Tolstoy knew very much what he was about when he wrote this famous first line of Anna Karenina, but few people really understand it until they are old enough to have a gander at their neighbors. The Carpenters, Booths, Lows, and Bristols were all very happy and secure in their happiness. The children were all blonde, blue-eyed, and well behaved. Husband and wife were faithful to each other, summered on the Vineyard, skied in Switzerland, and enjoyed their inherited wealth.
The men were well placed in business and the professions, their wives successful in their own right as volunteers and homemakers. Aside from Mrs. Booth's penchant for large flowered dresses, it was hard to tell them apart.
Of course each Townsend chair and Revere silver tea service was unique, and the Lows had a penchant for Persian carpets, but all in all these happy families were indistinguishable. The elder members of their families died old, peacefully, and at home; there were no squabbles about inheritance - there was plenty to go around, and the children were all successful in their own right - and disfiguring and disabling disease had missed them entirely.
More than the luck of the draw, it was healthy to be born well, and navigation through life's ups and downs with a full treasury and a Yale education always ensured smooth sailing. While less fortunate, envious neighbors kept waiting for crack in the marvelously polished and seamless armor of these favored families, it never came.
These neighbors, all unhappy, were indeed unhappy in unique and, for a small town, unusual ways. No one could have predicted that in 1957 Harold Potter would have been caught in flagrante delicto with the Orchard boy in his uncle's machine shop, an unlikely place for such an embrace, but sexual desire seems to have no limits, and Blanton Orchard's metalworks were just as good a sexual venue as any, despite the greasy tools and oil rags.
The Potters had been the mirror image of the Carpenters, Lows, et. al. - good schools, good manners, and a respectable summer home - but there had always been something creepy about the father, lurking, and somewhat suspicious. Nothing anyone could point to, no stains on his ties, no perennially loose collar; just something not right. Compared to the happy families down the street, something was off-kilter, awry...something waiting to happen, and when it did, it was no surprise.
Mrs. Potter stuck by her husband in the Fifties way, and for all intents and purposes her loyalty seemed merited. Harold shaped up nicely, that creepy seditious quality was all but gone, and no Orchard boy incidents occurred again. Until the Petrucci boy, son of the Italian grocer on Arch Street. Luigi Petrucci, either a product or cause of yet another unhappy family, was the femme fatale of New Brighton High School, who despite the probity and social conservativism of the time, was a flaming queer who never made any attempt to hide it; and so caught the attention of the besotted Harold Potter.
His relationship was as clandestine as that with the Orchard boy, but this time in an unpleasant root cellar beneath the abandoned Frisbee place where no one had bothered to clean out the rotten potatoes and onions after the Frisbees, another unhappy family, left town after the 'City Hall Scandal' when Bartlett Frisbee had embezzled $50,000, a hefty sum in those days.
It turned out the embezzlement was only the tip of the iceberg, for Bartlett couldn't keep away from the track, and even with the thousands embezzled from the city, he lost his shirt and Monmouth, Yonkers, and Pimlico.
A sidebar to the real story of Harold Potter and the Petrucci boy who had become, even at his young age, a moneymaker. The nastiness of the Frisbee root cellar tripled his ordinary price, but Harold simply could not keep away. He had never had a pretty boy before, and he would pay any price for ten minutes with him.
Meanwhile Angelo Petrucci, livid, ashamed, and brutally angry at this fairy he had somehow created was finally arrested for child abuse, and handcuffed and on his way to jail, he hurled the most unheard of, vile, homophobic epithets the town had ever heard. The happy families couldn't believe that such a person existed in their town, but that was their nature - so settled, accomplished, and successful in their ways were they, that the could not imagine the depths to which unhappy families descended.
Nothing of course changed over the years, and New Brighton retained its social divisions even despite the leveling ethos of the Sixties. As always the town was divided - the heirs and legatees of the industrial fortunes of an earlier era; the doctors and lawyers who handled their affairs; tradesmen and clerks; and the workers in the tool and dye factories which remained and grew after the big factories were sold and moved to China - but the essential division between happy and unhappy families remained.
Martha Anderson was a professor at Central Connecticut State University, and chair of the Department of Social Culture, a minor feature of the Liberal Arts Faculty, but popular because of its woke progressivism. Prof. Anderson demanded little of her students except buy-in to the ethos of the Department, and her classes were no more than disassembling screeds that used culture as a convenient context for the promotion of her own extreme liberal notions.
No one can hold such impossibly febrile and in her case discredited socialist ideals without some kind of leakage into family affairs. Prof. Anderson could not contain her academic anger at American society and a boiling hatred for political conservatism and brought it home with her. Such was her intemperance and growing mental imbalance that she was convinced of a narrowing perimeter of social justice and a universal infection hemming her in.
Her uncle, a conservative intellectual educated in the economics of Hayek, Friedman, and Adam Smith, a political satirist with a sharp eye for progressive overreach, and a profound social traditionalism which favored religion and marriage, was the enemy - an insidious, seditious traitor to political sensibility and the potential corrupter of her son, Adam, the apple of her eye, future progressive hero, good responsible citizen, and prized member of the new age of communality; and in one fell swoop she banned the uncle and his entire family from coming within a hundred miles of New Brighton.
What had been a tightly-knit extended family was now history, cancelled, and obliterated. The uncle, his wife, and the Professor's nieces and nephews were blindsided, sandbagged for no reason. The former integrity of a happy family was disassembled in an instant and tossed aside.
It gets worse. No marriage can survive such virulent animus, universal enmity, and viral hatred. When Donald Trump got re-elected, Prof. Anderson went completely off the rails and became a whirling dervish of uninhibited insanity, a St. Vitus' dancer, an apoplectic Mad Woman of Chaillot. In less than a year the marriage ended in divorce with all three family members thrown to the wind.
No one had ever seen such a woman in New Brighton, and the happy families could only say, 'No wonder', when the professor's family split. Martha Anderson had been unique in her political animus and on the asymptotes of the social bell curve; but it only takes one such individual to cause chaos.
Now, it has been said that happy families in their predictable similarity are the brakes to a vibrant, dynamic society. They in their rectitude, moral probity, and incessant goodness send just the wrong message to the rest of the upside down world which is in the vast majority.
Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a self-proclaimed vaudevillian. Without me, he tells Ivan, everyone would fall asleep in their traces. I do my villainy, my nasty tricks, my troublemaking just to wake people up. Somnolence is no way to live; and Tolstoy had the same idea. The families in Anna Karenina are unhappy in very distinctive, memorable ways, but without their vitality, sexual desire, and social ambition, where would Russian society be?
New Brighton is no different from any American Town. Thornton Wilder in his Our Town writes of Grover's Corners where everyone is happy, but looking down upon it from heaven, a young girl recently dead sees nothing but an artificially settled happiness and beneath it endemic unhappiness; so perhaps the world needs more Martha Andersons not fewer.
'God forbid', said a retired postal carrier who remembered both the affairs of 1957 and of the Anderson family.
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