East Side Story

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Oh, I know that, of course. He rather makes up to his old great-aunt. He may put it on a bit, but I like it. He has charm. We can start by admitting that.”

  “And he has interesting ideas. Not like other people’s at all. And I think he’s kind. At least he seems so.”

  “My dear, I asked you about love.”

  “Well, I think maybe I could love him if he loved me.”

  “And he doesn’t?”

  “No. Though I think he’d like to.”

  “Because he thinks you’d make him a good wife? And wouldn’t you?”

  “But not a useful one, Gran. That’s what worries me. I have this impression that he’s looking for a wife who’ll be socially useful to him. I don’t mean moneywise. He’s very well off himself.”

  “Humph. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want more. These men! Don’t tell me. But I’m far from viewing a mercenary motive as prohibitive, unless it’s the only one. I was married in part for my fortune, and I always knew it. But unlike you, my dear, I was small and plain, and in the worldly society in which I grew up, I soon learned that money was my chief magnet. The thing to do was to pick the right man among the swains looking for it. And Bruce Carnochan was just that. He proved an admirable husband and father. But I agree with you that Pierre is not primarily interested in money. To begin with, he’s very knowledgeable and is quite aware, I’m sure, that what you will have depends largely on myself and that I have a considerable progeny to share my estate. And second, as you say, he’s a big earner himself. Pierre, my dear, is a better man than many consider him. He puts people off with his airs. But he has brains and character. He’s what they call a catch. That doesn’t mean for a minute that you ought to marry him. But it’s something you ought to think about. A life with Pierre could be an interesting life.”

  “And now it’s my turn, Gran, to ask you about love.”

  “Not all men are capable of great love. And those who are, are often prone to feel it for more than one woman in their lives. I suspect that the temperature of Pierre’s heart is nearer cool than boiling. But that’s not always a bad thing in a husband.”

  “Oh, Gran, that sounds so cynical!”

  “I’m a realist, child. Or try to be. I’ve seen a lot of things in a long life, and Pierre is not a man to be underestimated. I know what some of the family think of him. That he’s worldly and snobbish. That’s so like a family. They skip over the fact that he was a wonderful son to his father and is still one to his mother, that he was a brave and competent officer in war, and that he’s successful downtown. Furthermore, he’s never been known, to my knowledge, anyway, to have been mean or malicious. So what do they have against him? Simply that he allows people to know that he thinks well of himself and that he wants to get on in the world.”

  “Gran, you’re telling me that I should marry him!”

  “I am not! I’m telling you that he’d make a good husband. Whatever he does, he’ll do well.”

  “But would I be the wife he needs?”

  “You can leave that decision to him. But, anyway, why shouldn’t you be?”

  “Because I’m stupid about so many things. Mother says I can’t even count trumps.”

  “That’s only because you don’t like bridge. If you ever got to like it—and there’s no reason you should—you’d count them soon enough.”

  “But I’m so slow!”

  “My dear, you’re quite capable of doing anything you really set your mind on.”

  “Oh, do you really think that?”

  “I do. And if you think you could be in love with Pierre, doesn’t that mean you are? A little bit, anyway?”

  LETITIA CARNOCHAN saw to it that her daughter’s wedding was a principal event of the social season. And when the bride and groom returned from a honeymoon in Barbados, where a beautiful Palladian villa had been lent them by a client of Pierre’s, they moved into a charming little Park Avenue duplex, which the bride’s mother had tastefully decorated. It seemed to everyone that the lucky couple had a life opening before them as elegant as an issue of Vogue or Town and Country.

  Nor was it all outwardly seeming. Isabel, even in her moments of greatest apprehension, had to admit to herself that she had married a man of imaginative goodwill and kindness. He was always supportive, never impatient. When he instructed her in the details of how to manage a dinner party for a difficult client or what not to mention to a sensitive weekend hostess, he was never bossy or overdetailed and always appreciative of her efforts. But the instruction was there; that was the rub. She was not only a spouse; she was a pupil. She was being fitted, she could only surmise, for her role as a partner in what to him was evidently a noble enterprise. It was true that he was always careful not to overdo it. After one of their entertainments he would always congratulate her on how well she had done things, and only after that would he drop a gentle hint on how she should always check the guest list in advance to be sure of the names and how she could tactfully change a subject if it was arousing an argument too violent. Yet these gentle hints always suggested to her that she had failed him in one or another respect.

  For some months their satisfactory lovemaking at night made her hope that at least she was not failing him in this very basic aspect of marriage, but eventually her gratification at her success in bed paled before the realization that any attractive woman could have given him that. Was she improving herself in the arts of social life, where his needs could only be supplied by a wife? Alas, she was increasingly convinced that she was not. She was getting worse, not better, at remembering names, and at table now she would sometimes sit in utter silence, unable to conjure up a word to say to the embarrassed and soon bored gentlemen on either side of her. And with her fear of further failure she became worse.

  In time she began to excuse herself from dining out with the invention of a migraine. The third time this happened, Pierre insisted on staying home with her. He was all solicitude. She begged him desperately to leave her and go to his party, but he refused. Then she actually heard herself tell him that she might be pregnant. This, of course, would excuse everything. Pierre was elated.

