behind the times. That he wouldn’t have enough work for me to do. That the pay was terrible. A job as his assistant, he concluded, would be a cul de sac.
How good were his predictions?
Pembroke was forty years behind the times. On my first day on the job I could tell that the editors at Pembroke were nothing like their younger counterparts around town. Not only did they have manners, they thought them worth preserving. They treated the opening of a door for a lady or the hand-scripted regret the way an archaeologist treats a fragment of pottery—with all the loving care that we normally reserve for things that matter. Terrance Taylor definitely wouldn’t have hailed a cab away from you in the rain; Beekman Canon wouldn’t have let the elevator door close as you approached; and Mr. Parish would never have raised his fork before you raised yours—he would sooner have starved.
They certainly weren’t the sorts to hound out the “boldest” new voices, elbow their way into contracts and then mount a Times Square soapbox to advertise their authors’ artistic bravery. They were English public school professors who had misread the map in the tube and haplessly gotten off at the World of Commerce stop.
Mr. Parish did not have enough work for me to do. Mr. Parish still received plenty of unsolicited manuscripts, but his reputation having outlived his enthusiasm for new fiction, they were generally sent home in the company of a polite regret—an apology from Mr. Parish for not being quite as active as he once was and his personal encouragement for the artist to persevere. At this stage, Mr. Parish avoided meetings and administrative responsibilities of all kinds and his circle of serious correspondents had dwindled to a reassuring handful of septuagenarians who alone could decipher each other’s faltering script. The phone rarely rang and he didn’t drink coffee. To make matters worse, within days of my starting, the calendar turned to July. Apparently, come summer the writers stopped writing, editors stopped editing and publishers stopped publishing—allowing everyone to extend their weekends at their family enclaves by the sea. Mail piled up on the desks and the plants in the lobby began to look as wilted as the academic poets who would occasionally appear unannounced and wait Job-like for an audience.
Luckily, when I asked Mr. Parish where I could file his correspondence, he said I needn’t bother, making an oblique reference to his system. When I insisted he elaborate, he sheepishly looked toward a cardboard box in the corner. It seems that for over thirty years whenever Mr. Parish finished reading an important letter, that’s where it was filed. When the box was full, it was carted off to storage and replaced with an empty. This, I explained, was not a system. So, with Mr. Parish’s consent, I pulled a few boxes from the turn of the century and began building chronological correspondence files alphabetized by author, subcategorized by theme.
Though he had a house on Cape Cod, Mr. Parish had avoided going there ever since his wife died in 1936. It’s really just a shack, he would say, referencing that self-imposed simplicity favored by New England Protestants who respect everything about wealth other than its uses. But in his wife’s absence, the hooked rugs, wicker chairs and rain-gray shingles that for so long had been symbolic of the perfectly understated summer retreat had suddenly revealed themselves to be inherently sorrow-making.
So as I sorted through his old correspondence, I would often find him