by John Darnton
That summer I was sent to stay with relatives in Michigan. They were on my father’s side of the family and so I had not known any of them. They were welcoming. They kept appearing, dozens of them, it seemed, pouring out of cars, coming from different towns. And—to my astonishment—they all had the same last name as I: Darnton. I hadn’t known anyone with that name outside our little circle of three.
The start of my visit was rocky. I wasn’t sure this new Darnton family would like me, so I had prepared a rough list of jokes and favorite lines, a sort of crib sheet of what I took to be winning witticisms. As I went to my room in the evening, I was shocked to see that the woman of the house—my cousin, though she was more than twice my age—had unpacked my suitcase. The crib sheet had been placed in a drawer. I felt my face redden. She must have read it. I had been unmasked. At the very least, I couldn’t use any of my prepared routines. I was on my own, with nothing to fall back on. How would I ever win their admiration and affection? That evening, around the dinner table, I dropped a cutting remark about Senator Joe McCarthy, who was then at the height of his crusade to root out Communists, and the same woman looked me square in the eye and said, “You shouldn’t speak ill of Senator Joe McCarthy. He’s an American hero.” I was taken aback. I didn’t know how to respond. I had never met a McCarthy supporter and had been raised to view him simply as the devil incarnate, with no specifics to back up that opinion. I probably wouldn’t have offered them even if I’d had any.
Despite the start, the summer turned out okay. I went from relative to relative in a guest-passing relay that crisscrossed the state and eventually landed me in summer bungalows on the upper reaches of Lake Michigan. I slept out on the beach during the warm nights with my first cousins once removed, tried to water-ski, and spent three weeks on a farm. I also learned manners: A cousin who handed me an ice-cream cone was shocked when I didn’t respond “Thank you.” “What do you say?” she asked, and I could only give her blank looks. She took on my boorishness as a project and put me through a drill—to wait for others to start eating, not to look into the milk pitcher before pouring from it, to hold the door open for adults. By the summer’s end, I could pass for polite—barely.
When I returned to Washington, Mom appeared to have improved somewhat. She had been going to work every day. Bob returned, too, and stayed a short while before heading up to Massachusetts. He was the subject of a segment on local TV. At the time the airwaves were filled with the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency and somehow my mother had pitched the idea of doing a countervailing piece on “a good boy.” He was it. As cameramen and soundmen and a woman interviewer with a bouffant hairdo traipsed through his room, asking him about his experience in New Mexico, directing him to hold up to the camera the Hopi doll he had acquired there, I watched in admiration. My own brother on TV! It didn’t strike me as odd that he was becoming famous—after all, he deserved it—but I could tell that all the attention made him self-conscious and miserable. He was submitting to it with clenched teeth. I wouldn’t have traded places with him for the world—though I also knew that there was no chance that would ever happen.
A few weeks later I began Alice Deal Junior High School. After the Westport school, it seemed large and impersonal. During my first period, I got myself pegged as a wiseacre. The homeroom teacher told us to introduce ourselves by citing positive things about ourselves; she called on us one by one, and when she reached me, I glanced up at the clock, noted there were a mere forty-five minutes remaining and said I needed more time. She glared as the class broke up in laughter, then took a deep breath and told me to try again. I said that I had come from a town in Connecticut, and on the spur of the moment I decided to lie: I said I had been president of my class. It was important to me that my new classmates realize how popular I had been and how much I had given up by moving to their school.
As the days passed I felt myself a loner and became shy. I made friends but wasn’t particularly fond of any of them, comparing them to the lifelong buddies I had had in Westport. I developed a crush on a girl in my class but never acted on it. There didn’t seem to be any boy-girl parties down there. Were they all emotionally stunted? I concluded that my days of intimate friendships and flirtations had come to an end. I missed my New England woods—there was no place to go where you could be alone and lose yourself among the trees and streams. Restless, I explored Washington. I attended several sessions of the Army-McCarthy hearings, went paddle-boating in the Tidal Basin, took repeated tours of the FBI (looking for traces of Dillinger), and haunted the gruesome anatomical exhibits at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. As time went on, I amassed a thick collection of visitor’s passes to the public gallery of the House of Representatives, signed by the congressmen and -women (or their secretaries), by passing myself off as a tourist from their home states. I took up trumpet lessons for a while, inspired by the Montgomery Clift character in From Here to Eternity. Each evening, I climbed out onto our roof and played taps to the setting sun, until a neighbor yelled at me to shut the hell up and threatened to call the cops.
