Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  Clearly, our family myth was evolving and growing stronger. The storybook life that our parents had conjured up in Westport years before would continue with us as a threesome. We boys were supposed to flourish in bucolic splendor. We would go to good public schools and have family outings—clambakes on the beach, croquet games on long summer evenings, ice-skating on backwoods ponds in winter. The idyll would continue and it would be unchanged—only without one of the principals.

  Six years after his death, my mother received notification from the army that Barney’s body would be transported to the United States for reburial. She chose the Darnton family plot in a wooded cemetery in Adrian, Michigan, where his parents were buried. They had once visited the graves together. We drove there from Connecticut. I remember nothing of the trip and almost nothing of what happened when we got there. I’m told that uncles and cousins surrounded us, that men hoisted us two boys up in their arms, that there were friendly dinners around large dining room tables, with everybody talking and lots of ice cream. What I remember is the grave site. A coffin draped in an American flag, some words said, taps playing slowly and sadly, and then the sound of gunfire—the horrible sound of the guns going off in volleys, one after another, three times. They were deafening. I gripped my mother’s hand and felt nothing but terror.

  *Estimates are that some 183,000 American children lost their fathers.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I was growing up, I learned about fathers through my friends, but I don’t believe I ever envied them. The reason was simple. I couldn’t imagine having a father any better than the one I didn’t have.

  My closest friend was Johnny Ray, or “Raisin,” a nickname I gave him so long ago that neither of us could remember when. I met him on my first day of kindergarten. As I was sitting on the floor, feeling abandoned and trying through my tears to build a tower of blocks, he walked over, sat down, and joined in. For the next seven years, we were inseparable. Because our houses were close to each other, it was easy for us to visit, so on most afternoons when school let out, he could be found at my house or I at his.

  Raisin’s home life was strange and frightening. A brother and sister, much older, had moved out and rarely visited. His mother, Eloise, was a soft, quiet woman, and her nurturing seemed an effort to compensate for his father, Joe. Joe was a tyrant. He rode a motorcycle, wore a black leather jacket, and went on violent binges. When he was home, he thundered about the house, answering the phone with curse words and barking commands. His spine was fused, so he couldn’t swivel his head; to look at you, he’d turn his large body square at you. I avoided him at every turn, feeling like Jack and the Beanstalk in the castle of the giant. Now, when I look back, I can see him as a rebellious eccentric. An innovative architect, he had designed and built his own home, a meandering house of five levels, with an interior entirely of wood, and he sailed his own twenty-five-foot boat, Hardtack. But back then, he was my bogeyman and the fount of my nightmares. When he was drinking, he threatened his son. Worse, he was mercurial, so that on some days, he would be unaccountably friendly. He would sit us down in front of sketch pads and dash off a few lines for us to turn into completed drawings, or sail us across the Sound to the north shore of Long Island and back. I succumbed to these overtures fearfully, meekly waiting for him to explode. And sure enough, the next day he would be on a tear, crashing about the place like a madman. We would flee to the woods and stay away until dark, then creep back to look through the windows to see if he was still there. If he was, we’d stay out until he disappeared upstairs—the giant asleep in the castle’s tower.

