Pain & Prejudice

LACE CURTAIN (375 pp.)--Ellin Berlin --Doubleday ($3).

Veronica Reardon was only a little girl when she heard one of her parents' snooty guests say to another: "Oh well, they're not so bad." And the reply: "Well, no, not for R.C.s." When her aunt explained that R.C.s meant Roman Catholics and not Red Cross, Veronica didn't get it; she had always "thought it best to be a Catholic." As she grew up, she discovered that a great house on Long Island and another on Fifth Avenue couldn't protect her from social wounds inflicted by snobbish non-Catholics. She picked up other facts of life: "shanty" Irish didn't rate with her own "lace-curtain" set; German Jews thought that marriage to a Russian Jew was a comedown.

Ellin Berlin, an R.C. who married a Russian Jewish songwriter named Irving Berlin and made a go of it, knows that those who marry out of their faith are not always so lucky. In Lace Curtain, her second novel, Veronica goes through a young girl's social hell before she finally marries Protestant Jamie Stair. Then she discovers that not even love and children are sufficient armor against relatives and religious differences. At the end, Veronica waits for her husband to return from the war, prays that somehow they can make their marriage last.

Mrs. Berlin, whose Irish immigrant grandfather made his pile in the Comstock Lode, and whose father was Postal Telegraph Tycoon Clarence Mackay, plainly knows her lace-curtain set. But she handles her characters with kid gloves, eagerly plays up the best side of the worst of them. Most readers will get the feeling that she knows more about their problems than she has chosen to write.

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