I pined so much for Westport that Mom sent me there for a couple of days. I stayed with friends and accompanied them to school. My presence in a classroom was so disruptive—girls were passing me notes; boys were throwing things around—that the teacher, whom I didn’t know, expelled me. She told me to report back after school. I did. As I entered the empty classroom, I could tell that she had forgotten about me. She had me clean the blackboard and perform a couple of other chores, and then we started talking. I liked her. She asked me if I liked Washington and I said no, that I hated it. She asked me why and I said, “Because I like it here.” She said she understood. She had just moved to Westport, she added, and she missed her old hometown. The next day I returned to Washington. My sojourn in Westport only seemed to make things harder to bear.
With Bob gone, a hole was torn in our family. There was no one to look to for guidance, no one to drive the car home safely, no one to take charge in an emergency. Even if we hadn’t talked about Mom’s drinking—though in later years, Bob would insist he told me about it in the days before he left, something I have no memory of—I’d felt we somehow were confronting it together. Now I was suddenly vulnerable, as if the roof of our house had been ripped away by a tornado and I was huddling, helpless, in a corner.
Mom, meanwhile, bounced from job to job. The list of agencies for which she did public-relations work grew ever longer. She worked for outfits representing American Indians, aircraft owners and pilots, sufferers from arthritis and rheumatism, people with mental illness, criminals on parole and probation, and on and on. Each time, the story was the same: She would start out fine, fired up with enthusiasm, then encounter some bumps along the road, begin to skip workdays, succumb to “grogginess,” and then lose the job. The periods of work grew shorter and shorter. We moved into a semiattached house farther up the street. Her mother died and she made it to the funeral in Philadelphia.
Bob came home on Christmas vacation, then Easter. With him in the house, I breathed easier. He seemed alarmed at what he found, though we didn’t discuss it in detail. He noticed that we had been selling off our furniture. Once, I took a snapshot of him and inadvertently captured Mom in the background, slumped over in a chair. Weeks afterward, when she saw it, she flew into a rage. Was I trying to humiliate her? I had no idea what she was talking about. I stared at the photo—everything in it struck me as ordinary.
One Sunday, Mom announced that Carleton “Bill” Kent, the man who had been the correspondent for the Chicago Daily Times in the Pacific, was coming by for a visit. He and his wife, Janet, and their son lived in Arlington. Mom spoke of him with such respect and affection that it was clear his friendship with Barney gave him a special place in our pantheon. I had never before met a man who had been so close to my father in the war. And yet, during that visit, I acted younger than my age, hamming it up and playing the clown. As the adults sat on the porch having drinks, I took t
heir son, a few years younger, into our backyard. At my instigation, we imitated them. “Let’s be boozehounds,” I said, and we staggered around, pretending to be drunk, holding imaginary drinks in our hands, chugging them, falling down, and giggling. When the time came for the Kents to leave, I wouldn’t let go of the joke. We hiccupped and staggered, and I kept going on about “booze” and “boozehounds” even as my mother’s face turned hard. She was clearly embarrassed, but I kept at it. Instead of shaking Kent’s hand, I missed it by a foot. Finally, as their car pulled away, I pitched over and fell down in the street. “What is wrong with you?” she cried, turning away in anger. I had no idea, so as I picked myself up, I didn’t answer.
