by John Darnton
Bob rarely got into trouble, but once he did. He and three friends played hooky at the local swimming hole, Lee’s Dam, and were found by the police officer charged with investigating juvenile crime. They were taken to school in disgrace. That evening, Mom and Bob had a talk. She asked him why he’d done it. Hanging his head, he said he didn’t know. There was a long silence. She broke it, saying she thought she knew: He had been too good for too long. He must have felt the need to kick over the traces—everyone did sooner or later. His face brightened. “That’s it, Mom,” he said. “That’s exactly it.” She hugged him. I heard this conversation from a short distance, standing in the shadows. I, too, had been playing hooky that day—Dickie and I had spent it in the woods, smoking. I told her this—leaving out the smoking part—and she sighed. “What do you think—should I give myself up?” I asked. She finally just laughed and shook her head no.
Not long afterward, the same police officer, a lean man with acne scars on his face, came to our place, looking for me. Raisin had called, his voice cracking nervously, to let me know the cop was on his way. He was coming to retrieve some items that Raisin had stolen from a neighbor’s shed—maritime maps, flares, a flashlight, binoculars, and other things. Raisin had asked me to stash them for him, and I had buried them in a grove near the road. I dug them up and had them waiting when the cop arrived. He warned me that there might be serious repercussions, that theft was a felony and so was holding stolen goods. I worried about the threat for weeks and then, when nothing came of it, gradually forgot it.
I began writing gruesome stories for English assignments. I had always liked spinning tales—during sleepovers, we would take turns telling ghost stories, and I was usually nominated to cap the evening with a gothic horror. But now my proclivity for describing eviscerated corpses and the like spilled over into my homework. I would write such passages as: “The cop walked into the bedroom, surprised to find the bed overturned and Mrs. Ferguson’s guts splayed upon the wall and her scalp hanging from the chandelier.” My English teacher, Miss DeMers, called me in for a talk. Why, she wondered, did I feel a need to write so graphically? Didn’t I realize that reading passages like that was upsetting? I pondered the question—I had never thought about it and was curious myself to discover the answer. Perhaps, I said, I wanted to shock people so that they would feel something strongly. Or maybe it was language—I was experimenting with it, trying to find different ways of saying things. Had she noticed, for example, that I had found four different ways to describe Mrs. Ferguson’s guts—some of them sort of funny? She frowned and told me not to write like that anymore. From then on I censored myself and was delighted to find that for some reason the stories came out even scarier.
Around this time Mom stopped coming home for dinner. It was hard to predict her comings and goings. She would be groggy for days on end, then abruptly go into the city to work and stay there until long after dark. This was a new development; up to now, especially once Inell had left, she had returned in time to feed us. How would we eat without her? Bob could drive, but he wasn’t much of a cook. Still, he tried his hand at making a dinner, invariably thawing out some frozen vegetables and frying hot dogs or hamburgers. That became our routine. A guidance counselor at school somehow caught wind of it, he told me years later, and with feigned casualness asked Bob, “Is it true you cook dinner most days?” Sensing a danger—that we might be separated—he replied, “Certainly not.”
On special nights, Mom made arrangements with a small Italian restaurant to feed us on demand. We’d run up a tab eating grinders and she would take care of it later. The restaurant was across from the train station, about a mile’s walk, which would have been fine except that the only way to get there was to cross the railroad bridge over the river on a pedestrian walk that seemed more like a catwalk. I was petrified at the prospect. I had seen, from the safety of solid land, what happened to the bridge when a train roared across, how it trembled and even seemed to sway. Once or twice, I had been caught on the catwalk and the wind rush from the engine seemed powerful enough to press me against the wooden railing and possibly hurl me over into the water fifty feet below. Now every evening, twice an evening, I had to negotiate this perilous journey. I timed my trips to avoid trains. I waited on one side of the bridge, peering down the tracks, sometimes putting my ear to them (a trick picked up from the Westerns) until I became convinced that the coast was clear. Then I walked rapidly along the catwalk, ready to break into a sprint at the first sign of a train. The trip back, my belly loaded up with spaghetti and meatballs, was even worse in the dark, though with the advantage that the train’s headlight would provide plenty of advance warning, almost enough for me to make it across the catwalk unscathed. It was my very own Bridge of Sighs.
The saving compensation for these problems was my social life. Girls had now become the focal point of my and my friends’ existence and we pursued them everywhere, trying hard not to appear as if we were. There were any number of places where we could get together with them; at Miss Comer’s dancing class in the gymnasium of the local YMCA, where we wore black suits and white gloves and the popular girls filled out tasseled dance cards in the first five minutes; at Compo Beach, where we migrated to one particular section, spreading out blankets close to one another, the girls rubbing suntan lotion on one another and the boys wrestling in the sand; at the Saturday movies at the Fine Arts, where double-dating, triple-dating, even quadruple-dating meant the possibility of whispered endearments and stolen kisses; at parties, where everyone waited for the moment when the host would produce an empty bottle and place it in the center of a circle; and, of course, at junior high school, where the intrigues were hatched in notes passed around in class and during conspiratorial clusters at recess. Through it all, we boys were led around by the nose. Girls joined us as girlfriends and then broke up with us and switched places in a bewildering parade of matchups that seemed to have been planned without us. We knew nothing about these schemes and suspected that they had been hatched during secret conclaves, but we accepted them passively and willingly. What else could we do? The girls were so much more focused and single-minded than we were. We were clueless.
