East Side Story (12 page)

That is all I urge upon you. I do not suggest that you embrace any creed or adopt any ritual. I do not open the gates of a new Jerusalem whose streets are paved with gold and echo the anthems of angels; I do not even offer you a resurrection of the body or a reunion with loved ones. I only ask you to open your mind to the possibility that this is not the end.

I yearn to see you, but as long as you restrict me to the meager epistolary consolation of a Horace Walpole or a Madame de Sevigne, I obey.

Estelle replied:

Of course, my dear, you're too intelligent not to see that where an ultimate purpose is concerned, you're begging the question. You feel there
must
be purpose in the universe. I see no reason that compels me to agree. Like Pascal,
je vois ces effroyables espaces de l'univers qui m'enferment,
but I lack his abiding consolation. Nor do I really think I have much needed it. By fastening my thoughts on this terrestrial globe and concentrating on how to make such life as we have a bit pleasanter for myself and those in my immediate vicinity, I seem to have managed to get by—at least until now.

I readily concede that my range of vision has been very limited. Indeed, it has been largely confined to the story of the Carnochans. What have they accomplished to make life more agreeable since they braved the Atlantic waves to establish a branch of their thread business on the shores of a new world? And what have I done to aid them?

Well, I seem to see their accomplishment as largely negative, but that is something. As you rightly point out, I myself have been mostly motivated by the desire
not
to be a certain kind of person. The Carnochans, at least in America, have been guilty of no felonies, no public improprieties, no incitements to disorder, no grotesque outbursts of scandalous behavior. They have been law-abiding, tax-paying, pacific members of the community, minding their own business and minding it well enough. If the whole world behaved so, would it not be a peaceable kingdom? Perhaps. But the Carnochans never reached out very far; they never regarded themselves as their brother's keeper. Or perhaps as keepers only of one as close as a brother. And, for all my criticism of them, have I? I may not have been the kind of person I didn't want to be, but have I been anyone else?

My mother, as any mother would be, is proud of her six sons, who are all on their way to making some sort of mark in the world. She sees them as vigorous, manly, and, I fear—for she admires this—aggressive, and she attributes what she deems their tough hides to the rugged lowland Scottish farmers from whom we presumably descend. But actually the Carnochans seem to have been already rather watered-down stock by the time they arrived in New York. They had just enough energy to perch on the seaport where they landed and never moved an inch farther west. Our original immigrant, David, had nine children, but all of his many living descendants owe their being to only one of them: his son Douglas. The other eight died without issue; six of them, all daughters, never even married. I remember when I was doing a volunteer temporary job in the library of the Seamen's Church Institute finding an old daguerreotype of a very plain lady over the caption
Miss Phoebe Carnochan
, on the back of which some rude sailor had scribbled the words "Why I went to sea." No, our vigor, if such it be, must stem from the colonial aristocrats in the family tree of my grandmother Carnochan, born a Dudley of your beloved hometown, who was able to say—and I'm sure frequently did—"
Both
my grandmothers were Saltonstalls." I sometimes even wonder if my mother, who is the soul of consideration and love to her ailing daughter, isn't puzzled by the contradiction, in a family so apparently strong, of a member as frail as myself.

Do you know what I think is the secret of the "moral" success of such American so-called upper-class families as the Carnochans, and even the sacred Hales of Boston? It's that they never for a moment admit, either to themselves or to anyone else, that they are not the "nicest" people on the globe. They shy away from the brutal candor of their British opposite numbers, who scorn to hide their open snobbery, and they deplore the French and German aristocrats, who actually glory in it. No American mother would ever admit that her children had married for any reason but a sincere and abiding love, nor would her children dare to deny it. Friendships, they insist, are formed on the basis of mutual affection and admiration; business is always conducted for the greater development of the nation's God-given resources, and death contains, as in the old hymn, "welcome for the sinner and more graces for the good." There have to be moments, of course, when even the rosiest Pollyanna has doubts about all this, but so long as the flag is kept unfurled to flutter in the breezes of fatuity, such darker periods can be kept under control.

Well, does it really matter what gets them through this life so long as they get through it? I don't know. Does it help people to face the void? What is it in me but a hollow pride that makes me rear up and cry, "I won't be taken in! I face the truth and defy it!" And where does it get me? I still can't make up my mind not to be, not to exist. I still shrink before that door through which such countless numbers have passed before me. I'm like the blind woman in the Watts painting, plucking the last string of the shattered harp of hope. And I'm ashamed of it.

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life—a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it—filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction, and when our regular preacher tried to assure me that there would be no time in a future life, I found it unimaginable.

To which Bronson replied:

Of course, you're right about being only in a small part a Carnochan. You're no more a blood member of that clan than you are of the families of your mother and her parents and of your paternal grandmother. Indeed, as we travel down the family tree, the blood of our cognomen shrinks to a mere trickle of our life stream. But I was interested to learn that you have Dudley and Saltonstall forebears, for so have I, and I embrace anything that brings us closer. I feel, I fear, I share a bit of my own parents' ancestor worship; to be linked to an honorable past has seemed to me a way of adding a touch of dignity and order to the chaos of modern life, but I cannot be unaware that an undetected fault on the part of an unsuspected many-greats-grandmother could lop off the finest limbs of a haughty tree. Not that I suspect any of those revered puritan ladies of having a lover on the sly—heaven forbid! But the past contains wide tracts of undiscovered country. All we can be sure of is that we are ourselves.

And perhaps of something else. That a man and a woman can form a relationship that is something more than themselves, a thing of beauty, a thing, I dare to suppose, that has its own existence. Oh, I'm talking nonsense, and I promised you that I wouldn't belabor our epistolary communication with such outbursts, but oh, my dear one, it is very hard.

