Class, Culture, And Sex - The Saga Of A Yale Man Who Ventured Across The Tracks At His Peril

Town-Gown relationships at Yale were always testy back in the day when East was East and West was West; or in other words, venture across the tracks at your own peril.  Maria and Leona might be appealing - a break from the blonde, blue-eyed, predictably suitable women from Smith, Holyoke, and Vassar that one was expected to marry - but they were dangerous.  

There was nothing but pure gold to be found in that neutral ground between Wooster Square and the Yale campus, the New Haven Green.  There Yale men who trolled for a pretty, dark-eyed girl from across the tracks might find a willing signorina from Olive Street for an interlude, a cross-cultural affair, a dip into foreign waters. 

The New Haven Green, historic burial place for the Davenports, the Potters, and the Longworths and gathering place for Revolutionary partisans whose militias were instrumental in the war against the British, was the modern day crossroads for the two communities.  Italians from Wooster Square came across the canal to shop at Malley's and see the latest Hollywood epics at the Palace and Strand, and crossed the Green in sight of Harkness Tower, the Old Campus, and Silliman College. 

Angie Lacava had never much thought about Yale, a world apart from the Italian neighborhood in which she had grown up. Depending on where you stood, you might see Harkness Tower and if the wind were right, hear the bells which rang every hour, but it would be passing, incidental, and irrelevant moment.  

The two sides of New Haven - the old Italian one with neighbors from Sorrento, Amalfi, and Naples, corner bakery shops that sold cannoli, bocconotti, and sfogliatelle, butchers, fish mongers, Jesuits, and mafiosi; and the Yale one, privileged, monied, well-to-do, legatees of old New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Wall Street, presidents, and ship owners. 

Angie's father had always wanted her to marry a nice Italian boy, a doctor maybe, or a lawyer.  Italians were making it out of Wooster Square, having a go the the Anglo-Saxon world and at times making it big. Italians were already doing well in construction - demolition, cement, hauling, and roofing - and were big on the docks.  New Haven's port was small compared to anything in New York or New Jersey, but it captured the short-haul trade from Providence and Boston.  More than enough to make a living.

Most of the Italians on Wooster Square had worked their way up from day labor and were still half-educated guidos.  They made plenty but still were goombas with all the lawn ornaments, patio furniture, sconces, and Carrera marble of the working class.  Lacava wanted something more American for his daughter, and the Yale men across the green had it and then some.  They lived on Beacon Hill, had summer homes on Nantucket, wintered on St. Bart's, and skied on the slopes of Gstaad and Chamonix; and here they were not more than a mile away. 

Of course he underestimated the depth and width of the divide.  How could he possibly know what it was like to study Blake's Tyger, head off to Vail for Christmas, intern at J.P. Morgan, and marry similar wealth, privilege, history, and upper class drawing room sophistication?

However, he had a willing student in his daughter, Angie, who had always felt hemmed in, deceived, and misinformed.  America outside Wooster Square was not to be trusted.  It was venal, godless, greedy, and alcoholic; but on those occasions when Angie and her friends ventured past the Green and went to the movies or shopped at Malley's and rubbed shoulders with men from Yale, the warnings of her grandmother and maiden aunts seemed off the mark, inventions, gossip. 

The Yale men were handsome, confident, at ease with themselves, relaxed and able; and oh, what it would be like to be in love with one of them!

Once this scintilla of doubt crept in behind her protective, suspicious wall, it was preoccupying.  She could think of nothing else, and wondered what it would take to meet one of these gorgeous men.  Would she have to seduce them, trap them, entice them?  Or simply act their virginal, simple, pious selves and offer something deep and reassuring?

Anson Wright was one of these Yale men who was anxious to spread his wings, see what the palaver about hot Wooster Square girls was all about.  One foray across the tracks didn't mean a shotgun wedding, so if it happened, it happened. 

Watch your Ps and Qs', Angie's mother warned her when she got an inkling of her daughter's intentions. 'Those boys are no good' and went on to relate stories of girls of her generation who got hooked by the idea and snookered by one Yalie after another.  'You know what they're after', she said; and of course she was right.  No self-respecting Boston Brahmin or Fifth Avenue gentleman would want anything to do with them.  She knew because she cleaned up after them in their dining rooms, their residences, and their libraries. 

