East Side Story Page 15

  The subject of the thesis was English Restoration comedy, as exemplified in the plays of Congreve, Wycherley, and Vanbrugh. The following quotation expresses the kernel of Jaime’s thought:

  It was an age of true enlightenment. The religions of the world, before and after it, have shrouded the natural joys of sexual gratification, granted us perhaps by a remorseful demiurge to compensate us for the manifold errors of creation, in a dark mist of fear and sin. Tragedians have written eloquently of the agonies associated with great passions; dramatists have used jealousy as the basis of half their plots, and ultimately Proust equated it with love itself. But for a brief era of glittering sunlight the immortal Congreve and his fellows had the genius to assign all this to the dustbin. His heroes, those superb, utterly self-confident, magnificently strutting bucks, are intent on gratifying each passing fancy that assails them. To them the rantings of a pantaloon husband or the snivelings of an abandoned mistress are simply comic. Is that heartlessness? The pantaloon had no right to expect fidelity from his much younger spouse, and the reproachful mistress would soon enough console herself. Too much, far too much has been made through the ages to justify, or even to glorify, the greedy possessiveness of men and women who should be grateful for even the temporary affection of their more attractive mates. Congreve taught us that if you take the gravity out of sex, you may also take the pain. So what have we lost?

  Tetine, born Smiley, the daughter of a reasonably prosperous dentist whose patients had been largely fellow residents of the affluent but unfashionable Riverside Drive section of Manhattan, had entered the Carnochan clan more through her own seeking than theirs. Not that they didn’t like her, but they certainly hadn’t gone after her, and had any male member other than the amiable but hardly promising Andy courted her, there might have been some sharp objection. Who were the Smileys, anyway? The West Side and a dentist? Really! Weren’t they probably Jewish? And had changed the name from Smilkstein?

  Actually they weren’t and hadn’t. Tetine from the start had known exactly what her in-laws might surmise and how to handle them. She was the essence of tact. Though not endowed with beauty—she was slight of build, with an oval face and a nose a touch too long—she had wonderfully expressive, greenish-brown eyes and a wit that could put a man gently in his place without hurting. From childhood she had been, as her family and all the neighbors had put it, “bright as a button,” and her father had not hesitated to send her to Barnard College in 1910, a time when many parents still regarded a daughter’s education concluded at eighteen. Graduating, she had worked for a spell on a fashion magazine, but once she had taken in the new world around her, she had decided that marriage was still the surest path for a woman’s advancement.

  But the young Tetine was never charged with the lack of heart that so many would later ascribe to her firstborn, nor was she ever crudely ambitious. She always made a point of this in her silent sessions of self-appraisal. To attract the sort of man she wanted she might have been a bit short on sexual allure, but she knew well how to use the equal asset of a lively and resourceful mind. Always an astute observer, she had noted in her magazine work the difference between fashionable society and her own family’s milieu, and she had modeled herself successfully on the more restrained and disciplined ladies of the former, as exemplified by her charming and capable editor in chief. She was very clear in her own mind about the environment in which she would choose to live.

  All of which did not have to entail any condescension toward her own home. She was perfectly aware, for example, that her mother, quite unlike her modest, hardworking, and docile father, was too stout, too dressy, too trivial, too pushy; in short, that she was patently vulgar and a hindrance to a daughter’s entry into any society more select than her own. Yet she still loved her mother, and chose to think of herself as an Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, seeing her female parent through Darcy’s gimlet eyes but never wavering in her family loyalty and support. And so it would be with any man she was lucky enough to catch as a mate. The husband who pulled her up would be pulled up himself. She would work to make the best of any male material she had to hand.

  Her chance came when an aunt, a sister of her father who had made a fortunate match with the owner of a large hotel, took her on a lavish summer tour of Europe, partly for her amusing company and partly to act as a friend and companion for the aunt’s crippled daughter, a polio victim. They crossed the Atlantic on the White Star liner Boadicea, of course first class, and Tetine and the cousin, who was both charming and lovable in her pitiable state, found themselves widely cultivated by sympathetic passengers. The ocean was a great mixer, and the two flanking sides of Central Park, the untouchable West and the snooty East, aided by the brisk sea air and the tumbling billows, came together in a third world where apparently the twain could meet.

