A FOURTH OF JULY STORY FOR THE JULY 4TH WEEKEND

In December, 1957, having completed the active-duty portion of my National Guard obligation, I returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to take up a delayed postdoctoral fellowship prior to beginning my instructorship at Harvard. I moved into an apartment in a converted one family home at 12 Prentiss St. off Massachusetts Avenue north of Harvard Square. My apartment was on the first floor and above me lived Hugh Amory, a graduate student in the English department. Hugh was a member of the Boston Amorys, an old upper crust family that thought of Harvard as the neighborhood school. I became friendly with Hugh, and his family “took up” me and my girlfriend, Cynthia, perhaps amused by a nonreligious Jew and the daughter of a self-made Catholic businessman. The Amorys had an in town home and an estate on the North Shore where they summered. Hugh’s birthday, it turned out, was July 4 and the family had adopted the custom of celebrating it with a big Fourth of July party at their summer home. In 1958 Cynthia and I were invited to come along to the shindig.

Cynthia and I pooled our funds and bought Hugh a magnum of champagne as a present. Then we put on our Sunday best and drove out to the party. As soon as we arrived, it was clear that we were going to be completely out of place. Everyone else was wearing T-shirts and cut off jeans and beach sandals. The party was a clambake – the only actual clambake I have ever seen or attended. A big pit had been dug in which hardwood had been burned down to glowing embers and then layers of seaweed and clams and seaweed and lobsters had been put down to cook. In those days, oddly enough, lobster was actually cheap and I had on several occasions cooked one in my apartment. I had inherited my taste for lobster from my father, who would work over a lobster cracking open the claws and painstakingly sucking the bits of lobster meat from each of the little legs. When I went up to the table to get my food, Hugh’s mother was just ahead of me. Mrs. Amory was a rather flamboyant lady who was rumored to have played the piano with the Boston Pops many years earlier. After the death of her husband, Hugh’s father, she had married a stuffy white shoe lawyer named Phillips Ketchum. One evening when Cynthia and I had dinner with the Ketchums at their in town residence, Mr. Ketchum, in an attempt to make me feel at ease, had told stories about the sole “Hebrew gentleman” who had been in his Harvard class.

At the food table, Mrs. Amory picked up a lobster, pulled off its tail, and tossed the rest into a barrel. She must have seen my appalled look because she turned and said, laughing, “life is too short.” I took my food and tried to blend in, which was difficult considering how I was dressed. I sat down with a group of young people who were chattering gaily about the Boston Arts Festival, a big summer event. The young man sitting next to me on the ground seem to know a good deal about the festival so in an attempt to make conversation I asked him politely “are you with the festival?” He turned to me and said coolly, “I run it.”

That was my only encounter with the Boston upper crust, those folks whose ladies had their hats and did not buy them. After one more year on Prentiss Street I moved into Winthrop House as a resident tutor and lost touch with Hugh. I think he ended up working at the Harvard library.