East Side Story (16 page)

Anyway, it was working. Sam had started to miss meetings of the Society. He spent more of his evenings at his club. There were even times when he came home in such a condition that Alida had to awaken the faithful butler to help put him to bed. And then one early spring night, when they had moved to the Long Island house and Sam had attended a rather riotous bachelors' dinner at the Glenville Country Club for the son of an old friend who was to be married the following week, he took a stroll, perhaps to sober up before going home, on the terrace overlooking the golf course and stumbled over the edge, dropping a precipitous dozen feet to the ground below.

The accident should not have been fatal, but he broke two ribs, and the jagged point of one penetrated a lung. Pneumonia developed, and ten days later he was dead.

David Carnochan produced an old will, executed several years earlier, but a young lawyer whom Sam must have recently met at one of his New York clubs unexpectedly came forward with a much more recent one. It contained the bequest of a million dollars to the Society of Reborn Christians.

Alberta was with her mother in her Uncle David's office when they received this news. She had turned very white and insisted that Alida accompany her to another chamber where they could be alone.

"Dad
knew!
" she almost wailed. "He knew what you were doing to him! He had lost his faith in the Society. And his faith in you! He had nothing left but his revenge. And this is it!"

"Alberta, pull yourself together! You're making no sense."

"I'm making only too much! Oh, why didn't I stop you?"

"Will you please get up and go home. I must go back to David. We have much to discuss. But of this you may be sure. You and I will never mention this topic again!"

Nor did they. And with David's great firm behind her, Alida successfully challenged her husband's will on the grounds of undue influence. Her case was not a strong one, but Dr. Forman dreaded the publicity that a drawn-out trial would give to his fund-raising techniques, and he settled for a mere hundred g's.

I
N THE TWO YEARS
that followed the Japanese surrender in 1945, the fortunes of the Carnochans in the city might be said to have reached their peak. Their very visible presence in town was owed in some part to two factors: one, that their offspring were predominately males, which gave their name considerable currency, and, two, that none of them emigrated to other parts of the nation. The six stalwart sons of James and Louisa formed the most noted of the clan. Except for Andy, all had married to social advantage, and they occupied substantial residences on Manhattan's East Side. They were large-sized men, and their wives were for the most part of comparable build, sometimes plain enough but always self-assured; the ladies could be seen stepping briskly in and out of their chauffeur-driven motors as they entered or left the Colony or Cosmopolitan Club before or after a lunch between meetings of their charitable boards. Sam's widow occupied a red-brick mansion on lower Park Avenue; Ted, who headed an accounting firm, had built a small Beaux Arts palazzo on Seventieth Street, and Alex, a noted dealer in odd lots who had chosen as his bride a granddaughter of the late Mayor Peter Cooper Hewitt, resided in a double brownstone on Madison Avenue.

David had aspired to be the first of the six, and in his middle fifties, he had certainly come close, as the number two partner of one of the great law firms of New York. Indeed, by some of his partners he was considered the true head, for his father-in-law, Adam Carter, was now aged well over eighty and left all the administrative details of their association to his second in command. But that was not the way the clients or the general public viewed it. Carter, who had been a conspicuous solicitor general, a colorful ambassador, the revered adviser to Republican Presidents, and a giant of corporate law, stood high in the popular gaze, like some modern Colossus of Rhodes, a seventh wonder of the world of today. David, who had hoped to grow in his shadow, thought he might have reason to recall the old saying that some great men were like plane trees: nothing flourished under their broad boughs.

Of course, David could not claim that he had not flourished; the question was whether he had flourished as much as he ought. He enjoyed a large income; he was listened to respectfully by captains of industry; he had served both as president of the New York State Bar Association and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; he was a man who was appointed almost automatically to the boards of his corporate clients, his clubs, his favored charities. And he lived well, too: he and his wife, Janetta, entertained extensively in their elegant little French pavilion, with its gleaming marble front and delicate grillwork, in a mews on Eighty-sixth Street, and in their high-gabled Louis XIII château in Westbury, Long Island. Yet he had never been summoned to take any part in the administration of his great nation, either as an attorney, a diplomat, or a cabinet officer. And he was beginning to wonder if his seemingly immortal father-in-law had not been an actual hindrance to his ambitions rather than the great booster he had originally hoped.

Of course, he was fair enough to recognize that, insofar as federal advancement was concerned, the recent years had been against both of them. Carter's federal glories had been under past Republican regimes—Coolidge and Hoover—while his son-in-law was still too young to do anything but plod away to establish his basis on Wall Street. And in the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Carter's famed appearances before the United States Supreme Court to attack savagely and often successfully the constitutionality of F.D.R.'s social legislation had created a breach between Washington and Wall Street that rendered out of the question any political bid to a partner of the thundering attorney who had made himself the symbol of what was reactionary in America.

Indeed, David had come to question, entirely aside from his own future, whether Carter's reputation was altogether a good thing for the firm. Granted that it had brought in plenty of rich clients, would it, looking ahead, as the clear-minded David always did, be ultimately attractive to the brightest law students, whom the firm always hoped to attract? For David, who took sides in his own actions but rarely in his own mind, and who never honored his prejudices with any unnecessary loyalty, saw that the New Deal was more the wave of the future than the laissez-faire of its opponents, and bent his mind to ways of making his father-in-law a continuing asset rather than a liability to the firm.

It was thus that he concocted the plan of making use of the government's arbitrary imprisonment of Japanese immigrants in the beginning of the war. Although he was not personally much concerned with what was done to the poor souls who were thus roughly rounded up and incarcerated, despite their American citizenship and utter blamelessness, and although he quite took in the hopelessness of defending them against the war fever that swept the nation, the government, and even the courts, he had the wit to see that when times changed, as they inevitably would, this blatant disregard of the most fundamental rights would be seen as a scandal and that those who had opposed it would be deemed heroic.

