A Little On The Side - A Yale Blueblood Falls For Maria With The Faintest Of Mustaches

Blanton Fairchild was a child of privilege.  Born to the Boston Fairchilds, heir to a shipping and financial fortune, and ancestry traced back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth and the Earl of Buckingham, Blanton was welcomed with open arms to Yale, in those days still a conservatory for the well-to-do. 

 

Blanton summered on Nantucket, skied at Gstaad, and sojourned at his family's homes in Palm Beach, Park Avenue, and St. Tropez; and never in a million years would his improbable romance with Maria Veneziano have been thought possible.  But there he was, smitten, taken by this dark Italian girl from across the tracks in Wooster Square, New Haven's Italian ghetto. 

What could it have possibly been that drew the blonde, blue-eyed, chisel-jawed young scion of the American aristocracy to her? Her gypsy darkness, her Les Misérables eyes, or perhaps that slight, delicate trace of soft dark hair - not a mustache, nor even a suggestion of one, but enticing, sexy, and alluring beyond all reason. 

They met on a park bench on the New Haven Green.  Blanton had often gone their slumming with his Davenport friends and Maria, despite the warnings of her aunts, wandered there hoping to meet some well-to-do Yale man who would take her out of the ghetto, love her, marry her, and live in luxurious mansion anywhere in the world. 

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 Blanton Fairchild and his Nantucket-Vineyard crowd wanted some wiry, tangled guinea snatch as a change from their usual blonde, silken delights, Maria Veneziano and her girlfriends wanted husbands.  Tired of wife-beaters, garlic, and goombas, they wanted the real America, the white, flaxen-haired, well-tailored and well-mannered men of Yale. 

'Watch your Ps and Qs', Maria'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. 

Maria, 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. 

Blanton and his classmates, so imbued with the idea of privilege and historical worthiness, assumed that any woman would fall for them immediately, without hesitation, and without restraint.  They had heard stories about Italian fathers with shotguns and elephantine mothers armed with bottles of acid to scar the faces of wayward daughters, but dismissed them as impossibilities - not in this day and age, and certainly not within a stone's throw from the most important university in the world. 

Yale men, tired of their weekends at Vassar, Smith, and Holyoke, and wanting some real pussy – not just fluffy blonde bush from the North Shore - made their forays into the town, the Green.  Not surprisingly there were girls from Wooster Square there who were quite willing to go out with them, perhaps not to give it up on the first date, taught as they were by their grandmothers to give just enough to keep a man’s interest but to keep their corsets laced. These goomba nonnas of course had no idea what was across the canal, and their granddaughters dreamed only of sailing in a white, Anglo Saxon moonlight. 

Maria Veneziano was taken with Blanton the moment their eyes met. 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. 

Maria politely demurred at the offer of a night at the Taft, but ended up giving it up in his Davenport 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.  

Now, the story should have a predictable end - Yale cad dumps innocent Italian girl, leaves her crying on the curb, and goes back to Muffy Parsons and the Vassar crowd - but it didn't.  Blanton found something 'psychologically trending' as he explained to his roommates who were dumbfounded at his dalliance with this wiry-haired, cheap tart from garlic-ville.  He was fishing in the wrong pond, dabbling in murky waters, and certain to get upped, outed, and offed by her Mafia cousins. 

Yet he persisted - or rather was compelled by some driven sexual passion that knew no traditional bounds.  Every time he had Maria on the bottom bunk of his college room, he felt he had found that ineffable soul, that hidden, sublime beauty for which every man yearns. 

Love has no predicate, said Stendhal, and Blanton's desire for this unlikely, rather plain, and ordinary ghetto girl certainly fell into that category.  Nothing had prepared him for this, nothing in his past, his upbringing, his parentage, or his genes; but there it was, and there she was beneath him, delighted at his passion, looking dreamily into his eyes, and imagining a life of ease, luxury, and good fortune. 

'It stinks of pussy in here', said Blanton's roommate as he climbed to the top bunk, tired after a long weekend in Poughkeepsie; and it was that crude, unanticipated remark that shook Blanton to his senses. One false move and she would be pregnant or claiming so, and the mob - dirty little guineas with cleavers and shotguns would be after him.  

Predicate or no, what was he doing? Everything has its place in the order of things, and Maria Veneziano was not in it.  In one moment of clarity he saw her for what she was, a dumb guinea with a mustache, wiry poontang, and painted nails.  

So the applecart was upset - that is, the romantic one, the Petrarchan, Romeo and Juliet one, the love has no borders or boundaries one - and so the correct one, the Nantucket, Boston, Gstaad one was righted and put in its proper place. 

An interlude, a dalliance, a pause in his road to anointed fame and fortune on which he often looked back.  What if?  What if?  But that fantasy was only reserved for down times, rainy days on a Rimini beach; and as for the rest of his life?  As it should be.  Planned, neatly executed, respected and pleasant. 

As for Maria? Back to Wooster Square, wife-beaters, garlic, and pasta fazool.  Her mother was kind enough not to say, 'I told you so', but that was in the edge and tone of her voice after consoling her daughter in tears, but when Bruno Garaffa showed up at the door smelling of aftershave and holding a posey of flowers, offering his arm and opening the door for her to his new Buick Riviera with Jerry Vale on the radio, she lost it. 

If she couldn't have Blanton Fairchild, then she wouldn't have this butcher boy, reeking of cologne and fried cutlets, no taller than Uncle Guido, and as dumb as West Rock. 

'But he's a nice boy', said her mother; the icing on the cake, the last sugary, sweet, tasteless schmear she vowed would be her last; and so she became one of those tweeners - a neither here nor there woman who had tasted American's finest but was forever consigned to sausage and peppers 

'I won't do it', she shouted down Olive Street. 'I won't!' but of course she did.  The American dream has to be taken in little bites.