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 the first chapter of a Dickens novel then everything is probably going to be fine. By the end of the year she'd learned: - How to launch a paper airplane high over Park Avenue - How to live like a redhead - How to insist upon the very best - That the word 'yes' can be a poison - and the Rules of Civility. That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weathervane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.