The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Individual commuters also “reserve” seats for themselves on their regular trains going to and from the New York suburbs. A man may perpetually choose, say, the third window seat from the door on the shady side in the second car from the front of the train. This becomes, over the years, “his” seat, and his fellow commuters, who become aware of his preference, respect it. Not long ago, on the 8:18 from Rye, a long-time commuter boarded the train, to discover that his regular seat was occupied. He demanded that the occupant remove himself. The occupant, politely pointing out that there were many vacant seats in the car, demurred. What followed was a terrible scene in which the two well-dressed gentlemen hurled insults at each other until finally the conductor was called to settle the matter. Wringing his hands, he pleaded with the interloper, saying, “I know there are other seats, but Mr. Caldwell has been taking this train for years and this has always been his seat!” Commuting patterns, when interrupted, can have effects that are downright traumatizing.

  The commuting crowd changes, meanwhile, as the day progresses. On the earliest trains are the bright, eager young junior executives, clear-eyed and efficient, who will be at their downtown desks at the crack of nine or even earlier. The early trains fairly throb with youthful determination and ambition and high seriousness of purpose. The later trains convey an older, more secure and leisured mood and group of passengers. These are men who have successfully scaled the corporate and professional ladder and have found a comfortable place near the top. They are no longer in a hurry, and if they are not at their desks or in their board rooms by ten o’clock, the desks and board rooms will wait for them. But look carefully at the faces in this group, and some will seem less serene than others. This is because some of these men in the late-morning crowd are actually out of work and are headed into Manhattan for interviews. They will spend the afternoon, perhaps, in a movie theater. On Wednesdays, the late-morning crowd is special: ladies heading for early luncheons in town, followed by matinees. Then, in the late afternoon, still another group commutes from the suburbs: black domestics going home to Harlem.

  The evening bar car is, of course, a world of its own—beloved by the regulars, shunned by others. Crowded and noisy, with miniature drinks served in plastic glasses at two dollars apiece, the bar car is the only car on the commuters’ train where social intercourse is encouraged, or even tolerated. Commuters jostle each other for a spot at the bar, shouting orders; friendships are struck up here, but there are also, as in any bar, heated arguments and, on more than one occasion, fistfights. The bar car is a kind of rowdy prelude to the suburban cocktail hour, which in some cases begins in the suburban railroad station, where wives wait for husbands with glasses, flasks, and buckets of ice. The “driving home drink”—or the d. h. d., as it is affectionately called in suburbia—can be hazardous. Several years ago, a Rye housewife was killed when her car went out of control pulling out of the station parking lot; she had been turning the wheel while, at the same time, trying to hand her husband a martini.

  For years, the most elegant way to commute to and from suburbia was in the private club cars—the most stylish, and the most mysterious. The club cars’ membership policies were secret and their rules were unwritten. Formidable black porters guarded their entrances and exits and only members were admitted. Window shades were drawn closed for privacy, and the club cars were coupled to the end of their trains so that members—who paid as much as one thousand dollars for the privilege—could sit in comfortable parlor-car chairs undisturbed by ordinary commuters. There were two exclusive club cars on the Penn Central’s New Haven line: the Rye-Greenwich car and the Southport car. On the western side of the county there was the Mount Kisco car. Memberships in these private-car associations carried great cachet, and were often passed down from fathers to sons.

  In 1976, however, Connecticut’s Governor Ella Grasso decreed that what amounted to restricted clubs had no place traveling on rails designed for public transportation, and the club cars were put back into ordinary service. Rye, Greenwich, and Southport members are still up in arms about Mrs. Grasso’s action, and are fighting to get their club cars back—so far without success.

