East Side Story Page 2

  The disasters that followed Bull Run darkened the next two years and ultimately necessitated the draft, which brought on the major decision of my life. For my health had gone as well as the war had gone badly; my asthma attacks had virtually ceased. It was evident that if I were to avoid military service, it would have to be through an official exemption, for I knew that I would rather die than submit my heroic brother Andrew, who had been severely wounded but had rejoined his regiment, to the humiliation of having two brothers who bought substitutes.

  Of course, Mother and Dr. Findlay were vigorously of the opinion that there could be no question of the army’s sending a sick “boy” (I was twenty) to perish on some freezing winter night in a Virginia campaign. If there was any question of my exemption not being promptly granted, they were prepared to appeal to the Secretary of the Army. But what attitude was I to take? For weeks I hovered miserably in indecision. And then something happened that induced me to request the exemption. I had another attack.

  Was it that? How the question agonized me! Even now, decades later, it hurts me to write it. But I have long faced the truth. There was an element of the willed in it. I was so familiar with the nature of such attacks that it could not have been difficult for my psyche to simulate one, particularly if so much as the ghost of a former onslaught were to assail me. I made the most of my symptoms, and so convinced Dr. Findlay, who accompanied me to my examination by the draft board, that he lost his temper at one of its members who questioned his diagnosis. The board accorded me the requested status, but I saw in the expression of the doubting member that he, for one, had not been convinced, and I hated him, for I knew in my heart that he was right.

  Anyway, it was done, and I pleased Father by telling him that I was now willing to enter Columbia Law School, from which I had so far been protected by Mother’s fearing that the hard dry study of the law might not sit with my nervous disposition. Father, counting on his two older sons to succeed him in his business, thought it would be well for them to have a family lawyer, and although his hopes for me were slender, he thought that my effete taste for literature might be strengthened by a dose of the cod-liver oil of law.

  But I had a different reason for choosing law. In a world at war the mood was masculine, and I had a nervous desire to merge myself as much as possible with a generation of young heroes, or at least not to stand out too harshly as not belonging to it. I think I was obsessed with the silly idea that lawyers were somehow more men than readers or writers, that I would, as a student of the profession, be more qualified to join in the brave chorus of “Glory, glory, alleluia!,” that I would be, despite my shameful civilian garb, more a part of the general uplift, which could be very contagious. Was law to me a kind of protective coloration? But from what was I really protecting myself? From myself, of course. For I didn’t really believe for a minute that anyone would see me as even remotely comparable to my gallantly fighting brother.

  My defenses may have been artificial, and indeed, they were not to last, but for a year they brought me the greatest, and perhaps the only real, happiness of my life. It was certainly not the law that brought this about. I attended the lectures and skimmed the cases, but without any real attention or without the least anticipation of ever being admitted to the bar. My big brown notebook was filled not with summaries of statutes and court decisions but with the scribbled manuscript of the romantic historical novel of the American Revolution that I was intent on composing, whose hero, of course, was a fervid Yankee and whose heroine a haughty Brit. When I opened its pages, the terrible Battle of the Wilderness would fade away into a gray distance.

  But oh, the joy of that time, of those months, of those long, delectable afternoons when I was shut up in the dark, half-empty, overheated law school library, which excluded not only the war but my family: Father and Douglas and the sisters and even Mother, who in her daily tortured anxiety about Andrew had almost ceased to be concerned about my now quite sturdy health. I was alone, blessedly alone, accountable to no one, and I could hug to my heart my own little genius and cultivate the wild illusion that one day it might startle the literary world. For as I read over and over the seemingly mellifluous passages that flowed from my active pen, I treasured the notion that I was husbanding a talent of which future generations would have need, and that it would have been a sorry waste to let it perish with its possessor in the red dirt of Virginia. If I had done a wrong to myself and to my country in abstaining from battle, was I not making up for it in giving what I could to the future? The Carnochans would have produced more than just Father and Douglas; they would have produced me!

