East Side Story (26 page)

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.

L
OUISA, "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 would 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.

Of course, he later made a fortune in automobiles.

Loulou assumed that another lover would come into her life, and indeed one might have, had she not so violently regretted the one she had lost. His business success, following so rapidly upon the act of marriage that he had apparently counted to get him really started, seemed to fling in her face the deserved consequences of a folly that proved her to be a born old maid. At any rate, she found herself more and more resigned to sharing the regular and mind-numbing brownstone existence of her aging parents, reading at night, working in the daytime with the very young and the very senile at a settlement house, and occasionally on weekends visting at the houses of her fewer and fewer unmarried woman friends.

And then one evening as she was reading Anatole France's wonderful story "The Procurator of Judea," she came upon these words: "It was amid such peaceful occupations and meditations on Epicurus that, with surprise and a faint chagrin, he met the advent of old age." Of course, with her it was not senescence; it was worse—it was middle age. She was in her thirties, early thirties, it was true, but still ... what could she do to give her life some shred of meaning? A friend in the management of her settlement house had spoken of the city's urgent need of more trained nurses, and the idea lit a sudden fire in her head. She talked to her brother, Gordon, her only true intimate in the family, and he gave her instant and enthusiastic encouragement. He looked into the possibility of her enrolling in the Bellevue Training School and brought her the needed forms to fill out.

Of course, there was initial opposition. Her mother took the position that a "lady" could never be a nurse and that it had taken a major war to make Florence Nightingale reacceptable to the good society into which she had been born. But the younger members of the family thought it very sporting of Loulou, whose warm and cheerful personality had made her a popular figure, to strike for her own thing, and Julie Carnochan was induced at last to withdraw her veto, practical woman as she always was, insisting only that Loulou should confine herself to hospital work and never serve in a patient's home, where she might find herself treated as a kind of upper servant.

Loulou did not find it always easy to train with much younger women, most of whom came from very different backgrounds, but she had brains and determination, and she achieved not only high grades but the ultimate admiration of classmates who were impressed that a woman of her age and class should undertake so many humble and often distasteful tasks. And in the two decades that followed, she rose to be a head floor nurse in the private patients' wing of a famous New York hospital. Even the older Carnochans were now actually proud of her and cited her as an example of the contrary if some young radical son of a friend was so brash and bold as to suggest that the family belonged to a bypassed society that had not kept up with the times.

Loulou's career as a nurse was cut short at sixty-five, when she developed cancer and had half a lung removed. She decided to retire while recovering from the operation in a private room on her own floor of the hospital, where, needless to say, she was receiving the best of care. But an incident with a new young intern who did not know who she was or her connection with the hospital put her on notice of how much her old background still clung to the modernized professional woman.

The intern had asked her, as part of a routine questionnaire, if she had ever given birth. She pointed to the name on her door, which was slanted inward.

"If you'll look at that card, Doctor, you'll see it reads
Miss
Carnochan."

The young man glanced at the card, shrugged, and repeated his question.

Loulou felt immediately a fool at her old-fashioned assumption that virginity had to be assumed in an unwed lady and answered his question in the negative. But it weighed on her mind that even two decades of medical service had not made more of a dent in the Carnochan way of viewing the world. And when she left the hospital and took up her life as an unoccupied lady of small means, she began to wonder if it had been anything but a disadvantage to have been born and raised as she had been.

The principal fact in her new life was that she was poor. The term, of course, was relative, but it was certainly applicable to her—indeed dramatically applicable—in contrast to her siblings and cousins. Her father had been nearly ruined in the Great Depression, and his situation had not been ameliorated by his wife's refusal to recognize it, with the result that Loulou's one third of his estate enabled her to maintain only a two-room flat in a respectable East Side Manhattan apartment house and escape the hottest part of the summer only in a modest seaside hotel in Maine. The difference of her daily life, deprived now of the busy work of the hospital, from that of her sister, Betty, who had married a man of considerable means, and that of her brother who was a successful lawyer, was only too painfully evident. Gordon, it was true, helped her out from time to time with welcome checks, but she still found it in her heart to criticize a family that had raised her in such luxury only to leave her in such poor straits.

She had nonetheless found a kind of occupation in her jobless days in putting together the history of her family, at least of its American chapters, which were all that were known of it, and speculating on what motivated, or failed to motivate, each generation of the Carnochans. She noted one particular characteristic that seemed to attach itself to most of the members, and perhaps to account for why so large a percentage of them succeeded either in retaining the social status to which they were born or in improving it. The males, and there was an unusual predominance of them, were all able either to make money or to marry it. There were none of the social dropouts or exiled remittance men that plagued so many families listed in the Social Register. The family instinct for survival was strong indeed. On the other hand, its contribution to the arts, to politics, to teaching, to any occupation that involved giving out rather than taking in, was minimal. If there were no criminals, neither were there any saints. The Carnochans seemed dedicated to their own permanence.

And why had Loulou ended up as she had? Because she had neither made money nor married. She might have done more, in her own small way, for people who had needed such services as she had been able to provide, than any other member of the family, but what did that avail her now? Resentment followed by curiosity began to turn her study of the clan into a kind of obsession. She started to fill albums with photographs and press cuttings, yellowing invitations and pages of old letters; she wrote to all her cousins asking for dates of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, and she undertook to compile a book of the family tree, which Gordon promised to have printed. The family was becoming the occupation of her life.