by John Darnton
My brother was old enough to have friends visit, and we often went straight to the barn loft. They usually let me tag along, though not always with good grace. On one occasion Inell summoned us to lunch. Bob and his two friends shimmied down a rope hanging from the loft opening, leaving me behind. I ran to the rear of the loft and tried to lift the door set in the floor. It was too heavy. I ran back to the opening, beginning to panic, and leaned out. That was the last thing I remember. When I regained consciousness, I was lying in my bed in a cast up to my neck—my arm and collarbone broken. My mother gave me a talking-to, about using my head and the need to remain calm in a tense situation and the importance of good judgment. I took it all in happily; I was basking in all the attention. I felt sure she must have also lectured my brother for abandoning me, and that made me feel good, too. From the first he had been told that he must look out for me and protect me, and in this instance he had clearly abrogated his responsibility.
The two of us were settling down into our respective roles. He was the steady one, helpful and responsible beyond his years, having been told early on that he was “the man of the house.” I was difficult and uncommunicative, given to extreme moods and prone to trouble. As far as I was concerned, my brother was simply bigger and better in all things—he could run faster, jump higher, articulate better, and understand things beyond my comprehension. In her book, our mother wrote that Bob sailed through the early years, adaptive and friendly and curious about people. I, on the other hand, did everything my own way and took everything hard. To put a label on it, she wrote: “Bob was an Integrator and Johnnie, Johnnie was a Creator.” But beneath the rose-tinted generalizations, darker shadows loomed. Bob was already worried about protecting our mother from bad news. One morning he balked at going to school but relented when she insisted he live up to his obligations. That night, while bathing him, she felt his forehead; it was hot. He had a rash—measles. Why hadn’t he told her that morning? “I thought you had enough on your mind,” she recalled his saying. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
I sometimes acted out. One weekend her friends the MacKayes came to stay with us. The three adults were up late into the night, and the next morning, hungover, my mother strove to be the good hostess. But I ragged her mercilessly, talking back, needling her but failing to get a rise out of her. Finally, I shoved a chair in her path and she cracked her shins on it. She grabbed me and spanked me, hard. My howls raised the roof and Milton MacKaye rushed in, concerned. I turned on him, yelling, “Go ’way. Can’t me and Mommie ever be alone?”
Not long after that, one of my father’s brothers, whom my brother and I had never met, came for a visit. The two of us were told, or we intuited, that this was to be an important occasion. We were to eat lunch early, to allow the adults to talk in the short time available, but when our guest arrived, I refused, and after my mother insisted, I ran off toward a busy road. Once there, I had no recourse but to give up and walk back, in defeat. My mother was mortified by my behavior and took me indoors by the hand. When she returned, my uncle said, “I’d forgotten how naughty Barney was as a little boy. I’d forgotten how he loped, too, when he ran—as Johnnie does.”
Looking back now, I realize that she guided my upbringing with references to my father and often said how much I resembled him. If I lay on my back with my hands folded behind my head, she would remark that he used to lie down in exactly the same posture. If I made a wisecrack, she would observe that the two of us had the very same sense of humor. We made a game of expressing an endearment. One would say, “Have I told you today that I love you?” The other would reply, “No.” And the reply to that was, “Well, I do.” It was soon shorted to: “Have I told you today?” and a quick nod no and a counter nod yes. It was the same game that she had played countless times with him. If I encountered a problem or a setback or felt unequal to a task—feelings exacerbated by having a brilliant, well-rounded older brother—she made me feel better by reciting one of Barney’s sayings: “Don’t worry. Some Darntons mature late.” All of this made me feel less bad and that I was accepted for myself, though it also planted a hard seed that would sprout over time: my attempts to be just like my father.
At a certain point I took to the idea of running away. Comic strips of the time featured the hobo, a man in ragged clothes carrying his belongings in a simple red bundle at the end of a stick. I identified with that. At the age of six I packed a bundle, filled with clothes and provisions like raisins, and kept it in a corner near the back door. When my mother asked me what it was for, I explained that it was in case I wanted to run away. She raised an eyebrow, but in time she and my brother accepted it as a harmless indulgence. I found it a comfort. You never knew when you might need to hit the road in a hurry. And then, inevitably, came the day I did.
The dispute had undoubtedly been building for some time. I was in a climbing phase and was scrambling up and down the furniture. Inevitably, ashtrays and glassware were sacrificed. One afternoon I mounted a wing-backed chair to reach the mantelpiece, above which hung a painting that had always puzzled me (a copy, I found out later, of El Greco’s View of Toledo). Where were the roads exactly? Why did they appear and then disappear behind all those splotches of gray-green? I found a letter opener and tried to trace them, scratching the canvas. I climbed down, examined my work, and promptly forgot about it—until several days later, when my mother summoned me into the room and pointed angrily at the painting. “Why did you deface this?” she demanded. I couldn’t answer. In fact, I had not the vaguest idea. We talked. She expounded on the principle of private property and the selfishness in destroying someone else’s possessions. I felt miserable. She asked me what punishment I thought I deserved, and again I was at a loss. Finally she gave me a clue. Every Saturday, we observed a ritual: The three of us would drive to a candy store near the railroad station, where my brother and I would get to select two comic books from a rack that covered an entire wall. I took the hint. “No comics or allowance for six years.” “That’s a bit harsh,” she replied gently. “How about two weeks?” That was fine with me. I was grateful the subject was settled.
