East Side Story Page 3

  Nor did the silently stricken Eliza at all wish any such thing, though there were moments when she almost wished that the Amorys would persist in their pigheaded opposition so that she might continue these delightful sessions. But she was too honest not finally to let the supposedly lovelorn Andrew know that his victory was an assured thing.

  “I understand that there’s a romantic side to you, Andrew, that makes you want to equate your problem with that of Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed lovers. But candor compels me to inform you that you only have to wait, and not too long at that. The Amorys basically know they’re licked. Lily may be in a tizzy over their opposition—I even think she rather enjoys tizzies—but in the last analysis she’s never going to give you up.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t say she enjoys it, Eliza. You should have seen her last night in tears. Floods of tears!”

  “Like spring showers. To make the sunlight, when it reappears, even brighter.”

  The Amorys, as Eliza predicted, at length did come around, and the engagement was eventually announced, but as it almost coincided with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and Andrew had already enlisted, Lily’s father insisted that the wedding wait until the end of hostilities. He had no wish to see his daughter a war widow, and thus it came about that she never was one. After the elapse of a proper period following Andrew’s death in battle, Lily married her old Lowell beau, who was himself a war hero.

  Eliza had married Douglas Carnochan even before the engagement of Andrew and Lily was announced. She had clearly seen that she was exactly the bride Douglas wanted, socially, physically, and temperamentally, and that he was just the husband she would need if she married at all: steady, faithful, even-tempered, and of a cool and dispassionate disposition that would neither feel nor require a great love. They would be the respected and respectable members of a sober and serious community and raise a large family in which she might have the luck to find another Andrew. She was convinced that she would never again fall in love, and looking back now over the decades, she confirmed how right she had been. She had made the most of her life and not wasted it in futile regrets. She had loved her five children—Annie, Bruce, Clara, James, and Wallace—particularly the gentle Clara, who had returned to Scotland to wed the thread tycoon, Sir John Muir, and died there of breast cancer. But she had not had another Andrew. Had she ever really expected it? Could the trespassing cuckoo bird that had deposited that golden egg in a nest of Carnochans be expected to do it twice?

  Her plain and middle-aged maiden daughter, Annie, of blameless character, blameless and blank, now came out of the house to remind her that her ex-son-in-law, Sir John, was coming for tea. Ex, because he had remarried after Clara’s death, though his second wife was also now deceased.

  “How could I forget it, Annie? You know what he’s coming for, don’t you?”

  “To tell you he’s going to be married? Yes, that’s the rumor. To the red-haired governess of some Philadelphia family. Imagine! The old goat! What will he do in heaven, if he ever gets there, with three wives to claim him?”

  Eliza knew that people had to be saying that Annie was a saint to stay home to look after her aging mother. People had to be saying that because people did say such things. But certainly Annie’s extreme religiosity was a cross for her mother to bear. Eliza paused to prepare herself for a mild retort. “But, Annie darling, there’s supposed to be no giving in marriage there.”

  “But the wives will still be there, won’t they?”

  “Perhaps they will no longer mind.”

  Sir John came on the dot of his expected hour and took his seat stiffly on the porch by his former motherin-law. He was a portly, pink-faced, balding hunk of a man, affable enough, and, for all his wealth and baronetcy, inordinately proud of the humble origin that his business genius had allowed him to transcend. He had always admired and liked Eliza, two of whose sons acted as his American agents.

  “We hear exciting news of you, John,” Eliza began. “Is it true that you’re to be congratulated?”

  “Quite true, dear Mother Carnochan. At least that I am to be. There may be some question if the bride is. She is twenty-five years my junior.”

  “That’s nothing where love is concerned.”

