East Side Story Read online

  Of course, he later made a fortune in automobiles.

  Loulou assumed that another lover would come into her life, and indeed one might have, had she not so violently regretted the one she had lost. His business success, following so rapidly upon the act of marriage that he had apparently counted to get him really started, seemed to fling in her face the deserved consequences of a folly that proved her to be a born old maid. At any rate, she found herself more and more resigned to sharing the regular and mind-numbing brownstone existence of her aging parents, reading at night, working in the daytime with the very young and the very senile at a settlement house, and occasionally on weekends visting at the houses of her fewer and fewer unmarried woman friends.

  And then one evening as she was reading Anatole France’s wonderful story “The Procurator of Judea,” she came upon these words: “It was amid such peaceful occupations and meditations on Epicurus that, with surprise and a faint chagrin, he met the advent of old age.” Of course, with her it was not senescence; it was worse—it was middle age. She was in her thirties, early thirties, it was true, but still … what could she do to give her life some shred of meaning? A friend in the management of her settlement house had spoken of the city’s urgent need of more trained nurses, and the idea lit a sudden fire in her head. She talked to her brother, Gordon, her only true intimate in the family, and he gave her instant and enthusiastic encouragement. He looked into the possibility of her enrolling in the Bellevue Training School and brought her the needed forms to fill out.

  Of course, there was initial opposition. Her mother took the position that a “lady” could never be a nurse and that it had taken a major war to make Florence Nightingale reacceptable to the good society into which she had been born. But the younger members of the family thought it very sporting of Loulou, whose warm and cheerful personality had made her a popular figure, to strike for her own thing, and Julie Carnochan was induced at last to withdraw her veto, practical woman as she always was, insisting only that Loulou should confine herself to hospital work and never serve in a patient’s home, where she might find herself treated as a kind of upper servant.

  Loulou did not find it always easy to train with much younger women, most of whom came from very different backgrounds, but she had brains and determination, and she achieved not only high grades but the ultimate admiration of classmates who were impressed that a woman of her age and class should undertake so many humble and often distasteful tasks. And in the two decades that followed, she rose to be a head floor nurse in the private patients’ wing of a famous New York hospital. Even the older Carnochans were now actually proud of her and cited her as an example of the contrary if some young radical son of a friend was so brash and bold as to suggest that the family belonged to a bypassed society that had not kept up with the times.

  Loulou’s career as a nurse was cut short at sixty-five, when she developed cancer and had half a lung removed. She decided to retire while recovering from the operation in a private room on her own floor of the hospital, where, needless to say, she was receiving the best of care. But an incident with a new young intern who did not know who she was or her connection with the hospital put her on notice of how much her old background still clung to the modernized professional woman.

  The intern had asked her, as part of a routine questionnaire, if she had ever given birth. She pointed to the name on her door, which was slanted inward.

  “If you’ll look at that card, Doctor, you’ll see it reads Miss Carnochan.”

  The young man glanced at the card, shrugged, and repeated his question.

  Loulou felt immediately a fool at her old-fashioned assumption that virginity had to be assumed in an unwed lady and answered his question in the negative. But it weighed on her mind that even two decades of medical service had not made more of a dent in the Carnochan way of viewing the world. And when she left the hospital and took up her life as an unoccupied lady of small means, she began to wonder if it had been anything but a disadvantage to have been born and raised as she had been.

  The principal fact in her new life was that she was poor. The term, of course, was relative, but it was certainly applicable to her—indeed dramatically applicable—in contrast to her siblings and cousins. Her father had been nearly ruined in the Great Depression, and his situation had not been ameliorated by his wife’s refusal to recognize it, with the result that Loulou’s one third of his estate enabled her to maintain only a two-room flat in a respectable East Side Manhattan apartment house and escape the hottest part of the summer only in a modest seaside hotel in Maine. The difference of her daily life, deprived now of the busy work of the hospital, from that of her sister, Betty, who had married a man of considerable means, and that of her brother who was a successful lawyer, was only too painfully evident. Gordon, it was true, helped her out from time to time with welcome checks, but she still found it in her heart to criticize a family that had raised her in such luxury only to leave her in such poor straits.

  She had nonetheless found a kind of occupation in her jobless days in putting together the history of her family, at least of its American chapters, which were all that were known of it, and speculating on what motivated, or failed to motivate, each generation of the Carnochans. She noted one particular characteristic that seemed to attach itself to most of the members, and perhaps to account for why so large a percentage of them succeeded either in retaining the social status to which they were born or in improving it. The males, and there was an unusual predominance of them, were all able either to make money or to marry it. There were none of the social dropouts or exiled remittance men that plagued so many families listed in the Social Register. The family instinct for survival was strong indeed. On the other hand, its contribution to the arts, to politics, to teaching, to any occupation that involved giving out rather than taking in, was minimal. If there were no criminals, neither were there any saints. The Carnochans seemed dedicated to their own permanence.

