Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  BY THE STARS OF ORION,

  I SWEAR YOU ARE MINE.

  At some point, later in 1937 or in early 1938, Barney returned home to Michigan for a visit while she remained in New York. His letters are chatty, filled with news about family members coming and going in profusion. He wrote about an ex-banker who absconded with thousands in embezzled funds, about a teenage niece telling him over an ice cream cone of her dream to become an opera star, about discovering a great deal of animosity toward President Roosevelt. He ended one letter talking about the two of them:

  New York is very far away. You’re in New York. But you are not far away. One thing you are doing very well: you come always into my mind when a conversation pauses, when I walk home from town, when I awaken. It is good to go to you a hundred times a day, for thoughts of you are pleasant thoughts.

  Her letters, by contrast, seek reassurance about the two of them. She worried and reached for metaphors and confessed and poured out her feelings, signing her letters “Kate”—her middle name—which Barney preferred to Eleanor or Tootie.

  You know once I made a promise to myself about you—one you never knew about and one I’ve lived by. And that is, that with you and about you I would never fake anything. Never simulate a feeling, never pretend a thought. It’s a good promise. I’ve kept it, always. And I always intend to.… I know I will never have to mask any feeling of mine for you. Nor will I ever have to force one into being something greater than it is. This is real, you are real, I am real. The realness has started to weld. And will continue until it is truly one.

  There follows something that confuses me. My mother spoke of losing trust. She hinted at something that had happened, something that he had done, perhaps, that she had to come to terms with.

  The past has to be gathered up, the dross looked at and thrown away, the good integrated into the new way of life—so that I come to you whole and good and strong.… But there is this one important exception. I loved you wildly, exultantly—blindly—once. And now I love you with knowledge. And that’s better. But this I think is true. With the coming of the knowing love I lost a little trust. That’s hardly a fair way to express it. Because of circumstances, a little of that trust that you could love me died—or rather, I am sure—became only benumbed. I have to get used to believing that you love me again.

  He reassured her in a letter that appears to have been written the day he received hers.

  Look, my dear. Worry a bit about this and that if you want to—but I’m not going to. Before the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I love you, I’m going to live the rest of my life with you, I’m proud of you, I’m nuts about you, I miss you, I want you. I like New York–to–Albany with you. I wish I could marry you tonight. I wish you were here tonight. I can create that tight little circle with you. I want kids with you.… In short, you are what I’m about. Past? There isn’t any. Future? Nothing else.… Ah, Kate, you arch minx, you have veritably stolen my heart.

  The letter goes on to describe his joy in spending an afternoon with a nephew, his wife, Laura, and their six-month-old daughter. He found himself transfixed by the new mother. It’s clear, I now understand, that he wanted to settle down, to have children. It was this that Tootie was offering him. He wrote:

  When they left I walked with her to the car and with a nice understanding of what had been going on in my mind (for I had been staring at her all afternoon—and thinking of you) she suddenly held out the baby to me. It was such sweet hokum and I was so proud. Laura got in the car and I handed the baby in to her. Jesus, Darling, I felt swell!

  His letter melted whatever reserve was bothering her. She answered quickly, beginning: “Darling, darling, darling, darling,” and said that had she been there with him, she would have felt the same thing about the baby. She said their private circle was “soft and warm and brewing.”

  And so the story of their love, with its beginning in public scandal, reached its fairy-tale ending. According to my mother’s entry in Who’s Who, my father and my mother were married not long after that—on April 23, 1938.

  CHAPTER 6

  In October 1943, one year after our father’s death, our mother was promoted to the position of women’s editor at the Times, and we moved to Washington Square in New York City. The following summer she tried an experiment: She rented a beach cottage on a spit of land in Westport—not far, in fact, from the spot where she and Barney had fallen in love. Why she would want to return to a place with so many emotion-laden memories is hard to fathom, unless, of course, that was the whole point: that it was the memories themselves that drew her there. Only later did I postulate that this was her way of clinging to the life they had envisioned together.

