The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Another indication of what has happened in Darien is that the number of requests for “bank escorts” has climbed steadily in the last twenty years, reaching 1,085 last year. “It used to be that a local merchant just strolled over to the night depository of his bank at the end of each business day and made his deposit,” a member of the local police force declares. “Nowadays, he asks for an armed escort from us.”

  To cope with the climbing crime rate, Darien has increased its police force to thirty-five, and a policeman’s starting salary, which formerly was $3,800 a year, is now $13,000. Darien police used to be trained in a desultory fashion, and were not even instructed in the use of firearms. But now each officer must qualify weekly at the department’s new indoor firing range with a standard .38 caliber revolver. Some officers have been taught bomb-disposal techniques and how to use tear gas and high-powered rifles, as well as to conduct ransom negotiations with kidnappers. Merchants, meanwhile, have been attending police seminars on credit card fraud, dealing with shoplifters, and how to spot a phony check.

  While Darien feels that most of its crime comes from “outside,” there is a new kind of criminal in the town that is even more disturbing: the young offender who is a member of Darien’s old, proud establishment. The owner of one of Darien’s snappier ready-to-wear shops describes the following incident: “A sixteen-year-old girl was in the store the other day, and I saw her pick up a fifty-dollar cocktail ring, look at it, and drop it in her purse. I know the girl, and I know her parents. So I telephoned her mother and told her what had happened. The mother immediately began screaming at me and telling me that her daughter would never do such a thing. She told me that she intended to close her charge account with me. Later, the girl’s father called me and said that not only would his family never do business at my store again, but that if I tried to press charges against his daughter he’d sue me. So what can you do when something like that happens—lose a fifty-dollar ring or lose a customer who spends a couple of thousand dollars a year in your store? I wrote the parents and apologized for everything. I even sent the girl’s mother a bottle of perfume.”

  Of course, it would be wrong to assume that a town like Darien is experiencing anything like a crime wave, nor is what is happening there much different from what is happening in suburbs all over the country, where, last year, as statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show, serious crime increased 10 percent. Darien residents insist that their shaded, manicured streets are still for the most part safe, and that their rolling green hills along the Connecticut shore provide an unusually pleasant and comfortable place to live. They point to the fact that neon signs and outdoor advertising have been kept to a minimum, and that the old Boston Post Road which runs through the center of town still has an agreeable, New England look. They would live, they say, nowhere else. But the presence of crime has made Darien edgy, and added an uneasy note to the town’s formerly leisured, sneakered, casual mood. Complacency has given way to a certain nervousness and wives cast worried looks at husbands when, in the night, the family dog sits up and growls at the door. The possibility of crime—or at least the interruption of peace of mind—hangs in the air as persistently as the distant drone of traffic from the turnpike. It is something unwanted and unexpected that the turnpike has brought to little Darien.

  Becky Thompson graduated from Darien High School in 1965. A year earlier, a young man named Michael Valentine, leaving a teen-age party where he had had much to drink, was driving his date, Nancy Hitchings, home when his car struck a tree. Nancy Hitchings was instantly killed, and suddenly Darien was the center of unpleasant publicity. The parents of the youths giving the party were arrested for serving liquor to minors, and Becky Thompson’s senior year at high school was spent with New York reporters roaming the school grounds looking for more stories about the rich, decadent, “swinging” youth of Darien. “It was also the year the police started making pot busts,” Miss Thompson recalls. “Everybody was convinced that the youth scene in Darien was full of drugs, sex, and depravity. Actually, drugs had never been the real problem. The real problem was alcohol. Kids would swipe it from their parents’ liquor closets, bring it to school parties, drink it in cars or even on the school bus.”

  Growing up in Darien was, for someone like Becky Thompson, a somewhat confusing experience. On the one hand, she was imbued at an early age with Darien’s mystique of being one of the nicest places in the world to live—nicest, and most socially acceptable. “I was always convinced that the farther you got from New York on the New Haven Railroad, the better your address became,” she says. “I was sure that we had it all over those New York suburbs down the line.” She was also impressed with “the prettiness of the town,” and the public school system. “I know the schools were superior to what you could find in other places,” she says. “At Darien High, I was a slightly above average student. But when I spent my sophomore year with an aunt in Columbus, New Mexico—the only place in the United States to be invaded by a foreign power: Pancho Villa—I was at the top of my class.”

  Socially, however, it was another story. “There were cliques that started in grammar school, and that went right on through high school. They were cliques based on how much money your parents had, what kind of cars they drove, how big a house they lived in, whether they belonged to the Wee Burn Country Club and the Noroton Yacht Club, or Woodway, the poor man’s club. The cliques were based on how well kids dressed, how much spending money they had, and what parties they were invited to. There was one section of maybe fifty Cape Cod development houses on Allen O’Neill Drive, cheap houses put up in the 1950s. Nobody associated with the Allen O’Neill bunch. There was also a tremendous amount of bigotry in the school—against Jews, but mostly against blacks. There was a handful of black kids, mostly the children of domestics, and nobody paid any attention to them; they were like invisible. There were a couple of Jews, but I was told that Jews had a hard time buying property in Darien. They had to go to Stamford or South Norwalk. Then there was the Tokeneke group, from the rich families on Tokeneke Road. They were a world unto themselves. By high school, most of the Tokeneke group went off to private boarding schools. The rest of us simply never saw them again. They disappeared.”

