East Side Story (20 page)

Yale and girls brought complications to Jaime's life, for his idea of a "date" was a good deal more sophisticated in the early 1930s than it would later become. It was only because the outraged parents of one impregnated debutante dreaded an open scandal that they held their tongues and consented to a secret abortion. Tetine, to whom an at last temporarily troubled son made a full confession—his father never knew—gave him what his old Irish nurse used to call "the length and breadth of her tongue" for the first time in their relationship, but she had little hope that he would reform his ways.

She pinned her feeble hopes for a less tumultuous life on his making an early marriage, which he did. Graduating from Yale, he took a job with the famous advertising agency Ross and Codman, which seemed the ideal opening for one of his facile and ingenious talents, and he was soon courting the beautiful Lila, daughter of the powerful head of the firm, Alton Ross.

"You're planning to marry her, I hope?" Tetine demanded of Jaime when he stopped by, as he often did after work, to share a cocktail with her. He had his own apartment now, and she knew only too well why.

"Well, I guess I'll have to, won't I?"

"Not, I hope, because of anything you've done."

"Of course not. Mothers have dirty minds, I'm afraid. No, it's because of what I want to do."

"You relieve me."

"Mother! You don't think I'd seduce the boss's daughter, do you? It would cost me my job!"

"Or get you a promotion. Isn't the son-in-law the natural heir of the American tycoon? The son too often goes to the dogs."

"Will you be pleased if I bring you a princess for a daughter-in-law? A commercial princess, anyway."

"Only if you promise to be a good and faithful prince."

"You do ask rather a lot. What do you give in return?"

"My blessing."

"And I, poor fool, thought I could count on that in any event! But I see that a mother crossed may become the wicked fairy godmother. Had you known what I might become, would you have tossed a curse into my cradle?"

"Much good it would have done me. Or anyone else, for that matter."

"And what does that mean?"

"What it means, dear heart, is that I'm very much afraid that whatever you do, you'll get away with."

"That's my lucky card, is it?"

"You beg the question."

Jaime married Lila Ross at a big church wedding, followed by a bigger reception on the St. Regis Roof, to the plaudits of all concerned. Two children were born to the couple in the first three years of their union, and Jaime's first adultery, or at least the first of which anyone had any notice, did not occur until their fourth anniversary. He then had an affair with the wife of a Yale classmate who had been best man at his wedding, Gilbert Warren, a sober, serious, high-minded lawyer who deemed it his duty to think the best of all his friends, even Jaime. When his wife, Eugenie, exasperated at the fatuity of his seemingly willful blindness, actually threw her guilt in his face, he solemnly suggested a conference between the two couples to discuss the situation and its possible solutions in a thoroughly modern and scientific fashion. Lila and Eugenie reluctantly and resentfully agreed, but the meeting came to an explosive finale when Jaime, straight-faced, calmly put on the table the suggestion that the air might be cleared of its thunder if his wife and Gilbert would first conduct an affair of their own.

"And then we'd be able to talk without the hang-up of outmoded tribal myths," he concluded with a brisk nod, as if disposing of the whole question.

An outraged Lila appealed to her even more outraged father, who at once fired Jaime from his office. Through the loud denunciations of Alton Ross his son-in-law's suggestion of an open marriage which might otherwise have remained in the dark became the talk of the town. Like everyone else, the whole Carnochan clan was scandalized. Even Andy, prone to excuse, or at least snicker at, the most flagrant sexual excesses, thought his son had gone too far. Meeting his wife and Jaime at noon at his lunch club in a private glass alcove commanding a dazzling view of the wicked city, he reverted for an odd moment to the harshness of an old Presbyterian divine.

"What you suggested, Jaime Carnochan, struck at the very roots of our church and our faith. It is hard even for a loving father to condone what you have done and, perhaps even worse, what you have said. I can reluctantly understand why your unhappy wife has chosen to sue you for divorce here in New York on the one ground allowed. The only thing I can suggest, sirrah, is that you disappear for a considerable time. Time enough so that the town, or some of it, anyway, may forget this wretched business."

"Forget what, Pater?" demanded his obviously unrepentant son. "My offering a simple proposition that might have turned an ugly row into a pleasant roll in the hay? Is everybody crazy?"

