East Side Story (2 page)

It was on the tender ears of such a nonparticipant in the bracing life that the angry tumult of pre-secession America fell. At first it sounded far from our quiet household. Father was of the school that found slavery sanctioned in the Bible and that felt, anyway, it was solely the business of the South; he joined my brother Douglas in holding that no compromise of the issue was too great to save a Union that was good for business. Andrew, on the other hand, was a fiery abolitionist and even dared to beard his father at the family board meeting with taunts about his tolerance of "Simon Legrees and women floggers." But the actual outbreak of war brought about a cautious lineup of the formerly peace-loving Carnochans on the side of "Honest Abe."

My brother Douglas led the way. Bluff and single-minded, he was already Father's right-hand man in the family business and was beginning to dominate his now aging parent. He had the gift of renewing his native heartiness in the wake of each new change in his point of view; he was able, I believe, quite literally to chase out of his conscious mind any memory of attachment to a superseded cause. New York had plenty of Southern sympathizers in its business community, and our family connection with Scotland might have inclined us at least to tolerate Britain's initial hostility to the Union side, but Douglas was a shrewd man in his predictions and he had surmised that the future lay with the North. Accordingly, no one was louder now in his denunciations of what were soon to be called "copperheads." Andrew, who was getting ready to enlist and who was well aware that his embattled older brother had no such military intentions, was more than willing to throw Douglas's past opinions in his face. I recall in particular one family dispute. Douglas, a recent member of the Union Club—his hand was already gripping the upper rings of the social ladder—was holding forth on the needed expulsion of certain members who, in his loudly voiced opinion, were no better than traitors.

Andrew went right for the jugular. "It seems to me, Douglas, that you take a pretty strong line for a man who only yesterday was supporting the Fugitive Slave Law."

"That was a simple question of law, Andy. A slave was private property, and strayed property had to be returned to its owner. My attitude did not for a minute imply that I was ever in favor of slavery. I respected the Constitution, that was all."

"You didn't think the law of God was superior to that of the Constitution?"

"Boys, boys," came Father's gravelly voice. "Will you kindly leave the name of the Almighty out of your political discussions. We have had no divine guidance as to which side, if either, He would favor in this unhappy conflict. There are men of undoubted faith among our foes. We can only pray that what we are doing is God's will."

A short, respectful, but perfunctory silence followed the paternal admonition, but the brothers were soon at it again.

"Slavery was the price we paid for our Union," Douglas continued. "It was a bitter price, but we paid it. But now that the rebels have gone back on their word, we have every legal and moral right to free their slaves and force them back into the Union. They have torn up the Constitution. There is nothing inconsistent between my pre- and postwar thinking."

"Only between your pre- and postwar heart," Andrew sneered. "We remember how sweetly you used to cultivate all those rich planters who came North to spend their summers in Newport!"

But this was nothing compared to the bitterness between the two much later in the war when the draft was passed. Andrew, a twice-wounded army captain was fighting in Virginia when he got word from Father that Douglas, who had never left the family office, had purchased a substitute for $300. Father's letter mentioned this as if it had been the only thing that his much-needed assistant could do, but he may have anticipated something of his second son's reaction when he added a note of the connection between the thread business and the army's need of uniforms. But Andrew was not impressed. His stinging answer to Father's letter was that the family had been disgraced.

There had never been any question of my enlisting. I had felt an obligation to utter some murmurs about joining the colors, but Mother's indignant protests, backed by those of our kindly old family physician, Dr. Findlay, whom she had, so to speak, in her pocket, allowed me to retreat from glory behind my noticeably diminishing asthmatic attacks. The only slight shame that I felt was in the hearty endorsement of the maternal attitude taken by my war-minded brother Andrew, whose ever-generous nature ascribed to me a genuine disappointment at missing combat and who assured me, placing a friendly arm around my shoulders, that if I would be good about staying home, he would fight hard enough for two. I could not but blush at the thought of my own hidden relief at my nonenlistment, but I solaced myself with counting up how many of my contemporaries remained out of uniform and with the hope, soon to be dashed, that the war would be a short one.