It was with this in mind that he approached Carter with the proposal that he take a brief in the defense of the incarcerated. The senior partner, as always, honored him with his full attention. Carter was a small man, wiry and tense, whose slightly ominous stare was hard to interpret. His heavy concentration as he listened seemed to promise a heavy response, but David was only too aware of the older man's unpredictability and knew that he might answer with either a hearty guffaw or even an off-color joke. Carter was equally aware of his reputation for the unexpected and reveled in it. As a young man he had been known to make fun of T.R. to his face and get away with it!

This time, however, he neither smiled nor joked.

"Surely, David, the war powers of a President suffice to justify the measures that the Squire of the Hudson (you needn't rise) has taken to safeguard our Western coast from the dangers of invasion?"

"Even if those dangers are remote? Even if they may not exist? If we should ever find ourselves at war with Great Britain, and an arbitrary chief of state should decide to lock up all citizens of Anglo-Saxon heritage, where would you and I find ourselves, sir?"

"In the majority, my friend. And we wouldn't put up with it!"

"But how long will that majority last, sir? You know how the demographic charts predict that—"

"Yes, yes, yes," Carter interrupted impatiently. This was not something he cared to think about. "Get to the point, David. What do you want me to do?"

David knew his man. He knew that Carter's somewhat eighteenth-century conception of the Constitution was balanced with deep humanitarian convictions. If Carter believed in an almost total freedom of action for the great corporation leaders in whose capable hands, as he saw it, the economic destiny of our nation had been fortunately placed, he was also seized with a Jeffersonian passion for the dignity and freedom of the individual man. Carter had no use for kings or despots, and in religion he was at least a deist. His vision of the ideal republic was one where no man need fear repression of his body or his tongue, and where any man of brains and ability and determination, no matter how humbly born, might rise to take hold of any business that would cover the land with rails, pump oil from the bowels of the earth, and smelt ore into steel.

With this kind of libertarian argument David had been able to induce Carter to argue case after case on behalf of the unfortunate Japanese, and as he had foreseen, when the war was over, his father-in-law was hailed by law reviews, honored at testimonial dinners, and his name enshrined among the great defenders of civil rights. Fortunately, it did not come to the attention of the liberal circles of the bar that David had a good deal of trouble keeping his senior from taking a brief defending the continued segregation of public schools in the South. Some of the old man's ideas of liberty did not jibe with the times, and nothing could persuade him that "separate but equal" was not the same as equal.

But that was just David's gripe: that everything he, David, did redounded to the credit of his father-in-law, never to himself. The world seemed to smell out any lack of burning conviction and to honor only those who felt such. How was it possible that people somehow suspected that he, David, did not give much of a hoot about Japanese internment and that Carter did? Yet it was he, David, who brought about the briefs in their favor! Carter on his own would never have done a thing for them. It was the same way with the firm's German clients before the war. David had come to the reluctant conclusion, persuaded by his son, that the Nazi taint and the firm's public relations required that the firm cease its representation of Hider-dominated businesses, and when he finally convinced Carter of this, and the old man took fire and enthusiastically shed them, Carter got all the credit. Because he cared, although it took David to get him to care! And David, who had acted purely out of policy, was sneered at. How did people
know
what he was thinking? And why did they care? Wasn't it the action and not the inner motivation—or inner fantasy (for that was what it often was)—that mattered? Evidently not.

It was not thus that he had visualized what his relationship with the great man would ultimately become when he had courted Carter's daughter Janetta in the winter of 1917. He had dared to predict it as an evolving partnership in which, with the march of ineluctable time, senior and junior would gradually and painlessly change places, all in the natural order of things. He now saw that he should have foreseen that his spouse's parent would be as solid and enduring an urban fixture as Grant's tomb.

In that early winter that saw our entry into the First World War, Adam Carter had been free of federal duties and was repairing a fortune depleted by the lesser pay of government service, as the all-powerful head of a small but brilliantly successful litigating firm. True to his never-failing confidence in his own future, no matter what years flew by, Carter had used a large percentage of his remaining capital to erect a freestanding Georgian town house, the long side of whose oblong shape faced not on a less tax-expensive side street but boldly on Park Avenue. There at night he worked with foreign experts on a secret bipartisan committee designated by President Wilson to work out a peace plan to be presented to the victors when an armistice should come. David, who had once impressed Carter when he had argued a brief against him—the attorney-statesman had always an eye out for young forensic talent—and who, though already commissioned, could be exempted from army service at Carter's wish, had been requested by the latter for his peace-plan staff, and had actually been asked to move into Carter's great house to be available for work at all times.

Of course the appointment had not come without maneuvering on David's part. He had carefully cultivated the first good impression he had made on Carter in court, following it up with respectful calls at the latter's home and letters with bright comments on many of the older man's law review articles or public addresses. The reward of his appointment had been beyond his wildest dreams, and he was intent on taking full advantage of it, including the courtship of Carter's big, blond, self-assured elder daughter.

David was anxious for a just peace, because any but a just one would reflect badly on its designers. It was obvious to him that Germany, fatally overextended, was doomed to lose, but he had never wasted much time being incensed by Hun atrocity tales or being inspired by Wilsonian dreams of a world made safe for democracy. He rarely expressed himself on the emotional aspects of the conflict or, at most, signified an adequate agreement with majority-held views. Mr. Carter allowed himself to be dramatically eloquent on the subject of Kraut brutality and Yankee idealism, but David was to note, three years later, when Carter, reversing himself, decided with his friend Senator Lodge that the League of Nations was a trap and fought it, that he used the same eloquence. And David once more assisted him, keeping to himself the low mark that he assigned to his senior's supposed sincerity.