East Side Story (17 page)

Janetta, large and fair and strong, had played a kind of dumb Brunhilde to her father's wily Wotan. Papa always came first, particularly as she had lost her mother early and, as the elder daughter, had sought to take her place with a widower who had chosen to remain that, but she saw no difficulty or conflict in her attitude even should she marry, for she took it blithely for granted that everyone else, including any husband-to-be, would feel the same way. Marriage was an expected rite, even for a Valkyrie; David was pleasant, attentive, clever, and approved by Papa—what else could a daughter want? And when David, duly wed, after the war had prevailed upon her father to assume the leadership of the larger firm of which he was a junior partner and which had been temporarily crippled by a pair of senior demises, Janetta had felt that it was only fitting that her father should rule in the office as he had always ruled in the home.

Their marriage, which some observers called tepid, though both got out of it pretty much what they had sought and expected, was mightily assisted by the distraction of hard work. David's labors at the law accounted for the bulk of his time and partially satisfied both his ambition and his imagination, while Janetta's indefatigable energy in fund-raising for charitable causes went far beyond the usual fashionable requirements: she enjoyed every minute of her highly successful drives. But the precariousness of the marriage's basis was ultimately made sadly clear by the wife's catastrophic menopause, followed by a near-fatal hysterectomy. Janetta, who had never been seriously ill in her life, suffered a nervous breakdown, and emerged from it only with the aid of a High Church Episcopal priest who transformed her formerly conventional religious observances into something much more fervid. This might have been an adequate salve to her apprehensive disposition had she not, for the first time in their union, turned the full lights of her attention on her husband in what began as a pleading and ended as an angry resolution to make him share her new faith.

David had always before been quite willing to give lip service, which cost him nothing, to all her expressed enthusiasms. After all, little more than a smirk or a nod had been needed to satisfy a woman who assumed that the world around her held all her little values. But now that she wanted him to say prayers with her and go to church with her, he waxed at first restless, then impatient, then irritated, and at last explosive. "I'm goddamned if I'll let you turn me into a Tartuffe!" he finally shouted at her, and the shocked silence that followed this outburst marked a profound change in their relationship. It was the reverse of what had earlier happened to his brother Sam and Alida.

Janetta was now forced to face the fact that David had sides to his nature that had not been revealed to her in the twenty years of their marriage. She was at a loss as to how to handle it, and when she went to her father (who else was there for her to go to?), it was only to be cruelly rebuffed.

"Hasn't David seen things your way for three decades?" he cried with a high cackle of laughter. "Can you expect more of a man? Good God, you women are insatiable!"

The souring of his dealings with his wife brought an odd but significant alteration to David's emotional needs. In all his life thus far he had been stalwartly independent of the usual human craving for love, both given and received. So long as his relationships with family, friends, and associates had been formally correct and outwardly cordial, he had not minded if they were tepid. His best friend, his most congenial companion, had been himself. Life was the clay, he the potter. His younger sister Estelle, whom he had lost while he was just starting out as a lawyer, had been a rare exception. Her intelligence had penetrated to the depths of his egotism, and her understanding had taught her that this quality in her brother might be used as well for good as for bad. In short, she had both
seen
him and loved him, the only combination that could undermine the walls he had built around his prickly personality. He might have been a different person had she lived.

What he found difficult now to face was hostility in the home. It was, of course, what he expected in the marketplace; indeed, that was what the struggle of life was all about. But the presence of domestic opposition bred in him the need for something else, something warmer and more gladdening when he opened his front door back from work, some gentle massage for a weary brow. And David began to be aware that if this was ever going to be offered him, it would only be by his son, Ronald, the sole issue of his marriage, an awareness that soon blossomed into a conviction.

