East Side Story Read online

  When Ronny was only twelve, he actually intervened in a dispute between his father and his maternal grandfather at a Sunday family lunch. Grandpa Carter was the only person who could prevail over David even in the latter’s own home. The issue discussed was David’s plan to send Ronny the following fall to Chelton, the Massachusetts boarding school that he and his cousins had attended and which was still under the administration of the same veteran headmaster, Dr. Nickerson, who had taught them.

  Mr. Carter was in the habit of taking positions opposed to those of his family, sometimes in order to stimulate them to new ideas and sometimes simply to irritate them, but in neither case did it keep him from waxing violent.

  “Of course, we all know that the only real value of the New England private schools is what they can do for a stupid student. With their big endowments and fancy faculties they are in a unique position to pay attention to backward boys. The glory of Chelton is that it was probably the only academy that could have got my friend Cabot Storey’s moron grandson into Harvard. But they can hardly boast about that, can they? And why does Ronny here need Chelton? Isn’t he already at the top of his class at Buckley?”

  “Isn’t it a proper thing, Mr. Carter,” David demanded, a bit testily, “for me to want the best education going for my son?”

  “Pooh. Boys like Ronny educate themselves. I know I did, and I believe you did. All we needed was the books. The good teachers know that. They know that boys like Ronny are the sort out of whose way you have to get. The odd thing is that all those expensive private schools are hell-bent to get just the students who don’t need them. They want to exclude the only ones they can really help. But then, we know it’s a cockeyed world.”

  “How do you explain, then, that practically everyone you know is doing their damnedest to get their sons into schools like Chelton?”

  “Very easily. Because they’re all after another thing those schools do offer, and that is not just education. How many fathers in Wall Street give a hoot in hell about cultivation? Not many, as I’m sure you’ll admit, David. They want to send their sons to the schools and colleges where they will make the friends most valuable to them in the financial world of the future. That’s the system, and it works, too. You and I, my dear David, have seen many examples of just how smoothly it works. But Ronny’s already in that world, thanks to your efforts. Thanks even a bit to my own.”

  “I think you grossly underestimate, sir, the effect on a fine mind like Ronny’s of really first-class teachers.”

  Ronny could see now that his father was becoming really upset. He knew how carefully his parent had laid all his plans for his son’s future, and that it was truly painful for him to hear Mr. Carter disillusioning his child. Ronny felt it suddenly incumbent on himself to reassure his sire.

  “But, Grandpa,” he interposed tactfully, “if I don’t go to Chelton, I’ll have to change to another school in the city. Buckley doesn’t take us through to college. And many of my friends are going to Chelton. I should miss them.”

  “Oh, Chelton isn’t going to do you any harm, my boy,” Carter said with a sarcastic smile. “I know old Nickerson. He’s not what I’d call an intellectual man, and he thinks he talks to Jesus, but he means very well. As they say in England, a gentleman needn’t know Latin, but he must have forgotten it. Your son is quite safe, David. Even if he doesn’t go to Chelton, everyone will think he has.”

  “Oh, Father, you’re hopeless,” Ronny’s mother now exclaimed. “You make fun of everything.”

  And with this, the little dispute was terminated, but Ronny appreciated his father’s grateful glance. It marked the beginning, not of their mutual love, which had existed all along, but of an alliance in which the son was beginning to realize that he was destined to play an important supporting role, and that his whole heart would go into playing it. For nobody understood his father as he did!

  Ronny’s entry into the life of Chelton School was eased by his being accompanied by so many of his pals from their day school in New York. They even formed a little clique in which they could stand together against the trials of being “new kids.” And then the school itself was a kind of extension of the family; more than half his form mates were the sons of graduates who were even more in awe of the headmaster than their parents were. The panels in the main hall listing the alumni bore the names of several Carnochans. And the shining red brick and white columns of the buildings gracefully spaced around the emerald green of the circular lawn opening on the full beauty of a New England rustic fall lent a welcome even to the boy least sensitive to scenery. Add to this that Ronny’s father was an active trustee of the institution, often consulted by the headmaster himself.

  Ronny, as he grew into his teens, was too smart not to be aware that all the world did not see Chelton as he and his father did. The father of Tony Gates, his closest friend there, though a graduate and classmate of Ronny’s father, had been the enfant terrible of an ancient Boston family, and he still enjoyed being blasphemous about his alma mater when he came up to visit his son and took him and Ronny out to supper at a local inn. His diatribes would go something like this:

  “If Dr. Nickerson had been the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he wouldn’t merely have exiled the sainted Anne Hutchinson for her antinomian views, he’d probably have hanged her! Like John Winthrop, he’d have fled religious intolerance at home to establish his own version of it on the rocky coast of New England. Is there a single Jewish boy in Chelton? And how many Catholics?”

  “But we’re a church school, Mr. Gates,” Ronny pointed out. “Jews have their own, don’t they?”

  “What about the many who have converted?”

  “Dr. Nickerson says they did so for social reasons. Which doesn’t make them true Christians.”

  Mr. Gates’s laugh was as big and noisy as himself. “I love it! Nickerson wouldn’t have even let in Saint Paul!”

