East Side Story (22 page)

Ronny took this advice very much to heart. He tended now to see critics of his school, like those of his father's great law firm, as wantonly destructive agents, gnawing away at pillars that were just strong enough to keep society from the ever-present danger of crumbling to pieces. The few boys in his form who sneered openly at such evangelical hymns as "Onward, Christian Soldiers" were apt, he suspected, to contain a nasty streak in their nature; he compared them to the Red Soviet guards who had butchered the lovely young grand duchesses in that cellar in Ekaterinburg. There wasn't enough good in the world to permit the smearing of what little there was. Life would be a fight to preserve that good. But it would be a brave fight. He even began to wonder if brave fights were not what life was all about.

He lacked the physical bulk to be a star at football, but he was adequate at other sports, and he became editor in chief of the school magazine, a prefect, and president of the Dramatic Society. Shakespeare's
Henry V
was chosen for the annual school play in his last year, and he learned by heart every one of the ringing orations of the warrior king, imploring the master who directed the drama not to cut a line of them. It was generally agreed among the boys, faculty, and visiting parents that his performance was a sterling one.

Certainly he had put his whole heart into the part. The spirit of the conquering monarch thrilled him.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he, today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon St. Crispin's day.

When Tony Gates's critical sire had come up from Boston to watch his boy play Fluellen at a rehearsal and had taken him and Ronny out for supper, he offered the argument that the play contained Shakespeare's hidden pacifism and that King Henry's seizing on an abstruse dynastic claim for the French crown had been only the bald excuse for his arrant imperialism.

"But he sincerely believed in his claim," Ronny had protested, almost passionately. "However abstruse later commentators may have deemed it, he was truly convinced that God wanted him to become King of France and that the war was sanctioned from heaven! And anyway, the play contains some of the greatest poetry ever written about man's courage to fight for what he deems right!"

"Let's hope, then, that life will give
you
such a chance, my boy" was Mr. Gates's rather grim answer to this.

"Amen, sir."

Ronny became something of a favorite of the aging headmaster, and Dr. Nickerson actually consulted him from time to time on matters of discipline. On one occasion, Nickerson summoned him to his study to ask him why more boys did not attend holy communion, which, of course, unlike other chapel services, was strictly optional.

"I haven't really heard it discussed, sir," he answered gravely. "But I do know that one boy's mother objected to his drinking from the same cup used by others."

The headmaster shook his great bald head with equal gravity. "But doesn't she know that it's optional to dip the wafer in the cup and consume the wine that way?"

"Perhaps she doesn't think that's quite enough."

"Anyway, I always give the edge of the cup a good strong wipe with the napkin after each use."

Ronny might have pointed out that this might be less than the sterilization required by a worried mother, but respect sealed his lips. And something else. For he knew that the "strong wipe" was only a concession to the weak in faith. Dr. Nickerson had not the slightest doubt that no germ could be transmitted in the celebration of a sacrament. His faith was the rock on which his school and his life had been founded. Whatever doubts might assail so frail a vessel as Ronald Carnochan, it was not his function to shake that rock. And, anyway, it could not be shaken.

Ronny's transition to Yale was even easier than his transition to Chelton. One half of the Chelton graduating class went with him to New Haven; the other half, minus one to Princeton, matriculated at Harvard. But Ronny was at first determined not to be sheltered in a "prep-school crowd"; he dreaded the aridity of social snobbery which he knew infected the Ivy League colleges. Snobbery had existed, it was true, at Chelton: rich boys for poor ones, athletes for the unathletic, even bright students for the stupid, but there had been no "class" distinctions. The millionaire father of one boy might have been the college roommate of another's bankrupt parent, and the mothers of both might have been debutantes together. Yale offered Ronny the opportunity of meeting men from all over the country and from widely varying backgrounds, and in his first two years there he made some successful efforts to extend the circle of his acquaintance, but the prep-school men who dominated his class and who included some of its most attractive members welcomed him so warmly that it was hard indeed to resist their encompassing embrace.

