East Side Story (10 page)

Well, this
was
something to pull Gordon up. Bulldog was one of the Yale senior secret societies, generally considered second only in distinction to Skull and Bones, each limited to fifteen members who were selected in the spring on "Tap Day," when the junior class assembled on the campus to await the blow, or "tap," on the shoulder from a society member circulating among them and to hear the shouted "Go to your room" for the initiation. The selection process was carried out with the greatest secrecy, but Gordon well knew that his cousin was capable of ferreting out the darkest concealments.

David watched Gordon carefully as he let his startling news sink in. "Bulldog is not apt to tap a man who is cozy with the likes of Key, and if they pluck one Carnochan, the contamination may spread to the other two. This is serious, Gordie. Andy and I are counting on you not to do anything to hurt our chances."

This argument was irresistible. Gordon could have forfeited his opportunity for admission to Bulldog—he had no particular feeling for or against the senior societies about which, in his new literary preoccupations, he had given little thought—but the idea that he might stand in the way of cousins who had played so dominant a role in his life was simply unthinkable. Bulldog, he knew well, was something that not only David and Andy cared passionately about but that the Carnochans of the generation earlier would consider a desirable tribal enhancement. And as for the family member who botched it ... well, there would indeed be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

"You can count on me, Davie," he muttered, and left the room before he had the humiliation of being thanked for the task of dropping an inconvenient friend.

He decided that the way to handle Philip Key was to tell him frankly the dilemma in which fate had cast him. He hoped that even Philip might understand the pressure that had been brought to bear on him and agree that a friendship suspended for some term was not too great a price to pay for family loyalty and solidarity. He was careful to make it entirely clear that he himself knew just how vile it would ordinarily be to slight one friend for the social advantage of another, and that he was depending on Philip's intelligent detachment to understand the particular circumstances that made Gordon's action imperative. But Philip's silence as he listened was ominous, as was his malicious half smile.

"But it's not just for the sake of your cousins that you propose to give me the sack," he observed at last. "Are you not yourself expecting to be tapped by this august institution?"

"Well, David says I may be, yes. But you know I don't give a damn about those things. If I joined, it would only be because the family would take on so if I didn't. It's not a matter worth upsetting them about."

"You're gobbling the cake you're keeping, my onetime friend. Disgustingly, too, I might add. You want Bulldog's and my approval of your dropping me! Your greed is unimaginable!"

"Philip, what would you do in my case?"

"In your case? How could I have the gall even to conceive of my humble self wearing the tartan of the Carnochans? But you needn't be concerned over my missing your little visits. You were born to be your cousins' toady, and you might just as well get on with it. I even doubt you have the character
not
to be a toady. As they say about inevitable rape, relax and enjoy it."

Gordon turned away from him, in part relieved that Philip's nastiness softened some of his own guilt feeling. It was unreasonable, after all, for Philip not to see that life could offer some hard choices, and that it wasn't always cut-and-dried which way to take. On second thought, however, he found himself wondering if life really did have choices. Wasn't it fairly plain that the way for him to go was a Carnochan way? Was he really qualified for any other? Did he really
want
any other?

He and David and Andy were all tapped for Bulldog, and everyone was delighted, even his usually indifferent father, who seemed to sense a dim revival of his own Yale days so many years before. Uncle James and Uncle Bruce, however, were more visibly enthusiastic. Never before had a senior society taken in three new members of the same family.

His senior year brought another honor to Gordon. He was named class poet. He did not send a draft of his poem to Philip Key. He knew only too well that the latter would label it sentimental drivel, and that, indeed, was just what it was.

David had planned that both Andy and Gordon should go with him to Harvard Law School, and Gordon, who now fully realized that his literary talents were not such as to sustain a writing or even a journalistic career—if he owed anything to Philip Key, he owed him at least that—was willing enough to compromise on a career which still made a primary use of words, for however different a purpose. Even David, however, could do nothing to overcome Andy's decided lack of capacity for law, and the latter was destined for New York and a firm of stockbrokers.

Alone now, so to speak, with David, for they shared rooms in Cambridge, Gordon had much occasion to reflect, with his self-impressed passivity, on the forceful role that his cousin seemed increasingly to be playing in his life. David struck him at times as a leader looking for loyal troops to support him in a battle for ends he had not yet determined but which time was bound to make clear. With his long, bony face and lean, bony figure, his high, balding dome and eyes that could turn in a second from a winning friendliness to an icy disapproval, David seemed to be training his agile intellect to subject other men to his pressures, and he appeared to sense intuitively whom he could bully into submission and to whom it was more politic to kowtow. David was intensely clannish, even for a Scot; he viewed the Carnochans, and in particular his brothers and cousins, as a force to be united in a general push to become a major league in the football games of life. And just where would Gordon fit in? Oh, that was obvious enough. He would be the utterly trustworthy second in command, or executive officer, an aide whose primary value would lie in his unwavering loyalty.

Oh, yes, Gordon saw all this; he was not a fool, nor would he have been much use to David had he been one. But he also saw that he needed David. David could cope with the world, especially the Carnochan world, with which Gordon found it often difficult to cope. His father was remote and unpredictable, his mother intent on leading her own life, if cautious not to trespass too heavily on her husband's guarded territory. His sisters were giggly and silly, obsessed at this time with boys. The practical maternal philosophy of the family had no place for the moral doubts and questionings of what to them was a more or less neurotic son and brother who could be expected to answer them himself, and he turned in the end to David for the benefits of a relationship that he liked to think of as symbiotic. If David supplied him with confidence in his own ability to survive as a member of David's team, did he not help David by acting as a sounding board for his plans and projects and a consolation in his inevitable if temporary setbacks?