But I pull myself up. I will be good. How about this? At the time of your first diagnosis, you expressed to me the wish that, if things should turn out as darkly as predicted for you, I should nonetheless, after a due interval, marry and raise a family. Very well. I will undertake to do that. I will seal you up in a watertight compartment of my heart into which no wife or child of mine shall ever enter. But that compartment will not be either a reproach or a cloud to them; it will simply not exist for them. It will exist for me and me alone. This will take willpower, but I shall have the willpower. I shall have learned it from you.

The above is to show you my willingness to comply with even your sternest instructions. But you have not forbidden me to abandon all hope. Your nice cousin Gordon told me that a famous specialist, a Dr. Bretton, had seen you and spoken of the possible beneficent effects for you of a winter in southern Italy. Estelle, is that true? Why didn't you tell me? And what in God's name is keeping you here?

Look. Your brothers are all occupied with their lives and families as they should be. In Italy you would have help—servants are cheap and plentiful there—as well as nurses and perhaps your mother to care for you. But you would need a man to cope with the household, the currency, the shopping, the taking you on drives, the checking on doctors, and all the myriad little odd jobs living abroad entails. I speak some Italian—enough to get along, anyway, and I could easily become more fluent—and I have a sufficient private income to support myself. It would be my pride and joy to take an indefinite leave of absence from my firm and go to Italy as your majordomo or courier, or whatever it pleased you to call it. And I could stay there for a year or two years, or as long as it took you to get well. Nor would you have to worry about the propriety of it; I would of course not occupy your villa or even visit it except to perform my duties.

What are we waiting for? Let's go!

What follows is Estelle's last letter.

I did not write you, dearest Bron, of Dr. Bretton's brief optimism because the day after he had expressed it I had a severe hemorrhage that almost carried me off, and after a consultation with my regular attendant, dear old Dr. Wren, he regretfully changed his opinion. It seems I am past even Neapolitan miracles. But oh, dear man, what a joy and a lift it gave me to know that you were willing to jump off the ladder to the legal fame which I
know
is your destiny to devote to my welfare a great span of your working time that might well be fatal to your career. You may remember how you and I once talked of the great J. P. Morgan (whom, with his partners, the Carnochans worship as the twelve apostles), who abandoned his career as a young man to take his ailing first bride to Egypt for her recovery. Of course, she died before it was too late for him to resume it, but he didn't know that at the time, and you and I agreed that he showed a love of which no other contemporary American tycoon would have been capable. Can you imagine Gould or Rockefeller doing any such thing? And now I can boast that I have inspired an equal devotion! It makes me on the one hand bitterly regret the fate that keeps us from sharing a golden partnership, but on the other, it gives me a glorious consolation to think that I have not lived without a great happiness.

Bless you, my beloved. I can die in peace. Well, anyway, in a kind of peace. I think I can make do with it. And I owe it all to you.

B
RONSON SURVIVED ESTELLE
for half a century. He became the senior partner of a major Boston law firm, a renowned lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and the author of a classic textbook on the law of contracts. A wise and grave gentleman of the old school, he was respected and esteemed by all who knew him, though many found him too formal of manner and difficult to approach. His marriage of forty years to an amiable and noble-minded woman, a Cabot, seemed serenely smooth, and it was blessed with three fine children. He was reputed never to have mentioned his first love, but everyone knew his story.

G
ORDON CARNOCHAN
did not remain long separated from his cousin David in the practice of law. After only a few years in the Perry, Whitehead firm, interrupted by a brief service in 1918 in officers' training camp brought to a sudden close by the Armistice, he was faced with the dazzling offer of a partnership in David's firm, which was in the process of being reorganized, largely by David himself, due to the near-simultaneous deaths of its two senior partners in 1920. David had prevailed on Adam Carter, one of the leading legal lights and statesmen of the era—and whose daughter Janetta David had wed—to take over the administration of the distinguished but now leaderless Brown & Livermore, and David himself, of course, was to be a junior partner in the new firm. He had also been authorized by Mr. Carter to offer an equal position to his cousin Gordon, who had a fine record in his own firm but who had not yet been promoted to partnership there.

"We'll be at least two of the old musketeers!" David exclaimed, with something of his old Yale enthusiasm. "And when old father Carter goes to his well-deserved reward, we two, if we play our cards right, should be able to rule the roost."

It was certainly a tempting offer. Carter had a fine reputation, and the new firm had every look of future success. The partners in Gordon's old firm might have applauded his work, but they had been stingy and slow in promoting their juniors. Agatha had her doubts about the project, but she was happily engaged now with two children and a job she loved, teaching at a private girls' school, and she thought Gordon had shown sufficient independence of his family to be free of domination from any of them. So the offer was accepted.

At a later period in his life Gordon looked back on the years 1920 to 1933 as the golden ones. The children were growing up healthy and happy; Agatha was content with her job, and he was finding keen satisfaction running the lucrative bond department of the firm, which had made him quite as much a voice in its management as David with his corporations. The cousins had worked together harmoniously, and it was beginning to look as if David's prediction would come true. There was talk among the partners now of renaming the firm and including both the Carnochans in the new tide. He and David were not only musketeers; they were almost rivals!

But in 1933 his life seemed to darken. It was not so much the Great Depression, which had seized the nation, and which his firm had survived, though it formed an appropriate background. It was more a kind of disillusionment and apathy. It started with an incident that David at least would have regarded as trivial.

Gordon had adopted a private hobby of preparing a history of the firm, and one morning he uncovered a document in Mr. Carter's private files, which had been freely turned over to him, that deeply upset him. He told Agatha of it that night; he said it might have changed his whole attitude toward the firm. She was surprised.