The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Benny’s good friend Webley Edwards, KGMB’s popular Hawaii Calls radio announcer, came down to the docks to see him off. The last time they had seen each other was at Webley’s house—laughing and talking over rum punches with Barton and Ensigns Miller and Vogt. The flickering Arizona lit their faces.

  “It’s up to you carrier boys now,” Webley said, clasping Benny’s hand in a farewell handshake. “You’re all we’ve got left.”

  At 0400 on December 9, barely a dozen grueling and traumatic hours since arriving, Enterprise and her escorts pushed back through the wreckage and headed northwest. With the harbor under blackout orders, their departure was illuminated only by oily water, still aflame. Her orders were to clear local seas of enemy submarines and repel subsequent attacks.

  Swinging west to east and back again, they scrutinized Oahu’s every seaborne approach, searching for a killer fleet that not a single pair of American eyes had seen. The lookouts reported so many sightings of Japanese submarines that dozens of depth charges were dropped and hundreds of gallons of precious fuel were expended in pursuit. An exasperated Admiral Halsey finally signaled to his task force: “If all the torpedo wakes reported are factual, Japanese submarines will soon have to report home to reload, and we have nothing to fear. We are wasting too many depth charges on neutral fish. Take action accordingly.”

  After breakfast on December 11, Benny picked up the ship’s newspaper on his way back to Sky Control. He glanced down at the headline and stopped dead in his tracks to reread the headline splayed across the top of the typed mimeographed sheet: “Cavite Navy Yard Smashed.” Casualties were estimated in the hundreds, with more feared.

  Whether it was the instant remorse over the confident assurances he had just sent his mother or fear for Barton’s life, Benny felt his knees go weak. There was no denying any longer that Barton was in the bull’s-eye of a dangerous war zone. Benny’s next call would be to Bill in Washington to see whether Barton had survived the attack and, if so, where he was now. If anyone could find out, it would be Bill.

  3

  HELEN

  AT LILAC HEDGES ON Sunday night, December 7, Helen and Arthur Cross settled gloomily by the fire after turning off the Victrola. They had been fastened to the newscasts for hours while their dinner sat cold and untouched. They had been trying to reach Bill in Washington since hearing the news, assuming that he had more information than had been broadcast, or could get it.

  But all of Washington was reeling, too. Even Bill could not supplement their meager information stores by bedtime, though he promised to do everything in his power to find out. Before retiring to a sleepless night, Helen unscrewed her fountain pen and took a long draught of blue-black ink from a porcelain inkwell. She opened her black leather diary with “1941” stamped in green on the cover and leafed to the seventh page of the last month.

  Blackest of all Sundays! At 2 today, we got word that Japan foully attacked Hawaii while her ‘ambassadors’ talked peace in Washington. Poor laddie Bart at Manila, getting his baptism by fire, he who never had a thought of hate for any man. Poor Benny on the Enterprise in Pearl Harbor! God be at their side.

  After listening to President Roosevelt’s declaration of war and address to Congress the next day, she wrote:

  Let the Philippines not become another Dunkirk! The Japs according to radio are swarming like locusts. Have we got proper air protection? And Benny, on those boundless waters, looking for death from above and below! What have mothers done to deserve such grief? I stare numbly at my Christmas cards and packages, longing to stow away the gaudy reminders.

  To her British-born husband, Helen revealed a stalwart and pragmatic side, but to her diary, she indulged fiery opinions, fierce indignation, and withering insights. Her entries the preceding several months had amounted to a dread-filled countdown to the hour of Barton’s departure for the Philippines: the cholera shots, the farewells to friends and neighbors, and the final family dinner at the Russian Tea Room before the mournful trek to Grand Central Station to meet Barton’s transcontinental train.

  On his last evening at home, she wrote, “I must steel myself for the hour when dread imaginings give place to reality and he is gone. Every moment of his life has blessed me and I am truly grateful—and ashamed of my weakness.”