Angie, however, refused to be cloistered and corralled by a phalanx of fat duennas in black dresses.  Those were Old Country ways and this was America! and so she made her leisurely forays across the canal to park benches on the Green, hoping for a proper Mr. Right to notice her.  At the same time, despite her rebelliousness and hardened attitude towards Southern Italian prudery, she couldn't help but be influenced by it.  As she sat demurely on the bench, legs properly together, blouse buttoned to the top, and cardigan neatly arranged, she knew that there was more to Yale, the Green, and prospective wealthy husbands than met the eye. 

And so it was that they met on a park bench on the Green.   She reminded him of Anna Magnani who was playing in We, The Women at the Strand, of Anne Bancroft nee Anna Maria Luisa Italiano;  she with every stereotyped thing about him - his blond, straight hair, his fair coloring, his perfect teeth, his tall, easy grace.  They were who they were supposed to be, and that is as good a beginning of an affair as any. Men always are attracted to women who remind them of their mothers, etc. 

He was so charming, so unbelievably attractive, and so rich; and one thing led to another and soon he was inviting her to spend the night with him at the Taft.   He of course had been only trolling when he picked her up.  It didn’t take much with these Wooster Square girls unlike Vassar girls who checked family pedigree as carefully as a Hebrew manuscript in the Dead Sea scrolls.  They wanted to be wooed by someone of superior wealth, charm, and intelligence, but such a man was hard to find and harder to catch given the narrow, crowded milieu in which they lived.  These goomba twats only wanted someone, anyone with money. 

Angie politely declined his offer of a night at the Taft, but ended up giving it up in his Trumbull College dorm room anyway. “I can’t believe I’m really here”, she thought to herself as she kissed him and looked out the window at the College’s Gothic spires, manicured courtyard, and ancient window tracery.  Shortly after what had been a marvelous, romantic adventure for her but only a Townie interlude for him, he left her on the curb.

It didn’t pay to get involved with one of them she told her girlfriends, sobbing, missing him, but angry at how she was so shamelessly treated.  “Never again”, she said. 

At about this time Yale had begun to come under increasing pressures from New Haven to invest more in the city - not only in infrastructure, but in human resources as well. It wasn't enough, City officials said, for Yale to hire the men and women who served the elite; it was time for them to recruit talented New Haven students for Yale's undergraduate body itself. The moment had come for New Haven's Italian-Americans to stop serving strawberries, and to eat them.

Yale agreed, but with a prejudice characteristic of the times, assumed that any Italian-American New Haven student would be only suitable for menial work, agreed to admit Richard Puzzi, Alderman Guido Marucci's highly recommended candidate who had been a football standout at New Haven High. At least this slab of hairy meat would make short work of the Princeton line, so fuck the grades. A memo went out to all Puzzi’s professors at the beginning of the year: "Pass this ape".

What the Yale recruiters didn't know - and in their rush to scrape up a bit of detritus from Olive Street - was that this hairy piece of meat was the son of a connected guy. Mario Puzzi had worked his way up in the Gianfredo family and was known in the neighborhood as someone who did generous favors but brooked no disrespect.  The only reason that his son Richard had been admitted to Yale was because of the pressure he put on Alderman Marucci.  It was win-win all the way around - a son at Yale, an Italian finally learning not serving, and even more respect for Mario and his family. 

So, despite her WASP yearnings, Angie returned to her roots and went to Mario for a favor.  Could his son, Richard, now enrolled at Yale, teach that philandering, deceitful prick Wright a lesson he would never forget? 

No one found out how or why the unfortunate Anson Wright got so badly beaten, enough to force him to take a year off from Yale, but rumor mills, ethnic prejudice, and preconception being what they are, it was assumed that his goomba chippy was behind it.

They never once suspected the new Yale Italian fullback who was indeed making mincemeat of the Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth lines, but that's the upside of prejudice.  The oaf got admitted to Yale, so that had to mean something. 

All this has changed in the Yale of today of course.  It no longer is the Old World, British colonial place of privilege and wealth that it once was.  It is now 'democratic' with all comers let in.  Diversity - not just the town-gown kind of decades before, but the real kind is the meme.  No need to cruise the New Haven Green anymore.  However with such libertinage something was missing.  No risk, no crossing the canal, no pursuit, and no consequence.  A dull affair; and Yale is now a dumbed down, safe place - a university like all others without cachet, admiration, or privilege. 

