Amanda Phillips was a simple woman of simple tastes and modest expectations. She had grown up in a small New England town, daughter of a homemaker and a pharmacist, good Catholic, choir girl, good student, and aspiring citizen.
That is what New Brighton did. It was the model of propriety, rectitude, and good manners. Men still tipped their hats to women and opened doors for them, mothers happily and willingly took care of their husbands and their homes, and neighbors were helpful and considerate.
Some thought that Thornton Wilder had New Brighton in mind when he wrote Our Town; and while the play had a dark message about life, the characters were much like those in Amanda's home town.
Mrs. Eddy next door, for example, watched out for the Phillips children, brought angel food cake to Emma Phillips on Saturdays, and her husband helped Jack Phillips shovel snow from the driveway after bad storms.
The town had its rumors - Irma Swanson's suicide, John Baxter's fugue to Paraguay to meet his Guarani lover, the 'incident at Chestnut Hill Park', an affair best left alone, and the arrest of a city alderman who 'had one hand in the till and the other hand up the skirt of the receptionist' - but all in all New Brighton was a good place to live, worship, and work.
Amanda spent two years at Central Connecticut State College before it became a university and when it was still a teachers' college. Her family intended her to become an elementary school teacher and she followed their advice and counsel. Until one day she woke up dissatisfied, disappointed with and discouraged by her ordinary, common, and uninspiring life.
It could have been the times. Despite the insularity of New Brighton, the social revolution taking place everywhere else in the country could not but help but influence the town. Or perhaps it was sexual maturity and a growing sense of her femaleness and erotic desire; or the surprising fragility of her parents' marriage, itself a product of the age. She heard late night arguments in their bedroom over her mother's frustration, immobility, and desperate desire for independence.
In any case, Amanda became increasingly restive, told her parents that she was going to quit CCSC and go to New York to find herself and her fortune.
Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were just as happy to have their now adult daughter out from underfoot - the decks needed to be clear for running in these difficult times - and wished her well.
New York was a far cry from New Brighton, but the young Phillips girl had her wits about her and enough savvy to negotiate the pitfalls of a young ingenue in the big city. In fact she found the city exciting, demanding, and perfectly matched to her mood and expectations.
It was a heady time, a time of coffee shops, intellectual debate, revolutionary thinking, and liberal vision. Life was now an open field, vistas in all directions, and room to roam.
She enrolled in NYU, took courses on Hegel and Marx, found places of intellectual opening and collegiality, and her life trajectory now seemed clear. Her life as a committed progressive began.
Her personal life was just as fulfilled. She had many sexual partners, travelled with them cross-country and stayed in Haight-Ashbury and a cabin in the Humboldt County woods and with each adventure became more and more convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her journey.
However, the doors to her inner rooms, as she put it, remained closed. None of her lovers had the patience to go beyond political philosophy, but she enjoyed her immersion in the heady social freedom of the times to explore who she really was. Love was absent in an otherwise full and complete life.
She, like most of her New York friends grew out of rebellion and channeled her progressive energies into more substantial and productive work. Too limited in education to follow a career in law and pursue a radical agenda in the courtroom, and too rooted in progressive ideology to pursue one in business, she turned to non-profit advocacy and joined the mainstream of liberal activism.
Over the years there was no progressive cause that she didn't embrace - women's rights, the fate of the black man, the environment, world peace. So committed, involved, and passionate was she about the causes she fought for, that she lost the perspective that she once had. If there was one thing about the Grover's Corners and New Brighton it was foundation - the importance of social and personal compassion and the inclusion of others in one's life and liberty.
Now she had become embittered, angry, and annoyed at the ignorance of conservatives who refused to acknowledge the problems faced by the country and the world at large. They were hidebound in the false security of wealth and privilege or so trapped in a working class prejudice that their obduracy and unwillingness to open their eyes was maddening.
It is hard to love anything, let alone anyone within this zeitgeist of hate, resentment, and suspicion; and so that one important piece of the puzzle remained missing. There was no room for wine and roses when the problems facing humanity were existential.
Epiphanies happen unexpectedly - that is what they are, sudden aha! experiences that come without warning, and so it was that she met the man of her dreams in a K Street bar. All of the subliminal, long immured, but powerfully romantic feelings that had remained behind closed doors for so many years came to the fore.
At first she hated her feminized, independent, willful self for even entertaining such feelings, but simply could not help herself. She fell head over heels in love with Trevor Cabot, Republican, conservative, lawyer and developer.
Patrick McGrath in his book Asylum writes of the spontaneous, uncontrollable sexual desire of a young married woman for a patient at the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane where her husband is Deputy Superintendent. There was no question of propriety or caution involved. Like Amanda, too much unrequited emotional need had built up and there was no question of for once and for all releasing it.
McGrath's Stella simply could not help herself, and even awareness of her lover's violent, psychopathic past could deter her. She abandoned all reason, all caution, all responsibility to her husband and young son and pursed a disastrous relationship with Edgar Stark.
Women, said McGrath, are creatures of vast, inexhaustible resources of sexual desire, passion, and need; and under the right circumstances and with the right partner, they are expressed and cannot be reversed. Men, he went on to say, are much more limited and circumspect in their desires. Perhaps because they have always been the pursuer, the privileged, and the dominant sex, they have fewer such emotional reserves; but in any case it is women who fall the hardest, who succumb despite every measure of social discipline.
Stella was so impossibly in love with Stark that she risked her life and despite the reemergence of his deadly psychopathic side never lost her desire for him.
McGrath could have written just as easily about Amanda Phillips who from the very first came under the thrall, the spell, the control of Trevor Cabot. All reserve was abandoned, and despite everything - his radical conservatism and his socially dismissive and arrogant political posture against which she had fought for decades - she couldn't resist. He was inimitably attractive, confident, sexually mature, and irresistibly charming.
In her calmer moments, she thought of her mother who had warned her against such men. They had only only one thing on their mind and all women should beware. In fact Trevor was a caricature of the cad, the Casanova, and the Lothario her mother had described, and she had to smile at both the image and the reality. Neither mattered. She knew that she could not do without him.
It is not surprising that her political advocacy waned as her sexual desire increased. There was clearly no room for both in such an intense physical and emotional relationship; but it was more than her liberalism being shunted aside to make room for the more immediate passion she was feeling. The sexual desire somehow dismantled the architecture of her political belief.
If this individual, highly personalized, intense, independent relationship was so completely satisfying, then wasn't individualism itself more valuable than communitarianism? And if such irrevocable intimacy erased everything outside it, of what value was that pedestrian, predictable world she had spent so many years trying to change?
The relationship between Stella and Stark ended and ended badly - he off into his own febrile, insane world and she desperately depressed, still hopelessly in love with him and unable to live without him. The affair between Amanda and Trevor ended less dramatically and existentially; but the transformation in her had been ineradicable. The world looked different after the affair, as clear as before but the obverse of what she had seen.
Love - usually the obfuscator of reality - was a cleansing agent, and gone were her former dreams of utopia and a new, compassionate, verdant, and peaceful world. She had been tamed as completely as Kate had been by Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. In both cases the taming had not been enslavement but freedom to choose once the fetters of the inhibiting past had been removed.
Amanda was finally a happy woman.
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