"Somebody is!" Andy's cheeks were turning a beet red. "At least that's the only excuse I can make for you. Speak to him, Tetine, will you please!"

"Oh, leave me out of this, I beg of you."

"But it's just this sort of talk that's making his father-in-law badmouth us all over town! He's asking everyone what sort of bringing up you and I could have given our son."

"Well, I'm a big girl now. I can stand up to it."

"Mr. Ross takes that position publicly, does he?" Jaime swooped on the idea with\a laugh that was actually cheerful. "I love it! The mighty Ross, who's covered his great nation with ads to make the smelly multitude dream that it can cure its natural stink. Or to delude the victims of halitosis with the lure of sweeter breath. And for what purpose? That they may aspire to attract sexual predators! What else, in the name of a puritan heaven? Why, Ross's whole business is founded on sex! Does he care if it's priest-approved? A fat lot he does."

Tetine sighed as she listened to him. She knew now what she had known but tried to repress before: that her son was hopelessly and irredeemably amoral, certainly in all matters relating to sex, and probably in a goodly number of others.

"I think, anyway, my dear," she responded in a milder tone, "that what your father suggests about a trip is a good idea. Also, it might be wise for you and Eugenie Warren not to see each other for a bit. Anything else might look as if you were flaunting your affair in the face of society."

"I think that's good advice, Ma.
Very
good advice."

"Oh? Why is it so good as that?"

"Because the minute Lila obtains her decree, I become vulnerable."

"Vulnerable to what?"

"To husband seekers. Who else?"

"And you think Eugenie, when she gets
her
decree, might fit into that category?"

"I
know
she would fit into it."

"And that is so much to be avoided? We thought you two were so close."

"Mother! Can you imagine your Jaime boy wed to a woman who thinks that going to two nightclubs after the theater is twice as much fun as going to one?"

"And three times, three times as much?"

"Precisely. For Eugenie there is no law of diminishing returns. She'd be an exhausting spouse."

"But she is good, I gather, for other things."

"She is very good for other things."

Which Jaime indeed proved, for he broke off his liaison with Eugenie Warren, took an extended trip to South America, and resumed the affair when he returned to New York with his second wife, Estella, whom he had met in Rio.

This second match was already on the rocks when Jaime joined the army in 1941. As a first lieutenant he was sent to London at an early date to join the staff there planning the ultimate invasion of the Continent. He engaged in a regular and detailed correspondence with his mother, in which he offered to her bemused but resigned eye light-hearted descriptions of the new fields for gallantry that the dislocations of war had brought to a formerly more ordered society.

Tetine knew that she would never be able to change his nature; all she could hope to accomplish was somehow to keep him within the borders of respectability. She had made it her business to study his nature to the bottom, and she thought that she now understood the extraordinary attraction that he exercised over her sex. It was not that he was so handsome, though there was more than a smitch of the Byronic in his pale intensity which made so intriguing a background to his mocking wit. Plenty of men less successful with women were better looking and had heftier builds. It was more the lightness of his touch that did the trick. He stripped the ancient mystery of sex of all its formidability; he made it seem as harmless and noncommittal as a picnic or a day at the races. He made a girl feel a fool to have taken for a mountain what nobody had taught her was only a molehill. And at the end of the affair, if the girl reverted, as they often did, to the old theory of the mountain, where was Jaime? He was gone. Tetine wondered at times if he was a scamp or a prophet. Was the so-called sexual revolution of the postwar world not perhaps a confirmation of his theory?

Andy had lost a good percentage of his capital by holding on too long to his shares in businesses only temporarily enriched by the war, and Tetine, partly to supplement their reduced income and pardy simply to conquer her boredom, had joined with a woman friend to form a business partnership that would plan and organize private entertainments: debutante dances, anniversary dinners, charity balls. She found that she had a definite flair for the job, particularly for parties in the last-named category, and would ultimately write a bestseller, a memoir entitled:
Who Pays for Elsa Maxwell's Ticket?,
but her real reward came with her discovery that her firm provided just the niche that Jaime had always needed.