  Her emotions were not just those of an anxious mother relinquishing a grown child to a dangerous world—painful enough, any mother knows. Barton was much more than a son to Helen Cross. He was the very symbol of her own reincarnation in a promising second marriage. As if to cement that success, she had insisted on naming him after her new husband: Arthur Barton Cross—Jr. With this, Helen had permanently cast off the forsaken image of failed wife and mother. Her apparent preference for this youngest of her three sons may have read as favoritism, but it was, more accurately, a mantle of gratitude for the miraculous second chance his arrival signified.

  HELEN ESTELLE CHAMBERLAIN WAS born in New York City in 1883 of recently emigrated parents. Respectively, her father and mother were of English and Irish descent. Soon after Helen’s birth, the young family moved to the historic and progressive township of Framingham, Massachusetts. By all accounts, Helen was focused and determined from an early age. She was an industrious child who excelled in school and spent after-school hours developing a mastery with the needle and thread. This was likely due to the County Cork needlecraft talents conferred by her mother, née Annie Lynch.

  According to family lore, Helen’s father, William Lincoln Chamberlain, was one in a continuum of prosperous enough English merchants. Though he supported the family well, Helen and Annie formed an alliance familiar among Irish American women in the late nineteenth century and one that supplemented their household incomes: fine embroidery and skilled needlework. For Helen and Annie, there was never a shortage of orders for their handiwork, particularly around Christmas.

  Whether or not the independence gained from that experience was the reason, Helen joined the slim 3 percent of American women at the turn of the century who pursued a college degree. Triumphantly, at age seventeen, she made the brief but seminal journey from Framingham to nearby Wellesley College in September 1900.

  Helen double majored in German and Latin, perhaps believing that mastery of Goethe, Virgil, and Horace gave her a certain gravitas that widened the distance from a relatively unremarkable childhood. Her superior showing in Wellesley’s elocution classes completed Helen’s transformation from ambitious student to a refined and elegant—if strong-minded—young woman.

  The first decade of the new century was a time of expanding opportunity for American women, and Helen approached her 1904 graduation with optimism and self-assurance. Soon after her commencement, she was thrilled with the offer to teach Latin at a high school in a small New Jersey borough. But the social dictates of the time also stressed that young women should marry, and in the borough of Rockaway, Helen Estelle Chamberlain fell in love and did just that.

  In the young and attractive Dr. Raymond Mott, Helen saw a promising future. Raymond in turn was delighted to have drawn such a prize. The town dentist, Dr. Mott descended from a long line of Motts, dating back to their arrival on Long Island from Saffron Walden, Essex, England, in the early 1700s. Rockaway Township, named after a historic Indian tribe that roamed its hills and fished its streams long before the American Revolution, was a close-knit community with a strong social fabric, and the surrounding Jersey countryside was an idyllic tapestry of stone mills, fields, streams, and woods threaded with old Indian paths.

  Born into this stable and secure world were two Mott sons, Elias Bertram and William Chamberlain—Benny and Bill—in 1908 and 1911, respectively. The family lived in a white frame house with dark-green shutters a short distance from Mott Hollow, a once-thriving hive of mills and other business concerns settled by Dr. Mott’s Quaker ancestors more than a century earlier. The young boys ran free with friends whose families had been neighbors for generations. Rockaway’s general store, barbershop, soda fountain, and
five-and-dime were all run by merchants who knew Benny and Bill by name. They also enjoyed a close circle of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  Their grandfather, Elias Briant Mott, was Rockaway’s grand patron. His large personality won him local adoration, and his civic and community activities were legion. Elias held the august position of Morris County clerk, was a patriarch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and served as a standing member of the Improved Order of Red Men. The Red Men were said to have descended from the Sons of Liberty, who, famously disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three East India Company ships and tossed ninety-two thousand pounds of English tea into Boston Harbor. Being grandsons of Elias Mott was the closest thing to royalty that little Rockaway had.

