Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  CHAPTER 5

  My brother and I were always eager to hear the story of how our parents met. I suspect that’s true of most of us as children—probably because on a psychological level the story is really about us. It’s our own creation myth, a fairy tale whose ending, equivalent to “and they lived happily ever after,” is: “and then, you were born.”

  Except in our case, the story remained tantalizingly vague. Our mother seemed to be telling an expurgated shorthand version. There was no precise moment when she first met Barney, no thunderstruck beginning. They didn’t spot each other across a crowded room or happen to sit opposite each other in the dining car of the 20th Century Limited—or if they did, we weren’t told about it. It took years for me to learn the reason for this opaqueness, and when I finally did, everything fell into place. It was simple: When they met and fell in love, each was married to someone else. The subsequent disentanglement, necessitating two divorces, was ugly. And so, the beginning of our own particular fairy tale was X-rated.

  Of course we didn’t see it that way. Privately, as we came to learn the through line of the story in small doses and adorned it with our own imaginative touches, we elevated it to the status of a heroic epic. It made their love seem passionate and even in a way pure. What is love without an obstacle to surmount? Long before I saw a staging of Romeo and Juliet, I knew something about star-crossed lovers, and long before I heard of Abélard and Héloïse, I felt an instinctive connection to the romantic proposition that great love will not be denied.

  When they met in the mid-1930s, my parents belonged to a subculture of New York literati. Their crowd was made up of magazine writers, newspaper reporters, novelists, and professionals from tangentially connected professions, such as advertising. Early on I got the impression that they were given to fast living and heavy drinking. To some extent they were spiritual heirs to the earlier Algonquin Round Table, though less vicious and backbiting. The ethos was epitomized by The New Yorker, which offered a knowing take on life in the anonymous big city, with its manifest excitements and small, hidden pleasures. The magazine, grounded on the unstated assumption that New York was the center of the universe, mirrored them and their aspirations, since so many of them were refugees from other parts of the country. My parents were part of that migration.

  I came to know my mother’s family much better than my father’s. As a young child I visited my grandparents in West Philadelphia. My grandmother was lively and irreverent, always ready to play tic-tac-toe or tell a child a tale. She had a soft spot for people in trouble—her father had been a down-and-out drunk—and I can close my eyes and see a parade of palsied men given room and board in exchange for sweeping the basement. My grandfather, who had been an orphan in the slums of London, seemed never to have recovered from his Dickensian childhood—he was quiet and removed from family life. I found their Victorian house, with its thick-curtained rooms and china bed pans under the beds, airless and claustrophobic. The photos of my mother and her three brothers hanging on the wooden stairwell were unsmiling. My mother didn’t reminisce much about her years at home, and the stories that she enjoyed telling, with gusto, were of school yard and outdoor tomboy adventures. She acquired her lifelong nickname, Tootie, on a grade-school baseball diamond the day after she appeared as Little Boy Blue in a class play; she socked a home run and, cheering her, her classmates shaped their hands into horns and shouted, “Toot! Toot!”

  Whatever it was that was wrong in that house caused my mother to rebel. She became a 1920s flapper, complete with a pageboy haircut, short dresses, and long beads. In summers, she followed her passion—acting—at the Hedgerow Theatre, housed in a picturesque 1840 gristmill. She left home by dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania in her senior year and eloping. The man she married was named Clarkson Hill. Because in later years Mom regarded him with such contempt, we never found out much about him, other than that she compared him, like Thomas Dewey, to “that little man on the wedding cake.” I did learn that he worked in Philadelphia as a banker and that Mom got a job there as a copywriter for an advertising agency, N. W. Ayer & Son. In 1933 they moved to New York City, where she worked for another ad agency, J. M. Mathes, Inc. Together they apparently led a high life, despite the Depression, just as Prohibition was ending. In an image that probably belongs more to the movies than reality, I envision them like William Powell and Myrna Loy, in a duplex with a winding staircase. She became the editor of a high-quality glossy women’s fashion magazine called YOU and wrote a racy tongue-in-cheek book called Ain’t Love Gland? Subtitled A Psychological Guide to Mating, it was based on the pseudoscientific principle that various glands dictated personality types and it dispensed worldly wisdom for “streamlining your love life.” She wrote it under a pen name, Kate Townsend.