  “Well, there, my dear lady, you may be begging the question. Let me tell you how we met. I was in Philadelphia on business and dining alone in the very good restaurant of my hotel, when I observed a lovely lady with red hair sitting at a table across the room with two quiet and well-dressed children and a nice-looking couple who seemed to be their parents. I had the notion that the red-haired lady was in some kind of governess position with the children, for she supervised their eating and their table manners. Obviously, she had a way with them, and obviously, she enjoyed the full confidence of the parents. You could tell by the way they smiled at her. You may laugh, Mother Carnochan, but I was immensely struck by my young woman. I asked the headwaiter, who knew everybody, it seemed, and he reported the name of the man, a member of a distinguished Main Line family, and informed me that my redhead was a Mademoiselle Hortense Duval, the French governess of his children. I asked the headwaiter to deliver my card to the gentleman with my written request to be introduced to Miss Duval and the assurance that my intentions were strictly honorable. I watched the gentleman read my note, hand it to his governess, who read it and calmly nodded. Her employer then laughed, turned, and waved at me in the friendliest way to come and join his table. Which of course I promptly did. Miss Duval was utterly charming in what many women might have thought the oddest of encounters, and two days later I proposed to her.”

  “And she accepted.”

  “As a good French girl without a penny to her name or anyone to look after her naturally would. Obviously, to her it was a miracle. A baronet and a fortune appearing like Cinderella’s golden coach! Love, however, is another matter. You may say there’s no fool like an old fool, but I still know something about the French. A bargain to them is a serious thing. Hortense may take me for better, but she also takes me for worse. If I should lose my last shilling, she’d turn my castle into a hotel, run it to the queen’s taste, and support me to the end. It would almost be worth going bust to see that happen. And my cynical friends proved wrong!”

  “I have no doubt you’re justified in that faith. And I’m sure that my Clara would have given you her blessing.”

  Sir John laughed, but he was obviously moved. “Clara would have wanted me to be happy, yes, but perhaps not this happy. Bless you, anyway, dear Mother Carnochan, for saying what so few would say—in other words, just the right thing. I’ll tell my children, who, I regret to say, have taken a much less charitable view of my matrimonial plans. But they deeply respect their grandmother and will listen to her words.”

  “Unless they think I’m gaga.”

  Eliza sat alone after he had left, turning over his news in her mind with mild amusement and considerable sympathy. She wondered if the redheaded Hortense was not a bit like herself. She had to force herself to smile when Annie interrupted her quiet reflections and prepare herself for her daughter’s inevitable fulminations.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, but I really didn’t want to sit and hear John boast of his romantic triumphs. Really! As if it were such a glorious thing to be taken in by an obvious gold digger!”

  “Hardly an obvious one, my dear. I should say; if anything, a rather subtle one.”

  “These men! They can’t bear to be alone, even for a few weeks or months.”

  “Why should they, if they don’t have to be?”

  “Because marriage is not a state to be entered into without mutual love. And a great love, too. Like yours and Father’s!”

  Eliza mused for a moment. “Is that really what you feel about marriage, my dear? That it can only be based on a great love?”

  “Of course. Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know if it has to be so great. If some fine, honest man should offer you a good home and the prospect of a family, would
you feel obliged to turn him down because he hadn’t set you on fire?”

  “Well, it so happens that I see my duty here at home and that I’m proud and happy to remain here and perform it.”

  “I deeply appreciate that, my dear, but I should never wish to stand in the way of your having your own home and family.”

  “You needn’t worry about that, Mother.”

  And indeed, Eliza saw that she needn’t. That fine, honest man was not going to come along, no matter how much Annie and Annie’s mother might pine for him. Annie had built into her mind the heroic picture of a woman who had sacrificed any prospect of her own domestic bliss on the altar of her duty to an aging parent. To take that from her and leave her with the bleak alternative of having been condemned to old maidhood by a neglectful sex would be the last cruelty. Eliza saw that yet another role in life had been assigned to her to enact: that of the selfish old mother who hoards one child to be her nurse and companion in the so-called sunset of life. She could only hope it would be the last one.