The boy even looked like Estelle. He had her soft brown eyes, her delicately sculpted features, her pallor. He had been a beautiful child, and he was turning into a beautiful man. Slight of build but seamlessly put together, suggesting a poet, he was nonetheless sturdy and had a loud laugh of almost vulgar enthusiasm. His goodwill and good humor were infectious, and he had the gift of immediately reconciling his parents if a quarrel was threatened in his presence. People found it hard to be disagreeable when Ronny was around. Nor was it because he was naïve or innocent. In fact, he was very shrewd, though, like his late aunt, he made every kind of charitable allowance for those he loved. And wonderfully, indisputably, he loved his father. He even seemed to want to protect David from David, as if he had some mysterious mission to guide his father through the sloughs of despond. To his mother he was blandly affectionate, charmingly considerate, but it was as if he sensed that there was not much he could do about her. She was what she was.

His life was a succession of successes. He was a popular student at Chelton, Yale, and Yale Law School, a gallant naval officer in World War II, and a brilliant and industrious associate in his father's law firm. He had wanted to go into politics, but David had persuaded him to follow the example of such great leaders of the New York bar as Elihu Root, Henry L. Stimson, and Adam Carter, and first establish the firm and profitable base of a law partnership from which he could take a leave of absence if called by a President to fulfill some cabinet or ambassadorial position. At the time of what David came to think of as the "Krantz crisis," Ronny had been an associate for two years and was doing very well.

There was only one aspect of his son's personality to which David took private exception—private because there was certainly nothing that he could reasonably complain about and even less that he could do about it. It was the young man's unqualified worship of his maternal grandfather. To him Adam Carter was the symbol of the great American lawyer-statesman at his finest and best, whose genius oiled the wheels of the nation's business and whose wisdom guided Presidents in times of war and world crises. And how could David, himself one of the embellishers of the legend, even hint that there might be another side to his sainted father-in-law? Still, there were times when it was bitter tea to swallow.

The worst of these sprang from the issue with Joel Krantz over the firm name. Krantz had long been the thorn in David's side that made his troubles with his wife seem a harmless itch. Krantz headed the important litigation department of the firm. He was a big bulldog of a man, handsome enough in his own rough way, with high-rising gray-brown hair parted in the middle, a broad brow, massive chin, and steely eyes, usually garbed in well-pressed black with a scarlet necktie, who made no pretense of hiding his humble Brooklyn background and sneered openly at the amenities of social life, which he lumped under the term "fancy pants." But he was no bull in a china shop; nothing crumbled before his stealthy but steady advance except his adversaries in the courtroom. A great trial lawyer, he could thunder or purr as the occasion demanded, and he instilled in his clients the pleasing conviction that God was on their side. Adam Carter had spotted him years before as a coming force in the courts and had lured him away from a rival firm with an offer that had then seemed to David extravagant. But it had worked, as even David had to concede.

So long as Carter's grip was firmly on the firm's tiller, a comparative peace reigned over the partnership. But when age began to relax the old man's hold—at least to the eyes of his intimates, if not to those of the public—and he seemed to be retaining, like Lear, "only ... the name and all the additions to a king," Krantz began suggesting to any partner with whom he happened to be lunching the possible desirability of raising himself to equality with David in the number two spot of the firm and even changing its letterhead from Carter & Carnochan to Carter, Carnochan & Krantz. When he had enlisted what he considered an adequate number in his favor, he approached David directly in the latter's office.

"We're living in a new world, Carnochan," he began, in a near-hectoring tone. It was his habit to call his partners, with a few chosen exceptions, by their last name, a ploy that seemed designed to keep them at a discreet distance, or at least to warn them to look out for themselves. "These young fellas of ours returning from war service have had a rougher time than they ever anticipated. If a man's been through the hell of the Normandy beaches or Iwo Jima, he's not ready to sit quietly by while some old geezer who never saw a shot fired in anger gobbles the firm profits that younger guys have earned. He's lost four years in uniform, and he wants a slice of the here and now."

"Are you and I, Joel, among these old geezers?" David asked acidly. "Are you suggesting that we surrender our undeserved share of the take to these young Turks?"

"I'm talking about changes in the general atmosphere. Not of anyone in particular."