  Raymond, the youngest of Elias Mott’s four children, was overshadowed by his eldest brother, Bert. The most successful of the siblings and heir apparent to their father’s revered community role, Bert became a bright and gregarious lawyer and founded many of the town mainstays, including First National Bank of Rockaway and the Rockaway Building and Loan Association. He succeeded his father as clerk of the conservative Morris County and rose to state Republican Party chairman. Under Bert’s tutelage, the county GOP maintained consistent majorities of twenty thousand votes over Democrat opposition, a statistic of which he was very fond.

  Raymond, a quiet man by comparison, chose dentistry as a solid if less prominent profession than his brother’s. From a young age, he was deeply affected by his father’s preference for Bert, and his early insecurities metastasized into overwhelming melancholia when he became an adult. Raymond’s family life and marriage to Helen came to suffer as a result. Perhaps for fear of falling short of his wife’s expectations in the same way he felt he had his father’s, he sought refuge in the quiet world of his dental office and possibly relief from anxiety in his supply of the calmative ether.

  While Raymond saw to his dental patients, the diminutive Helen rose in stature at the local American Association of University Women chapter as well as at Wellesley’s local alumnae chapter. She became friends with the well known and well respected, including fellow Wellesley graduate Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the future first lady of the Republic of China. Helen also aspired to the intellectual and social world of nearby New York City and relished her Wellesley Club teas and lectures in the city. When Benny and Bill came along, she proved a caring, if emotionally contained, mother.

  Then something went terribly wrong, though accounts vary. Did Dr. Mott’s melancholia tear at the fabric of the marriage? Did the former Quaker village of Rockaway become too limiting for his ambitious and intellectually curious wife? Whatever the truest answer, Dr. and Mrs. Mott’s marriage ceased to flourish in that environment. At first, young Benny and Bill were only vaguely aware of the growing distance between their parents, but the boys grew anxious as their mother spent more and more time away from them. Rumors spread that the marriage was on the brink.

  In an era when divorce was rare, Helen and Raymond parted ways in 1915. Helen returned to teaching and relied on family to care for her young boys, now seven and four, when she was at work. Society of the day looked unkindly on divorced mothers, and Helen wanted nothing more than to be released from that stigma and a second chance at a respectable and respected life.

  In 1916 she met a prosperous British textile merchant, Arthur Barton Cross. Arthur was handsome, well dressed, and worldly. She was captivated from their first meeting while on an outing to New York City. He had attended the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and then returned to England for university in the renowned textile city of Leeds. Within five years of his graduation, he had achieved high professional regard in the burgeoning international textile and cloth-making industry.

  Arthur had offices in both New York and the textile-rich town of Rock Hill, South Carolina. With a casual, high-born manner, he smoked Chesterfields and drove a Model 30 Cadillac. He was interested in observing the birds of America and in purchasing good art, and had the time and money to indulge in both. Within six months, Helen and Arthur became engaged.

  At Arthur’s insistence, they traveled to England to wed, leaving Benny and Bill behind in the care of relatives. After the nuptials, they took an extended honeymoon trip throughout the British Isles. When they returned to New Jersey, the newlyweds launched their new lives with enthusiasm. They collected Benny and Bill and moved to an old farm estate in the affluent borough of Eatontown in Monmouth County.

  The main house was a large, gabled Victorian with scalloped cedar shingles and green-striped awnings that stretched over a broad span of south-facing windows. Its ample, manicured grounds met an acres-wide nursery of English boxwoods in the rear, beyond which was an apple orchard and a broad expanse of farmland on the western border. But the estate’s most prized feature was a full surround of mature, brilliantly purple lilac bushes that passersby would famously stop and admire every spring. The property was named Lilac Hedges.

  Despite her newfound happiness, Helen had been shaken by the failure of her first marriage and occasionally fretted that she couldn’t live up to Arthur’s idealized image of her. She confided to her diary:

  Ah me! I can only give Arthur what life gave me . . . what my good blood called for and which life nearly squeezed out of me. Is there not virtue in struggle, in attainment through one’s own effort, in the simple joys of love and work well done, even if spent by the effort?