  By her account it was a good summer. We went swimming and clamming and sunbathing. These activities were amply recorded by the camera of Meyer (“Mike”) Berger, a frequent visitor. I dropped my bathing trunks and went about most of every day naked. Bob continued his preoccupation with war, spending much of the time in a child’s khaki uniform, learning how to march like a soldier and collecting army insignia. He took naps in a pup tent erected in the backyard sand. For a while, his predilection to play soldier distressed Mom, but she soon evolved a positive explanation, as she invariably did when we engaged in potentially disturbing behavior. She decided that his war games were a kind of therapy—“an instinctive sloughing off of some buried hurt,” as she was to write in her book.

  She found that she could handle the hour-plus commute to the city and so decided to move us year-round to Westport. Typically, she regarded the decision as a weighty choice between extremes painted in black and white. The city was confining and dirty and dangerous. The country was the only place for boys to grow up, to flex their muscles and fill their lungs with clean air and become strong and healthy. As children, we bought this proposition wholeheartedly. Westport would become the crucible of our childhood, the place that would form and sustain us. During this time, my conscious life began—that is to say, my memory kicks in—and so I can say with assurance that I loved it, everything about it. The Connecticut woods were my Eden.

  Without realizing it, my family was anticipating the great postwar migration to the suburbs, where the American dream would search for itself in split-level houses and country clubs and wood-paneled station wagons. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s Westport was not yet a bedroom community. It was a self-sustaining village with lots of forests and meadows, closer in spirit to New England than to the New York metropolis. There were onion farms in the back-country, unheated bungalows along the shore, and a few redbrick factories along the Saugatuck River. Shopping centers had not yet sprouted on the Boston Post Road, not even supermarkets. Local grocery stores delivered to customers’ houses and their deliverymen tried to get through even when blizzards dropped two feet of snow. People didn’t lock their doors, and some left their car keys in the ignition. Many artists and writers lived there. So did theater people, because of the summer productions in the one-hundred-year-old red barn of the Westport Country Playhouse. Main Street and the side streets were replete with shops that fascinated children—an Army-Navy store, Western Auto, Klein’s toys, a hardware store with wooden floors, a five-and-dime with open bins, and Bill’s Smoke Shop, a tiny cabin that dispensed penny candies like jawbreakers and wax lips. The Fine Arts movie theater showed double features for twenty-five cents.

  We were ignorant of the social order in Fairfield County’s Gold Coast, but looking back it now appears clear cut. Italians were the underclass, but they were moving up, assuming the ownership of liquor stores and restaurants. There were no African-Americans other than maids and a few day laborers. The suburbs had not yet become a subject for sociologists. Richard Yates and John Cheever were not yet sharpening their pencils on anomie and conformity in the land of manicured lawns. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo—or rather, their fictional TV counterparts—had not yet moved in from the Upper East Side. Nor had the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or the Stepford Wives. At th
e time, only scores of commuters, not hundreds—virtually all men—joined my mother weekday mornings at the quaint wooden railroad station with screen doors that slammed in the summer and large radiators that clunked in the winter.

  Years later, recalling that time, Mom would say that she felt she stuck out “like a sore thumb.” A single mother working in the city and raising two children alone was almost unheard of. Returning in the evenings, she’d find the railroad station parking lot crammed with idling cars, the wives waiting to greet their husbands, standing on the running boards to wave, some with martinis already mixed in a thermos. At PTA meetings parents filed into the gymnasium in a phalanx of twos, for all the world like the animals mounting the gangplank to Noah’s ark. Wives sometimes regarded her, an unattached woman, with a hint of suspicion. And sometimes men, assuming she must be sex-starved, tried to force themselves on her. One day we stopped going to our family doctor, a mild-looking man with thick, round spectacles, whom I feared because he gave me injections. Twenty years afterward, my mother explained why: During a physical examination he had tried to rape her.

  But Mom didn’t complain. You played the hand you were dealt and you didn’t make any bones about it. “You makes your bed and you lies in it,” she used to remark in a resounding stage voice. That was our family ethos and the ethos of the country emerging from the war. She thought she’d be strong enough to carry the burden. After all, as Barney had written to his older brother, “She isn’t the stuff that cracks under a bit of difficulty.”

