East Side Story (21 page)

David was clearly irked by the sour turn that his brother had given to a topic designed to amuse. He smiled, but his smile was a wry one. "Jaime may still get his comeuppance. And in this life, too. And all the worse for being delayed!"

A nervous titter from his audience was the only response to this. The family sensed the grimness in David's tone and thought best to make light of it. Then Tetine, with her customary tact, put an end to any further discussion of her adored son.

"The Commendatore has not yet descended from his pedestal," she observed. "And I for one hope he will remain perched on it. Hadn't we better let it go at that?"

R
ONNY CARNOCHAN
"celebrated," or rather deplored, his fifty-second birthday alone during the hot summer of 1970 in his red-brick colonial rented Georgetown house in the District of Columbia. His wife, Elly, had gone to New York to be with her ailing mother. A strict and loving observer of anniversaries, she had wanted to stay with him, even at the cost of discomforting an invalid parent, but he had insisted on her not doing so, asserting, quite truthfully, that he saw no occasion for festivity on reaching the age that he had. Particularly as neither of their two children would be present: Tom having hidden away (shamefully, as Ronny had originally seen it) from the draft in Denmark and Elsa being in Chicago to organize another of her protest marches against the war in Vietnam. Certainly neither of them would have cared to raise a glass to toast a father who, as a special assistant to the Secretary of State, was toiling night and day to support a war which they abominated.

So Ronny welcomed the chance for an evening alone to reflect, over a modestly refilled whiskey-and-soda, on the vicissitudes of a life that had brought him to this pass. For if he had initially greeted the prospect of war in Asia as a crusade for the containment of Communism, he had subsequently incurred grave doubts not only as to its wisdom but as to its morality. And if he had deplored what he had deemed at first a lack of patriotism in his offspring, he was now not so sure that their national loyalty was not deeper than his own. And if he had once seen the assemblage of his brightest contemporaries around the shining star of Jack Kennedy as the advent of a golden age, he now found himself wondering if "Camelot" had not been as fictional as King Arthur's round table.

What he himself had once seemed and what he had wanted to be was symbolized by his portrait as a naval lieutenant in World War II, which had been hung over the mantel in the parlor by a loyal wife determined to give it the most prominent place. It had been painted on one of his home leaves in that earlier war, commissioned by his adoring father, David, who had had likenesses of his only son taken at every stage of the latter's life. The picture, embarrassingly flattering, showed a young officer adorned with ribbons and battle stars whose pale, delicate features, high brow, rich curly hair, and far-gazing eyes seemed to unite a poet and a warrior, an idealist and a man of action. Time of course had altered the model, but the present Ronny had at least retained the hair, the figure, and the almost lineless physiognomy of the man in the portrait. Oh, yes, he was vain enough to acknowledge that he had worn well enough, at least outwardly, but he was also still able to recognize that he was, and always had been, a bit too small in stature to quite justify the air of importance that emanated from the canvas. Indeed, from boyhood he had been haunted by the sense that his modest physical dimensions just missed living up to the expectations that his facial beauty aroused. Was it nature's warning to him to temper the elation evoked in him by the admiring glances of others with a judicious modesty?

For he had been undeniably the pet of his family, of his school and college mates, of his fellow officers and law associates. All his life he had been blessed and burdened with charm. His mother, Janetta, large, bland, practical, and preoccupied by the exact performance of her daily tasks, had been a trifle baffled as to how to handle this prince in the family and had ended by giving in to him in everything, but her attitude had almost smacked of indifference in contrast to Daddy's total absorption in him. And Daddy was the one who counted, whose rule was absolute over the Louis XIII chateau in Long Island and the small but elegant marble-fronted town house in New York.

