East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  “But what is my business, Dad? And what is yours? Will your ghost, like Marley’s, wail, ‘Mankind was my business!’?”

  “Ronald, I must ask you to change the subject. You are making an ass of yourself, and I can’t bear to listen to it.”

  And indeed Ronny took in the flash of true pain in his father’s eyes. It even appalled him.

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I can’t talk of anything else. It’s too awful to see you put yourself in the same boat with these butchers.”

  “Ronald!”

  “Sorry, Dad, but I can’t!”

  Ronny rose abrupdy, left the table and the club, and returned to New Haven. Two days later he received a telegram from Cousin Gordon informing him that the German clients had been dropped.

  His desire to take a military part in the war that broke out in Europe in 1939, while he was in Yale Law School, cooled a bit during the long winter months of 1940 when so little action occurred, but it flared again to a frenzy with the fall of France and the desperate Battle of Britain. He wanted to go to Canada and enlist in the air force, and was restrained only by his father, who, distraught at the notion, finally persuaded him that it was his duty to stay home until he could serve with his own countrymen in a war that was bound to involve the United States. Ronny controlled his impatience and trained for the navy aboard the U.S.S. Prairie State in New York, becoming what was called a “ninety-day wonder,” an ensign, just before Pearl Harbor.

  After two years of convoy duty on a destroyer in the Atlantic, hearing that trained officers were needed for the new amphibious craft, he volunteered for that service and became the skipper of a Landing Ship Tank destined for the invasion of Normandy. The landing in France was followed by months of channel crossings carrying troops and supplies for the fighting front and bringing back the wounded and prisoners of war to England. It was toward the end of this duty that a serious crisis occurred in Ronny’s life.

  While his vessel, high and dry on the Normandy beach, was receiving prisoners through the open bow doors to its tank deck, he strode down the shore to visit other skippers of landing craft who were standing about smoking, not being needed for the business of loading. He found they were discussing a large band of ragged-looking young men who were being assembled to be marched away from the scene and not transported to Britain. He asked who they were.

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” an officer told him. “Apparently, they’re Russians. They were fighting on the Eastern Front and captured by the Huns, stuffed into German uniforms, and sent to France as cannon fodder. They’re mostly dumb peasants who’ve no idea where they are. Some have never heard of France or England. They’re young, too, sixteen or seventeen, and some have turned out to be women. But Russia wants them back, and Ike is sending them. Poor bastards, they’ll probably all be shot for being in German uniforms. How can you be a good Red after that’s happened to you?”

  Later Ronny learned that that had indeed been their fate, thousands of them.

  In the weeks that followed, on the bridge in the tossing channel, or in the wardroom playing cards, or in his bunk, he could not free his mind from the image of those strange, round-faced, bewildered young men (and some women!) in their ragged, ill-fitting uniforms, huddled before a machine gun and mowed down. He seemed to see their facial expressions as blankly accepting their fate, as if it were no more than what had always been meted out to them from the start of their wretched and unwanted lives. God knew how much he had heard of the slaughter of innocents (who wasn’t innocent?) since the start of the war, but somehow his having actually seen this last batch made it permanently real and permanently ghastly to him.

  In Portland harbor, on a dark stormy day, when his LST was waiting in a long line for its turn to discharge on the crowded docks, a cargo of wounded American soldiers lying on stretchers on the tank deck, an army doctor pushed his way onto the bridge and shouted at him about the need immediately to disembark patients dying of the pitching and rolling of the vessel. Ronny tried to explain to him that he had to await his turn, that the ships in front of him had their own share of desperately wounded men. The doctor continued his now near-hysterical appeals, until Ronny had to have him forcibly removed from the bridge.

  The incident angered him. How could an officer, even if a medical one, be so unreasonable? Had the war not taken its toll on millions? And then, as the image of the Russian peasants surged again in his mind, his heart flamed with wrath against the Soviet regime. For what were the Communists doing but stripping the whole horrible struggle of its only possible excuse, which was the glory of putting down evil in the world? He vowed never to forget or forgive it.

  Later he was transferred to the Pacific, to be the executive officer to an LST flotilla commander, then in Ulithi. After the Japanese surrender, the flotilla went briefly to Sasebo Harbor in Japan, bearing troops for the occupation. He and his chief took a day off to drive a jeep to neighboring Nagasaki and view the devastation of that unfortunate city. They started at the crater of the bomb and drove in circles to the outer perimeter of its damage. The god of battles had indeed avenged the rape of Manchuria and China and the treachery of Pearl Harbor, and Ronny, for all the horror of what he saw, could not resist the elation of total victory. It was indeed Saint Crispin’s Day. If only it didn’t have to be shared with the Reds!

  RONNY, retracing the principal emotional crises of the two decades that elapsed between the end of World War II and the beginning of the one in Vietnam, had to admit the fact, often, even irritably, pointed out by his all-observing and sometimes critical, though always loving, wife: that the vision of the slaughtered Russian prisoners never altogether deserted him.

  “Why,” she would want to know, “is that bit of barbarity always so poignant to you? Haven’t we lived in a world of unspeakable atrocities?”