  3. BRUCE

  ONE FINE SPRING EVENING in 1892 Bruce Carnochan was striding east on Fifty-seventh Street toward Fifth Avenue, boasting neither top hat nor cloak (both faultless but left at home), yet even more resplendent (or so he dared to assume) in white tie and tails, with a scarlet carnation in his buttonhole, as if to advertise to the humbler world of the byways that he was dining en ville with the partner, however lesser a one, of the richest man in the world. For wasn’t that what people claimed for Mr. Rockefeller? Of course, there were all those Indian maharajas, but Bruce shook his head impatiently, as if to disclaim their eligibility. Wasn’t their wealth all in jewels, and probably bad ones at that?

  The weather was benign; only the gentlest breeze brushed his clear pale forehead and large fine nose, nor did it muss the sleek black hair so carefully parted in the exact middle of his scalp, despite the legend that the late President Grant had taken a dislike to Ambassador Motley for no other reason. But then Grant, though the greatest of generals (oh, yes, Bruce gave him his full due), had never been quite a gentleman, had he? Where would he have been, broke and nearly disgraced, dying of throat cancer, if the late lamented Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt (God rest his generous soul!) had not come to his aid?

  Bruce, healthy and essentially trim (though he would have to mind his tummy—yes, yes), and only twenty-eight, nodded approvingly as he passed the giant pink improvement on the chateau of Blois that Mr. V’s eldest son had reared on the avenue and turned south toward the even more glorious abode of Willie K. Bruce felt zestfully at home in the wonderful city, at least in this part of it; he liked to think of Fifth Avenue as the apex of civilization, a new Rome, but a freer and gladder one unstained by the blood of gladiators or of Christians mauled by big cats in an arena full of yowling wops. Oh, yes, of course, he was aware of the smart sophisticated little set, including the misguided Kitty Atwater—God help the poor stubborn girl—who referred to the beautiful architecture of Richard Morris Hunt as “the derivative and ostentatious palazzos of the new goldbugs,” but he stoutly maintained that the great avenue was fully as fine as anything the Italian Renaissance had produced, and that the interiors of the new structures, illuminated by electricity and freshened by plumbing, were more edifying than marble interiors stained by the memory of the victims of Borgia poison or Riario daggers.

  Did he not have reason to feel exalted? Only that morning his brother and partner, Wallace, had announced that each of them might expect this year that his share of the net profits of Carnochan Brothers, American agents of the Scottish thread king, Sir John Muir, would amount to $20,000! His mother was always after him to find a bride, and how many lovelies would not gape at a figure like that? Even Kitty Atwater might not turn her nose up at such an offer, intent though she was supposed to be on her search for a man who could give her all the things among which she lived but none of which she owned. For Kitty, as Bruce kept telling himself with a snort, hadn’t a dime to her name, for all her habit of sponging off the objects of her scorn!

  Yet Kitty, despite her evident pleasure in chatting and gossiping with him at parties, was inclined to downgrade him in her supposed compliments. When she referred to him as a “dandy” or “a boulevardier,” the terms showed a bit of bite behind her always charming smile. Kitty, of all people! Talk about pots and kettles! And the worst part of it was that she echoed (though without being aware of it, as she hardly knew them) his two older brothers. The Carnochans had never been ones to restrain themselves in playing their favorite game of “The trouble with you.” They had not left any of their sometimes brutal candor in Ayreshire. The slightest pretension, the least effort to ally oneself with anything that introduced a bit of color and gaiety into a world of grayness was promptly labeled what his mother, scorning the mitigating Gallic pronunciation, called “blazzy.” And any such attitude on the part of a younger brother like Bruce, however much loved as a member of the sacred clan (even though they were lowlanders!), was considered essentially incompatible with the financial ability that the Scots needed on this side of the Atlantic to prove how different they were from the Irish. Even Wallace did not deem Bruce his equal, or near equal, in the office.

