The End of Rocky's GOP

By Stephen Rascher

This novel recounts the sweeping changes in Republican politics from FDR to Trump and the impact of these changes on two Republican families from New England—the Fletchers and the Keegans.  Growing up in Connecticut, Nora Fletcher never cared for her parents' politics. Instead, she preferred spending time with her grandfather, Linton Fisker, on his standardbred horse farm in Bennington, New Hampshire.  Grandpa Fisker taught Nora harness racing and how to treat, train, and race his championship stock. He looked forward to the day when Nora would take over the Fisker Stock Farm and continue the customary trips to the winner's circle.  

Before Linton Fisker died, however, Marty, Nora's mother, and Lillian, Nora's grandmother, convinced "Papa" to change his will and not leave the farm to Nora but rather to her younger brother Ricky Fletcher, who showed no passion for horses. Like his mother Marty, Ricky was more interested in Republican politics, and to please his mother, Ricky married into a staunchly Republican family. As Republican politics turned more strident, combative, and exclusive, Lintie Fletcher, Ricky's son, became enamored with his grandmother's adoration of Donald Trump and a brand of Republicanism filled with extremist rhetoric and hatred.    

Although denied ownership of her grandfather's horse farm, Nora Fletcher never blamed her grandfather. Instead, she revered her memories of him, memories which helped her regain a sense of personal worth and dignity.  Yet she still faced a family which valued status and money more than they valued her.

245 pages      

Stephen R. Rascher teaches theater at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut, USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Rascher
• Release date: Mar 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386215004

Book preview

PART I

Chapter 1

Pitkin Street April 7, 2016

AROUND HER NECK, SHE wore a diamond-studded, golden horseshoe, formerly mounted on her grandfather’s tie clip, to keep close the memories of her grandfather—yet the horseshoe brought her very little luck.

Nora Fletcher, a twice-widowed 69-year-old, resided in a historic Greek Revival farmhouse on Pitkin Street. Built in 1838, the house was once the centerpiece of a working, Connecticut farm. Painted white to mimic a marble temple, its gable end with triangular pediment, pilastered corners, and evenly spaced windows overlooked the road. The front door, painted red and flanked by narrow sidelights, stared at the side yard where the driveway led to a red barn now converted to a two-car garage. A wooden porch, covered with a flat, canted roof supported by turned columns with fretwork brackets, sheltered the front entrance. A seasoned antique dealer, Nora became instantly enchanted with the house’s period style and the exterior’s smaller additions stretching back from the original dwelling, like extended nesting tables. On the interior, she adored the low ceilings and undersized doorways, the pitched, chestnut floors, and the decorative moldings.  

At one time, it was the residence of Mr. Henry Pitkin whose good deeds the town of Manchester eventually recognized and thus the street bears his name. Today, it is a long, residential street and Nora’s house marks mile three of a five mile, Thanksgiving turkey trot. Long before foot races became popular, Mr. Pitkin, inspired by hearing Fredrick Douglas speak at the Methodist church in the center of town in 1847, furnished a way station, a hidden space below the floor of a still-standing outbuilding, for runaway slaves trying to make it to freedom. It was a link in the Underground Railroad, the only site of its kind in the town.      

Andrew had often seen Nora picking up sticks in the yard or taking out the barrels to the curb but always kept driving, telling himself that one of these days he would stop. Since Andrew had known Nora’s parents and her younger brother, Ricky, he finally decided it was time to say hello. He parked in the driveway, walked across the flagstone terrace bordered with new spring daffodils, and knocked at the side door of the rear addition. After a period of silence, he turned toward the front door when he heard the side door open cautiously, Nora, hi, do you remember me?

Of course, Andy Tischler, Ricky’s friend. Hey, how are you? Dressed in jeans, a flannel checkerboard shirt, covered with a thin down vest and a collared thermal shirt below the flannel, Nora stepped out to the terrace to shake Andrew’s hand but with a wobble to her gait. She wore a chocolate-brown wig, which she tugged down lightly at the edges with the trembling fingers of her left hand. 

I thought I would stop and say hello since I drive by your charming farmstead every day on my way to work.

