East Side Story (7 page)

Sir John had recently proposed that his new American son-in-law, Frederick Ames, be taken in as a full partner in Carnochan Brothers, and Wallace and Bruce had, somewhat stiffly, declined.

"Could we backtrack?" Bruce gasped. "Do you think we could still get hold of Fred?"

Wallace shook his head gravely. "Not a chance. I heard yesterday that Fred had accepted a partnership in Fletcher. It's all sewed up. And you know Muir. He never changes his mind. I had no idea he'd take our refusal so hard. I thought he might understand that you and I would be reluctant to share a business that we've built up from nothing with a young and inexperienced fellow who's just had the luck to marry into the family. But I guess nothing that we can do can reduce the size of the swelled head that John's brand-new baronetcy has given him."

"But Muir Thread is three quarters of our business," Bruce moaned.

"Well, we must look for a substitute, that's all."

"It's all very well for you, Wally. You have Julie's money."

"And what do
you
need money for? You live free at Mother's, and you dine out every night at other people's houses. Buck up, old man! It's not the end of the world."

"It's the end of part of one. There are things you don't know, Wally!"

Bruce lost no time in doing what he now knew he had to do. He wanted to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. He called at the Bensons' that very afternoon, asked to see Miss Atwater, and was received by her in a small antechamber next to the great hall.

"Could you even think of marrying a man with only five thousand a year?" he blurted out.

"Oh, my poor Bruce, what's happened?"

She listened attentively while he poured out the sad financial tale. But she took it in more as a friend whose sympathy and advice were to be sought than as a potential partner in woe. At last she said: "Of course, I see that this puts a definite hold on the discussion we had yesterday."

"A hold or a veto?"

"Don't you have to wait and see if your brother-in-law may change his mind?"

"But he never does."

"Well then, you must wait and see what new business opportunities show up."

Bruce shook his head firmly. "I'm afraid Muir was the chance of a lifetime. It was a great boon for me. The long and short of it, Kitty, is that I'm afraid I may never be an adequate earner. But I'll always have something, and when Mother goes, a bit more. You and I could make do on it."

Kitty's smile seemed meant to confirm the depth of her worldly knowledge. "I don't think we would ever be a happy couple just making do, Bruce. We might be pretty enough flowers in the sunshine, but I'm afraid we'd droop sadly in the shadows. I know myself too well, and I think I know you. We're both spoiled brats, in a way. We might be hard to live with on a beer income dreaming of champagne."

"Unless we were in love."

"Yes. Unless we were very much in love. More in love, in fact, than either of us is apt to become."

"Oh, Kitty, you can be cold!"

"Or realistic. Choose your word."

He rose. "Goodbye, Kitty."

She rose as well and held out a friendly hand. "You make it sound as if it were forever. Won't you come back?"

"What for?"

"Well, why not for Ada? She thinks the world of you. And the sun will always shine for Ada."

I
N THE MONTHS
that followed, Wallace Carnochan engaged his not inconsiderable financial talents in promoting various commercial enterprises, including a phosphate mine in Georgia, and he invited his brother Bruce to take an interest in each, but Bruce would always shake his head and mutter: "It's too soon, Wally. Pardon me, and give me another chance in a month or so. I just don't feel up to any new business as yet." Wallace hoped that while he was engaged with minor successes in risky ventures, his younger brother would at least mind the old shop and take care of such little thread business as remained after the defection of Muir, but this soon melted away under Bruce's inertia, and the latter took to spending his days moping about the family house or walking his mother's poodles in Central Park. Eliza was at first silently sympathetic, then admonitory, and at last briskly critical.

"You must take hold of yourself, my boy, or you'll end up in a sorry state. You're not the only young man who's been crossed in love or failed in a business. When you're down, the only sensible thing to do is to get up."