  And why had Loulou ended up as she had? Because she had neither made money nor married. She might have done more, in her own small way, for people who had needed such services as she had been able to provide, than any other member of the family, but what did that avail her now? Resentment followed by curiosity began to turn her study of the clan into a kind of obsession. She started to fill albums with photographs and press cuttings, yellowing invitations and pages of old letters; she wrote to all her cousins asking for dates of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, and she undertook to compile a book of the family tree, which Gordon promised to have printed. The family was becoming the occupation of her life.

  She discovered, however, that she now had a value to her aging siblings and aging cousins quite other than that of historian. It was not, however, particularly gratifying to her. She found herself frequently invited to spend weekends or even weeks with relatives who in the past had found bids to dinner over Christmas or Easter a sufficient recognition of the connection. Of course, it was her nurse’s training that elicited these bids. How comforting it was to have staying in one’s house, and at no expense except for her meals, a competent medical practitioner whom one could consult at one’s ease about one’s back or hip or throat or heart, or whatever organ or limb the evening of life was eroding!

  Worst of all was her sister, Betty, who considered Loulou only too well compensated by her presence in the big breezy villa on Long Island Sound, not only for her temperature takings and back rubbing, but for her secretarial assistance with bills and correspondence.

  Though handsome enough as a young woman, Betty had broadened with the years, and her limited imagination and unlimited ego, plus her confirmed status as a malade imaginaire, had rendered her not only less easy to look at but less easy to live with. Yet Lionel Harrison still saw her as the “marble beauty” with whom he had fallen in love decades before, and her children, taken in by the claims of her self-esteem and shamed by her unjustified complaints of family neglect, hovered around her with c
onstantly proffered love and sympathy. Loulou could never forget how, on a family trip to Europe in their younger days, the prurient Betty had flung her copy of Anna Karenina over the side of the ocean liner, outraged by its vision of adultery. There had been, however, no violation of the marriage vow in her own union. Life had filled Betty’s lap with treasures: her husband’s ample means as well as his blind devotion, healthy and obedient children, and doctors who catered to her every whim. Yet she persisted in believing that she had kept her head up under an avalanche of misfortune.

  Loulou had been invited to Long Island for the Christmas season and had been asked to help with her sister’s Yuletide greeting cards. Betty, in the grip of one of her periodic and pointless fits of economy, had decided that by using the cards sent to her the previous year, cutting off the front flap with the picture and scribbling her name and greeting on its verso, she could save herself the trouble and expense of acquiring new cards. She was even fatuous enough to assume that such friends as might thus receive back their own mutilated card would appreciate so wise a saving.

  Loulou at last drew the line. She threw down her pen. “No, Betty, I’m not going to write another one for you. You can’t send this trash to the family. It’s a disgrace.”

  “But we’re saving our national forests!” Betty declared grandly. “Recycling Christmas cards! Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re always advocating? Take Lionel’s office, for example. It has a hundred employees. If each one sends a card to the other ninety-nine, that’s ten thousand cards! To and from people who see each other daily!”

  “It’s madness, I grant. But why not give it up altogether?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. Everyone sends them. It’s an expected thing.”

  “Well, it’s not expected to do it the way you do. I shan’t address another envelope.”

  “And of course I wouldn’t dream of asking you to. But I must say, Loulou, you don’t show much gratitude for what Lionel and I have done for you.”

  “Nor do I feel any. You’re lucky I don’t send you a bill.”

  “Loulou! How dare you say such a thing!”

  “Well, that’s it. I’ve said it, and I’m glad I said it. I think I’ll go back to town tomorrow.”

  “Loulou! You can’t do that. You promised me you would stay till after the New Year!”

  “Well, I’ve decided to join David and Janetta on their Mediterranean cruise.”

  “And when did you decide that}”

  “Just now. I’m not going to be a free nurse anymore for a family that’s too cheap to pay for one!”

  But Betty was now ready to give as good as she got. “And what do you think Janetta wants you for?” she sneered.

  “For her heart, of course. David is my one honest cousin. He makes no bones about why he’s asking me. But he offers me a first-class cabin on a luxury cruise, and he sees to it that I’m free to take every expedition in every port in which we stop.”

  “David has always been one to get his money’s worth,” Betty retorted with a sniff.

  “Damn right he is. Because he’s willing to pay the price. You always know just where you stand with David.”

  A month later, steaming toward Sicily on a benign sea, Loulou reclined on a deck chair beside David Carnochan and told him of her encounter with Betty. Janetta was sleeping the sleep of the unjust in the cabin behind their chairs.

  “It will make no difference in your relationship,” he assured her. “Betty will always be willing to have you back. On her own terms.”

  “And I’ll probably be fool enough to go. The Bettys of this world never seem to get their comeuppance.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that. Old age approacheth.”

  “And for me, too, David. But I shan’t need much of a comeuppance. I haven’t made much of my life.”

  “As much as any of us.”

  “Oh, David, don’t say that. Not anyway from the pinnacle of your success.”

  “Such as it is. And what is it? You know what my marriage is. And as for the great law firm I dreamt of running my own way, I’ve had to share it, first with a bossy father-in-law, and now with a bossy partner whom I detest. And with whom I’ve even had to share my beloved son.”

