Harrison Potter was a fifth generation Yale man. His forbear, Isaiah Cabot graduated from the university in 1860, joined the Union Army to fight the Confederacy in the Civil War, went on to amass millions as a shipbuilder, investor, and international trader. His whaling ships plied the South Pacific, and his commercial ships were active in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean in the lucrative Three Corner Trade.
The Potters were a tight family, proud of their English heritage, their aristocratic legacy, and their success, and each successive generation shepherded their wealth, so by the time it was Harrison's turn to head the family, he was heir to a small fortune.
Yale had changed since the days of his father and grandfather - it was no longer the Old Blue bastion it once was, Mory's, Fence Club, Skull & Bones and all the rest - but it still retained its Ivy League cachet despite the inroads made by 'democratization' - the process of opening Yale's doors and turning it from a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant redoubt to something more reflective of larger America.
The Potter family was never entirely happy with this progression, and by the time Harrison matriculated they were furious that their hallowed institution, a beacon of the Enlightenment, the center for advanced learning, and most important the model for cultivated taste, manners, ethics and morals, had become an inchoate, frenzied, nasty place of viral politics, racial division, and downright hostility.
The real problem was not systemic but personal. Harrison came home for the holidays with some rather upsetting ideas and went on about identity, social justice, reparations, and righting historic wrongs. His barbed asides about Wall Street and capitalism were particularly hurtful. After all, he owed everything to the entrepreneurial genius and financial wizardry of his grandparents, his uncles, and his father.
It was at Christmas that Harrison came home with Esther Rabinowitz, a fellow student at Yale, a girl from Brooklyn, daughter of the descendants of Samuel Gompers, early Twentieth Century labor organizer, socialist, and progressive leader.
Her family, like the Potters, had passed on their legacy through the generations, and Esther was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, as committed to economic and social revolution as the Potters were to preserving America's storied patrimony.
She was an unattractive girl, sallow complexion, narrowly-set eyes, and a rather beaky appearance overall. She was smart enough in that intellectual way - staccato speech uttered quickly in passionately contrived metaphors and insistent claims - but there seemed to be no chemistry between her and Harrison.
It was clear that the boy admired her, listened to her attentively, nodding at all her key points, and tending to her comfort and well-being; but she rattled on in her own world, seemingly indifferent to the family's reaction or response.
They stayed in the Longworth room, the old Victorian chamber overlooking Beacon Street and the park, but other than some animated discussion, the room was quiet. If they made love it was either with quiet courtesy for others or desultory routine, for not a passionate peep was heard all night.
'How did you like her, Dad?', Harrison asked his father on the station platform before boarding the train to New Haven. Old Potter, never an effusive or particularly affectionate father, sniffed, adjusted his tie, brushed his lapels, shook his son's hand, and wished him bon voyage.
‘Brooklyn?’ he snorted as the train pulled out. ‘Esther Rabinowitz?’
The couple spent less and less time on the Yale campus attending to academic affairs. Instead they traveled as members of Yale Socialists Of America, an influential campus group which had successfully lobbied for divestment of South African gold bonds (apartheid would never be over until the last white had left the country or had been eliminated), the first openly gay club, and a rush to triple affirmative action admittances.
And this was still not the halcyon years to come. Under Esther Rabinowitz's charismatic, defining leadership, the Yale socialists were able to achieve every last one of their goals, setting the stage for the more revolutionary years that were to define the new Yale.
'What on earth are you doing, boy?', said Potter Senior, and followed with a disquisition on American history - their American history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Davenport and the New Haven plantations, the founding of the new republic, the framing of the Constitution, and the legacy of the best of British and Western civilization.
Harrison listened politely and when his father had finished, said, 'Over and done with, Father'. He said no more - those summarily dismissive words were enough. The old man shook his head, relit his cigar looked around the room at portraits of Putnam, Davenport, Trumbull, and Berkeley, shook his head again and said a brief goodbye.
