East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  “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 witha 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 lighthearted 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.

  IN 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 dine
d 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.”

  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?”

  10. RONNY

  RONNY 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 mu
ch 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.