East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  Pierre was good at sports and enjoyed them. He liked football, though he gave it up, as allowed in his last year, concentrating on crew, where he stroked the school eight. He was popular with the other leaders of his form, as was Ron, but unlike Ron, he was less so with the boys who did not stand out or who did not fit into what was called the “Manhattan crowd,” and these gave him the nickname of “Captain O’Haughty.” But these were not the fellows whom he expected to see much of when the blissful, long-awaited days of college at last dawned.

  And they very much dawned in the late fall of his last school year, when Pierre had already relegated Chelton to the back of his mind and was looking eagerly forward to what he could do with the next step in his life. He carried this to the point where, on a Saturday afternoon, the day of an important football game with a principal rival academy, he did not even bother to watch the play but reclined on the couch of the study that he shared with Ron, reading the latest Galsworthy novel.

  When Ron came in at last, wearing the darkest countenance, and flung himself gloomily down in a chair, Pierre looked up from his book with a smile.

  “I take it we lost.”

  “And you didn’t even go!” Ron almost shouted. “You’ve been sitting here on your ass all afternoon while Chelton lost the big game of the year!”

  “Why should I give a tinker’s damn about the silly match? Really, Ron, you look as if you’d actually been crying.”

  “I have! And I’m not ashamed of it! It’s better than being a snot bag like you!”

  “You don’t think it’s time you grew up? just a little, anyway?”

  “Grow up! Is that all you care about Chelton?”

  “Look, Ron. We’ll be out of here for good, come spring. You ought to be thinking about Yale and what you’ll be crying about there. If you’re still crying, which I devoutly hope you won’t be.”

  “You think they don’t care about football at Yale and who wins a game? Well, ask your old man. Uncle Sam is one of the greatest boola-boolas of all!”

  “I concede that about Dad. In fact, I concede it about all the Carnochans. Maybe that’s just what’s wrong with Yale. I’m thinking myself of applying for Harvard. Uncle Timmy Van Rensselaer says that no Eli is ever quite a gentleman.”

  “Who the hell is Uncle Timmy? And who cares what an old snob like that thinks!”

  “Uncle Timmy is on my mother’s side of the family, no kin to you,” retorted Pierre, with a semicomic affectation of loftiness. “He married Mummy’s sister. A Van Rensselaer wed to a Livingston. Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?”

  “I seem to find it still dry. You’re not serious, though, Pierre, about going to Harvard? You wouldn’t break with a family tradition just to please some stuffy old relative of your ma’s?”

  “No, but to become a gentleman I might.”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Pierre. But I know I don’t even want to go on sharing this study with you!”

  Which resolve Ron actually proceeded to implement, finding a classmate who was glad to change his own study mate for the more amusing Pierre. But Pierre saw that he had let things go too far, and he took pains to make things up with his cousin, which the latter’s open and generous nature soon made possible.

  As Pierre carried out his plan to go to Harvard, and as Ron, like his forebears, matriculated at Yale, the cousins saw less of each other in the next four years. Pierre’s father, Sam, always a stout Eli, had objected at first to his son’s rejection of his alma mater, but his wife’s firm endorsement of the decision had weakened his opposition, and when Pierre was elected to the Porcellian Club, deemed by many of Sam’s downtown circle to be the ne plus ultra of college societies, all was forgiven, even Uncle Timmy’s muttered remark that one Carnochan had at last “made the grade.”

  Pierre at Harvard considered that he had finally come into his own. He dressed well, dined well, and cultivated those whom he considered the leaders of his class—mostly members of fashionable families in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. His weekends were rarely spent in Cambridge: there were debutante balls in the cities mentioned, rural house parties, and even fox hunts. He was careful, however, to achieve respectable grades in all his courses—a gentleman should not, of course, be a “greasy grind,” but on the other hand, he must never fail in anything he undertook. Hard work could be properly postponed until one had adopted one’s life career, and then it was fully countenanced. Pierre was under no illusion that the material success on which he counted could be attained without labor and dedication.

  For a time he had debated entering Harvard Law School, whither Ron was bound, and the cousins discussed this during a Christmas vacation in New York. Ron pointed out that there would undoubtedly be a good opening for both in his father’s law firm. Far from seeing a hurdle in nepotism, David Carnochan, in the still-accepted European fashion, believed in the kind of solidarity that a united family could give to a continuing organization.

  “Yes, but isn’t the question whether you’d rather be the client than the client’s counsel?” Pierre wanted to know. “Of course, I know that argument doesn’t always fit the bill. I’d rather, for example, be the patient than his dentist. On the other hand, I’d rather be the undertaker than the corpse. But take a gander at your father’s principal clients. Aren’t they all a dozen times richer than he?”

  “Oh, at least. They head big companies. But they haven’t the joy and interest of a learned profession.”

  “They have the joy, anyway, of being rich and famous.”

  “Oh, Pierre, be serious.”

  “I’ve never been more so. You’ll be nodding yourself to sleep over some old casebook while I’ll be strutting up and down my private art gallery, admiring my fake Rembrandts and genuine Picassos, or whatever junk I happen to want to buy.”

