East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  Estelle was impressed by his earnestness, so unlike that of his more cynical friend, her brother David, but she was a bit troubled by his obvious feeling that the Hales and their like in his hometown were a good deal closer to the future ideal state than any of their more material opposite numbers in Manhattan. She chaffed him on this.

  “You know, Bronson, everyone in my world doesn’t see the first families of Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue quite as you do. It is not uncommon to hear them accused of narrow minds and ancestor worship. We’ve even heard of a family on the ‘hub’ that refers to the great Queen Elizabeth as Cousin Bessie Tudor.”

  “And that’s perfectly fair,” he admitted. “There are such, and I’m not proud of them. But I maintain there’s an idealism under the layer of snobbery and stuffiness in Boston that’s unlike anything else I’ve seen in America. Take our record in the Civil War. What city sprang to arms to eliminate slavery as quickly and as widely as Boston? In New York you had the draft riots.”

  “The Irish did that.”

  “Do you think we didn’t have our Irish?”

  She had to laugh. “It’s funny, you know, that you and David should be such good friends. He doesn’t think at all as you do. David looks at the world as something to conquer. You see it as something to improve. But I suppose you should be complimented by his interest in you. It means he’s spotted you as a comer. David is already selecting the friends with whom he will share his triumph.”

  “I don’t see myself in any such grand role. If I ever accomplish anything in this life, it will be because someone like you believes in me.”

  They had been seeing each other for some weeks now. He had come down to New York on several weekends to call on her despite the heavy demands of his law practice. Of course, she knew that it meant something, and she found that something exciting, though she tried not to exaggerate it. For he had uttered no word—not a syllable—until this last statement, to indicate the birth of the least romantic feeling on his part. And yet the warmth of his tone and the intensity of his dark stare seemed to belie any imputation of indifference.

  Did he know something? Had he been told something? Oh, God, she thought. She had to know.

  “Has my mother said anything to you?” she demanded. “Or David?” They were sitting in the rarely inhabited stiff little front parlor that was used by any family member who wished to receive a guest alone. “About me, I mean. My health.”

  As his dark brow seemed to darken and she glimpsed the immediate pain in his eyes, she caught her breath at her sudden sense of how sharply his looks attracted her. Could she really be falling in love? But of course she could!

  “Your health?” His tone was barely audible.

  “Yes. My lungs.”

  For another long moment he was gravely silent. “Your mother told me it was not good for you to get excited.”

  “She was warning you!”

  “Warning me of what?”

  “That I wasn’t marriageable!”

  “Nothing could make you unmarriageable” was his firm reply. “Nothing in this world, Estelle.”

  “Not even death!” she exclaimed defiantly.

  “Nothing,” he repeated. But he did not repudiate her term.

  “I don’t want to be married out of pity.”

  “I could never have the gall to pity you.”

  She felt that she could almost hear the crack of her breaking heart. Were the doors of life to slam shut just as they seemed about to open? She was too undone to do more than ask him to excuse her and rush upstairs to bury her head in the pillows of her bed.

  That night she suffered her first massive hemorrhage.

  THERE WAS NEVER any real hope after this. When she was released from the hospital, it was only to return to a chaise-longue existence in her well-heated third-floor bedroom. There were books and visitors to relieve the dreariness of such a life, but her only true consolation was in her correspondence with the faithful Bronson. He had wanted to leave his law firm and move to New York to be available for as many visits as her doctor allowed, but she was resolute that he should do nothing to hurt his legal career. She was going to fashion the end of her existence in her own way, and in this determination she would not be gainsaid. She made this very clear in the first letter that initiated their weekly interchange.

  Dear Bronson,

  Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate. They never dare to mention the one topic that most nearly concerns their affected friend—no, that is strictly forbidden. And so their conversation, as with all chatter when the mind is otherwise preoccupied, is hollow and dull when it is not actually painful. Even some of our nearest and dearest have a genius for saying the wrong thing.

  And yet one yearns to talk of one’s own demise. Which is why I have conceived this idea of a correspondence with the one soul I feel understands me, and who happens to be the man who might have become more than a friend had I been healthier and had our mutual interest continued to grow. You see? I can say that now. What need have I anymore for maidenly restraint? Of course, I cannot know what might have developed between us, nor can you. Certainly couples have been happily wed who started less congenially than you and I. Some might even claim that we have already enjoyed the sweetest part of a relationship between a man and a woman: the early dawn of what might mature into a great love. But it does not matter now except to demonstrate my freedom to say whatever is on my mind. What I need is someone to whom I can open my heart in writing, and I choose writing as the blessed veil to cloak the inevitable embarrassments of face-to-face communication.

  Will your Emersonian transcendentalism allow of that, dear Bronson? An exchange of keen minds rather than vulnerable hearts? I know you are too honest to undertake something in which you do not believe, simply to placate an ill woman. However delightfully you may be one, don’t in this case be a Boston gentleman!

