Is Class Disappearing In America? - Yale Men Who Summer On The Vineyard Don't Marry Across The Tracks

Back a generation or so, 'nationality' was the distinguishing feature of American society.  One was labeled early and often as Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish or any of the other minor immigrant groups who had come to these shores.  Epithets were common, accepted, and dismissed as shorthand, and national stereotypes, often not far from the truth, were widely held.  The Irish were indeed brawlers and drunkards if you went down Arch Street to the Blarney Stone or the Dublin Arms any Friday night. 

Sean O'Shaughnessy was proud of his broken nose, never realigned and as off kilter as an old telephone pole.  He downed his pints of Guinness one after the other until he was roaring drunk, picked a fight with any one of the Reilly boys and fought until blood had soaked the sawdust.  No one stepped in to stop the brawl - it was as much a part of Friday night as NHL hockey, and O'Shaughnessy always paid Mickey Finn, the owner, for anything broken. 

Italians were loud and whole neighborhoods smelled like garlic. Mothers hung out tenement windows and yelled at each other. All clothiers, tailors, and jewelers were Jewish, and the Poles from Silesia as dense as the stereotype.

  

New Brighton was typical of small New England cities in those days, divided by class.  The sons and daughters of the industrialists who built the city lived in the West End, summered on the Vineyard, played golf at the country club, and planned trips to Greece together. 

Italian doctors treated Italian patients, Poles-to-Poles, Jews-to-Jews and each lived in his own quarter of the city - not as well-heeled and old money like the West End, but places like Walnut Hill or Belvedere.  They had their own golf courses, and summered at local beaches or a few weeks in the Berkshires. 

The Swedish housepainters, carpenters, and electricians lived in salt boxes in Eddy Glover; every Pole in town lived on Broad Street in four-story walkups, but in a neighborhood with delicatessens, kielbasa shops and a cathedral which celebrated masses only in Polish. 

There were no black people in New Brighton - except for the Dominican who was the Surgical Ward janitor at New Brighton General Hospital, and he counted for the only Latino as well.  Race and ethnicity were not issues in that 'nationality' generation, and nobody was clamoring for any more diversity than what they had. 

Arthur Townsend was a West Ender.  The Townsend family had roots in Northumberland and had come to America in its earliest days.  Arthur had genealogical links both the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown.  The Townsend side of the family moved to New Haven with the Davenport mission in the early 17th century, became prosperous landowners and shipbuilders, and finally industrialists.  The family moved a few miles to the north and settled in New Brighton where they founded the factories that produced arms and material to the Union Army and the United States Army in both world wars. 

So when Arthur was seen with Marilyn Petrucci, the daughter of a factory worker, a Sicilian not many years off the boat, and sister to six other children in the worst part of town, his parents were livid.  What was a St. Paul's and Yale education worth if note to marry well?  Worst of all she was a smallish, dark girl who wore cheap perfume.  She was not only unsuitable for Arthur,  she was unthinkable; but Arthur found her irresistible. 

La nostalgie de la boue, said his father citing Emile Augier from his novel, Mariage d'Olympe referring to the hero's dalliance with the lower classes turning it into a kind of reverse romanticism; but there was no romance in it all.  Once his son crossed the tracks, it was like Dante's Inferno -  Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate - enter here and lose all hope. 

It simply wasn't done in those days.  Multiculturalism was not even a fictional notion.  One stuck to one's own kind. 

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one Anglo and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Arthur's father had had many romantic adventures as a young man - summers on the Vineyard were literally harems for wealthy young men of good parentage - and during his years working at J.P. Morgan on Wall Street he trolled the girl ghettoes of the Upper East Side and landed one blonde, blue-eyed beauty after another; but his son's dipping into the mire was something else indeed.  It was not just youthful sexual exuberance or his son's social adventurism.  It was complete idiocy and dangerous to boot.  All he needed at his age was a grandson who looked like a Ubangi. 