But Bruce seemed unable to do this. He felt himself sliding into what threatened to become a chronic state of depression. He had had his first dazzling glimpse of what it might be like to have a "real life," founded on his own character and not on what he had tended to see as the image of a character devised to conceal the smallness and weakness of Bruce Carnochan from a critical but fortunately still gullible world. It was hard now to live with that glimpse snuffed out. A "real girl," by which he meant a girl whom
he
could really love, and not one he just made up to, and a "real business," like the one John Muir had offered to him and to Wallace and not just to Wallace, had now escaped him, and there was something about the sad finality of Kitty's parting smile that persuaded him it would never return. He was driven back to the status of calling-card dandy he had once not been ashamed to be, but which now seemed to deserve the scorn he had been so silly as to deem envy.

He was frankly recognized as a family problem. His brothers called to buck him up, to joke -with him, finally to subject him to stern lectures. His sister Annie wept over him, which was even worse. The pastor of the Fifth Avenue Church came to remind him that the deity's patience might be exhausted by his behavior—or at least by his lack of behavior. Bruce, to give them some reassurance, or at least to keep them at bay, took pains with his clothes and appearance, so as to present an immaculate exterior over his inner troubled self, and spent his mornings in the library on the excuse that he was writing a novel. This fooled nobody but himself, and he was actually surprised to find that six weeks of plotting had produced only six pages. It was then that, with the avowed purpose of seeking material, he started going about in society again. And with the dinner parties something like a cure began to creep over his blue spirits.

He was surprised to receive a card from Mrs. Benson inviting him for dinner, as he had heard that Kitty was no longer staying there, but when he went and found himself sitting next to Ada, he suspected the handiwork of his former inamorata.

Ada informed him, when he inquired about Kitty, that she was well and had rejoined her mother in the latter's flat after Mrs. Atwater had returned from one of her chaperoning trips to Europe. But the big news was that Kitty was engaged to one Gilbert Palmer.

"A gentleman of means, no doubt," he remarked with unbecoming bitterness.

"Why do you say that? He's just been made a junior partner in the law firm that represents Daddy, and I suppose he'll do well there, as everyone says he's brilliant. But I know he had to work his way through college and law school. Do you assume that Kitty is interested only in riches?"

"Something like that."

"Because she wouldn't accept you?"

Bruce was startled, not only that she knew this, but that she should say it. "Oh, you've heard about that?"

"Of course, I have. Kitty's my best friend. Did it never occur to you that she might have thought that
she
was too poor for
you?
And not just that you were not rich enough for her?"

"You mean that she was afraid I mightn't be easy to live with if we were poor?"

"As you just said. Something like that."

He found himself wondering what it was about this flatly outspoken little woman that seemed to brush aside his incipient resentment as a foolish intrusion on their colloquy. "I suppose many men mightn't be easy to live with under those circumstances" was his lame conclusion.

"How true. It's women who have to put up with such things."

"You won't."

"With poverty, perhaps not. The way things look now. But life has other hurdles. However, I think I can get over the ones I see at the moment. At least I can make a running jump."

He looked at her half in wonder. "You don't get angry? At life, I mean?"

"Oh, yes. But I keep it in. I only make a scene when I'm pretty sure it's the only way."

"I could learn a lot from you. Would you care to teach me?"

"If you'll teach me in return."

"What on earth could I teach
you?
"

"How to enjoy things more."

"Ah, but my faculty in that direction has taken a rude bump in recent months." Bruce here tried to look melancholy.

"Then teach me how it used to be."

And so began their curious friendship. Bruce became a regular visitor at the Benson "at homes" and a frequent occupier of a back seat in their opera box. When he sat in a corner of their parlor with Ada, nobody came to join them. The family had clearly decided, no doubt after one of their formidable conferences, to accept him as a suitable beau. After all, was he not utterly respectable, afflicted with no known vice, and of agreeable presence and manner? And, where money was concerned, there was surely no need of that. Besides, Ada's stature and plainness were not designed to make a catch that would awe the town. It was only realistic to face this, and the Bensons were nothing if not realistic.

Yet Ada was like Kitty in showing not the least hint of having anything like a match in mind. Any step in that direction would have to be made by him alone. She was always serious, factual, and rigidly truthful, and oddly enough, she did not bore him the way her siblings sometimes did. It might have been because he felt that she saw through him and didn't mind what she saw. He could be utterly frank and natural with Ada. He could discuss, it seemed, anything in the world but the possibility of their ever marrying each other. But this was a large, and increasingly larger, exception. It came almost to torture him.