Yet even as late as Tap Day in the spring of his junior year Ronny was not sure that he would accept the bid from Bulldog which it had been strongly hinted that he would receive. He wanted to make
one
gesture of protest against the enveloping mold. It was his roommate, Tony Gates, whose own essential conservatism had received its one and only blow in his having chosen, to irritate a too pushy father, Yale over the ancestral Harvard, who argued him out of it. They had sat up late on the eve of Tap Day discussing their options.

"The whole white Protestant Anglo-Saxon world is going to disappear," Tony observed complacently. "Our rule is over. The gentleman will become as extinct as the dodo. The private clubs and schools, the restricted summer re-sorts, the stock exchange, even the debutante parties will be taken over by Jews and Catholics and Irish and Latins, to leave not a wrack behind. But, God, are we going to be missed! A world without Scott Fitzgerald or Noël Coward or even Hemingway! A world without Cary Grant! But let us at least go out in a splendid twilight of the gods. Let us show that our Ivy League still has ivy! Let us make it a great year for Bulldog!"

"Really, Tony, you sound too utterly 1918. Wasn't that all said about Rupert Brooke and his sacrificed generation?"

"It is true that the mortal wound was given us in the Somme and the Marne. We can only play the last act with style."

"You're being trivial, my friend. We're not nearly done for. There's plenty of leadership and courage and honesty still in Wall Street. You'll see! Men like my father and his law partners not only still stand for something. They're willing to fight for it!"

Tony's silence might have betrayed a somewhat different view of what his roommate's father stood for. When he spoke, however, it was to use the name of David Carnochan to back his essential point.

"What your father really stands for is Bulldog. He will simply expire if you reject their bid."

And Ronny had reluctantly to admit that this was true. His hands were tied. He went to bed for a sleepless night, and the following afternoon he and Tony stood in the Branford Quadrangle to receive the shoulder taps from Bulldog and run obediently to their room to be initiated.

Furthermore, they both had a happy senior year.

Ronny, however, had been utterly sincere in his stated belief that the world in which he had been raised contained vital elements of public leadership, and he was quick to note that in the rising public feeling against the Nazi rule in Germany the sentiment of his family and their friends and associates was very much ahead of popular opinion in its opposition to the British policy of appeasement. Indeed, he found himself more and more absorbed by the dark drama of what Hider was bringing to Europe. He read every article he could find on the suppression of human decency in Germany and Italy. But it was not entirely with a dirge in his heart that he read of each new horror, each new violation of the most basic principles of humanity. It seemed to him that matters were bound to come to an issue, and to a global issue at that, and that it would be a glorious thing to fight, even to perish, in the final struggle against the forces of evil. If the kind of society to which he belonged was really doomed, how fine it would be to go down, not in foolish merriment such as his friend Tony had seemed to suggest, but heroically!

Ronny had always felt at ease with his father's first cousin, Gordon Carnochan, whose mind he found congenial and whose gentle character, attractive. It was Cousin Gordon who, visiting New Haven for a Bulldog dinner, had alerted Ronny to the criticism his father was incurring in downtown New York for not giving up certain German corporate clients who importantly supported the Nazi regime.

"Our younger partners are particularly disturbed by it," Gordon told him. "I've spoken to your pa about it, of course, but I can get nowhere with him. He might listen to you."

Ronny did not wait. On the very next day, a Sunday, he took the train for New York, and on Monday he lunched with his father at the Downtown Association. He went straight to the point. His father gave vent to his irritation.

"Gordon's been after you, hasn't he?"

"Daddy, it doesn't matter who's been after me. The point is that I've heard that you continue to represent these evil men. If you don't, please relieve my mind."

"I represent the two firms you have mentioned, yes. That is, I represent them insofar as they have business relations with American companies. I have nothing to do with what they do or don't do abroad or in Germany. I do not regard it as my duty to inquire as to what may be their politics at home. And I can assure you that working on their contracts in New York does not align me in any way with supporting how they may be violating human rights or persecuting Jews in Europe. I mind my own business, my boy, and I advise you to mind yours."

"But what is my business, Dad? And what is yours? Will your ghost, like Marley's, wail, 'Mankind was my business!'?"

"Ronald, I must ask you to change the subject. You are making an ass of yourself, and I can't bear to listen to it."

And indeed Ronny took in the flash of true pain in his father's eyes. It even appalled him.

"I'm sorry, Dad, but I can't talk of anything else. It's too awful to see you put yourself in the same boat with these butchers."

"Ronald!"

"Sorry, Dad, but I can't!"

Ronny rose abrupdy, left the table and the club, and returned to New Haven. Two days later he received a telegram from Cousin Gordon informing him that the German clients had been dropped.

His desire to take a military part in the war that broke out in Europe in 1939, while he was in Yale Law School, cooled a bit during the long winter months of 1940 when so little action occurred, but it flared again to a frenzy with the fall of France and the desperate Battle of Britain. He wanted to go to Canada and enlist in the air force, and was restrained only by his father, who, distraught at the notion, finally persuaded him that it was his duty to stay home until he could serve with his own countrymen in a war that was bound to involve the United States. Ronny controlled his impatience and trained for the navy aboard the U.S.S.
Prairie State
in New York, becoming what was called a "ninety-day wonder," an ensign, just before Pearl Harbor.

After two years of convoy duty on a destroyer in the Atlantic, hearing that trained officers were needed for the new amphibious craft, he volunteered for that service and became the skipper of a Landing Ship Tank destined for the invasion of Normandy. The landing in France was followed by months of channel crossings carrying troops and supplies for the fighting front and bringing back the wounded and prisoners of war to England. It was toward the end of this duty that a serious crisis occurred in Ronny's life.

While his vessel, high and dry on the Normandy beach, was receiving prisoners through the open bow doors to its tank deck, he strode down the shore to visit other skippers of landing craft who were standing about smoking, not being needed for the business of loading. He found they were discussing a large band of ragged-looking young men who were being assembled to be marched away from the scene and not transported to Britain. He asked who they were.

"It's the damnedest thing," an officer told him. "Apparently, they're Russians. They were fighting on the Eastern Front and captured by the Huns, stuffed into German uniforms, and sent to France as cannon fodder. They're mostly dumb peasants who've no idea where they are. Some have never heard of France or England. They're young, too, sixteen or seventeen, and some have turned out to be women. But Russia wants them back, and Ike is sending them. Poor bastards, they'll probably all be shot for being in German uniforms. How can you be a good Red after that's happened to you?"

Later Ronny learned that that had indeed been their fate, thousands of them.

In the weeks that followed, on the bridge in the tossing channel, or in the wardroom playing cards, or in his bunk, he could not free his mind from the image of those strange, round-faced, bewildered young men (and some women!) in their ragged, ill-fitting uniforms, huddled before a machine gun and mowed down. He seemed to see their facial expressions as blankly accepting their fate, as if it were no more than what had always been meted out to them from the start of their wretched and unwanted lives. God knew how much he had heard of the slaughter of innocents (who wasn't innocent?) since the start of the war, but somehow his having actually seen this last batch made it permanently real and permanently ghastly to him.

In Portland harbor, on a dark stormy day, when his LST was waiting in a long line for its turn to discharge on the crowded docks, a cargo of wounded American soldiers lying on stretchers on the tank deck, an army doctor pushed his way onto the bridge and shouted at him about the need immediately to disembark patients dying of the pitching and rolling of the vessel. Ronny tried to explain to him that he had to await his turn, that the ships in front of him had their own share of desperately wounded men. The doctor continued his now near-hysterical appeals, until Ronny had to have him forcibly removed from the bridge.