It’s not much of a farmstead anymore since the land has been swallowed up by housing developments, but I like it for its simple style and history, explained Nora.

The last time I saw you was at the memorial service for Ted at the town hall nine years ago. You were so busy that night, but your daughter Abby brought me to the head of the line because my kids were waiting in the car. It was a wonderful tribute to your husband. There were so many people there that I didn’t think that you would remember me.

Ted was on everything—the town zoning commission, the library board, and the board of directors for a while. I had so many people to greet that night. I was dazed by it all.

I remember seeing your parents that night—your father for the last time, I’m sorry to say, but I hear your mother is doing well at her new house on the farm in New Hampshire. I remember that Ricky told me you overcame cancer, but I guess that was quite a long time ago now.

It was twenty years ago this month, and I recovered from that but the medication almost killed me. I had David Epstein, who’s a great oncologist, working on me at the time, Nora recalled.

David Epstein, that’s Ricky and Regan’s friend who is at UConn.

No, no, no, she emphasized, blowing out bursts of breath. Harvard, Harvard, Harvard! That is where David went to school. He’s the vice-president of UConn Medical Center now." Her eyes passed from side to side as she began to realize that Andrew meant that Epstein worked at University of Connecticut Medical School, not that he had ever been a UConn undergraduate. Andrew recalled that Nora, like her family, had always placed great emphasis on intelligence and where people went to college, which perplexed Andrew considering Nora’s final choice.

In the spring of 1965, Nora’s dad, George Fletcher had grand plans for his daughter who would graduate near the top of her class of eight hundred students from the town’s public high school. Yet Nora was poised on the cusp between the hope of a resurgent women’s movement in 1969, encapsulated in Hillary Clinton’s graduation speech at Wellesley, and the early 1960s when a male professor from Connecticut told a female colleague that writing a book about Squanto, the Wampanoag Indian, was not an appropriate topic for a white woman.

During Nora’s senior year, Mr. Fletcher and his daughter drove to Cambridge for an interview at Radcliffe.  The interviewer, an older, prissy type who wore thin, wire-rims, glanced at Nora as she addressed her father with a condescending air, You realize, Mr.  Fletcher, that today the lion’s share of the young women here have attended private school. Muffling his outrage, Mr. Fletcher, a graduate of the Kennebunk Public Schools in Maine but also of Bowdoin and MIT, stood up, nodded to his daughter and both silently left the room. In the end, Nora opted for Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts, a two-year finishing school, which offered classes on poise and elocution and the same college that her mother had attended in the 1940s. Nora chose to throw in with the housekeepers and domestic heroines of the 60s instead of attending an academically rigorous four-year college and pursuing a career. She did not choose the meaning behind the words of Nancy Scheibner’s poem that Hillary Clinton quoted in her commencement speech:

In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds

And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.

It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.

And once those limits are understood

To understand that limitations no longer exist.

Nora decided to hang her future on a narrow peg. Even though she looked like her father and had her father’s brains, she was not, unfortunately, her father’s gender. Instead of pursuing a rigorous academic path, Nora took her surplus mental energy and poured it into a love for antiques. Her desire for old treasures started when she was a little girl and her close relationship with her grandfather, Linton Fisker, who owned and raced harness horses in Barrington, New Hampshire. Mr. Fisker collected aged items and drew Nora into the mysteries and stories behind them. 

When Andrew was fresh from high school, Nora, who was four years older, tended to  hang him on a narrow peg too. She always gave him the impression that she thought that he was not very bright and just her brother’s doofus friend. In fact, the whole family gave Andrew this impression. Whenever he spoke with Nora, she would invariably contradict what he was saying. She even did it again as they became reacquainted at her Pitkin Street home. He did not remember exactly the context, but he remarked, Builders don’t put up large developments with vast streets of new homes as they did when we were kids. But she just couldn’t help herself.