  But at least one suburban club car remains: on the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad’s line from Gladstone, New Jersey, to the Hoboken, New Jersey, pier, which carries passengers from the moneyed Somerset County suburbs of Bernardsville and Summit. For more than a hundred years, the 8:18 morning train out of Gladstone, which returns at 6:10 at night, has been known as the “Millionaires’ Express,” and its private club car has remained a bastion of upper-class exclusivity. Only members, their wives, and a limited number of guests—for a fee—may enter the Gladstone Car. The curious are turned away at the door by James Moore, who has been the car’s porter since 1955. Though the car’s exterior windows are as dirty and soot-stained as those of all the other cars, it is widely assumed that, behind the drawn green shades, the interior is luxurious. Actually, a guest on the Gladstone Car would be disappointed, for its furnishings are decidedly Spartan. The present car dates from about 1908, when it was an ordinary open-vestibule coach pulled by camelback engines, and its fittings date from roughly the same era. Two rows of white-painted wicker veranda chairs face each other down the length of the car, and Mr. Harry Young of Gladstone recalls seeing the same chairs, or their counterparts, when he was a trainman on the line in 1916. Foam-rubber cushions were added several years ago, and in 1975, the cushions were re-covered in a tweedy material when the Erie-Lackawanna raised the club car’s rental. “Unnecessary,” sniffs Mr. Seymour Hall of Oldwick, New Jersey, the Club Car Committee chairman, who, like other members, reacts unfavorably to change.

  The car’s lighting is provided by a double row of incandescent ceiling bulbs shielded by fluted glass shades of the Art Deco era, and Harry Young remembers when these were gaslights. Brown-flecked carpeting and teak-paneled walls with small inlaid designs add meager touches of luxury. One luxurious detail—though some might consider it a necessity since the car’s windows will not open—is air conditioning, though it is air conditioning of a 1935 variety. On hot days, before the car departs, two men slide three-hundred-pound cakes of ice into bunkers underneath the car. Water runs over the ice and into pipes, and a fan above the ceiling blows air over the pipes and into the car through ducts. This archaic system works fine, James Moore says, “as long as the ice is clean.” Dirty ice causes the pipes to clog, and then the entire system must be flushed. The ice now costs twenty dollars a cake, and on the hottest days, as many as a dozen cakes may be required. These costs and others may one day spell the doom of the Gladstone Car. In fact, when the Erie-Lackawanna goes completely into diesel operation, which is expected to happen by 1979 or 1980, it is assumed that the club car will be declared obsolete. Meanwhile, the only significant renovation occurred as long ago as 1956, when the old restroom commodes were replaced with flush toilets.

  Ordinary commuters on the line would also doubtless be surprised to learn that liquor is not and has never been served in the club car. In the morning, after each member is seated with his Wall Street Journal or New York Times, Mr. Moore comes through the car with glasses of ice water. On the evening run, he may heat up the water for tea, warm some soup, or serve soft drinks and cookies, for which members reimburse him at the end of each month. Mr. Moore is the members’ custodian, guardian—and alarm clock, gently rousing sleeping commuters when the train comes to their stop. During the day, when the car stands locked and empty on a siding in Hoboken, there is plenty to do, Moore insists: polishing glasses and emptying ashtrays, doing personal errands or shopping for members, and endlessly repairing the ancient wicker chairs with tape, nails, and baling wire from his toolbox. Mr. Moore, one of the last of a breed, says he has been with the railroad longer than anyone in Hoboken.

  The Gladstone Car is both exclusive and sexist. It is divided into two sections: one for men, who may smoke, and one for women, who may not smoke. The women, mostly widows of members, accept this rule,
which dates back to the turn of the century, when, of course, it was unladylike to smoke. Today, there are seventy-six members of the Gladstone Car, most of them from the Somerset Hills area, and nearly all of whom knew each other before joining the club. There is a waiting list, and prospective members are requested to supply two letters of recommendation from members. Dues in the club presently run two hundred dollars a year, plus the cost of first-class Pullman passage. Still, no more than thirty riders use the car on a regular basis, meaning it is nearly always less than half full. The decline, according to committee chairman Hall, is attributable to the fact that people are transacting more business away from New York, that former members are moving away or retiring, and that the economic crunch has been responsible for several dropouts. But, men like Mr. Hall are devoted to their club car. “It’s comfortable, it’s private, there’s room to move around, and you’re always guaranteed a seat,” he says.

