East Side Story Read Free Page B

glean what profit he can from its few pages without irritating the family by publishing them.

2. ELIZA
    T HE SUMMER OF 1905 was a high-water mark in the social and architectural history of Newport. The long line of birthday cake palazzos, seemingly products of a second Italian Renaissance, though one happily free of stilettos and poison, each standing proudly on a finely tended strip of green lawn as exiguous as its occupying edifice was huge, ran down Bellevue Avenue and the Cliff Walk in a glittering riot of marble never to be bettered. Maintenance was at its most perfect; there was not a stray leaf out of place. But there still survived an older Newport, an eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century town that bordered on Narragansett Bay rather than the Atlantic, with smaller, soberer, chaster homes, among which, on modest Washington Street, stood the simple wooden frame, high-gabled residence of Mrs. Eliza Dudley Carnochan, widow of Douglas, whose porticoed front porch faced the water over a neat little lawn and garden.
    Mrs. Carnochan was a small, plain, white-capped, black-garbed lady of nearly seventy, of the utmost respectability, whose large, drooping, but perceptive china blue eyes gazed not always benignly at what she evidently regarded as the tinselly aspects of such rich Johnny-come-latelies as the Vanderbilt clan. It was not that she scorned all the summer newcomers. But she picked and chose among them. She liked the staid, churchgoing Mrs. Alice Vanderbilt and called at the Breakers, but she avoided her imperious sister-in-law, Alva, and she would never have attended a party given by the flamboyant Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. Nor did she ever forget that she hailed back to the pre-gilded age of a literary Newport, the summer home of Julia Ward Howe, of Thomas Higginson, of Longfellow, the Newport that had enchanted the young Henry James and whose meadows and rocky shores had been painted by John La Farge and Kensett. Eliza Carnochan numbered two colonial governors among her forebears. It was known that both her grandmothers had been Saltonstalls.
    She was essentially satisfied with the role which she knew had been assigned to her by her friends, neighbors, and many visiting descendants. She was to be the steadying force in a changing world, a gentle reminder—never a comminatory one—of the necessity of preserving some minimum of standards in manners and morals. Like the elderly and benevolent late Queen Victoria, reigning over the pomp of her far-flung empire and softening the mailed fist of the Raj, so did Eliza Carnochan remind the barons of steel and oil that money was not and could not be everything. In New York, of course, Eliza's sober brownstone on West Fifty-seventh Street was dwarfed to nothing by the giant Vanderbilt copy of Blois on the Fifth Avenue corner, but in Newport, Washington Street was still recognized by the Breakers.
    Eliza, however, was not altogether inwardly what her outer self suggested. This did not mean, of course, that she didn't firmly believe in decorum of manners, fidelity in marriage, decency in dress, and orderliness in one's daily tasks and pleasures. She knew that wildness in men and women had to be restrained. But she had a vivid sense of the rages that went on within the soul of man and an equally vivid sense of the hypocrisies used to conceal them. She knew, in short, the cost of discipline and could sympathize with the pains of those who had subjected themselves to it—or who had tried to and failed. She regarded herself in this respect as a victor, but she never forgot how easily the struggle might have been lost. She never allowed herself to put out of her mind what no one in the world had ever known or even suspected: that there had been a time in her young life, before she married Douglas Carnochan, when she would have agreed to any proposition that his brother Andrew might have put to her, however illicit. And she gave herself no credit for the fact that he never