  “Darling, why didn’t you tell me before? At the very first hint of it? Of course, we won’t go out at all now until you are feeling absolutely fit.”

  “Oh, but you must!” she protested in dismay. “I’ll be perfectly all right alone in bed with a book. You can’t just isolate yourself because of me!”

  “But I’ll be glad to! And I’ll read to you. Anything you like. Even one of your detective stories. After all, it’ll only be till you give birth to a bouncing boy.”

  “Boy?”

  “Our second will be a girl.”

  To her surprise, and almost as if some hidden fate was determined to spare her a lie, she discovered that she was pregnant. She was briefly delighted. Here at last was something she could do for him, and something that would fit in perfectly with all his plans for the future. And besides, it would give her a blessed intermission in the long and tedious drama of her social life; she could stay at home, in bed or on a couch, reading mysteries, as much as she liked. She shamelessly exaggerated the discomforts of her condition and treated herself to the isolation of what she fantasized as a luxurious Oriental harem maintained for the benefit of a single inhabitant. Pierre was constantly attentive and spent many of his evenings reading aloud to her from Jane Austen or the Brontes. She was content, but of course she always knew it couldn’t last.

  It ended abrupdy and painfully with a dangerous miscarriage, and her doctor recommended that she should put off starting another pregnancy for at least a year, and possibly two. For some weeks she was plunged into a deep depression, and it was not until she began to show signs of emerging from this dark period that Pierre urged her to take the first steps toward picking up the old strings of her life. And one of these, of course, was going out to dinner parties.

  Little by little they resumed the old pattern of their existence. But there was a differ
ence now. Isabel had discovered the anaesthetic of alcohol. A swig of gin before Pierre came home, from the tiny Burgundian chapel of a bar that her mother had designed off the living room, fortified her if they had to go out, and the swig soon became two.

  It did not take Pierre long to perceive what was going on. He had already unsuccessfully tried to free her from smoking; now he undertook to tackle her drinking. He never reproached her, never scolded her, never even asked her if she had been imbibing. He would simply gravely warn her.

  “Smoking, my dear, may kill you, but drinking is worse. It can ruin your life.”

  She swore to him that she would give it up, and would do so for a time, but she always returned to it, and when he removed the bottles from the little bar, telling her, of course, just what he was doing, she bought her supplies on the sly and hid them about her room, though she knew he never searched it. Of course, she did not fool him, and he insisted finally that she consult a psychiatrist, for he seemed to shudder at the publicity of Alcoholics Anonymous. Isabel went dutifully to this new doctor and undutifully shunned his advice. Her fuzzy condition at dinner parties was now widely noticed, and at first she tried to persuade herself that people thought each occurrence was a rare rather than a habitual thing, but it was soon evident even to her that their friends had classed her as a “case.” Pierre mostly refrained from comment. At a social gathering, when he detected across the room (for he always had an eye on her) that she was beginning to look hazy, he would rise, get her coat, and approach her with a quiet: “Darling, I think you’re looking tired. It’s time we went home.” And at home he would help her undress and put her to bed without a word. It agonized her to think that people were praising him as the perfect gentleman in dealing with a “sousy spouse.” Was he even putting it on, she thought once with a stab of terror, to salvage what little gain he could from a lost cause?

  The end, or what she hoped might be the end, came at a glittering dinner party given by old Mrs. Townsend Martin to bid farewell to her Gothic mansion on Fifth Avenue, now to be replaced by an apartment house in which a part of her purchase price would be the penthouse. At the long dining-room table, with its glittering gold service and centerpiece of Neptune on a craft driven by dolphins, before the splendid tapestry of Louis XV at a hunt, Isabel, who had been feeling unusually queasy, leaned suddenly forward and vomited all over the place in front of her.

  The next morning she stole out of her apartment while Pierre was still asleep and went to her stepgrandmother’s. Ada, who had already heard of the disaster from Mrs. Martin herself, took her in without a word and put her to bed. She sent a note to Pierre immediately by her butler, stating briefly: “She’s here safe and sound. You’d best leave her to me for a day or so.”

  The following day, Isabel sent her husband a letter offering him a divorce without alimony and volunteering to go herself to Reno to obtain a decree on neutral grounds without legal cost to him. “The least I can do for you,” she ended, “is to put you back as nearly as possible to the happy state you were in before I wrecked your life.”

  She could hardly refuse to see him when he called, only an hour after receiving her letter. He was grave, almost solemn. He stated his proposition briefly and very clearly, asked her please to give it her closest attention, raised a hand to indicate that he wanted no immediate answer, and took his departure.

  What he proposed was that she should return to him and resume their wedded life as if nothing had happened, except that they would both give up alcohol permanently, and also give up all social life, barring family gatherings and meals with intimate friends, until such time, if ever, when she felt ready and willing to greet the world with pleasure. He even ended on a lighter note, saying that they would turn the Burgundian bar into a powder room. She burst into tears as he closed the door behind him.

  “Think of it, Gran!” she exclaimed to Ada afterward. “Think of his behaving so kindly after seeing what he had hoped would be the perfect wife make that unspeakable mess at the dinner table.”

