Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  * During World War II the island’s eastern half was divided into North-East New Guinea and Papua. In 1949 they united into the nation of Papua New Guinea. The island’s western half, which was Dutch New Guinea, is today part of Indonesia.

  CHAPTER 2

  For years my brother and I associated our father with a ship—not the creaking trawler he was on when he was killed, but a gigantic Liberty ship named after him: the SS Byron Darnton. The wartime merchant vessel loomed large in our family’s iconography. Our mother raised us on stories about her. She told us how the Byron Darnton had valiantly plied the treacherous Murmansk Run, carrying war supplies from Scotland and Iceland into the stormy Arctic, defying German submarines, to keep the vital Russian front going. I used to imagine the ship cutting through a sea of ice to reach the frigid port, a deep-throated whistle announcing her arrival, stevedores with frosted beards raising their hands in gratitude before leaping into action as cranes swung across the hold to lift out tanks and crates of ammunition.

  Then we heard of her sad ending in March 1946, as she made her final voyage home. She ran aground in a gale somewhere in Scotland. Everyone on board was rescued only minutes before she broke apart. A tattered flag, one of the few items saved, was presented to my family. It hung on a wall over my brother’s bed throughout our childhood, not far from a watercolor of the ship that was done by a member of the crew and sent to our home in Westport.

  The Byron Darnton was built in the Baltimore shipyards and launched in December 1943, an event seminal in the life of our tight-knit family. The New York Times sent a photographer and Meyer Berger, one of its top reporters, to cover the christening. Our mother is captured in a photo, wearing a handsome coat with a fur collar and a round fur hat, swinging the champagne bottle in a wire casing covered with red, white, and blue streamers as a port official nervously backs away. Berger sets the scene. He describes the launching platform from which we children look out, “wide-eyed, on the busy yard, on plumed smoke white in the frosty air.” Somewhere a whistle screams. Loudspeakers pour out music: the “Marines’ Hymn” with its opening line, “From the Halls of Montezuma,” and “Song of the Victory Fleet.” For a moment, workers on other ships stop their labors. “A welder bent over deck plates not far away, raised a mask and disclosed a frail, fair-haired girl.” Another whistle sounds to signal the torch men to burn the cribbing plates. The gigantic 10,500-ton merchant ship begins to budge. My mother gamely swings the bottle—“her aim was hard and true”—and it bursts in an explosion of spray as the ship gently slides down the ways, “as if feeling the water, gliding easily into the river.”

  Later, my mother described that day in a book she published. Entitled The Children Grew, it is her account of how a woman raised two small boys alone, a largely anecdotal guide based on her experience and aimed at other families that had suffered losses of husbands and fathers in the war. She wrote about herself in the third person. One chapter is devoted to the ship, beginning with the christening, told with characteristic verve and bravado. (“The occasion had had its amusing moments—the obvious fear that she’d miss when she swung the bottle. As if she could. She’d batted too many baseballs in her childhood to feel any doubt of her ability to connect with that big hulk.”) She found it amusing to refer to Barney’s ship as “she.” At one point, she wondered how her sons, “with just that mouse’s view of a great hull,” could feel a personal connection with such a towering mass of steel.

  As rectification, she later arranged a visit to the ship in New York harbor. In vivid detail, perhaps rendered even more vivid by the romantic haze of her recollection, she recounted a glorious day. A sleek launch speeds us from the Upper East River to the Hoboken docks. Two red fire tugs with whistles screaming come out to escort us. On board ten men stand at attention in an honor guard and Bob responds appropriately. (“He drew himself straight, raised his right hand in correct salute, held it a moment, then calmly proceeded to walk in great dignity between the guard.”) The captain greets her with a corsage of gardenias. We’re given a tour of the ship, from the engine room to the bridge, and allowed to pull the cord of the air horn, which bellows across the harbor. Finally, in the officers’ mess, the two chefs lay on an imperial meal, with a desert that is half apple pie and half cake, because each one wants to present his specialty. The feast is consumed under a large painted portrait of Barney, which dominates the room. She wrote, with her gift for hyperbole, “She and Bob, particularly, looked at it long, she still with a bit of sharp pain with her love. But, as she looked at Bob’s adoring gaze, she saw the uplifted face alight with an uncomplicated love and with belief, as some men look at the stars. ‘It’s almost as though the ship were Daddy, isn’t it, Mommie?’ he whispered.”

  Throughout the war years, we kept in touch with the ship. We gave the crew a music library. They sent us presents, including an ashtray fashioned in the ship’s shop from the cylinder of a downed Nazi warplane. One gnarled old mate, she wrote, sent her something made out of the ship’s twine—a pillowcase, perhaps; she was never quite sure. And a young man who worked in the engine room, an aspiring writer, sent her a novel he had written for her appraisal. Of the Byron Darnton’s demise, my mother was philosophical: “The ship had served her purpose and nobly. It was almost better to lose her in a valiant two-day fight against forces stronger than she, than to think of her degenerating into a sluggish banana boat.” She ended the chapter this way: “What interesting compensations Nature and men try to make. The loss of a father is a dreadful loss. But how many boys have a ship all their own? How many boys have a whole ship’s crew of men trying to take some part of his place?”

