East Side Story (4 page)

"And she accepted."

"As a good French girl without a penny to her name or anyone to look after her naturally would. Obviously, to her it was a miracle. A baronet and a fortune appearing like Cinderella's golden coach! Love, however, is another matter. You may say there's no fool like an old fool, but I still know something about the French. A bargain to them is a serious thing. Hortense may take me for better, but she also takes me for worse. If I should lose my last shilling, she'd turn my castle into a hotel, run it to the queen's taste, and support me to the end. It would almost be worth going bust to see that happen. And my cynical friends proved wrong!"

"I have no doubt you're justified in that faith. And I'm sure that my Clara would have given you her blessing."

Sir John laughed, but he was obviously moved. "Clara would have wanted me to be happy, yes, but perhaps not
this
happy. Bless you, anyway, dear Mother Carnochan, for saying what so few would say—in other words, just the right thing. I'll tell my children, who, I regret to say, have taken a much less charitable view of my matrimonial plans. But they deeply respect their grandmother and will listen to her words."

"Unless they think I'm gaga."

Eliza sat alone after he had left, turning over his news in her mind with mild amusement and considerable sympathy. She wondered if the red-headed Hortense was not a bit like herself. She had to force herself to smile when Annie interrupted her quiet reflections and prepare herself for her daughter's inevitable fulminations.

"I'm sorry, Mother, but I really didn't want to sit and hear John boast of his romantic triumphs. Really! As if it were such a glorious thing to be taken in by an obvious gold digger!"

"Hardly an obvious one, my dear. I should say; if anything, a rather subtle one."

"These men! They can't bear to be alone, even for a few weeks or months."

"Why should they, if they don't have to be?"

"Because marriage is not a state to be entered into without mutual love. And a great love, too. Like yours and Father's!"

Eliza mused for a moment. "Is that really what you feel about marriage, my dear? That it can only be based on a great love?"

"Of course. Don't you agree?"

"I don't know if it has to be so great. If some fine, honest man should offer you a good home and the prospect of a family, would you feel obliged to turn him down because he hadn't set you on fire?"

"Well, it so happens that I see my duty here at home and that I'm proud and happy to remain here and perform it."

"I deeply appreciate that, my dear, but I should never wish to stand in the way of your having your own home and family."

"You needn't worry about that, Mother."

And indeed, Eliza saw that she needn't. That fine, honest man was not going to come along, no matter how much Annie and Annie's mother might pine for him. Annie had built into her mind the heroic picture of a woman who had sacrificed any prospect of her own domestic bliss on the altar of her duty to an aging parent. To take that from her and leave her with the bleak alternative of having been condemned to old maidhood by a neglectful sex would be the last cruelty. Eliza saw that yet another role in life had been assigned to her to enact: that of the selfish old mother who hoards one child to be her nurse and companion in the so-called sunset of life. She could only hope it would be the last one.

O
NE FINE SPRING EVENING
in 1892 Bruce Carnochan was striding east on Fifty-seventh Street toward Fifth Avenue, boasting neither top hat nor cloak (both faultless but left at home), yet even more resplendent (or so he dared to assume) in white tie and tails, with a scarlet carnation in his buttonhole, as if to advertise to the humbler world of the byways that he was dining
en ville
with the partner, however lesser a one, of the richest man in the world. For wasn't that what people claimed for Mr. Rockefeller? Of course, there were all those Indian maharajas, but Bruce shook his head impatiently, as if to disclaim their eligibility. Wasn't their wealth all in jewels, and probably bad ones at that?

The weather was benign; only the gentlest breeze brushed his clear pale forehead and large fine nose, nor did it muss the sleek black hair so carefully parted in the exact middle of his scalp, despite the legend that the late President Grant had taken a dislike to Ambassador Motley for no other reason. But then Grant, though the greatest of generals (oh, yes, Bruce gave him his full due), had never been quite a gentleman, had he? Where would he have been, broke and nearly disgraced, dying of throat cancer, if the late lamented Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt (God rest his generous soul!) had not come to his aid?

