East Side Story (14 page)

And so did her world. At least a good part of it. There were always those who suspected that her air of self-assurance insufficiently masked her downgrading of themselves. Her tall, rather bony figure and large-featured, plain physiognomy were familiar sights in her neighborhood, getting in and out of her big shiny Cadillac town car or entering or leaving the handsome red-brick Georgian house that was one of a matching and abutting trio erected by her and two of her brothers. Her dresses were oddly fashionable for one who seemed so above fashion, and the thick wavy blond hair, which the world thought dyed, was actually entirely natural, even at her age. Alida was always a rule to herself.

She was the president of the Martha Washington Women's Club, of the Tuesday Evening Club, of the Schuyler Livingston Settlement House, and she served on the boards of two private schools and of the two subscription holiday dances that dominated the social lives of the Knickerbocker young. All this marked her strong sense of social and civic responsibility.

In 1917, when Sam as an army captain had been sent to the front in France, she had left her three infant children in the good care of her mother in Rhinebeck and torn her way through red tape to go abroad as a nurse's aide. What she had seen in military hospitals by the Marne had given her a lasting horror of the chaos that lies in the wake of battles and a deep respect for even the shallowest ribs that hold a society together. It intensified her childhood feeling that clothes and covers were apt to be better things than what they concealed, as her dresses sheltered a too lanky torso and helped her to compete more fairly with more beautiful girls. It was the weak who discarded appearances. The strong recognized weapons and seized them.

Alida was far from being an unreconstructed right-winger, but she was always inclined to try to make do with the present situation, tending to regard change, even change for the better, as something to be watched lest it get out of hand. But when change was really needed, in her opinion, she was ready to push it. Some of her friends even thought that she at times went too far, as when she proposed a Jewish couple for membership in the Tuesday Evening Club. They were at first turned down, but her immediate and clearly serious threat to resign the presidency precipitated a hasty reconsideration by the admissions committee and a reversal of the decision. "You have to be firm to be taken seriously," she had told her supporters. "But don't get into a fight until you're pretty sure you can win. I wouldn't have proposed the Rosenbergs ten years ago. There's no point getting too far ahead of the times you live in. Today anti-Semitism is dead, or at least moribund."

Which was why she did so little for the cause of feminism. "Women have enough for the present," she would say. "The rest will come in due time. And what's more, it will come without a serious fight." The same argument she used when it came to blacks. "Their time has not yet come."

She did, however, on one occasion indulge in a bitter controversy which she almost lost. It was not a question of the time being right or wrong; her opponents claimed there was no question of timing involved. The elder of her two daughters, the lovely Alberta, the one who most closely resembled her mother in character, though less so, fortunately, in looks, attended a fashionable girls' boarding school in a Philadelphia suburb, Delamar Academy, named for its headmistress, where she roomed with one Molly Kane, whose family were neighbors of the Carnochans in Glenville, Long Island. Molly suffered from excessive modesty, so much so that she waited until the gymnasium shower room was empty before slipping in for a hasty cleaning. To cure her of this, a group conspired while she was in the shower to hide her clothes and then chase her naked, when she emerged, throughout the building past throngs of girls all hooting at her.

Alberta related this to her mother when the latter had come to the school for a parents' weekend. She had not herself been one of the conspirators, but she found the incident amusing. Alida did not.

"It might have given the poor girl a dangerous nervous shock," she protested.

"Well, she did take it pretty hard, I admit. But she shouldn't have been so prim about other girls seeing her starko."

"A natural modesty isn't a bad thing at all. I'm sure Miss Delamar must have been horrified if she heard about it. Have any of these nasty girls been punished?"

"Oh, Miss Delamar is supposed to have been tipped off. There was no teacher in the locker room that day."

"Well, Miss Delamar is going to get a piece of my mind this very afternoon! She'll find that she has no rubber stamp in the school board. I shall demand an apology to Molly and to her parents!"