  “It’s because we had those people and gave them to the Russians! It stained our victory!”

  “But things like that are necessary between allies. We needed the Russians to lick Hider. We couldn’t have done it without them.”

  Ronny at such moments was reminded that Elly was the daughter of a great trial lawyer. She had been reared to believe that compromise was never to be disdained. “I maintain we could have!” he declared stoudy. “And then America would have been the shining light of the world! After all, we saved civilization twice in my lifetime. And we didn’t have to!”

  “Pooh. We fought because we were attacked.”

  “Attacked by evil forces, yes. And we’re being attacked again by them. By Communism, all over the world.”

  “Oh, of course, we’re all against Communism,” she retorted with a shrug.

  “Perhaps not enough.”

  Ronny himself took as active a part in resisting the spread of Marxism as a busy and successful corporate lawyer could. He took a leading role in the Council on Foreign Relations; he chaired debates on international law; he rejoined the navy and worked in Washington during the Korean conflict; he took a year’s leave of absence from his firm to act as assistant counsel to the CIA, and finally, under L.B.J., he accepted a post as special assistant to the Secretary of State in Indochinese affairs. His closest friends, from Chelton, Yale, and the downtown New York law firms, were almost to a man in enthusiastic accord with him; they, too, took time out to perform government functions and were constantly meeting to promote their common cause.

  Even the ever-skeptical Elly had to admit that the society into which her husband had introduced her was an amiable and admirable one, however much a privileged background may have formed its greatest common denominator. The men all had good war records and important jobs; their wives were all engaged in serious charitable works; their opinions were attractively liberal and their marriages, most remarkable of all in an era of myriad divorces, were happy. They loved their work and their parties, and though exclusive so far as intimate friendships were concerned, they somehow managed not to be or to seem snobbish. They were content with themselves as a social
group, and why not? What more did they need? What did they lack?

  Elly thought she might have found the answer to the last question at a cocktail party in Washington in the 1950s while Ronny was with the CIA. The talk revealed the dismay of the group at a report of socializing between Jack Kennedy, much admired by all, and the nefarious Joseph McCarthy.

  “But they’re both senators,” Elly had protested. “Senators always talk to each other. Isn’t that what they’re for?”

  “It may be the Irish in Jack,” someone observed. “They call it realism.”

  “And they’re both Catholics,” another remarked, but the room booed him. Religion was taboo.

  “Do you know something?” Elly exclaimed, as a bright thought struck her. “Do you know the real reason you all hate McCarthy so?”

  “Because he’s made a travesty of justice!”

  “Because he’s made bum wad of the Bill of Rights!”

  “Because he’s the shit of shits!”

  “All that, of course,” she replied. “But there’s something else. Because he’s made it seem villainous to be anti-Red. He’s so godawful that some decent folk feel they have to be against him in everything he stands for. He makes the whole struggle against Marxism seem ridiculous.”

  “You’re not, I trust, darling, implying that it is,” her husband asked, with some concern in his tone.

  “No, but I think it’s exaggerated. Yes, I really do, Ronny. You needn’t look at me that way. Is there a single Communist Party member in the House or the Senate? Just tell that to a Frenchman or an Italian and then try to convince him that this country is in any real danger of revolution. The trouble with all of you is that you never knew a Communist in your fancy backgrounds, so you don’t know how easily the thing can be dropped. You didn’t, as I did, go to public school in Brooklyn during the Depression and before my father made good in the law. Why, half my friends were Red! And none of them are today.”

  The discussion ended on a more or less friendly note, but the evening was important in Ronny and Elly’s married life, as it marked the beginning of a definite rift in their political thinking that steadily widened with the passing years. Elly was a resolute isolationist who believed that one went to war only when directly attacked, but she was determined not to allow foreign affairs to effect a dent in her marriage. She became more and more silent in discussions of foreign policy, and when Ronny undertook his State Department job during the fury of the Vietnam War, and her children rebelled, home life became almost unendurable for her.

  “I will not discuss the war with you, Ronny. It’s the only way we can live together.”

  “But, darling, when I live, breathe, and eat it every hour of my day, how can I shut it off?”

  “I don’t know, but you’ll have to try. I’m just about at the end of my rope.”

  Alone with his whiskey now, he stared balefully into the fire in the grate. Had Elly really gone to New York to be with her mother? Hadn’t the last news from the Krantzes been that she was definitely on the mend? Bereft of wife, son, and daughter and beset with doubts over the appalling and seemingly endless continuation of the war, he had the sick feeling that his whole life had been a farce. There had been a mob of young protesters in front of the White House that very morning, howling obscenities about men who were only doing their duty as they had always been taught to do it. Had everything been in vain?

  The front doorbell rang, and he jumped up in surprise. A wild hope sprang up in him that it might be Elly unexpectedly returning from New York. But to his shock the figure that greeted him on the threshold was his father.

  “I’m just off the train from New York. Can you put me up?”

  “Dad! Of course. But what good wind brings you here?”

