East Side Story (3 page)

Eliza, however, was not altogether inwardly what her outer self suggested. This did not mean, of course, that she didn't firmly believe in decorum of manners, fidelity in marriage, decency in dress, and orderliness in one's daily tasks and pleasures. She knew that wildness in men and women had to be restrained. But she had a vivid sense of the rages that went on within the soul of man and an equally vivid sense of the hypocrisies used to conceal them. She knew, in short, the cost of discipline and could sympathize with the pains of those who had subjected themselves to it—or who had tried to and failed. She regarded herself in this respect as a victor, but she never forgot how easily the struggle might have been lost. She never allowed herself to put out of her mind what no one in the world had ever known or even suspected: that there had been a time in her young life, before she married Douglas Carnochan, when she would have agreed to any proposition that his brother Andrew might have put to her, however illicit. And she gave herself no credit for the fact that he never had, and had never even thought of doing so.

Her grandchildren visited her in the summer in turns, and she loved these visits, but she particularly relished those of David, one of her son James's six boys, who, still in his teens, was planning to write up the family history, on which he exhaustively consulted her. David was very clever and perceptive, sometimes uncomfortably so, for he did her the honor of treating her as a human being as well as an ancestress, and was bold enough to voice his suspicion when she was holding something back. Eliza was aware that there was a side to this young man that might ultimately lead him into false pride and disregard of intellectual inferiors, but she could still delight in his wit and openness.

David's great-uncle and Eliza's brother-in-law, bachelor Peter Carnochan, had just died, and among his effects had been the memorandum that David had earlier requested of him but never received. It was this memorandum that the two were now discussing on a veranda overlooking the bay.

"Was Uncle Peter's description of Great-grandpa Carnochan a true one?" David wanted to know. "Or was he simply inventing another character for one of his immortal tales?"

"
De mortuis,
" Eliza warned him. "You mustn't be sarcastic about your poor Uncle Peter's fiction. We can't all be Hawthornes. Let me answer your question this way. I recognize my father-in-law in Peter's sketch of him."

"You mean it's not the whole picture?"

"It's the whole picture of what he was to Peter. Peter had a motive for seeing his father as he depicted him."

"And that was?"

"To justify his own failure in life. There! I've said it. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but it's true, and I don't really think the truth, the real truth, can ever do much harm."

"Unless it's the greatest harm of all! Look where it leaves Uncle Peter."

"But, my dear boy, look what harm withholding the truth would do to the memory of your great-grandpa."

"He wasn't, then, a tyrant?"

"Certainly not. He was a strict disciplinarian to his children when they were growing up, but he never laid a hand on them. And after they were grown, he never interfered with them at all. He was always a great one for minding his own business. I found him an easy father-in-law to get on with."

"Was it perhaps because he didn't care that much about anyone?"

"That could have been a part of it," Eliza sturdily admitted.

"Or did he think those who didn't mind him would go to hell, and that was punishment enough?"

"No, David, he thought no such thing! I don't believe he ever speculated on the hereafter. The here and now was good enough for him. He did his duty, and that was that."

"What did he think of his sons, Peter and Grandpa, both not fighting in the war?"

"He never spoke of it. At least I never heard him do so. I doubt that he thought it was any of his business. Peter was the one who fussed over the ethics of his claim for exemption. He lacked the fortitude to accept the weakness in his own disposition, and he let it ruin his life."

"You mean he couldn't face his own cowardice?"

"You're very free with your terms, David."

"Perhaps I'm learning them from you. How did Grandpa feel about buying a substitute to fight for him?"

"Oh, he was totally different from Peter. He felt that it was his duty to stay in a business that helped produce uniforms for the soldiers."

"And, besides, he became rich while his brother Andrew was lying dead in the Wilderness!"

"David, be quiet!" Eliza rapped on the table by her big basket chair. Things were getting out of hand. "You must have more respect for the dead. Particularly your own grandfather!"

"Oh, Grandma, don't be like that, please! You're the one member of the family I feel I can really talk to."

Eliza was a bit ashamed of how quickly this placated her. "Let us talk of these things, then, my dear, without stamping our post-mortem moral judgments on them."