  And Bronson replied:

  Yes, dearest Estelle, I accept your offer. But far from not being a Boston gentleman, I will endeavor to be one of the truest. Every word that I write to you will be as sincere a reflection of my thoughts as I can make it. There may be motives that lie beneath that are hidden from me—we have read of recent Viennese explorations into the unconscious—and therefore must remain hidden to you, nor can I promise you that I shall unveil every passing thought or fantasy that may flit across my mind. There may be such, of which we have no control, that I refuse to dignify with my pen. No mind should be totally free of the censor of decency. But what I inscribe here will be true.

  To begin with, yes indeed, dear heart, I had dared to hope that our friendship might ripen into something more binding. But I am not going to belabor our correspondence with anguished sentiment—I know you have not embarked on a Sonnets from the Portuguese. I am steeling myself to face what you must face, not with as clear an eye and brave a heart, for I am much your inferior in such, but with as much clarity and courage as I can muster.

  I will not say that had you been blessed with stronger health, all would have been plain sailing between us. I had my doubts as to whether you would ever be fully happy in Boston or I away from it. Not only is my law practice almost immovably grounded here, but so, it seems, is my stubborn soul. I could have moved anywhere rather than have lost you, but I would always have felt “New Englandly,” and that might have created a difficulty for both of us. One that we would have surmounted, but there it would have been. I have always believed that there was a fundamental nobility of character under all the constantly satirized traits of old Boston. There! At least I have got that off my chest.

  You might, of course, have come to see the best in the “hub,” as you call it, as I do, but I fear that your sharp eye would have alwa
ys seen the common caricature of the Brahmin type in those of my friends and relatives who adhere more closely to it than I dare to hope I do. But I only make the point to introduce another: the point of your much more fundamentstal variance from the principles of my family background, by which I mean (oh, I can hear your “Here we go!”) the absence in you of any brand of Christian faith. It is here that I see the strength in even the weakest and silliest of my tribe, and I desperately stretch out a hand to offer to your reluctant self even a drop of the divine consolation that they receive. You may wince at my choice of words. I stick to them.

  You believe strongly, I know, in the difference between right and wrong, and no one has been more resolute than yourself in your determination to be on the side of the former. When I have asked you what impels you to choose to do the unselfish rather than the selfish thing, your reply has always been the same: “Because I don’t wish to be the kind of person who would do the other.” On that distinction hang all your law and your prophets. It is a matter, one might almost conclude, of taste, of turning away from sin as one would from an unpleasant odor. What need of a god has a person of strong enough nostrils?

  But if right and wrong have any meaning, any true existence other than as mere figments of your imagination, there must exist somewhere, somehow, a standard that defines the difference between them—a moral sense in the universe. Can one not make out a dawning of this even in beasts? The lion that kills the cubs of its mate to bring her back into heat to satisfy his lust is obviously devoid of it, but the African wild dog, which kills only the precise number of its litters needed to keep the pack within the limits of the available food supply, and forcibly feeds any reluctant puppies, shows the beginning of a social conscience, the faint origin of a moral standard. And if such a standard exists, even outside the ken of mortals, is it not feasible to suppose there is a purpose in creation? And if there be any purpose at all, is it not irresistible to infer that this life, with its manifold injustices, its bizarre distribution of comedy and tragedy, is not all?

  That is all I urge upon you. I do not suggest that you embrace any creed or adopt any ritual. I do not open the gates of a new Jerusalem whose streets are paved with gold and echo the anthems of angels; I do not even offer you a resurrection of the body or a reunion with loved ones. I only ask you to open your mind to the possibility that this is not the end.

  I yearn to see you, but as long as you restrict me to the meager epistolary consolation of a Horace Walpole or a Madame de Sevigne, I obey.

  Estelle replied:

  Of course, my dear, you’re too intelligent not to see that where an ultimate purpose is concerned, you’re begging the question. You feel there must be purpose in the universe. I see no reason that compels me to agree. Like Pascal, je vois ces effroyables espaces de l’univers qui m’enferment, but I lack his abiding consolation. Nor do I really think I have much needed it. By fastening my thoughts on this terrestrial globe and concentrating on how to make such life as we have a bit pleasanter for myself and those in my immediate vicinity, I seem to have managed to get by—at least until now.

  I readily concede that my range of vision has been very limited. Indeed, it has been largely confined to the story of the Carnochans. What have they accomplished to make life more agreeable since they braved the Atlantic waves to establish a branch of their thread business on the shores of a new world? And what have I done to aid them?

  Well, I seem to see their accomplishment as largely negative, but that is something. As you rightly point out, I myself have been mostly motivated by the desire not to be a certain kind of person. The Carnochans, at least in America, have been guilty of no felonies, no public improprieties, no incitements to disorder, no grotesque outbursts of scandalous behavior. They have been law-abiding, tax-paying, pacific members of the community, minding their own business and minding it well enough. If the whole world behaved so, would it not be a peaceable kingdom? Perhaps. But the Carnochans never reached out very far; they never regarded themselves as their brother’s keeper. Or perhaps as keepers only of one as close as a brother. And, for all my criticism of them, have I? I may not have been the kind of person I didn’t want to be, but have I been anyone else?