  “And we have several Catholic boys, sir.”

  “Yes, but not many. And they still have to attend the chapel services, do they not?”

  “Yes, but they can go to early Mass in the village.”

  “With the chambermaids in the school bus! I remember that from my own days. Oh, my dear young Ronald, I see you’ve been brainwashed. That’s why I come here so often to visit my Tony.” Here he gripped his son’s shoulder. “To see that he gets at least a glimmer of other points of view. After all, no matter what walls we raise around our precious youngsters, they’re bound one day to have some contact with the great unwashed.”

  But Ronny was far from being brainwashed. He saw perfectly that, for all his free thinking, Mr. Gates had taken care to send all his three sons to Chelton. Whatever it was that the school offered, it was evidently something that made up in Mr. Gates’s mind for religious intolerance. Ronny also saw that Chelton and its headmaster stood sincerely for the principal virtues: honesty, courage, chastity, industry, cleanliness, patriotism, moderation in satisfying natural appetites, and gentlemanly good conduct. What was wrong with that? The school might draw its students from a limited social stratum, but that was because the headmaster had cared deeply for the small group of families that, fifty years before, had helped him create his then exiguous academy, and he had ever since favored the sons of his graduates. And if fewer of his boys went into the church or public service than he had hoped, was it not because, as President Coolidge had stated, the main business of America was business?

  When Ronny’s father came to the school—and his fiduciary duties as well as his paternal concern made such visits frequent—Ronny asked him how best to answer Mr. Gates’s onslaughts.

  “Ted Gates has always made a thing out of being a rebel against the status quo. It’s jealousy, pure and simple. Even at school he was bitter about not being made a prefect. And he’s never succeeded in anything. He may take potshots at old Boston, but he hasn’t rejected the comfortable trust fund that keeps him, and you won’t find him spending a summer in any place less fashiona
ble than Nahant. He’s the kind of liberal who is concerned only with tearing down those above him, never with raising up those below. You’ll find a lot of men like that in life, I’m afraid, my boy. Ignore them.”

  Ronny took this advice very much to heart. He tended now to see critics of his school, like those of his father’s great law firm, as wantonly destructive agents, gnawing away at pillars that were just strong enough to keep society from the ever-present danger of crumbling to pieces. The few boys in his form who sneered openly at such evangelical hymns as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” were apt, he suspected, to contain a nasty streak in their nature; he compared them to the Red Soviet guards who had butchered the lovely young grand duchesses in that cellar in Ekaterinburg. There wasn’t enough good in the world to permit the smearing of what little there was. Life would be a fight to preserve that good. But it would be a brave fight. He even began to wonder if brave fights were not what life was all about.

  He lacked the physical bulk to be a star at football, but he was adequate at other sports, and he became editor in chief of the school magazine, a prefect, and president of the Dramatic Society. Shakespeare’s Henry V was chosen for the annual school play in his last year, and he learned by heart every one of the ringing orations of the warrior king, imploring the master who directed the drama not to cut a line of them. It was generally agreed among the boys, faculty, and visiting parents that his performance was a sterling one.

  Certainly he had put his whole heart into the part. The spirit of the conquering monarch thrilled him.

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered,

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he, today that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition:

  And gentlemen in England now abed

  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks

  That fought with us upon St. Crispin’s day.

  When Tony Gates’s critical sire had come up from Boston to watch his boy play Fluellen at a rehearsal and had taken him and Ronny out for supper, he offered the argument that the play contained Shakespeare’s hidden pacifism and that King Henry’s seizing on an abstruse dynastic claim for the French crown had been only the bald excuse for his arrant imperialism.

  “But he sincerely believed in his claim,” Ronny had protested, almost passionately. “However abstruse later commentators may have deemed it, he was truly convinced that God wanted him to become King of France and that the war was sanctioned from heaven! And anyway, the play contains some of the greatest poetry ever written about man’s courage to fight for what he deems right!”

  “Let’s hope, then, that life will give you such a chance, my boy” was Mr. Gates’s rather grim answer to this.

  “Amen, sir.”

  Ronny became something of a favorite of the aging headmaster, and Dr. Nickerson actually consulted him from time to time on matters of discipline. On one occasion, Nickerson summoned him to his study to ask him why more boys did not attend holy communion, which, of course, unlike other chapel services, was strictly optional.

  “I haven’t really heard it discussed, sir,” he answered gravely. “But I do know that one boy’s mother objected to his drinking from the same cup used by others.”

  The headmaster shook his great bald head with equal gravity. “But doesn’t she know that it’s optional to dip the wafer in the cup and consume the wine that way?”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t think that’s quite enough.”

  “Anyway, I always give the edge of the cup a good strong wipe with the napkin after each use.”

  Ronny might have pointed out that this might be less than the sterilization required by a worried mother, but respect sealed his lips. And something else. For he knew that the “strong wipe” was only a concession to the weak in faith. Dr. Nickerson had not the slightest doubt that no germ could be transmitted in the celebration of a sacrament. His faith was the rock on which his school and his life had been founded. Whatever doubts might assail so frail a vessel as Ronald Carnochan, it was not his function to shake that rock. And, anyway, it could not be shaken.