  Today, neither my brother nor I have any recollection of the ship herself or of any of its crew members, who, in fact, meant very little to us. We were too young—Bob four and a half and me two—to remember either the christening or the visit. It’s impossible to reconstruct what we—the two mice—were thinking and feeling as we looked up at that towering hull. But I suspect that our mother had no idea of how important an icon that ship would become or how it is psychologically possible for children to turn an inanimate object, even a 10,500-ton hunk of metal, into a totem for a missing father. Now, when I read the Times article, itself yellowed and crumbling, I notice details that escaped me before, touches that Meyer Berger put into his story. He wrote how “awed” we were by our surroundings. He conveyed an impression of how small and vulnerable we appeared, tiny figures wrapped in winter snowsuits, dwarfed by the cranes and scaffolds, overcome by the din of sirens and whistles, gaping up at the ship that rose far above us like a mountain. Held in the arms of a nurse, I threw my head back, trying to see the top where the letters B-Y-R-O-N D-A-R-N-T-O-N stood out large and white across the upper bow. My brother had hoped to be the one to christen the ship. For more than a week, he had rehearsed the ceremony, repeating “I christen thee SS Byron Darnton. I christen thee SS Byron Darnton” in the hotel lobby all morning. But when the time came, when he stood on a nail keg and tried to lift the bottle encased in wire with the steamers flying, it was too heavy for him. Tears welled in his eyes and he gave up. Looking at the huge white letters far above him spelling out his father’s name, he whispered something to our mother. She turned and asked a question of the port official, who nodded yes. My brother pulled out a blue crayon and carefully scrawled his name—a “BoB” in a shaky hand, the way he had seen it on the last page of his father’s letters. He wrote it upon the ship’s immense keel, inches above the water-line. Meyer Berger spotted this and a photographer captured it on camera. Moments later, as the Byron Darnton slid down the ways, the letters were lost to view even before the ship touched the water on that cold afternoon in Baltimore.

  Over the years, memories that you don’t fully possess fade away. The flag has long since been packed away in a carton and stored in an attic. So have most of the photographs and the yellowing newspaper article. Only one copy of The Children Grew, inscribed to a friend of my mother who left it behind, sur
vives on my bookshelf. Our mother died many years ago, in May 1968. By that time I had already begun working for the newspaper for which my father gave his life. Only later did I wonder: Was I acting out of my own free will or was I playing out a destiny laid down for me years before?

  I was three months old when my father left home and eleven months old when he was killed, and so I have no memory of him. The slate is blank. My brother, two and a half years older, doesn’t remember him either, though a legion of small, grainy photos attests that they spent those early years together. One shows Barney awkwardly holding Bob as a newborn; his back looks tight, his muscles tensed, as if he were cradling a Fabergé egg or a miniature bomb. A series of snapshots captures them sledding: Barney sits on the sled, a tiny snow-suited boy on his lap. He pushes off, wrapping his legs around him as they descend a tiny slope, open-mouthed in excitement, and finally they end up sprawled in a snowbank—the figures hard to make out because the image is hopelessly blurred. I imagine my mother dropping the camera and rushing over to make sure they’re all right.

  All that. And neither of us retains any memory of him. Yet in that place where memory might reside, there’s not a vacuum. Not having a father present didn’t mean not having a father. There wasn’t just an absence in my life. There was the presence of an absence, and that presence, along with snippets of information and my mother’s recollections and bits of writing that came my way, filled my imagination. They led me, eventually, to romanticize his life and to mythologize him. I was dealing with a mythic entity, something that possessed no physical substance but was capable of exerting influence and power. It was like a ghost in a child’s nightmare, a shadow at high noon that is almost invisible. Was the specter benign or malevolent? The question didn’t even arise. It was simply there, as large and overwhelming as a ship.

  I know it may sound peculiar, but over the years I became superstitious about my father. The truth is that when I was very young, I lived in a world apart. It was a world of magic, where boundaries between the real and the supernatural were porous and where things seemed to cross back and forth as effortlessly as clouds scurrying their shadows across farms and cities. Who was to say which was which? I tried to piece things together on my own and to make sense of events and scraps of information without recourse to outside wisdom. I rarely sought explanation or guidance from adults, whom I held in suspicion. As a result I was prone to misunderstandings. I evolved some odd constructs to explain what was going on around me. Many of my misconceptions centered on my father. Much of the time I didn’t think of him at all, at least not consciously, for the simple reason that he wasn’t part of my everyday life. But some of the time, in odd moments, I would wonder about him and what had happened to him. I was apt to question whether he had, in fact, stopped existing altogether or whether he, or parts of him, somehow carried on. When courting, my parents chose Orion as their constellation—and later it became magical because she could see it from our backyard in Connecticut and he could see it from the South Pacific—so at night I would search for the three stars of Orion’s belt and stare at them. At times they made me feel an almost mystical connection with him. I was like a shepherd from a past age on a hillside under the night sky, awestruck in the presence of the gods.

