East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  He was surprised to receive a card from Mrs. Benson inviting him for dinner, as he had heard that Kitty was no longer staying there, but when he went and found himself sitting next to Ada, he suspected the handiwork of his former inamorata.

  Ada informed him, when he inquired about Kitty, that she was well and had rejoined her mother in the latter’s flat after Mrs. Atwater had returned from one of her chaperoning trips to Europe. But the big news was that Kitty was engaged to one Gilbert Palmer.

  “A gentleman of means, no doubt,” he remarked with unbecoming bitterness.

  “Why do you say that? He’s just been made a junior partner in the law firm that represents Daddy, and I suppose he’ll do well there, as everyone says he’s brilliant. But I know he had to work his way through college and law school. Do you assume that Kitty is interested only in riches?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Because she wouldn’t accept you?”

  Bruce was startled, not only that she knew this, but that she should say it. “Oh, you’ve heard about that?”

  “Of course, I have. Kitty’s my best friend. Did it never occur to you that she might have thought that she was too poor for you? And not just that you were not rich enough for her?”

  “You mean that she was afraid I mightn’t be easy to live with if we were poor?”

  “As you just said. Something like that.”

  He found himself wondering what it was about this flatly outspoken little woman that seemed to brush aside his incipient resentment as a foolish intrusion on their colloquy. “I suppose many men mightn’t be easy to live with under those circumstances” was his lame conclusion.

  “How true. It’s women who have to put up with such things.”

  “You won’t.”

  “With poverty, perhaps not. The way things look now. But life has other hurdles. However, I think I can get over the ones I see at the moment. At least I can make a running jump.”

  He looked at her half in wonder. “You don’t get angry? At life, I mean?”

  “Oh, yes. But I keep it in. I only make a scene when I’m pretty sure it’s the only way.”

  “I could learn a lot from you. Would you care to teach me?”

  “If you’ll teach me in return.”

  “What on earth could I teach you?”

  “How to enjoy things more.”

  “Ah, but my faculty in that direction has taken a rude bump in recent months.” Bruce here tried to look melancholy.

  “Then teach me how it used to be.”

  And so began their curious friendship. Bruce became a regular visitor at the Benson “at homes” and a frequent occupier of a back seat in their opera box. When he sat in a corner of their parlor with Ada, nobody came to join them. The family had clearly decided, no doubt after one of their formidable conferences, to accept him as a suitable beau. After all, was he not utterly respectable, afflicted with no known vice, and of agreeable presence and manner? And, where money was concerned, there was surely no need of that. Besides, Ada’s stature and plainness were not designed to make a catch that would awe the town. It was only realistic to face this, and the Bensons were nothing if not realistic.

  Yet Ada was like Kitty in showing not the least hint of having anything like a match in mind. Any step in that direction would have to be made by him alone. She was always serious, factual, and rigidly truthful, and oddly enough, she did not bore him the way her siblings sometimes did. It might have been because he felt that she saw through him and didn’t mind what she saw. He could be utterly frank and natural with Ada. He could discuss, it seemed, anything in the world but the possibility of their ever marrying each other. But this was a large, and increasingly larger, exception. It came almost to torture him.

  It was Kitty who broke through his block. At a large dinner in honor of her and her fiancé, Palmer, given by the Bensons, she, despite her position as chief guest, took him aside after dinner for a quiet talk. He couldn’t help wondering if it were not with the secret consent of Ada’s mother and Mr. Palmer. Certainly the latter, whom Bruce had been somewhat chagrined to find absolutely charming, made no move to interrupt Brace’s tête-à-tête with his future bride. Kitty came straight to the point.

  “Look, Bruce. I want you to listen carefully, for I have only a few minutes before I have to join the other guests. You must marry Ada. She’s just what the doctor would order for you.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “It wasn’t meant to sound romantic. I don’t believe that romance is what you need, or even very much want. What I believe you really need is a firm base from which you could operate to amuse yourself and the world with your good taste, your collegiality, and your cordial and generous nature.”