"Very well. How would
you
have felt had you been an able-bodied, well-to-do young man, even in a war-supporting business and even with a family? Would
you
have paid some poor devil to fight for you, perhaps die for you?"

"But I wasn't such a man, David! You're being ridiculous."

"Am I? Answer me, Grandma! I dare you."

After a pause, she heard her own reply surprisingly ring out. "No, I'd never have bought a substitute."

"Ah, you see!"

"I see only what concerns myself. It doesn't mean I condemn others. It certainly doesn't mean I condemn my husband."

"No, but it shows whom you really admire. It was Uncle Andrew, wasn't it? The slain Siegfried?"

"We all admired Andrew, certainly. Who would not have?"

"Dad says you were all in love with him! The whole family!"

"David, if you're going to go sailing, you'd better go now."

He left the porch reluctantly to amble down the pathway to the dock where the small family sailboat was moored. Eliza was relieved to be away from his penetrating stare. It was not that she had the least fear of disclosing matters so long and firmly locked in her heart, but she hated to have clumsy feet treading so near her secret garden.

Settling back in her chair and allowing her gaze to roam over the bay, she had no need to be faced with the ancient photograph over the mantel in the front parlor to have it fixed in a mind which it never altogether deserted. It showed, sometime in 1863, a group of half a dozen Union officers of different rank and age in relaxed poses, some sitting, some standing, but all aware of the camera, on the stout-pillared portico of the Lee mansion in Arlington, presumably commandeered as an army officers' club. It was somehow to be detected that all were veterans of combat; they had an air of gruff confidence, even a touch of something akin to defiance. Standing more stiffly than the others to the left, one hand on his hip, with almost a scowl on his dark handsome countenance, was the obvious junior of the gathering, and his inclusion seemed to mark the special regard in which his elders held him. His gravity of expression might have been attributable to the grim sights to which his youth had already been exposed, but it was easy to infer how rapidly his near scowl would change into a charming grin should a pretty woman obtrude upon the scene. The setting, however, was too darkly masculine for any such possibility.

Eliza had known Andrew Carnochan first in the summer of 1859, when his father, David, the emigrant, had moved his summer home from Staten Island to Newport at the behest of his eldest son, Douglas, who considered it a better address for business purposes. The Carnochans had rented a cottage near that of the Dudleys in Washington Street, and the children of the two families had rapidly become friends. Douglas, sober, serious, and direct in his manners and approaches, had constituted himself a beau of Eliza, and Andrew, whose good looks and exuberant friendliness had made him the darling of the summer community, had fallen violently in love with the one girl in Newport whose family didn't want him. The snobbish Amorys from Boston sniffed at the "haberdashery" Carnochans and took the position that their lovely Lily had already committed herself too unreservedly to the young Lowell of their choice to now dispose of her affections elsewhere. Besides, Andrew's loudly proclaimed abolitionism was wormwood to the hot-tempered gentleman he sought as a father-in-law.

Lily Amory's dazzling beauty was not partnered with a character of equal quality; she was not one to defy a bossy father. She tearfully consulted Eliza, her best friend and cousin (the Dudleys had long left Boston for Providence, but Eliza's mother had been an Amory), as to how to handle her situation, and Eliza soon found herself the confidante of both Lily and Andrew. Andrew was too modest and too preoccupied with his own passion ever to suspect that his long, private talks with Eliza could arouse any emotion beyond friendship in his consultant. Was she not by way of being his brother Douglas's girl? What nice young woman would want to create trouble between two brothers?

Nor did the silently stricken Eliza at all wish any such thing, though there were moments when she almost wished that the Amorys would persist in their pigheaded opposition so that she might continue these delightful sessions. But she was too honest not finally to let the supposedly lovelorn Andrew know that his victory was an assured thing.

"I understand that there's a romantic side to you, Andrew, that makes you want to equate your problem with that of Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed lovers. But candor compels me to inform you that you only have to wait, and not too long at that. The Amorys basically know they're licked. Lily may be in a tizzy over their opposition—I even think she rather enjoys tizzies—but in the last analysis she's never going to give you up."