  Lying in bed in the evenings, unable to sleep, I evolved an elaborate ritual, which lengthened over time. First I recited the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a series of psalms. I added more memorized passages from the Bible and then a prayer of my own. My compulsion was such that if I found myself saying so much as a single line by rote, I had to start over from the beginning. Otherwise, some unnamed but spectacular horror would befall me or my family. As a result, I often ended up repeating many times over: “Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name …” And at some point the words “Our Father” conflated with “My father” and I found myself imagining my father seated on some kind of heavenly throne. On occasions when I was bad—which I was convinced I was much of the time—I imagined him peering down at me and I tried to surmise his reaction: Disapproval? Disappointment? Anger? Whatever it was, it was remote and judgmental, in keeping with the spirit of the Old Testament, not compassionate or familial. The construct gave rise to a host of theological questions. How strong were his powers? Could he see through rooftops and ceilings? Did his dominion extend over the whole world or just over me? Within a few years, of course, when I became more rational, I discarded the idea of him as a deity, though on some level the essence of the construct lived on in the recesses of my mind like a half-remembered dream. For a long time, even though I didn’t fully believe it, I found I couldn’t quite reject it.

  One of the stories that I heard from my mother—so early on that I couldn’t possibly say when I first heard it—was that she perceived her husband’s death the moment it happened. There he was on the other side of the earth, fourteen thousand miles away, and the second the bomb splinter entered his brain and extinguished his life, my mother knew it. She was in her home in Westport on a chilly autumnal day. A couple had just been married by a preacher in front of the fireplace in our living room, a quiet wedding attended by a handful of close friends and family. My mother was alone in the kitchen, washing a few dishes, when abruptly she was struck by an overwhelming sensation that Barney was in trouble, that he was trying to send her a message. It was a powerful feeling, one that made her need to be alone. She put a plate down in the sink and stepped outdoors. She walked across the lawn until she came to a tree and sank down beneath it. “The feeling was so strong,” she used to say, “that I felt I had to speak out loud. I said, ‘What’s wrong, darling? I know something is deeply wrong.’ And then I knew what it was.” For the remainder of the day, she felt odd, and on the following day came the call from the Times. The timing matched up. As a youngster, I did not find that episode at all incomprehensible or even unnatural. Quite the opposite: It was the linchpin connecting my magical world to the afterlife, and as such I welcomed it into my private religion.

  That religion was replete with various ceremonies. Every so often I would rummage through the bottom of our mother’s closet to find a wooden box containing his posthumously awarded war medals—the Purple Heart and two others—and I would spread them on the bed to admire and fondle them like a medieval Christian handling a saint’s bones. On a table in our living room we had a patriotic globe dotted with stars to mark the scenes of major American battles. There was one star for Buna. In my naïveté I believed the manufacturer had placed it there to commemorate the spot where my father fell. I used to spin the globe with my eyes closed to see if my finger would land on it, like a Tibetan monk spinning his prayer wheel.

  As I grew older, many of these feelings and recollections gradually dissipated. Months would go by in which I would scarcely think of my father at all. But then something would happen to jog me out of my everyday concerns and bring him back center stage. This was especially true after I graduated from college, married, and began at the Times. In the mid-1960s, a number of editors and reporters who had been around since the war still worked there. They would say they remembered him vividly, but, to my exasperation, their recollections were invariably vague. They would say only that he was “witty” or “debonair” or “handsome.” Once, a long-retired city editor invited my brother and me to his apartment to see some footage of Barney in a home movie. The two of us sat on his couch, a stiff drink in hand, as he cranked up an old projector. Black-and-white images flickered upon a luminous screen. “There he is!” he yelled as the back of a man’s head crossed from one side to the other for all of three seconds.

  As my time at the paper grew, the number of reporters and editors who had known Barney dropped away, but every so often reminders of him surfaced. In the early 1970s, I covered City Hall out of the pressroom there, and two years after I left, I received a package in the mail from a woman who had been Mayor Beame’s deputy press secretary. Inside was a book entitled The Dictionary of Misinformation and a note directing me to look a
t page ten. There I read that the famous quotation “Anybody who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad” was not, as generally believed, uttered by W. C. Fields, but spoken by none other than Byron Darnton. He made the wisecrack in an elevator, descending from a party in a penthouse apartment, where the host had punished a misbehaving dog. The remark was picked up by a reporter friend, Cedric Worth, and published in the November 1937 issue of Harper’s. Later it was used to introduce Fields at a banquet and so became associated with him and eventually attributed to him.

  Over the years, I encountered a number of these mementos and reminders. Some came in the form of letters out of the blue, written by his fellow war correspondents or servicemen. One, from a retired colonel in Texas, Mark T. Muller, called him “a dedicated true professional” and included a Kodachrome color snapshot of him grinning as he poked his head into the top turret of a B-25. The authors of the letters sometimes said they had been meaning to write for years and had finally decided to now that they had been “rummaging through old papers in the attic” or “putting my affairs in order.” I took the explanations as code, meaning they were tying up loose ends because they were feeling that their days were numbered. Other reminders of Barney came in the form of articles he had written decades ago, popping up on the Internet as the data bank reached further back in time.