Social opprobrium always works wonders, and his Yale roommates, all from as well-positioned families as his own, told him if he wanted wiry poontang, pick up one on the New Haven Green and be done with it. 

Italian girls from Wooster Square did indeed come to the New Haven Green to meet Yale men in the vain hopes of a a meal ticket out of the ghetto; and not a few Yalies took advantage in a one-and-done affair. 

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. 

Now, while the Yale Nantucket-Vineyard crowd wanted some wiry, tangled guinea snatch as a chaser for their usual blonde, silken delights, Wooster Square girls wanted husbands.  Tired of wife-beaters, garlic, and goomba parading, they wanted the real America, the white, flaxen-haired, well-tailored and well-mannered men of Yale. 

So it was easy pickin's for Yale men, so it was within that augury that Arthur's roommates disabused him of his 'love' for this non sequitur, inconsequential woman.

It worked, and Arthur straightened out, went up to Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley, dated the most eligible girls from his milieu and married well.   A home on Park Avenue, winters in the islands, and of course summers on Nantucket. 

Yet, for reasons neither his family, colleagues, or friends could understand, Arthur still had that itch for something other than the flaxen-haired beauties of his class, and took up with Annie Casertano from the Brooklyn projects.  She was a single mother with two children, surviving on welfare and downtown Manhattan cleaning jobs, divorced twice, both from Italian dockworkers, but for some inexplicable reason was Venus de Milo for Arthur Townsend.  He wasn't sure which he loved more - Annie or the projects, such was his nostalgie de la boue and ornery populism. 

Managing the affair was tricky.  He and his family lived in Greenwich and the hours of his Wall Street job were punishingly long, so sojourns in Bay Ridge were not easy.  Yet, he managed.  He had too such was his extraordinary desire. Although the nasty remarks of his Yale roommates often popped up on the Far Rockaway train to Brooklyn, clattering around and interrupting his thoughts of the beautiful Annie, but he dismissed them. 

She hoped that he would leave his wife but she had no clue about his other life, the rarified atmosphere of the well-to-do, or the near impossibility of him marrying below one's station, so assumed that love would conquer all and her ships would come in. 

As for him, an affair in Bay Ridge was far easier to conceal than one in the city - his stories about layered loans, redevelopment projects, and offshore money were easier for his wife to take on face value than if he simply was 'staying late at the office', or meeting clients in Gramercy Park. 

Perhaps it was the contrast that did it - dark, hippy, high-heeled, made-up Annie from the projects and elegantly tailored, manicured, Armani and Arpege  Elizabeth Barrett Browning from Beacon Hill.  Coming home after a Saturday with Annie - driving up the long driveway past the carriage house and the stables, admiring the thousand-year old oak tree,  being greeted by Samuel the butler and kissed by his fragrant, wine-scented wife was immeasurable. From one set of arms and bed into another, irreplaceable. 

Just to be clear, the projects in Arthur's day were nothing like they are now - savage, tribal places ruled by gangs, hookers in the halls, Fentanyl dopers sagging and frozen on the steps, pimps and tarts on the avenues.  They were just poor white, just like New Brighton across the tracks but more concentrated.  The smell of garlic and roast peppers was in the halls, in the elevators, and on the stairs.  Arthur could have been visiting Marilyn Petrucci on Alexander Street and instead was on the 21st floor of the Verrazano Homes. 

   

Annie never gave up hope, and so the goomba idyll so fantasized by Arthur Townsend continued.  A black-white thing in these same projects renamed the Frederick Douglass Homes would never be possible in a million years, but today class has been replaced by race and the barriers are impenetrable.  Slumming - for that was what his wife called it when she finally found out where he was punching his ticket - does not exist today. 

