East Side Story (11 page)

"You don't like David?"

"I don't like him at all. But that's not the point. I'm not going to be a bossy wife, Gordon, but in this one thing you must yield to me. This one thing I insist on. Don't go into the same firm with David."

"Darling, what's come over you? Have you gone crazy?"

"Let's put it that I have. But I won't marry you if you don't give in to me in this one instance."

Well, what could he say to that?

E
STELLE
C
ARNOCHAN,
David's sister, the youngest of the seven children of James and Louisa, was their only daughter, and being pretty, blond, and very bright, she was the family pet. Her perennially delicate health—the early signs of tuberculosis—only added to the domestic affection. She was the particular favorite of her father, a charming and witty man, only intermittently faithful to his large, formidable, and adoring spouse, and after his premature death at forty-six, in 1907, Estelle had obligingly assumed the role of primary emotional support to her widowed mother, whom all New York regarded as a heroine, left as she was with all those sons to launch in the world. Why a heroine? Estelle sometimes asked this question of the shrewd little observer whom she artfully concealed behind an impassive front. Was Louisa Carnochan not possessed of robust health, an exuberant disposition, and a comfortable inheritance from a father who had bought farmland in northern Manhattan for nothing? But New York liked heroines, and Louisa enjoyed the role quite as much as her audience enjoyed attributing it to her.

Estelle may have been willing to play her part as acolyte to this grand figure of sorrow, and to act as confidante to rowdy brothers who seemed, for all their bravado, to need more pats on the back than might have been expected from their boasts, but she was determined that she was going to have a life of her own and never sink into the position so often then expected of the youngest born of a large family: the patient companion of a never-dying parent. Particularly if that youngest was afflicted with the symptoms of a dread disease.

She defied her mother's protests by insisting on attending Barnard College, although she had to submit to the humiliation of being accompanied on her daily trips uptown by an Irish maidservant, whose odd presence in the back of the classroom she explained to her new and more liberated friends as that of a cousin who desired to audit the courses. And when she had her first beau, a former Harvard Law School classmate of her brother David, whom she had met on his visit to her family's summer place on the Cape, she thought she might have found an independent base for a vision of life outside her family and her frail lungs.

Bronson Hale was a Bostonian to the core of his being. His dark and rather solemn good looks were accompanied by a gravity of demeanor that might have chilled had it not been accompanied by the warmth of his evident sincerity. The Hales were kin to half the Brahmins of his native city, but his high-mindedness eschewed the least tint of social snobbery. He seemed to feel a kindred soul in Estelle, and she found herself wondering if she had perhaps met the man who could answer all the questions that her brothers could not.

Not that he asked those questions. It was the answers that he seemed ready to provide. Bronson Hale did not openly challenge the values of a society that Estelle tended to find restricted and money-grubbing, nor did he query the existence of a beneficent creator somewhere in the heavens, nor did he even criticize the code of dress and deportment laid down by the social leaders of New York or Boston. But he believed in a constantly progressing society; he had faith that mankind was improving with each century and that our ills of today would one day be shed in a world more perfect. But he also believed that a man must be always at work to bring about this better state, and he had no smugness in regard to his own minor part in the task which, however minuscule, would be all that a hardworking and idealistic lawyer could contribute. Oh, it was clear that he meant every word that he uttered!

Estelle was impressed by his earnestness, so unlike that of his more cynical friend, her brother David, but she was a bit troubled by his obvious feeling that the Hales and their like in his hometown were a good deal closer to the future ideal state than any of their more material opposite numbers in Manhattan. She chaffed him on this.

"You know, Bronson, everyone in my world doesn't see the first families of Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue quite as you do. It is not uncommon to hear them accused of narrow minds and ancestor worship. We've even heard of a family on the 'hub' that refers to the great Queen Elizabeth as Cousin Bessie Tudor."

"And that's perfectly fair," he admitted. "There are such, and I'm not proud of them. But I maintain there's an idealism under the layer of snobbery and stuffiness in Boston that's unlike anything else I've seen in America. Take our record in the Civil War. What city sprang to arms to eliminate slavery as quickly and as widely as Boston? In New York you had the draft riots."

"The Irish did that."

"Do you think we didn't have our Irish?"

She had to laugh. "It's funny, you know, that you and David should be such good friends. He doesn't think at all as you do. David looks at the world as something to conquer. You see it as something to improve. But I suppose you should be complimented by his interest in you. It means he's spotted you as a comer. David is already selecting the friends with whom he will share his triumph."

"I don't see myself in any such grand role. If I ever accomplish anything in this life, it will be because someone like you believes in me."

They had been seeing each other for some weeks now. He had come down to New York on several weekends to call on her despite the heavy demands of his law practice. Of course, she knew that it meant something, and she found that something exciting, though she tried not to exaggerate it. For he had uttered no word—not a syllable—until this last statement, to indicate the birth of the least romantic feeling on his part. And yet the warmth of his tone and the intensity of his dark stare seemed to belie any imputation of indifference.

Did he know something? Had he been told something? Oh, God, she thought. She had to know.

"Has my mother said anything to you?" she demanded. "Or David?" They were sitting in the rarely inhabited stiff little front parlor that was used by any family member who wished to receive a guest alone. "About me, I mean. My health."

As his dark brow seemed to darken and she glimpsed the immediate pain in his eyes, she caught her breath at her sudden sense of how sharply his looks attracted her. Could she really be falling in love? But of course she could!

"Your health?" His tone was barely audible.

"Yes. My lungs."

For another long moment he was gravely silent. "Your mother told me it was not good for you to get excited."

"She was warning you!"

"Warning me of what?"