  Following Mom’s funeral forty years later, two hours after her body was laid in the grave, her moralistic older brother, Ernie, who had labored away with dogged rectitude as a high school principal in Philadelphia, reminisced bitterly about his sister during that time. He told of how she had called to borrow money from him, and his surprise when he went to deliver it. A Japanese houseboy opened the door and ushered him into a marble lobby decorated with potted palms. He told us that as a bitter complaint, and I knew I was supposed to be troubled by it. But I couldn’t suppress a smile. For years afterward, that image—my mother living in splendor while the responsible world came to call in the person of Uncle Scrooge—was emblematic of something I loved best about her: her irrepressible spirit and her Auntie Mame conviction that life was to be lived to the fullest.

  By contrast, I had little to do with Barney’s family. I did visit them in Michigan when I was thirteen and encountered a bewildering array of cousins old enough to be my father. That’s because Barney was by far the youngest of his six siblings. His father, Robert (a name passed down through the generations) was a prominent town elder, eventually becoming the postmaster. In high school, Barney visited New York under the tutelage of an uncle, Charles Darnton, the drama critic for Pulitzer’s New York Evening World. He got his first taste of the glamour of the big city and his first look at the innards of a newspaper, and he was smitten by both. According to his obit, he laughingly told friends as a middle-aged reporter that it was while watching his uncle pound out reviews on a typewriter that he caught the newspaper bug.

  Growing up, I heard various stories about Barney’s experiences in World War I. He enlisted out of high school in the Michigan National Guard, which became part of the 32nd Division, nicknamed “Les Terribles” by the French for their courageous tenacity in taking on “the Boche.” They were the first doughboys to fight their way onto German territory. When I was twelve, an animal died in the hollow of our living room wall, resulting in a putrid smell throughout the downstairs. My mother remarked that a similar thing had happened to the two of them years before, only Barney hadn’t noticed it. She said that he had spent so much time in the trenches, surrounded by bodies, that he had lost “the ability to smell death.” I pondered that idea for weeks, wondering what it had been like to have gone through such hell on earth—and whether I would have been able to withstand it.

  His obit in the Adrian paper was accompanied by the recollection of a fireman who had served in the same outfit. It was headlined BAPTISM OF FIRE. The man noted that shortly after arriving in Europe, Barney fell ill, was hospitalized, and then had to catch up to his unit.

  After the usual greetings and back slapping he wanted to see just what the front line looked like. I walked up to an advanced position with him through a connecting trench. A Frenchman was standing by. We visited a few minutes and Darnton remarked that it sure was quiet. “Don’t they ever do any shooting?” he asked. The Frenchman just smiled. He pulled a rifle grenade out of his pocket, attached it to his gun and sent it looping over to the German trenches a few yards away. Darnton watched him quietly. That grenade hadn’t any more than landed when German machine guns began to cut loose. Bullets whizzed overhead and o
ne of them clipped off a barbed wire fence post right over us. Darnton ducked. “Gosh,” he exclaimed, “they really do shoot over here, don’t they?”

  He attended the University of Michigan, but, as my mother told the story, after his time in France college life struck him as puerile. He dropped out after two years, toured the old battlefields of the Oise-Aisne and the Meuse-Argonne, and then took up a job as a reporter on the Port Huron Times Herald. After a year, he moved to Baltimore to work for H. L. Mencken on the Evening Sun, the afternoon paper, which was more prankish than the morning Sun. He began writing short stories and got some of them published in Mencken’s magazine, The Smart Set, and in Scribner’s Magazine. Mencken tried to convince him to take up fiction as a career. He flirted briefly with the idea but decided against it. I went back and located some of his stories. They were well written but struck me as a bit heavy-handed. I think he was wise to stick with newspapers.