Alida recognized the look that immediately clouded Alberta's features. It was the look of the daughter who realizes that she is no longer dealing with a parent but with a power of the outside world immune to the charm of even a favorite child. Alida had had occasion to see that look on the faces of her other children, and she did not deplore it. She was willing, when needed, to be feared by her family. To be feared was to be respected, and to be respected was to be obeyed.

"I think Miss Delamar meant well, Ma. After all, it was only a way of getting a silly girl over a silly hang-up. Everybody was nice to Molly afterward."

"Afterward may have been too late. Who knows what permanent damage may have been done to that girl? Stripped in public! Why it's like one of those old Academic paintings of a slave market where some poor lady captured by pirates is exposed to the leering gaze of purchasers!"

"But it was only in front of girls, Ma!"

"Girls can leer. Do you know what clothes are, Alberta? Clothes are civilization!"

Alida paused, noting a new and unwelcome expression of astonishment on her daughter's face. Had she gone too far? Was she opening, even by a crack, the door she kept so firmly sealed on her own inner being? The door that
everyone
should keep sealed? Clothes were not the only veil that protected civilization.

"Well, never mind," she concluded. "But I am certainly going to speak to Miss Delamar."

Walking that early spring afternoon down the pretty little lane that led from the campus to the headmistress's cottage, Alida recalled every minute of the episode in her childhood that had made the ordeal of Molly Kane so particularly vivid to her. It had occurred in Bar Harbor, where her family had a vacation house, in the summer of 1902. She had been on a hike with her parents and two brothers up one of the hills, and they had picnicked by a tarn in the forest and had had the rare excitement of starding a drinking bull moose which had crashed away from the intruders through the brush. The day had been an unexpected scorcher, and her mother had suggested a plunge in the water before eating.

"But we have no bathing suits," Alida had protested.

Mrs. Livingston prided herself as being above the inhibitions of the vulgar. Her progenitors, she insisted, had always been leaders and not followers of fashion. It may have been a natural desire to put a smug and sometimes impertinent fifteen-year-old in her place that made her now take a step beyond her usual pale.

"Here we are alone with nature!" she exclaimed, flinging her arms toward the sky. "Why should we be ashamed of the bodies the good Lord gave us? It was not He but Adam and Eve that provided the fig leaves. Let us like King Lear cry, 'Off, off, you lendings!' Don't you agree, Robert?"

And calmly, slowly, deliberately, as though he were in his own dressing room at home, Robert Livingston proceeded to disrobe. His sons enthusiastically followed him and were soon splashing in the water like boys in a Thomas Eakins painting.

"Come on, Alida," her mother called to her cowering daughter. "Join us, dear. There's nothing like the feel of cool water against your bare skin."

"No, no!" And when one of her brothers, horridly bare, leapt from the water to make a merry move to yank down the front of her dress, she slapped his hand away with a shriek of actual terror.

"Alida, don't be such a prude!" Her mother stood before her, a blinding vision of incredible exposure, with long, stringy tits and a huge ebony triangle of pubic hair between wide alabaster hips. Alida shielded her eyes.

"Harlot!" she yelled.

The silence that fell seemed to encompass even a stricken forest. Nobody uttered a word. Nobody urged her anymore to disrobe. Nobody spoke to her on the long walk back to the road. Nor was the subject mentioned thereafter. Her father came to her room that night to talk to her, but before he had said a word, she burst into such a passion of tears that he departed in silence. Perhaps he had decided that she had suffered enough. She had said something so unspeakable that neither of her parents knew how to cope with it, so the episode was treated as something that had not happened. But Alida knew that her relations with her family had taken a new turn. She began to wonder if she was not even respected. She had been left with her defenses intact, and she would know how to use them in the future.

