Rules Of Civility

In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn"'t afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew: the location of every old church in Manhattan how to sneak into the cinema how to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine million a year and that if you can still lose yourself in a Dickens novel then everything is going to be fine. By the end of the year she"'d learned: how to live like a redhead and insist upon the very best; that riches can turn to rags in the trip of a heartbeat, chance encounters can be fated, and the word "'yes"' can be a poison. That"'s how quickly New York City comes about, like a weathervane, or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.