Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [88]
—Isn’t the station in the other direction?
—I’ll take you in, he said.
—You don’t have to do that.
—I’ve got to head back anyway; I’ve got a meeting first thing.
I doubted he really had a meeting; but it wasn’t a ploy to spend time with me. As he drove, he didn’t look over or bother to make conversation. Which was just as well. To get out of that party, we both would have volunteered to walk a rabid dog.
After a few miles he asked me to check the glove compartment for a pad and pen. He balanced the pad on the dash and wrote some notes to himself. He tore the top sheet off and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
—Thanks, he said, handing back the pad.
To stave off any chatter, he switched on the radio. It was tuned to a station playing swing. He turned the dial. He passed over a ballad, paused on a speech by Roosevelt, and then turned back to the ballad. It was Billie Holiday singing “Autumn in New York.”
Autumn in New York,
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York,
It spells the thrill of first-nighting.
Written by a Belarusian immigrant named Vernon Duke, “Autumn in New York” practically debuted as a jazz standard. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughn, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting?
Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city’s architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna, or April in Paris.
That’s the way we New Yorkers feel about fall. Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of gray autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there’s a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.
Glittering crowds
And shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel—
They’re making me feel
I’m home.
It’s autumn in New York
That brings the promise of new love.
Yes, in the autumn of 1938 tens of thousands of New Yorkers would be falling under the spell of that song. Sitting in the jazz bars or the supper clubs, the worn and the well-to-do would be nodding their heads in smiling acknowledgment that the Belarusian immigrant had it right: that somehow, despite the coming of winter, autumn in New York promises an effervescent romance which makes one look to the Manhattan skyline with fresh eyes and feel: It’s good to live it again.
But still, you have to ask yourself: If it’s such an uplifting song, then why did Billie Holiday sing it so well?
When I got on the elevator early Tuesday morning, I found that like Mason Tate’s desk, it was made of glass. A story below me, stainless steel gears turned like the works of a drawbridge while thirty stories overhead was a square of clear blue sky. On the panel in front of me were two silver buttons. One that said Now and one that said Never.
It was seven o’clock and the bullpen was empty. On my desk sat the letter to Bette Davis’s agent, its flaws faithfully transcribed and carefully proofed. I read the letter one more time, then I put a fresh piece of stationery in the typewriter and fixed it. I left both versions on Mr. Tate’s desk with a handwritten cover note indicating that given his time constraints, I had taken the liberty of preparing a second draft.
Mr. Tate didn’t buzz until the end of the day. When I went in, he had the two versions