  “Oh, but you’ve had so much else. Your being able to take this cruise, for example. Whenever you like. And even being able to take a poor old cousin along. Who, incidentally, is enjoying it very much.”

  “Mind you, I’m not complaining, Loulou. It was you who brought the subject up.”

  “Fair enough. And, of course, anything bad that happens to any member of a family like ours is more or less that member’s fault. For each of us started with a pack of advantages. It was up to each to use them as best he or she could.”

  “Except for my darling sister, Estelle, who was given only twenty-three years of life.”

  “Which she made the most of! I wonder if she wasn’t the happiest of us all!”

  “You know, in some ways I think she was.”

  Loulou thought they had now said enough on the subject, and she rested her head against the back of her chair to contemplate the blue infinity of the motionless sea. She thought of her young cousin Estelle, and a pleasant peace stole over her. She had been a few years younger than this lovely and popular relative, but the latter had always been particularly kind to her, insisting that Loulou had qualities just as fine as any possessed by her prettier sister, Betty. She recalled now Estelle’s little cry: “Never forget, Loulou, that you’re somebody!” And glancing now at the austere profile of David beside her, she felt a sudden impulse of real warmth toward him. He, too, had loved Estelle, though she had never had to convince him that he was somebody!

  “Estelle would have been proud of you, David.”

  “Oh, my dear, you don’t have to say that. Estelle saw me through and through.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  The next day they were anchored off Girgenti in Sicily, and David and Loulou went ashore with the group that was to visit the line of ancient temples looming over the harbor. Janetta, who was suffering from a cold, had chosen to remain on board and confine her acquaintance with the ancient world to what she could espy from her deck chair with field glasses.

  As they ascended the rocky pathway that led to the largest and best preserved of the temples, David asked Loulou if she had not been there before.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied, “on a summer cruise, not unlike this one, with my parents when I was seventeen.”

  “Is it the same now?”

  She looked up at the front columns of the temple they were approaching, and suddenly and startlingly, she felt again the thrill that had penetrated her whole body at her first visit to the scene. Where could it have come from, that long-forgotten sensation? That early visit had provided her with her first sight of an old Greek temple, and the dramatic surging of it before her eyes, in place of all the photographs and prints she had seen on schoolroom walls, had filled her with a strange ecstasy and a curious but elated conviction that she was going to have a wonderful life!

  “It is just the same,” she replied at last in answer to David’s question. And then she added: “And this path is just the same.”

  “They might have fixed it up a bit in all those years.”

  But she ignored a comment that had nothing to do with what was happening to her. Looking ahead at the backs of the members of their group who were preceding them, she had become mysteriously conscious of quite other backs. What she saw now in her mind’s eye, but just as clearly as if she had turned the page of an old family album, was the ascent of another group of tourists on the mild gradient of the same path to the edifice above. All the figures were familiar to her, though she viewed them only from behind. She recognized her mother, who seemed about to stumble, for her father had a hand on her elbow, and a boyish Gordon, who was hurrying ahead of them. She also recognized the stout outline of Mr. Talbot, the cruise lecturer, and the big ugly black hat and broad shoulders of
Mrs. Otis T. Lanier (how in those days people used to stress the middle initial of familiar society names!) and the small bobbing figure of her paid (and probably underpaid) companion, Miss Trimble. And then the picture disappeared as abrupdy as if someone behind her had reached over her shoulder to slam the album shut.

  Yet she knew, she knew of a certainty, that what she had seen in her mind was a moment of the past preserved precisely as it had been on that particular Sicilian summer morning of 1907. She was familiar with all the scrapbooks that she herself had put together about family excursions, and there was no such photograph in any of them. But why had this particular and not very interesting vision been saved so carefully in the dark archives of her mind?

  It was all very well for her to argue to herself that there didn’t have to be a reason for one memory to be kept and another lost, that the mind contained a jumble of impressions that didn’t have to make sense, but she could not deny the little flame of ecstasy that the vision had excited in her heart. All during their subsequent visit to the temples, she tried to put together this vision and her reaction to it in such a way as to tell her something about herself, and the only answer she could arrive at was that both were somehow twined about that strange prognostication inspired by the temples when she was a girl that she was going to have a wonderful life! Was it simply the irony of her existence that she had just been telling David that such a life was precisely what she hadn’t had?

  When, back on board that night, she told David of her experience, he nodded in some bewilderment, but made a conscientious effort to take her tale with at least some of the seriousness with which she endowed it.

  “Well, there you are, Loulou. It’s as I was saying. You have had a wonderful life.”

  “Is that what a wonderful life is?”

  “It seems so. It doesn’t necessarily follow that you have to feel you’ve had a wonderful life.”

  “And might that be true of you, too?”

  “Very probably. We seem to be an ungrateful pair, you and I. But there is one thing, now I come to think of it, that strikes me about what you call your vision. What you saw was everyone’s back. It was entirely a rear view, I take it?”