"Oh, you mustn't say she enjoys it, Eliza. You should have seen her last night in tears. Floods of tears!"

"Like spring showers. To make the sunlight, when it reappears, even brighter."

The Amorys, as Eliza predicted, at length did come around, and the engagement was eventually announced, but as it almost coincided with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and Andrew had already enlisted, Lily's father insisted that the wedding wait until the end of hostilities. He had no wish to see his daughter a war widow, and thus it came about that she never was one. After the elapse of a proper period following Andrew's death in battle, Lily married her old Lowell beau, who was himself a war hero.

Eliza had married Douglas Carnochan even before the engagement of Andrew and Lily was announced. She had clearly seen that she was exactly the bride Douglas wanted, socially, physically, and temperamentally, and that he was just the husband she would need if she married at all: steady, faithful, even-tempered, and of a cool and dispassionate disposition that would neither feel nor require a great love. They would be the respected and respectable members of a sober and serious community and raise a large family in which she might have the luck to find another Andrew. She was convinced that she would never again fall in love, and looking back now over the decades, she confirmed how right she had been. She had made the most of her life and not wasted it in futile regrets. She had loved her five children—Annie, Bruce, Clara, James, and Wallace—particularly the gentle Clara, who had returned to Scotland to wed the thread tycoon, Sir John Muir, and died there of breast cancer. But she had not had another Andrew. Had she ever really expected it? Could the trespassing cuckoo bird that had deposited that golden egg in a nest of Carnochans be expected to do it twice?

Her plain and middle-aged maiden daughter, Annie, of blameless character, blameless and blank, now came out of the house to remind her that her ex-son-in-law, Sir John, was coming for tea. Ex, because he had remarried after Clara's death, though his second wife was also now deceased.

"How could I forget it, Annie? You know what he's coming for, don't you?"

"To tell you he's going to be married? Yes, that's the rumor. To the red-haired governess of some Philadelphia family. Imagine! The old goat! What will he do in heaven, if he ever gets there, with three wives to claim him?"

Eliza knew that people had to be saying that Annie was a saint to stay home to look after her aging mother. People had to be saying that because people
did
say such things. But certainly Annie's extreme religiosity was a cross for her mother to bear. Eliza paused to prepare herself for a mild retort. "But, Annie darling, there's supposed to be no giving in marriage there."

"But the wives will still be there, won't they?"

"Perhaps they will no longer mind."

Sir John came on the dot of his expected hour and took his seat stiffly on the porch by his former mother-in-law. He was a portly, pink-faced, balding hunk of a man, affable enough, and, for all his wealth and baronetcy, inordinately proud of the humble origin that his business genius had allowed him to transcend. He had always admired and liked Eliza, two of whose sons acted as his American agents.

"We hear exciting news of you, John," Eliza began. "Is it true that you're to be congratulated?"

"Quite true, dear Mother Carnochan. At least that I am to be. There may be some question if the bride is. She is twenty-five years my junior."

"That's nothing where love is concerned."

"Well, there, my dear lady, you may be begging the question. Let me tell you how we met. I was in Philadelphia on business and dining alone in the very good restaurant of my hotel, when I observed a lovely lady with red hair sitting at a table across the room with two quiet and well-dressed children and a nice-looking couple who seemed to be their parents. I had the notion that the red-haired lady was in some kind of governess position with the children, for she supervised their eating and their table manners. Obviously, she had a way with them, and obviously, she enjoyed the full confidence of the parents. You could tell by the way they smiled at her. You may laugh, Mother Carnochan, but I was immensely struck by my young woman. I asked the headwaiter, who knew everybody, it seemed, and he reported the name of the man, a member of a distinguished Main Line family, and informed me that my redhead was a Mademoiselle Hortense Duval, the French governess of his children. I asked the headwaiter to deliver my card to the gentleman with my written request to be introduced to Miss Duval and the assurance that my intentions were strictly honorable. I watched the gentleman read my note, hand it to his governess, who read it and calmly nodded. Her employer then laughed, turned, and waved at me in the friendliest way to come and join his table. Which of course I promptly did. Miss Duval was utterly charming in what many women might have thought the oddest of encounters, and two days later I proposed to her."