  Coming up from cabin class, where even rich young bachelors were apt to be quartered, knowing full well that they would be always welcomed above, were three young Carnochans, two brothers and a cousin, traveling together for a bicycle tour of France. Two were law students, David and Gordon, the third, Andy, a broker, and the trio were soon the center of the younger set on board and regular guests for cocktails in Tetine’s aunt’s commodious suite.

  She found Gordon the most attractive of the three; he was the handsomest and quietest, and his shy good manners had considerable charm. But it did not take her long to elicit from his franker and noisier cousin Andy that his heart was wholly possessed by a young lady in New York. David, the evident leader of the group, she instantly assessed as a snob who would never take seriously a girl who lived on Riverside Drive, however much his rather aggressive twinkling might open the door to less binding attachments. There remained Andy, to whom she turned her principal attention.

  Large, portly, very friendly and gregarious, merrily loud and rather too much the “life of the party,” Andy, with his blond hair and laughing blue eyes, might have been almost handsome had he lost thirty pounds. He was certainly the intellectual inferior of his brother and cousin, and Tetine gathered that he had not been able to get into Harvard Law, but he was nobody’s fool, and she suspected early that he knew more about what was going on around him than he cared to let on. If he was dominated by his brother David, it was in part because he chose to be. He recognized the elder’s superior brain, but saw no reason to be humbled by it. On the contrary, he probably expected to profit by it. Andy, for all his joking self-depreciation, was somebody in his own right.

  He liked to circle the great vessel on her top deck every morning for some twenty rounds, and he invited Tetine to accompany him, to which she cheerfully agreed. With his hearty male egotism he would regale her with stories about himself and his doings, providing so much of his own laughter that she hadn’t to do more than smile in return, and rarely intruding on any province of her own presumably less interesting life. But she found herself enjoying his buoyancy in the shining sunlight and against the infinite blue of a benign Atlantic. And at last he did favor her with a few personal inquiries and showed himself frankly amused at the information of her place of residence and her father’s profession.

  “A dentist!” he exclaimed in mock dismay. “And a West Side dentist at that! Tell it not in Gath! At least not while King David is within earshot.”

  “He’d disapprove?”

  “Oh, David rolls up the windows of his car if he’s driving on the West Side, north of Central Park. The air, as he puts it, is malsain. And as for the noble medical practice of your revered sire, to him your old man might as well be an undertaker.”

  “Do East Siders have no teeth? And can they compare the paltry stream that abuts their shore with the mighty Hudson?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, dear girl,” he hastened to reassure her. “I have no such idiotic hang-ups. We’re speaking now of my more elegant sibling. To David the number of places where a so-called gentleman can reside and the number of professions in which he may engage are strictly limited.”r />
  “And you’re not ashamed to be seen on deck with a dentist’s daughter? Or is that the reason you take me to this less-frequented one?”

  “On the contrary, it is to spare you from being seen on such cozy terms with a cabin-class passenger,” he retorted with a broad smile, and actually put an arm around her waist. “But to be serious for a moment, Tetine,” he continued as she gently disengaged herself, “the only reason I couldn’t be a dentist is that I’m not smart enough. People make fools of themselves over what is fashionable and what isn’t. Have you ever been to Newport? We go there for a week every summer to stay with Granny Carnochan, who has a quaint old house on Washington Street overlooking the harbor in a dear old district that is no longer fashionable. So to swim we go all the way to Bailey’s Beach to get our noses full of the smell of garbage dumped from passing barges and our toes nipped by crabs in the most miserable stretch of sand on the East Coast. But would we be seen dead on the public beach, not only more available and less crowded, but boasting clean sand and pure water? Never! Perish the thought.”

  “And these arbitrary standards are carried over to New York?”