  “Not all that good a one.” David Carnochan, now eighty, used a cane as he entered the hall. Ronny grabbed his suitcase. “I’ll tell you all, my son. But first let me wash up while you get me a drink.”

  Seated some minutes later by a relogged fire, David took a long sip of his Scotch-and-soda. “I came down to bring you this news myself. Elly has flown to Denmark to be with your son over Christmas. She knew how upset you’d be at her going without you, and that you would try to stop her, so she wanted me to tell you. I was going to telephone you, but I thought I’d rather come down here and be with you.”

  Ronny said nothing for a few long moments. “But she’ll be coming back?”

  “Oh, good Lord, yes. There was no question of her leaving you. You couldn’t have thought that, could you?”

  “Oh, but I could. She’s had a lot to put up with.”

  Another silence followed this, and then David seemed to have gathered courage to bring up another topic. But it was another sore one.

  “Look, Ron. Why don’t you quit this thing? Resign your post. You and I have both begun to see this war as a mistake. We were both for it at first, but it’s tearing the nation apart. I’ve always been a realist. There have been times in the past when you thought I was being too much of one, and you may have been right, and I appreciate your having guided me. But now let me guide you. It’s never too late to change one’s mind. And with one’s mind, one’s position, one’s stand.”

  “But not one’s President.”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Dad, I see your point all too clearly.” Ronny had a sudden odd memory of an air raid in London while his ship had been at dock there. A buzz bomb, called a V-1, had hurtled overhead rattling ominously, but while it rattled one was safe. It was when the rattling stopped that one ducked, for that meant it was coming down. And now he visualized it exploding on the very roof of this house in Georgetown, but noiselessly, and his home dissolved to ashes, but harmlessly, leaving him and his father sitting together in a void. “We must not lose the war, Dad. I must not leave my team.”

  “Ron! You talk as if you were back at Chelton! This isn’t a football game.”

  “Perhaps Chelton is where I belong.”

  David always knew when he was licked. His only consolation was that a son with an alienated family would be closer to a loving and faithful parent. It was not a bad consolation, either.

  11. PIERRE

  PIERRE AND RONALD Carnochan were first cousins and contemporaries, both born in 1918, but in looks and character they were strongly contrasted. Ronald, the shorter and slenderer of the two, had some of the appearance of a romantic poet, while Pierre, tall, blond, and rangy, had the easy, slightly supercilious air of an English peer’s son at Oxford. Yet most of the time, and except for one bitter quarrel in their last year at Chelton School, they managed to get on fairly well together. Each felt that the other had something that he himself lacked, and however much he might try to depreciate it, he couldn’t help suspecting that this missing quality might be just what he should one day most need. The issue between them might be summed up in Talleyrand’s principle: Surtout, point de zèle. Ronald was fall of zeal; Pierre had none. Or if he did, he would have died rather than show it.

  Pierre was his mother’s darling. Alida Livingston Carnochan thought him the fine flower of her Hudson River heritage, the best type of American colonial aristocrat. She saw him, even as a boy, adequately equipped to handle one day the financial tangles of Wall Street, while at the same time preserving the standards and manners of a more elegant past. In short, she deemed him her equal, if not her superior, in not only resisting but actually repelling the intrusion of modern vulgarity into the citadel of good taste. But in one important respect, which she utterly failed to perceive, her son was very much unlike her. Where she took for granted that the standards in which she had been raised were based on a Christian—and hence to be accepted—order of creation, Pierre had no belief in anything but himself. His sole duty in life, as he conceived it, was to make of Pierre Carnochan a perfect gentleman, not only in poise, appearance, and social grace, but in wealth, power, and social status. When a man had done that, and only then, could he chant his Nunc Dimittis.

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p; But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed. Besides, it was easy to do. Alida had no idea that the boy who knelt beside her in church on Sundays in Rhinebeck saw the Gospels as only novels, and bad ones at that. It was true that she never gave a thought to her own God outside the church, and even inside He had to compete in her thoughts with her plans for the week, but she never doubted His existence.

  There were, of course, moments in his life, however rare, when Pierre felt the need of crying out, like Puck, “What fools these mortals be!,” but he knew that life in due course was bound to supply him with fellow cynics, and in the meantime, he could get some relief by baiting his cousin Ron, whose naive enthusiasms created a china shop that would have aroused the most listless bull. And the great thing about Ron was that, however shocked he might be, he would never give one away.

  Chelton School was the subject of their most important falling-out. Pierre had quite taken in, by the time he was seventeen, the glaring dichotomy between the high principles on which the institution was built and the lives of its average graduates. The latter Pierre had had ample opportunity to observe, as they included his father and his uncles. They all professed what could only be called an ardent admiration for the veteran headmaster who had also been theirs, and highly approved the way he united his students in a hearty “school spirit” which made a kind of jumbled sense out of the heavy emphasis on athletics, chapel, and the classic tongues. But Chelton to them was entirely a part of their past and seemed to have had very little effect on their business and social lives. Yet Pierre was quick to see that to have been to Chelton was still an asset in the 1930s, and he was not one to denigrate assets. It was well to do well at Chelton, and besides, it was not difficult.