Yes, they do. There is that development behind Shady Glen Dairy. It seems that if there is one stretch of vacant land, some contractor is ready to put up houses on it. Andrew dropped the subject, but her comment reminded him of her ever-present, condescending tone, lording over him and Ricky, her brother, whenever she had the chance. During a college weekend, when he raked and bagged the fall leaves in the yard for her and her first husband Graham Garrett, Nora told her brother, Andy isn’t like Burly who works at a steady rate and never looks at his watch. Of course, Burley, actually Thomas but Burley because of the overabundance of hair that covered his muscular body, was a student at Amherst College while Andrew attended state college. Andy, on the other hand, looks at his watch too frequently. This comment was code for Burley is very intelligent and has a mature sense of time passing steadily while Andy is small brained, impulsive, devoid of high intelligence and thus needs to check the time frequently.  

Nora had Andrew convinced that she was a genius until New Year’s Eve of 1969. There was a party at her and Graham’s house in Tolland. The married couple’s first house was a raised ranch in a rural development, and Nora had invited Ricky and Andrew along with their girlfriends to celebrate the new 70s decade with Nora, Graham and their friends who had just graduated from college. It was semester break during their freshman year, and both Ricky and Andrew still remained with their high school sweethearts yet all parties knew that these relationships were withering.

Well before midnight, Andrew’s girlfriend, realizing that it was over between them, decided to drink herself into a stupor.  Likewise, Ricky, realizing that his gorgeous, blond girlfriend wanted to move on, blacked out too. During the build up to New Year’s Eve, Andy would check periodically on his girlfriend who lay catatonic on Nora’s bed. Sometime after midnight, Andy opened the bedroom door to retrieve his girlfriend and head home. Through the dark, he saw Nora wrapped up with some guy, who wasn’t Graham, clenching fitfully.  He shut the door quickly and retreated but noted that something was not quite right in Nora’s domestic sphere. 

In the summer of 1970, when Andy was eighteen, a year after high school, he worked for Nora and her husband Graham, who had inherited a million dollars on his twenty-first birthday. Graham’s family had owned a thriving paper manufacturing business in Manchester that dated back to the Civil War. The Case brothers, two twins, started the company by making washed cotton or gun cotton, a better substitute for gunpowder, for the Union Army. After the war, the brothers produced paper products and became well-known industrialists during the late-Victorian era. In 1905, Graham’s grandfather patented a papermaking machine that manufactured pressed paper, a forerunner of cardboard and pressboard. In the 50s and early 60s, Graham’s father, William Case Garrett, was the president of the company. In 1967, Graham’s father sold Case Brothers to Georgia Atlantic, a much larger international paper company. A trust was established for the children, stipulating a million for each child—Graham and his two sisters—when he or she became of age.

Adjacent to the paper mills, Case Brothers, the company’s name, owned 640 acres, a square mile of woodlands that later become Case Mountain, a recreational area that remained in the family until the town of Manchester eventually purchased it. In the early 60s, Andrew’s father would drive up the one lane, dirt road to the top that provided an expansive view of Hartford and western Connecticut. On the trip down the mountain (elevation 744 feet), the family would drive passed a rustic cabin with overlapping, log corners, built high on stone pillars overlooking a large pond, and then drive over a vaulted, stone bridge under which water cascaded down the other side to a stream below. Built in the late Victorian era, the bridge, the chestnut cabin, the tumbling falls, the horse and buggy path, the two Italianate villas built between the factories and the pond—all fulfilled the Case brothers’ notion of the Romantic. At one time, just below the falls, the brothers bottled and sold Highlander Water, a mineral water with an unmatchable taste.   Long after the bottling building had burned down, the artesian well was still running. An L-shaped pipe protruded from the ground, and Andrew would stop to fill his plastic jugs with the sweet-tasting water before driving back to college for the week. 

After college, Graham Garrett moved into the rustic cabin and during one of his weekend parties, Nora met Graham for the first time. He was lounging in a beaten leather chair with a young woman sitting in his lap. Nora’s companion, Jimmie, liked the young woman and wanted to meet her. Can you get her off his lap? Jimmie whispered to Nora.

Who is she sitting on anyway? Nora whispered.

That’s Graham Garrett who owns not only the cabin but the whole of Case Mountain. Graham wore his straight, black hair to the side, yet if one could have placed a smudge of black polish under his nose, he could have doubled for the Fuehrur—and many of those who knew him believed that he also possessed some the leader’s authoritarian traits. As a child, Graham would patrol his father’s estate with his bow and arrow, swearing to his comrades that any trespasser would feel the sting of a feathered projectile in his back.

