East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  “What harm can it do me, David? What have I got to lose?”

  “It can blow your chances for Bulldog, that’s what it can do.”

  “But what chance do I have for Bulldog, anyway?”

  They were sitting in David’s room. He rose now and closed the door to the hallway. Returning, he looked very grave and serious.

  “I have it on very good authority that you and I and Andy may all three be tapped for Bulldog.”

  Well, this was something to pull Gordon up. Bulldog was one of the Yale senior secret societies, generally considered second only in distinction to Skull and Bones, each limited to fifteen members who were selected in the spring on “Tap Day,” when the junior class assembled on the campus to await the blow, or “tap,” on the shoulder from a society member circulating among them and to hear the shouted “Go to your room” for the initiation. The selection process was carried out with the greatest secrecy, but Gordon well knew that his cousin was capable of ferreting out the darkest concealments.

  David watched Gordon carefully as he let his startling news sink in. “Bulldog is not apt to tap a man who is cozy with the likes of Key, and if they pluck one Carnochan, the contamination may spread to the other two. This is serious, Gordie. Andy and I are counting on you not to do anything to hurt our chances.”

  This argument was irresistible. Gordon could have forfeited his opportunity for admission to Bulldog—he had no particular feeling for or against the senior societies about which, in his new literary preoccupations, he had given little thought—but the idea that he might stand in the way of cousins who had played so dominant a role in his life was simply unthinkable. Bulldog, he knew well, was something that not only David and Andy cared passionately about but that the Carnochans of the generation earlier would consider a desirable tribal enhancement. And as for the family member who botched it … well, there would indeed be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  “You can count on me, Davie,” he muttered, and left the room before he had the humiliation of being thanked for the task of dropping an inconvenient friend.

  He decided that the way to handle Philip Key was to tell him frankly the dilemma in which fate had cast him. He hoped that even Philip might understand the pressure that had been brought to bear on him and agree that a friendship suspended for some term was not too great a price to pay for family loyalty and solidarity. He was careful to make it entirely clear that he himself knew just how vile it would ordinarily be to slight one friend for the social advantage of another, and that he was depending on Philip’s intelligent detachment to understand the particular circumstances that made Gordon’s action imperative. But Philip’s silence as he listened was ominous, as was his malicious half smile.

  “But it’s not just for the sake of your cousins that you propose to give me the sack,” he observed at last. “Are you not yourself expecting to be tapped by this august institution?”

  “Well, David says I may be, yes. But you know I don’t give a damn about those things. If I joined, it would only be because the family would take on so if I didn’t. It’s not a matter worth upsetting them about.”

  “You’re gobbling the cake you’re keeping, my onetime friend. Disgustingly, too, I might add. You want Bulldog’s and my approval of your dropping me! Your greed is unimaginable!”

  “Philip, what would you do in my case?”

  “In your case? How could I have the gall even to conceive of my humble self wearing the tartan of the Carnochans? But you needn’t be concerned over my missing your little visits. You were born to be your cousins’ toady, and you might just as well get on with it. I even doubt you have the character not to be a toady. As they say about inevitable rape, relax and enjoy it.”

  Gordon turned away from him, in part relieved that Philip’s nastiness softened some of his own guilt feeling. It was unreasonable, after all, for Philip not to see that life could offer some hard choices, and that it wasn’t always cut-and-dried which way to take. On second thought, however, he found himself wondering if life really did have choices. Wasn’t it fairly plain that the way for him to go was a Carnochan way? Was he really qualified for any other? Did he really want any other?

  He and David and Andy were all tapped for Bulldog, and everyone was delighted, even his usually indifferent father, who seemed to sense a dim revival of his own Yale days so many years before. Uncle James and Uncle Bruce, however, were more visibly enthusiastic. Never before had a senior society taken in three new members of the same family.

  His senior year brought another honor to Gordon. He was named class poet. He did not send a draft of his poem to Philip Key. He knew only too well that the latter would label it sentimental drivel, and that, indeed, was just what it was.

  David had planned that both Andy and Gordon should go with him to Harvard Law School, and Gordon, who now fully realized that his literary talents were not such as to sustain a writing or even a journalistic career—if he owed anything to Philip Key, he owed him at least that—was willing enough to compromise on a career which still made a primary use of words, for however different a purpose. Even David, however, could do nothing to overcome Andy’s decided lack of capacity for law, and the latter was destined for New York and a firm of stockbrokers.

  Alone now, so to speak, with David, for they shared rooms in Cambridge, Gordon had much occasion to reflect, with his self-impressed passivity, on the forceful role that his cousin seemed increasingly to be playing in his life. David struck him at times as a leader looking for loyal troops to support him in a battle for ends he had not yet determined but which time was bound to make clear. With his long, bony face and lean, bony figure, his high, balding dome and eyes that could turn in a second from a winning friendliness to an icy disapproval, David seemed to be training his agile intellect to subject other men to his pressures, and he appeared to sense intuitively whom he could bully into submission and to whom it was more politic to kowtow. David was intensely clannish, even for a Scot; he viewed the Carnochans, and in particular his brothers and cousins, as a force to be united in a general push to become a major league in the football games of life. And just where would Gordon fit in? Oh, that was obvious enough. He would be the utterly trustworthy second in command, or executive officer, an aide whose primary value would lie in his unwavering loyalty.