Esther couldn't wait for the post-mortem, for Harrison had promised that he would cut formal ties with his family. Love, patrimony, filial duty, and family were insignificant at best in the workers' struggle, and obstacles at worst. Affiliation with such racist, capitalist tools was tantamount to treason.
'Cut the cunt loose', said his college roommate, but the woman had gotten her hooks into him good, and he came not only to understand her political philosophy, but to adopt it. More Catholic than the Pope, observed his classmates who had watched him transform from a Nantucket, Gstaad, St. Moritz scion of wealth and privilege to a whiny, single-track leftist polemicist.
Esther's mother said, 'I don't care what you do or who you marry, that's your problem, but there will be a rabbi at your wedding’, so one officiated. Mrs. Rabinowitz, the rugalach, and the rabbi were the only Jewish items at the wedding.
Despite her long history of socialist secularism and fidelity to the Jewish reformers of yesteryear, Esther's mother couldn't shake Judaism no matter how she tried. She asked the rabbi to make it quick, no Biblical homilies or injunctions, a joke or two perhaps and then 'let the young people be young'.
Harrison's life was a completely committed, responsibly political one. There wasn't a progressive cause he didn't espouse or hold passionately - gays, transgenders, the climate, the black man, socialism, all were within his attention span.
It was only a few years later when walking out into a cold Washington rain, he bumped into two Yale classmates on their way down K Street to their law offices. Both, from families as fine as his, wealthy, patrician families of storied history and American legacy, who had married well and had become successful corporate attorneys with homes in McLean, Bar Harbor, and St. Bart's, were happy to see him; but how could this crumpled, disassociated-looking, grizzled person possibly be their peer. What had happened?
The cold wind across the Potomac had them anxious to get moving, but not before, 'let's have lunch', the usual Washington promises, and an exchange of cards.
'I heard he married that Jewish girl, Esther something, rabbinical stock, leftists, the wrong type' and in that dismissive, offhanded comment hit the nail on the head. It summed up Harrison's life in a nutshell. He had no shimmering summer days on the Vineyard, no powder at Chamonix, no sailing out of St. Tropez, no cigars and cognac at the Yale club, no Southampton weekends, no Cosmos Club, no Society of the Cincinnati. He had had nothing but rugalach, sour corned beef, and endless talk of the worker, the black man, and the oppressed.
A dismal life, no getting around it. The question this mini-epiphany raised was why - why did he do it? How did he fall so easily, enticed by the blandishments of a mousy, nervous, girl from the outer suburbs?
His friends, arch-conservatives, surely were leading the life he had always wanted to live and expected. They felt no guilt about defending the interests of capitalist enterprises, no shame in making tens of millions in salary and benefits, no second thoughts about giving social reform a pass. If they slept well at night, then why was he the one to toss and turn next to a savagely unattractive wife?
'A prince of a man', said one of the two classmates to the other, ‘derailed by a leftist - not a Jewish princess, heir to a Miami Beach fortune, all mink and ermine walking down Collins Avenue, that I could understand, but her?’
After that meeting Harrison spent more time at the Yale club, renewing friendships and old college ties. He fudged his resume, confected something more believable and expected, accepted invitations to the Vineyard, and turned over a new leaf.
He felt like a snake losing his skin and growing another, sloughing off the old and unnecessary and ready to sun himself high up the canyon. Of course he had never forgotten his good manners and breeding and was sure to take care of Esther, but on the day the papers were finalized, he felt like the Shah of Iran returning to Persepolis.
The poor, the marginalized, the deprived? What of them? Life is personal, Maslow's self-actualization, Ayn Rand's individual spirit emeritus. It didn't matter what the result of his actions were, only the actions themselves; and in his case they were shelved like so many old essays, insignificant relative to what he had become.
His father welcomed him home at Christmas, reinstated him in the family, anointed him heir and noble son, and forgot - just like Harrison did - the odd twists and turns that took him finally to the place where he belonged.
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