  His explosions got worse over time. Once he followed my mother into the train station and yelled at her—insisting that her car had cut off his motorcycle—and, to her mortification, demanding to know if she was drunk. His treatment of Raisin became ever more abusive. It reached the height of cruelty on the day of the party for my seventh birthday, an event I had been planning for weeks, inviting everyone in sight and laying down treasure hunts and other games. Moments before it was to start, Raisin’s mother called to say he couldn’t come. The reason was vague and she sounded shaken. When I called him back, I learned what had happened but prevailed upon him to come anyway. He showed up with a sailor’s cap pulled down low over his ears, his face bright red. His father, furious over some minor infraction, had hauled him to a barbershop and forced the barber to shave off every hair on his head. At first we tried pretending it was no big deal. We scarcely mentioned it. Then, during a game of hide-and-seek, as the two of us were lying in the crevice of an upended tree trunk, Raisin told me the story of his punishment step by gruesome step and lifted his hat to show me what he looked like. His bald dome was shocking—so perfectly smooth and shining—and for some reason the skull under the babyish pink skin seemed immense and freakish. Once again his face flushed red to the roots. I tried to console him, though he was beyond consolation. That Monday he missed school, and the news of what had happened to him spread through the class. The following day, Eloise having obtained permission for Raisin to wear the sailor cap at all times, he turned up. He was at least saved from the ignominy of having to reveal his baldness—that is, until one afternoon when our class was unruly in the cloakroom. The third-grade teacher, Miss Anderson, who had given permission for him to wear the hat, was livid. She marched into the cloakroom and with one quick motion grabbed the sailor’s hat, yanked it off, and held it at her side. A stunned silence fell upon the room. Everyone froze and stared at poor Raisin. He turned flaming red and tried to shrink down through the floor. Slowly, the teacher returned his hat and we all filed out silently. I spent that afternoon at Raisin’s house, but we didn’t discuss the incident. I could see it was too painful to talk about. From that day on, our hatred of Miss Anderson grew to pathological bounds. We cursed her at every turn, prayed for misfortune to fall upon her, imagined tortures to be inflicted upon her. We dug a six-inch grave and buried a doll in it, scrawling her name on a cross made from Popsicle sticks. Two years later, when we had moved on to higher grades and learned that she had, in fact, died, from cancer, we celebrated by digging the doll up, wrapping her in burlap, and burying her again, laying a bunch of dandelions on her grave. Our prayers had been answered.

  When I was seven we moved across town. The year was 1948. Harry Truman was elected president, “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” was on the charts, and Fort Apache was packing them into the movie theaters. Our new place, a rambling two-story white clapboard house on a hilly street called Roseville Road, was smaller than our old one. The move was exciting. I was mesmerized as I watched our belongings being boxed and wrapped and slotted into a huge van. We raced the van to reach the new home first, and my brother and I bolted through the empty rooms and hallways, laying claim to certain spaces, like the hidden hollow under the staircase. Seeing our old furniture in unfamiliar surroundings was jarring but strangely hopeful—like the promise of a new start.

  What made the new house special was the backyard, set in the bowl of a surrounding hill, and the woods behind, which seemed to go on forever. As I grew older, I spent hours and hours in them, sometimes with a friend, sometimes just with Nicky, the black hound dog I got for my birthday. I picked him out of a litter of mutts next to a barn on a farm. On weekday mornings Nicky walked me to the school-bus stop and at night he slept curled up at the bottom of my bed, always in the same place, so that over time his body pressed out a perfect doughnut in the mattress.

  The day after we moved in, I met Dickie, a boy who lived just up the road. He demanded to know if I had met “Boss.” I shook my head no, envisioning something of a neighborhood bully, and he promptly led me down a hill to an ancient gray house, where “Boss”—to my surprise—turned out to be a fifty-five-year-old retiree. He lived with his wife and an aged dachshund and he liked kids. Given to wearing red-and-black-checkered wool shirts and a day or two of gray stubble, most of the time he seemed to be caring for his property, raking leaves, pruning trees, and putte
ring around in his garden. He took time to consider our questions, and something about him, the way he treated us as equals who simply happened to be less schooled in the ways of the world, prompted us to ask him things we wouldn’t ask others.

  “If Jesus was the son of God, why wasn’t God angry at us for killing Him?” “If an atom bomb was dropped on New York, would it reach us way out here?” “What happens to animals when they die—do they go to heaven, too?” Most of his answers, I don’t remember. It was the asking of the questions and the discussions that followed that counted.

  Boss lent us a chicken coop in his back woods for a clubhouse, taught us lore about the out-of-doors, and, when it was cold, made room for us in front of his fireplace and his TV set. There on the tube I followed the hour-by-hour countdown to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. When I asked him who they were and what they had done, he turned his back and said simply, “Nothing.” If they had done nothing, then why were they going to the electric chair? “Because some people in this country are very stupid—very scared and very stupid.”