Alexander Hamilton And Fear Of The Majority - America Today, The Mob Rule Of The Unwashed

In the early days of the American republic, a vigorous debate went on, especially between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson on the nature of democracy and the balance between the governing and the governed.  

Hamilton was suspicious of Jefferson’s populism – i.e. a deep faith in the wisdom of the people – and new that the American electorate could easily vote with unenlightened self-interest and venality no different from Jake Cade, the anarchist/populist of Henry VI, or the plebeians of the fickle mob of Coriolanus or Julius Caesar.  

In his Speech on the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton said:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

Hamilton wrote further of his concerns in his Federalist Papers:

The republican principle demands, that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden gust of passion, or every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests...

When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited, in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from the very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men, who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure

The Framers agreed with Hamilton and created the Senate which would be the venue for such ‘cool and sedate reflection’; but Hamilton was far more of an aristocrat to trust an institution which was still an elected body.  His view of statesmanship reflected his views. As Historian Bruce Miroff noted:

Alexander Hamilton attempted to be, an aristocratic yet visionary statesman. Hamilton's statesman would resist and rise above popular prejudices and passions; occupying a commanding eminence, he would plan grand projects for the nation's future. His architectonic vision detailed instruments for efficient action: the energetic executive and the administrative state.

 Having shaped these powerful tools, he turned them to economic use, fashioning a carefully integrated set of policies that fostered the rise of manufacturing in the United States. While the aristocratic statesman did not expect the public to understand his vision, he did expect it to respond to the prosperity and power that his efforts produced. As the nation rose to greatness, so, ultimately, would his fame. 

 

It isn't bad enough that American democracy has devolved from the reasonable governance envisioned by the Founding Fathers - sane, reflective, objective, universally patriotic men providing wise guidance to the electorate - into a free-for-all, a chaotic, inchoate brouhaha of petty demands of insular, selfish motivation. The country has fragmented into artificial, competing interest groups of race, gender, and ethnicity. 

Not only do the unwashed rule, they rule in caviling, self-centered cabals.  The House of Representatives is a side show of bearded ladies, babies with two heads, dwarves, and grotesque giants.  The Senate, the compromise between Hamilton and Jefferson, designed to be a buffer between the caterwauling of the masses and the higher powers of national leadership, had descended into the same mindless anarchy. 

The very idea of federalism, the core principle of the Constitution, has devolved into the worst kind of narrow political demands. If the state legislatures aren't bad enough, catcalling, smearing, and food fighting over issues supposedly good for the citizens under their protection, municipalities have sunk to an even lower, unconscionably ignorant morass of vaporous politicians. 

Avowed Socialists are mayors of New York and Washington.  Portland and Seattle have become ungovernable Third World shitholes of crime, addiction, incivility, and political anarchy. Hundreds of people are shot and killed every weekend in Chicago where the mayor claims racism, police brutality, and federal indifference for the violence.  Baltimore, St. Louis, and Memphis ranking near the top of the world's most violent cities are havens for illegal immigrants, safe places for gangs, drug crewes, and wanton criminals.

It is hard to imagine how the country after World War II and its uncompromising defeat of Hitler and Hirohito and recognized as the beacon of sanity, the nation of opportunity, justice and fairness, has so rapidly descended into such political dissension, division, and unholy chaos. 

 

It is even harder to imagine how so many voters think that such division into identity groups who claim legitimacy and justice only by sex, race, and ethnicity is a good thing; voters who have chosen separatism and superficial judgment over  central, universal, moral ethos. 

Jefferson made it quite clear when he explained 'the pursuit of happiness'. Americans were to pursue individual enterprise and benefit from their labors but not at the expense of others.  Individualism and community were two branches of the same tree.  He envisaged a country whose citizens acted with individual spirt, desire, and determination but were mindful of the larger commonwealth in which they acted.  All Americans were to abide the same moral, Christian code. 

Other powerful nations of the world, many America's adversaries have understood the absolute necessity of a central ethos around which all enterprise - personal, regional, and national - revolves.  China has refused to tolerate ethnic separatism, and seen such parochial demands antithetical to the nation.  The Uighurs, the Tibetans, and the Taiwanese are insurrectionists, antithetical to the smooth running or the state. a

Autocracy? Hardly. Based on a Confucian ethos, a long history of Chinese world influence, and thousands of years of dynasty and high culture, China has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, engineered wealth, prosperity, and world leadership. 

