Kathleen Marple Kalb's Blog, page 16

GETAWAY TIME!

In the newsroom, we call it the Summer Slump. The Professor and the Imp call it Break. The schmancy people in the Hamptons call it the Season. My writer friends just call it August, and sigh because they know nothing good – or bad -- will happen until after Labor Day.
Whatever you call it, you can thank the late 19th century for your summer break.
Until then, taking more than a day or two off was only for people who were deathly ill, or taking care of someone who was. The very idea was an offense to the whole concept of work ethic that so many Americans held dear. People, unless they had the sheer good fortune to be born wealthy, were expected to work for their keep on a daily basis.
But then, a few things happened to move the needle.
Unions started to succeed in their push for eight-hour days, safer working conditions – and actual time off.
Schools started to adopt calendars with longer breaks in the summer, and not just so kids could work in the fields. In some communities at some times, farm work did play a role…but it was just as possible that the length of the year was determined by the amount of money the school district had to pay teachers. Not to mention the fact that most of the really serious farm work happens at planting and harvest – spring and fall – not summer.
Another big reason for summer vacations was the rise of an urban or suburban middle class. That meant more families with more money and time off to take a break.
The Victorian housewife also had a role to play. With their men working in city offices, and their children out of school for weeks at a time, many mothers started wanting to go somewhere cool, clean and safe.
So they did.
Resorts and summer rentals exploded anywhere families could reach by a reasonable train or wagon ride. This is the beginning of the summer seasons in the Catskills and more.
Families of even relatively modest means started sending the wife and children to a cabin or resort for weeks at a time. It was intended as a break for everyone, getting the family away from the heat, grime and danger of the city in the summer, and giving Dad a little bachelor time. Of course he wasn’t supposed to take advantage, and Mom wasn’t supposed to acknowledge it…but…
The family summer holiday remained a tradition for decades – it was still very much a thing as late as the 1950s, when it was the plot device for “The Seven-Year Itch” starring Marilyn Monroe as the temptation for a bachelor dad.
Eventually, as more women started working, and businesses tightened up their rules, the months-long vacations tapered off…and many of us would be thrilled to get a few days at the shore now.
Still, though, even if you don’t take the month off, there’s no question that the old-fashioned work ethic drops off a good bit in August -- and everyone needs a break. So don’t be too annoyed if it takes a while to get a reply to that email. And don’t rush to return mine.

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THEY SWAM WITH THEIR BOOTS ON

“She took the boots off when she went in the water, right?”
That’s what a friend asked recently when I showed her a picture of a 19th century bathing costume.
My first response was: “Boots? What boots?”
We already knew Victorian swimwear was a long way from even the most modest modern gear. Sure, there are a significant minority (including me) who wear legging swimsuits and rashguard shirts for modesty, sunburn protection, or some combination of the two. But nobody’s out there splashing around in several layers of wool.
With boots.
If you’re like me, it takes you a while to get down to the boots.
The rest of the outfit is wild enough.
When swimming became a socially acceptable activity for mixed-gender groups, instead of slipping off to skinny-dip in the nearest body of water, people needed something to wear. As usual in matters of dress, men were more concerned with comfort than modesty, and their swimwear evolved from the wool long underwear that was common at the time.
Women’s clothes, though, were much more about coverage than comfort, never mind safety. Well after the turn of the 20th century, women were still wearing full wool union suits with dresses over them, or long-sleeved dresses with wool stockings in the water. You’ll note two mentions of wool there – for good reason.
We associate wool with warm winter gear, but it was actually a pretty good material for swim stockings. In the right knit, it’s breathable and handles water well. Cotton, the other possibility, gets soggy and loses its shape pretty quickly. (Nobody would wear silk stockings in the water – if you could even get them, you’d save them for your best ballgown.)
Still, nobody wants to be running around in all those layers at the beach – and for sure not in the water. Long skirts and long hair looked nice, but you’ll note that almost as soon as women started swimming competitively, you start seeing bathing caps and more streamlined suits.
Now, about those boots.
They really WERE boots. I’d thought maybe it was just the way things looked in the illustrations or photos, but nope, women wore canvas boots at the beach – and you can still find them online!
Boots in general were the signature footwear of the time. Men, women, and children wore boots for almost everything outside the house. A woman might have a pair of high-heeled slippers for her fanciest evenings…but she might as easily wear satin boots.
So it’s really no surprise that women would wear boots to the beach. Swim boots were usually black or cream-colored canvas, with laces. Regular boots sometimes came in canvas, so that wasn’t really unique.
But the soles were. Unlike street boots, which had leather or rubber soles, swim boots usually had canvas soles. Overall, surviving models look a lot like boxing shoes, between the laces and the flat, thin sole.
The end result was a relatively light, flexible shoe that would provide some protection from any hazards in the water.
Note “relatively” light. You’d still be paddling around out there with a bunch of wet canvas laced to your feet. No wonder women ditched the shoes as soon as they started competitive swimming.
But swim boots live on today (beyond the vintage ones on Etsy!). Those water shoes you wear at the beach are direct descendants of them…if just a little cuter.