  · · ·

  Our first house, bought with the insurance money, was a large Colonial built in 1785. It was set in a hidden valley only a mile from the center of town. Approaching it was a surprise. One minute you were on a well-traveled road overlooking the Saugatuck River and then, after an abrupt left turn under a canopy of trees that seemed to part like a curtain, you were on a tranquil road called Edge Hill Lane. It dipped down into the valley, and the house, the only one on the road, rose up on the right on a bluff behind a retaining wall. It was three stories high, white, with green shutters. The front door, up a brick stoop and under a peaked portico with benches set on either side, announced it as a grand dwelling. We always used the back entrance. We’d follow the driveway, which curved around the bluff and ended near the kitchen. The backyard seemed to go on forever. It held a chicken coop, an apple orchard, an old red barn, and five or so acres of meadow and fir trees.

  Inside, the house was a child’s paradise of hidden nooks and mysterious spaces. The front entrance gave onto two large living rooms, each with a fireplace framed by ancient Delft tiles, one blue, the other pink. A soot-blackened arm, once used for hanging cooking pots, swung out over the hearth. The main staircase swept up to the second floor, where our bedrooms were. Mine was small and tucked in the back. An enclosed staircase, like a secret passage, led down to the kitchen. The third floor had sparsely furnished bedrooms, which were rarely used. They seemed to cry out for children who should have been born. I used to think they were intended for the large family my parents would have had if my father had lived.

  Of the war years, I have only a smattering of memories. One is of a spoonful of bitter-tasting chocolate pudding—bitter, I was told, because all the sugar had gone to the war, something that puzzled me. Why would grown-ups—not to mention soldiers—want sugar? Another is of a gruesome comic book depicting the Nazis as wolves; they wore swastika armbands and their long snouts dripped with blood. I hated them and feared them in equal measure. A third memory is of a family, a couple with a young daughter, who shared our house for a while because of the housing shortage. I enjoyed playing with the girl, especially with her dollhouse, until my brother told me that this was not fitting for a boy.

  I have a memory of something else, but it is hazy and diffuse, of a time in 1946 when my mother was away for a long time. She went on an editing assignment to Paris for five months. Our grandmother came to stay with us, and we also had Inell, the maid who had left us in Washington, to see us through. I don’t recall missing Mom badly, though I suppose I must have. But for my brother it was a different story. One day, after she returned, the two of them were standing beside our car, when he picked up a stick and raked it back and forth across the radiator. “I used to come out here when you were away and do this,” he said, according to her book. “I pretended it was your voice.… Then I’d be less lonely for you.” She wrote that she suddenly understood “a boy’s hunger and need for his mother,” a remarkable revelation coming from someone who thought she understood child psychology. And then, with earnest resolve, she said that after that she “managed never to be away for more than a few weeks at a time, at the most.”

  My favorite possession was a koala teddy bear that my father had sent to me from Australia (my brother got a kangaroo). I slept with it every night and often carried it around during the day, though rarely risked taking it outside. It had a flat rubber nose, two soulful glass eyes, and soft, musky fur that smelled, I thought, of faraway places. I found a small blue-patterned chair that was a perfect fit. I often put the bear there, seated as comfortably as an old man in an easy chair, to supervise whatever project I was engaged in. I slept with it long after its arm and leg fell off and the fur had mostly rubbed off into bald spots.

  Christmases were an extravaganza, an agony of waiting, followed by a frenzy of greedy acquisition. While we were sleeping, the tree would somehow materialize. In the morning, we would race down to a blaze of colored lights and sparkling tinsel and the sweet aroma of pine sap and needles. The gifts were set out in stacks as tall as we were. More than anything, I loved the ritual of hanging the stockings from the mantel the night before and the magic of seeing them so stuffed that they hung like mail sacks, almost reaching the floor. My stocking was special. Wartime shortage meant that I had no red stocking to match those of my mother and brother, so my mother took the unused one, embroidered with DAD, and put my name on the reverse side. Ever after, I treated it as a talisman. Hanging it became almost a mystical rite, confirming me in my unspoken conviction that my father and I shared a unique connection.