Elizabeth forgave him, he gave up the life and they lived happily ever after, but lounging on the beach on St. Bart's he was sorry that class had disappeared.  He liked being upper upper in bed with lower lower and smelling pasta fazool on the stove.  No one of the new technocratic empire would ever know the pleasure.  Oh, sure, there was always Louise from Gaithersburg but she was just anybody, and there was nobody like deep guinea Annie Casertano or Marilyn Petrucci anymore. 

Invitation To A Beheading - The Public Undoing Of A Limited Mind

There was never anyone like Felicia Roberts, a woman of limited intellectual range but with a loud, irritating, harping voice that attracted attention.  She crowed, hectored, and badgered until her audience either gave in or walked out.  She had that kind of effect on people. 

What did she hammer on about?  Donald Trump, of course, an easy target but one that suited Felicia to a tee.  She could go on for hours about the man, his devilish moods, his hopeless ignorance, his racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  She harangued her golf partners, her tea party guests, her alumnae friends and all her neighbors.

The thing of it was that she fulminated in a a vacuum.  Every single one of her University Park neighbors had flown a Black Lives matter flag, posted Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs, drove electric cars, voted solidly Democratic, and loved Kamala Harris. 

So did all her wretched hawking was pretty much for her own benefit - like crows cawing on a telephone line.  She felt good about herself - she was doing her part to rid the nation of the beast in the White House. 

Her social group was as unalloyed and passionate about the progressive cause as she, her colleagues, and professional associates. She lived in a cocoon, her private playground, a congenial venue for sharing ideas and opinions. 

So Bill Baxter took her completely by surprise.  Bill was a Trump supporter - a man delighted with the President's outrageous persona - the glitzy, Baroque ballroom, the two hundred and fifty feet tall Victory Arch, the Field of Heroes, and the fancy makeover of the Kennedy Center - and equally thrilled at his turning back the woke tide and pursuing a definitive conservative agenda. 

He was an invited guest at the home of a third party for dinner given in honor of a local poet who had promised to read verses which she hoped captured the zeitgeist of the horrendous Trump years.  Bill was a colleague of one of the guests who suggested that he would be a good addition to the gathering, and, a gracefully aging, divorced middle aged man, he would make the perfect companion for the many widows attending. 

Now, Bill was recondite about his political views.  Better to keep them to himself, living as he did in the same lock-stepping neighborhood as Felicia. Expressing anything other than the received wisdom - that Trump was a destructive, divisive interloper, an autocrat, a boorish, lowbrow, bourgeois bottom feeder - would be upsetting to everyone. 

Not a week passed when he was not asked about the American flag flying over his front porch - not a little Fourth of July ACE Hardware throwaway but a proper, full-sized banner. That must be a symbol of his Trump support, passersby asked to which he simply responded that it was part of his patriotic family tradition - Revolutionary War veterans, DAR dames, and Philadelphia Franklin relatives. 

He was not lying, exactly, for it was all true; but because he could not show any more direct for the President without having eggs thrown at him, the flag would have to suffice. 

So, he was prepared to keep his own counsel at the dinner, keeping true to form and not letting on his partisanship; but after Felicia had finally dipped into the last of her vichyssoise and stopped talking, he had to respond.  Something about Elon Musk being a Nazi-saluting, racist anti-Semite simply required a riposte. 

In his best, most polished, practiced eloquent manner, he fashioned a reply that acknowledged Felicia’s concerns, agreed that Musk had indeed ruffled many feathers on his way up and down Independence Avenue addressing issues of waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, but wasn't she - Felicia - wandering into dangerously offensive territory.  Where was the evidence?  On what grounds did she brand him as a racist enemy of the state?

Of course Felicia had never had to construct any logical arguments regarding Musk.  Everyone she knew knew that he was a crony capitalist, out only for money, himself and the establishment of a cabal of like-minded bigots.  

So looking quite thunderstruck, she bumbled and floundered, looking for the right reply; but since she had never been asked for proof - who needed it for God's sake when the truth was right there staring you in the face? - she had no ready answer. 

