Schorr Brief History of Kate Parker

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-0983-6336-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

A Brief History of Kate Parker is the story of a woman in search of tranquility and belonging. The novel follows the life of an ordinary American woman, Kate Parker, from her high-school years to her late twenties. Originally from Ohio, her prestigious eastern college completes her transformation into a provisional member of the upper middle class, though her status is menaced by an unsuccessful marriage and her limited income as a public-school teacher. A symposium given by a wealthy financier who has taken an improbable interest in public education leads to her world being irrevocably altered, but to what degree?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schorr, Daniel

Leseproben

II.

Millard College was founded in 1834 in the wooded mountains of northwestern Massachusetts by an idealistic minister (and abolitionist) named Isaiah Millard, with the backing of some enlightened merchants from Boston whose names would be forgotten soon enough. The college was not named after its founder until several years after his death, just following the Civil War; its original name had been “The Western College for Men.” Women were not admitted until the late 1940s, but now represented more than half the enrollment.

Eventually, everyone became more or less indifferent to the life and work of Isaiah Millard. His most tangible presence was his daguerreotype portrait, which was still included prominently in the college’s information materials (though almost in a spirit of irony). There was also the oil portrait of Millard that hung high in the foyer of the main administration building, but it was not illuminated, and dark colors predominated in it, except for the ones used to portray the face, which were pure white and a choleric red, perhaps to convey his sense of mission. Scarcely anyone, regrettably, took the time anymore to contemplate this depiction of Isaiah Millard and its competent romanticism.

There did still remain a trace of Isaiah Millard’s vision for a bastion of liberal thought and erudition in what was a wilderness at the time of the college’s founding. The thing that was so difficult for contemporary students to imagine was the proselytizing impulse behind Millard’s project. People would just as soon forget that, and so they did.

Existing side by side with his solicitude for “Negroes” was irascibility toward anyone who may have been put off by Millard’s brand of Protestant moral uplift. His letters and sermons denounced, with the wonderfully restrained indignation of the nineteenth century, not only the use of the word “savages,” but the depredations of white men in general. In many of his writings, though, it was evident that Millard had difficulty accepting that those of whom he disapproved (a long list) might have possessed some virtues. History would prove Millard correct in some of his convictions, though it would relegate most of his writings to obscurity.

If Millard had been able to travel forward in time, he would have been aghast at the lack of reverence for the canon of Western thought that prevailed at the institution he had founded at such great sacrifice (to be fair, who knows what he would have thought of our world in general, save for its stumbling progress toward equality). Upon graduating, the typical Millard College student was not so much ignorant of as simply unexposed to the Old Testament, classical, and for the most part, modern languages, mathematics, and even philosophy. There were numerous exceptions to this, but in the main, it was possible to leave Millard knowing quite a bit less than one should have had every right to expect from an institution enjoying the reputation it did (to say nothing of the tuition it charged).

What Millard College graduates may or may not have known was, however, somewhat beside the point. For over the generations, Millard College had been subtly transformed into an example of that institution that exists nowhere else save in the United States: the prestigious liberal arts college. And owing to the success of its evolution, what anyone learned or failed to learn at Millard was of distinctly secondary importance to the grace that was conferred on any fortunate person who happened to obtain a degree from it. Whether one had been raised in one of our nation’s favored places, where attending a college like Millard was a rite of passage, or whether one’s path to Millard had not been as clearly marked (as was the case for both Katie Leung and Kate Parker, though for vastly different reasons), the four years at Millard College left a transformative stamp. The Millard student was, from the moment of matriculation, separated from the common lot of humanity; he—or, as was ever more likely, she—would enjoy a nameless prestige that was, to the same degree that it was instinctually appreciated by those with influence and the right degree of wealth, the source of vague resentment to the masses living outside the enchanted circle occupied by Millard College and other similar institutions.

For most of the people Kate Parker knew or would have encountered in her part of Ohio, the name of Millard College would simply have been unrecognizable. This being the case, she was at least spared the embarrassment of being acknowledged as occupying, effectively, a higher station than her interlocutor. In notable contrast, in Katie Leung’s extended family, the Millard name was held in reverence. Through a kind of cultural telepathy, when older relations of Katie’s were told of their American-born young relative’s acceptance to Millard College, a knowing smile was brought about; the approbation was generous—and this was from people who had done little more than upbraid Katie and her siblings throughout their childhood. The words “Millard College” were enough on their own to soften, at least temporarily, the caring but often hard and unyielding hearts of Katie’s elders.

Millard College was at the heart of the American exception, the cultural entitlement (which has nothing to do with the material entitlement that commentators are always referring to) that has allowed generations of graduates—this current one not least of all – to strike out into the world forcefully and with unbeatable confidence, by dint of possessing a diploma from Millard or a hundred or so (but certainly no more than that) similar institutions. Once again, what one studied there mattered considerably less than the mere fact of having obtained the degree.

Anyone doubting the truth of the foregoing assertions might be directed to the small but growing contingent of Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, and so forth, who had begun to be a presence at Millard. A small campus in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts was able to exercise an irresistible pull on elites hailing from the opposite side of the world. What more proof did one need?

There are three paths to Millard, of which we shall be concerned with one. The well-known trajectory of the prestigious boarding-school student, or the elite high-school or private-school student from Newton, Chevy Chase, or some such place, for whom Millard College is almost inevitable, is not relevant here. Neither is the instance of the excessively privileged foreign student, just alluded to. Wealthy families of whatever geographic origin, it is often said and to little effect, are able to bring overwhelming resources to bear on the admission of their children to elite institutions; evidence of this was certainly not in short supply at Millard College. Kate Parker and Katie Leung, however, were part of the fully one quarter of the student body that arrived at Millard by a much less predetermined route; this was absolutely to the credit of those responsible for the college’s contemporary mission.

At a cost and sacrifice that would have been unimaginable to most of her classmates at Millard, Katie Leung’s grandparents had arrived not just penniless, but in crushing debt from mainland China, Katie’s father in tow. They built their livelihood in an industry (dry cleaning) that everyone associates with Chinese immigrants; it would be simple to assume that their success was inevitable, though it had been anything but that.

At Millard College, as it is at most elite institutions nowadays, snobbery is frowned upon; this made the condescension Katie experienced at Millard, if anything, the more hurtful. Though a few other Millard families earned their livings from successful small enterprises, none possessed a chain of dry cleaning stores (along with a substantial cleaning plant to serve them). Katie’s classmates did not consciously wish to hold her in lesser regard, yet because of her immigrant background and the manner in which her family made its living, on some level many of them clearly did so. Katie learned of her inferior status through revealing looks and the briefest, most innocuous-seeming of remarks; in her four years of college, she never devised an adequate way to respond.

Until she was eleven, Katie’s family had lived in a semi-dilapidated one-and-a-half bedroom apartment in Sunset Park, shared by Katie’s parents, brother and sister, and grandparents. Through brutal economizing, they at last saved enough for a down payment on a two-family house in Bensonhurst. Katie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins would live in the other half of the house.

The house had been occupied for over sixty years by the family of a recently deceased widow named Carlotta Di Paolo, whose long-departed children held absolutely no sentimental attachment to the place. Foremost in their minds was the house’s phenomenal appreciation in value, which their parents had purchased for a mere $80,000 in today’s dollars. The Leung family wasted no time in obliterating all traces of the life that had carried on there for three generations, with a particular lack of sentiment shown toward the arched partial walls between the common rooms—for decades this unassuming feature had been a distinguishing feature of the dwellings of New Yorkers aspiring to the middle class; today it is still common. At...