Bruce, healthy and essentially trim (though he would have to mind his tummy—yes, yes), and only twenty-eight, nodded approvingly as he passed the giant pink improvement on the chateau of Blois that Mr. V's eldest son had reared on the avenue and turned south toward the even more glorious abode of Willie K. Bruce felt zestfully at home in the wonderful city, at least in this part of it; he liked to think of Fifth Avenue as the apex of civilization, a new Rome, but a freer and gladder one unstained by the blood of gladiators or of Christians mauled by big cats in an arena full of yowling wops. Oh, yes, of course, he was aware of the smart sophisticated little set, including the misguided Kitty Atwater—God help the poor stubborn girl—who referred to the beautiful architecture of Richard Morris Hunt as "the derivative and ostentatious palazzos of the new goldbugs," but he stoutly maintained that the great avenue was fully as fine as anything the Italian Renaissance had produced, and that the interiors of the new structures, illuminated by electricity and freshened by plumbing, were more edifying than marble interiors stained by the memory of the victims of Borgia poison or Riario daggers.

Did he not have reason to feel exalted? Only that morning his brother and partner, Wallace, had announced that each of them might expect this year that his share of the net profits of Carnochan Brothers, American agents of the Scottish thread king, Sir John Muir, would amount to $20,000! His mother was always after him to find a bride, and how many lovelies would not gape at a figure like that? Even Kitty Atwater might not turn her nose up at such an offer, intent though she was supposed to be on her search for a man who could give her all the things among which she lived but none of which she owned. For Kitty, as Bruce kept telling himself with a snort, hadn't a dime to her name, for all her habit of sponging off the objects of her scorn!

Yet Kitty, despite her evident pleasure in chatting and gossiping with him at parties, was inclined to downgrade him in her supposed compliments. When she referred to him as a "dandy" or "a boulevardier," the terms showed a bit of bite behind her always charming smile. Kitty, of all people! Talk about pots and kettles! And the worst part of it was that she echoed (though without being aware of it, as she hardly knew them) his two older brothers. The Carnochans had never been ones to restrain themselves in playing their favorite game of "The trouble with you." They had not left any of their sometimes brutal candor in Ayreshire. The slightest pretension, the least effort to ally oneself with anything that introduced a bit of color and gaiety into a world of grayness was promptly labeled what his mother, scorning the mitigating Gallic pronunciation, called "blazzy." And any such attitude on the part of a younger brother like Bruce, however much loved as a member of the sacred clan (even though they were lowlanders!), was considered essentially incompatible with the financial ability that the Scots needed on this side of the Atlantic to prove how different they were from the Irish. Even Wallace did not deem Bruce his equal, or near equal, in the office.

But could he not console himself, indeed pride himself, on being the one member of the family who knew what this New York of the nineties was really all about, who understood and appreciated how much its puff and its glitter were basic parts of it? Mightn't he one day write a memoir that would rival Cellini's? Which reminded him: he should start that diary he was always postponing.

As he turned west on Fifty-first Street to visit his favorite bar on Sixth Avenue for the preprandial gin cocktail and oysters which had become a treasured habit, he felt the mild sway of guilt that such a break from Scottish rigor still briefly entailed. And with it came the perennial, always lurking suspicion that in his exalted moments, such as strolling down Fifth Avenue was apt to give him, he was inclined to attribute overexalted motives to his inner thoughts and judgments. To be strictly honest now—and a son of Eliza Dudley Carnochan should know just what honesty was—had he been strictly fair in attributing a mercenary goal to Kitty's husband-hunting? What could any girl in their society do but husband-hunt, and should one expect her to seek a poor one? No, not at all, and hadn't he now to face the horrid suspicion that he was looking for his own excuse to exclude from the candidates for the hand of Bruce Carnochan a girl with no money? How about that? Hadn't he dreamt of wedding a Vanderbilt? Or even a Gould? No, never a Gould—one could step too low.

Pulling himself together now, he assured himself that he was too poor for a Vanderbilt and very likely too poor to wed a girl of Kitty's expectations, and that he should stop beating himself and look for a sweet girl who would be content with his $20,000 per annum, and perhaps bring him a little something of her own, so that together they might have a shingle house in Newport next to the one that his brother Wallace and his wife, Julie, had built?

