East Side Story (5 page)

Abel looked to see if anyone was within hearing and lowered his voice. "Because I was one of the first to cultivate the Bensons. You know me and how I scan the newcomers to see who's going to make the grade. Well, I don't tell people this, but you and I have always hit it off, so I'll trust you with it. I proposed to Flora and was turned down flat. Indeed, I was put in my place."

"But why?" To Bruce, Abel had always seemed something of a catch, particularly to the new rich. "Why wasn't she complimented?"

"Because she thought me mercenary. And of course, she was dead right. Naturally, I was after her chips. But where she was wrong was in not realizing that I'd have made her a good husband, better, anyway, than the more convincing hypocrite who will ultimately marry her. For all I really wanted was to retire to the broken-down family estate in Virginia with someone who could afford to keep the old place going. We'd have had just the kind of tranquil rural life she'd have loved. Because I'm not altogether what people think me. Yes, even you, Bruce. I have my price, but the buyer would get her money's worth."

"Couldn't you have told her that?"

Abel shook his head firmly. "She'd have thought it only a snare. Girls like her and Ada, well educated, intelligent but morally rigid, don't admit qualifications to their blacks and whites. If you're mercenary, you're all bad. And, of course, some of us are. But I'd be an ass if I didn't appreciate the good points even in those who downgrade me. I study the world. And, believe me, my friend, those two Benson girls have the real stuff in them."

"Meaning that the man who marries one will have to be truly in love?"

"Or make her think so." Abel gave his friend a sly look. "You might be just the man to put on such an act, my boy. And once you'd done it, you'd believe in it yourself! So it might work out all around!"

Bruce twinged at the other's mocking laugh and lightly shook off the hand that grasped his shoulder in an effort to mitigate the irony. "I must be off now," he insisted, though he hadn't finished his drink. "You say you're going to the Stoddards'?"

"Yes, for my sins. You know what they say about Tom Kidder's odd death? That it couldn't have been suicide, for he'd dined the night before with the Stoddards, and why, to anyone who had
that
behind him, wouldn't the future have seemed bright?"

"Why do you go, then?"

"She's a cousin of Mother's.
Noblesse oblige.
"

Bruce reflected uneasily on the substance of their colloquy on his brief walk to his hosts. The husband of Ada Benson would certainly make a bigger splash in the pool of Gotham than any other male Carnochan. But that was idle speculation. He now reviewed word by word everything Abel had said about Kitty. It had been gratifying to hear as sharp an observer as Abel praise her wit and cleverness. It helped to justify the increasing hold that this irritating and intriguing
young woman
had taken on his fancies and fantasies. And perhaps it was just as well that he should learn that she was too busy promoting her own material future to listen to any crazy proposal that her charms might elicit from the likes of Bruce Carnochan! For even with his promised twenty g's, an unendowed wife would put him in the lower ranks of his rising family. Should not a proper gentleman stay out of the lady's chosen way of advancing herself? Was it not simple charity?

Arriving at the wide marble French façade of the Bensons', whose big glass double doors under a gilded marquee separated two pairs of vast rectangular windows, he paused and, consulting his watch, noted that he was ten minutes early and decided to take a tour around the block. Kitty again filled up the sudden vacuum of his mind.

He thought back on their first meeting. It had been at a Sunday lunch party on Sixteenth Street, given by old Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor's dressy and garrulous majordomo, the veteran expert on manners and decorum, the exquisite gourmet and wine taster, who had taken upon his tottering shoulders the self-imposed task of reorganizing New York society into a simulacrum of European aristocracy. His star at this point had waned; to the men and younger women he had become something of a joke, but some of the so-called dowagers (whether or not they had a husband), still powers in the land, admired him, and his favor could bring some desired invitations. He was known to cultivate strapping young "blue bloods," and Bruce was not above flattering himself that he might be included in such a category. As the old boy, glossy-whiskered and colorfully clad, had approached to grasp his hand in both of his, he had made Bruce think of a septuagenarian beau in a parlor comedy. Now he poured out his welcome and his confidences in Bruce's listening ear.