Had she found the headmistress repentant, Alida might have been content to let the incident at the Delamar Academy pass with a vote of censure from the board, but finding her defiant and quite ready to charge her critic with encroaching on the prerogatives of the principal, Alida declared war. Returning to New York, she called a special meeting of the board and demanded that Miss Delamar be discharged. The opposition was clamorous: a good proportion of the board insisted that Alida was making a mountain out of a molehill, and nobody knew what the outcome would have been, had not a newspaper reporter got wind of the fray and printed the whole story, whereupon the headmistress, humiliated and disgusted, resigned her post.

Alida had won what she boldly called a victory, but it was certainly a Pyrrhic one. She had broken her own rule of fighting only when she was sure of an easy win, and she had gained the reputation of being too willing to "throw her weight around." Assessing her damages and regrouping her forces, she decided to avoid the limelight for a period.

It was many years after this long forgotten (except by her) episode, that, in late middle age, she encountered her first troubles with her husband.

Sam Carnochan had always been inclined to drink too heartily, though with a strong head for it, he rarely embarrassed the company he kept, but in his fifties this tendency notably increased. A muscular problem in his left arm reduced his golf score from the high seventies to the low nineties, he endured painful attacks of gout, and the old age that he had always dreaded began to loom. The Great Depression had reduced his fortune by half, and his business was decreased—consolation was more and more sought in the shining hour before dinner devoted to the martini.

Alida had never been such a fool as to suppose that she could, with subtle female flattery, lead her husband by the nose; she knew that, however unintellectual and unimaginative, he possessed a brain and a wit as sharp as her own. She was sure that any appeal to him to cut down his drinking on the grounds of morality or character would be fruitless; she had to concentrate on the danger to his health and on the increase it boded to his already considerable weight. This for a while had an effect, but she soon became aware that he was reducing only his home consumption and making up for it in his clubs. She decided on a more drastic method. One morning when he was donning his overcoat to go to the office, with his chauffeur and car at the front door, she swept into the hall and told him abruptly that she had to confer with him.

"What is it, dear?" he demanded impatiently.

She pointed firmly to a small room off the front hall that was hardly ever used. Its lonely severity would give a proper gravity to their little talk. Sam, seated uncomfortably on a stiff little gilt chair, his removed overcoat folded in his lap, listened unhappily as she related, relendessly, the remarks she had garnered from her friends, and from his own children, showing how visible the occasional effects of his bibulousness had become.

When he responded at last, it was in a much gender tone than she had anticipated. She had expected the usual defenses of the accused alcoholic: that the charges were absurdly exaggerated, that he was already cutting down, that if she thought
he
was bad, she should see some of his friends at the Hone Club. But no, his answer was startlingly different.

"I don't deny anything you've said, my dear, and I realize that you've shown the patience of an angel. But I want you to know that for sometime now I've been very much aware of what I've been doing to myself, and I've been determined to find a way out of my trouble. In the past two months I think I've really made some headway. Of course, I've been meaning all along to tell you about it, but I didn't want to get your hopes up before I was sure. Maybe even now isn't quite the time, but so long as you've chosen this moment to speak to me seriously, I guess that's my signal to do likewise. You know my old pal Sidney Wagstaff. I know you've never liked him and probably even blame him for leading me into what let's call my excesses. And there may be some truth in that, though I daresay his wife thinks it's the other way around. But anyway, all that's more or less in the past. What Sidney may be leading me into today is what I'm beginning not to be ashamed of calling my salvation."

Alida stared at him in astonishment. "Is it some kind of religious experience that you're referring to?"

"It is." His tone was sturdy, even a bit defiant. "You're surprised, of course. You know how little I've ever been a churchgoer. And how I've always sneered at the family for deserting the old black Presbyterianism of their forebears for the more fashionable Episcopalianism of society. Looking for God, I used to call it, in the Social Register. But it could be that I've found something I may have been unconsciously waiting for. Or that's been waiting for me. In the sense that it's been waiting for all human souls."

"Sam, what on earth are you talking about?"

"The Society of Reborn Christians. Have you heard of it?"

"Of course, I've heard of it. It started in Newport, didn't it? A rather opulent Bethlehem. Peggy Tulliver belongs to it."