Russia, renascent after decades of ruinous Communism has harkened back to its imperial past and brooked no dissension from separatist ethnic groups in the Caucasus. A united, indivisible Russia must never be challenged. 

Turkish President Erdogan has the same intimations of empire and is determined to return the country to its Ottoman, fundamental Islamic roots.  Iran, however insidious and adversely militant as the theocratic regime might be, it has the same unifying, absolute commitment to its Persian and Islamic past. 

Europe is in the process of electing ultra-conservative governments in France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands.  Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have already vowed to shut the door to unwanted African and Middle Eastern immigrants, to close mosques and to deport any imam or mullah who preaches separatism and anti-European, Christian values. 

'I am Giorgia', shouts Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy. 'I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian, I am European, and I am Italian', the litany of new wave Europeanism sweeping the continent.  Enough 'diversity' and calls for 'the other'.  It is time to recognize Europe's greatness and return it to his legendary leadership. 

Only the United States clings to its febrile, fantastical, baldly idealistic view of society.  Not only does the American Left lionize the mob, but in its call for Diversity Equity Inclusion, encourages its basest, least intelligent, bottom-feeding instincts. 

Hamilton is turning over in his grave and Jefferson stirring.  How could this new country, born of the Enlightenment, guided by such profound and universal moral and ethical values have fallen so far into anarchy and international disrepute?

It is probably too late to reverse the course, to re-establish the moral order, patriotism, and universal civility envisaged by the Founding Fathers; to late to center the nation, to end deliberately engineered divisiveness and hostility, to return to civilized values and culture; and so be it.  You reap what you sow. 

Historical revisionism - the rewriting of history, the expunging of inconvenient truths, and the blatant ignorance of the past can only accelerate America's descent to the bottom.  The unwashed majority, already ignorant, marginally educated, decidedly fundamentalist, and unremittingly parochial will continue to grow at the country's peril. China and Russia are watching from the wings, patiently awaiting its downfall. 

Love With A Proper Stranger - Vetting, Triage, Bad Cards, And Muffy Potter's Search For The Holy Grail Of Romance

Muffy Potter had tried everything - singles bars, the Whitney, the National Gallery, the Vassar Club, and even box seats at Nationals Stadium - with no luck.  She never thought that she would have to put in overtime for finding a husband - the best schools, college, the right milieu, and enough gifted genes to make her a passable find for any man should have been enough. 

 

Yet there she was dabbling in the personals of the New York Review of Books, 'SWF seeks lover of Great Falls, Bach, and afternoon tea', and checking out online dating sites.  How unexpected, how disgraceful, how sick! A woman of her pedigree, talents and not inconsiderable beauty scrounging around the personals for a 'likeminded lover of Nature and Bayonne, New Jersey'. 

A friend at work suggested a popular and apparently successful online mating service - a simple matter of filling out a detailed questionnaire and waiting for a vetted list of compatible men.  The temptation to overdo it, warned Muffy’s friend, is strong; so don't give in to vanity. Those on the other side of the fence will be doing the same thing and you will end up with some deformed caricature of your dreams. 

So Muffy signed up, paid the fee, and set to work.  There were two parts to the questionnaire - what she wanted in a man, and how she would describe herself.  She tackled the 'him' part first, but her entries were replays of the personals in the New York Review - 'someone to share books, firelight, and poetry' and the like, when what she really wanted was a rutting ram. How to express this without attracting unwanted attention?  She didn't want to come off like some tart, a hooker on a street corner on the Rue St. Denis.

This was more like her senior essay, one with frankness, sincerity, and innuendo; and she worked at it just as hard she did at Vassar.  Yet, it still came out stilted, fabricated, and far from the truth. 

Her side of the coin - 'Describe yourself honestly, correctly, and exactly' the instructions indicated - but how was one to assemble all the subjective, intuitive, sensitive parts of one's character without some embroidery? Isn't that what she did at the bars on the Upper East Side?  Or how she adjusted her persona to accommodate the more rarified environment of Soho? 