  Arthur was a decent enough stepfather, easing Helen’s concerns over the marital transition’s effect on Benny and Bill. But the new family arrangement had not eased the boys’ anxiety. Though they had been quite young, their parents’ divorce made them freshly aware of hidden messages in adult behavior that before had eluded them. Benny and Bill also became highly sensitive to their mother’s priorities, even before they knew what those really were. Her behavior toward them had always been more matter-of-fact than affectionate. Occasionally, however, her habitual coolness was interrupted by spells of genuine warmth and interest in them, and the two responded hungrily to such moods. They worked fervently to maintain her approval and win what affection might be granted under these new circumstances.

  Most afflicted by the sudden change in family life was Bill. In neither parent, it seemed, could he find reliable emotional sustenance. His mother’s remarriage compounded by irregular contact with his father ultimately pushed him toward his schoolwork, at which he excelled. The kindness and positive reinforcement of his teachers and, later, his professors and professional superiors seemed to compensate for the early parental shortfalls. The consequence of Bill’s early childhood was a hyper-self-reliance fueled by a determination to excel.

  Though Dr. Mott never remarried, he overcame his difficulties with the loving help of the extended Mott family and local community. But his ongoing emotional frailty made being around him increasingly awkward for his young sons. Their grandparents Elias and Lauretta Mott stepped in and filled this gap admirably.

  They performed all the requisite parental duties, from bathing and feeding to nightly reading, and, with the help of their great-aunt, Mathilda, taught them the family art of making bread with scalded milk. Lauretta nursed Bill back to health during an early battle with typhoid fever when neither parent could minister to the bedridden boy. But after Helen and Arthur returned from England, Bill and Benny made the permanent move to Lilac Hedges.

  One year after Helen and Arthur married, two brothers became three. In April 1918, with the lilacs in full bloom, Arthur Barton Cross Jr. was born. He came into the world the same joyful year that saw the end of the Great War, which President Woodrow Wilson declared would be the “war to end all wars.”

  Barton was born a month premature, and Benny and Bill were protective from the start. That Barton was their half brother was no more than a biographical detail to the older boys. In fact, the ensuing years were happy ones for Helen and Arthur and Benny, Bill, and Barton.

  They spent long summer days at the Jersey Shore, where the boys pl
ayed endlessly in the waves. Their painted woven beach basket was always filled with the family’s summertime favorites: cold shrimp and potato salad, sandwiches, shortbread cookies, and a jug of freshly squeezed lemonade. After hours of play in the cold water, the boys would rejoin Helen and Arthur to picnic on the beach, she always under a broad-brimmed, brightly colored hat, and never without a book in hand.

  When they returned home from these outings, siblings William and Nelly, their southern black live-in housekeepers, would have the chores done and dinner under way, the house full of aromas drifting from the large, well-stocked kitchen. The antique dining table was set nightly for five. When their new baby sister, Rosemary, arrived, a mahogany-and-cane high chair was added in the corner.

  Arthur presided over these meals, tapping the butler’s button under his foot from time to time should they lack for anything. He was always the initiator of well-chosen conversation, in keeping with his orderly British upbringing. Helen’s place at the long, polished table was across from Arthur. Barton sat by himself to his mother’s right, freeing his right hand to toy with his food or to slip minty chops, scraps of tenderloin, or fresh cherry pie to his cocker spaniels. Benny and Bill always sat together, across from the favorite young son and to their mother’s left.

  The older brothers were delighted with their new siblings—first Barton, and then fiery and quick-witted Rosemary, nicknamed Muff for reasons lost to history. They did not seem to care or notice that Barton and Rosemary had nicer clothes, more toys, and the majority of their mother’s and stepfather’s attention. The older brothers attended public schools and worked paper routes to earn their spending money, while Barton and Rosemary were privately educated and flush with pocket money from their parents, who seemed to not want them to take on odd jobs.