  Becky Thompson’s parents were neither of the Tokeneke group nor of the Allen O’Neill bunch, but were somewhere in between. Miss Thompson grew up in a medium-sized house on a one-third-acre lot on Phillips Lane, modest by Darien’s standards. Her father, now retired, was a design engineer, who commuted daily to New York. Her parents were Democrats, which marked them as oddities in the predominantly Republican Darien community. “My father always felt a little out of place in Darien, I guess,” she says. “Actually, he had an excellent job and earned a fine salary, but it didn’t seem fine enough for Darien.”

  To be betwixt and between, neither rich nor poor, in a town like Darien is not easy. “I used to walk along Tokeneke Road and look at all the beautiful houses,” Becky Thompson says. “The Lindberghs’ big place, for example. It made our house on Phillips Lane seem awfully small and pitiful. When I got a summer job as a cashier at Stoler’s store, it was because I wanted to earn some money, but at the same time I knew that it was the lower-class kids who did this sort of thing. I grew up feeling that I—and my parents—just didn’t fit into Darien, that I couldn’t compete with the best kids because they wore more expensive clothes. I felt inferior, and I’m sure I grew up thinking that we were a lot poorer than we really were. I suppose that’s why, after college, I left. My impression is that the rich kids come back to Darien, get married and settle there, and join the Wee Burn Club. It’s the kids like me who leave.”

  When Becky Thompson comes back to Darien these days to visit her parents she tries, in a sense, to forgive it and to see it in its prettiest light—the tree-lined streets, the scarcity of neon. On a recent visit, she found the town still talking heatedly about the new nursing home, which was the center of a bitter zoning battle (it was opposed b
y many, first, because it was a nursing home and, second, because of its height: a full three stories), and which was built despite the editorial opposition of the Darien Review, a conservative publication generally against all forms of change. She was pleased to discover a new Darien paper, the News: “livelier, somewhat less Republican, and filled with more than just bridal announcements and social notes.” Her parents and their friends were also talking excitedly about a neighbor’s house on Phillips Lane that recently sold for $101,000. Though the house has only three bedrooms and one and a half baths, such a price makes it begin to sound like a rich person’s dwelling and has the Thompsons thinking that their own house may be a rather valuable piece of property. “When I go back now, Darien doesn’t seem quite as pretentious a place as it used to seem,” Becky Thompson says. “But it is a pretentious place.”

  “Pretentious” is not really the right word with which to assess a town such as Darien which longs to be taken as a quiet, pretty town where people can lead quiet, pleasant, safe, and almost unnoticed lives—unless, of course, a conscious effort to appear as unpretentious as possible is, in itself, pretentious. Darien is certainly not pretentious in the sense that Las Vegas or Beverly Hills is pretentious, with vaulting marble façades concealing an essential shabbiness and poverty of spirit. But if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what is the nature of the eye that beholds? If Darien, Connecticut, could hold a mirror up to its residents, what would it see? A certain amount of playacting, perhaps—a conspicuous attempt to be inconspicuous. The rich have always ached (or claimed to ache) for privacy, for anonymity, for shelter; at the same time, they cannot bear to be unheeded or overlooked. This ambivalence—this uncertainty whether to flaunt or to hide—is possibly too subtle and complicated for an “outsider” to grasp.

  12

  The Lively Art of Commuting

  Wealthy residents of the New York suburbs are often spared the ordeal of commuting. Edgar Bronfman, for example, the head of Seagram’s, solves the problem of getting to the office by having his private helicopter pick him up on his lawn in Yorktown and whisk him over the treetops to Manhattan. John D. Rockefeller III simply spends a good deal of time at home in Tarrytown, where he operates a two-hundred-acre farm. But for most suburbanites, commuting is simply a daily fact of life which, as they say, goes with the territory.

  Because of New York City’s size, its commuters probably travel greater distances—and spend more time and money traveling—than do those of any other city, with the possible exception of Los Angeles, which is another story. It takes a New York businessman anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half to get to or from a good suburban address, and it costs him anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty dollars a month to do so. Obviously, a New York commuter has special problems which require special solutions.

  The word “commute” has several meanings other than to travel with a commutation ticket. To commute also means to exchange or convert, to substitute one form of obligation for another, or to revoke a penalty and impose another that is slightly less severe—the death penalty commuted to life imprisonment, for example. In the case of the New York commuter, at one time or another all these definitions apply. Few New Yorkers would go so far as to say that they enjoy commuting. But most would agree that commuting is a price worth paying, a punishment less harsh than city living. Furthermore, just as a well-run prison must have regulations, so must well-organized commuting operate according to certain rules. Seasoned New York commuters know the rules by heart and seldom give them any thought, abiding by them automatically. To newcomers to the New York commuting scene, the rules at first seem mysterious and baffling.

