Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [82]
—And he’s here.
Sure enough, at the far right of the assembly was another figure, slightly blurred, but unmistakably him.
In order to have the whole school in focus, Wallace explained, they used the old box cameras on stilts where an aperture is slowly pulled across a large negative, exposing one part of the assembly at a time. This allows someone on the far side to sprint behind the student body and appear in the photograph twice—but only if he times it well and runs like the devil. Every year a few freshmen tried the stunt, but Tinker was the only one Wallace remembered succeeding. And from the wide smile on the second Tinker’s face, you sensed that he knew it.
Wallace and I had been reasonably true to our promise of leaving Tinker and Eve out of our conversations. But there was something nice for the both of us in seeing Tinker’s Puckish self at play. We lingered, giving the stunt its due.
—Can I ask you something? I said after a moment.
—Sure.
—That night we all had dinner at the Beresford—when we were riding down in the elevator, Bucky made a crack about Tinker rising like a phoenix from the ashes.
—Bucky is . . . a bit of a boor.
—Even so. What was he talking about?
Wallace was silent.
—Is it that bad? I prodded.
Wallace smiled softly.
—No. It’s . . . not bad, per se. Tinker came from an old Fall River family. But I gather his . . . father had a run of rotten luck. I think he . . . lost just about everything.
—In the Crash?
—No.
Wallace pointed to the photograph.
—It was around then, when Tinker was a freshman. I remember, because I was a . . . prefect. The trustees met to discuss what they should do given the . . . change in his circumstances.
—Did they give him a scholarship?
Wallace gave a slow shake of the head.
—They asked him to leave. He finished high school in Fall River and . . . put himself through Providence College. Then he got a job as a clerk at a . . . trust company and began working his way back up.
Born in the Back Bay, attended Brown, and worked at his grandfather’s bank. That had been my smug assessment of Tinker ten minutes after we’d met.
I took a second look at the photo of this boy with his curly hair and friendly smile and for the first time in months, I wanted to see him. Not to hash anything out. I didn’t need to talk about Eve or what had or hadn’t or might have happened. I just wanted a second shot at a first impression—to have him walk into The Hotspot and sit at the neighboring table and watch the band—so that when the soloist began to bray and Tinker gave me that bewildered smile, I could take him in without assumptions. For this little piece of information from Wallace told me something that I should have known all along—that as Tinker and I had come of age, we hadn’t been on opposite sides of a threshold; we’d been standing side by side.
Wallace looked back and forth across the photograph with a probing gaze—as if the very moment that it had been taken was when Mr. Grey had lost the last of the family fortune—and the two Tinkers on either side of the assembly represented the end of one life and the beginning of another.
—Most people remember the phoenix for being born from the ashes, he said. But they forget its other feature.
—What’s that? I asked.
—That it lives five hundred years.
The next day, Wallace shipped out.
Well, not exactly.
In 1917, they “shipped out.” Young men in pressed uniforms with fair hair and red cheeks gathered in battalions on the docks of the Brooklyn shipyards. With their duffel bags on their shoulders, they marched up the gangplanks of the great gray cruisers gamely singing choruses of “Over There, Over There.” And when the whistle finally blew, they competed to hang over the railings so that they could blow kisses at their sweethearts or wave to their mothers, who presciently wept in the background.
But if you were a well-to-do young man in 1938 off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, there wasn’t much fare to fan. You bought a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary and showed up on the docks after a leisurely