But it continued to trouble Gordon that David's failure to share any of the idealism that had inspired Gordon at Chelton seemed, when they progressed from Yale to law school, increasingly to divide them. At school and at college the atmosphere in the sometimes excited discussions, political, ethical, or literary, among the friends was apt to be imbued with a shared desire, if not expectation, for a better world to which the disputants might hope to make some modest contribution. But in law school, in all the heated general discussions that he and David shared with fellow students, David was apt to focus, not on the growth of the law as a material factor in the improvement of society, not on how best to interpret the Constitution to deal with changing times and conditions, but on how to achieve a client's purpose in the teeth of a seemingly prohibitive statute. David appeared to see law as something to get around and a lawyer's function as how to advise him to do it. And a good many of their classmates seemed to agree with him.

It was a woman, of course, who, at last, and at least temporarily, released Gordon from the pervasive influence of his cousin. He met Agatha Houston at a Sunday lunch party given by his mother during a Christmas vacation when he had come down from law school in Cambridge. Julie Carnochan and Agatha's mother were old friends, and Agatha's father, Dr. Houston, who was also present at the lunch, was the well-known throat doctor to some of the great singers at the Metropolitan Opera in what was coming to be known as the golden age of song. His name was associated with such shining ones as Fremstad, Nordica, and Eames. Agatha, however, reflected none of this glamour. She was pert, bright, and pretty, with large brown eyes, but she made an immediate point of being matter-of-fact and down-to-earth.

"If you had experienced the temperaments of some of Daddy's patients as I have," she told Gordon after he had spoken of his envy of her opportunities to meet the great divas, "you would be less anxious to hear them anywhere except on the stage, where they belong. It's just as well to keep on the other side of the footlights. They preserve the illusion, and that's what they're for."

"You never wanted to be a singer yourself?"

"Well, I didn't have a voice, which settled the question. But yes, I might have liked to, when I was in my teens. I used to fancy myself singing the 'Liebestod' to an audience too rapt even to applaud. I saw the curtain descend in a reverent silence more gratifying than the loudest cheers. But I've graduated from that. I live in the real world now. I hope it's better, but I'm not always sure. How about you? Do you dream of yourself as formidably clad in black robes, sitting up there on the Supreme Court bench, explaining the Constitution to admiring counsel?"

"How did you know?"

"Well, maybe you'll make it, then. I sometimes wonder if daydreaming is not the road to success. Does being preoccupied with hurdles really help?"

"You should know. They seem to interest you."

"And look at me. I'm nowhere!"

Gordon indeed looked at her. It was true, then, he felt with a sudden leap of his heart, that one could love at first sight! And the very first weekend after his return to Cambridge he came back down to New York to call on her at her family's brownstone, only two blocks from his. It soon became a habitual thing.

He was enchanted by her openness and candor. She was devoid of the coy flirtatiousness of so many of the girls of his acquaintance, who were only too well aware that the only game they were allowed to play was the marriage game. Agatha did not hesitate to let him know that she liked him very much indeed and saw no reason that either of them should be bothered or concerned with where their friendship might be heading. Let the future take care of itself. If marriage, why not? Neither family would object. If no marriage, was that such a tragedy?

He took her to the theater; he took her for long walks in Central Park. They were both twenty-two; they were free. Gordon found himself telling her all kinds of things he had never told anyone else, including his old fear that his mother, perhaps not even consciously, blamed him for surviving his twin brother.

"Of course, you don't know that," she warned him. "To be absolutely fair, you have to admit it's only a supposition on your part. But suppose it's true. It may not be a thing your mother can help. She's never said anything about it, has she?"

"Oh, never. Of course not."

"Well, give her credit for that. She's probably tried to be as good a mother as she was capable of being. I'm an only child, as you know. My mother was not allowed to have another baby after my very difficult cesarean birth. I've always been aware how bitterly disappointed my father was that I wasn't a boy. As a little girl I used to resent that terribly. But I got over it. And you can, too, Gordon. It's not easy, but you can."

He found such exchanges exhilarating. It was as if this wonderful girl was hewing him out of a marble rock of family solidarity and turning him into something that was at least the statue of a man. One Sunday night, arriving back in Cambridge at the rooms he shared with David, he decided that the time had come to tell his cousin that he was planning to propose to Agatha and that he had reason to believe that he would be accepted.

David, of course, was aware that Gordon had been seeing Agatha, whom he knew, though not well, but Gordon had not chosen to let his cousin know how far things had gone, being afraid that David might make some snotty remark about there being better social fish to fry than the Houstons, who, however respectable, were not notable in the fashionable world. He suspected that he would not be able to control his wrath if David should do so, and their friendship might be gravely marred.

But he had grossly underestimated David's capacity to deal with any novel situation. His cousin had fully appreciated the depth of his involvement with the girl and clearly recognized that it was something that had to be accepted. And when David made up his mind to accept something, he knew how to do it right.

"And do you know what, Gordie?" he cried, as he jumped up to embrace his cousin. "She's just the girl for you. She'll even be the making of you!"

A
N UNEXPECTEDLY LARGE
allowance promised the young couple by Agatha's enthusiastic father made possible their marriage right after Gordon and David's graduation from law school, and David was best man at the wedding. But the cousins did not go to work for the same law firm, Brown & Livermore, as they had originally planned and as that firm had offered. At the last moment Gordon had decided to accept another offer, one proffered by an equally distinguished firm, Perry, Whitehead & Cox. It had been the result of a tense parley he had had with his bride-to-be, shortly before their union. She had been firmer than he had ever seen her.

"The Periy firm has one great advantage," she had insisted.

"And what is that?"

"David's not in it."

"Darling? What's wrong with David?"

"Nothing. Except for you."

"For
me
?"

"Yes. Not for anyone else. Or at least not for anyone else I care about. Only for you."