  Did our mother date in those early years? If so, we didn’t know about it. I seem to remember—judging from the double names on cards attached to the presents—that her friends came mostly in couples. Undoubtedly they were carryovers from her years with Barney. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, when guests slept over, I would rise early and slip down to the living room. There, I’d look at the detritus of the night before, when I had heard laughter mounting the staircase and sliding under my door. I’d examine the half-filled cocktail glasses, the shriveled slices of lime, the sour-smelling cigarette butts in overflowing ashtrays, and the bits of hardened cheese and crackers or leftover desserts. The assorted leavings were a small window onto the adult world. It was clear that grown-ups behaved differently when we weren’t around, that their pleasures were exotic and unimaginable. Who knew what those pleasures were? Someday, I thought, I might comprehend that world and even join it, a prospect that filled me with awe.

  As I grew, my horizons expanded outward from the house. Next to the bulkhead cellar door, hidden under a spreading pine bush, I built a miniature village. Ducking under the branches, which blocked passage for anyone bigger, I entered a world of my own making. I would lay the roads and move the cars and rearrange the houses. I ruled over this village with a benign but despotic hand, while in the real world I was small and dependent. My powerlessness was brought home to me every morning because of the terrifying chore of feeding the chickens. Opening the wire gate, I would be set upon by our vicious red rooster, which pecked me on the legs and arms, hard enough to draw blood. Each morning I dreaded the attack, searching for new stratagems to avoid it, but it always seemed to come. I would slip into the coop noiselessly, and just as I finished pouring the feed into the trough, the rooster would dart around the side of the henhouse and come at me with its beak bobbing and wings flapping. Soon I began having nightmares about it. Yet I have no memo
ry of asking to be relieved of the chore. One morning I found the rooster hanging dead on the wire fence. He had caught the spur of one leg in the wire mesh, ripped it half off in his frenzy to escape, and bled. I stared at his body, hanging headfirst, limp and lifeless, over a pool of blood congealed in the dust below, and my heart overflowed with joy.

  Soon my universe expanded to include the barn, which became a hideaway and my favorite place to play. I spent hours there. Once I peered down from the loft through a second-floor window and spotted a worker who had been using a scythe to cut the knee-high grass in a nearby field. He walked to the side of the barn, ten feet below me, and urinated against the wall. I was shocked at the size of his penis, and I quickly pulled my head back inside the dark loft. It was the first time I had seen an adult male appendage.

  When I turned five, I widened my universe farther still, exploring the lane out front. I’d follow the slope of the road to a crest, where there was an old graveyard packed with leaning tombstones and ornate crypts. I spent hours there, contemplating, listening to the birds and the humming of the insects in the quiet sanctuary of the place. I walked along the paths between graves, vigilant to avoid stepping on them, and toured the crypts, wondering which one contained the body of Jesus. I strained to peer through thick stained-glass windows to the dimly-lit marble slabs inside. Clearly His would be the most impressive. But which one was that? There seemed to be so many, each one more grand than the one before. To cover my bets, I prayed before different ones on different days, leaving behind offerings of wild daisies on the stoop or interlaced in the protective window grilles.

  Returning home, I usually turned off onto the remnant of an abandoned road. The excavation was dug into the hillside, so that at the end I had to scramble up an embankment. It led to a grove of pines. Pushing the branches aside, I came to the top of a tall bluff covered by a patch of moss. From there I had a spectacular view. I could see clear across the river to the cluster of buildings that constituted the rear of Main Street. On the near bank of the river was a crossroads. Spread out beneath me, so that I could see the rooftops, were a brick fire station, a grocery store, and half a dozen houses. From my vantage point, sitting cross-legged on the bed of moss, I would watch the comings and goings of the town. A traffic light blinked yellow at the intersection. A car turned off the Post Road and gained speed on the road below me, shifting gears noisily. A pedestrian crossed the street and disappeared into a photography studio. There was something exhilarating in being the unseen observer, in contemplating the larger world far beyond the boundaries imposed by my size, and presiding over it, a giant leap from ruling my miniature village beside the cellar door.