Rules of Civility

It’s late March, and Katey has a new studio apartment. She’s taken to playing contract bridge after buying a primer and teaching herself. She now takes turns playing imaginary people around the table, including a rabbi and a gangster. As she’d doing so, Tinker calls. She hasn’t heard from Tinker or Eve in nearly two months. Tinker has to go to his office and stay late, and he doesn’t think Eve should be alone. He explains the difficulty of the last few weeks. The doctors said that it would get worse before it got better, and it has. Katey agrees and leaves for his apartment at the Beresford.

Katey flashes back to when Eve was still in the hospital and unconscious the first few days. Eve received visits from the girls at Mrs. Martingale’s boardinghouse, her father (Mr. Ross), and Tinker. Eve eventually woke up and became a steelier version of herself. Her father and mother insisted she return to Indiana, but Eve refused. Mr. Ross tried to reason with her as she couldn’t get up and down the boardinghouse steps with her leg. Finally, Tinker offered his apartment at the Beresford. Before Mr. Ross left without his daughter, he spoke to Katey and gave her the envelope with the 50 ten-dollar bills in it; Katey uses this money to secure her studio apartment and put the rest aside.