  Oh, yes, Gordon saw all this; he was not a fool, nor would he have been much use to David had he been one. But he also saw that he needed David. David could cope with the world, especially the Carnochan world, with which Gordon found it often difficult to cope. His father was remote and unpredictable, his mother intent on leading her own life, if cautious not to trespass too heavily on her husband’s guarded territory. His sisters were giggly and silly, obsessed at this time with boys. The practical maternal philosophy of the family had no place for the moral doubts and questionings of what to them was a more or less neurotic son and brother who could be expected to answer them himself, and he turned in the end to David for the benefits of a relationship that he liked to think of as symbiotic. If David supplied him with confidence in his own ability to survive as a member of David’s team, did he not help David by acting as a sounding board for his plans and projects and a consolation in his inevitable if temporary setbacks?

  But it continued to trouble Gordon that David’s failure to share any of the idealism that had inspired Gordon at Chelton seemed, when they progressed from Yale to law school, increasingly to divide them. At school and at college the atmosphere in the sometimes excited discussions, political, ethical, or literary, among the friends was apt to be imbued with a shared desire, if not expectation, for a better world to which the disputants might hope to make some modest contribution. But in law school, in all the heated general discussions that he and David shared with fellow students, David was apt to focus, not on the growth of the law as a material factor in the improvement of society, not on how best to interpret the Constitution to deal with changing times and conditions, but on how to achieve a clie
nt’s purpose in the teeth of a seemingly prohibitive statute. David appeared to see law as something to get around and a lawyer’s function as how to advise him to do it. And a good many of their classmates seemed to agree with him.

  It was a woman, of course, who, at last, and at least temporarily, released Gordon from the pervasive influence of his cousin. He met Agatha Houston at a Sunday lunch party given by his mother during a Christmas vacation when he had come down from law school in Cambridge. Julie Carnochan and Agatha’s mother were old friends, and Agatha’s father, Dr. Houston, who was also present at the lunch, was the well-known throat doctor to some of the great singers at the Metropolitan Opera in what was coming to be known as the golden age of song. His name was associated with such shining ones as Fremstad, Nordica, and Eames. Agatha, however, reflected none of this glamour. She was pert, bright, and pretty, with large brown eyes, but she made an immediate point of being matter-of-fact and down-to-earth.

  “If you had experienced the temperaments of some of Daddy’s patients as I have,” she told Gordon after he had spoken of his envy of her opportunities to meet the great divas, “you would be less anxious to hear them anywhere except on the stage, where they belong. It’s just as well to keep on the other side of the footlights. They preserve the illusion, and that’s what they’re for.”

  “You never wanted to be a singer yourself?”

  “Well, I didn’t have a voice, which settled the question. But yes, I might have liked to, when I was in my teens. I used to fancy myself singing the ‘Liebestod’ to an audience too rapt even to applaud. I saw the curtain descend in a reverent silence more gratifying than the loudest cheers. But I’ve graduated from that. I live in the real world now. I hope it’s better, but I’m not always sure. How about you? Do you dream of yourself as formidably clad in black robes, sitting up there on the Supreme Court bench, explaining the Constitution to admiring counsel?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Well, maybe you’ll make it, then. I sometimes wonder if daydreaming is not the road to success. Does being preoccupied with hurdles really help?”

  “You should know. They seem to interest you.”

  “And look at me. I’m nowhere!”

  Gordon indeed looked at her. It was true, then, he felt with a sudden leap of his heart, that one could love at first sight! And the very first weekend after his return to Cambridge he came back down to New York to call on her at her family’s brownstone, only two blocks from his. It soon became a habitual thing.

  He was enchanted by her openness and candor. She was devoid of the coy flirtatiousness of so many of the girls of his acquaintance, who were only too well aware that the only game they were allowed to play was the marriage game. Agatha did not hesitate to let him know that she liked him very much indeed and saw no reason that either of them should be bothered or concerned with where their friendship might be heading. Let the future take care of itself. If marriage, why not? Neither family would object. If no marriage, was that such a tragedy?

  He took her to the theater; he took her for long walks in Central Park. They were both twenty-two; they were free. Gordon found himself telling her all kinds of things he had never told anyone else, including his old fear that his mother, perhaps not even consciously, blamed him for surviving his twin brother.

  “Of course, you don’t know that,” she warned him. “To be absolutely fair, you have to admit it’s only a supposition on your part. But suppose it’s true. It may not be a thing your mother can help. She’s never said anything about it, has she?”

  “Oh, never. Of course not.”

  “Well, give her credit for that. She’s probably tried to be as good a mother as she was capable of being. I’m an only child, as you know. My mother was not allowed to have another baby after my very difficult cesarean birth. I’ve always been aware how bitterly disappointed my father was that I wasn’t a boy. As a little girl I used to resent that terribly. But I got over it. And you can, too, Gordon. It’s not easy, but you can.”