Nora stepped in front of the couple in the chair, took the girl’s hand and said, My turn. Without protest, the girl complied with Nora’s request while Nora occupied the vacant spot in Graham’s lap. Nora charmed Graham with her quick wit and wispy body—all ninety pounds of it. The next day, Graham called her for a date.

Andrew met Graham’s toys before he met him. Graham drove an early-60s Volkswagen bus with the rear seat removed so he could stow his Norton 750 motorcycle in the back. If the occasion arose, Graham would park the bus, fashion a makeshift ramp, and tear off on his Norton. When Andrew was still in high school in the late 60s, Graham would park the van in the Fletchers’ driveway, and Andrew could only shake his head in admiration as he peeked in the van’s window at the renowned, British bike. Graham, the son of a millionaire who attended private school and then Colgate University in New York, referred to himself as a ski bum, a phrase coined from the 1965 Romain Gary novel of the same name: handsome, well-to-do American, detached from life, engages in a romance with the American daughter of a diplomat stationed in Geneva. Only in Graham’s case, the girl was Nora, the daughter of an engineer at Allied Aviation—whom Graham knocked up while they were both still in college.  Nora graduated from Bradford, showing, so the parents from both sides discussed the impending problem and then arranged a hasty marriage. Graham sold his bus and motorcycle, ending, for the moment, his wild, carefree days.

With his new family and freshly inherited million, Graham wanted to buy his grandfather’s pink Italianate villa, which sat prominently above the brick factories of Case Brothers . Unfortunately, it had been sold years earlier to someone outside the family and was not for sale, so he sent Nora out on an expedition to find a house that was suitable for someone of his ancestral roots and legacy. After much searching, Nora discovered that one of the Cheney mansions was for sale in Manchester. The Cheneys had built a community of mansions on The Great Lawn, an area of Victorian mansions built by imported, European artisans in the late 19th century. Each boasting its own design, the mansions sat adjacent to a small, industrial town of brick mills, workers’ houses, and family fire department. The Cheney family had owned the largest silk manufacturing company in the country, flowering from 1860-1890. They even had their own theater, placed at the end of a rail spur, where Samuel Clemens from Hartford’s Nook Farm was an occasional guest. However, as the Cheneys intermarried and interbred, like the solid capitalists that they were, their numbers dwindled as did their brainpower. After the Great Depression, the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company never regained its financial footing.

From the time of the financial downturn, the mansions began to fall into the hands of those outside the too-closely-knit family. The Catholic Church owned the brick gabled, English manor that Graham wanted to buy. Archbishop Reardon, a priest adrift, planned to turn the mansion into a plush pad for himself, but a splinter of conscience surfaced at the last moment. He thought it better to nurture a nunnery, a cloister for nuns under his direction. In the end, however, the Archbishop abandoned his plan and put the house up for sale. He had some maintenance men, who cared for the Roman Catholic properties in Hartford and surrounding towns, board up the windows, but it was too late: the neighborhood kids had smashed all the glass and pillaged the insides before the workers could put any plywood in place.

At the closing on the property, the Archbishop Reardon entered the real estate agent’s office in full clerical garb: purple cape swishing as if lifted by divine breeze; gold pectoral cross dangling from a chain around his neck; the black cassock with the 33 vertical, red buttons; and the zucchetto covering his naturally tonsured skull. But Graham was having none of Reardon religious airs, for Graham, with his Waspish roots, viewed Catholics as religious hypocrites and priests even more so. Graham knew of the Archbishop’s furtive antics and extravagant tastes—the Crown Royal whiskey, the chateaubriand cuts, the gold rings flashing from his fingers— all of which repulsed him.

You should be ashamed of yourself, Graham blurted across the table as the Archbishop brushed some lint from his ferraiolo and settled himself in his chair. The Archbishop’s cheeks reddened, perhaps thinking about the birdbath with the two ceramic birds alighting on the water’s edge that he had bought for the family of the two spectacularly handsome teenage sons on whom he had doted a bit too openly.

What do you mean? the Archbishop sternly said, tipping his head down, and looking across at Graham from above his reading glasses.