  My dreams were shattered by the news of Andrew’s death in the Wilderness Campaign, only months before Appomatox. Reading over the manuscript of my novel in the shadow of the shining monument that my agonized imagination immediately raised to his glory, I saw—unmistakably—what feeble stuff it was. And the gray shattered countenance of my mortally stricken mother, and even the new lines of sorrow on my father’s craggy features, convinced me that it was, after all, a world of men which had little but a mild pity for and, at best, a mild tolerance of such weaklings as myself. I suffered what would later be called a nervous breakdown, quit law school, abandoned my novel, and moped at home. Mother was almost lost to me in the deep night of her mourning, and Father treated me with an almost kindly acceptance, which was intended to disguise, I had little doubt, an essential indifference to a son who was evidently to be of little further use to him or his business, but who, like his several unmarried daughters, was as permanent a part of his home as the chairs and tables and prints of biblical scenes. He never said a word about my draft exemption, but I suspected that he smelled the fraud. It was devastating, and it remained so until he died, which both he and Mother did, within months of each other, in the year 1869.

  Their estates were divided evenly among their many offspring, and my share was just enough to maintain a decent bachelor’s existence. Eventually I resumed my writing and produced the three light historical romances whose small but steady sale through the years has given me the faintest trickle of literary renown. It will soon enough dry up. And the brave Andrew is quite forgotten. It is only through Douglas and his posterity that we survive. That would not in the least have surprised my eldest brother.

  Well, there it is. I leave this memorandum to young David in the mild hope that it may help him to understand the past. He is clever enough to glean what profit he can from its few pages without irritating the family by publishing them.

  2. ELIZA

  THE SUMMER OF 1905 was a high-water mark in the social and architectural history of Newport. The long line of birthday cake palazzos, seemingly products of a second Italian Renaissance, though one happily free of stilettos and poison, each standing proudly on a finely tended strip of green lawn as exiguous as its occupying edifice was huge, ran down Bellevue Avenue and the Cliff Walk in a glittering riot of marble never to be bettered. Maintenance was at its most perfect; there was not a stray leaf out of place. But there still survived an older Newport, an eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century town that bordered on Narragansett Bay rather than the Atlantic, with smaller, soberer, chaster homes, among which, on modest Washington Street, stood the simple wooden frame, high-gabled residence of Mrs. Eliza Dudley Carnochan, widow of Douglas, whose porticoed front porch faced the water over a neat little lawn and garden.

  Mrs. Carnochan was a small, plain, white-capped, black-garbed lady of nearly seventy, of the utmost respectability, whose large, drooping, but perceptive china blue eyes gazed not always benignly at what she evidently regarded as the tinselly aspects of such rich Johnny-come-latelies as the Vanderbilt clan. It was not that she scorned all the summer newcomers. But she picked and chose among them. She liked the staid, churchgoing Mrs. Alice Vanderbilt and called at the Breakers, but she avoided her imperious sister-in-law, Alva, and she would never have attended a party given by the flamboyant Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. Nor did she ever forget that she hailed
back to the pre-gilded age of a literary Newport, the summer home of Julia Ward Howe, of Thomas Higginson, of Longfellow, the Newport that had enchanted the young Henry James and whose meadows and rocky shores had been painted by John La Farge and Kensett. Eliza Carnochan numbered two colonial governors among her forebears. It was known that both her grandmothers had been Saltonstalls.

  She was essentially satisfied with the role which she knew had been assigned to her by her friends, neighbors, and many visiting descendants. She was to be the steadying force in a changing world, a gentle reminder—never a comminatory one—of the necessity of preserving some minimum of standards in manners and morals. Like the elderly and benevolent late Queen Victoria, reigning over the pomp of her far-flung empire and softening the mailed fist of the Raj, so did Eliza Carnochan remind the barons of steel and oil that money was not and could not be everything. In New York, of course, Eliza’s sober brownstone on West Fifty-seventh Street was dwarfed to nothing by the giant Vanderbilt copy of Blois on the Fifth Avenue corner, but in Newport, Washington Street was still recognized by the Breakers.