Bill waited until she composed herself and then continued on the in the same vein - questioning her attacks on Musk, Trump, Vance, and Rubio - the band of thieves assembled as Trump's henchmen to take over the country. 

As one absurd notion after another poured out of the woman's mouth the more incensed and offended she became, the more her motor revved up, and the torrent of invective and ad hominem attacks increased in intensity and volume. 

When she paused for breath, he added one more logical codicil to his argument, and sat back.  Let the woman rant on infinitum for all he cared, showing her true colors and her desperately addled mind to all those around the table.  

When she stopped again amidst an uncomfortable silence, she was flabbergasted.  The usual applause and amens were absent. The wind had been taken out of her sails.  She finished her diatribe and could think of nothing to follow.  No one jumped to her rescue.  Nothing about the World Cup, the NBA Finals, or tacking on the Bay. 

Not that anything Bill said in Musk's defense - his creation of a hundred thousand jobs, exploring space, on the forefront of cybernetic healing (brain implants to help the deaf hear and the blind to see), in the avant-garde of free speech - had any traction with this devotedly progressive gathering.  

It wasn't so much that he changed their minds, just that he showed Felicia to be a blustering fool. Progressivism was a passionate calling, for sure, and  some measure of invective and even exaggeration was at times necessary, but such unhinged, demented outbursts did the movement no good. 

Felicia looked like a drowned duck, feathers all wilted and sagging, quacker closed, eyes distant and unseeing.  She felt deflated, dispirited, and lost.  She would never be the same again.

'It just goes to show you', Bill said to a colleague the next morning; but after such a wild evening he could be excused for not finishing his thought. 

Annals Of Marriage - Library Book Romance, Nietzsche, And A Pound Of Flesh

The frustrated woman, second fiddle can only take her pound of flesh - but unlike Shylock takes it from a thousand cuts.  

Cassandra Evans never had a chance. Smart, but not quick, well-read but in the wrong things, library romance instead of deeper fare, she was frustrated in a marriage because she hoped for more, for better, but was never up to her husband's reach.  Her ripostes were off the mark, her remarks graspy confections, and her analyses dim. 

It was inevitable that the husband would leave and get away from the clucking of his wife who grappled for a toehold, never found the right step, and ended up a wounded duck.  

At the end of The Duchess of the Orient, a Faye McAllister romance about an American woman looking for love who travels to China and finds her Oriental prince only to be left on the streets of Shanghai replaced by the beautiful granddaughter of last Shantung emperor, Cassandra cried like a baby, so much did she empathize with McAllister's heroine, both left disconsolate by unfaithful men. 

She quickly borrowed the next in the McAllister series - An Oriental Love - a story which followed the heroine back to her farm in Iowa where she finds a new life of simplicity, purity, and healthy aspiration, only to return to China where her prince has been left alone and disconsolate by the emperor's granddaughter and is in need of Cassandra's solace and consolation. 

The two live in an idyll until the winds of change blow, the servants are dismissed, the princely gardens fall into a sad, neglected, flowerless bed, and the prince is arrested for treason.  

The story, not one of McAllister's best gets tangled up in Han Chinese politics and the fractious debates within the Communist party, but the prince is exonerated and he and his American bride find everlasting love in the Yellow Mountains. 

These library fugues were of course just temporary anodynes to Cassandra's suffering.  The more she demanded her birthright - to be treated royally or at least with the respect due to any woman - and the more she was ignored by her husband who thought only of extrication, the less satisfaction she could glean from the marriage.  It was a hopeless impasse. 

Had she read about Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel, Ibsen's Nietzschean women for whom male disassembly is a specialty she might have taken heart. Hilde seduces Solness, the Master Builder, convinces him that he, despite his failings and pedestrian ventures is close to God, and urges him to climb the steeple of the tallest church in the town from which he falls to his death.

She smiles.  She has taken over and controlled the will of another for no other reason that she could. What could be more fulfilling for a woman, asks Ibsen? 