  Ronny’s transition to Yale was even easier than his transition to Chelton. One half of the Chelton graduating class went with him to New Haven; the other half, minus one to Princeton, matriculated at Harvard. But Ronny was at first determined not to be sheltered in a “prep-school crowd”; he dreaded the aridity of social snobbery which he knew infected the Ivy League colleges. Snobbery had existed, it was true, at Chelton: rich boys for poor ones, athletes for the unathletic, even bright students for the stupid, but there had been no “class” distinctions. The millionaire father of one boy might have been the college roommate of another’s bankrupt parent, and the mothers of both might have been debutantes together. Yale offered Ronny the opportunity of meeting men from all over the country and from widely varying backgrounds, and in his first two years there he made some successful efforts to extend the circle of his acquaintance, but the prep-school men who dominated his class and who included some of its most attractive members welcomed him so warmly that it was hard indeed to resist their encompassing embrace.

  Yet even as late as Tap Day in the spring of his junior year Ronny was not sure that he would accept the bid from Bulldog which it had been strongly hinted that he would receive. He wanted to make one gesture of protest against the enveloping mold. It was his roommate, Tony Gates, whose own essential conservatism had received its one and only blow in his having chosen, to irritate a too pushy father, Yale over the ancestral Harvard, who argued him out of it. They had sat up late on the eve of Tap Day discussing their options.

  “The whole white Protestant Anglo-Saxon world is going to disappear,” Tony observed complacently. “Our rule is over. The gentleman will become as extinct as the dodo. The private clubs and schools, the restricted summer re-sorts, the stock exchange, even the debutante parties will be taken over by Jews and Catholics and Irish and Latins, to leave not a wrack behind. But, God, are we going to be missed! A world without Scott Fitzgerald or Noël Coward or even Hemingway! A world without Cary Grant! But let us at least go out in a splendid twilight of the gods. Let us show that our Ivy League still has ivy! Let us make it a great year for Bulldog!”

  “Really, Tony, you sound too utterly 1918. Wasn’t that all said about Rupert Brooke and his sacrificed generation?”

  “It is true that the mortal wound was given us in the Somme and the Marne. We can only play the last act with style.”

  “You’re being trivial, my friend. We’re not nearly done for. There’s plenty of leadership and courage and honesty still in Wall Street. You’ll see! Men like my father and his law partners not only still stand for something. They’re willing to fight for it!”

  Tony’s silence might have betrayed a somewhat different view of what his roommate’s father stood for. When he spoke, however, it was to use the name of David Carnochan to back his essential point.

  “What your father really stands for is Bulldog. He will simply expire if you reject their bid.”

  And Ronny had reluctantly to admit that this was true. His hands were tied. He went to bed for a sleepless night, and the following afternoon he and Tony stood in the Branford Quadrangle to receive the shoulder taps from Bulldog and run obediently to their room to be initiated.

  Furthermore, they both had a happy senior year.

  Ronny, however, had been utterly sincere in his stated belief that the world in which he had been raised contained vital elements of public leadership, and he was quick to note that in the rising public feeling against the Nazi rule in Germany the sentiment of his family and their friends and associates was very much ahead of popular opinion in its opposition to the British policy of appeasement. Indeed, he foun
d himself more and more absorbed by the dark drama of what Hider was bringing to Europe. He read every article he could find on the suppression of human decency in Germany and Italy. But it was not entirely with a dirge in his heart that he read of each new horror, each new violation of the most basic principles of humanity. It seemed to him that matters were bound to come to an issue, and to a global issue at that, and that it would be a glorious thing to fight, even to perish, in the final struggle against the forces of evil. If the kind of society to which he belonged was really doomed, how fine it would be to go down, not in foolish merriment such as his friend Tony had seemed to suggest, but heroically!

  Ronny had always felt at ease with his father’s first cousin, Gordon Carnochan, whose mind he found congenial and whose gentle character, attractive. It was Cousin Gordon who, visiting New Haven for a Bulldog dinner, had alerted Ronny to the criticism his father was incurring in downtown New York for not giving up certain German corporate clients who importantly supported the Nazi regime.

  “Our younger partners are particularly disturbed by it,” Gordon told him. “I’ve spoken to your pa about it, of course, but I can get nowhere with him. He might listen to you.”

  Ronny did not wait. On the very next day, a Sunday, he took the train for New York, and on Monday he lunched with his father at the Downtown Association. He went straight to the point. His father gave vent to his irritation.

  “Gordon’s been after you, hasn’t he?”

  “Daddy, it doesn’t matter who’s been after me. The point is that I’ve heard that you continue to represent these evil men. If you don’t, please relieve my mind.”

  “I represent the two firms you have mentioned, yes. That is, I represent them insofar as they have business relations with American companies. I have nothing to do with what they do or don’t do abroad or in Germany. I do not regard it as my duty to inquire as to what may be their politics at home. And I can assure you that working on their contracts in New York does not align me in any way with supporting how they may be violating human rights or persecuting Jews in Europe. I mind my own business, my boy, and I advise you to mind yours.”