East Side Story Read online

  Instead of facing his cousin indignantly with the charge of fraud, Gordon sought desperately in his mind to excuse him. He could not bear to think that a friend and cousin would treat him so shabbily. It was suddenly vital to him that David should remain what he had always taken him to be. And might not the transaction simply be a lesson in American business as it was daily transacted? Was that not what his father meant by the caveat emptor he always quoted to his mother when she went shopping? David had never told him that the vessel was damaged, but hadn’t it been Gordon’s duty to inspect it? So he remained silent, knowing that David would certainly never mention it or even ask to see the broken toy when he came to visit.

  But this was not the end of the story. Sir John arrived on his annual visit to inspect his American markets, and David’s father told his sons to have all their gifts from the baronet ready to be prominently seen if the great man chose to ascend to the nursery. David protested that he could not find the vital toy, but, under pressure, admitted to seeing it in Gordon’s home. He implied that Gordon must have swiped it, and denied any knowledge of a trade. Never, he insisted loudly, would he have voluntarily parted with a gift from his beloved uncle. The ruined toy was retrieved and expensively restored for the unlikely event of a Scottish inspection, but Gordon, whose frantic explanation was disbelieved by both his father and his Uncle James, was branded as a liar and a thief.

  A terrible scene ensued in Wallace Carnochan’s dark study, where father and son faced each other standing, one pale and trembling, the other red-faced and of a sudden grotesqueness.

  “You’re worse than a robber! Even a gentleman fallen from grace might sink to that. But a liar, and to his own flesh and blood—no gentleman could stoop so low. It’s one thing if a man owns up to having filched some piece of trash that has caught his fancy, but to deny to his own kin is something I never thought I’d have to face in a son of mine!”

  “But, Daddy,” Gordon cried, with tears of dismay, “I didn’t take it. I…”

  “Hold your tongue, sirrah! Haven’t I heard the whole story from my brother? Has your mother a word to say for you? Just learn this. The next time anything like this happens, you’re going to get the whipping of your life. And from this right arm!”

  Terrifyingly, he raised his right arm and shook it at his shaking son. He had never whipped Gordon, nor did he ever thereafter. He didn’t even possess a whip, so far as his son knew. Yet the mere threat seemed to shatter forever the complacent brownstone world that had so long and so precariously sheltered the younger Carnochans. Gone was the pleasant joking realism of Gordon’s mother, so alien to these sultry comminations. Had not his father implied that she had washed her hands of the whole business? Oh, yes, she was not one to risk a hat, a dress, or a soul in such foul weather. The bright Episcopalian skies of the Denisons rolled back before the storm clouds of a Scottish Presbyterian doom. The Carnochan god had only been hidden away. He was back, and there would always be the danger that he would come again.

  But the injustice was too great; Gordon had to make one further appeal. He went to his mother’s bedroom one morning, after his father had left for the office. She was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair for the day, a time when she did not like to be disturbed by children, but when she took in how pale and grim he looked, she relented.

  “What is it, Gordon?” But when he stood before her, still speechless, it took only a moment for her impatience to rise. “Come on, child. Out with it.”

  He then told her the whole story of the broken toy. She listened with a growing concern that he desperately hoped might be on his account, but he soon found otherwise.

  “Well, I certainly agree that David Carnochan has treated you badly. I’m shocked, really. But what can we do about it now, dear? Isn’t that water pretty well under the bridge? Anyway, you’ve learned to keep a sharp eye on your cousin in any future swaps. If there are any. Which I strongly advise against.”

  “But won’t you tell Daddy I’m not a thief and a liar?”

  Surprisingly, his mother reflected on this for some moments. There appeared to be difficulties he had not suspected. “The trouble with that is that your father will go to your uncle, and your uncle will go to David, and David, of course, will stick to his story. And the chances are that your uncle will side with David, and he and your father will both lose their Carnochan tempers, and we’ll have a shattering family row. No, I think we’d better let the whole matter drop, which it already has.”

  “But, Mummy, Daddy will always think of me as someone wicked!”

  “Pooh. You don’t know your father. When something unpleasant is over for him, it’s over. He never thinks of it again. I’m sure he’s put the whole thing out of his mind already.”

  “Oh, please, Mummy, I can’t bear to have him think those things of me!”

  “Don’t be silly, child. I’ve told you he won’t.”

  “Mummy!” And he started to sob.

  This was a mistake. Julie Carnochan could not abide what she considered excessive emotional displays in her offspring. “That will do, Gordon. Go and get ready for school. You must learn that the family always comes first in these matters. I do not want a row between your father and your uncle. And that’s that.”

  Gordon had to admit that his mother seemed to have been right about his father’s easy dismissal of the unpleasant. The following Sunday, at a family lunch, Wallace Carnochan behaved to him as if nothing at all had happened. His mother was as brisk and smiling as ever, and even his sisters, Betty and Loulou, older and younger than Gordon, usually so smirking and teasing, uttered no word on the baleful subject. There was no way he could further defend himself, as no one in the family cared to be reminded of what he was supposed to have done. The unspeakable incident was closed.

