Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [64]
The pay was terrible. Terrible, of course, is something of a relative term and Mr. Parish actually never quantified what he meant by terrible. Under the genteel circumstance of cold potato soup, I certainly hadn’t pried.
So on my first Friday when I went down to payroll to pick up my check, I was still in the dark. Looking around, I took heart from the fact that the other girls were chirpy and well dressed. But when I opened the envelope, I discovered that my new weekly rate was half of what I’d made at Quiggin & Hale. Half!
Oh my God, I thought. What have I done?
I took another look at the girls around me who with blasé smiles had begun chattering about where they intended to weekend and it hit me: Of course they were blasé—they didn’t need the paycheck! That’s the difference between being a secretary and an assistant. A secretary exchanges her labor for a living wage. But an assistant comes from a fine home, attends Smith College, and lands her position when her mother happens to be seated beside the publisher in chief at a dinner party.
But while Mr. Parish had been right on these three accounts, he couldn’t have been more wrong about the job being a cul de sac.
As I stood in the payroll department licking my wounds, Susie Vanderwhile asked if I wanted to join a few of the other assistants for a splash. Sure, I thought. Why not? What better reason for a drink than looming penury?
At Quiggin & Hale when you went out with the girls, you’d hoof around the corner to the local well, snipe about your day, speculate on interoffice pinching, and then head for the elevated insufficiently soused. But when we walked out of the Pembroke Press, Susie hailed a cab. We all hopped in and headed to the St. Regis Hotel, where Susie’s brother Dicky, a floppy-banged gregarious sort freshly out of college, was waiting in the King Cole bar. In company were two of Dicky’s classmates from Princeton and a roommate from prep school.
—Halloo Sis!
—Hello Dicky. You know Helen. This is Jenny and Katey.
Dicky rattled off introductions like a machine gun.
—Jenny TJ. TJ Helen. Helen Wellie. Wellie Katey. Roberto Roberto.
No one seemed to notice that I was the oldest person by a few years.
Dicky slapped his hands together.
—Right then. What’ll it be?
G&Ts were ordered for all. Then Dicky ran off to roust up club chairs from around the bar. He pushed them up to our table, ramming them into each other like the bumper cars at Coney Island.
Within minutes there was some story about how Roberto, under the influence of Bacchus and in the bad graces of Poseidon, had gone astray in the fog off Fisher’s Island. He had steered his father’s Bertram right into a concrete bulkhead, smashing it to smithereens.
—I thought I was a quarter mile offshore, Roberto explained, because I could hear a bell buoy off the port bow.
—Rather sadly, said Dicky, the bell buoy turned out to be the supper bell on the McElroys’ veranda.
As Dicky spoke, he made animated and democratic eye contact with all the girls and he punctuated the details of his story with assurances of shared familiarity:
You know how the fog is off Fisher’s Isle.
You know how those Bertrams come about like a barge.
You know dinner at the McElroys’: three grandames and twenty-two cousins gathered round a rib roast like cubs around the kill.
Yes, Dicky, we knew.
We knew the curmudgeonly old gent who stood behind the bar at Mory’s in New Haven. We knew how dull was the crowd at Maidstone. We knew the Dobsons and the Robsons and all the Fenimores. We knew a jib from a jibe, and Palm Beach from Palm Springs. We knew the difference between a sole fork, a salad fork, and that special fork with the bent tines used for breaking the kernels of corn when it’s served on the cob. We all