It was Kitty who broke through his block. At a large dinner in honor of her and her fiancé, Palmer, given by the Bensons, she, despite her position as chief guest, took him aside after dinner for a quiet talk. He couldn't help wondering if it were not with the secret consent of Ada's mother and Mr. Palmer. Certainly the latter, whom Bruce had been somewhat chagrined to find absolutely charming, made no move to interrupt Brace's
tête-à-tête
with his future bride. Kitty came straight to the point.

"Look, Bruce. I want you to listen carefully, for I have only a few minutes before I have to join the other guests. You must marry Ada. She's just what the doctor would order for you."

"That doesn't sound very romantic."

"It wasn't meant to sound romantic. I don't believe that romance is what you need, or even very much want. What I believe you really need is a firm base from which you could operate to amuse yourself and the world with your good taste, your collegiality, and your cordial and generous nature."

"That base being Ada's money."

"That base being Ada herself, as well as Ada's money. You and she together could entertain the world and travel over the world, and collect art and wonderful friends, and raise fine children who would love you..."

"And bore me."

"You don't mind that in children. Not in dear good children such as Ada's would be, even if they were as dull as the dullest Benson! You're basically a family man, my friend, and you'll love being the center of a warm, admiring clan."

"Admiring? But you're painting me as a superficial ass, Kitty!"

"Once you were rich you'd cease to be superficial. The dilettante becomes the art patron. The diner out, the foundation trustee. The party wag, the charming and witty host. What you don't appreciate in yourself, Bruce Carnochan, is that you have that rare gift of enjoying life, something your Scottish forebears knew nothing about. And people who enjoy life, really enjoy it, help others to. But, of course, like a cricket, you need a little sunshine. Well, Ada will provide all the sunshine you perish without!"

"But what sort of a friend are you being to Ada? What is there for her in marrying a man who's not in love with her? For you may as well know, if you don't already, that however much I may respect and like Ada, however much I might want to be in love with her, I'm not! So there you are, Kitty, and don't tell me that love doesn't matter, for I suspect you of being very much enamored of that bright attorney across the room!"

"Yes, I've been blessed, far more than I deserve. But I am being a good friend of Ada, for I know that
she
knows exactly what she wants and has a good idea of the man you are. She's not going to sit home waiting for a Romeo who won't come. She wants a decent man of kindly character who will be a pleasant companion in life, a good father, and a faithful husband. I've assured her that, once you were pledged, you'd never so much as look at another woman."

"It's not necessarily a compliment to a man to say that of him."

"I'm not trying to compliment you. I'm trying to make you appreciate yourself as you are. Half the unhappiness in the world comes from people trying to be someone else. Anyway, I've said enough. Probably too much. And there's Mrs. Benson giving me the eye. It's time to join the others."

The very next day he called at the Bensons' and took Ada for a stroll in Central Park. She accepted his temperately stated proposal without the least fuss, and on their return they were warmly congratulated by her mother and more formally so by her father. In the days following, arrangements were made quietly and efficiently and with a minimum of embarrassment to a fiancé of very disproportionate wealth. A large fortune was settled on Ada outright; her father said he had entire trust in her ability to handle wisely anything that was hers. Every Benson and Carnochan expressed what was obviously their sincere pleasure at the match.

And Kitty was right, very right. In the three decades that he survived his wedding, Bruce had every occasion to be reminded of this. Ada settled an income on him to satisfy his every want without his having to appeal to her, and he never overspent it or made any demands on the far larger sums that she kept under her own watchful control. For this he was respected and well liked by all the Bensons into whose midst he fitted neatly, almost, he sometimes feared, in a rare pre-marital mood, too neatly. Four healthy, affectionate, and normal children, two boys and two girls, were born to him and Ada, almost indistinguishable from their numerous first cousins on the maternal side. Bruce reflected that the Benson genes were strong indeed, but he saw less and less reason to regret this. None of his offspring ever indicated that they were even aware of the fact that their wealth came from only one parent. The money seemed to cover them all with the same dye.