Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [79]
Tate waved at the pictures.
—Which is your favorite?
One of them had been penciled by Vitters to suggest how the photo might be cropped. In it, the candle was freshly lit and the two couples smiled at the camera like smokers on a billboard. But in one from a little later in the evening, Bette offers the last bite of cake to the young man at her side as his wife looks on with the narrowed eyes of a Harpy.
I pulled it from the pile.
Mr. Tate nodded sympathetically.
—It’s funny about photography, isn’t it? The entire medium is founded on the instant. If you allow the shutter to be open for even a few seconds, the image goes black. We think of our lives as a sequence of actions, an accumulation of accomplishments, a fluid articulation of style and opinion. And yet, in that one sixteenth of a second, a photograph can wreak such havoc.
He looked at his watch and waved me toward a chair.
—I’ve got ten minutes. Take a letter.
It was addressed to Davis’s agent. It referenced Mr. Tate’s respect for the actress and his fondness for her husband and the lovely birthday dinner they must have had at El Morocco. After an aside about an upcoming contract negotiation with Warner Brothers and a parenthetical about the little seaside town where he thought he saw Davis in the off-season, he requested an interview. He told me to leave the letter on his desk, grabbed his briefcase, and left for a vacation that apparently no one else had earned. Maybe Mr. Tate was still irked at Vitters, or maybe it was our faulty air-conditioning; whatever the reason, the letter was a paragraph too long, a verb too insistent, and an adjective too obvious.
When Alley and I came out of the building fifteen minutes later, it was so hot even she didn’t want a slice of cake. We wished each other well and parted company at the corner. Then it was back to the girls’ room at the automat, where this time I donned a black velvet dress and a bright red ribbon for my hair.
That first night Wallace and I played cards in my apartment, he confessed that he had been seeing his attorney in order to put his assets in trust. Why? Because on the twenty-seventh of August, he was going to Spain to join up with the Republican forces.
And he wasn’t kidding.
I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised. All sorts of interesting young men were joining the fray—some spurred by fashion, some by a love of risk, most by a healthy dose of misplaced idealism. For Wallace, there was also the small matter of having been given too much.
Born in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with an Adirondack summer house and hunting plantation waiting in the wings, Wallace had gone to his father’s prep school, his father’s college, and taken over the family business when his father had died—inheriting not only his father’s desk and car but the secretary and driver that went with them. To his credit, Wallace doubled the business, he established a scholarship in his grandfather’s name, he earned the respect of his peers. But all the while, he suspected that the life he was living so reliably was not his own. Those seven years he had just spent becoming a captain of industry and a deacon of the church were his father’s fifties. His reckless twenties had eluded him altogether.
But not for much longer.
In a single stroke, he was going to shed every aspect of his life that was sensible, familiar, and secure. And in the month before he left, rather than review the disadvantages of his decision with friends and family, he opted for the company of an amiable stranger.
We were both working long hours, so midweek we would meet Bitsy and Jack for a late supper and a few rounds of bridge. Née Van Heuys, Bitsy was Pennsylvania landed-wealth and she was tougher and shrewder than she needed to be given her looks. What solidified our relationship was her discovery that I had a head for cards. By the second date, we were playing the boys for money and fronting them points. Then when the night was over, Wallace would give me a friendly kiss at the curb, put me in