He had returned from the war jobless and penniless, with a reputation for philandering that hardly endeared him to the business and banking world of men. He was delighted to go to work for his mother, and soon proved adept at the job beyond her most extreme hopes. He delighted prospective hostesses with his enthusiasm and his imaginative ideas. If his underlying principle was that life was—or at least could be—a party, why should a lady not use her money, her talent, her very soul, to make it a good one?

"What is a party, after all, but a prelude to love?" he asked his mother.

"To your kind of love, maybe" was her rather dry response. But she saw that her plan was working.

I
N THE TWO DECADES
that followed, Jaime expanded the business to a point where his name was known throughout Gotham. His fame did much to mitigate the severity with which his philandering had formerly been condemned. The eye of criticism is misted by success, and Jaime's affairs were treated by society as the minor warts on the amiable countenance of a popular and accepted celebrity. Any mistress of his—or wife, for he married four times—who complained of betrayal was deemed a fool for not having anticipated what everyone knew would happen—everyone at least who had any doings with the "great world."

He had progressed far beyond the debutante party. He had seen early with his mother that the charity ball would become the regular and indispensable staple of social entertainment. The rich, both old and new, bowing to the fashionable liberalism that had sprinkled the surface of the economy ever since the New Deal, found it better for their public relations and easier on their consciences, when they had any, if they could identify their quest for festivity with the alleviation of human misery or the fostering of the arts. They danced for hospitals and medical research; they wined and dined for museums and schools. Charity excused their show of diamonds; humanity justified their mirth. Jaime used his agile inventiveness to conceive of ever-newer divertissements; he reveled in creating a world that more and more seemed to resemble the world as he had originally imagined it.

At a dinner party in the 1960s for the older generation of the Carnochans, given by David and Janetta, and attended by Tetine and Andy, their aging but still very alert host, David, held forth on a favorite theme of his.

"The old Presbyterians in our family used to preach at great length of the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. They feared that you couldn't expect even decent behavior from mankind without a promised reward or a threatened punishment. And, as it was obvious that in this world the wicked often prospered and the good suffered, they had to invent another life where the score was more justly kept. But do we really need that today? Don't we largely get our comeuppance in this mortal life? By 'we,' mind you, I don't refer to the poverty-stricken masses of the globe who die wretchedly of hunger and disease. I'm talking about the people we know, our own kind, who are born with the luck of a decent affluence and at least the opportunity of a decent career. Look about you at your relatives, your friends, your business associates, even your enemies, if you have any. Don't the good ones, on the whole, have a pretty good life, and don't the bad ones generally end up in some sort of trouble? Do they have to die to get what's coming to them?"

This was followed by a rather noisy round of general chatter as the table, amused as always by David's theory, discussed it. Names were offered as examples, pro and con, sometimes eliciting hoots of laughter. Someone suggested about an apparently successful evildoer that a secret guilt might be his punishment, and was answered by another who jeered that in that case a secret self-satisfaction might be an adequate reward for a virtuous sufferer. A good time was had by all.

Until Andy introduced a jarring note. As he aged, he not only had become more portly; he was more inclined to refresh his thirst with whiskey. With a flushed resentment perhaps sparked by a lifelong jealousy of his "Irish twin" now at last beginning to break through its long cover, he seemed willing to sacrifice his own son to rebut David's assumptions.

"What about Jaime?" he demanded, and the table fell silent. No one had seen fit to use a family member as an example. Tetine looked down at her plate as one who knew that any remonstrance would only make matters worse. "I guess everyone here knows what a merry life my Jaime has led," Andy continued heartily, grinning around at the table. "We have little doubt as to what our emigrating ancestor would have thought of him. He would have sternly pointed to the yawning gates of hell! Yet what has happened to the sinning Jaime in this mortal vale of tears? He has built a prosperous business. He has had his pick of the beauties of the land. His children, left largely to the care of their abandoned mothers, have not only succeeded in their chosen careers but made happy and lasting marriages. And what has happened to your own offspring, oh, ye virtuous folk?" Here he almost leered as he glanced about. "Aren't half of them on drugs? Don't you curse the fatal sixties? While Jaime goes from prize to prize down the primrose path! To what? Perhaps to a restful oblivion."