  Eliza, however, was not altogether inwardly what her outer self suggested. This did not mean, of course, that she didn’t firmly believe in decorum of manners, fidelity in marriage, decency in dress, and orderliness in one’s daily tasks and pleasures. She knew that wildness in men and women had to be restrained. But she had a vivid sense of the rages that went on within the soul of man and an equally vivid sense of the hypocrisies used to conceal them. She knew, in short, the cost of discipline and could sympathize with the pains of those who had subjected themselves to it—or who had tried to and failed. She regarded herself in this respect as a victor, but she never forgot how easily the struggle might have been lost. She never allowed herself to put out of her mind what no one in the world had ever known or even suspected: that there had been a time in her young life, before she married Douglas Carnochan, when she would have agreed to any proposition that his brother Andrew might have put to her, however illicit. And she gave herself no credit for the fact that he never had, and had never even thought of doing so.

  Her grandchildren visited her in the summer in turns, and she loved these visits, but she particularly relished those of David, one of her son James’s six boys, who, still in his teens, was planning to write up the family history, on which he exhaustively consulted her. David was very clever and perceptive, sometimes uncomfortably so, for he did her the honor of treating her as a human being as well as an ancestress, and was bold enough to voice his suspicion when she was holding something back. Eliza was aware that there was a side to this young man that might ultimately lead him into false pride and disregard of intellectual inferiors, but she could still delight in his wit and openness.

  David’s great-uncle and Eliza’s brother-in-law, bachelor Peter Carnochan, had just died, and among his effects had been the memorandum that David had earlier requested of him but never received. It was this memorandum that the two were now discussing on a veranda overlooking the bay.

  “Was Uncle Peter’s description of Great-grandpa Carnochan a true one?” David wanted to know. “Or was he simply inventing another character for one of his immortal tales?”

  “De mortuis,” Eliza warned him. “You mustn’t be sarcastic about your poor Uncle Peter’s fiction. We can’t all be Hawthornes. Let me answer your question this way. I recognize my father-in-law in Peter’s sketch of him.”

  “You mean it’s not the whole picture?”

  “It’s the whole picture of what he was to Peter. Peter had a motive for seeing his father as he depicted him.”

  “And that was?”

  “To justify his own failure in life. There! I’ve said it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but it’s true, and I don’t really think the truth, the real truth, can ever do much harm.”

  “Unless it’s the greatest harm of all! Look where it leaves Uncle Peter.”

  “But, my dear boy, look what harm withholding the truth would do to the memory of your great-grandpa.”

  “He wasn’t, then, a tyrant?”

  “Certainly not. He was a strict disciplinarian to his children when they were growing up, but he never laid a hand on them. And after they were grown, he never interfered with them at all. He was always a great one for minding his own business. I found him an easy father-in-law to get on with.”

  “Was it perhaps because he didn’t care that much about anyone?”

  “That could have been a part of it,” Eliza sturdily admitted.

  “Or did he think those who didn’t mind him would go to hell, and that was punishment enough?”

  “No, David, he thought no such thing! I don’t believe he ever speculated on the hereafter. The here and now was good enough for him. He did his duty, and that was that.”

  “What did he think of his sons, Peter and Grandpa, both not fighting in the war?”

  “He never spoke of it. At least I never heard him do so. I doubt that he thought it was any of his business. Peter was the one who fussed over the ethics of his claim for exemption. He lacked the fortitude to accept the weakness in his own disposition, and he let it ruin his life.”

  “You mean he couldn’t face his own cowardice?”

  “You’re very free with your terms, David.”

  “Perhaps I’m learning them from you. How did Grandpa feel about buying a substitute to fight for him?”

  “Oh, he was totally different from Peter. He felt that it was his duty to stay in a business that helped produce uniforms for the soldiers.”

  “And, besides, he became rich while his brother Andrew was lying dead in the Wilderness!”