  He went on to Philadelphia, where he worked on the Philadelphia Bulletin and then the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. There he met Ann Hark, another reporter, and they got married. The marriage lasted only a year or so. In 1925, he reached the top of the newspaper heap—New York City. He joined the New York Evening Post, in those days a respected paper, first on the copy desk, then as a reporter; he covered both 1928 conventions. Two years later he moved over to the Associated Press, as a day cable editor—equivalent to the foreign desk—and then as city editor of the New York bureau. In April 1932, he married a woman named Eleanor Pollock. Two years later, on April 30, 1934, he transferred to the news staff of the Times and began rising in the ranks from reporter to editor. Somewhere along the line, he met my mother. The two Eleanors, Eleanor Hill and Eleanor Pollock, inhabited the same universe of advertising copywriters and magazine editors. So it was natural that the two women would become friends and, together with their husbands, all get to know one another.

  Over time my mother dropped tidbits about her illicit courtship with my father, but she never told the full story. When I was in my twenties, we might be eating in a restaurant—say the Oyster Bar at Grand Central or Cobb’s Mill Inn in Weston, Connecticut—and she’d remark that the place held a special meaning for her, because years ago she and Barney used to meet there. She’d look around, taking in the changes and subtracting them, and I could tell that she was traveling back a quarter of a century to be there with him, perhaps sitting at our very table. Once, passing a hotel—it was the Biltmore, with its gilded clock, a famous meeting place—she told of how several times, filled with remorse, they decided to end their affair. But each time the separation proved insupportable; one or the other would give in and place an urgent call and they’d resume seeing each other. On one occasion, Barney could no longer stand being apart. He telephoned and she admitted that she, too, had been about to phone. They fixed a rendezvous on the spot—a hotel lobby—but in the excitement, signals got crossed. Barney dashed off to the Roosevelt and she to the Biltmore. For over an hour each waited, pacing frantically and then despairing, thinking the other had had a change of heart. Not until the next day was the mix-up sorted out. As she told the story, she laughed fondly and shook her head, as if looking back at herself as a thirty-year-old and wondering how she had been able to endure such wild swings of emotion.

  One summer—it must have been 1936, but I can’t swear to that—Barney and his wife rented a cottage near the beach south of Westport, not far from where my mother and Clarkson Hill had rented theirs. This was the turning point in the relationship between Barney and Tootie, the time they became lovers. How did it come about exactly? Here the blank spaces intrude once again. They multiply and spread out to attach to one another, so that, try as I might, I come up with very little. That’s not surprising. In personal histories the key moments often drop away, while the mundane ones survive in bureaucratic papers or the recollections of others. In trying to piece together my parents’ courtship, I feel as if I’m tracking their footsteps on the beach just as the tide moves in to erase them.

  There was, apparently, a literal beach. That much my mother told us. There was a critical day—perhaps a Monday, when Barney didn’t go in to work (as a Sunday editor, he had Mondays off). She drove her husband to the train station for his commute to the city. Perhaps for some reason Barney was in the car with them, or perhaps he was back in the cottage. In any case, the two ended up together, walking on the beach, talking easily. A seagull glided in over the water for a landing on the shore. As she watched it, Mom realized that she was deeply, irrevocably in love. Everything that followed came from that moment.

