by John Darnton
I, of course, do not have any personal memory of those days, since I was experiencing them from a crib and a stroller. My brother doesn’t remember them either. There are so many blank spaces that I can’t reconstruct them with certainty. I believe that our mother faced the challenges bravely—she had been raised to regard stoicism as one of the higher virtues—but I believe it more from a sense of who she was than from any objective facts. Like most children, I never sat her down and plied her with methodical questions about the past. As a result, I’m dependent upon stories and comments that she let drop at random—my memories of her memories, meaning they are twice filtered and doubly unreliable.
But I do have her book, The Children Grew. It purports to tell our family story and it presents us as a tight-knit threesome standing up against the world. With wisdom and instinct, she solved the problems of raising two sons without a father. She opened the story with a powerful image. She described Barney’s departure from our home in Westport. He was wearing his uniform. He leaned down and told Bob that he would be gone a long, long time but that he would be coming back. “Never forget that,” he said. Then the door closed and the boy “pressed his face against the glass of the French door for a long, last look, his arms spread-eagled across the frame as if in embrace.… Did the child remember those parting words? How would it affect him, who had never known a broken promise, to find this promise broken, perhaps the largest of all?”
Later she recounted how easy it was to tell Bob that his father wasn’t coming back. There was no particular moment in which she had to tell him that he had been killed. (I was too young to require telling.) She simply stopped running eagerly to the mailbox and gradually began referring to “Daddy” in the past tense, until one day, Bob, puzzling over some flowers that had withered, intuitively grasped the concept of death and said, “Daddy died, didn’t he?” As I reread that passage, and try to imagine the scene, I am struck by the implausibility of it, of Bob’s precocious deduction and his passive acceptance of a shattering truth. Or, on the slim chance that it might have happened, I’m struck by the realization that our family dynamic centered on repression—all those important words left unsaid and all those primal emotions pressed down out of sight. More true to our inner life, I think, is the assertion that she said we were to raise in subsequent years: “If Daddy had loved us, he wouldn’t have gone away and left us.” I don’t remember saying such a thing, which would have struck close to the psychic bone. Nor do I remember her answer, as she wrote it: “It was because Daddy loved you so much that he had to go away. He didn’t want hurt or harm to come here to you or to this country where you will grow up. He went away to try to stop it before it would come here.” Hers was one of those abstract answers that adults think will lay a child’s fear to rest by appealing to some sort of higher logic, thus trumping it, but which children instinctually deem unsatisfactory.
Recently I discovered the carbon copy of a letter that our mother wrote during that first year, describing just how much Bob missed his father. I don’t know to whom she wrote, but because it was a contemporary account and because it was intended as a private communication, I trust it more than the version she presented in the book, in which Bob blithely accepted his father’s death as part of the natural order of things. In the letter she said that Barney had spent his mornings at home and that consequently Bob had seen him more than most children saw their fathers. She said Bob used to follow him around with his own small lawn mower, small rake, and small shovel, imitating him doing yard work. The father-son bond was especially strong. She then noted, “Bob missed his father tremendously the first six months after he went away. He reassured himself by quoting his father’s parting words: ‘I’ll be gone a long time but I’ll be back.’ When the time came to seem too long Bob had a tough time for a while. He would wake at night crying. I tried to give him all of me he seemed to need and I think he finally adjusted very well to his father’s absence.”
It occurs to me now that our mother believed that we adjusted easily because she needed to believe it. She needed to think we would all carry on almost as before, that she had been able to shield us from the hard reality that his death was a profound wound that would transform everything. Families that undergo tragedy evolve myths to make sense of the loss and define their place in the world. Our narrative was simple and heroic: We had endured a loss, but it was a sacrifice for a purpose—to rid the world of totalitarian evil—and to give that sacrifice meaning, we had to endure and prosper. We would support one another in the face of adversity, and everything would turn out all right. In fact, everything would continue pretty much as had been planned before. The only way for it to continue was for our mother to become both mother and father, to carry out both roles, of the nurturer and the provider. “Could she do it?” she asked herself in The Children Grew. “She would have to.” She would become superhuman. There is, of course, a problem with a myth, any myth. While it may embody a noble aspiration and provide a source of courage and moral sustenance, it is, by its nature, founded on a kernel of fiction. And so living a myth is a dangerous business, because fiction is not a solid foundation on which to build a family’s life. Our mother was not superhuman—on the contrary, she was all too human.
In Washington, we settled into a comfortable house on Ordway Street in the Northwest section. Back then, it was still very much a provincial southern city, though the war had shaken it out of its longtime lethargy. Despite gasoline rationing (three gallons a week), cars jammed the streets. Briefcase-toting government workers crowded the sidewalks—new ones were pouring into the city at the rate of fourteen hundred a week—and military men hurried by in a blur of uniforms, white, blue, green, and khaki. The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building, had just been completed. Temporary offices, long rectangular structures that evoked a sense of purpose, sprang up along the Mall and around the Washington Monument. The White House was newly fenced and guards were posted in boxed shelters. “You’re in the Army Now” was a hit on radio, This Is the Army packed them in at the National Theater, and celebrities like Hedy Lamarr, Bing Crosby, and Abbott and Costello came to town for war-bond rallies. Restaurants were crowded by day, homes blacked out at night. Everyone smoked. It was de rigueur to exude an air of calm, but, as is obvious from the memoirs of people who worked for FDR, war is nothing if not exciting.
Every weekday morning Mom went off to work at the War Department, housed in a mausoleumlike building on Independence Avenue. It must have been satisfying for her to play an informational role on the home front. For someone close to the news media, what better way than to help disseminate war news to an anxious public? She shared my father’s views on the essential symbiosis between the press and democracy, and his death had deepened her conviction that everyone must take part in the worldwide struggle to keep freedom alive. Otherwise—and I doubt she ever allowed herself to think so openly, because it would have been too painful—he would have died for nothing.
But practical considerations intruded. What to do with two young boys? She wrote of her problems finding dependable help. A black maid who had worked for us in Connecticut, Inell Jones, whom we were already deeply attached to, moved with us to Washington, but soon the city’s racism chased her back north. A succession of maids followed, coming and going so fast, as our mother told it, that they seemed to walk in the front door and out the back. She wrote that one drank heavily. I paint a vision in my imagination: Mom phones at midday, to no answer, then rushes home, to find the woman sprawled in a stupor on the couch, with me bawling in my crib and Bob lying wide-eyed in bed. Other maids were almost as bad. They’d accept the job and show up only periodically. She posted a phone number for a registered nurse to fill in as a backstop—an expensive proposition—and she was forced to avail herself of it often.
She indicated that money was not a problem—The New York Times and an insurance company made a generous financial settlement after Barney’s death—but rationing was. She had to scrape toge
ther enough coupons to keep herself in coffee and cigarettes, not to mention buying new shoes every six months or so for our growing feet. She gave up on my toilet training and decided to send Bob off to nursery school at the age of three, which in those days was regarded as far too young. But, she told herself, Churchill went off to school at a tender age—a precedent that probably struck her as fitting. She had to pull strings to get him in, and reading between the lines in her book, I get the impression that her reaction to the admissions process was typical. She resented the interview with the school psychiatrist, who had the effrontery to ask if he was “a wanted child.” (“Was he? Was ever a child more lovingly welcome!”) Then Bob failed at a test of stringing beads—he who “had spent many happy hours stringing beads and spools and buttons, long ago.” That night she asked him about it. He said that it was silly, that “I’m too big for that.” The whole experience was disheartening, she wrote. It made her feel that she was inadequate, that the job of raising two boys was “too complicated to do well under the most normal circumstances.” But she rallied and insisted that she was doing all right on her own. She simply had to trust her instincts; she couldn’t rely on help from so-called professionals or even expect understanding from them. “You had to find your own way,” she concluded. Counselors were outsiders and people with titles were full of thin theory, knowing nothing about the fire of practice. It would be the three of us against the world.
One day the ubiquitous Meyer Berger, the Times reporter, came to Washington to spend time with Bob. He took him around the city, visiting famous landmarks and jotting down the jumble of words that flowed in an unending stream from his young mouth. The result was a Times Magazine article titled “Robert, Age 4, in Wonderland.” The idea was that, as with the truthful child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” only the eye of an innocent could unmask truths about power and fear in the wartime capital. But now reading the article, which is crumpling and yellow with age, I see that it revealed something deeper—something about the boy, not the city. To a child who had just lost his father, the statues of men on horseback and the monuments to heroes and the wounded in Walter Reed General Hospital and the dead in Arlington Cemetery all stoked his febrile imagination. He was steeped in dread of spilled blood and panic-stricken about planes carrying bombs and obsessed with “the Bad Men,” who could drop out of the sky at any moment to kill everyone in sight. The article leaves him standing before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in his tweed jacket, short pants, and matching tweed cap, looking around wide-eyed at the marble sarcophagus and amphitheater. He whimpers: “I want to go home now. I want to sleep but not where the soldiers sleep because where they sleep is cold.”
In April 1943, Mom joined a protest of fifteen writers at the OWI. They charged that the publications division had turned its back on being an honest purveyor of war news. After much Sturm und Drang, they all resigned. The dispute was covered by the Times. “We are leaving because of our conviction that it is impossible for us, under those who now control our output, to tell the full truth,” read a statement from the group. It charged that the section was “now dominated by high-pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information.” The other dissidents included Henry F. Pringle, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer; Philip P. Hamburger, The New Yorker writer; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian; and Mr. MacKaye (my mother’s friend). My mother wouldn’t have missed a chance to stand fast on a matter of principle. But there was, sadly, that not so small matter of putting bread on the table, and she took what must have been for her a difficult step. She wrote to the publisher of the Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, asking for a job, and he graciously offered her a position as a reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau. In early June, she wrote him again: “I want to tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity you have given me. I start to work on Monday. My one concern is to measure up to the job you’ve given me a chance to do. I shall certainly try.”
The decision to take the job was nerve-racking, she confessed to me decades later, because she had never worked as a reporter. She hoped that she would be able to pick up the skill of gathering and writing news as she went along, that Barney’s talent and techniques had somehow rubbed off on her. I realized that her greatest fears were the same that I had had twenty-five years later, the same for every beginning reporter: that she would not be able to dig out all the facts or write quickly enough on deadline or spot the guts of the story and encapsulate it in her lead. For months, she said, she tried to conceal her fears and inexperience from her coworkers. Returning from covering a story, her notebook stuffed in her large leather purse, she would walk past the entrance to the Times’ office in the Albee Building and circle around the block two, three, or even more times, trying to settle her thoughts and compose the story’s lead in her mind.
The job turned out to be more difficult than she’d expected. And how to juggle both it and the demands of family? There didn’t seem to be enough time in the day to pack it all in, leaving for work early in the morning and returning at home in the evening, to find the two of us starved for her attention. Gone were the leisure hours, sleeping late on Sunday mornings. And gone, too—or at least so she feared—was family time given to just being together, not consecrated to planned expeditions like visits to the zoo or Rock Creek Park. It’s when you’re just hanging out together, she wrote, that kids are most apt to let slip the things troubling them.
She described the first Christmas as a trial, an unsettling blending of seasonal joy and personal sorrow. Presents poured in from family friends, especially for the two of us boys, but on the morning we opened them, when we sat on the floor surrounded by ripped wrappings like piles of leaves, there was no adult for her to share it with—or to give her a gift.
All in all, that first year was one of tribulation. And so, she wrote in her book, halfway through it she did something that only another grief-stricken person might understand. She sat down and picked up a fountain pen and wrote a letter to her dead husband. She described it this way: It was “a long letter, confiding in him the many ways she was failing and how she wasn’t sure that she could succeed. And how sorry she was. She had just spilled it out. It had done her good.” And afterward, she wrote, she burned the letter, explaining: “In this household, things inevitably got misplaced and one of the boys might have come across it one day. They must not be burdened with knowledge of what a struggle it was for her nor know her occasional depths of despair and fear of defeat.”
Truth, however, intervenes. She did not, as she had written, burn the letter so that we would never find it. I discovered it in 2005, stuffed inside a manila envelope, along with scraps of notes and faded newspaper clippings, tucked away in a carton that had rested undisturbed in an attic for many years. It was dated March 27, 1943, six months after he died. She began it this way:
Dearest,
This may seem a little screwy but I’m so much in the habit of writing to you, of having you to communicate with, that I think it might help. There are substitutes for lots of things, but there’s no substitute for that intimate communication.
I think we’re going to be alright. But it’s certainly an odd world without you. I haven’t yet found home base in myself, a complete home base, without you. You would be pleased that few people, if any, know that. You would be happy at the face I give the world. You would be happy that I’m managing so well and understand that I’m not managing better.
She told him that we children were all right so far and that we seemed to have adjusted to change. But she worried about spending so little time with us and about the energy her job consumed. She had proven that she was able to earn a living and she was proud that she was contributing something to the war effort. She vowed she’d rather be a ribbon clerk at Lord & Taylor than fall for a big salary doing something phony. “I know you’d feel that way.” Still: “I wish I had some of your confidence in me.… I’m greedy, I guess, to give the kids the values we would have given
them together.” She ended the letter:
I wish you could breathe your talent and experience into me—as you have given me so much else of yourself. Darling, do you really suppose I’ll get used to being without you? That first brilliant understanding of what your death meant, the rightness of it in terms of large issues, or at least acceptance instead of resentment. Then the numbness, stabbed with pain. And now this alert carrying on, with the unrelieved private desolation. Writing to you hasn’t helped as much as I thought it might. I guess kidding yourself, even this much, my darling, is no way to do. We’ll see. I may be able to resolve me by talking at you, instead of to you, yet. Darling, I love you. You’re my guy. And this is still the same world. It must be, even without you.
It’s clear that her account in the book was untrue in one other significant respect. In The Children Grew, she said that writing him had “done her good.” But in reality, in the letter itself, she noted that it “hasn’t helped as much as I thought,” that she was “kidding” herself to think otherwise.
The book is not a reliable account of our childhood. It’s such a perfect reflection of our mother, and her capacity for optimism and romantic delusion, achieved by gutting out the hard core of dark truths, that more often than not it points in the wrong direction. For years I was bothered by the disparity between what had happened and what she wrote had happened. My brother and I joked—with an undercurrent of bitterness, he more than I—that we didn’t know if it belonged on our shelves under the category of fiction or nonfiction.