  “That base being Ada’s money.”

  “That base being Ada herself, as well as Ada’s money. You and she together could entertain the world and travel over the world, and collect art and wonderful friends, and raise fine children who would love you…”

  “And bore me.”

  “You don’t mind that in children. Not in dear good children such as Ada’s would be, even if they were as dull as the dullest Benson! You’re basically a family man, my friend, and you’ll love being the center of a warm, admiring clan.”

  “Admiring? But you’re painting me as a superficial ass, Kitty!”

  “Once you were rich you’d cease to be superficial. The dilettante becomes the art patron. The diner out, the foundation trustee. The party wag, the charming and witty host. What you don’t appreciate in yourself, Bruce Carnochan, is that you have that rare gift of enjoying life, something your Scottish forebears knew nothing about. And people who enjoy life, really enjoy it, help others to. But, of course, like a cricket, you need a little sunshine. Well, Ada will provide all the sunshine you perish without!”

  “But what sort of a friend are you being to Ada? What is there for her in marrying a man who’s not in love with her? For you may as well know, if you don’t already, that however much I may respect and like Ada, however much I might want to be in love with her, I’m not! So there you are, Kitty, and don’t tell me that love doesn’t matter, for I suspect you of being very much enamored of that bright attorney across the room!”

  “Yes, I’ve been blessed, far more than I deserve. But I am being a good friend of Ada, for I know that she knows exactly what she wants and has a good idea of the man you are. She’s not going to sit home waiting for a Romeo who won’t come. She wants a decent man of kindly character who will be a pleasant companion in life, a good father, and a faithful husband. I’ve assured her that, once you were pledged, you’d never so much as look at another woman.”

  “It’s not necessarily a compliment to a man to say that of him.”

  “I’m not trying to compliment you. I’m trying to make you appreciate yourself as you are. Half the unhappiness in the world comes from people trying to be someone else. Anyway, I’ve said enough. Probably too much. And there’s Mrs. Benson giving me the eye. It’s time to join the others.”

  The very next day he called at the Bensons’ and took Ada for a stroll in Central Park. She accepted his temperately stated proposal without the least fuss, and on their return they were warmly congratulated by her mother and more formally so by her father. In the days following, arrangements were made quietly and efficiently and with a minimum of embarrassment to a fiancé of very disproportionate wealth. A large fortune was settled on Ada outright; her father said he had entire trust in her ability to handle wisely anything that was hers. Every Benson and Carnochan expressed what was obviously their sincere pleasure at the match.

  And Kitty was right, very right. In the three decades that he survived his wedding, Bruce had every occasion to be reminded of this. Ada settled an income on him to satisfy his every want without his having to appeal to her, and he never overspent it or made any demands on the far larger sums that she kept under her own watchful control. For this he was respected and well liked b
y all the Bensons into whose midst he fitted neatly, almost, he sometimes feared, in a rare pre-marital mood, too neatly. Four healthy, affectionate, and normal children, two boys and two girls, were born to him and Ada, almost indistinguishable from their numerous first cousins on the maternal side. Bruce reflected that the Benson genes were strong indeed, but he saw less and less reason to regret this. None of his offspring ever indicated that they were even aware of the fact that their wealth came from only one parent. The money seemed to cover them all with the same dye.

  He and Ada lived in four places; they had a Palladian villa in Newport, a French hotel in New York City, a rambling stone mansion in Fairfield, Connecticut, from which town the Bensons had sprung and in which each loyally maintained a residence, and a shingle villa in Jekyll Island, Georgia. The year was divided in four quarters between these, involving four stately annual moves and the displacement of some thirty in help, the walling up of garden statues against the cold, the packing and unpacking of countless trunks, and the shipping of large family portraits which could not be left in empty parlors. All this was efficiently supervised by Bruce, who sometimes wondered if it were not a life trade in itself, but he also had time to assemble a distinguished collection of Hudson River landscapes and to act as an oft-consulted trustee of the two Metropolitans, the museum and the opera.