  It is natural to want to fill in the blank spaces. I imagine the two couples cavorting together, a run of evenings and weekends of cocktails and dinners in restaurants, four-way conversations in which everyone is talking but two seem to be speaking mostly to each other. They laugh at each other’s quips, share looks, and trade observations—a natural affinity. The attraction is masked, which makes it more exciting, the boundaries continually pushing out. With his calm air, his natural authority, his newspaper storytelling, Barney overshadows the feeble bank clerk. I remember Mom telling me how she treasured small, insignificant items that Barney had used—a box of matches, say—husbanding them in his absence, keepsakes to invoke him. I see excursions—drives in the country or clamming or crabbing—when Barney and Tootie find themselves riding in the front seat of the same car or sitting side by side in the same boat, each intensely aware of the other. I imagine them looking forward to the times when they will be together, even as a foursome, then planning other times as a twosome.

  And that summer Monday morning when things came to a head—how much of it was planned? They end up on the beach, walking slowly, talking easily, discovering how much they have in common, how much alike they are. It is so different from the frivolous flirtations of the cocktail parties. Other walks follow on other days, then meetings in out-of-the-way places. At some point they make love. And the talks become even more personal, each telling things never told to anyone else. I imagine them, as the affinity deepens, speculating about where this crazy passion might lead them, eventually envisioning the kind of life they might have together, playing out the fantasy. It will be so different from the life they’re leading now. It will be without all that pretense and the self-conscious pursuit of pleasure. It will be rich in everyday joys, in the satisfaction of being with someone who understands instinctively what you are about. It will be refreshingly bourgeois. They will have children, something they’re both ready for; they’ll abandon the city and move to the back country—why not right here in Fairfield County? Barney will stay on at the Times—newspapering is almost a religion to him—and Tootie will give up her career and tend to the home. Will she do this, for him? Is she ready to throw it all in and become a housewife? Isn’t she, in fact, beginning to feel a nesting instinct, which surprises and delights her? For children, a home in the country, everyday delights. Some evenings, she’ll meet him in the city for dinner or the theater. On days off, they’ll loll about the homestead, reading until noon, going for a stroll through the woods, mixing cocktails in the late afternoon. It could be glorious.…

  My brother’s reconstruction is a bit different. As he remembers hearing the story, the two were walking on the beach and when the seagull swept down, our mother watched it and realized, in a single lightning stroke, that she was in love. Right away, they went to the cottage, and to bed. Our versions have a lot in common, but on a critical point—when sex comes into the picture—they are mutually exclusive: Mine is more romantic, his more hard-edged. The truth undoubtedly does not lie somewhere in between.

  Nervously, I pick up the bundle of their letters. My mother kept them safe, tied with ribbons. At some point she went back and tried to fix the dates, writing them on the envelopes, but sometimes she attached question marks. I have read the letters before, but that was so many years ago, I barely remember what’s in them. Besides, this time I’m not reading them in the same way, as a child content to
gather a general impression of their love. This time I’m like a detective, looking for clues about their relationship—when it began, what made it happen, and how it developed. I hurry over the letters from later years, those written during Barney’s trips to the West Coast after Bob was born and those from the war years, and I come to the early ones. I hope, feeling a flush of puritanism that surprises me, that they don’t talk about sex. To my relief, they do not. They trace the outlines of a deepening love. There was apparently a trip to Albany that somehow proved pivotal. Did Barney go there to write a story about Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and did Tootie accompany him? The word Albany becomes shorthand in subsequent letters. It seems to stand for a time when they realized they belonged together and were right for each other. A lovers’ code springs up, a series of hidden references. One is to the constellation of Orion, another to a Broadway play of that time. Above all is a sign of two x’s inside a circle, meaning that the two of them exist inside “the charmed circle,” cut off from the rest of the world.

  By Valentine’s Day, 1937, Barney had left his wife and moved into the Hotel Murray, at 66 Park Avenue. I know this because my mother sent him a Western Union Valentine greeting there. It reads:

  SWEET FLOWS A NAME ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE

  IT’S BARNEY D, THE SUNOFAGUN.

  I WOULD CALL IT BLISS DEVINE,

  IF HE’D ONLY BE MY VALENTINE.

  It was unsigned. She later sent him another telegram, again joking in false rhyme: