East Side Story (8 page)

He and Ada lived in four places; they had a Palladian villa in Newport, a French
hotel
in New York City, a rambling stone mansion in Fairfield, Connecticut, from which town the Bensons had sprung and in which each loyally maintained a residence, and a shingle villa in Jekyll Island, Georgia. The year was divided in four quarters between these, involving four stately annual moves and the displacement of some thirty in help, the walling up of garden statues against the cold, the packing and unpacking of countless trunks, and the shipping of large family portraits which could not be left in empty parlors. All this was efficiently supervised by Bruce, who sometimes wondered if it were not a life trade in itself, but he also had time to assemble a distinguished collection of Hudson River landscapes and to act as an oft-consulted trustee of the two Metropolitans, the museum and the opera.

Oh, yes, it was a life and not a bad one. And he had made Ada happy; there was nothing phony about that. And he sometimes wondered if he had not, after all, become as "real" a man as he had sometimes imagined his brothers and brothers-in-law to be, in contrast to himself. His children were as much Bensons in looks and wealth as any of their cousins of the Benson name, and totally accepted as such in society, and had he not created them?

B
Y THE YEAR
1900 the Carnochans had established themselves on a firm middle rung of the New York social ladder. Of the second generation from emigrator David only Douglas's widow, Eliza, survived, in quiet and sober respectability, in her brownstone on Fifty-seventh Street, which she shared with her maiden daughter, Annie, but her other children had made rather more of a splash. Brace's French
hotel
was a familiar sight to tourists who gaped at the long row of mansions on Fifth Avenue, and the annual visits of Sir James Muir, Clara's widower, were duly noted in the evening journals, though a city that could now claim two duchesses could hardly be much impressed by a mere baronet, even a rich one. Still, it was something.

But the members of the third generation, now middle-aged, who were most visible, particularly in the world of business affairs, were the brothers Wallace and James. Wallace, who had largely redeemed himself from the collapse of his thread business in some half dozen other enterprises, was a stout, gruff gentleman whose rare and supposedly well-conceived pronouncements on stock market trends carried conviction to many, and James, a long, lean, also often silent lawyer with a large and loyal clientele, were close friends as well as brothers. They had built adjoining matching brownstones in the same street as their mother's and filled them with the academic art of the period: cavaliers boisterously drinking in taverns, cardinals playing chess in gilded interiors, and gladiators pleading for their lives to a stony Caesar. In the early fall and spring their numerous progeny played noisy games up and down the chocolate stoops.

Both brothers had made appropriate matches: Wallace with Julie Denison, hearty member of a hearty, sports-loving, card-playing Brooklyn clan, and James with Louisa, the strong-minded and strong-willed daughter of a minor railroad tycoon. But the great difference between the two couples, at least in the eyes of one rueful observer, was that James and Louisa boasted six sturdy sons and Wallace and Julie only one.

Gordon, that sole male, was the rueful observer. He had not always been the sole. He had had a twin, Michael, not identical, but bigger, stronger, and more loudly yelling. Yet for all his apparent physical superiority, Michael had succumbed to the diphtheria that had attacked the twins when they were six, leaving a violently stricken mother who was only mildly consoled by the survival of Gordon and the presence of his two sisters. Julie's passionate favoritism had been no secret to the household; she had adored little Michael beyond anyone else, including her husband, and though she made periodic efforts to conceal this from the others after the boy's death, for she had a good enough heart and some sense of duty, she never wholly succeeded. Gordon, a puny child, at least in his early years, grew up with a keen sense that, in the eyes of Fifty-seventh Street at least, the wrong twin had survived, and that for some mysterious reason he was the cause of it.

It didn't always help that next door was the home that his mother must have really wanted: the nursery of six young males, a vigorous brood that would guarantee the future of the Carnochans. Fortunately, however, the closest rapport existed between the two establishments. Gordon's two sisters were in constant chattering and giggling relationship with Estelle, the single daughter of the other house, and Estelle's brothers included Gordon in all their games and sports with the same joshing put-on reluctance that they used with each other. Gordon saw it as a kind of desperate solution to his problem to lose himself in a merger with other Carnochans.

It was thus that he became the silent, curious, wide-eyed lad who was both a part and not a part of the tumultuous cousinhood, filling to overflowing the dark interiors of the twin brownstones, tumbling in and out of the narrow halls, steep stairwells, and square parlors crammed with big black knobbly furniture and hung with unlit paintings and prints. And there were not only the multitudinous cousins but all the neighborhood friends, the Browning School classmates, the neat little next-door girls, so surprisingly bold and shrill, who swarmed up and down the high stoops and played hopscotch under the eyes of Irish nursemaids in nearby Central Park. It seemed to Gordon a world dominated by Carnochans, a cheerful, sometimes too cheerful world, secure, if with smothered doubts, in its own continuing prosperity, and defiant, if a bit edgily so, of the alien population of the slums that so closely bordered it—oh, yes, he had seen these!—and of the menacing bums and beggars who sometimes invaded the park and even had the gall to fall into drunken slumber on the benches until a cop aroused them with his stick.

Just enough of the ancestral Presbyterianism survived in the heritage of his father and Uncle James to alert Gordon to the realization that sin might still penetrate even to the heart of all the jollity and goodwill. His mother, a Brooklyn Denison of pure English forebears without a taint of John Knox, was a square-faced, down-to-earth, worldly-wise woman who had little use for the moral severities of the old kirk and faced ethical choices with a broad practicality. She loved parties and card games and gossip and stylish dress, and took the world pretty much as it was, feeling sure that a society that favored such congenial souls as the Denisons must have enough good in it to get by. She ruled her husband more by his recognition of her efficiency and good sense than by any self-assertion, but when he was seized by one of his rare but violent fits of anger, she always promptly gave way. Gordon knew, from bitter experience, that the child who had had the bad luck to arouse the paternal ire, even if not at fault, could not count on Mama's support. The shrug with which she abandoned the victim to his father showed how few, if any, were the issues over which she felt called upon to make a scene. Certainly a child was not one of them. Julie knew it was a man's world, but it was still one where a clever woman could get anything she needed if she played her cards right. And cards were her strong point. As for Gordon, wasn't he, too, a male? He could jolly well learn how to cope with his own often unreasonable sex.

To Gordon the paternal rages, however happily rare, were illuminating as to the persistent existence of a darker reality behind the brighter appearance of daily life. Papa's temper was like a thinly smoking Vesuvius over a seemingly benign Pompeii. A large portly gentleman with a protruding pot and strong stubborn features that had once been handsome, Wallace Carnochan had gruff kindly manners and a charming courtesy, even in addressing his children, toward whom he usually maintained an attitude of mildly detached benevolence. Indeed, he appeared to manifest this detachment for many things besides his offspring; no one knew just what preoccupied him in those long, silent sessions in his study, where he was supposed to be poring over business reports or reading his beloved Gibbon or Macaulay. Sometimes Gordon or his sisters, standing outside the closed door, would hear the clink of a decanter against a glass, but the clinker never betrayed the least symptom of inebriation. His favorite sport was fishing in the Maine woods, but this, of course, was just another form of isolation. The only advice that he ever gave to Gordon when the latter was about to matriculate at Yale was a terse "Just remember that you're a gentleman and the son of a gentleman."

Wallace had one ugly burst of temper that particularly affected his son. Of Uncle James's sons, David Carnochan and his "Irish twin" Andy (they were born just under a year apart) were closest to Gordon. David, the undisputed leader of the trio—Andy was only his plump and amiable, dirty-talking sidekick—had the big nose of the Carnochans, craftily innocent blue eyes, and a long, equine face capable of a serene air of attention as the masque of a cleverly manipulative brain. It was generally conceded in the family that David, even more than his older or younger siblings, was the one to "keep an eye on." He had the look of a boy who would go far.

When David and Gordon were eleven and ten, Gordon found himself greatly coveting a toy of David's, the small replica of a steam yacht sent him for Christmas by rich Uncle John Muir in Glasgow. It had been a more expensive gift than any others sent from across the sea, for David had already shown a premature perspicacity in making up to the baronet on his annual visit to New York, but he had already tired of the toy, as he was quickly apt to do with new possessions, and was now himself casting an acquisitive eye on the prize of Gordon's collection, the model of a Madison Avenue streetcar. A swap was soon effected, but two days later Gordon's new yacht fell apart. It had been previously smashed in a fall from its table and cleverly glued together by its former owner.

Instead of facing his cousin indignantly with the charge of fraud, Gordon sought desperately in his mind to excuse him. He could not bear to think that a friend and cousin would treat him so shabbily. It was suddenly vital to him that David should remain what he had always taken him to be. And might not the transaction simply be a lesson in American business as it was daily transacted? Was that not what his father meant by the
caveat emptor
he always quoted to his mother when she went shopping? David had never told him that the vessel was damaged, but hadn't it been Gordon's duty to inspect it? So he remained silent, knowing that David would certainly never mention it or even ask to see the broken toy when he came to visit.

But this was not the end of the story. Sir John arrived on his annual visit to inspect his American markets, and David's father told his sons to have all their gifts from the baronet ready to be prominently seen if the great man chose to ascend to the nursery. David protested that he could not find the vital toy, but, under pressure, admitted to seeing it in Gordon's home. He implied that Gordon must have swiped it, and denied any knowledge of a trade. Never, he insisted loudly, would he have voluntarily parted with a gift from his beloved uncle. The ruined toy was retrieved and expensively restored for the unlikely event of a Scottish inspection, but Gordon, whose frantic explanation was disbelieved by both his father and his Uncle James, was branded as a liar and a thief.

A terrible scene ensued in Wallace Carnochan's dark study, where father and son faced each other standing, one pale and trembling, the other red-faced and of a sudden grotesqueness.

"You're worse than a robber! Even a gentleman fallen from grace might sink to that. But a liar, and to his own flesh and blood—no gentleman could stoop so low. It's one thing if a man owns up to having filched some piece of trash that has caught his fancy, but to deny to his own kin is something I never thought I'd have to face in a son of mine!"

"But, Daddy," Gordon cried, with tears of dismay, "I didn't take it. I..."

"Hold your tongue, sirrah! Haven't I heard the whole story from my brother? Has your mother a word to say for you? Just learn this. The next time anything like this happens, you're going to get the whipping of your life. And from this right arm!"

Terrifyingly, he raised his right arm and shook it at his shaking son. He had never whipped Gordon, nor did he ever thereafter. He didn't even possess a whip, so far as his son knew. Yet the mere threat seemed to shatter forever the complacent brownstone world that had so long and so precariously sheltered the younger Carnochans. Gone was the pleasant joking realism of Gordon's mother, so alien to these sultry comminations. Had not his father implied that she had washed her hands of the whole business? Oh, yes, she was not one to risk a hat, a dress, or a soul in such foul weather. The bright Episcopalian skies of the Denisons rolled back before the storm clouds of a Scottish Presbyterian doom. The Carnochan god had only been hidden away. He was back, and there would always be the danger that he would come again.

But the injustice was too great; Gordon had to make one further appeal. He went to his mother's bedroom one morning, after his father had left for the office. She was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair for the day, a time when she did not like to be disturbed by children, but when she took in how pale and grim he looked, she relented.

"What is it, Gordon?" But when he stood before her, still speechless, it took only a moment for her impatience to rise. "Come on, child. Out with it."

He then told her the whole story of the broken toy. She listened with a growing concern that he desperately hoped might be on his account, but he soon found otherwise.

"Well, I certainly agree that David Carnochan has treated you badly. I'm shocked, really. But what can we do about it now, dear? Isn't that water pretty well under the bridge? Anyway, you've learned to keep a sharp eye on your cousin in any future swaps. If there are any. Which I strongly advise against."

"But won't you tell Daddy I'm not a thief and a liar?"

Surprisingly, his mother reflected on this for some moments. There appeared to be difficulties he had not suspected. "The trouble with that is that your father will go to your uncle, and your uncle will go to David, and David, of course, will stick to his story. And the chances are that your uncle will side with David, and he and your father will both lose their Carnochan tempers, and we'll have a shattering family row. No, I think we'd better let the whole matter drop, which it already has."