  The atmosphere in the Gladstone Car, however, is not particularly clubby. As in ordinary commuter cars, conversation is discouraged, and with so many empty seats, members tend to sit apart from one another. Members nod briefly to one another as they enter and seat themselves, and then they retreat into their newspapers or briefcases. There is no camaraderie, no laughter. After all, commuting, which can consume as much as ten hours of a man’s week—more than a full business day—is not a joking matter. It is a serious business. It is something that a man must do if he is to enjoy the suburbs. It is the price one has to pay, and one pays it as one pays one’s monthly bills, grimly, with efficiency, and with strict adherence to the rules of Free Enterprise in a Capitalist Society. Commuting is a business.

  Several years ago, a man who had been standing on the station platform in Scarsdale, New York, waiting for his morning train, suddenly collapsed of a heart attack and died. The stationmaster summoned a police ambulance. The ambulance arrived, and the man’s body was covered with a gray blanket, lifted onto a hospital stretcher, carried into the ambulance, and driven away. Some three hundred commuters stood on the Scarsdale platform while all this was going on. No one looked in the dead man’s direction. No one commented on the man’s identity. No one, in fact, lifted his eyes from his newspaper, or changed his expression from that “loose half-frown.” Occurrences such as this, the expressions seemed to say, are certainly unfortunate, even disruptive of a set routine, but commuting must go on regardless.

  13

  Three Ryes

  In Rye, New York, on a balmy June night, the students of Rye High School were presenting Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. The auditorium was filled with proud and expectant friends and parents. The boys and girls had worked hard on their material, and had rehearsed for many weeks. So had the stage and lighting crew, and the musicians. The members of the football team had been convinced that it was not effeminate to serve as male dancers and chorus boys. A white girl had been persuaded to accept a black youth as a dancing partner, though not without difficulty. She seemed to feel that she had been singled out for an unpleasant task, and that the assignment carried with it a certain loss of social status. Still, as she danced she smiled bravely.

  The sentimental and familiar music and lyrics (“Climb ev’ry mountain … ford ev’ry stream …”) contained no surprises, the voices for the most part were thin and untrained, and the performances were decidedly amateurish. And yet the youth and good looks and innocent enthusiasm of the performers on the stage—the pink-cheeked boys, and the girls with their clean, swinging hair—managed effortlessly to create the illusion that one was seeing and hearing something wonderfully fresh and new. It was as though the musical had finally, and quite accidentally, found the perfect cast and company to perform it. By the time the curtain fell on the first-act finale, the audience was moved to tears and the houselights came up with such a golden rush that it was possible to be suffused with a feeling of awe and faith in the promises and prospects of today’s young people.

  During the intermission, however, excited whispers brought news of an episode that had taken place during the performance, and within fifty feet of the auditorium. A thirteen-year-old girl, taking advantage of her parents’ absence at the play, had pinched a bottle of vodka from their liquor closet, drunk most of it, and then passed out in the grass. A group of high school boys, who had also been drinking, had taken this opportunity to unbutton her shirt and pull down her jeans and panties. They had not raped her, exactly. They had “fiddled” with her, and finally, tiring of this, they had run off and left her, unconscious and half naked, lying under a bush. There a cruising policeman had spotted her and transported her to a hospital where she was being treated for alcohol poisoning and was having her stomach pumped out.

  Immediately, the girl’s distraught parents left the auditorium for the hospital (which was able to release her the following day). The news had an unsettling effect on the rest of the audience as it lingered in the lobby waiting for the bell to signal the beginning of the second act. Most of them knew the girl and her parents. Her parents were not quite of Rye’s elite, but ranked socially somewhere between the elite and the middle class. They were, as they say, people who were known. Their daughter, meanwhile, also had achieved a certain reputation. She had already been involved in one or two minor scrapes, and it was rumored that she had experimented with drugs—LSD and marijuana, at least. The group she hung out with was generally considered to consist of the town’s troublemakers.

  During the second half of the play, despite the energy of the young performers, the audience was subdued. At the final curtain, they clapped politely but perfunctorily, then hurried home to their own children.