  First of all, in addition to not smoking in the “No Smoking” car, the conscientious commuter knows that talking is unwelcome almost anywhere in the train. On an airplane, it is perfectly acceptable to speak to your seatmate, but on a commuter train it is a breach of etiquette. The reason is simple. On a plane, you will probably never see your fellow passenger again after you deboard. On the 7:58 out of Larchmont, your fellow passenger may be your neighbor, whom you have seen and will see far too often. Most commuters, while commuting, are loners. From the window seats, they will gaze resolutely at the passing countryside. On the aisle, they will bury themselves in newspapers. If a commuter recognizes a friend or neighbor coming down the aisle, he will do his best not to show it. The same rule applies while he is standing on the station platform waiting for the morning train. A newcomer to Greenwich commuting says: “At first I couldn’t understand it—how coldly people acted on the platform in the morning. I’d met a fellow at a party one night and had a great conversation with him. The next morning, I saw him at the station and went over to say hello. He just gave me a little nod and turned the other way. I thought: What the hell is this? But now I see that commuting is just a different scene.” It is different because, as a more experienced commuter puts it: “If you strike up a conversation on the platform, the chances are you’ll still be talking when the train comes in. That means you’ll have to get on the train together, and that means you’ll have to sit together. Next thing you know, you’ve got a regular commuting buddy who’ll be sitting next to you every morning of your life. Of course, there are some commuting buddies who always sit together, who’ve been sitting together for years, but they’re the exceptions.”

  On trains that are usually less than filled to capacity, it is acceptable to put an overcoat or newspaper on the empty seat beside you, to compose your face in a generally stern and unfriendly expression, and hope that no one will stop to ask, “Is this seat taken?” If someone does stop and ask the question, of course, commuter etiquette requires that you relinquish the empty seat. On crowded trains, meanwhile, it has never been necessary for a gentleman to give up his seat for a lady—even an elderly or a pregnant one—unless she happens to be a neighbor or a close friend. After all, the argument runs, the man has spent his day hard at work at an office. The woman has probably come from her hairdresser or a matinee.

  Commuting, most long-time New York commuters have discovered, is a kind of art, involving techniques and skills that must be learned as one would master any other craft. It is not, for example, a good idea to look too cheerful, either while waiting for the train or riding on it, out of respect for other commuters who may well be depressed. One develops, as one commuter puts it, an all-purpose expression: “a kind of loose half-frown, a vaguely dissatisfied grimace.” To avoid attracting unwelcome attention or acquiring unwanted companionship, the commuter learns to stand on the suburban station platform in a way that makes him look somehow smaller and in a sense nonvisible, the shoulders hunched under the topcoat collar. A newcomer to a New York suburban town must earn the right to display any form of personal idiosyncrasy. Before he can alter his clothing from what is considered the standard, center-vent New York business norm—can appear at the station wearing a beret, for example, or flared trousers, or a too-loud tie—the new commuter must establish his place in the social pecking order. Only then—and then only gradually—can he dress to conform to his individual style. The business commuter who is not only a newcomer but who also seemingly “doesn’t care” about his appearance will be quickly noticed and regarded as a pariah, and this could go against him when he wants to join the country club later on. To make enemies among one’s fellow commuters is, as one man says, unnecessary. Mr. Harry Ireland, a Manhattan advertising executive who for years commuted to New York from Rye, discovered to his horror one morning as he waited at the station that he had inadvertently put on a left shoe of one color and a right shoe of another. He hurried home to change, missed his train, and was late getting to the office, but at least no one noticed his apparent “eccentricity.”

  Every commuter quickly develops his own routine by which he makes use of, or copes with, his commuting hours. In addition to the window gazers and newspaper readers, there are the briefcase workers. It is never permissible to speak to a briefcase worker during the journey ex
cept, possibly, at the very end, when a “Well, here we are” will suffice. This is true even if the briefcase worker should happen to be a neighbor or a close friend, and it is to avoid such conversations that neighbors and close friends are always careful not to sit beside each other on commuter trains. Even those seated across the aisle from, or behind, a briefcase worker are expected to refrain from speaking. And if you have been talking to a briefcase worker, the moment he reaches for his briefcase it is the signal for the conversation to terminate. Most briefcase workers, however, open their briefcases immediately upon boarding the train.

  The nap-taking commuters compose another group whose privacy is obviously not to be violated. To be sure, many nap-takers do not really nap, just as many briefcase workers will admit that they are not really working. Pretending to sleep is just another defense against the possibility of intrusion. On most commuter trains, there is also a bridge-playing group, which usually confines itself to a particular car, or to one end of a particular car. The train conductor carefully arranges double banks of seats face to face on whichever train he has learned to expect bridge players. He will also provide tables of sorts—squares of pasteboard to rest on players’ knees—and playing cards, and he expects to be tipped for this service. In the bridge groups, conversation is restricted to bidding. Each bridge foursome usually has its regular, and favorite, group of seats which it considers “reserved,” and therefore privileged—even sacred. The unwary, or green, commuter who sits in one of these special seats will be informed that it is special, and will be asked to move elsewhere.