  One day Boss was pruning trees and cutting limbs in the woods behind his house when he called to us. He pointed to a young tree about twelve feet tall and asked us if we knew what kind of tree it was. We didn’t. He stood back a couple of paces to look it over and said, “Well, I think we may just have here the beginnings of a lollipop tree.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but he explained that when the season was right and the tree was big enough, it was known, under certain propitious conditions to grow lollipops. I remained skeptical. But sure enough, one week later he glanced up at a blue sky, sniffed a warm spasm of wind, and allowed as to how the lollipop season might well be upon us. He escorted us to the site. There was the tree, fully decked out, its young limbs almost touching the ground, festooned by hundreds of wrapped candies and lollipops. I knew, of course, that he had done it, but I pretended to be taken in, and soon I almost believed him, which made the whole thing that much more enjoyable. Walking home that day, our pockets stuffed with candy, Dickie confessed that he wished that Boss was his father instead of the one he had. I wasn’t surprised by this, because I didn’t like Dickie’s father either. He asked me if I felt the same way, and I said no, but I didn’t tell him why. Boss was way too old. My father would have been young and dashing. He wouldn’t spend the whole day just raking leaves and branches—he’d be out in the world, reporting and writing stories and making important things happen.

  Later that day Dickie told me about sex. I was shocked and disbelieving, so he led me into his parents’ bedroom and opened up a bureau drawer. Reaching under a stack of socks, he found a box of condoms and showed them to me. I was aghast. The whole idea, the very thought of it, was filthy. That night in my bed, I cried, and when my mother came in to say good night, she asked me what was wrong. I told her why I was upset, and she sought to calm me by overriding my misconceptions, insisting that sex was beautiful, a way that adults expressed their love for one another. But I cried even louder. She was confirming Dickie’s horrible revelation. So it had to be true after all.

  I didn’t have a solid idea of the life of a normal family, one with two parents, although I faithfully watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and, a few years later, Father Knows Best. The closest model at hand came from the parents of Scott and Craig, mischievous redheaded twins who were among my best friends. The mother, Betty, with long straight hair and a quiet chuckle, was young and attractive. The father, Russ, was friendly, but he could put on a gruff exterior if the situation called for it. They both worked as photographers, but she stayed home a lot, or at least she was at home whenever we arrived from school. I had the feeling that they expected kids to be a little wild, and approved of it even, but they also set clear boundaries. If I turned up with a small tear in my shirt, Russ would beckon me over; as I stood before him, he’d slip a forefinger from each hand into the hole and, with a loud whoop, rip the shirt from top to bottom.

  The twins had their bedroom in an attic that took up the entire second floor. Sleepovers began with pillow fights and turned into free-for-alls that seemed to shake the whole house. There was an unspoken understanding: The first two times Russ came up the stairs to quiet us, we could regroup and resume, but the third time he meant business and we had to obey. I looked forward immensely to these occasions. Once I arrived from school wearing my pajamas under my clothes, and when it came time for bed and I shed my shirt and pants, the whole family collapsed in laughter.

  Typically, after school I would walk the mile home from the bus stop and disappear outside until just before dark. I knew the lay of the land for miles around—where the meadows were, where the deep forest, the banks of moss for lying down, the blueberries for eating, and the vines for swinging. On weekends, friends would come over and we would build lean-tos against the stone walls or climb high in the trees, pulling up planks tied to ropes to construct lookouts. On windy days, we’d crawl to the end of the branches and sway back and forth with the gusts.