  That the family, both families, had dismissed the matter was far from meaning that Gordon did. He could not seem to help brooding about it. Did a thing have to be one’s fault to be held against one by some mysterious fate that kept its own secret records? Might not even a sin, however falsely attributed to him, if never corrected in the hidden score book, achieve a kind of reality? He began to feel an actual guilt over this thing which he had not done, as if accusation and conviction were one and the same. He had heard about original sin in sermons. Was it not something that man had inherited rather than committed? Did one need much more than that to be damned?

  And then David had the gall to bring up the matter himself. “Sorry to have let you down that way, Gordie,” he told him casually. “But I’d have got the very dickens from my old man if he’d learned I’d swapped anything Uncle John had given me. He can use a birch, too, and we all know that your father never would. Uncle Wallace is all talk, no do, when it comes to discipline. That’s true, isn’t it? That he never touches you? So you see, it was better all around for you to take the blame. But I’ll owe you one, fella.”

  Gordon wanted to protest that he had been vilified with a crime while David would have been found guilty of a mere indiscretion, but something made him pause. Was David a mere factor in the mysterious morality of the world, essentially acting as fate obliged him to act, as helpless as Gordon himself? David, of course, was a true Carnochan, every inch of him. And his father, Uncle James, was even more of one, having sired six sons as opposed to Wallace’s one. Gordon could only conclude that he would do better to accept David’s excuse, lame as it was, and hope that the blanket of family solidarity, out of the coverage of which he seemed to be slipping, would continue to shelter him.

  But it was not easy to adjust himself to a life where the tepidity of parental affection, which he attributed to their seeing him as the usurper of his deceased brother’s lost place, was somehow further justified by the fracas he had brought about, however involuntarily, over the broken toy. He became increasingly despondent, and his marks at school dropped, soon alarmingly. His mother, at last truly concerned, took him out of Browning and had him privately tutored for some months.
r />   This resulted in his being sent to Chelton School in the second form rather than the first, so that when he arrived at that handsome, red-bricked, green-lawned Palladian compound, an hour’s drive west of Boston, that strictly Protestant Church boarding academy for boys of respectable upper-middle-class origin, he found himself a “new kid,” while David and Andy, having been entered the year before, though in the same class, were “old kids” and possessed of all the privileges pertaining to their status.

  Gordon had hoped that David would be his friend and helpful guide in this new life, but he found that his cousin conformed strictly to the school code and kept himself coolly aloof. Andy, as was to be expected, followed his brother’s suit. Gordon accepted this, as he accepted without question all the school traditions. Freed, at least temporarily from the emotional frustrations of his family life, he was relieved to find that he could cope with the lessons and games at school and even make some new friends. He had grown in size and was beginning to be not bad-looking; he was quiet, modest, and inoffensive, and the other new kids accepted him.

  In his second year at Chelton, now an “old kid,” he received overtures from David to renew their friendship. David explained that his coolness of the year before had been only in conformance with school prejudice. But it was evident to Gordon that David had noted that his cousin was now well enough liked in their form to be an acceptable friend. But there it was again, the chance to be approved by the all-powerful family, to seek its shelter from the gales of black chance. And besides, there were distinct advantages to being under the aegis of his clever cousin. David was a politician to the core of his being; he was almost surely going to be one of the prefects of the school, and he knew how to ingratiate himself with those who would smooth his upward way. And then it was also true that no boy at Chelton was funnier or wittier or better company than David Carnochan when he chose; nobody was more fun to be with, so long as he got his way.

  David made no secret of his ambitions or how they were to be implemented. He explained frankly to Gordon and to his always loyal brother Andy his project to forge the three of them into a tight social unit to promote themselves: “There’s nothing so powerful as a well-organized team. It works in football. It can work in every side of school life. We can be like the Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all. So long as we stick together and back each other up in everything, we can become a force in the form.”

  Gordon, while perfectly realizing that David fully intended to be the leading musketeer, was gratified to feel that he was at last a full member of the family, almost as if he were now a seventh son of Uncle James and not just the unwelcome survivor of Wallace and Julie’s twins. And furthermore, he could see nothing but good in David’s plans for the three of them. If these plans were primarily concerned with the glory of David—one could never get away from that—they also involved the achievement of school goals that were perfectly laudable. David wanted to be senior prefect of the school, yes, but he also wanted Andy to be president of the Dramatic Society and Gordon to be editor of the school literary magazine. What was wrong with any of that?

  As they worked together toward their goals, Gordon began to find a new peace and satisfaction in identifying himself with the spirit and idealism of Chelton. It was as if the clouds of his early life had been rolled back and he had become an integral and accepted part of an institution dedicated to the raising of fine pure young men to the service of God and man. And he owed it to David! It was through David that he had come to share the radiant vision of the inspiring headmaster!