  “Of course. How can anyone compare the splendid sweep of the West Side and the glory of the Hudson with a neighborhood huddled by the smelly East River? No, as the French say, Il faut souffrir pour être belle, and belle to my family means the least attractive area of Manhattan. Yes, I note your moue. My Gallic accent leaves something to be desired.”

  “Your accent is just fine by me,” she assured him, and did not resist the hug with which he now encircled her. “And I’m glad that you’re not governed by your brother’s strictures.”

  “Oh, David’s all right,” he conceded, releasing her. “David has a few quirks, but he’s always someone to be reckoned with. David is going places in this life.”

  “And aren’t you?”

  “Well, maybe not quite the same ones. Not as grand, perhaps.”

  “Oh, you’ll be all right.”

  And indeed, she was beginning to see that he really would. She thought she could already make out the kind of man he would be: one who knew instinctively how to use his social contacts and his easy popularity so as to minimize his lack of drive or ingenuity. She saw him holding forth cheerily to a group of amused men in club bars, in locker rooms, at dining-room tables after the ladies had retreated, and, downtown, rising to some trusted post in a bank or brokerage house, never the top, but generating a good income. Quite as important, she fancied that she could discern, behind the bluff of his off-color jokes and the barely concealed lubricity of his views on the relationship of the sexes, a fundamental kindness and decency. Andy, she decided, would not make a bad husband at all, certainly as good a one as she would be a wife. For although she didn’t go so far as to think she could “civilize” him, she could certainly help him by keeping him under control as he grew older, fatter, and cruder. Which men like him were only too apt to do.

  The crossing of the Atlantic took only six days, but by the time they docked in Le Havre, Andy was showing her serious attention. He had evidently the rare sense to see that this smart and vivacious young woman might have just the qualities needed to complement his own, so that between them they should be able to tackle just about any problem that was apt to confront them in the kind of life they were presumably destined to lead.

  Nothing more committing was said on this trip, but when they found themselves back in New York, Andy became a regular caller on Riverside Drive, and in the following spring they became engaged. Louisa Carnochan accepted this new daughter-in-law with tempered enthusiasm; she had hardly anticipated that the rollicking Andy would choose so sober and intellectual a bride and had been apprehensive of one of a decidedly different nature. The family was quickly unanimous in its decision to make the best of her. The only relative whose welcome was a bit distasteful to Tetine was David. She hardly relished the obvious inference that she was probably the best that he could expect poor Andy to do.

  Their marriage turned out a good deal as she supposed it would. But not entirely. Andy was a kind and faithful husband, and for a long time he earned a sufficient income on Wall Street as a stockbroker. And Tetine fitted easily enough into the fashionable East Side social life that she had wanted to join; to the faultlessly behaving member of a solidly established clan all doors were open. But there was one thing she had not counted on. She found that she was bored. She was careful not to show it, but there it was. The life that seemed so completely to satisfy her sisters-in-law was not enough for her. She had hoped that maternity might distract her, but for three years it didn’t come. When it did, however, with Jaime, another life began for her, and she was determined to make the most of it.

  He was very much her child from the start. He had her oval face and longish nose, and his eyes had that quizzical appraising stare that was apt to be followed by a little hoot of infectious laughter. He was witty at an early age, acutely sharp, but not malicious; the world to him seemed a joke that never ceased to amuse. But where she divined their difference was that he had much more charm, an irresistible charm, particularly, as he grew older, to women. He was not handsome, at least in a silent-movie-star way, but his pointed features and tangled auburn hair had the curious attraction of an oddly beneficent and slightly ruffled sparrow hawk whose beak and claws offered no threat. Above all, he was bright, bright as that proverbial button to which she herself had been compared.