  “David, be quiet!” Eliza rapped on the table by her big basket chair. Things were getting out of hand. “You must have more respect for the dead. Particularly your own grandfather!”

  “Oh, Grandma, don’t be like that, please! You’re the one member of the family I feel I can really talk to.”

  Eliza was a bit ashamed of how quickly this placated her. “Let us talk of these things, then, my dear, without stamping our post-mortem moral judgments on them.”

  “Very well. How would you have felt had you been an able-bodied, well-to-do young man, even in a war-supporting business and even with a family? Would you have paid some poor devil to fight for you, perhaps die for you?”

  “But I wasn’t such a man, David! You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Am I? Answer me, Grandma! I dare you.”

  After a pause, she heard her own reply surprisingly ring out. “No, I’d never have bought a substitute.”

  “Ah, you see!”

  “I see only what concerns myself. It doesn’t mean I condemn others. It certainly doesn’t mean I condemn my husband.”

  “No, but it shows whom you really admire. It was Uncle Andrew, wasn’t it? The slain Siegfried?”

  “We all admired Andrew, certainly. Who would not have?”

  “Dad says you were all in love with him! The whole family!”

  “David, if you’re going to go sailing, you’d better go now.”

  He left the porch reluctantly to amble down the pathway to the dock where the small family sailboat was moored. Eliza was relieved to be away from his penetrating stare. It was not that she had the least fear of disclosing matters so long and firmly locked in her heart, but she hated to have clumsy feet treading so near her secret garden.

  Settling back in her chair and allowing her gaze to roam over the bay, she had no need to be faced with the ancient photograph over the mantel in the front parlor to have it fixed in a mind which it never altogether deserted. It showed, sometime in 1863, a group of half a dozen Union officers of different rank and age in relaxed poses, some sitting, some standing, but all aware of the camera, on the stout-pillared portico of the Lee mansion in Arlington, presumably commandeered as an army officers’ club. It was somehow to be detected that all were veterans of combat; they had an air of gruff confidence, even a touch of something akin to defiance. Standing more
stiffly than the others to the left, one hand on his hip, with almost a scowl on his dark handsome countenance, was the obvious junior of the gathering, and his inclusion seemed to mark the special regard in which his elders held him. His gravity of expression might have been attributable to the grim sights to which his youth had already been exposed, but it was easy to infer how rapidly his near scowl would change into a charming grin should a pretty woman obtrude upon the scene. The setting, however, was too darkly masculine for any such possibility.

  Eliza had known Andrew Carnochan first in the summer of 1859, when his father, David, the emigrant, had moved his summer home from Staten Island to Newport at the behest of his eldest son, Douglas, who considered it a better address for business purposes. The Carnochans had rented a cottage near that of the Dudleys in Washington Street, and the children of the two families had rapidly become friends. Douglas, sober, serious, and direct in his manners and approaches, had constituted himself a beau of Eliza, and Andrew, whose good looks and exuberant friendliness had made him the darling of the summer community, had fallen violently in love with the one girl in Newport whose family didn’t want him. The snobbish Amorys from Boston sniffed at the “haberdashery” Carnochans and took the position that their lovely Lily had already committed herself too unreservedly to the young Lowell of their choice to now dispose of her affections elsewhere. Besides, Andrew’s loudly proclaimed abolitionism was wormwood to the hot-tempered gentleman he sought as a father-in-law.

  Lily Amory’s dazzling beauty was not partnered with a character of equal quality; she was not one to defy a bossy father. She tearfully consulted Eliza, her best friend and cousin (the Dudleys had long left Boston for Providence, but Eliza’s mother had been an Amory), as to how to handle her situation, and Eliza soon found herself the confidante of both Lily and Andrew. Andrew was too modest and too preoccupied with his own passion ever to suspect that his long, private talks with Eliza could arouse any emotion beyond friendship in his consultant. Was she not by way of being his brother Douglas’s girl? What nice young woman would want to create trouble between two brothers?