Indeed, Ronny's relationship with his father raised all the principal questions in his life. His tall, bald, gleaming-eyed, enigmatically smiling parent, great lawyer and associate of the great, was unlike the fathers of Ronny's friends in that he could never seem to have enough of his son's company and liked to have him with him on all kinds of occasions in which fathers and sons were usually apart. David would sometimes, for example, even take Ronny with him on business trips or to his law firm's outings. Ronny had the opportunity to see his father from more angles than did other sons, and he came to note that some people were a bit afraid of him, however much they may have admired his legal or diplomatic skills, and that there were even some who manifestly disliked him. But what he noted in particular was that his father, despite his barrage of outer friendliness and habit of broad smiles, seemed to have little real warmth in his feeling for people. Even with Janetta there was a certain coolness in his approach. But there was no mistaking David's feeling for his son; his voice in addressing the boy took on the same tone that it did when he spoke of a favorite sister who had died young.

All of which had given the young Ronny a curious sense of responsibility for his seemingly impregnable sire, as if, by some quirk of fate, he should be the one person in the world with the capacity of hurting his father. And the fear of ever doing so, of setting off a fire in the too dry interior of this fortress of a man, engendered a deep devotion to him. For Ronny began to realize that if his father was vulnerable to anyone as weak as a young son, he might not be so impregnable, after all, as that son had imagined, and it might be Ronny's mission to protect him, not only from the effect of his exaggerated love for his son, but from the hostility that his personality indubitably sometimes aroused.

When Ronny was only twelve, he actually intervened in a dispute between his father and his maternal grandfather at a Sunday family lunch. Grandpa Carter was the only person who could prevail over David even in the latter's own home. The issue discussed was David's plan to send Ronny the following fall to Chelton, the Massachusetts boarding school that he and his cousins had attended and which was still under the administration of the same veteran headmaster, Dr. Nickerson, who had taught them.

Mr. Carter was in the habit of taking positions opposed to those of his family, sometimes in order to stimulate them to new ideas and sometimes simply to irritate them, but in neither case did it keep him from waxing violent.

"Of course, we all know that the only real value of the New England private schools is what they can do for a stupid student. With their big endowments and fancy faculties they are in a unique position to pay attention to backward boys. The glory of Chelton is that it was probably the only academy that could have got my friend Cabot Storey's moron grandson into Harvard. But they can hardly boast about that, can they? And why does Ronny here need Chelton? Isn't he already at the top of his class at Buckley?"

"Isn't it a proper thing, Mr. Carter," David demanded, a bit testily, "for me to want the best education going for my son?"

"Pooh. Boys like Ronny educate themselves. I know I did, and I believe you did. All we needed was the books. The good teachers know that. They know that boys like Ronny are the sort out of whose way you have to get. The odd thing is that all those expensive private schools are hell-bent to get just the students who don't need them. They want to exclude the only ones they can really help. But then, we know it's a cockeyed world."

"How do you explain, then, that practically everyone you know is doing their damnedest to get their sons into schools like Chelton?"

"Very easily. Because they're all after another thing those schools
do
offer, and that is not just education. How many fathers in Wall Street give a hoot in hell about cultivation? Not many, as I'm sure you'll admit, David. They want to send their sons to the schools and colleges where they will make the friends most valuable to them in the financial world of the future. That's the system, and it works, too. You and I, my dear David, have seen many examples of just how smoothly it works. But Ronny's already in that world, thanks to your efforts. Thanks even a bit to my own."

"I think you grossly underestimate, sir, the effect on a fine mind like Ronny's of really first-class teachers."

Ronny could see now that his father was becoming really upset. He knew how carefully his parent had laid all his plans for his son's future, and that it was truly painful for him to hear Mr. Carter disillusioning his child. Ronny felt it suddenly incumbent on himself to reassure his sire.

"But, Grandpa," he interposed tactfully, "if I don't go to Chelton, I'll have to change to another school in the city. Buckley doesn't take us through to college. And many of my friends are going to Chelton. I should miss them."

"Oh, Chelton isn't going to do you any
harm,
my boy," Carter said with a sarcastic smile. "I know old Nickerson. He's not what I'd call an intellectual man, and he thinks he talks to Jesus, but he means very well. As they say in England, a gentleman needn't know Latin, but he must have forgotten it. Your son is quite safe, David. Even if he doesn't go to Chelton, everyone will think he has."