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HOT AND DANGEROUS

Depending on where you are, it’s been a rough summer, or a record-setting disaster, and it’s not over yet. Even so, we’re confronting this misery with a lot of modern conveniences that people didn’t have in the 19th century – like air conditioning, refrigeration, and sanitation for starters.
In the Heatwave of 1896, most New Yorkers were pretty much on their own.
It’s hard to be sure exactly how hot it got. One writer suggests that if temperatures were in the mid-90s on gauges placed high on buildings, it was probably closer to 120 on the black asphalt. The precise number wasn’t really important as the sun beat mercilessly down, turning the pavement to a grill, and tenements to roasters.
Those tenements were some of the worst, and most dangerous, places to be. People were packed in at levels that we can’t imagine now, and it was stuffy on a good day. During the heatwave, residents did the only thing they could, hanging out windows and climbing onto roofs for any breath of air they could find.
It didn’t save them.
Hundreds died inside from heat stroke, especially babies, who were the first casualties because their tiny bodies don’t regulate temperature as well. The climbers didn’t fare much better. Deaths from falls became so bad that the city opened up parks for sleeping.
The other group that suffered most is the same one that suffers today: outdoor laborers. The majority of people who died were actually working-class men, who had to go out there and do whatever backbreaking job they usually did, only on streets that held the heat and radiated it back at them.
At first, the City didn’t do much, leaving it to people to just deal with it as best they could. As the heat wore on, the death toll rose, and the sheer misery increased, the outcry grew. And finally, when it was almost over, leaders decided to act. The Public Works Department re-arranged shifts so its men (and they were all men then) didn’t have to work in the heat of the day, and started opening fire hydrants to give people a chance to cool off.
And the Police Commissioner brought out the ice.
The Commissioner, a fellow by the name of Theodore Roosevelt, gave away free ice from police stations and made sure it was taken into the tenements. He learned a lot about his fellow New Yorkers and their lives, and at least one writer (Ed Kohn, who literally wrote the book on the heatwave: HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN, 2010) believes the experience helped shape his later policies as president.
After ten days, the heat finally broke.
For the survivors, it would be a terrible memory, and if they lived long enough, a wonderful story with which to torment their grandchildren. But this time, when Grandpa said he lived through the worst heat wave ever, he wasn’t exaggerating for effect.
There’s also some truth to the walking to school through three feet of snow thing…but that’s another post.

(Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments)

BETTER NOT SOAK UP THE SUN!