  Oh, yes, it was a life and not a bad one. And he had made Ada happy; there was nothing phony about that. And he sometimes wondered if he had not, after all, become as “real” a man as he had sometimes imagined his brothers and brothers-in-law to be, in contrast to himself. His children were as much Bensons in looks and wealth as any of their cousins of the Benson name, and totally accepted as such in society, and had he not created them?

  4. GORDON

  BY THE YEAR 1900 the Carnochans had established themselves on a firm middle rung of the New York social ladder. Of the second generation from emigrator David only Douglas’s widow, Eliza, survived, in quiet and sober respectability, in her brownstone on Fifty-seventh Street, which she shared with her maiden daughter, Annie, but her other children had made rather more of a splash. Brace’s French hotel was a familiar sight to tourists who gaped at the long row of mansions on Fifth Avenue, and the annual visits of Sir James Muir, Clara’s widower, were duly noted in the evening journals, though a city that could now claim two duchesses could hardly be much impressed by a mere baronet, even a rich one. Still, it was something.

  But the members of the third generation, now middle-aged, who were most visible, particularly in the world of business affairs, were the brothers Wallace and James. Wallace, who had largely redeemed himself from the collapse of his thread business in some half dozen other enterprises, was a stout, gruff gentleman whose rare and supposedly well-conceived pronouncements on stock market trends carried conviction to many, and James, a long, lean, also often silent lawyer with a large and loyal clientele, were close friends as well as brothers. They had built adjoining matching brownstones in the same street as their mother’s and filled them with the academic art of the period: cavaliers boisterously drinking in taverns, cardinals playing chess in gilded interiors, and gladiators pleading for their lives to a stony Caesar. In the early fall and spring their numerous progeny played noisy games up and down the chocolate stoops.

  Both brothers had made appropriate matches: Wallace with Julie Denison, hearty member of a hearty, sports-loving, card-playing Brooklyn clan, and James with Louisa, the strong-minded and strong-willed daughter of a minor railroad tycoon. But the great difference between the two couples, at least in the eyes of one rueful observer, was that James and Louisa boasted six sturdy sons and Wallace and Julie only one.

  Gordon, that sole male, was the rueful observer. He had not always been the sole. He had had a twin, Michael, not identical, but bigger, stronger, and more loudly yelling. Yet for all his apparent physical superiority, Michael had succumbed to the diphtheria that had attacked the twins when they were six, leaving a violently stricken mother who was only mildly consoled by the survival of Gordon and the presence of his two sisters. Julie’s passionate favoritism had been no secret to the household; she had adored little Michael beyond anyone else, including her husband, and though she made periodic efforts to conceal this from the others after the boy’s death, for she had a good enough heart and some sense of duty, she never wholly succeeded. Gordon, a puny child, at least in his early years, grew up with a keen sense that, in the eyes of Fifty-seventh Street at least, the wrong twin had survived, and that for some mysterious reason he was the cause of it.

  It didn’t always help that next door was the home that his mother must have really wanted: the nursery of six young males, a vigorous brood that would guarantee the future of the Carnochans. Fortunately, however, the closest rapport existed between the two establishments. Gordon’s two sisters were in constant chattering and giggling relationship with Estelle, the single daughter of the other house, and Estelle’s brothers included Gordon in all their games and sports with the same joshing put-on reluctance that they used with each other. Gordon saw it as a kind of desperate solution to his problem to lose himself in a merger with other Carnochans.

  It was thus that he became the silent, curious, wide-eyed lad who was both a part and not a part of the tumultuous cousinhood, filling to overflowing the dark interiors of the twin brownstones, tumbling in and out of the narrow halls, steep stairwells, and square parlors crammed with big black knobbly furniture and hung with unlit paintings and prints. And there were not only the multitudinous cousins but all the neighborhood friends, the Browning School classmates, the neat little next-door girls, so surprisingly bold and shrill, who swarmed up and down the high stoops and played hopscotch under the eyes of Irish nursemaids in nearby Central Park. It seemed to Gordon a world dominated by Carnochans, a cheerful, sometimes too cheerful world, secure, if with smothered doubts, in its own continuing prosperity, and defiant, if a bit edgily so, of the alien population of the slums that so closely bordered it—oh, yes, he had seen these!—and of the menacing bums and beggars who sometimes invaded the park and even had the gall to fall into drunken slumber on the benches until a cop aroused them with his stick.

