Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [92]
—Are you going to be okay with this?
—Sure.
—I mean, I’m the fucking Catholic, right?
I laughed.
—Yeah. You’re the fucking Catholic.
She tamped out her cigarette and pulled back the lid on the pack. There was one more left. She lit it and threw the match over her shoulder; then she held it out to me like an Indian chief. I took a drag and handed it back. We were both silent, trading the tobacco.
—What are you going to do now? I finally asked.
—I don’t know. I’ve got the Beresford to myself for a bit, but I’m not going to stay. My parents have been hounding me to come home. Maybe I’ll pay them a visit.
—What’s Tinker going to do?
—He said he might go back to Europe.
—To fight the Fascists in Spain?
Eve looked at me in disbelief and then laughed.
—Shit, Sis. He’s going to fight the waves on the Côte d’Azur.
Three nights later, while I was undressing for bed, the telephone rang.
Ever since seeing Eve, I’d been expecting it—a call late at night, when New York was in shadows and the sun was rising a thousand miles away over a cobalt sea. It was a phone call that but for a patch of ice on Park Avenue might have come six months, or a lifetime, before. I felt my heart race a little. I slipped my shirt back over my head and answered the phone.
—Hello?
But it was a weary patrician voice.
—Is this Katherine?
—. . . Mr. Ross?
—I’m sorry to bother you so late, Katherine. I just wanted to find out if by any chance . . .
There was silence on the other end of the line. I could hear twenty years of upbringing and a few hundred miles of Indiana trying to contain his emotions.
—Mr. Ross?
—I’m sorry. I should explain. Apparently Eve’s relationship with this Tinker fellow has come to an end.
—Yes. I saw Eve a few days ago and she told me.
—Ah. Well. I . . . That is, Sarah and I . . . received a cable from her saying that she was coming home. But when we went to meet her train, she wasn’t there. At first, we thought we had simply missed her on the platform. But we couldn’t find her in the restaurant or the waiting room. So we went to the stationmaster to see if she was on the manifest. He didn’t want to tell us. It’s against their policy and what have you. But eventually, he confirmed that she had boarded the train in New York. So you see, it wasn’t that she wasn’t on the train. She just didn’t get off. It took us a few days to get the conductor on the phone. By that time he was in Denver headed back east. But he remembered her—because of the scar. And he said that when the train was approaching Chicago, she had paid to extend her ticket. To Los Angeles.
Mr. Ross was quiet for a moment, collecting himself.
—So you can see, Katherine, that we’re quite confused. I tried to reach Tinker, but it seems he’s gone abroad.
—Mr. Ross, I don’t know what to tell you.
—Katherine, I wouldn’t ask you to betray a confidence. If Eve doesn’t want us to know where she is, I accept that. She’s a grown woman. She’s free to chart her course. It’s just that we’re parents. You’ll understand one day. We don’t want to meddle. We just want to make sure that she’s all right.
—Mr. Ross, if I knew where Eve was, I’d tell you—even if she’d sworn me to silence.
Mr. Ross gave a truncated sigh, the more heartbreaking for its brevity.
What a scene that must have been: Having gotten up at dawn to make the journey to Chicago, the Rosses probably drove with the radio off, exchanging only the occasional word—not because they were some cliché of a married couple that time has turned into strangers but because in that closest of emotional alignments they were dwelling in the bitter-turned-sweet sense that their daughter, prone to self-reliance, bruised by New York, was at long last coming home. Through the revolving doors they walked, dressed as for a Sunday service, making their way through the democratic melee of the arriving and departing, a little anxious but on the whole exhilarated to be fulfilling this mission essential not simply to their parenthood but to their species. How devastating