East Side Story Read Free Page A

myself, of course. For I didn't really believe for a minute that anyone would see me as even remotely comparable to my gallantly fighting brother.
    My defenses may have been artificial, and indeed, they were not to last, but for a year they brought me the greatest, and perhaps the only real, happiness of my life. It was certainly not the law that brought this about. I attended the lectures and skimmed the cases, but without any real attention or without the least anticipation of ever being admitted to the bar. My big brown notebook was filled not with summaries of statutes and court decisions but with the scribbled manuscript of the romantic historical novel of the American Revolution that I was intent on composing, whose hero, of course, was a fervid Yankee and whose heroine a haughty Brit. When I opened its pages, the terrible Battle of the Wilderness would fade away into a gray distance.
    But oh, the joy of that time, of those months, of those long, delectable afternoons when I was shut up in the dark, half-empty, overheated law school library, which excluded not only the war but my family: Father and Douglas and the sisters and even Mother, who in her daily tortured anxiety about Andrew had almost ceased to be concerned about my now quite sturdy health. I was alone, blessedly alone, accountable to no one, and I could hug to my heart my own little genius and cultivate the wild illusion that one day it might startle the literary world. For as I read over and over the seemingly mellifluous passages that flowed from my active pen, I treasured the notion that I was husbanding a talent of which future generations would have need, and that it would have been a sorry waste to let it perish with its possessor in the red dirt of Virginia. If I had done a wrong to myself and to my country in abstaining from battle, was I not making up for it in giving what I could to the future? The Carnochans would have produced more than just Father and Douglas; they would have produced me!
    My dreams were shattered by the news of Andrew's death in the Wilderness Campaign, only months before Appomatox. Reading over the manuscript of my novel in the shadow of the shining monument that my agonized imagination immediately raised to his glory, I saw—unmistakably—what feeble stuff it was. And the gray shattered countenance of my mortally stricken mother, and even the new lines of sorrow on my father's craggy features, convinced me that it was, after all, a world of men which had little but a mild pity for and, at best, a mild tolerance of such weaklings as myself. I suffered what would later be called a nervous breakdown, quit law school, abandoned my novel, and moped at home. Mother was almost lost to me in the deep night of her mourning, and Father treated me with an almost kindly acceptance, which was intended to disguise, I had little doubt, an essential indifference to a son who was evidently to be of little further use to him or his business, but who, like his several unmarried daughters, was as permanent a part of his home as the chairs and tables and prints of biblical scenes. He never said a word about my draft exemption, but I suspected that he smelled the fraud. It was devastating, and it remained so until he died, which both he and Mother did, within months of each other, in the year 1869.
    Their estates were divided evenly among their many offspring, and my share was just enough to maintain a decent bachelor's existence. Eventually I resumed my writing and produced the three light historical romances whose small but steady sale through the years has given me the faintest trickle of literary renown. It will soon enough dry up. And the brave Andrew is quite forgotten. It is only through Douglas and his posterity that we survive. That would not in the least have surprised my eldest brother.
    Well, there it is. I leave this memorandum to young David in the mild hope that it may help him to understand the past. He is clever enough to