Yes, the Victorians were obsessed with fresh air (Queen Victoria herself never saw a window she didn’t want to open!) and they were pretty fond of sunshine, too. But they were not at all interested in what a day out in all the light and air would do to a lady’s skin. In the late 1800s, there were no reliable sunscreens, and no really good ways to deal with the after-effects of a sunburn beyond home remedies like buttermilk to ease the pain or lemon juice for the freckles and discoloration. Not to mention the fact that the idea of a status suntan was still several decades away.
In the Gilded Age, we are still very much in the era of fashionable pallor (and all of that whiteness carries plenty of its own issues). For all of what we’d now consider the wrong reasons, the ladies were absolutely determined to avoid sun damage with any means they had. Problem was, they didn’t have very many.
So it was umbrellas and parasols. Big, serviceable ones for the beach, and cute little ones for the promenade, but always something. Fashion plates always show ladies walking with them, and it seems like a spiffy fashion statement. Indeed it was, but before sunscreen and a fast way home, a lady needed to be prepared for anything.
Not just with the parasol, either. I recently posted some lovely vintage postcards on social media, and the first thing one friend said was, “Wow, look at all the clothes!” As in – all of the layers of clothes! Now it’s true that on any given day, a respectable woman would have at least four or five layers on (combinations – that’s underwear to you, a couple of petticoats, shirtwaist, jacket and possible coat), but back then the beach required one to add to the ensemble, not delete!
On a very hot day, the layers would be lightweight and white, but they’d still be there. Long sleeves and high necks were modest, of course, and that was important for a respectable lady in daytime…but they were equally helpful in protecting exposed skin from the sun.
Then, come the accessories.
A hat, of course, and even if the current fashion was for a frilly little nod in the direction of millinery, sun protection required a serious hat. Broad-brimmed straw hats never really went out of fashion in the summer; they might be trimmed up differently, depending on the colors and preferences of the moment, but it was hard to argue with a style that did such a good job of covering the face, and often the neck and decollete as well. Veils, too, were often part of the picture, whether full face (popular when driving) or just tied around the hat to be pulled out for more cover as needed.
Don’t forget the gloves. Almost as important as the face were smooth hands. While the amount of work involved in running any basically clean and decent home was mind-boggling, most ladies weren’t doing that much of it. And they certainly weren’t willing to risk their dainty hands in the sun. So gloves it was. Long with a short-sleeved dress, short for a wrist-length sleeve, often with sweet little buttons at the wrist, and various adorable trimmings.
Pretty, and ready for the sun. Now if we could just find a good book to read on the beach…

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WATCH THIS

If you think about a Victorian lady wearing a watch, it’s probably one of those pretty gold pieces pinned to her bodice. But women actually started wearing wristwatches before men did.
Watches had been around as jewelry since the 16th century, when German makers created the first “clock watches,” which were pretty large by our standards, and worn on a chain or pinned to (heavy!) clothing. Fun fact: they had only an hour hand, which was state of the art at the time.
As watch technology improved, the pieces became smaller and more affordable (sound familiar?) they evolved into two types: pocket-watches for men, and pendants for women. The pocket-watch shape was pretty much set in the 1600s, though styles changed and mechanisms became more sophisticated. King Charles II would have no trouble recognizing the watch worn by Prince Albert almost two hundred years later.
For women, the shapes and styles changed a bit, too, but most ladies were still wearing pendants around their necks or pinned to their clothes until the 19th century. Some historians point out that Queen Elizabeth I got an “arm watch” as a gift from her very good friend Robert Dudley…but one trinket doesn’t make a trend. The first wristwatch that mattered from a fashion standpoint was made in about 1810, by the watchmaker Breguet for the Queen of Naples.
Soon, other major watchmakers got into the act, and a lovely jeweled watch was a fashionable accessory for upper-class women. And women only.
Men wore pocket watches. And proudly. A pocket watch, and particularly a gold one, was a symbol of success. A man would pass his watch down to his son, and they often stayed in families. Watches could be a first family heirloom for the rising middle classes, and there are still plenty of people who cherish Grandpa or Great-Grandpa’s watch.
And they’re probably pocket watches, unless Great-Grandpa kept his soldier’s kit.
The first men’s wristwatches showed up during the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century, and they were a pretty standard item for World War I soldiers. Outside the service, though, gentlemen still preferred pocket watches.
By the 1930s, men’s wristwatches were an accepted thing, but they still hadn’t completely displaced the pocket watch. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when a wristwatch was positioned as a necessary professional tool that they became the standard for men, and the pocket-watch became the interesting retro accessory that it still is.
Women were much earlier adopters on wristwatches. And no wonder. As they threw off the heavy Victorian outfits, there were fewer places to pin a watch. More, as women moved out of the home and into the workforce, they needed a reliable, practical way to keep track of time. Some workers needed them more than others; there’s a great scene in one of my favorite old Cherry Ames books in which she admires her nurse’s watch.
Evening watches were also a thing for women. Unlike men, who often bought – and still buy – one status piece and wear it all the time, many ladies had at least a practical and a showy one, and sometimes more.
Many of those old pieces are still around and still cherished, because there’s something truly magical about measuring your hours the same way someone did so many years ago.

Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!