  Much of the time, we played war. We were American GIs on the front lines. The enemies were Germans or Japanese. To guide us, we had plenty of movies over the years, like Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Halls of Montezuma, and Stalag 17. We outfitted ourselves from the Army-Navy store with caps, canteens, woven belts, and thick-blade bowie knives. We dug foxholes, lugged around heavy battery-crank army field phones to communicate with our imaginary troops and died heroic deaths assaulting pillboxes or pinned down in no-man’s-land. We lived much of the time outdoors. In summer, we’d dip our hands in cool streams for a drink of fresh water and on sultry nights haul our sleeping bags deep into the woods and swat mosquitoes and listen to strange rustlings until we’d fall asleep. In winter, we’d make “Indian” fires, piling small twigs in a tepee to cook slabs of bacon and toast fat-soaked bread, or lug a snow shovel to a frozen pond surrounded by maples and birch and clear it for ice-skating, going home only when our toes turned red and numb.

  It was a time of consummate freedom. I was living out my mother’s dream of a freewheeling, untrammeled life in the country, though at times my wanderings felt more like escape. For my eighth birthday, I was given a new English racer. I often jumped on it, pounding the pedals with all my might until I was speeding wildly. I continued for miles along the side of the road. At moments like that, with the wheels spinning madly and the wind whipping my face, the speed lifted me out of myself and away from my concerns. Much of the exhilaration came from leaving my world behind me, from flight. But flight from what?

  Our mother had a smattering of psychology, which she probably picked up in the course of writing stories about children and family. She also knew psychological jargon, which was big in the 1950s, and so while eavesdropping on her conversation, the terms father substitute and role model would sometimes flicker across the screen of our consciousness. The attempt to find a suitable father substitute was a running subtheme in our household, though it never materialized. Did we, my brother and I—or did we not—want her to find a man to marry? The answer, as in many such situations, was resoundingly ambiguous. On the positive side, the reasons were obvious. Who wouldn’t want an adult male to step in as a protector and teacher?

  Then, too, there is the following exchange, reported in The Children Grew. It happened after I was teasing her about not really wanting to have more children. She countered that to do that, she would have to be married. I replied that “a smart woman like you” could get married if she wanted to. She noted that most men her age were already married. I observed that if she liked a guy enough, she could get him to divorce his wife. Disturbed, she explained that would not be right, and repeated that most of the available men were too young for her.

  “I knew you’d say that. This guy is forty-two.”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy I was talking to today. At the playground. He was showing me how to shoot baskets.”

  “He’s probably married.”

  “I knew
you’d say that. I asked him. He said not.”

  “Then he probably doesn’t want to get married.”

  “He said he’d be delighted to marry you.”

  “John!”

  On the other hand, if our father was the ideal role model, and perfect in every way, and if he was already a semiliving presence in our mythic lives, what right had we to countenance behavior on her part that might upset the delicate equilibrium and dethrone him? Her attempts to draft outsiders into the part were at times ham-fisted and embarrassing. When I was ten, she learned that the local Episcopal church was planning a father-son dinner. Fearful that I would hear about it, she somehow matched me up with a perfect stranger. The man, gray-haired, with glasses and a slight stoop, hardly fit my image of what I wanted a father to be. When we met in the church vestry and descended the stairs to the basement, where folding tables were covered with bright checkered cloths and slabs of meat and cooked vegetables were piled on a buffet, we had absolutely nothing to say to each other. I suppose he would have been a nice-enough fellow under different circumstances, but I couldn’t wait for the evening to be over, and I had the impression he felt the same.

  Into the vacuum of father substitutes wandered one or two other men. My favorite was an uncle named Ben, one of my mother’s two older brothers. Ben, a redhead gone bald, was a natural-born hell-raiser. He had flash and a rapier wit and a penchant for playing practical jokes, which were usually aimed at anyone and anything in authority. He drove a red Buick convertible with a mounted searchlight, which he’d shine into our windows when he showed up for impromptu night visits; the beam flashed across my ceiling like a summons for Batman, though in this case it came from the Joker. We’d leap out of bed and he’d pour presents on us as if it were Christmas—crystal radio sets, antique flintlocks, Arabian swords, baseball gloves. You never knew when he would appear or how long he might stay.