Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [81]
When Wallace opened the door to his apartment, I curtsied.
—Ho, ho . . . ho, he said.
In the living room, carols were playing on the phonograph and a bottle of champagne was wreathed in evergreens. We toasted St. Nick and Jack Frost and rapid returns from bold adventures. Then we sat on the carpet with scissors and adhesive tape and went about our work.
As the Wolcotts were in the paper business, they had access to every kind of wrapping paper on earth: forest greens patterned with candy canes; velvety reds with pipe-smoking Santas in sleighs. But the family tradition was to wrap everything in a heavy white stock that was delivered to the house by the roll. Then they dressed the gifts with a different-colored ribbon for each member of the clan.
For ten-year-old Joel, I wrapped a miniature baseball field with a spring-released bat that knocked ball bearings around the bases—and then tied it with a ribbon of blue. I wrapped and finished in yellow ribbon a pair of stuffed lizards for fourteen-year-old Penelope, a Madame Curie in the making who frowned on most amusements, including candy. As the pile grew smaller, I kept an eye out for Little Wallace’s gift. When we had gone shopping, Big Wallace had said he had something special in mind for his godson, but in taking a quick inventory, I couldn’t identify it. The mystery was solved when, with the last of the presents wrapped, Wallace cut a small rectangle of paper and then took his father’s black-dialed watch from his wrist.
With the job complete, we passed into the kitchen, where the air smelled of slow-roasting potatoes. After checking the oven, Wallace wrapped an apron around his waist and seared the lamb chops that I had carefully selected the day before. Then he removed the chops and deglazed the pan with mint jelly and cognac.
—Wallace, I asked as he handed me my plate, if I declared war on America, would you stay and fight with me?
When dinner was over, I helped Wallace carry the gifts to the back pantry. Lining the hallway were photographs of family members smiling in enviable locales. There were grandparents on a dock, an uncle on skis, sisters riding sidesaddle. At the time it seemed a little odd, this back hall gallery; but running into a similar setup in similar hallways over the years, I eventually came to see it as endearingly WASPy. Because it’s an outward expression of that reserved sentimentality (for places as much as kin) that quietly permeates their version of existence. In Brighton Beach or on the Lower East Side, you were more apt to find a single portrait propped on a mantel behind dried flowers, a burning candle, and a generation of genuflection. In our households, nostalgia played a distant fiddle to acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by forebears on your behalf.
One of the pictures was of a few hundred boys in coat and tie.
—Is that St. George’s?
—Yes. From my . . . senior year.
I leaned a little closer, trying to find Wallace. He pointed to a sweet, unassuming face, which I had already passed over. Wallace was just the sort who blends into the background of the school photo (or the greeting line at the cotillion) but who, with the passage of time, increasingly stands out against the lapses in character around him.
—This is the whole school? I asked after another moment of scanning the boys’ faces.
—You’re . . . looking for Tinker?
—Yes, I admitted.
—He’s here.
Wallace pointed to the left side of the photograph where our mutual friend stood alone at the outskirts of the assembly. Given another minute, I would certainly have identified Tinker. He looked just as you’d expect him to look at the age of fourteen—his hair a little tussled, his jacket a little wrinkled, his eyes trained on the camera as if he were ready to spring.
Then Wallace smiled and moved his finger across the photograph