But the following Saturday my gratitude evaporated when we drove to the store and I had to wait outside until my brother emerged with two brand-new comic books. On the drive back my rage grew, until we arrived home and I declared, “I’m not sticking around this joint any longer.” I grabbed some food and my hobo sack and slammed the back door. I walked down the valley beside our house, crossed a field of knee-high grass, and entered a small woody knoll. Then I doubled back and crept behind a large fir tree in the center of the field. I found a hideaway under the low-hanging branches. The pine needles smelled sweet and provided a soft bed. I lay down and waited, and I did not have to wait long. My mother came down the hill toward the field—she must have followed my direction—and I could tell from her stride that she was anxious. I drew farther back in the branches and watched. She walked toward me and passed close enough for me to hear the slap of weeds against her knees and to read the fear on her face.
She made a wide loop and disappeared. She began calling my name. I moved farther inside and leaned my back against the tree trunk. I opened a box of raisins and ate them, then an apple that was crisp and sweetly sour. The sound of her calling grew fainter as she rounded the house on the far side. The longer I waited, the better I felt, so I waited a long time, until finally, after an hour or so had passed, I went home. She was in the kitchen, washing the dishes, pretending to ignore me, but I could see relief coursing through her. Sometime after that we talked about my punishment, but we did not speak of my running away, almost as if nothing had happened. But I knew that something had happened, something important. I had learned a lesson. Small as I was, I had gotten a little taste of power. It was like the apple, both sweet and sour, and I savored it.
Like Bob, once I started school and left home every day, I felt an overriding need to protect Mom. In first grade, I was cast, along with a dozen other six-year
-olds, as a bumblebee in a skit during class, and I told her I needed a T-shirt with brown stripes to play the part. The night before, she stayed up late, sewing a costume much more elaborate than the occasion required—a whole ensemble, complete with translucent wings and springs attached to a beanie for antennae. It was one of the few times she was able to supply me with something special for school, and she did it up proud. The next day I was mortified to discover that all the other bumblebees had simple T-shirts. I was embarrassed beyond belief and I promptly hid my costume in a supply closet. That evening, when she asked how it had gone, I said her costume had been a big hit.
At night, to put myself to sleep, I often engaged in a fantasy of escape. Underneath my bed was a trapdoor. Opening it, I would come upon a tunnel that went deeper and deeper into the earth. It ended in a large cavern, in the center of which was a gigantic carnival with a single ride—dodge-’em cars. All my friends were there—they had similar tunnels under their beds—and we would play all night, smashing into one another and whipping around the course, then return home just before dawn.
I worried, somewhere deep within my core, that I was irrevocably bad—not just naughty or incorrigible, as those big grown-up words put it—but truly bad, as if compromised by some original sin. I carried this sense of myself through the day-to-day routine. It was the reason, I’m sure, that I found it hard to fall asleep and that, when I did, I was often beset by nightmares. One night, lying in bed, I heard, or felt, another presence in my room. I opened my eyes, and there in the doorway stood a man—or rather, the ghost of a man. The light was shining behind him, so that I could not get a good look. He seemed to shimmer, standing there on the threshold, looking down at me. I was gripped by terror and felt my heart thumping. I closed my eyes and lay there motionless, not daring to cry out, but resigned, waiting to see what would befall me. A second later I opened my eyes—and he was gone. I didn’t know what to make of this. Something told me that it was the ghost of my father, but if so … why was it so frightening? I pushed the memory down and didn’t talk about it. I waited to see if it would happen again. It didn’t.
Around this time I succumbed to a high fever and fell into delirium, and I confessed my secret. “I’m bad, I’m bad,” I said over and over as my mother sat by my bedside, placing cold compresses on my forehead. To read her version of the incident, she was able to convince me that I was good by repeating those simple words over and over—“No, you’re good, you’re good”—until finally they took hold. Like a miracle, my fever broke. Never again, she wrote, was I troubled by the thought that I was bad. When I read those words now, I smile ruefully. Once again her book, and her view of life, crossed over into fiction. She was a big one for happy endings.