This frenzy of activity allowed me to persuade myself that things were not so bad after all. I imagined that there were plenty of people worse off than I was—I could see them in class, the boys without girlfriends. Life still had possibilities. And from time to time, Mom would come alive, acting like her old self, to prop up the illusion that our ship was still steaming ahead. Several times I allowed myself to wonder what things would be like if our father had not been killed. It was the year of Eddie Fisher’s hit song “Oh My Pa-Pa,” which I added to my growing pile of 45s. I sometimes played it on my Victrola when I was alone, trying to look soulfully off into the distance as he crooned about how his dear father would bounce him on his knee, but I was aware that I was striking a pose. I was trying to express something, a deprivation of some sort, even if it was only a caricature of it. I was playacting to determine if the loss of my father was real, while covering up the loss of my mother, which was genuine. It was emotional camouflage.
But soon life was to change radically. One evening Mom announced that she had given up on the business and accepted a job in Washington. We would be moving there. First, Bob and I would stay behind to finish up the school year in Westport, a matter of some nine months. Then we would join her in the capital. The news came as a blow to me, but, being practiced in short-term thinking and immediate gratification, I postponed imagining just how big a change it would be. We were sent to live with a woman we did not know well, a friend of Mom’s whom I will call Betsy Evans. She had just moved to Westport after a spell abroad as a career diplomat, apparently after a scandal (I was later to learn that she had fallen in love with a Czech while stationed in Prague; the man turned out to be a spy and she was drummed out of the diplomatic corps). Betsy rented a run-down house on Riverside Avenue. When I heard the address, I was horrified. The i
mpoverished family that had lived there had lost all their children to polio. For two weeks, the school had taken up collections in the classrooms and we all had contributed our pocket change in a mood of self-congratulatory charity. The house, which I thought must have harbored the disease, loomed large in my nightmares. The banisters, the windowsills, the toilet seats—any or all of them could be diseased. We moved in and over time I forgot about the stricken family and the threat.
Bob’s room and mine were next to each other on the third floor. The furnishings were basic: a steel-frame bed with a thin mattress and a single chest of drawers—nothing else. The floors were covered with peeling linoleum and the walls were painted a dull green. Downstairs, the house was a little nicer, though small, decorated with European artifacts. Betsy had two Airedales. I learned to say “Come,” “Go,” “No,” and “Good Dog” in Czech so that I could walk them.
The time passed quickly, too much so. I wished it would slow down so that I could stay in Westport forever. We fell into a routine. Before school in the mornings, gathered around the breakfast table, we watched the Today show with the congenial Dave Garroway and his cohost, the chimp J. Fred Muggs. The producers sometimes interrupted the show to bring live coverage of atomic-bomb blasts in Nevada, and I soon became fixated on the bomb. I had been primed for years to consider its horrors. We’d seen instructional films in school: scenes of air-raid sirens going off, crowds scurrying off the city streets, families taking refuge in basements. In one film, the father, nailing a curtain over a cellar window, got a whiff of radiation; it struck him like a puff of invisible smoke. But seeing the bomb explode live on TV, watching the tower that held it crumble, the billowing dust, the gigantic mushroom cloud rising up from the desert like an avenging monster—now that got my attention. It far surpassed any sci-fi movie. I wrote numerous letters to the Atomic Energy Commission and other such bodies, receiving back a flood of pamphlets and brochures extolling the benefits of atomic energy. But of course it wasn’t the peaceful uses I was interested in. It was the monstrous prospect, and mystery, of so much instant annihilation that I found irresistible.
Two days after my twelfth birthday, I returned from school, to find a letter addressed to me in the mailbox. It had a New York postmark, which was unusual. Inside was a short handwritten letter, saying that the writer had been told about my birthday and so was dropping me a note. What a coincidence, he continued, his birthday was the same month. The letter was unsigned. I shrugged and tossed it into the wastebasket. Several weeks later my mother, during a phone call, asked if I had received any mail lately. I told her about the mysterious letter. She said nothing. About a week later, I found another letter in the mailbox in the same handwriting. The author said he was so sorry he had forgotten to sign the letter—he must have been too excited, because just as he finished it, he got a phone call informing him he had been selected as the Most Valuable Player that year. He added, “So I’ll sign this one twice.” And he did: “Roy Campanella. Roy Campanella.” Even from as far away as Washington, my mother could reach out and with her inventiveness make something fine happen.
One day, I broke two beautiful, expensive vases. I was playing ball in the living room, bouncing it against the wall, when the vibration caused a large mirror over the mantel to dislodge and pitch forward. I grabbed the mirror, halting its fall, then watched helplessly as the vases, one on each end, tumbled onto the floor. I replaced the mirror, then picked up the pieces and reassembled them as best I could. Time passed—weeks, months even. I forgot all about it. One Saturday, lying in bed, I heard Betsy cry out three floors below. I ran downstairs and she was holding the pieces of a vase in her hand. I realized she had not yet seen the other one. Slowly, guiltily, I recounted what had happened. When I told her about the second vase, and led her to it, I saw her eyes glisten with tears. She had to sit down. I blushed in shame.