LEAVE YOUR (STRAW) HAT ON

Boater or broad-brim, the straw hat was the official headgear of summer in the 19th century. Even in today’s sea of ballcaps and buckets, straw hats still turn up on the street, and especially the beach.
People have been weaving straw into hats to shield their faces from sunlight for centuries; historians say men wore them for field work in Asia and Africa in the Middle Ages, and ladies were wearing them in their gardens by at least the 1700s.
By the Victorian era, a big sun hat was an essential part of every lady’s wardrobe. With no reliable sunscreen, and very limited treatments for sun damage (buttermilk and lemon juice!) that broad brim was one of the few ways to avoid a painful and embarrassing burn.
Interestingly, though, toward the turn of the 20th century, the big wide hats that had been standard women’s sun wear for at least a hundred years fell out of favor, as women borrowed yet another style from the fellas: the straw boater.
For men, the straw boater hat was (and is) a marker of upper-crust style. Though the style originally began with the rowers on Venetian canals – it’s much more associated with the gentlemen of Oxford and their American Ivy League counterparts. Boaters were considered semi-formal hats, and gentlemen wore them with their summer dress suits.
Boaters were such a thing that there was a specific day to switch from the felt hat to the straw boater in the spring – and back in the fall. Each city had its own “Straw Hat Day,” and “Felt Hat Day.” As late as the 1960s, the New York Times still marked it!
No surprise, then, that when ladies were borrowing men’s suits and dress shirts and adapting them to a more modern wardrobe as dressmaker suits and shirtwaists, that they also grabbed the boater. A lady’s boater was often a fairly small affair, perched on her hair, held in place with a hatpin (which are a post of their own someday!) and more useful for style than sun protection.
That’s why you often see women wearing boaters and carrying parasols – if you can’t rely on your hat for shade, you’ll have to get it some other way.
And then there’s the Panama hat.
It’s not really a Panama hat – they can be made in Panama, but the idea of making hats from palm fiber in a special tight weave started in Ecuador, and many of the best ones still come from there. The hats were around before Theodore Roosevelt, but when the then-president wore one to visit the Panama Canal construction zone in 1906, the name stuck for good.
These days, we may not think of Theodore Roosevelt as a fashion leader (even if Tom Selleck sure seems to be taking style cues from him on “Blue Bloods”) but in the early 1900s, Teddy was hot. The white suits and Panama hats from that trip weren’t groundbreaking, but they became iconic.
Straw hats are still around, of course, whether they’re a top-notch Panama – think thousands of dollars – or a cheap beach topper, and they’re still a symbol of summer. And they’re still easier than a parasol for keeping off the sun!

Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!

SEND A POSTCARD

To modern collectors, vintage postcards are a beautiful window into the past. A way to peer back into a former world, and a chance to see things that don’t exist any more.
For the first collectors, though, picture postcards were new and exciting.
Postcards themselves weren’t new.
Early mail services always had a few folks who would scribble something on a card and send it through the post, but at first, they were homemade one-offs and not a standard postal offering. The first official postcard, in fact, was a hand-painted design a British writer mailed to himself in 1840, using a penny stamp.
(Fun fact: the design is a caricature of postal workers, and experts believe the creator, Theodore Hook, intended it as a joke. Nobody’s laughing now; the piece recently sold for more than 31-thousand pounds.)
Cards showed up in the U.S. a few years later, and initially, they were mostly for advertising. Soon, greeting cards became a thing, too, as the cost of printing dropped. Many vintage valentines and Christmas cards are in postcard form.
While souvenir cards were printed for big events several times in the 19th century, the experts date the first true picture postcard to 1893. That’s when the enterprising folks at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition took government-issued penny postcards and printed images of World’s Fair buildings on the blank side. They charged twice the price and sold boatloads of them. In fact, they’re still around, and still viewed as the first collectible postcard.
And the party was on.
Soon, most destinations had postcards, and people were happy to snap them up and send them off with a “Wish you were here.”
The timing was great; postcards became widely available just as the burgeoning middle class was starting to have the money and time to go places. And what better way to celebrate the visit, and spark a little friendly envy, than to send a postcard home?
When the postcards arrived, they were often too special to just read and discard.
Some people kept them in boxes, but many put them in albums.
And few folks were above mailing themselves a few nice postcards for their own album.
A postcard collection was a real status symbol, a statement that you’d been places and seen things, and had friends who’d done the same.
It’s no surprise that Ella Shane has a carefully curated one. If anyone would want to keep a record of her travels and not incidentally her prosperity, it’s our Lower East Side orphan made good as an opera star. Ella’s especially fond of the more exotic cards – San Francisco, the desert, Europe.
Like many others, though, she also cherishes ones from friends and family, even if they just show a generic Staten Island beach.
So when she sits down with the Duke to look through the album in A FATAL OVERTURE, they’re doing a classic courting-couple activity…but there’s a lot more in the room.
For Ella, that postcard album is a record of where she’s been and how far she’s come. And they’re pretty too.