"Always glad to see you, my dear fellow. Fresh as a daisy on a Sunday morning and not, like too many of your age group, sleeping off your Saturday-night excesses. I've put you at a table next to a protégée of mine, Miss Kitty Atwater. Smart as the proverbial whip, charming, and of good old Knickerbocker stock, doncherno. And with character, too, plenty of character. She's the only unmarried maiden to whom I've given a separate listing in my 400. I'm not speaking, of course, of rich old maids, of whom,
entre nous,
we have our fill. Enough, indeed, to challenge the notion that our city is worldly. In Paris every last one of them would be married, even crazy as a loon. But my poor girl is poor, poor as that equally proverbial little clerical rodent. What I'd like you to do is spread the word around among some of the gilded young bucks you see, the
jeunesse dorée,
doncherno, that a wife with a noodle can be as much help to a man in society as a dumb one with a pot of gold. Indeed, even more so. And tell 'em that comes from one who
knows.
"

Miss Atwater had fulfilled her host's description. She was on the small size, but well shaped and with a pretty, heart-shaped countenance and large alert brown eyes, and she radiated a pleasant air of involvement with each new thing that met them. She was seated on her host's right, with Bruce on her other side, and as the lady on his right failed to appear (another note of the casual way that society was now treating McAllister), the talk at lunch in the first part of the meal was largely among the three of them.

She talked to Bruce as easily as if he had been an acquaintance of long standing, and she made no distinction in her manner between him and their host. He and McAllister were equally her audience, presumably gentlemen of goodwill. She held forth amusingly about the undue length of the ordinary fashionable New York dinner party and the martyrdom of the guest who is planted between two persons of no conversation.

"He might recite poetry to himself. In his mind, of course." McAllister recalled an instance. "I had a friend who knew great chunks of 'Marmion' by heart. While the lady at his side droned on about her wonderful children and grandchildren, he would be the escaped and recaptured nun who is about to be buried alive. 'Yet dread me, from my living tomb, / Ye vassal slaves of bloody Rome!'"

"But I have a better idea, Mr. McAllister!" Kitty exclaimed. "And you, as the arbiter elegantiarum of our modern Rome, should be the one to initiate it. How about creating a bore insurance company? The members, in return for a modest premium, would receive a secret list of all the notorious bores in Manhattan society. Then, if you found yourself seated next to one, you would call the company the next day and collect the sum with which that particular bore pays off and be able to buy yourself an etching or watercolor or what you please."

McAllister seemed much taken with the idea. "Bravo! But mightn't there be those who would hint to their hostess beforehand that they'd like to be next to some bore of high return? People do cheat, doncherno."

"Oh, our members would have to be persons of probity, of course. They would form a highly exclusive group."

Bruce wondered uncomfortably if he might not have found his name on Miss Atwater's list of bores. "Supposing a bore applies for a policy in your company?" he asked her. "Could he recover by sitting in his own seat?"

"Oh, there'd be no applications," she assured him. "Membership would be only by invitation. And kept strictly confidential."

No, her friendly smile seemed to offer him reassurance that she did not deem him a bore, and she even looked pleased when, after the meal, he had offered to escort her up the avenue to the Bensons', where she was staying. They continued their pleasant chat as they walked, until at last she said something he didn't like at all. She had reverted to their old topic of bore insurance and now volunteered the notion that their recent host, despite his apparent amusement at the concept, was disqualified to hold a policy, as he had created the very society which had engendered the epidemic of boredom.

"But that should make him president!" Bruce protested.

"Well, then there's an even better reason for barring him."

"And what, pray, is that?"

"Why, the simple fact that he's the most crashing old bore of the lot!" she cried with a spurt of laughter. Bruce was shocked. Could any really nice girl speak so callously of an old gentleman who had condescended—yes, condescended—to call her his protégée? But he found nonetheless that she remained very much on his mind when he went to bed that night, and his sleep was restless.