You should have hired a caretaker to look after the property instead of leaving the house idle and allowing the vandals to move in and ruin it. The Archbishop stared across the table at the devout disbeliever, lifted his pen, and signed the papers with a silent sigh of relief.

In 1970, for 48,000 dollars, Graham Garrett purchased the rundown, seven-thousand square foot, semi-Gothic brick spectacle and set out to return it to its original splendor. Graham hired his brother-in-law Ricky and Andrew to help refurbish the place before leaving for college in September. Both eighteen and equipped with rudimentary carpentry skills, the boys started replacing all the panes of glass that neighborhood kids had stoned to death. Someone had also ripped out the marvelous marble sinks and ornate fixtures in the six bathrooms—but children were not responsible for this thievery. Besides replaced window glass, Ricky and Andrew sandblasted, scrapped, and painted the layered, crown moldings throughout the mansion.  

Ensconced in his new residence, Graham lived an aimless life of privilege, considering himself as to the manor born. With his inheritance, Graham began with the purchase of his new estate but then moved on to pricey, Spanish dirt bikes, a new Z sports car, and, with Nora’s urging, two antiques—a vintage early 1900's antique Reading Railroad, roll top desk with brass fittings, and an American Empire, cherry sleigh bed.  When Ricky bought a SLR 35mm camera, the next day Graham bought one, too. Graham would sit at his roll top desk in his new mansion, working the camera’s dials, trying to figure out all the settings yet looking bored and dissatisfied.

Nora’s grandfather, Linton Fisker, had given Graham and Nora a squat, pot-bellied stove for a housewarming gift, knowing that Nora cherished the piece. It once sat in Linton’s store, a fish market in Barrington, New Hampshire, but now it sat idle in a breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen. Relief castings adorned the cast iron stove. It had nickel-plated trim bars, a foot rail and a plated finial on top. On the iron door that opened to feed the fire, there was a tableau of a girl running in a field of swaying grain. It reminded Andrew of reading about Achilles’ shield, idealizing a moment in time yet provoking a sense of something sinister. It was the most beautiful stove that Andrew had ever seen.  

The job paid cash and Andrew saved enough money to travel to Europe the following summer. Graham’s Norton and his Spanish motocross bikes had inspired Andrew to buy a Triumph 650 in London. When Andrew returned, Graham and Nora’s marriage was crashing and the mansion was up for sale once again.

After that summer, Andrew mostly lost track of the former couple. He did see Graham at a party a few years later—blond on his arm, drunk on California merlot—talking about wine as if he were a sommelier. He had moved into his inherited demesne, the log cabin at the base of Case Mountain. Nora, on the other hand, took her modest chunk of the divorce settlement, and she and Abby moved into an apartment a block off Main Street, a mile down the road from her former stately mansion. Years later, Nora married again and Ted, her new husband, an ardent Democrat of Armenian descent, and her daughter, Abby, moved together into the old Pitkin house.

When she was forty-eight, Nora was diagnosed with cancer; it eventually went into remission, but then a few years later, a blood clot in her temple left her completely disabled and only after extensive rehabilitation did she reclaim her sense of physical and mental stability. She gradually overcame all of these malicious maladies, but then, through a dark twist of fate, it was Ted who suddenly died of cancer. For a time, Nora, shaken to her core, lived with her daughter Abby who was now married and living comfortably in Easton, Connecticut. After gaining a tentative grip on her circumstances, Nora eventually returned to Manchester, marking a new beginning as a widow in her Henry Pitkin homestead, a historical port in a perfect storm of past calamities.

See this outbuilding near the garden? said Nora. Mr. Pitkin used it as a way station for runaway slaves who were attempting to flee to Canada. A local college is going to do an archeological dig here soon. I do not think anyone has ever studied this little building in any detail.  A professor and his student team of diggers and sifters from Eastern Connecticut State are going to start this summer.

I can’t wait to hear the results of the dig, Andrew replied. "Listen, I’m conducting a bit of a dig myself. I am writing an article about the changes the Republican Party has undergone from the time when your parents were avid Republican in the 50s and 60s to the present rise of Donald Trump. I remember