Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

—This is the whole school? I asked after another moment of scanning the boys’ faces. —You’re . . . looking for Tinker? —Yes, I admitted. —He’s here. Wallace pointed to the left side of the photograph where our mutual friend stood alone at the outskirts of the assembly. Given another minute, I would certainly have identified Tinker. He looked just as you’d expect him to look at the age of fourteen—his hair a little tussled, his jacket a little wrinkled, his eyes trained on the camera as if he were ready to spring. Then Wallace smiled and moved his finger across the photograph to its opposite edge. —And he’s here.

The School Portrait: Wallace Wolcott and Tinker Grey first came to know each other as students at St. George’s, the prestigious, all-boys boarding school in Rhode Island. According to my original outline for RULES OF CIVILITY, in Chapter Fifteen—when Katey joined Wallace in his apartment to wrap presents—she would see a photograph of the St. George’s student body, and identify the young Tinker in the crowd. This would prompt a conversation with Wallace that would give Katey a better understanding of the challenges that Tinker faced as a young man. As I was writing the passage and beginning to describe the photograph of these few hundred students standing in rows in their coats and ties, I was struck by a sudden memory. I too had attended an old New England prep school where the student body was photographed ever year. The school portrait would be taken by a man who used a traditional box camera on a tripod. In this type of camera, the photographer draws a narrow aperture across the face of a large negative, slowly exposing it from one side to the other. Given the slow movement of the aperture, a game young student who started on one side of the frame and ran as fast as he could behind the student body to the other side of the frame, could appear in the photograph twice. As soon as I had the memory, I realized that Tinker should be the game young student who has met this challenge, appearing in the picture twice. By adding this element, I felt the photograph would not only represent Tinker’s boyish sense of joy, but also prefigure the fact that years hence, there would be two Tinkers coinciding at the same time.