East Side Story Read Free

had never been any question of my enlisting. I had felt an obligation to utter some murmurs about joining the colors, but Mother's indignant protests, backed by those of our kindly old family physician, Dr. Findlay, whom she had, so to speak, in her pocket, allowed me to retreat from glory behind my noticeably diminishing asthmatic attacks. The only slight shame that I felt was in the hearty endorsement of the maternal attitude taken by my war-minded brother Andrew, whose ever-generous nature ascribed to me a genuine disappointment at missing combat and who assured me, placing a friendly arm around my shoulders, that if I would be good about staying home, he would fight hard enough for two. I could not but blush at the thought of my own hidden relief at my nonenlistment, but I solaced myself with counting up how many of my contemporaries remained out of uniform and with the hope, soon to be dashed, that the war would be a short one.
    The disasters that followed Bull Run darkened the next two years and ultimately necessitated the draft, which brought on the major decision of my life. For my health had gone as well as the war had gone badly; my asthma attacks had virtually ceased. It was evident that if I were to avoid military service, it would have to be through an official exemption, for I knew that I would rather die than submit my heroic brother Andrew, who had been severely wounded but had rejoined his regiment, to the humiliation of having
two
brothers who bought substitutes.
    Of course, Mother and Dr. Findlay were vigorously of the opinion that there could be no question of the army's sending a sick "boy" (I was twenty) to perish on some freezing winter night in a Virginia campaign. If there was any question of my exemption not being promptly granted, they were prepared to appeal to the Secretary of the Army. But what attitude was I to take? For weeks I hovered miserably in indecision. And then something happened that induced me to request the exemption. I had another attack.
    Was
it that? How the question agonized me! Even now, decades later, it hurts me to write it. But I have long faced the truth. There
was
an element of the willed in it. I was so familiar with the nature of such attacks that it could not have been difficult for my psyche to simulate one, particularly if so much as the ghost of a former onslaught were to assail me. I made the most of my symptoms, and so convinced Dr. Findlay, who accompanied me to my examination by the draft board, that he lost his temper at one of its members who questioned his diagnosis. The board accorded me the requested status, but I saw in the expression of the doubting member that he, for one, had not been convinced, and I hated him, for I knew in my heart that he was right.
    Anyway, it was done, and I pleased Father by telling him that I was now willing to enter Columbia Law School, from which I had so far been protected by Mother's fearing that the hard dry study of the law might not sit with my nervous disposition. Father, counting on his two older sons to succeed him in his business, thought it would be well for them to have a family lawyer, and although his hopes for me were slender, he thought that my effete taste for literature might be strengthened by a dose of the cod-liver oil of law.
    But I had a different reason for choosing law. In a world at war the mood was masculine, and I had a nervous desire to merge myself as much as possible with a generation of young heroes, or at least not to stand out too harshly as not belonging to it. I think I was obsessed with the silly idea that lawyers were somehow more men than readers or writers, that I would, as a student of the profession, be more qualified to join in the brave chorus of "Glory, glory, alleluia!," that I would be, despite my shameful civilian garb, more a part of the general uplift, which could be very contagious. Was law to me a kind of protective coloration? But from what was I really protecting myself? From