Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [83]
Ever since the League of Nations prohibited the volunteering of extra-nationals in the conflict, it had been bad form to discuss that you were headed there while you dined at the captain’s table (seated in between the Philadelphia Morgans and the Breezewood sisters in the company of their aunt). You certainly couldn’t say it to the immigration officials in Southampton. Instead, you’d say you were on your way to Paris to see some school chums and purchase a painting or two. Then you’d take the train to Dover, the boat to Calais, and a car to the south of France, where you could either hike over the Pyrenees or hire a fishing trawler to run you down the coast.
—See you Mike, Wallace said at the gangplank.
—Good luck, Mr. Wolcott.
When he turned to me, I observed that I wouldn’t know what to do with my Saturdays anymore.
—Maybe I could run some errands for your mother? I suggested.
—Kate, he said. You shouldn’t . . . be running someone’s errands. Not mine. Not my mother’s. Not Mason Tate’s.
When Michael and I were driving back from the dock, it was pretty mournful in the car—for the both of us. As we crossed the bridge into Manhattan I broke the silence.
—Do you think he’ll be careful, Michael?
—Being that it’s a war, Miss, that would sort of defeat the purpose.
—Yes. I suppose it would.
Through the windows of the car, I saw city hall float past. In Chinatown, miniature old women crowded around street carts laden with ungodly fish.
—Shall I take you home, Miss?
—Yes, Michael.
—To Eleventh Street?
It was sweet of him to ask. If I had given Wallace’s address, I think he would have taken me there. After pulling up to the curb, he would have opened the door to the backseat, Billy would have opened the door to the building, and Jackson would have brought me in the elevator up to the eleventh floor, where for a few weeks more I could fend off my future. But with a pile of presents waiting patiently in a law firm’s file room, Michael would soon be covering the brown Bentley in tarpaulin even as John and Tony dismantled the Remington and the Colt and stowed them in a locker. Maybe it was time for my brush with perfection to be dismantled and stowed away too.
On the Thursday after Wallace left, I wandered over to Fifth Avenue after work to see the windows at Bergdorf’s. A few days before, I’d noticed that they’d been curtained for the installation of the new displays.
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, I always looked forward to the unveiling of the new seasons at Bergdorf’s. Standing before the windows, you felt like a tsarina receiving one of those jeweled eggs in which an elaborate scene in miniature has been painstakingly assembled. With one eye closed you spy inside, losing all sense of time as you marvel at every transporting detail.
And transporting was the right word. For the Bergdorf’s windows weren’t advertising unsold inventory at 30% off. They were designed to change the lives of women up and down the avenue—offering envy to some, self-satisfaction to others, but a glimpse of possibility to all. And for the Fall season of 1938, my Fifth Avenue Fabergé did not disappoint.
The theme of the windows was fairy tales, drawing on the well-known works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; but in each set piece the “princess” had been replaced with the figure of a man, and the “prince” with one of us.
In the first window, a young lord with raven hair and flawless skin lay in state under a flowering arbor, his delicate hands folded on his chest. But at his side stood a dashing young woman (in a red bolero jacket by Schiaperelli), her hair cut short for battle, her sword tucked neatly through her belt, and the reins of her faithful horse in hand. With an expression at once worldly and compassionate she looked down upon the prince in no apparent