  My mother, as any mother would be, is proud of her six sons, who are all on their way to making some sort of mark in the world. She sees them as vigorous, manly, and, I fear—for she admires this—aggressive, and she attributes what she deems their tough hides to the rugged lowland Scottish farmers from whom we presumably descend. But actually the Carnochans seem to have been already rather watered-down stock by the time they arrived in New York. They had just enough energy to perch on the seaport where they landed and never moved an inch farther west. Our original immigrant, David, had nine children, but all of his many living descendants owe their being to only one of them: his son Douglas. The other eight died without issue; six of them, all daughters, never even married. I remember when I was doing a volunteer temporary job in the library of the Seamen’s Church Institute finding an old daguerreotype of a very plain lady over the caption Miss Phoebe Carnochan, on the back of which some rude sailor had scribbled the words “Why I went to sea.” No, our vigor, if such it be, must stem from the colonial aristocrats in the family tree of my grandmother Carnochan, born a Dudley of your beloved hometown, who was able to say—and I’m sure frequently did—“Both my grandmothers were Saltonstalls.” I sometimes even wonder if my mother, who is the soul of consideration and love to her ailing daughter, isn’t puzzled by the contradiction, in a family so apparently strong, of a member as frail as myself.

  Do you know what I think is the secret of the “moral” success of such American so-called upper-class families as the Carnochans, and even the sacred Hales of Boston? It’s that they never for a moment admit, either to themselves or to anyone else, that they are not the “nicest” people on the globe. They shy away from the brutal candor of their British opposite numbers, who scorn to hide their open snobbery, and they deplore the French and German aristocrats, who actually glory in it. No American mother would ever admit that her children had married for any reason but a sincere and abiding love, nor would her children dare to deny it. Friendships, they insist, are formed on the basis of mutual affection and admiration; business is always conducted for the greater development of the nation’s God-given resources, and death contains, as in the old hymn, “welcome for the sinner and more graces for the good.” There have to be moments, of course, when even the rosiest Pollyanna has doubts about all this, but so long as the flag is kept unfurled to flutter in the breezes of fatuity, such darker periods can be kept under control.

  Well, does it really matter what gets them through this life so long as they get through it? I don’t know. Does it help people to face the void? What is it in me but a hollow pride that makes me rear up and cry, “I won’t be taken in! I face the truth and defy it!” And where does it get me? I still can’t make up my mind not to be, not to exist. I still shrink before that door through which such countless numbers have passed before me. I’m like the blind woman in the Watts painting, plucking the last string of the shattered harp of hope. And I’m ashamed of it.

  I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life—a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it—filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction, and when our regular preacher tried to assure me that there would be no time in a future life, I found it unimaginable.

  To which Bronson replied:

  Of course, you’re right about being only in a small part a Carnochan. You’re no more a blood member of that clan than you are of the families of your mother and her parents and of your paternal grandmother. Indeed, as we travel down the family tree, the blood of our cognomen shrinks to a mere trickle of our life stream. But I was interested to learn that you have Dudley and Saltonstall forebears, for so have I, and I embrace
anything that brings us closer. I feel, I fear, I share a bit of my own parents’ ancestor worship; to be linked to an honorable past has seemed to me a way of adding a touch of dignity and order to the chaos of modern life, but I cannot be unaware that an undetected fault on the part of an unsuspected many-greats-grandmother could lop off the finest limbs of a haughty tree. Not that I suspect any of those revered puritan ladies of having a lover on the sly—heaven forbid! But the past contains wide tracts of undiscovered country. All we can be sure of is that we are ourselves.

  And perhaps of something else. That a man and a woman can form a relationship that is something more than themselves, a thing of beauty, a thing, I dare to suppose, that has its own existence. Oh, I’m talking nonsense, and I promised you that I wouldn’t belabor our epistolary communication with such outbursts, but oh, my dear one, it is very hard.

  But I pull myself up. I will be good. How about this? At the time of your first diagnosis, you expressed to me the wish that, if things should turn out as darkly as predicted for you, I should nonetheless, after a due interval, marry and raise a family. Very well. I will undertake to do that. I will seal you up in a watertight compartment of my heart into which no wife or child of mine shall ever enter. But that compartment will not be either a reproach or a cloud to them; it will simply not exist for them. It will exist for me and me alone. This will take willpower, but I shall have the willpower. I shall have learned it from you.

  The above is to show you my willingness to comply with even your sternest instructions. But you have not forbidden me to abandon all hope. Your nice cousin Gordon told me that a famous specialist, a Dr. Bretton, had seen you and spoken of the possible beneficent effects for you of a winter in southern Italy. Estelle, is that true? Why didn’t you tell me? And what in God’s name is keeping you here?