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EARLY TO RISE

Sleeping in was not a Victorian thing. A respectable lady was awake at respectable hour to tend to her home and family. Oh, yes, those decadent aristocrats who stay up until the wee hours dancing at their nasty parties no doubt need to sleep deep into the midday, but, as Ella Shane’s upright and rather terrifying Aunt MaryKat would happily point out at any opportunity, “decent people keep decent hours.”
And really, while most folks didn’t express it with the asperity of Aunt MaryKat, people outside the highest upper-class circles generally followed the old advice generally attributed to Ben Franklin about early to bed and early to rise. For women, much of the “early to bed” part was sheer exhaustion. Even if you had servants (and most even minimally comfortable people had at least one), you still had to tell them what to do, and usually work alongside them to accomplish the most basic tasks. Just getting breakfast on the table could be a multi-hour production, never mind cleaning up after it. More, blacking the stove and scouring skillets was a treat compared to the dreaded laundry day. That meant every female in the house was awake before the birds, and hard at the weekly boiling, scrubbing, and ironing required to keep everyone clean and next to godliness.
No wonder women hired cooks and sent out the laundry the second they could afford to do so!
With all of that work to start the day, sleeping late was inherently suspect; you’re in bed when you should be up and doing your part. Add in the association with those questionable high society types, not to mention the fact that the only women who were out late at night were the sort respectable females aren’t supposed to know about…and you have plenty of ladies who are very motivated to get up early and make sure everyone knows it.
Which brings us to Ella, who absolutely must sleep late on occasion. Her mentor, Madame Lentini, following the advice of many health experts of the time, insisted that she should always make sure to get a good night’s sleep (eight hours or so by Victorian standards, just like ours). But if the clock starts at two or three, after a performance, perhaps a small family snack and a relaxing medicinal sherry, you’re still well past any wakeup time that most people would consider decent – especially Aunt MaryKat.
All of that makes Ella more than a little defensive about sleeping in – pointing up one of the very few areas where our rather modern diva is a truly old-fashioned girl. So that’s why, when she comes downstairs around eleven-thirty the morning after a benefit in A FATAL FINALE, she reminds us that she is practicing discipline, not decadence. For a Lower East Side orphan made good, it’s bad enough to be doing something vaguely not respectable – but truly intolerable that anyone might think she was lacking in work ethic.
So if you’re wondering why on earth Ella feels the need to justify sleeping in, even though she works all night, comes straight home from her show, and tucks herself in like a good maiden lady…it’s because she can almost hear Aunt MaryKat’s sharp voice: “Well, it must be nice to be able to just lie abed!”
She’s too nice to suggest that a little extra sleep might improve Aunt MaryKat’s humor. But I’m not!

