We Are The Lucky Ones

What a wonderful age we live in. This morning, I opened the New York Times and was able to read two pieces from either side of the planetary experience: A review of Katherine Boo's book about garbage collectors in Mumbai, India, who live on the precipice of economic disaster, eking out a living from scraps and a memoir of the "outed" paramour of President John Kennedy, who enjoyed what would have to be labeled a life of privilege.

I was able to download the books right in my own wireless home to my Kindle and to begin reading.

I started with the paramour, Mimi Beardsley Alford, who was 18 when she was first introduced to Kennedy in the Rose garden, and he, speculatively registered her blond rangy good looks and arranged for her to be invited down for a summer internship in the press department, working for Pierre Salinger, alongside Fiddle and Faddle, two other young women with whom the young President was cavorting whenever opportunity presented, and she became one of his stable of young women.

The man took his pleasures where he found them, apparently.

Alford's description of the world of boarding schools, women's colleges, debutante balls is straight out of Mad Men, and, despite myself, I find myself enthralled. Best thing since The Bell Jar.

As a young woman, Mimi knew she was living out of the Social Register, which her mother kept on the study desk at home.

What made this particularly piquant for me is Mimi is just four years old than I am and she was coming down to the White House during her summer breaks from college, just 9 miles from my own home in suburban Maryland, living in those years 1962-1963 which are years I can well remember, along with the mores of the time, when a woman was supposed to be virgin on her wedding night, and when women were deflowered and "ruined," as if the first sexual encounter was some sort of transformative, defiling event.

But what really struck me, as she described her debutante world was the memory of my own teachers telling us how very privileged we were, living in Montgomery County, Maryland, which, they said, had the highest per capita income in the country, and we were attending the Walt Whitman High School, from which 95% of the graduating class would go on to college and a high percentage to elite colleges.

We felt so privileged, we were almost apologetic, we had so much given us. Dr. Zhivago had just come out in movie form, and I could well imagine, some day, we would all be the targets of some proletarian revolution, like Marie Antoinette or the czar's family.

Now, reading, I realize none of us public school kids would ever have been welcomed into Mimi's home by her mother. We did not have debutantes and none of our names, to my knowledge, were in the Social Register.

But oddly, Mimi went to Wheaton College, from Miss Porter's, and I went to Brown. The snobs of my years at Brown thought the young ladies of Wheaton College had more money than brains and we, most of us public school boys, had no interest in going up the road to Wheaton College. We were breaking a tradition which held that road trips there were part of the social order. But Social Register did not count much by the mid 1960's. Those girls may have been debutantes, but they could not hold a candle to the Pembrokers, the women on our own campus, who were as highly selected as the women of Radcliffe, Vassar, Barnard, Bryn Mahr, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellsley.

In fact, debutantes were dealt with by none other than Bob Dylan, in a single line: "Your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want."

Apparently, Mimi discovered what JFK wanted, only 4 days into her internship.

Mimi did not, apparently, fall into ruin or lead a life much worse than her mother would have hoped for her. Certainly, her life, as the lives of my public school mates was worlds better than what we would have led in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then called.

But what of happiness? Did my mates, or Mimi's cohort live lives which felt wonderful?

She speaks of the electric feeling she had when she arrived at the White House, that she was part of something really important, that her life mattered, that she mattered. Of course, this idea, like the idea of love may simply be a delusion.

Don Draper tells Ms. Menken, the Jewish heiress who runs a large Manhattan department store, that love, that electric jolt which changes your life and transports you to a life of ecstatic hope is all a delusion, and he ought to know delusion because that's what he does for a living, in advertising.

I very much like Ms. Alford for never saying how sorry she was for her part in JFK cheating on his wife. She says now she is only a little sorry she had not been more sorry, but that is the socially correct thing to say. Fact is, JFK was looking for outside business and Mimi was not hurting Jacqueline Kennedy, or threatening JFK's home life or political life. She was simply enjoying the ride and she is honest enough to say she's glad she had it.

It made her happy then.

When you look at life among the garbage merchants, in a teeming, sweltering country like India, like China, like any African nation, you might say, "You can keep reality; I'll take the life of fantasy and illusion any day."