Kathryn Kontent Hollingsworth

"Portrait of a Young Woman Reading," 1938 by G.B. Barlow

Katya Kontent, whose story is told in The Rules of Civility [2011] by Amor Towles, grows up in Brooklyn with a Russian immigrant father. Her mother abandons them and at 19, Katya’s father dies, leaving her almost without family. By this time, however, she has a job doing typing and stenography for an attorney in New York and lives in a boardinghouse with her roommate Eve.

At 24, Katey and Eve are ready to take the town by storm. It is 1938 and the Depression is waning. They go out for a drink in a jazz club and meet an attractive man, Tinker Grey, who leaves them with his address and a gold lighter. At lunch one day, in the hole in the wall diner Katey enjoys, Tinker turns up and they talk. Katey falls in love with him. But an accident, in which the car the three of them were sharing is hit by a milk truck and Eve is badly injured, makes Tinker, who was driving, take responsibility for her. Eve recuperates at his apartment, and soon they are off to Palm Beach and then Europe. Katey is left to her books (often Dickens) and games of contract bridge, which she plays with herself in her apartment on the lower East Side.

During a bleak winter, Katey runs into Tinker’s brother, a painter. “Place no trust in appearances,” she is told. She also meets Ann Grandyn, Tinker’s “godmother.” By June, she is given a promotion, becoming the top secretary at her firm. On June 21, her birthday, she buys a new dress, shoes and clutch and goes out to dinner by herself at La Belle Epoch. Unlike her father, who thought restaurants an “ungodly waste,” Katey feels they are the height of civilization. “A fine dinner could revive the spirits.”

Katey quits her job and talks herself into a job at Pembroke Press. Here, the workers don’t need their jobs, don’t care what they are paid, as they have family money. Very quickly she is snapped up by the editor of a new magazine. Gotham is a Conde Nast publication of cultural demolition, clearing the way for something new. In a week, Katey’s life in New York has “come about.”

Katey’s new friends are very well off. Wallace, who is kind, steady and sincere, takes her shooting. He is planning to leave to fight in the Spanish Civil War, however. Katey and he shop for his Christmas gifts to his family in August, wrapping them and squirreling them away. Katey hears that Tinker and Eve will become engaged. She secures an invitation to the Hollingsworth Labor Day picnic on Long Island. When she finds that Tinker and Eve are there, she leaves for the train, but her host sends her home in a car with his son, Valentine. The radio is playing “Autumn in New York.”

Eve, it turns out, has refused Tinker and run away. She keeps running, all the way to California. Katey notices that Tinker is relieved. He invites Katey to come see him at Wallace's hunting camp, where he is building fires and reading Thoreau. They spend the night together, and Tinker invites her to meet him at a club on Monday night. Katey joyously prepares, but at lunch she runs into Tinker and Ann Grandyn, who is clearly much more than a “godmother.” Katey slaps him and ends up telling her friend the whole story.

Tinker tries to apologize; he was actually bidding Ann and the many things she provided him with goodbye. But Katey has been badly hurt. She goes out with others and runs again into Tinker’s brother. “My old man lost everything,” he tells her. “Tinker was sent to school, learned five languages. What he’s got can’t be taught in schools.” Katey knows this. Tinker is vibrant, fearless, naïve. Katey admits that she loves him.

Katey finds Tinker in the flophouse where his brother lived near the docks. His brother has enlisted. Tinker is not downcast or unraveled. Katey apologizes and they have lovely times together until Tinker sets off to find his way to unfettered openness. “I’m going to try the present on for size.” Katey keeps her eyes open, but she does not run into him again.

Katey continues to work for Gotham, the Depression ending as 1940 arrives. Wallace dies in Spain and bequeaths Katey $800 a year, enough so that she can continue to live with integrity and no regrets. In 1947 she is introduced to Val Hollingsworth, who remembers their drive, listening to “Autumn in New York.” She becomes editor of Gotham in 1955. In 1966, she and Val go to an exhibit of Walker Evans’ photographs of people on the subway, taken in 1938. Katey spots Tinker, twice. Once in his cashmere coat, looking rich, and later looking scruffy and happy.

Amor Towles' wonderful book is a love poem to New York, replete with all kinds of characters. “Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out?” But it is also the story of a young working class woman who maintains her dignity. On her way up, she does not do anything against her true feelings, does not demean herself. Dignity is under-rated, in my estimation. Katey’s father has left her with this advice: “One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition, and all manner of glamorous enticements.” She does not tell her husband about what happened between her and Tinker, keeping the memory of her 24^th year to herself. She has no regrets, though she does note that “the right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.” As physical creatures, we can only live one life.