  But could he not console himself, indeed pride himself, on being the one member of the family who knew what this New York of the nineties was really all about, who understood and appreciated how much its puff and its glitter were basic parts of it? Mightn’t he one day write a memoir that would rival Cellini’s? Which reminded him: he should start that diary he was always postponing.

  As he turned west on Fifty-first Street to visit his favorite bar on Sixth Avenue for the preprandial gin cocktail and oysters which had become a treasured habit, he felt the mild sway of guilt that such a break from Scottish rigor still briefly entailed. And with it came the perennial, always lurking suspicion that in his exalted moments, such as strolling down Fifth Avenue was apt to give him, he was inclined to attribute overexalted motives to his inner thoughts and judgments. To be strictly honest now—and a son of Eliza Dudley Carnochan should know just what honesty was—had he been strictly fair in attributing a mercenary goal to Kitty’s husband-hunting? What could any girl in their society do but husband-hunt, and should one expect her to seek a poor one? No, not at all, and hadn’t he now to face the horrid suspicion that he was looking for his own excuse to exclude from the candidates for the hand of Bruce Carnochan a girl with no money? How about that? Hadn’t he dreamt of wedding a Vanderbilt? Or even a Gould? No, never a Gould—one could step too low.

  Pulling himself together now, he assured himself that he was too poor for a Vanderbilt and very likely too poor to wed a girl of Kitty’s expectations, and that he should stop beating himself and look for a sweet girl who would be content with his $20,000 per annum, and perhaps bring him a little something of her own, so that together they might have a shingle house in Newport next to the one that his brother Wallace and his wife, Julie, had built?

  His heart had regained all its buoyancy as he entered the great dark paneled bar and took his place at the long, oaken counter facing a huge mirror and a Bougereau canvas of naked laughing nymphs dangerously teasing a randy satyr. He signaled Paddy for his usual. If the truest joy lay in anticipation, what was better than his sense of the forthcoming gin in an iced glass and the prospect of a sumptuous dinner in Gotham?

  “Good evening, my dear Bruce. Do we have the good fortune of dining at the same place? Are you going to the Stoddards’?”

  It was Abel Fisher, in similar attire, who had taken the adjoining stool. Also a bachelor, though older, perhaps forty, with a pink boyish face and thick prematurely snowy hair, he was a well-known diner out and man about town whose encyclopedic knowledge of society gossip always impressed Bruce.

  “I’m afraid not. I dine with the Bensons.”

  “Old Ezra’s? Really? I didn’t know you were an habitué there.”

  “I’m hardly that. This will be my first time. What may I expect? You, who know
all.”

  “Well, nothing that need alarm you. They’re a new type in town, so rich they don’t honestly much care about society. It’s true of several of the Standard Oil partners. The old guard that was ready to snub them were so surprised to find themselves the ones snubbed that now they cultivate them.”

  “But the Bensons have bought a mansion, Abel!”

  Abel’s shrug showed how little this impressed him. “They bought the Buckinghurst morgue when old Buckinghurst went broke. Ezra needed rooms for his big brood. He probably got his secretary to pick the house for him, just telling her to get the kind of thing Rockefeller partners got. You know how he made his pile, don’t you? By a lucky loan to young John D. when the latter was just starting out. He was paid back in stock, which he’s hung on to like a leech. You’re on to a good thing there, my boy. The daughters may be on the plain side, but the man who marries one will find his ass in a tub of butter!”

  Bruce was a bit disgusted by Abel’s crudeness, but he was careful not to show it. He had no wish to stem the flow of his information. “I don’t know the Benson girls. Kitty Atwater is spending part of the winter with them, and she’s the one who invited me tonight.”

  “Kitty? Really? So she’s on to them already. Ezra Jr. had better watch his step.” Abel suddenly pulled himself up. “I beg your pardon, old boy. Is Kitty perhaps something special to you?”

  “Oh, no, just a friend. Or perhaps you might say, a friendly acquaintance. I think she’s trying to expand the Bensons’ social circle.”