"And not of the nonparticipation of our age bracket in the recent conflict? Forgive me if I misunderstood you. Perhaps the point you wanted to make is that the new spirit of which you speak is contagious. That it affects even those of us who fought only the home battle."

"I sent a son to the Pacific."

"And so did I."

"We all know that, Carnochan. I even thought it might make you more understanding of the young men's point of view."

"Isn't it the old men's of which you are thinking?"

"How do you mean?"

"My dear Joel, you can't think that I am so much out of touch with firm matters that I have not learned of your interesting proposals for changes both in our name and in our percentages?"

Krantz glowered at him. "Very well, then. What are you going to do about it?"

"First of all, I must talk to Mr. Carter. I must see how he views your ideas. Particularly as to the change in the firm name."

"Is it his decision alone?"

"Isn't it?"

"Funny. I thought it was yours. Well, speak to me after you've talked to him."

Saying which, Krantz turned abrupdy on his heel—he had not chosen to sit during the short interview—and marched (there was no other word) out of the room.

Carter, as no one knew better than his son-in-law, was never to be totally relied on. There was nothing more likely to elicit his negative response than the least assumption of a favorable one; he hated the idea of being predictable. Added to this was his fear, or at least his apprehension, as he aged, that the next generation might "gang up" on him, so that he derived a certain relish from any falling-out among his younger partners. He didn't even mind outraging Janetta's younger sister when she was divorcing a notoriously philandering husband by muttering about middle-aging wives who put on weight with their wrinkles yet expected their husbands to be saints.

"Well, I don't know but that our Joel may have a point." Adam Carter leaned back as he drawled this proposition in the Louis XIV armchair by the great boule Renaissance table that served him for a desk. Black-and-white Piranesi prints of old Roman forts and prisons looked down on him and David from the paneled walls, interspersed with silver-framed autographed photos of kings and presidents. "Carter, Carnochan & Krantz strikes me as perhaps more in keeping with the ethnic widening of our day. Krantz. What exactly is Krantz? Probably shortened from something else. Krantzberg? Krantzstein? Is it Jewish? It might be. At any rate, it leaves the door comfortably ajar for a minority member to speculate that it might be his own. And it's certainly not Wasp. There was no Krantz on the
Mayflower.
Mightn't it be even better to put the monosyllabic name in the middle? Carter, Krantz & Carnochan, how does that strike you? Of course, people would abbreviate it to Carter Krantz."

"Why not Carter & Krantz?" David queried bitterly. "Mightn't that be best of all? Or just Krantz. Krantz et al. Alone and magnificent."

"Now, dear David, let's not be silly about this."

"It's the man's pushiness I object to, sir. The way he barges into my office and expects me to bow to his every demand. A gentleman should at least give the appearance of waiting till he's asked."

"But Joel doesn't claim to be a gentleman. He probably despises gentlemen. And I must say, he's never asked anything of me."

"He knows better ways of getting around you, sir."

"You mean by channeling it through you, David? Well, think it over, my friend. Think it over. I haven't given it my blessing. As yet."

David had reached the point where he shared his deepest concerns with his son, who had converted one floor of the Carnochan town house to a temporary bachelor's flat. It was almost as if he needed concerns to justify the serious sessions where Ronny would sit with him over a nightcap after his mother had taken herself to bed with a rather cross "You two night owls can sit up till dawn if you like."

The night when he told Ronny of his grandfather's enigmatic reaction to Krantz's proposal, the latter was silent for a couple of reflective moments before he had a comment.

"Don't you think you and Mr. Krantz could hit it off? He might be easier to deal with if he got the recognition he thinks he's earned."

David looked at him carefully. Of course, he was well aware that Ronny belonged to a tight little social group that included Elly Krantz, the monster's daughter, who, damn her, was blond and pretty. David had hugged to his heart the wishful thought that his son had befriended her with the object of easing the tension that he knew to exist between their fathers, but he couldn't blind himself to the possibility that, even if such had been the origin of his interest in the young woman, the girl's strong sex appeal might well give it another emphasis.