In 1950, my mother and brother and I went to see a movie called Three Came Home. Starring Claudette Colbert, it was (as I later researched) based on the story of Agnes Newton Keith, an American writer in British North Borneo during the war. Mom sat between the two of us, as usual, and we settled in with popcorn and soft drinks. Along with her husband, a colonial officer, and her young son, the heroine falls into the hands of the invading Japanese. They are interned in a camp behind barbed wire, and the husband and wife learn they are to be relocated and separated. Standing on either side of a ditch, they say farewell; he slips a note into her hand, telling her to be strong. She takes the boy with her. At one point, going outside at night to rescue laundry from a storm, she is assaulted by a Japanese guard. She lodges a protest, is beaten and interrogated, and faces execution for impugning the honor of the guard. At this point, I noticed something upsetting. On my left, my mother was sitting stiffly in her seat and tears were running down her cheeks, glistening in the glow from the screen. I looked around in the dark to see if others had noticed. Thank God, they were engrossed in the movie. Eventually the heroine is saved by a sympathetic Japanese camp director. The war ends and the male prisoners, emaciated and dressed in rags, come walking back to their families. Everywhere men and women are hugging and weeping in joyful reunions, but Agnes can’t find her husband. Her face registers complete despair. Then, as the music soars, the camera pans up a road to the crest of the hill, and we see him, first just his head, then all of him. He’s on crutches but manages somehow to run. They fall into each other’s arms, then onto the ground. The boy pokes his head in between them and all three hug. The End.
By now my mother was sobbing uncontrollably. As the lights went up, people darted glances at her. I was confused and mortified. It was not often that I saw my mother cry, certainly not in public. On the way home we talked in general terms about the war, careful to avoid any reference to her tears. Once there, my brother pulled me aside and explained what was going on. She was crying, he said, because the husband in the movie came back and her husband did not. He used the word husband, not Daddy. We tried to make her feel better. We brought her slippers, a glass of water, and I read to her, playing the comedian, until finally she began to laugh—out of relief or just to please us, I’m not sure. What stays with me is the sense of reversal: Here we were, taking care of her. Even more, I remember the fear—fear in seeing a crack in her emotional façade. I sensed that the crack could lead to other cracks, that our world was not as secure as I had imagined. I had thought she was happy and contented, as she had told us she was. But I was wrong. The world was dark and dangerous. Old sorrows could rise up out of nowhere to shatter your world, and there was nothing you could do about it.
Growing up, I did not consciously miss my father, because I had never known him. There was no discernible hole in my life that made it seem less than complete, nothing gone that was definable, like a rip in a fabric or a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s impossible to imagine your life different from the way it is. And in any case the thought of Barney was not something that arose in the daily routine. I went to school, played at recess, ate lunch in the cafeteria, and took the bus home—all without the dimmest notion that anything could be different. I have memories of scattershot moments in which other people learned of his absence. A teacher taking an impromptu census of likely attendees at a PTA meeting asked us to hold up one or two fingers and, embarrassed, quickly counted me—yet I was proud and continued to hold my one finger in the air for all to see. A kindly woman, meeting me at the beach, asked, “What does your father do?” and, at my response—that he had been killed in the war—she gasped and reddened. I quickly said, “It’s all right,” meaning it. I added, “I was young. I never knew him.” But what stung me, I think now, and why I remember the incident so vividly six decades later, was my embarrassment, because it was clearly not all right. I knew of no other family that had lost someone in the war.* What else could her reaction signify but that I was different somehow, singled out, to be pitied.
In our family we didn’t speak of Barney every day or even every week. That would have been unnatural. But we incorporated rituals about him into the rhythm of our lives. Every time we drove to or from Compo Beach we passed a roundabout with a statue of a kneeling minuteman holding a rifle, and we would say, “Hi, Butch,” because, we were told, that was what Mom and Barney had done. And there were times when my mother would be moved by some unseen sentiment to talk about him, and then we two would soak it up voraciously, the way I imagine blind people might listen to a description of a sunset or a forest. In her book, my mother said she was aware of the danger of building him up too much, of creating an idol whose heroic stature would smother us. For this reason, she was careful to tell us about his crotchets and small slipups—why was it, she would wonder, that whenever she asked him to pick up things in town, he would return empty-handed? Or that when she asked for a bottle of ink, he’d bring a spool of thread? We would chortle, she wrote, and then she knew that everything was all right and we were seeing him as a fallible human being and not some sort of god.
Today I smile when I think of her little stratagems and her conviction that they worked. Forgetting to buy items in a store, confusing thread for a bottle o
f ink—such minor, insignificant failings, they served only to highlight the perfection of the man. In my heart I knew him for what he was—a leader among men, someone who was courageous and idealistic, unafraid in war, suave and debonair in public, witty and warm in private. There could never be anyone better than he and it would be impossible to live up to him.
We learned at some point that he had been killed by friendly fire, but that made no difference in the larger scheme of things. We couldn’t, of course, blame the Americans. We blamed the enemy—in particular, the Nazis. If they hadn’t started the war, causing him to feel the compulsion to go away to write about it, then he never would have been killed. For a child, the emotional logic hits home with a vengeance. At some point I heard that the young pilot of the plane that had dropped the bomb came to our house seeking forgiveness, but I have no recollection of such a visit and I now doubt that it took place. In my juvenile brain I conflated the pilot with the one who dropped the bomb from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima, and I came to believe that he had had a nervous breakdown and was unable to return to his bomber, like Gregory Peck struggling to climb aboard his B-17 in Twelve O’Clock High.