Hedda Gabler takes over the will of her former lover, encouraging him to acts of bravery and heroism encouraging him to murder or suicide, and when he fails miserably and dies a disgustingly miserable death, she is left with nothing but an uxorious fool of a husband and kills herself in defiance of all convention.  She has exerted her will - the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world, said Nietzsche - and only her suicide, a refusal to capitulate to ordinary men, will do. 

Laura, the heroine of Strindberg's The Father, who wants complete control of her daughter and the family fortune - an impossibility in Victorian Scandinavian society - sets out to destroy her husband.  She suggests that their daughter is not his and playing on that chronic male weakness drives him mad, has him committed, and takes over everything. 

Cassandra Evans never got that far, so immersed as she was in the romantic life of Faye McAllister's heroines- women as far from Ibsen's Nietzschean characters as can be.  The heroines of her library books found romance, but it was always a pyrrhic victory.  It was a woman's fate to need love, to be cared for, to suffer at the hands of male duplicity, and to try and try again. 

As the McAllister romances piled higher on her night table, her desire for a pound of flesh increased.  She was bound and determined to turn misery into felicity, and the only way she knew how was to bring her dismissive, philandering husband to heel.  Weak as she was and no Ibsen or Shakespearean heroine, the only way she knew how was determined pettiness.  Eventually, if the pound of flesh were taken by a thousand cuts, he would come around, realize how his indifference was turning her shrewish and how realizing the error of his ways, he would offer attention, kindness, and a newfound love. 

Of course she was just whistlin' Dixie, a prisoner in her own skin, a woman without a clue, so hammered in by forces beyond her control that she could only flap about while her anger and resentment grew. It was a rock and a hard place - finding a comfortable resting ground between anger and desire was nigh impossible; and yet propelled by years of antagonism and an innate inability to act decisively, she kept up the nastiness.  

Her husband, of course, paid her no mind. The more irritating and demanding she became, the more he was out the door - his own flanking maneuver.  It would have been better had they both been more knightly - confronted each other directly, fought a fair fight, dismissed the innuendoes and petty assumptions of the past and moved on - but life is a duplicitous, petty affair. 

In Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George and Martha flay each other to the marrow - brutal, savage honesty is the only salvation.  Too much anger, resentment, pettiness, jealousy, have built up for anything but a complete purge to set things straight.  For there to be any hope of reconciliation let alone harmony, a complete divestiture is required. 

Cassandra Evans and her husband never gave purification a chance.  She took her pound of flesh in small, annoying pieces which only served to infuriate, and he bolted at each slice.   By the time she had finished the job, the marriage was too far gone for resuscitation. 

By this time though, she was stymied - stuck in a marriage she didn't want because of age and sunken costs - and he had set his compass for other harbors. 

He got the best of the deal - he had a stack of get out of jail free cards that he played at the first sign of foul weather  He knew that eventually he would have to come to port - some port, but not any port, no country for old men, etc. - but that time was still far enough off not to have to worry about failing. 

He was set to put up with the quacking, the misshapen stories, the fabulist confections that were invented as quickly as she was challenged.  The pound of flesh included trying to gain traction even though she had to spin her wheels; and when it got too weirdly psychological - Cassandra's need for attention turned her shrewish instead of imprecatory - he withdrew to safe havens. 

To be fair, she couldn't help herself - born too early to avoid daddy-love and be a natural feminist; and born of an insecurity which owed much to time and place but was something she was born with.  How all this got convoluted into such frustration and petty meanness was question even her psychiatrist had trouble answering, but even if he had figured it out and helped her deal with it, it would have been too late. 

So, no George and Martha flaying to the marrow, no epiphanies, no coming to one's senses, no closure.  The marriage rattled on with its peculiar modus vivendi - but then again all marriages have their peculiar ways of getting on and getting through. 

However it ended - such marriages after all are too common to be followed to finality - is irrelevant.  Just another tale of Pauline warning. 'Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do'.