Passing the grand French Renaissance exterior of city hall, I am reminded of good manners. Max and I got married there. He was a Catholic, I an Episcopalian, and it was easier just to do it that way, civilly and with a nondenominational party for both of our families after, rather than trying to unify the two faiths. Plus we were able to save the money that a more stately wedding would have cost and use it to take a boat to Italy.
The funny part, the manners part, is that I was working on an etiquette book at the time: a guide that I had been invited by the publisher—thanks to the success of my verses, and to my prominence as a writer for R.H. Macy’s—to compose. Helen was illustrating. We called it Little Better than Beasts: A Guide to Rudeness and How to Avoid It, and all of her drawings were of anthropomorphic animals. In the chapter on weddings, I advised blushing brides such as myself to work hard to reconcile the families but also to recognize—as I had—when such a reconciliation would not be possible, and to navigate the differences with grace.
For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity—one’s own and others’—but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.
I suppose I came to hold this belief for the same reason I came to work so hard: Civility and work gave me, respectively, a rationale and an opportunity for evading my family, my mother in particular. Work always provided an excuse not to see them when I didn’t want to, and work always kept me from being indebted to them.
My mother understood the world to be a place where one’s behavior was determined by rules, and rules determined by beholdenness. That understanding is not mine. If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant. Solutions of style have a greater moral force than those of obligation.
You could, of course, read all about this in my preface to Little Better than Beasts, were that book not long out of print. If fortune smiles, perhaps one day you’ll come across a cheap copy on the sidewalk outside the Strand—one mute tirade among many.
About six blocks from Delmonico’s I pause at Cortlandt Street, because Cortlandt Street always gives me pause. It used to be small and dense—full of trade—until they shut it down to build the World Trade Center.
It went by the name of Radio Row before the Port Authority—that practically paramilitary factotum of the odious Robert Moses—demolished it all in 1966, citing eminent domain. Social priorities are always changing, but these changes sadden me even when they don’t affect me directly. Good-bye, Radio Row. Good-bye days when men—mostly men—came down to Cortlandt Street to comb the wholesalers in search of replacements for broken components that might Lazarus their radios, resurrect the dead machines. Max used to bring Johnny down here. But people don’t repair very much these days.
By now I have come to appreciate the Twin Towers, even though I thought them ugly at first, boxy and rectangular and needlessly huge. While they were being constructed, somebody, I can’t remember who, called them soulless and inhospitable to human use: a pair of glass and metal filing cabinets on a colossal scale. In spite of myself, I have always found their gigantism majestic, and now I esteem them, too. If some latter-day Moses ever displaces them—their current tenants’ arcane shifting of cash and commodities someday rendered as quaint as the radio scrappers’ labor, supplanted by robots, satellites, who knows what—then I suppose I would feel their absence much as I do that of other already absented parts of my city. Dully but not quite fully gone. A pair of phantom limbs.
I am standing there, north of Liberty Park Plaza, looking up at the Towers, when someone barks at me.
“Excuse me, ma’am” he says, in a bass-drum boom. “Excuse me. Hey, lady!”
The voice is close, but I don’t see anyone on the street, and for a beat I’m confused—a feeling I hate for its resemblance to senility. Then I see he’s yelling from the rolled-down window of a long limousine.
I have Mace in my purse—a Christmas present from Gian—but I do not bother to reach for it. The man looks harmless. He pulls his heavy car to the curb, clicks on a light above his head to better show himself, and we regard each other through his open window. He is black and has a mustache as dapper as Dashiell Hammett’s, and his eyes are wide, brown, and kind beneath his chauffeur cap. He is wearing a tuxedo, out of professional obligation, of course, but I admire how put together he is, all the same.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says over the idling engine.
“I’d hate to see what you’d do if you did,” I say.