She was creative in spirit, but had never gotten beyond stick figures in reality; intelligent but well behind the curve when it came to differential calculus and organic chemistry; athletic but somehow just shy of the goal.  What she was, was an interesting person that had been in Europe, could converse about Styron, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy with some fluency, and....goddamn it, something real, palpable and within reach. 

She finally completed the questionnaire - the man she was looking for might not be Adonis but close, a man of scruples but fun, one of sexual maturity but adolescent desire, a man of intelligence and breeding...She erased it all.  She had fallen into the smarmy trap of sexual idealism, and would not tolerate it for an instant more. 

But looking at the now erased, scrubbed, and empty questionnaire, she was stuck. She knew exactly what she wanted, but couldn't quite put it into words.  

There was the 'Help' option on the site. AI would suggest, picture, and describe men she might, according to her demographic data, like.  Not real men, of course, but generated images and confected characterizations.  The avatars were given names - Bob, Billy, Lance, Pedro and the like; and the seeker was to pick and choose.  The computer would do the rest, winnowing, vetting, searching, and suggesting on its own.  The 'reactive mode 'rather than the 'proactive' one. 

Trial and error, entries and erasures, assisted searches, end-arounds, fictions, hard facts, and closure.  Muffy could only hope for the best.  The service provided her with a short list of eligible men, asked her to review their annotated CVs and photo albums, to pick the most likely and contact them through the company's secure server. 

It was an out-of-body experience, as Muffy described it.  The man sitting across the table from her was not there by circumstance - two needy souls at the Mayflower bar just before closing - but some electronically facilitated, virtual assignment.  Bruce - the guy sipping his pina colada across from her -was not real, nor imagined, but generated. 

She went through three of these programmed meetings, all pleasant enough, respectful, dutiful, and serious.  The men were well dressed and groomed, tapered properly, and reasonable enough, but the thought of any one of them on top of her was disgusting.  It wasn't so much the guys, all decent enough, but just the idea of some virtual stranger in an intimate, compromising position was disgusting.

'You weren't honest', Muffy's friend said, 'try again and this time go deep'; but once again without sounding like a tart, a Belle de Jour, a Happy Hooker, a loose woman, how could she find the Lawrentian partner she was looking for. 

Connie Chatterley left her crippled husband in a wheelchair looking at the smoldering embers of the fire, while she had her way with Mellors, the gamekeeper and they came together in ecstatic union.  Sexual complementarity, expressed in the moment of simultaneous orgasm is epiphanic and soul- releasing, wrote Lawrence.

How to put that in words, wondered Muffy? and Lawrence gave no clues as to finding that one, orgasmic partner; so she soldiered on, increasingly frustrated with the lame, weak Nellies, overbearing sods, and blowhards as ridiculous as Portia's suitors who came her way. How did one do it?  How did one find a match from the overwhelmingly indecorous lot of ordinary men?

'Time out', she shouted to no one in her Dupont Circle walkup, and decided to let serendipity take its course. Perhaps her bullying intent was the problem.  Let love come to her; but as the months passed with no dice, she was tempted to re-up, to give it a go once again, to take hold of the reins. 

She looked at the calendar. She wasn't getting any younger and her biological clock was ticking.  She wanted to be taken, to be impregnated, to give birth and to be fulfilled as a woman, and her she was watering her petunias alone on a Saturday night. 

It would be nice to report that Mr. Right appeared thereafter - a knight in shining armor, a Mellors, the man of her dreams, her ying-yang Tantric complement - but some women are destined for spinsterhood, old maids, and aunties

It was surprising to many that Muffy Potter ended up in this leaky lifeboat - so attractive, appealing, and available was she - but the gods of determinism have some say in the matter. Who knows why she was so picky - an unreliable father? A snipped, curt, and sexually diffident mother?  Father Brophy and his apocalyptic warnings?  Mrs. Linder, the dancing teacher who showed her perhaps too much interest?

Who's to say, and what does it matter?

It would be nice to say - a fitting end to the story - that Muffy Potter found Mr. Right, but the cards had been dealt long before she knew what was what. Given the configuration of ancestry, parentage, environment and the quirky genes of Aunt Melissa and Great Uncle Hiram among others, she had no say in whether the matter, so despite her desire, ambition, and good intention, she ended up a crotchety, testy old maid.