  Many people find the two-sided nature of suburban life disconcerting. On the one hand, there are comfort and space and ease and money. In Rye, as in other well-to-do Westchester County communities, it is commonplace for parents of children too young to drive to open charge accounts with one of the two taxi companies in order that the children can go to and from school, and visit their friends, without mothers and fathers having to act as chauffeurs. No one stops to ask whether this might be “spoiling” the children; it is simply a matter of practical convenience. But in Rye, as in other such towns, there are also parents who simply cannot afford such luxuries.

  “Rye is a town of people waiting to move on to Greenwich,” is one statement frequently made here, but this is not entirely true. Rye has many families who are quite content with Rye, and have no ambitions to achieve a grander Connecticut address. Rye money is quiet, conservative, a little inbred. Out on Milton Point, it lives in large, well-tended houses overlooking Long Island Sound, and the possessors of this subdued wealth are bankers, insurance company executives, lawyers, stockbrokers, a sprinkling of advertising executives. Lesser money lives prettily, on smaller lots, in Indian Village (so named because the streets there have Indian names), or in Loudon Woods. These might be called the New Guard as opposed to the Old, and the gap between the Old Guard and the New is almost unspannable. Nowhere was the division more apparent than when, strolling together toward the 5:23 out of Grand Central, Mrs. Ralph Manny (Old Guard) and a neighbor (New Guard) chatted pleasantly until Mrs. Manny reached the door of the (now discontinued) Rye-Greenwich private club car. There, with a polite handshake, they parted, and Mrs. Manny entered the private car. Her friend moved on to one of the cars used by the general commuting public, where no reserved seat or Pullman porter waited. The same division was apparent on the night of the performance of The Sound of Music—the good kids (of “good” families) singing and dancing wholesomely on the stage, and the “bad kids” on the street outside: the longhairs, the pot smokers, and the girl found in the shrubbery with the empty vodka bottle.

  In a real sense, Mrs. Manny represents the values of the Rye Old Guard. A sedate, pleasant-faced, white-haired lady, she moves with an air of polite self-assurance, never obviously condescending, everywhere in the town. The Mannys are listed in the New York Social Register, and are members of the American
Yacht Club, the New York Yacht Club, the Colony Club, and the Huguenot Society. Elizabeth Manny is also a member of the Daughters of the Cincinnati. Several years ago, she helped found a local charitable organization called the Twigs. The Twigs started as a small ladies’ sewing circle, and now has expanded to the point where there are a great many Twig groups (the idea being that each is a twig of the central branch). The Twigs toil chiefly for the United Hospital in Port Chester. One must be invited to join the Twigs. When it was pointed out not long ago that there were hardly any Jewish women in the Twigs, it was pleasantly suggested that the Jewish ladies might like to form their own little Twig, and perhaps call it something else, like Tendril or Rootlet. The suggestion did not meet with enthusiasm. Mr. and Mrs. Manny are unusual, furthermore, in that they own their own club—the Shenerock Shore Club, a private beach club on the Sound.

  Like many old-line Westchesterites, Mrs. Manny is distressed by the “Bronxification” of Westchester, the steady collapse of what was once rolling farm country, then became a leisured land of summer estates, and is now just another New York suburb with “a Jewish tinge,” with high-rises, shopping centers, fast-food outlets, and motels. She is proud of the fact that the stretch of the Boston Post Road which runs through Rye is, with Darien’s, one of the two remaining sections of the highway that have not become completely commercialized. And yet, at the same time, there have been incursions of industry into Rye—an Avon Products distribution center, for example. A hotel chain has built the huge new Rye Town Hilton—though “Rye Town” is technically Port Chester. (If you hear someone say he is from “the Town of Rye,” you know he is trying to make his address sound better than it is; real Rye is the City of Rye.) Mrs. Manny deplores what she calls “the eleven little houses” that went up across the street from her tennis court when a large property was broken up—“little houses” which nonetheless sell in the $70,000 to $120,000 range. But, in the next breath, she glances at the still intact estate that lies behind her house and remarks: “When that place is broken up it will be a nice little piece of change for somebody.” As is the case everywhere in America, the Old Guard is torn between a reluctance to see things change and the “nice little piece of change.”