In New York everyone belongs to a minority group. This gives you pride in your roots and encourages you to feel everybody else is picking on you, which is one of the basic pleasures of the New York experience.
My group is called “the WASPs,” which is an acronymic word standing for “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” I did not want to join the WASPs but I was press-ganged into it. The reason I didn’t want to join was that the WASPs are the only minority who cannot have any fun.
All the other minorities are entitled to make a mess of Central Park once a year or paralyze traffic by marching on Fifth Avenue. They also enjoy the right to hold noisy demonstrations and tell all the best ethnic jokes.
All the WASPs can tell are Harvard jokes. This is because all WASPs are supposed to have gone to Yale, or at least Princeton, or to act as if they had, even if they haven’t. Instead of marching down Fifth Avenue or eating wonderful old WASP food in an annual Central Park WASP Festival, WASPs have to sit around dim, musty clubs reading the Yale Alumni Bulletin and talking about their ancestors.
I have never liked clubs since I was sneered at in one in Baltimore many years ago for wearing a green double-breasted suit with a red stripe and unmatching two-tone shoes.
Talking about ancestors, however, is very enjoyable. Upon first coming to New York, I used to do it frequently among friends like Fried, Ciccelo, Moynihan and Leventhal. When they reminisced about ancestors who had been beaten by Cossacks, tortured by Fascists and shot by the Black and Tans, I told them about my great-great aunt who had been fatally gnawed by a bear.
This did not please Fried, Ciccelo, Moynihan or Leventhal. It was bad form for a WASP to have an ancestor with nutrient appeal to bears. WASP ancestors were supposed to spend their time knitting samplers, extolling the virtues of sexual repression and Brooks Brothers stylings.
Friends who belonged to other minorities seemed to think it was cheating for a WASP to talk of interesting ancestors. It was useless to protest that I did not want to be a WASP and, in fact, didn’t even qualify since my normal hue was closer to gray than white. Efforts to escape destiny with a frail joke about my grayness—“I’m a GASP, not a WASP”—cut no ice. In New York one had to belong to a minority, and the only one I came close to fitting was the WASPs.
There was no escaping. My wife, who is pink and Celtic, was allowed to join the Women, a group which qualifies as a minority in New York, although they are in the numerical majority. This means she does not have to wear tweeds or pinstripes all winter, the way I do, and can talk about being oppressed whenever the mood is upon her and be sure of a sympathetic audience.
If she wants to reciprocate our friends’ invitations to knishes, pigs’ trotters or canelloni by inviting them to corned beef and cabbage, they respect her for loyalty to her edible roots. But if I invite them for a feast remembered from my own tradition—heaping platters of boiled kale and chitterlings, say—they regard me as a traitor to WASPism. WASPs are not allowed to like interesting food.
This seemed like tyranny at first. One began to feel paranoiac, persecuted. Why should I be forced to wear tweeds and pinstripes? To sit in clubs, which I hated, reading alumni bulletins which made me weep with boredom? If others could serve ravioli and blintzes to applause, why did chitterlings on my table merit nothing but contempt? Why did I have to have a great-great aunt who knitted samplers instead of getting gnawed by a bear?
The worst part was the sexual repression that one was supposed to exhibit on all possible occasions. No, on second thought, it wasn’t the sexual repression. It was the inability to have a mother like everybody else.
Members of all the other minority groups had mothers who had driven them, smothered them with love, worried about them, cherished ridiculous hopes for them, trained them in guilt and tyrannized them in emotional family relationships. In short, they had mothers.
As a WASP, I was not permitted a mother. Attempts to prove that I had one were met with knowing glances passed surreptitiously among my listeners. What does a WASP know about mothers? An old lady wearing tweeds and pinstripes and telling Harvard jokes—call that a mother?
WASPs don’t have mothers. They have old ladies sitting in dim, musty clubs reading the Vassar Alumnae Bulletin.