  The Reverend Silas Nickerson was a big, hearty, deep-voiced minister of forty-odd years who had founded his very fashionable academy only twenty years before with the blessing and financial backing of Boston’s first families, to all of whom he was related. He professed to be what was then called an ardent Christologist of the school of Bishop Phillips Brooks, and his daily joy in the felt presence of a never-absent Jesus was instantly contagious to a boy like Gordon, who had been passionately wanting such a solution to his adjustment to life. The dark Carnochan Presbyterianism evaporated before the glory of Nickerson’s enthusiasm. David and Andy, Gordon could not help but observe, failed to share his feeling in this respect, but they accepted religion as a formal aspect of the life they would one day be expected to lead, and David was heard to observe respectfully that the headmaster was held in high regard by many of the great of the land, including President Theodore Roosevelt himself. David never downgraded Gordon’s faith. He simply ignored it.

  Their final year at school crowned David’s efforts, not with the success he craved, but with a fair simulacrum of it. He was not elected the senior but one of the six prefects; Andy did not make president of the Dramatic Society, but he was a member and played Falstaff creditably in the school play; and Gordon became an editor but not editor in chief of the magazine. It was a good-enough show.

  James and Wallace Carnochan had gone to Yale, and to Yale their sons were sent. Gordon and his cousins did many things as a trio in New Haven, but in sophomore year Gordon, who had a greater interest in literature than his cousins, drew slightly apart from them by trying out for the Yale Literary Magazine, known as the Lit. It was in the cramped offices of that publication that he met Philip Key.

  Key was a long, thin, young man with a long, thin face, a small, mean, oval chin, and opaque eyes that re-emphasized the distrust and disapproval of his fixed expression. He was a New Yorker, but of a different background from Gordon’s; his father ran a bar in Chelsea, and Philip Key, politically, espoused radical views. But his stories in the Lit were both imaginative and thought-provoking, far more mature and sophisticated than any others in the magazine, and actually showed promise of a significant literary future. Gordon well knew how gready these surpassed his own poor efforts, but it was nonetheless disagreeable to have this flung in his face by his merciless new friend. He used the term “friend” to describe his tenuous relationship with the ever-sardonic Key, though it never received a reciprocal use by the latter, who seemed to have no need for intimate companionship. Gordon had decided to suffer Key’s constant jibes as the price of a literary education that he was beginning to see might be wider—or at least different—from what was offered in the classroom, as exemplified by the roseate lectures of Professor William Lyon Phelps. And Key tolerated Gordon as his only available audience.

  Given the draft of one of Gordon’s short stories and asked his opinion, Key drawled: “In La Boheme the manuscript of Rodolfo’s tragedy was at least useful as fuel for the stove to keep him warm. But as there is just enough heat in this dreary attic of our beloved Lit, we needn’t put a match to your masterpiece, Carnochan.”

  With a stubborn faith in the salubrious effect of humiliation, Gordon persisted in visiting Key in his bare but untidy room, where he was received with the grudging welcome of a hermit who needs at least one ear in which to vent his contempt for the outside world and who noted that his caller was always the bearer of a packet of beer.

  Gordon’s spine tingled with a mingled dismay and excitement as his new mentor savaged the reputations so inflated by the enthusiastic Billy Phelps. A Browning worshipper who had not hesitated to rank The Ring and the Book with Paradise Lost, Gordon gaped to hear the sainted Pompilia reduced to a flirting adulteress.

  “Who the hell did Browning think he was kidding?” Key sneered. “He tells you again and again that he got it all from an old volume about the trial he picked up in a bookstall. He insists that he’s telling the gospel truth. But he isn’t. Unfortunately for him, scholars have unearthed that book and read it. They’ve seen that Pompilia was a sad little bird who was abused by a brute of a husband and fled the nest with a priestly lover by whom she had a bastard child. That’s not a bad story in itself. But what does Browning do with it? A fatuous Victorian, he makes Pompilia inhumanly pure, so pure, in fact, that if she were alive she’d be a psychopath!”

  Under Key’s guidance Gordon began to read Whitman, Emily Dick
inson, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. His world was beginning to expand. But just as he was speculating on the possibility of inviting Key to spend some days with him in the forthcoming summer in Bar Harbor, counting on the perhaps irresistible friendliness of such an invitation to induce his guide to mitigate the rigor of his spoken judgments in the presence of his parents, Key, who had hitherto been one of the obscurer members of his Yale class, attained a sudden and undesirable notoriety with the publication of the last story that the Lit would accept from his pen.

  In it the protagonist, who has led a sinful life, repudiating in his every thought and act the teachings of Christianity, dies, only to discover that those teachings have all been true. There is an afterlife; there is a God; mercy is accorded and all is forgiven. The angels trumpet the glory of the Almighty in the golden streets of a new Jerusalem, and the Trinity is worshipped by an exuberant chorus of the saved forever. Forever and ever and ever! “I must be in heaven!” the new arrival exclaims joyfully. “Oh, no,” a little voice whispers in his ear. “You’re in the other place.”

  David Carnochan, who had kept a suspicious eye on his cousin’s new friendship but who knew better than to encourage something by too harshly discountenancing it, now saw his chance to sever Gordon from this unwholesome association. “You see, Gordie, this Key fellow just won’t do. He’s not our sort. Andy and I have not wanted to talk to you about this before, because we assumed you’d catch on in time to what a meatball the guy really is. And then nobody of any consequence in our class knew how much you were seeing him. But now that he’s become infamous as a radical and an atheist, it won’t do you any good to be seen palling around with him.”