The disasters that followed Bull Run darkened the next two years and ultimately necessitated the draft, which brought on the major decision of my life. For my health had gone as well as the war had gone badly; my asthma attacks had virtually ceased. It was evident that if I were to avoid military service, it would have to be through an official exemption, for I knew that I would rather die than submit my heroic brother Andrew, who had been severely wounded but had rejoined his regiment, to the humiliation of having
two
brothers who bought substitutes.

Of course, Mother and Dr. Findlay were vigorously of the opinion that there could be no question of the army's sending a sick "boy" (I was twenty) to perish on some freezing winter night in a Virginia campaign. If there was any question of my exemption not being promptly granted, they were prepared to appeal to the Secretary of the Army. But what attitude was I to take? For weeks I hovered miserably in indecision. And then something happened that induced me to request the exemption. I had another attack.

Was
it that? How the question agonized me! Even now, decades later, it hurts me to write it. But I have long faced the truth. There
was
an element of the willed in it. I was so familiar with the nature of such attacks that it could not have been difficult for my psyche to simulate one, particularly if so much as the ghost of a former onslaught were to assail me. I made the most of my symptoms, and so convinced Dr. Findlay, who accompanied me to my examination by the draft board, that he lost his temper at one of its members who questioned his diagnosis. The board accorded me the requested status, but I saw in the expression of the doubting member that he, for one, had not been convinced, and I hated him, for I knew in my heart that he was right.

Anyway, it was done, and I pleased Father by telling him that I was now willing to enter Columbia Law School, from which I had so far been protected by Mother's fearing that the hard dry study of the law might not sit with my nervous disposition. Father, counting on his two older sons to succeed him in his business, thought it would be well for them to have a family lawyer, and although his hopes for me were slender, he thought that my effete taste for literature might be strengthened by a dose of the cod-liver oil of law.

But I had a different reason for choosing law. In a world at war the mood was masculine, and I had a nervous desire to merge myself as much as possible with a generation of young heroes, or at least not to stand out too harshly as not belonging to it. I think I was obsessed with the silly idea that lawyers were somehow more men than readers or writers, that I would, as a student of the profession, be more qualified to join in the brave chorus of "Glory, glory, alleluia!," that I would be, despite my shameful civilian garb, more a part of the general uplift, which could be very contagious. Was law to me a kind of protective coloration? But from what was I really protecting myself? From myself, of course. For I didn't really believe for a minute that anyone would see me as even remotely comparable to my gallantly fighting brother.

My defenses may have been artificial, and indeed, they were not to last, but for a year they brought me the greatest, and perhaps the only real, happiness of my life. It was certainly not the law that brought this about. I attended the lectures and skimmed the cases, but without any real attention or without the least anticipation of ever being admitted to the bar. My big brown notebook was filled not with summaries of statutes and court decisions but with the scribbled manuscript of the romantic historical novel of the American Revolution that I was intent on composing, whose hero, of course, was a fervid Yankee and whose heroine a haughty Brit. When I opened its pages, the terrible Battle of the Wilderness would fade away into a gray distance.

But oh, the joy of that time, of those months, of those long, delectable afternoons when I was shut up in the dark, half-empty, overheated law school library, which excluded not only the war but my family: Father and Douglas and the sisters and even Mother, who in her daily tortured anxiety about Andrew had almost ceased to be concerned about my now quite sturdy health. I was alone, blessedly alone, accountable to no one, and I could hug to my heart my own little genius and cultivate the wild illusion that one day it might startle the literary world. For as I read over and over the seemingly mellifluous passages that flowed from my active pen, I treasured the notion that I was husbanding a talent of which future generations would have need, and that it would have been a sorry waste to let it perish with its possessor in the red dirt of Virginia. If I had done a wrong to myself and to my country in abstaining from battle, was I not making up for it in giving what I could to the future? The Carnochans would have produced more than just Father and Douglas; they would have produced me!