  Pierre opted to go into his father’s small but very successful investment banking firm, determined to learn everything he could about the stock market. He combined long days of hard work with evenings at parties, some dull and some almost brilliant, yet always apt to be written up in the social columns of the evening papers, where his name made a frequent appearance. But he saw the war coming in Europe, and he studied how to make the best of what was bound to be an interruption of his career.

  That he would have to be an officer was obvious, and it was equally clear that combat would make a more dashing entry in his record than desk or headquarters service, so he chose the navy, pardy because sea spray was more picturesque than mud and pardy because most of his Porcellian pals had elected it, too. Shortly before Pearl Harbor he had received his training and his commission as an ensign, and when war broke out he did not hesitate to induce his father to use such pull as he had in Washington to get him assigned to a destroyer. The image of himself on the bridge of so sleek a warship attracted him, and it was an image not difficult to make real.

  He served on the U.S.S. Barclay for three years, on convoy duty in the Atlantic, and in two atoll landings in the Pacific. He performed his tasks efficiently, as assistant gunnery officer, then gunnery officer, and ultimately as first lieutenant, was liked by the men, and became something of a favorite of the captain. Some of the junior officers, particularly those from small towns and lesser-known colleges, found him a bit standoffish, but nobody disliked him, even though his ardent cultivation of senior army brass and naval braid at officers’ clubs was noted and commented on. In the last year of the war, at such a club in Pearl Harbor, he ran into Ron, now skipper of an LST, and they sat at the bar together.

  “Just like you to end up in the amphibious navy,” Pierre remarked with family candor. “How did it happen? Couldn’t your dad have done something? Oh, no, of course, your conscience wouldn’t allow you to use anything like pull, would it?”

  “Pierre, I volunteered for amphibious.”

  “Why, in God’s name? Didn’t you know the regular navy regards it as second class? Or even third? I’m surprised they even let you use this club.”<
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  “They probably wouldn’t if they didn’t have to,” Ron replied with a grin. “Our flotilla commander is USN, and he’s supposed to have been assigned to us as punishment for some gaffe he made in the Pentagon. But I heard they needed officers with sea experience, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. You may call us sea trucks, but it seems sea trucks are needed to win the war.”

  “And we’ll probably both be blown up anyway, invading Japan,” Pierre conceded, to finish the argument. “But if we survive, what’ll you do? Finish law school?”

  “Oh, yes. And you? Back to the money mine? Will that sort of thing go on as before, do you think?”

  “Even more so! The war may have bust the world, but it will have made America rich. And I plan to share the wealth.” Here he allowed himself a wink. “Even if I have to marry it.”

  Ron ignored the qualification as typical Pierre. “Speaking of marriage, do you realize that more than half our Chelton classmates are already wed? The war at least has speeded that up.”

  Pierre shrugged. “Let us not be in a hurry, my friend. Let our friends plunge into wedlock as they choose. Half of them will live to regret it. A good marriage takes time and patience and careful observation, and I intend to have a very good marriage indeed. A wife can be a great asset, or a great liability. My bride shall be beautiful, or at least very handsome, with the kind of looks, anyway, that people notice and admire. She shall be poised, gracious, and cultivated. Not a bas bleu, mind you, but well-read and up-to-date on things. She shall be every inch a lady, if not by birth, at least by training. She will conform to the decorative tolerance of the highest society, where prejudice against color, religion, or sexual preference is deemed small-town or middle-class. She need not be an heiress, but I rather assume that she will come of a background that will supply her with at least a competent dowry.”

  “You describe a paragon.”

  “She shall be a paragon.”

  THE ATOM BOMB aborted the invasion about which Pierre had been so dark and accelerated the future about which he had been so hopeful, and he found himself back on Wall Street and happily at work in his father’s firm, of which he was now promoted to partnership. He made a fortunate choice when he induced his parent to make a substantial investment in a new company that produced novel and imaginative children’s toys (and one, incidentally, run by a young ex-army colonel he had met at an officers’ club in Leyte), and now a millionaire in his early thirties, he was heralded in the press as one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

  His cousin Ron was also on the rise, a promising associate in his father’s law firm, a position solidified—if such were needed—by his marriage to the daughter of the number two partner. At one of their biweekly lunches, he reminded Pierre of the peerless bride whose existence he had predicted at that officers’ club in Pearl Harbor.

  “I think I can assure you that you won’t have to wait much longer,” Pierre informed him, with a superior and confident smile. “And what may surprise you is that you already know her.”

  And know her Ron certainly did, though not well, as she was more than a decade younger than the two cousins. Isabel Grantley was a stepcousin of theirs, being the daughter by her first husband of Letitia Carnochan, widow of Benson Carnochan, cousin of Sam and David, and son of the late Bruce and the still-living Ada, the oil heiress. And as Benson had left no children of his own/and his mother regarded her stepgranddaughter with a favorable eye, Isabel might find herself one day possessed of more than the “competent dowry” that Pierre had once taken for granted in his envisioned consort.

