Much has been made of small town values. There is something almost mythical about the family farm, its moral rectitude, faith, patriotism, and hard work. Up before dawn, to bed after sunset, hearty family meals, and everyone helping, doing their share, being part of family, community, and nation.
The small town of which the farm is a part is also considered the model of the American way of life, its citizens all responsible, caring, and respectful.
Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town set it in fictional Grover's Corners.
There is no culture in the town, says Mr. Webb. It is just a plain, practical, hardworking place with nothing in particular to distinguish it. No, ma'am, there isn't much culture; but maybe this is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here. We like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of the seasons; yes, everybody knows about them.
Sinclair Lewis in Main Street takes a much harsher look at such towns - insular, snobbish, ignorant, and objectionably cultureless. Carrie Underwood, a young woman from the big city, married to a country doctor, tries her best to reform Gopher Prairie to no avail. The ways of the townspeople are too set, too contrary to anything beyond the prairie, the church, and the crops.
The small town has been praised and criticized for decades. Some see the big city as a sinkhole of moral corruption. Its size, complexity, and anonymity are no less degenerate and spiritually vacant than Sodom and Gomorrah. These pessimists look to the small town as America's hope and salvation.
We are a nation formed by settlers, they say, covered wagons, farmers, herders, cattlemen, and entrepreneurs. Our values never veered from Biblical injunction, a devout sense of community, and a burning love of the new land.
Others insist that the small town is simply a smaller, quieter version of the city. Human nature, after all, with all its aggressive territorialism, bullying self-interest, suspicion, jealousy, and violent anger, is universal.
There is something about the restrictive confines of a small community where everyone knows everyone else and where gossip, innuendo, and suspicious distortion, the byproducts of that intimacy, that make it the rule - a hothouse where dark, irresistible impulses grow more quickly, morph and metastasize and inward on themselves until the whole town is viral with endemic corruption.
The New England town of New Brighton had its sexual underground, its permanently sexual and devious side, the world of illicit affairs, shady dealings, and circus side shows of weird babies, thieves, and crooked gamblers.
Melissa Blevins, for example, wife of the Methodist minister, who, like one of Tennessee Williams' frail, delicate women, lived a life of dutiful submission to her husband, to his faith, and to her two children; but beneath this patent veneer, she was a serial lover, a promiscuous, demanding woman who satisfied the priests, doctors, lawyers, and dentists of her town without conditions or consequences. She was a libertine, a woman for whom no settled, muddled life would ever be enough. She, like her Victorian counterparts, was careful and canny in her planning and deceit, and her cinq-a-sept rendezvous were quiet, hidden affairs.
Every morning Mrs. Miller, made up, chipper, and dressed in a bright pastel pinafores regardless of season, opened her front door at 8:30 exactly, walked briskly to the bus stop, boarded the 32 and headed off to her job as a dental hygienist in the same building as her husband. Forty five minutes later Mr. Miller emerged, spiffily dressed, brown fedora in winter, straw boater in summer, into his car to head to his job in Wethersfield. Both, at precisely 4:15 headed off for their assignations in Bristol and Meriden, and were at home in time for the casserole dinner Mrs. Miller had prepared that morning.
Marvin Epstein was a furrier the go-to place for matrons from New Brighton and as far away as tony West Hartford. Minks, sables, ermine, fox – he had them all, perfectly made by New York tailors, elegant, and on display. It was rumored that despite his lucrative business and standing in the community, Marvin was involved in questionable securities trading.
He was overheard talking about Grand Cayman, the Turks and Caicos, and the Canaries, but never went on vacations, and only traveled by the New York, New Haven & Hartford once a week – ‘to attend to business’, he explained to his poker group at the Jewish Club in Wethersfield, ‘nothing more, nothing less’, but everyone knew or assumed they new what he was up to. What they did not know was that his trips were punctuated by afternoons at the Westerly, an out-of-the-way hotel too far west to be chic but clean enough for a love affair.
Every small town in America is Peyton Place, the fictional town of early television which, just like New Brighton, was a model of rectitude, propriety, and good taste; but barely beneath this well-curated and –cultivated veneer was a smarmy, sex-smelling brothel. What could be more dramatic? Intrigue, deceit, shameless sex and promiscuity, the fodder for Hollywood, was there for the asking. No, it did not have the bright sun, tinsel, and palm -treed elegance of Los Angeles; and managed only a feeble sun in winter and cloying humidity in summer, but it had all the ingredients of hot afternoon soap opera.
Who cared whether Melissa Blevins bedded every dentist in New Brighton ? Or whether the Puccini Brothers were actually local fronts for the New Haven mafia. Or whether or with whom Marvin Epstein was sexually entangled. It was the rumors, the innuendos, the offhanded remark, the raised eyebrows which gave life to this otherwise dull and unremarkable city.
New Brighton had its share of tragedy - Irma Swanson committed suicide by closing the garage door and turning on the engine of her old Plymouth. Her son found her ashen grey, splayed on the front seat, mouth agape, eyes wide open. No child should be subjected to such horror, but Herbie recovered, went to school the next day where the reports of his mother's death had already circulated.
His classmates kept their distance, not knowing how to deal with such a horrific event or how to approach the boy who witnessed it; but they all were morbid enough to want to know more. How does one do it? How long does it take? Don't you gag on the exhaust and rush to open the doors before it kills you? What did she look like?
The parents fueled this curiosity with technicalities. That old Plymouth with its worn rings would surely do the job quicker than our Roadmaster; and no surprise that she ended her life, what with Herb Senior as a husband, and that old crone of a mother-in-law picking at her day and night. And what will become of the children, wards of the state since their father will certainly leave the county?
It was a grisly event in the first place, but once it made the rounds of New Brighton, it got macabre, unbelievable, and more horrific than a cannibalistic feast.
The Albright's boy Arthur was severely retarded, and the rumor was that his parents kept him locked in a windowless basement, feeding him slop and sending an old blind, homeless Negro man down there to clean up. The next in line to hear the rumor was at first incredulous, but when they began to think about it, and how weird the Albrights were, they began to understand, and when they passed all on to their next door neighbors, they had added their own frills and embroidery.
The townspeople of New Brighton were not surprised when they read about Bernie Madoff, swindler, conman, fraudster, and thief who bilked millions out of his Jewish friends, or Jeffrey Skilling of Enron who 'invested' millions in shell companies, sold shares to credulous third party investors and walked off with a king's ransom.
Why should they be surprised when their own Arnold Birnbaum got caught with his hand in the till to the tune of ten million dollars, money amassed through the same brilliant, underhanded trickery as Madoff; or when Hamilton Cabot, descendant of the famous Boston Cabots and longtime resident of New Brighton's West End, created financial instruments as canny and innovative as Skilling ever had?
On the surface, New Brighton seemed just like any other small town in America - like Grover's Corners in fact. It was a model of good taste, good living, and upright men and women of good standing. Its children were neat and well-behaved. Its churches were filled on Sundays. Husbands took their sons fishing and wives taught their daughters how to bake.
But underneath all the heralded niceties, good manners, and good will, was the real New Brighton, the unvarnished one, the true one, the one with the same unspeakable crimes of anywhere else.
New Brighton should not be criticized for hypocrisy or wrongdoing. If the nastiness of New Brighton was common to all communities and all people - the expression of an innate, hardwired perennially unsatisfied human nature - then there should be no room for censure. People just being people.
The stuff of melodrama, in fact. Peyton Place was a very tame version of what went on in New Brighton.
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