The next summer I took a Greyhound bus to Texas and worked on a small ranch owned by Aunt Dixie’s brother-in-law. It was a maturing experience. On the way I read my first serious work of literature (Of Mice and Men). We passed through the South, and I was shocked and angry at the separate drinking fountains and bathrooms and lunch counters in the bus stations. I thought of Inell: The idea that she would be consigned to separate facilities was infuriating. The ranch was four hours outside of Dallas. I rose every day at 5:30 to help feed the cattle. I learned to ride a horse, toss bales of hay out the back of a pickup, and help a cow give birth by pulling out the calf. I returned home taller and more confident. Mom was sick again, but this time she announced she had discovered the cause. Her liver was diseased, something called sclerosis. She would undergo an operation to have a portion of her liver removed and then she would be fine. “Does this mean you won’t be groggy anymore?” I asked yet again. “That’s exactly what it means,” she replied. She had the operation, recovered at home, and was better for a while. But three weeks later, the grogginess struck again. Perhaps they hadn’t removed enough of the liver, I speculated.
I became fearful and obsessive. I was convinced that thieves would break into the house we were renting or that the windows had been left unlocked or the gas left on. I stayed up late into the night listening for the sound of a door opening, a muffled whisper, a tread on the stairs. My room was the first at the top of the staircase, so I felt exposed. If robbers or killers came, I would be the first one they would get. I would creep out of bed, turning on the lights, and carefully make my way downstairs. I’d check the gas taps on the stove and the window locks. Then I’d retrace my steps. Lying in bed, I’d begin to wonder if I had checked everything thoroughly enough. Once planted, the seed of doubt would sprout and grow larger and larger, until I felt compelled to get up and check again. Sometimes I performed this ritual two or three times a night. In between, I was terrified. Every creak made me sit bolt upright in bed. I became so exhausted, I asked to sleep in my mother’s bed, and she let me for several nights running. Then she worried that it would become a habit. I knew that she probably had some half-baked sexual theory in mind—but how could I tell her that it was a physical attack that frightened me so? What was at stake was my very survival. At her insistence, I dragged myself back to my own room and there, night after night, I stayed awake until well past midnight or awakened suddenly, my heart throbbing, at two or three in the morning. What was that sound? How many robbers were there? What weapons did they carry? What would they do to me? In the mornings, I would arise slowly, dark rings under my reddened eyes.
One day, on a school holiday, I went with Mom to her office not far from the Capitol. From there I crossed the Mall and went to the Smithsonian. I had been there about an hour and was looking at a wooden display case when a man sidled up next to me, uncomfortably close. As I was gazing at the exhibit, he was looking at me. I glanced at him—his eyes were opened wide and had a crazed look. I moved away around a corner and he followed. I quickened my step and walked through a door into the next room and he came, too, still looking at me with that lascivious leer. I sped into another room, turned a corner, entered yet another room, and stopped before a glass case. I looked up—he was there! Now I ran. I ran through three rooms, found a door to a back staircase, ran down the stairs, opened a door to the outside, and ran up the sidewalk and across the Mall. I didn’t stop for six blocks, until I reached my mother’s office building. Breathlessly, I told her what had happened. She was concerned, but chided me: Instead of running away, if I’d been convinced the man was out to harm me, I should have reported him to a guard. Later that afternoon, returning home with her on a streetcar, I was convinced I saw the man sitting ahead of us, but when we got off, he didn’t follow us. Then I saw him strolling along on the sidewalk. At dinner in a restaurant a few hours after that, I saw him sitting alone at another table. I couldn’t be sure—I hadn’t gotten that good a look at him—but I told Mom. She said that it was impossible, speaking sharply in a “Pull yourself together” tone. I did. And soon I stopped seeing him.
Mom began staying home even more. She would send me on errands to the drugstore, a few blocks away on Wisconsin Avenue, mostly for Camel cigarettes. She supplied me with a note so that the clerk would sell them to me. She was usually too far gone to check on the change, so after a while I began pocketing a dollar or so. Then I began to keep all of it. She would be too drowsy to remember to ask for it. I amassed a cache of savings. Once or twice she would ask if I had returned the change, and, waxing indignant, I would insist that I had. During those walks to the drugstore, I was trying, consciously, to cope with the bleakness that had descended upon me. I began looking at myself from afar, objectively, as if I were in a movie, a movie about a young boy coming from a house of sickness. He was on an errand; he would soon buy a pack of cigarettes and pilfer the change. Somehow, for some reason, the fantasy made things easier to take.