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THE GLORIOUS FOURTH

The Founding Fathers (and Mothers) would not recognize the way we celebrate a lot of holidays these days, but they’d fit right in at a Fourth of July party.
Food and fireworks were at the center of early festivities too, if a lot looser on the safety rules.
It was just as John Adams would have wanted it – in a letter to Abigail, he called for massive nationwide celebrations including parades, shows, illuminations and more. The new country took his advice and Independence Day quickly became an excuse for a grand summer party.
Mr. Adams, though, would not have approved of the way the festivities evolved in New York; Tammany Hall, the infamous political machine, ran the party for most of the 19th century, providing feast and fun in return for votes and clout. Originally, the festivities were a sort of big open street fair with food booths near City Hall.
The neighbors didn’t much like that and spent several decades working to stamp out the party. Eventually, they succeeded – in handing over the event to Tammany Hall. One late 19th century writer observed with a distinctly disapproving sniff that it had become a holiday for little boys and the political machine.
Whoever was running it, though, everyone could still agree that food and fireworks were the center of the party.
Some things are familiar; plenty of people still mark the Fourth with a pig roast. Pickled oysters, not so much. It made sense at the time, though. Oysters were not in season in the summer, at least partly because of the possibility of illness from contaminated water, so the only way you were going to get a fast and simple meal of oysters was to preserve them.
Another treat is something we still enjoy – but not on July 4th: egg nog! While we associate it with the winter holidays, egg nog was actually a year-round festive drink in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was a special-occasion treat because of the huge amount of eggs – and especially the sugar and spices, both of which were expensive and sometimes hard to get. Not to mention the rum or brandy.
Lobster was also often on the menu. And it’s worth remembering that for a very long time, lobsters were poor people’s food because they were plentiful and cheap.
For dessert? Pineapple – very exotic at least until the late 19th century – and various puddings. Thanks to unreliable refrigeration, ice cream was a very high-end delicacy until the late 19th century. (That’s a whole other post!)
So what about the fireworks?
Well, that’s the scary part. Remember that writer who called it a holiday for little boys? He meant that the boys were setting off the fireworks. In the days before federal safety standards, no one thought much of allowing the little guys to run around with firecrackers. Before you clutch your pearls, though, don’t forget that a lot of us grew up waving sparklers around, and they’re not exactly harmless.
Leaving the pyrotechnics to the pros is no great loss – I’ll vote for the Macy’s Spectacular every year! But it might just be fun to bring back the egg nog…or maybe make it into ice cream!

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NOT THE MARRYING KIND

They didn’t have out and proud in 1899, but they certainly had gay people.
Probably not a revelation, but definitely a good place to start when we’re talking about Ella Shane’s cousin Tommy Hurley, one of my favorite characters for a bunch of reasons.
He’s a smart businessman, a standup guy, an avid history buff, and a devout Catholic. He’s also “not the marrying kind,” which is how Ella describes him. Close family and friends would know exactly what that meant.
And, since Tommy’s a former boxing champ, anyone who wasn’t close enough to trust with the truth would not ask too many questions. Tommy has a good bit more space to live his life than many gay people did, thanks to the very prejudices that built the closet.
A boxing champion, a big, sturdy handsome fellow, could not possibly be a “sissy,” which was one of the less offensive descriptions of a gay man at the time. Tommy, of course, is well aware of that, since he took a fair amount of playground bullying before he got his full height and polished his right cross.
Ella, by the way, was part of his problem, and his staunchest defender. His kindness to his little orphan cousin (as she was at the time) marked him as “soft” to the tenement bullies, and may have sparked their suspicions. Ella knew it, and threw in on his side anytime she could.
For the adult Tommy, though, life is a lot easier.
And that boxing trophy is a big part of it. The stereotypes of the time mean a fighter is the manliest of the manly. It would be very difficult for anyone to wrap their brain around the idea of him as anything else.
Not just in 1899, either. Part of my inspiration for handling Tommy’s orientation came from an old episode of “All in the Family.” A friend of Archie Bunker’s, played by a big strapping hero type, comes out to him…and Archie doesn’t believe it. He can’t process the idea that a “real man” could be gay.
Offensive stereotype for sure, but an opening for a person hoping to live some version of their truth in a closeted time. Tommy takes that opening and builds a life with it.
People assume that he lives with Ella because she needs him to run her business. (Yep, more stereotypes!) Nobody’s especially bothered by his close friendships with other men, either. Remember, in the 1800s, it wasn’t unusual for men or women to have intense same-sex friendships that they experienced and discussed in terms we would consider almost romantic.
Those friendships, by the way, are exactly that, most of the time. Tommy’s best friend, Father Michael Riley, is emotionally closer to him than anyone – including Ella. But there’s nothing else going on; as observant Catholics, neither Tommy nor Father Michael would even consider the possibility that there could be. As far as Tommy’s concerned, Father Michael’s heart belongs to God. Full stop.
But, things are a little different with Cabot Bridgewater. The patrician uncle of one of Ella’s stage-door johnnies, he shares Tommy and Ella’s interests in books, baseball and making the world a better place. Cabot, who’s never been married and has none of the usual nasty habits of rich single men, has been hanging around Washington Square a lot lately. And there’s a good reason for that…

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