  He found such exchanges exhilarating. It was as if this wonderful girl was hewing him out of a marble rock of family solidarity and turning him into something that was at least the statue of a man. One Sunday night, arriving back in Cambridge at the rooms he shared with David, he decided that the time had come to tell his cousin that he was planning to propose to Agatha and that he had reason to believe that he would be accepted.

  David, of course, was aware that Gordon had been seeing Agatha, whom he knew, though not well, but Gordon had not chosen to let his cousin know how far things had gone, being afraid that David might make some snotty remark about there being better social fish to fry than the Houstons, who, however respectable, were not notable in the fashionable world. He suspected that he would not be able to control his wrath if David should do so, and their friendship might be gravely marred.

  But he had grossly underestimated David’s capacity to deal with any novel situation. His cousin had fully appreciated the depth of his involvement with the girl and clearly recognized that it was something that had to be accepted. And when David made up his mind to accept something, he knew how to do it right.

  “And do you know what, Gordie?” he cried, as he jumped up to embrace his cousin. “She’s just the girl for you. She’ll even be the making of you!”

  AN UNEXPECTEDLY LARGE allowance promised the young couple by Agatha’s enthusiastic father made possible their marriage right after Gordon and David’s graduation from law school, and David was best man at the wedding. But the cousins did not go to work for the same law firm, Brown & Livermore, as they had originally planned and as that firm had offered. At the last moment Gordon had decided to accept another offer, one proffered by an equally distinguished firm, Perry, Whitehead & Cox. It had been the result of a tense parley he had had with his bride-to-be, shortly before their union. She had been firmer than he had ever seen her.

  “The Periy firm has one great advantage,” she had insisted.

  “And what is that?”

  “David’s not in it.”

  “Darling? What’s wrong with David?”

  “Nothing. Except for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes. Not for anyone else. Or at least not for anyone else I care about. Only for you.”

  “You don’t like David?”

  “I don’t like him at all. But that’s not the point. I’m not going to be a bossy wife, Gordon, but in this one thing you must yield to me. This one thing I insist on. Don’t go into the same firm with David.”

  “Darling, what’s come over you? Have you gone crazy?”

  “Let’s put it that I have. But I won’t marry you if you don’t give in to me in this one instance.”

  Well, what could he say to that?

  5. ESTELLE

  ESTELLE CARNOCHAN, David’s sister, the youngest of the seven children of James and Louisa, was their only daughter, and being pretty, blond, and very bright, she was the family pet. Her perennially delicate health—the early signs of tuberculosis—only added to the domestic affection. She was the particular favorite of her father, a charming and witty man, only intermittently faithful to his large, formidable, and adoring spouse, and after his premature death at forty-six, in 1907, Estelle had obligingly assumed the role of primary emotional support to her widowed mother, whom all New York regarded as a heroine, left as she was with all those sons to launch in the world. Why a heroine? Estelle sometimes asked this question of the shrewd little observer whom she artfully concealed behind an impassive front. Was Louisa Carnochan not possessed of robust health, an exuberant disposition, and a comfortable inheritance from a father who had bought farmland in northern Manhattan for nothing? But New York liked heroines, and Louisa enjoyed the role quite as much as her audience enjoyed attributing it to her.

  Estelle may have been willing to play her part as acolyte to this grand figure of sorrow, and to act as confidante to rowdy brothers who seemed, for all their bravado, to need more pats on th
e back than might have been expected from their boasts, but she was determined that she was going to have a life of her own and never sink into the position so often then expected of the youngest born of a large family: the patient companion of a never-dying parent. Particularly if that youngest was afflicted with the symptoms of a dread disease.

  She defied her mother’s protests by insisting on attending Barnard College, although she had to submit to the humiliation of being accompanied on her daily trips uptown by an Irish maidservant, whose odd presence in the back of the classroom she explained to her new and more liberated friends as that of a cousin who desired to audit the courses. And when she had her first beau, a former Harvard Law School classmate of her brother David, whom she had met on his visit to her family’s summer place on the Cape, she thought she might have found an independent base for a vision of life outside her family and her frail lungs.

  Bronson Hale was a Bostonian to the core of his being. His dark and rather solemn good looks were accompanied by a gravity of demeanor that might have chilled had it not been accompanied by the warmth of his evident sincerity. The Hales were kin to half the Brahmins of his native city, but his high-mindedness eschewed the least tint of social snobbery. He seemed to feel a kindred soul in Estelle, and she found herself wondering if she had perhaps met the man who could answer all the questions that her brothers could not.

  Not that he asked those questions. It was the answers that he seemed ready to provide. Bronson Hale did not openly challenge the values of a society that Estelle tended to find restricted and money-grubbing, nor did he query the existence of a beneficent creator somewhere in the heavens, nor did he even criticize the code of dress and deportment laid down by the social leaders of New York or Boston. But he believed in a constantly progressing society; he had faith that mankind was improving with each century and that our ills of today would one day be shed in a world more perfect. But he also believed that a man must be always at work to bring about this better state, and he had no smugness in regard to his own minor part in the task which, however minuscule, would be all that a hardworking and idealistic lawyer could contribute. Oh, it was clear that he meant every word that he uttered!