My dreams were shattered by the news of Andrew's death in the Wilderness Campaign, only months before Appomatox. Reading over the manuscript of my novel in the shadow of the shining monument that my agonized imagination immediately raised to his glory, I saw—unmistakably—what feeble stuff it was. And the gray shattered countenance of my mortally stricken mother, and even the new lines of sorrow on my father's craggy features, convinced me that it was, after all, a world of men which had little but a mild pity for and, at best, a mild tolerance of such weaklings as myself. I suffered what would later be called a nervous breakdown, quit law school, abandoned my novel, and moped at home. Mother was almost lost to me in the deep night of her mourning, and Father treated me with an almost kindly acceptance, which was intended to disguise, I had little doubt, an essential indifference to a son who was evidently to be of little further use to him or his business, but who, like his several unmarried daughters, was as permanent a part of his home as the chairs and tables and prints of biblical scenes. He never said a word about my draft exemption, but I suspected that he smelled the fraud. It was devastating, and it remained so until he died, which both he and Mother did, within months of each other, in the year 1869.

Their estates were divided evenly among their many offspring, and my share was just enough to maintain a decent bachelor's existence. Eventually I resumed my writing and produced the three light historical romances whose small but steady sale through the years has given me the faintest trickle of literary renown. It will soon enough dry up. And the brave Andrew is quite forgotten. It is only through Douglas and his posterity that we survive. That would not in the least have surprised my eldest brother.

Well, there it is. I leave this memorandum to young David in the mild hope that it may help him to understand the past. He is clever enough to glean what profit he can from its few pages without irritating the family by publishing them.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1905 was a high-water mark in the social and architectural history of Newport. The long line of birthday cake palazzos, seemingly products of a second Italian Renaissance, though one happily free of stilettos and poison, each standing proudly on a finely tended strip of green lawn as exiguous as its occupying edifice was huge, ran down Bellevue Avenue and the Cliff Walk in a glittering riot of marble never to be bettered. Maintenance was at its most perfect; there was not a stray leaf out of place. But there still survived an older Newport, an eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century town that bordered on Narragansett Bay rather than the Atlantic, with smaller, soberer, chaster homes, among which, on modest Washington Street, stood the simple wooden frame, high-gabled residence of Mrs. Eliza Dudley Carnochan, widow of Douglas, whose porticoed front porch faced the water over a neat little lawn and garden.

Mrs. Carnochan was a small, plain, white-capped, black-garbed lady of nearly seventy, of the utmost respectability, whose large, drooping, but perceptive china blue eyes gazed not always benignly at what she evidently regarded as the tinselly aspects of such rich Johnny-come-latelies as the Vanderbilt clan. It was not that she scorned all the summer newcomers. But she picked and chose among them. She liked the staid, churchgoing Mrs. Alice Vanderbilt and called at the Breakers, but she avoided her imperious sister-in-law, Alva, and she would never have attended a party given by the flamboyant Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. Nor did she ever forget that she hailed back to the pre-gilded age of a literary Newport, the summer home of Julia Ward Howe, of Thomas Higginson, of Longfellow, the Newport that had enchanted the young Henry James and whose meadows and rocky shores had been painted by John La Farge and Kensett. Eliza Carnochan numbered two colonial governors among her forebears. It was known that both her grandmothers had been Saltonstalls.

She was essentially satisfied with the role which she knew had been assigned to her by her friends, neighbors, and many visiting descendants. She was to be the steadying force in a changing world, a gentle reminder—never a comminatory one—of the necessity of preserving some minimum of standards in manners and morals. Like the elderly and benevolent late Queen Victoria, reigning over the pomp of her far-flung empire and softening the mailed fist of the Raj, so did Eliza Carnochan remind the barons of steel and oil that money was not and could not be everything. In New York, of course, Eliza's sober brownstone on West Fifty-seventh Street was dwarfed to nothing by the giant Vanderbilt copy of Blois on the Fifth Avenue corner, but in Newport, Washington Street was still recognized by the Breakers.