"Oh, Father, you're hopeless," Ronny's mother now exclaimed. "You make fun of everything."

And with this, the little dispute was terminated, but Ronny appreciated his father's grateful glance. It marked the beginning, not of their mutual love, which had existed all along, but of an alliance in which the son was beginning to realize that he was destined to play an important supporting role, and that his whole heart would go into playing it. For nobody understood his father as he did!

Ronny's entry into the life of Chelton School was eased by his being accompanied by so many of his pals from their day school in New York. They even formed a little clique in which they could stand together against the trials of being "new kids." And then the school itself was a kind of extension of the family; more than half his form mates were the sons of graduates who were even more in awe of the headmaster than their parents were. The panels in the main hall listing the alumni bore the names of several Carnochans. And the shining red brick and white columns of the buildings gracefully spaced around the emerald green of the circular lawn opening on the full beauty of a New England rustic fall lent a welcome even to the boy least sensitive to scenery. Add to this that Ronny's father was an active trustee of the institution, often consulted by the headmaster himself.

Ronny, as he grew into his teens, was too smart not to be aware that all the world did not see Chelton as he and his father did. The father of Tony Gates, his closest friend there, though a graduate and classmate of Ronny's father, had been the
enfant terrible
of an ancient Boston family, and he still enjoyed being blasphemous about his alma mater when he came up to visit his son and took him and Ronny out to supper at a local inn. His diatribes would go something like this:

"If Dr. Nickerson had been the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he wouldn't merely have exiled the sainted Anne Hutchinson for her antinomian views, he'd probably have hanged her! Like John Winthrop, he'd have fled religious intolerance at home to establish his own version of it on the rocky coast of New England. Is there a single Jewish boy in Chelton? And how many Catholics?"

"But we're a church school, Mr. Gates," Ronny pointed out. "Jews have their own, don't they?"

"What about the many who have converted?"

"Dr. Nickerson says they did so for social reasons. Which doesn't make them true Christians."

Mr. Gates's laugh was as big and noisy as himself. "I love it! Nickerson wouldn't have even let in Saint Paul!"

"And we have several Catholic boys, sir."

"Yes, but not many. And they still have to attend the chapel services, do they not?"

"Yes, but they can go to early Mass in the village."

"With the chambermaids in the school bus! I remember that from my own days. Oh, my dear young Ronald, I see you've been brainwashed. That's why I come here so often to visit my Tony." Here he gripped his son's shoulder. "To see that he gets at least a glimmer of other points of view. After all, no matter what walls we raise around our precious youngsters, they're bound one day to have some contact with the great unwashed."

But Ronny was far from being brainwashed. He saw perfectly that, for all his free thinking, Mr. Gates had taken care to send all his three sons to Chelton. Whatever it was that the school offered, it was evidently something that made up in Mr. Gates's mind for religious intolerance. Ronny also saw that Chelton and its headmaster stood sincerely for the principal virtues: honesty, courage, chastity, industry, cleanliness, patriotism, moderation in satisfying natural appetites, and gentlemanly good conduct. What was wrong with that? The school might draw its students from a limited social stratum, but that was because the headmaster had cared deeply for the small group of families that, fifty years before, had helped him create his then exiguous academy, and he had ever since favored the sons of his graduates. And if fewer of his boys went into the church or public service than he had hoped, was it not because, as President Coolidge had stated, the main business of America was business?

When Ronny's father came to the school—and his fiduciary duties as well as his paternal concern made such visits frequent—Ronny asked him how best to answer Mr. Gates's onslaughts.

"Ted Gates has always made a thing out of being a rebel against the status quo. It's jealousy, pure and simple. Even at school he was bitter about not being made a prefect. And he's never succeeded in anything. He may take potshots at old Boston, but he hasn't rejected the comfortable trust fund that keeps him, and you won't find him spending a summer in any place less fashionable than Nahant. He's the kind of liberal who is concerned only with tearing down those above him, never with raising up those below. You'll find a lot of men like that in life, I'm afraid, my boy. Ignore them."