It mitigated some of my wild behavior that I was getting good marks at school. I was moved up to a more advanced math class and the teacher there took an interest in me. He was also the coach of varsity basketball, and Bob, now in ninth grade, the last year of junior high, was on the starting team. The teacher, Gordon Hall, appointed me as official scorer, presumably to give me a position to buck up my self-esteem. I enjoyed traveling around with the team, sitting at a wooden table courtside, along with a scorer from the rival team, assiduously marking down every basket and every foul. But I was conscious of the striking difference between playing the game, dribbling down the court with all eyes upon you, and sitting there anonymously writing down what happened.
Before long, the school year ended. I did not want to leave and found it painful to say good-bye to my friends. I was sure they would soon forget me and that I would pine away for all of them. On the next-to-last day, the math teacher offered me a ride home. As we arrived at the house where I was staying, he pulled the car to the shoulder and peered at it. He frowned and seemed disturbed by the look of it. He reached over and patted me on the back, then grasped my hand to shake it and held on to it for what seemed like a long while. Then, his voice breaking, he wished me good luck.
Two days later, I left Westport.
CHAPTER 11
I drove to Washington with the family of friends, the twins Scott and Craig, who were headed on a sightseeing trip there. I hoped that being with them would make my departure a little easier—as if postponing it by an extra day or so. Bob was not going with us; he had made arrangements to spend the summer helping to build a school on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Furthermore, he had won a scholarship to Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, so he wouldn’t be home during the coming school year. It began to dawn on me that I was now going to live alone with my mother in a strange city.
My sorrow over leaving Westport was lightened somewhat by my excitement over seeing Mom. We had not been in close touch in recent months—as always, I was an abysmal letter writer, and long-distance phone calls were reserved for emergencies—but she had led me to believe that her new job was going well. She was the press officer for the Children’s Bureau of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Having a full-time paying job, bringing in a regular weekly salary, would be a relief after the financial tailspin of the past few years. The Women’s National News Service had finally collapsed in bankruptcy that year, 1954.
My anticipation mounted as we drove down the turnpike, playing games by spotting animals along the way. I began a silent monologue, attempting to persuade myself that things might turn out all right, that Washington was going to be intriguing, maybe even exotic—after all, it was the nation’s capital, not even a state. It had no representation in Congress; you could almost claim it wasn’t even part of the United States. Plus, I’d get a chance to see the government in operation. Problem was, I didn’t believe these rationalizations for a second. I began to long for my hometown an hour after we hit the road.
We arrived in Washington in the early afternoon. I had in my hand a slip of paper with the address of our new place on Newark Street, in the Northwest section. We drove up broad boulevards of embassies and restaurants and drugstores with the curious name of Peoples, across a bridge above the treetops of Rock Creek Park, and up and down various side streets. Houses of brick and stucco faced tiny front yards—a landscape that struck me as puny and confining. We got lost. Eventually we found my new place, a squat, sturdy-looking Victorian structure. Mr. Kuhner parked in front and suggested that I go in first, since I hadn’t seen my mother in some time. I knocked at the front door. It was answered by a stooped man with a nimbus of white hair. He kindly explained that he was the owner and my mother was a renter, and he directed me to an adjacent door. It opened onto a staircase leading to the second floor. I bounded up the stairs. No one was home—or at least no one answered my knock. I turned the knob and stepped inside a small room, sparsely furnished. There were two doors. One, I could see, led to a bathroom. I opened the other. The bedroom was dimly lighted and it took a moment for my eyes to ad
just. I saw a bed, mussed but empty. Next to it was an easy chair and there, dressed in a nightgown, heavily asleep, her head draped to one side and her mouth open, was my mother. I tried to wake her, but to no avail. She was, I saw at once, too groggy.
I went back outside. I told the Kuhners that Mom needed to rest a bit more—the two adults exchanged quick glances—and they invited me to have lunch with them. We spent the afternoon in a blitz of sightseeing. I became frenetic. I felt a sudden need to burn off energy. I proposed to the Kuhner twins that we climb the Washington Monument as many times as we could. After running up and down four times, we sprawled, exhausted, on the vast lawn of the Mall. Then they took me back to my new home. I said there was no need for them to climb the stairs, grabbed my one suitcase, thanked them, and leapt out of the car. Mom was still asleep when I arrived. I managed to get her into bed, made two peanut butter sandwiches, and, some hours later, found that the couch in the living room converted to a bed. I lay awake for hours, listening to my own breathing.
At some point during the night, my mother came to, slowly and not altogether coherent. She seemed surprised to see me there and asked what I had been doing. My voice dripping with sarcasm, I replied that I had been counting raindrops, looking at shadows, twiddling my thumbs. I saw her expression collapse into hurt and I regretted it instantly. I felt racked with guilt. Who was I to think only of myself and to add to her miseries at a time like this? The next few days passed in a blur.