  Just enough of the ancestral Presbyterianism survived in the heritage of his father and Uncle James to alert Gordon to the realization that sin might still penetrate even to the heart of all the jollity and goodwill. His mother, a Brooklyn Denison of pure English forebears without a taint of John Knox, was a square-faced, down-to-earth, worldly-wise woman who had little use for the moral severities of the old kirk and faced ethical choices with a broad practicality. She loved parties and card games and gossip and stylish dress, and took the world pretty much as it was, feeling sure that a society that favored such congenial souls as the Denisons must have enough good in it to get by. She ruled her husband more by his recognition of her efficiency and good sense than by any self-assertion, but when he was seized by one of his rare but violent fits of anger, she always promptly gave way. Gordon knew, from bitter experience, that the child who had had the bad luck to arouse the paternal ire, even if not at fault, could not count on Mama’s support. The shrug with which she abandoned the victim to his father showed how few, if any, were the issues over which she felt called upon to make a scene. Certainly a child was not one of them. Julie knew it was a man’s world, but it was still one where a clever woman could get anything she needed if she played her cards right. And cards were her strong point. As for Gordon, wasn’t he, too, a male? He could jolly well learn how to cope with his own often unreasonable sex.

  To Gordon the paternal rages, however happily rare, were illuminating as to the persistent existence of a darker reality behind the brighter appearance of daily life. Papa’s temper was like a thinly smoking Vesuvius over a seemingly benign Pompeii. A large portly gentleman with a protruding pot and strong stubborn features that had once been handsome, Wallace Carnochan had gruff kindly manners and a charming courtesy, even in addressing his children, toward whom he
usually maintained an attitude of mildly detached benevolence. Indeed, he appeared to manifest this detachment for many things besides his offspring; no one knew just what preoccupied him in those long, silent sessions in his study, where he was supposed to be poring over business reports or reading his beloved Gibbon or Macaulay. Sometimes Gordon or his sisters, standing outside the closed door, would hear the clink of a decanter against a glass, but the clinker never betrayed the least symptom of inebriation. His favorite sport was fishing in the Maine woods, but this, of course, was just another form of isolation. The only advice that he ever gave to Gordon when the latter was about to matriculate at Yale was a terse “Just remember that you’re a gentleman and the son of a gentleman.”

  Wallace had one ugly burst of temper that particularly affected his son. Of Uncle James’s sons, David Carnochan and his “Irish twin” Andy (they were born just under a year apart) were closest to Gordon. David, the undisputed leader of the trio—Andy was only his plump and amiable, dirty-talking sidekick—had the big nose of the Carnochans, craftily innocent blue eyes, and a long, equine face capable of a serene air of attention as the masque of a cleverly manipulative brain. It was generally conceded in the family that David, even more than his older or younger siblings, was the one to “keep an eye on.” He had the look of a boy who would go far.

  When David and Gordon were eleven and ten, Gordon found himself greatly coveting a toy of David’s, the small replica of a steam yacht sent him for Christmas by rich Uncle John Muir in Glasgow. It had been a more expensive gift than any others sent from across the sea, for David had already shown a premature perspicacity in making up to the baronet on his annual visit to New York, but he had already tired of the toy, as he was quickly apt to do with new possessions, and was now himself casting an acquisitive eye on the prize of Gordon’s collection, the model of a Madison Avenue streetcar. A swap was soon effected, but two days later Gordon’s new yacht fell apart. It had been previously smashed in a fall from its table and cleverly glued together by its former owner.