He had found other things, too, in the days that followed. When his mother offered him two seats in an opera box loaned her for the night by one of her grand friends, he invited Miss Atwater, and she not only came but explained to him in the entr'acte some interesting points about
Siegfried
that helped him for the first time to appreciate Wagner. And she did it charmingly, he had to admit, never seeming to reproach his ignorance. And then he took her to an exhibit of Holbein drawings at the Metropolitan Museum, where she proved equally congenial and instructive company. She seemed to like him, or at least to put up with him easily. He wondered if she didn't attribute a greater intelligence than he possessed to his silences as he took in her lively prattle. When he did speak, she listened carefully, and her responding comments seemed in their interpretation of his thoughts to give them a defter touch.

But there was another aspect to her responses that at once chilled him and relieved him. She did not once, by so much as a tremor in her tone or a downward glance, seem to note or acknowledge the least hint of a suit for her affections in his sudden attentions. If he was constantly on the watch about committing himself in his relationships with the opposite sex—and he was fully aware that he was—he seemed to have nothing to fear where Kitty was concerned. If this was relaxing—and it was—he was delightfully at his ease with her—it was also a bit mortifying. Who did she think she was, that the likes of Bruce Carnochan wasn't good enough for her? He was tempted to tell her about the anticipated twenty g's.

The great hall of the Benson palazzo, into which, after his walk around the block, he now entered, might have been harmlessly if conventionally grand without the huge stucco putti attached to the pilasters with the supposed function of holding up the capitals, a style disastrously borrowed from Bavarian baroque. Bruce, spreading his hands to indicate to the approaching footman that he had nothing to remove, proceeded up the curving marble stairwell, reminding himself of what his bar friend Abel Fisher had said of his host's indifference to interior design.

The family and a few guests were somewhat dourly gathered in a rigidly correct French eighteenth-century parlor with Fragonard panels that portrayed a life of swings and kisses and gaiety that Mr. Benson, a portly, silent tower of crusty self-assurance, would never have tolerated in his home. Everyone nodded discreetly at Bruce as his host, one firm hand gripping his elbow, took him about the chamber; Kitty, standing somehow independently by the fireplace, simply smiled at him. The Benson children, unlike their progenitor, were on the short side, with square bland faces and small staring eyes; they bore an almost comic resemblance to each other. Yet they were somehow obviously decent folk. They even made Bruce feel that it might be superficial of him to miss the charm that was lacking. But miss it he did.

The gentlemen outnumbered the ladies in the dining room, and Bruce, who had a largely silent man on his left, held an uninterrupted discourse with his other neighbor, Ada Benson, who was Kitty's particular friend in the household. She was the shortest and smallest and plainest of the tribe, but she was also sensible, definite, and very articulate. She was clearly devoted to Kitty, and she merely nodded, without smiling, when he described the bore insurance company as an example of her wit. But then she added this comment:

"I daresay you'd get a fat check in the morning for having been stuck with me." Her tone was not rueful, but simply dry, and she pressed on, ignoring his flurried protestation. "But Kitty is actually much kinder than that idea of hers might make you think. We had some Western cousins here last week who would have fitted into Kitty's despised category, but you can't imagine how nice and helpful she was with them. Mummy calls her an artist in making people feel at home and bringing out the best in them."

Bruce wondered immediately if that was what Kitty did with him. And he worried that Miss Benson might think him superficial for having primarily noted a sharper side of her friend's nature. But he soon discovered that he need have no such concern. Ada did not bother to make judgments in matters that to her had little significance, and now she proceeded, obviously briefed on his trade by Kitty, to ask him about the thread business.

"We buy from the Scots," he explained, "and we sell to the Jews, and on the slim profit that such a deal allows us, we endeavor to subsist."

This evoked Miss Benson's first smile. It was a small one. "Kitty said you had a sense of humor. And that despite your strict Presbyterian background."

"I'm afraid I've a good deal lapsed from that strictness. Does Kitty object to Presbyterians?"

"Oh, no, I don't think she objects to any religion."

"Isn't that apt to mean one doesn't care for any?"