  He was everything to her, and he knew it, and she knew that this was not altogether a good thing. He had captivated and rendered impotent the parent who should have been his guide. In somewhat the same way he handled resistant forces in the highway of life: governesses, schoolteachers, rival boys, and, as he matured, critics of his lighthearted epicureanism. No name-calling could shatter the steel wall of his stubborn amiability. He seemed always to get his way, to succeed in doing the thing he most wanted to do. And, most baffling of all, he gave her the impression of knowing that nobody really understood him but herself, which might have been why he kept even their most intimate talks on a keel of light persiflage, as if they both understood that anything more serious might open the door to disconcerting disclosures. There were things, evidently, that even he was not anxious to face.

  That he also thoroughly understood his father was shown in how deftly he handled the latter. He would roar with seemingly genuine laughter at oft-repeated paternal jokes and cap them with better ones that would elicit genuine roars from the delighted Andy, who could deny him nothing and spoiled him outrageously. Jaime flattered him to death by treating him as a totally congenial contemporary whose company he preferred to that of his schoolmates. They would plan little ruses together, as when, at Chelton School, Jaime, then a fifth-former and chapel usher, handed the collection plate to his father seated by the aisle and the latter calmly placed it in his lap, removed a number of bills, and solemnly returned the platter to his impassive son. The astonished and scandalized witnesses would learn later, of course, that the bills had been duly returned.

  Yale and girls brought complications to Jaime’s life, for his idea of a “date” was a good deal more sophisticated in the early 1930s than it would later become. It was only because the outraged parents of one impregnated debutante dreaded an open scandal that they held their tongues and consented to a secret abortion. Tetine, to whom an at last temporarily troubled son made a full confession—his father never knew—gave him what his old Irish nurse used to call “the length and breadth of her tongue” for the first time in their relationship, but she had little hope that he would reform his ways.

  She pinned her feeble hopes for a less tumultuous life on his making an early marriage, which he did. Graduating from Yale, he took a job with the famous advertising agency Ross and Codman, which seemed the ideal opening for one of his facile and ingenious talents, and he was soon courting the beautiful Lila, daughter of the powerful head of the firm, Alton Ross.

  “You’re planning to marry her, I hope?”
Tetine demanded of Jaime when he stopped by, as he often did after work, to share a cocktail with her. He had his own apartment now, and she knew only too well why.

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?”

  “Not, I hope, because of anything you’ve done.”

  “Of course not. Mothers have dirty minds, I’m afraid. No, it’s because of what I want to do.”

  “You relieve me.”

  “Mother! You don’t think I’d seduce the boss’s daughter, do you? It would cost me my job!”

  “Or get you a promotion. Isn’t the son-in-law the natural heir of the American tycoon? The son too often goes to the dogs.”

  “Will you be pleased if I bring you a princess for a daughter-in-law? A commercial princess, anyway.”

  “Only if you promise to be a good and faithful prince.”

  “You do ask rather a lot. What do you give in return?”

  “My blessing.”

  “And I, poor fool, thought I could count on that in any event! But I see that a mother crossed may become the wicked fairy godmother. Had you known what I might become, would you have tossed a curse into my cradle?”

  “Much good it would have done me. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “What it means, dear heart, is that I’m very much afraid that whatever you do, you’ll get away with.”

  “That’s my lucky card, is it?”

  “You beg the question.”

  Jaime married Lila Ross at a big church wedding, followed by a bigger reception on the St. Regis Roof, to the plaudits of all concerned. Two children were born to the couple in the first three years of their union, and Jaime’s first adultery, or at least the first of which anyone had any notice, did not occur until their fourth anniversary. He then had an affair with the wife of a Yale classmate who had been best man at his wedding, Gilbert Warren, a sober, serious, high-minded lawyer who deemed it his duty to think the best of all his friends, even Jaime. When his wife, Eugenie, exasperated at the fatuity of his seemingly willful blindness, actually threw her guilt in his face, he solemnly suggested a conference between the two couples to discuss the situation and its possible solutions in a thoroughly modern and scientific fashion. Lila and Eugenie reluctantly and resentfully agreed, but the meeting came to an explosive finale when Jaime, straight-faced, calmly put on the table the suggestion that the air might be cleared of its thunder if his wife and Gilbert would first conduct an affair of their own.