  “It can’t have been pleasant for him. But it gave him the chance to be what he has always wanted to be: the perfect gentleman.”

  “But that sounds so artificial!”

  “It doesn’t have to be. When I say gentleman, I’m using the term in its best and truest old-fashioned sense. That’s what so many of the family haven’t the sense to see about Pierre. But I have, God bless me. He’s an idealist. And he knows that looking and acting like something you want to be may help you to become it. Theodore Roosevelt, whom so many young people tend to deride today, used to say that by pretending to be brave, you could cast out fear. I think you married a good man, Isabel.”

  “But if he wants me back just to be good, is that enough?”

  “Enough for whom?”

  “For me!”

  “I see.” Ada nodded ruefully. “Like so many sillies you want love. Or some big red smothering thing you call love. Has it never occurred to you that this may be Pierre’s way of loving?”

  “And you think I should make do with it?”

  “I think you should certainly try. And if you try, you’ll very likely succeed. As the old hymn says: ‘Only God’s free gifts abuse not, light refuse not.’”

  Ada wisely declined to say more. She was sure that she had won her little battle. And she knew something else, but that was something she was most certainly not going to say. She knew that the brilliant Pierre had chosen just the right way to create the “perfect wife” at last.

  12. LOULOU

  LOUISA, “LOULOU,” Carnochan had more than ample time, since her retirement as a trained nurse in 1955, to contemplate the early steps she had taken in the initial mismanagement of her life. Of course, the real fault, or at least so she liked to tell herself, had been in the date of her birth. She should have been a doctor; that would have made all the difference. Some girls, like herself born in 1890, had indeed become that, but very few, and none at all in the walk of life in which she had been raised. It was a shocking fact, in view of the general enlightenment that had come later, that after her coming-out party, neither she nor her family had even considered her going to college. It had been taken quite for granted by all that marriage would be her career unless she elected to stay at home and ease the long exit from life of aging and seemingly immortal parents.

  Yet the hand that had been dealt her, as such hands went, had not been a bad one. In looks, it was true, she was a bit on the diminutive and plain side, unlike her older sister, Betty, who was the “beauty” of the family, though this was something of a relative term, but she had bright eyes, high spirits, and a modicum of wit, and was considered a “sport” by her contemporaries. Unfortunately, however, she tended to accept the unspoken but obviously felt verdict of her so dignified parents and sister that if she was a dear little thing she was also something of a social liability. Her brother didn’t share this opinion, but Gordon as a boy didn’t count, and Loulou shielded herself in the role of the tomboy, the clown, the family jester, someone to be coddled, even loved, but not basically an integral part of serious living. Not anyway a girl whom, when they grew up, the boys who now genially played with her would marry. No, they would marry sticks like Betty.

  Loulou, however, was to know what love was, and at its most cruel. The tennis pro at the Bar Harbor Swimming Club, Harvey Glenn, was a sturdy brown god of a youth, and Loulou took as many lessons from him as her mother would allow, which was not many after Julie had caught on to the real reason for her younger daughter’s sudden interest in the sport. Many other girls at the club had noisy crushes on the handsome Harvey, but Loulou’s worship was cultivated in absolute silence. She knew it was futile, and she knew, too, for her eyes were sharp, that Harvey had a low nature and was hunting for an heiress, and indeed, he eloped with one, but not to any avail, for the heiress’s father was one of the few parents on Mount Desert Island who really meant it when he said he would disinherit any child of his who married against his wishes. Loulou w
ould have been happy to console her tennis pro when he coolly ditched the bride he had impoverished, but needless to say, there was no job for him now at the club, and he disappeared from her life forever.

  Elwood Atkins had presented a more practical problem for her. He wanted to marry her and actually proposed. He was a bit on the stout side, dull and honest as the day was long, but that day was very long indeed, and he had a solid job in a small automobile company, where he was the right-hand man of an eccentric executive who was rumored to be something of a mechanical genius. Loulou’s family and friends tended to look somewhat down on the socially awkward Elwood, despite his gentle and kindly manners and upright character; only her brother, Gordon, insisted that there was more to him “than meets the eye.”

  Loulou liked Elwood; she liked him very much, but she did not love him and doubted that she ever could. But he was persistent, and time was passing, and it was evident to her that her parents were of the opinion that this was very likely the best she could ever do. Eventually they became engaged, but secredy, at least outside the family, and on a tentative basis—she could withdraw anytime she felt the least doubt. Loulou, however, began to be tortured by the idea that she might be doing him a wrong. Did she feel for him, for example, anything like what she had felt for the tennis pro? No!

  She told her mother: “I’m going to write Elwood and break our engagement.”

  “Well, don’t use the best notepaper” was Julie’s dry rejoinder. She knew how often that letter would be rewritten.

  Loulou was angered. She wrote the letter only once and mailed it herself before she could change her mind. Elwood left the island and neither returned nor replied. He took her decision as final and six months later married another girl. Evidently he had been determined that the time had come—if, indeed, it was not overdue—for wedlock. Loulou was bitterly disappointed, but she knew she had no one but herself to blame. She began to realize that she might have learned to love him.