"That I wasn't marriageable!"

"Nothing could make you unmarriageable" was his firm reply. "Nothing in this world, Estelle."

"Not even death!" she exclaimed defiantly.

"Nothing," he repeated. But he did not repudiate her term.

"I don't want to be married out of pity."

"I could never have the gall to pity you."

She felt that she could almost hear the crack of her breaking heart. Were the doors of life to slam shut just as they seemed about to open? She was too undone to do more than ask him to excuse her and rush upstairs to bury her head in the pillows of her bed.

That night she suffered her first massive hemorrhage.

T
HERE WAS NEVER
any real hope after this. When she was released from the hospital, it was only to return to a chaise-longue existence in her well-heated third-floor bedroom. There were books and visitors to relieve the dreariness of such a life, but her only true consolation was in her correspondence with the faithful Bronson. He had wanted to leave his law firm and move to New York to be available for as many visits as her doctor allowed, but she was resolute that he should do nothing to hurt his legal career. She was going to fashion the end of her existence in her own way, and in this determination she would not be gainsaid. She made this very clear in the first letter that initiated their weekly interchange.

Dear Bronson,

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate. They never dare to mention the one topic that most nearly concerns their affected friend—no, that is strictly forbidden. And so their conversation, as with all chatter when the mind is otherwise preoccupied, is hollow and dull when it is not actually painful. Even some of our nearest and dearest have a genius for saying the wrong thing.

And yet one yearns to talk of one's own demise. Which is why I have conceived this idea of a correspondence with the one soul I feel understands me, and who happens to be the man who might have become more than a friend had I been healthier and had our mutual interest continued to grow. You see? I can say that now. What need have I anymore for maidenly restraint? Of course, I cannot know what might have developed between us, nor can you. Certainly couples have been happily wed who started less congenially than you and I. Some might even claim that we have already enjoyed the sweetest part of a relationship between a man and a woman: the early dawn of what might mature into a great love. But it does not matter now except to demonstrate my freedom to say whatever is on my mind. What I need is someone to whom I can open my heart in writing, and I choose writing as the blessed veil to cloak the inevitable embarrassments of face-to-face communication.

Will your Emersonian transcendentalism allow of that, dear Bronson? An exchange of keen minds rather than vulnerable hearts? I know you are too honest to undertake something in which you do not believe, simply to placate an ill woman. However delightfully you may be one, don't in this case be a Boston gentleman!

And Bronson replied:

Yes, dearest Estelle, I accept your offer. But far from not being a Boston gentleman, I will endeavor to be one of the truest. Every word that I write to you will be as sincere a reflection of my thoughts as I can make it. There may be motives that lie beneath that are hidden from me—we have read of recent Viennese explorations into the unconscious—and therefore must remain hidden to you, nor can I promise you that I shall unveil every passing thought or fantasy that may flit across my mind. There may be such, of which we have no control, that I refuse to dignify with my pen. No mind should be totally free of the censor of decency. But what I inscribe here will be true.

To begin with, yes indeed, dear heart, I had dared to hope that our friendship might ripen into something more binding. But I am not going to belabor our correspondence with anguished sentiment—I know you have not embarked on a
Sonnets from the Portuguese.
I am steeling myself to face what you must face, not with as clear an eye and brave a heart, for I am much your inferior in such, but with as much clarity and courage as I can muster.

I will not say that had you been blessed with stronger health, all would have been plain sailing between us. I had my doubts as to whether you would ever be fully happy in Boston or I away from it. Not only is my law practice almost immovably grounded here, but so, it seems, is my stubborn soul. I could have moved anywhere rather than have lost you, but I would always have felt "New Englandly," and that might have created a difficulty for both of us. One that we would have surmounted, but there it would have been. I have always believed that there was a fundamental nobility of character under all the constantly satirized traits of old Boston. There! At least I have got that off my chest.

You might, of course, have come to see the best in the "hub," as you call it, as I do, but I fear that your sharp eye would have always seen the common caricature of the Brahmin type in those of my friends and relatives who adhere more closely to it than I dare to hope I do. But I only make the point to introduce another: the point of your much more fundamentstal variance from the principles of my family background, by which I mean (oh, I can hear your "Here we go!") the absence in you of any brand of Christian faith. It is here that I see the strength in even the weakest and silliest of my tribe, and I desperately stretch out a hand to offer to your reluctant self even a drop of the divine consolation that they receive. You may wince at my choice of words. I stick to them.

You believe strongly, I know, in the difference between right and wrong, and no one has been more resolute than yourself in your determination to be on the side of the former. When I have asked you what impels you to choose to do the unselfish rather than the selfish thing, your reply has always been the same: "Because I don't wish to be the kind of person who would do the other." On that distinction hang all your law and your prophets. It is a matter, one might almost conclude, of taste, of turning away from sin as one would from an unpleasant odor. What need of a god has a person of strong enough nostrils?

But if right and wrong have any meaning, any true existence other than as mere figments of your imagination, there must exist somewhere, somehow, a standard that defines the difference between them—a moral sense in the universe. Can one not make out a dawning of this even in beasts? The lion that kills the cubs of its mate to bring her back into heat to satisfy his lust is obviously devoid of it, but the African wild dog, which kills only the precise number of its litters needed to keep the pack within the limits of the available food supply, and forcibly feeds any reluctant puppies, shows the beginning of a social conscience, the faint origin of a moral standard. And if such a standard exists, even outside the ken of mortals, is it not feasible to suppose there is a purpose in creation? And if there be any purpose at all, is it not irresistible to infer that this life, with its manifold injustices, its bizarre distribution of comedy and tragedy, is not all?