  Isabel had dazzled the world as a much-publicized debutante, with her large, mysteriously smiling dark eyes, her smooth pale skin, and her raven black hair. Her dress was impeccably expensive, her motion graceful and flowing, and she radiated a mild, oddly shy friendliness. Her smiles went everywhere, like those of Browning’s last duchess, the envious commented, and she was bound to arouse envy, particularly, of course, among those of her own sex. These would also point out that, though she had the undoubted gift of making a striking opening remark, she could never seem to follow it up. But who cared? Her silence was charming.

  To Pierre, anyway, she seemed the epitome of all he had been looking for. And the bluebird, as Maeterlinck had predicted in his play, had been found at home, in a Carnochan nest! Early in their relationship, though after it had graduated from cousinly chats at family gatherings to dating, but still prior to the birth of sentiment, Pierre had introduced her to a playful conversational game in which they discussed what they would do if they were married.

  “I believe in disciplining children,” he told her once with mock severity. “Sternness tempered with love. Never threaten a punishment which you fail to impose if the occasion calls for it. And never allow children to pass the hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party, shoving plates every minute at the poor guests and expecting to be cajoled. And never talk about your children when you go out. Only bores do that.”

  “I was never allowed to attend one of Mother’s parties, much less pass anything,” Isabel responded, with a definite wistfulness.

  “Do you know something, Isabel? I don’t think your mother really likes children. More mothers don’t than you might suspect.”

  “Oh, I can suspect it.”

  “Of course, I didn’t mean to imply that your mother doesn’t like you. Don’t misunderstand me.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Everyone likes you, naturally. How can they help it?”

  “Well, they seem to.”

  “Certainly, Aunt Ada does. She raves about you.”

  “Oh, Granny’s all right.”

  The girl had certainly her baffling side. She seemed perfectly content to go out with him, but it was as if she somehow felt that the family connection guarded her from any alteration of the tempo of their relationship and as if she derived a certain comfort from this security. Nor did she go out, so far as he could make out, with other men, despite every opportunity, with the exception of a few old boy friends whom she had known from childhood and with whom she seemed to enjoy a joking and apparently sexless congeniality. He had a curious sense that neither the future nor the past had much meaning to her; she could only just cope with the present.

  What he had not known and was only gradually beginning to suspect was that Isabel had grown up without parental love. Her father, an amiable and irresponsible alcoholic, married for such money as she had mistakenly thought he had by the icy Letitia, had been early shed and disappeared to the Orient. Her mother had finally found the money and security she craved in her marriage to the bland and dull Benson Carnochan, who was too stubborn to be dominated by her and too inwardly directed to be more than numbly conscious of her bad temper, and the match had more or less worked out, each learning to leave the other alone as much as possible.

  A handsome woman herself, Letitia had been gratified by Isabel’s beauty, and had used her excellent taste to see that her daughter was well turned out and put forward, but she had little heart and saw Isabel as she saw the interiors of her houses, as something to be “done up.” She didn’t even try to conceal her disappointment that Isabel lacked her own biting intelligence and constantly threw her impatience at what she regarded as the poor girl’s stupidity in her face. She saw that marriage was the only way to dispose of her and deplored Isabel’s lack of interest in beaux. Finally, she decided that what struck her as Pierre’s “God-given” interest in her was what might save the day.

  “For heaven’s sake, can’t you perk up a bit when you go out with him?” she cautioned Isabel. “Anyone can see that you have him hooked, though God knows why. A girl with your looks doesn’t have to do much, but she has to do something.”

  “But I’m not sure I even want to get married.”

  “I’d like to know what else you think you can do with yourself.”

  “Maybe I can get a job or something. Lots of girls do.”

  “Lots of girls are trained fo
r something. What are you trained for? You can’t even count your trumps in a bridge game.”

  “Oh, Mummy, please! You’re hurting my feelings.”

  “It’s for your own good, my girl. I know what I’m doing. Didn’t I marry a Carnochan myself? It wasn’t a bad solution, even with Benson, and with Pierre it could possibly be brilliant. And if you don’t mess things up with my old bitch of a motherin-law, she may do handsomely by you. I know men like Pierre. They may be hard to live with if they don’t get what they want, but they’re fine enough husbands when they do. And he will get you, if you’ll only play your cards right. You and he can go to the top of the world together. My God, when I think what I could have done with your opportunities! I guess it’s true that God sends manna to those who have no teeth.”

  “But, Mummy, suppose I don’t want to go to the top of the world!”

  Letitia sighed deeply. “Then you’re a fool.”

  The only person in the family whom Isabel could talk to heart to heart was her stepfather’s mother, Ada Carnochan. This small, plain, dignified, and outspoken old lady, who despite her kindness would put up with no nonsense and was inclined to sniff at the oily manners excited by her large fortune, had early sensed that Isabel used her beauty to shield herself from people’s discovering what she feared was her lack of other assets. To cope with her stepgranddaughter’s problem, she spent more time with the girl than with her actual grandchildren, who, however affectionate, needed her less. Isabel, indeed, had become her favorite.

  “But how do you yourself really feel about Pierre?” she wanted to know, when Isabel told her of her mother’s bludgeoning. “Do you love him? Or could you love him? If we’re going to talk about this at all, we may as well get down to basics.”

  “Well, he’s nice to be with, you know. Really very nice. He’s so smart and funny.”