A boy I knew in school lived on a cul-de-sac near Richard Nixon. He, like me, had been taught to despise the vice president, though we weren’t altogether sure why. One afternoon, we armed ourselves with four eggs, went to Nixon’s house, approached the front stoop warily, and threw them, hearing delightful smashes as they splattered on the façade. Then we ran as fast as we could. We knew that Nixon wasn’t living there at the time—he was occupying the vice president’s official residence—but the act of petty vandalism still felt gratifying.
Our basement had a Ping-Pong table, but now Mom was no longer capable of playing with me. I built a makeshift darkroom there and tried my hand at photography. I began hanging out with a boy who lived up the street; he was small for his age and pale and clearly headed for trouble. Together we turned the basement into a shooting gallery. We propped up sheets of plywood and fired the .22 rifles at them from a distance of twenty feet. Sometimes the bullets would ricochet from the rocks in the walls and go dancing around our heads. The danger was part of the thrill.
After a year Mom and I moved again to a small brick house on Forty-sixth Street, a tree-lined road close to Chevy Chase, Maryland. One morning I woke up and found a man downstairs. He was partially dressed in a crumpled suit, his breath smelled sour, and he was moving slowly. I could see that he was drunk. He explained that he and my mother had had a few nightcaps and he had stayed over. From somewhere, he produced a football—it was mine; I must have left it around—and he began holding it in different grips, showing me how to spin a spiral. He put his arm around my shoulders. I imagined that somewhere in their drunken revelry, Mom had said how sad it was that no man was around to show me manly things and that he had decided, in his stupor, to fit in a quick lesson. I despised him. He soon left, wobbling down the front stairs.
For a few months afterward Mom seemed to be functioning, but then she hit rock bottom. She stopped going to work altogether and stopped getting dressed, instead wearing her nightgown and moving between her bed and the couch downstairs. I functioned on my own, making my breakfast before school, running a paper route after school, and helping to prepare dinner. I had no idea where money was coming from or how much of it was left.
I began simply disregarding her. When a friend came over after school and seemed surprised to find her lying asleep on the couch, I told him to pay her n
o mind. I fell into a routine, and it became important to maintain it. I became addicted to classical music—the louder, the better. I loved Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and, most of all, Beethoven’s symphonies. After school, I would retreat to my room, close the door, pile the records up to play automatically, and turn the volume up as high as it would go. Lying on my bed, I lost myself in the thundering chords blasting around. It was like being in an echo chamber. The music—transformed into brute noise—obliterated all thought.
At some point in all this, Mom took a spill down the staircase. She broke the second toe of her right foot, and the toe turned yellow and blue and became misshapen. It was twisted halfway up, like a bent twig. Somehow, I got her to the doctor, she hobbling in and out of a taxi. She came home with a cast that covered her right foot and went all the way up her leg; it was open at the toes, where her second toe had a pin running through it, held in place by a metal brace protruding from the cast like a large staple. The steel entering the fleshy side of the toe was hard to look at. As might be expected, she did not take care of it—nor did I, for that matter—and one day I noticed that the toe had turned almost black. We went back to the doctor. It had become infected. A closed cast was put on and remained there through a long convalescence.
At school we were given an English assignment—to write a short story. I worked on it all weekend. It depicted the end of the world in an atomic holocaust. In a forest a few survivors were holed up, but they were facing an invasion by an enemy who had started the conflagration with a missile strike. The men were hiding behind pine trees with their rifles at the ready—a lift from Hemingway—and discussing the perfidy of the invaders as shadows began moving up the hill toward them. The payoff of the story came at the very end: The reader naturally assumed the guilty ones were Russian, but in the last paragraph they learned the invaders were American. The teacher asked me to read my story to the class, and I readily did so. Afterward, there was a stunned silence. He asked for comments. The first person to raise his hand said he doubted that I had written it. Others backed him up. The teacher cut short the debate—he said he was sure I was the author. I was thrilled at the reaction; it couldn’t have been better.