Free East Side Story by Louis Auchincloss Page A

stricken mother who was only mildly consoled by the survival of Gordon and the presence of his two sisters. Julie's passionate favoritism had been no secret to the household; she had adored little Michael beyond anyone else, including her husband, and though she made periodic efforts to conceal this from the others after the boy's death, for she had a good enough heart and some sense of duty, she never wholly succeeded. Gordon, a puny child, at least in his early years, grew up with a keen sense that, in the eyes of Fifty-seventh Street at least, the wrong twin had survived, and that for some mysterious reason he was the cause of it.
    It didn't always help that next door was the home that his mother must have really wanted: the nursery of six young males, a vigorous brood that would guarantee the future of the Carnochans. Fortunately, however, the closest rapport existed between the two establishments. Gordon's two sisters were in constant chattering and giggling relationship with Estelle, the single daughter of the other house, and Estelle's brothers included Gordon in all their games and sports with the same joshing put-on reluctance that they used with each other. Gordon saw it as a kind of desperate solution to his problem to lose himself in a merger with other Carnochans.
    It was thus that he became the silent, curious, wide-eyed lad who was both a part and not a part of the tumultuous cousinhood, filling to overflowing the dark interiors of the twin brownstones, tumbling in and out of the narrow halls, steep stairwells, and square parlors crammed with big black knobbly furniture and hung with unlit paintings and prints. And there were not only the multitudinous cousins but all the neighborhood friends, the Browning School classmates, the neat little next-door girls, so surprisingly bold and shrill, who swarmed up and down the high stoops and played hopscotch under the eyes of Irish nursemaids in nearby Central Park. It seemed to Gordon a world dominated by Carnochans, a cheerful, sometimes too cheerful world, secure, if with smothered doubts, in its own continuing prosperity, and defiant, if a bit edgily so, of the alien population of the slums that so closely bordered it—oh, yes, he had seen these!—and of the menacing bums and beggars who sometimes invaded the park and even had the gall to fall into drunken slumber on the benches until a cop aroused them with his stick.
    Just enough of the ancestral Presbyterianism survived in the heritage of his father and Uncle James to alert Gordon to the realization that sin might still penetrate even to the heart of all the jollity and goodwill. His mother, a Brooklyn Denison of pure English forebears without a taint of John Knox, was a square-faced, down-to-earth, worldly-wise woman who had little use for the moral severities of the old kirk and faced ethical choices with a broad practicality. She loved parties and card games and gossip and stylish dress, and took the world pretty much as it was, feeling sure that a society that favored such congenial souls as the Denisons must have enough good in it to get by. She ruled her husband more by his recognition of her efficiency and good sense than by any self-assertion, but when he was seized by one of his rare but violent fits of anger, she always promptly gave way. Gordon knew, from bitter experience, that the child who had had the bad luck to arouse the paternal ire, even if not at fault, could not count on Mama's support. The shrug with which she abandoned the victim to his father showed how few, if any, were the issues over which she felt called upon to make a scene. Certainly a child was not one of them. Julie knew it was a man's world, but it was still one where a clever woman could get anything she needed if she played her cards right. And cards were her strong point. As for Gordon, wasn't he, too, a male? He could jolly well learn how to cope with his own often unreasonable sex.
    To Gordon the paternal rages,