His heart had regained all its buoyancy as he entered the great dark paneled bar and took his place at the long, oaken counter facing a huge mirror and a Bougereau canvas of naked laughing nymphs dangerously teasing a randy satyr. He signaled Paddy for his usual. If the truest joy lay in anticipation, what was better than his sense of the forthcoming gin in an iced glass and the prospect of a sumptuous dinner in Gotham?

"Good evening, my dear Bruce. Do we have the good fortune of dining at the same place? Are you going to the Stoddards'?"

It was Abel Fisher, in similar attire, who had taken the adjoining stool. Also a bachelor, though older, perhaps forty, with a pink boyish face and thick prematurely snowy hair, he was a well-known diner out and man about town whose encyclopedic knowledge of society gossip always impressed Bruce.

"I'm afraid not. I dine with the Bensons."

"Old Ezra's? Really? I didn't know you were an habitué there."

"I'm hardly that. This will be my first time. What may I expect? You, who know all."

"Well, nothing that need alarm you. They're a new type in town, so rich they don't honestly much care about society. It's true of several of the Standard Oil partners. The old guard that was ready to snub them were so surprised to find themselves the ones snubbed that now they cultivate them."

"But the Bensons have bought a mansion, Abel!"

Abel's shrug showed how little this impressed him. "They bought the Buckinghurst morgue when old Buckinghurst went broke. Ezra needed rooms for his big brood. He probably got his secretary to pick the house for him, just telling her to get the kind of thing Rockefeller partners got. You know how he made his pile, don't you? By a lucky loan to young John D. when the latter was just starting out. He was paid back in stock, which he's hung on to like a leech. You're on to a good thing there, my boy. The daughters may be on the plain side, but the man who marries one will find his ass in a tub of butter!"

Bruce was a bit disgusted by Abel's crudeness, but he was careful not to show it. He had no wish to stem the flow of his information. "I don't know the Benson girls. Kitty Atwater is spending part of the winter with them, and she's the one who invited me tonight."

"Kitty? Really? So she's on to them already. Ezra Jr. had better watch his step." Abel suddenly pulled himself up. "I beg your pardon, old boy. Is Kitty perhaps something special to you?"

"Oh, no, just a friend. Or perhaps you might say, a friendly acquaintance. I think she's trying to expand the Bensons' social circle."

"Well, they've picked the right gal to do it. Kitty knows everybody. It's odd she hasn't caught herself a mate by now. She must be getting on, perhaps thirty? I guess the trouble is the heirs think she's after their money."

"Why should they think that, any more than with another girl?"

"Because she's poor and lives on the rich. It's a pity she has no parents to guide her."

"But she has a mother!" Bruce exclaimed, astonished at such a gap in the other's knowledge.

"Yes, but a complete nincompoop who makes no secret of the fact that she's on the prowl for a fortune for her not so
jeune, jeune fille à marier.
A clever mama would never show that, and she would train Kitty to hold that too critical tongue of hers. The sons of tycoons are mostly asses who don't care for wit. They want to be dumbly adored. Kitty's far from dumb, and she doesn't adore."

"No, she certainly doesn't do that," Bruce agreed. "But why does she have to marry a rich man?"

"Because that's the world her old ass of a widowed mother has brought her up in. Ever since her father killed himself after losing his shirt in the panic of '73. Sponging is a curious art. You wouldn't think that Mrs. Atwater would be an appealing subject of charity, yet she has been just that to several bloated dowagers. It proves that the crudest flattery can sometimes do the trick. And Mother Atwater is always ready to fill an opera box or help with a house party or chaperone young girls on a trip to Europe, and Kitty has tagged along, seeing through it all and hating it and expressing her mind too freely. But the rich life can become addictive. It's like the opera.
On s'ennuie mais ony revient.
"

"And you think she may have her eye on Ezra Jr.?"

"She could be the making of him, but he's too dumb to see it. The girls, however, aren't dumb. Flora and Ada. How about Ada for you, my boy? She may not be Helen of Troy, but she's smart and she's true blue."

Bruce stared at his change of tone. "How can you be so sure of that?"