1901 (February/March 1998 | Volume: 49, Issue: 1)

1901

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February/March 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 1

Two men sit at the large windows of the Philadelphia Club on a Friday evening. The windows are open, it is early September, warm enough for that. The noise of Walnut Street has died down, because Philadelphia is not a crowded city with iron clangor. The men are second cousins, around forty, resembling each other not very much, one taller and leaner, less rubicund than the other, who has just returned from California. The latter has made an important decision. He will move to Pasadena. He is explaining his reasons. They include more than the legendary California weather. He and his wife—as much as himself, he insists, if not more—have sized up the civilities and people in Pasadena: urbane people, most of them Easterners, many of them Bostonians. (That is always a recommendation among proper Philadelphians, who have a sense of respect, because of a sense of intellectual inferiority, for the proper people of Boston.) He talks about some of those men and women, including a few recognizable family names; he speaks of the schools, the club, the theater, and the house they are about to have built, the gardening, the California flowers, the salubrious omnipresence of outdoor life year-round. Of course Pasadena is not Philadelphia, but that “not” carries at least a prospect of “not yet.” Already a civilization is developing there that will encompass and typify what is best in America. It amounts to more than a floriferous setting and a healthy climate; it is also a good place for the children to grow up, who will of course go on to their boarding schools and then colleges back in the East, no more than five days away from their parents by train. Yes, California is the West, with all of its pluses and with fewer and fewer of its minuses: civilization there is overcoming the pioneer roughness every day, sometimes incredibly fast, and the evidences of that evolution are all around.

It is a big move for a Philadelphian to leave and go to live in California, from a place where people move less than in any comparable city in the United States, where the web of family connections is as comforting as it is constricting, where respectability is the primary ideal, and not only in public. Queen Victoria has died in January … but Philadelphia is still quite Victorian (all right: Victorian-American). It is not fin de sißcle , not belle époque, and will not ever be Edwardian—because in Philadelphia the cult of respectability is inseparable from the cult of safety. That is, at least in part, the Quaker inheritance: the desire for safety, sometimes so rigid as to be uncomfortable. It is thus that his cousin and friend is not going to try to dissuade him, or even to ask more questions than are needed to stitch their conversation along. One of the reasons for this is the Philadelphia!! custom to refrain