by John Darnton
During these four or five months, I cut myself off from the few friends I had. I rarely invited anyone over after school, taking the trolley alone with my pile of schoolbooks. In the afternoons, I would take long walks with my dog or watch, with a gnawing sense of shame because it was below my age level, Disney’s Mouseketeers singing and dancing and offering phony companionship. I cannot say that I was unhappy. I was feeling almost nothing at all, which was a relief of sorts.
A year before, I had applied to Andover and been turned down. I scored badly on a qualifying test, and at my interview with a school alumnus, I had barely talked. Now I applied again, and this time—miracle!—I was accepted. I was told that I was being given a scholarship, though I would have to repeat the ninth grade, since the test revealed that I was behind in vocabulary and other areas. Mom conveyed the news of my admission with great excitement. Another member of my school class was selected to go to Exeter, Andover’s rival. He was tall and handsome, a football player and a good student, just the type of standout applicant who deserved to go to prep school. I felt that I—a mediocrity in terms of skills and grades and an athletic prowess hovering safely in the middle ground—did not. I believed I got in on my brother’s coattails.
That spring, for Easter vacation, I joined Bob and Mom in New York. I have a vivid memory of our first night, the three of us walking down the sidewalk holding hands. Mom hugged us, wearing her familiar perfume, I cracked jokes, and Bob laughed, and we all felt good—a family reunited and whole. We stayed in a tiny studio apartment in the Roger Williams Hotel. Sleeping on a roll-away bed next to an open window, I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I listened to the sounds of the city, that inchoate cacophony—taxi horns, subway rumblings, sirens, laughter—all filtered up and down the canyons into a steady low roar. I felt I was listening to the distillation of something powerful, like a distant waterfall. The first morning I was so excited, I got up early, while my mother and brother were still asleep. I stepped outside onto the sidewalk and stood at the corner of the building, gaping. A friendly doorman came over for a chat. He spotted me as a greenhorn and, leaning against the building with his hands in his pants, he clued me in about life in the big city. It was a place to be careful. It was dangerous: Everyone had some kind of scheme; you always had to be on the lookout. It was a rough place, he said, looking at the passersby as if he could spot their games. I knew instantly this was where I was born to be.
And two months later, I was. I said good-bye to my surrogate family and waited for a taxi. I was leaving my dog behind. Our car, the beloved Ford convertible with the rumble seat, would not accompany us, either. Mom had left it for repair at a local garage and it stayed there so long, the owner charged rent and impounded it. Mrs. Reynold, wiping tears from her eyes, stood on the threshold, holding the baby. Mr. Reynold walked me to the taxi and hugged me more tightly than I thought him capable. I gripped their good-bye present—a large, handsome suitcase—and the taxi took off for Union Station. I felt a rush of joy. I was glad to be leaving it all behind—them; Washington; Alice Deal; the steaming Mall; the stupid avenues named after states; the Mint; the FBI, with its underground pistol range; the medical museum, with its damaged fetuses in bottles; the grandiose Capitol dome. Only my dog would I miss, but him I regarded as a necessary sacrifice. As the taxi carried me down Connecticut Avenue, I looked out the window at a world suddenly come alive with novelty and possibilities. Not too long afterward, I heard that the Reynolds had separated, then divorced. I was happy for him.
In New York, we moved into a small apartment overlooking Madison Avenue and Sixty-third Street, a rent-controlled fifth-floor walk-up. “It sharpens the memory,” my mother cracked as she showed it to me. “You don’t forget anything when you go shopping.” On the ground floor, just outside the front door, was a hole-in-the-wall laundry presided over by a stooped old man whose arm bore a concentration camp tattoo. On the second floor, a two-foot sign announced THE FIXIT MASTER. No neighbor I passed going up or down the creaky wooden stairs ever said hello; most didn’t even nod. The apartment was two good-size rooms, a living room and a bedroom. There was no kitchen—only an open closet with a half refrigerator, on top of which was a two-burner hot plate. Next to the closet was a tiny bathroom with a floor speckled with old octagonal penny tiles and a porcelain sink that doubled as the water supply for cooking and washing dishes. Somehow, reaching up to crowded shelves for supplies, balancing pots and pans in elaborate configurations, allowing some to stay warm with just an edge resting on the scorching hot plate, stirring in sauces, and parking frying pans on the sink, Mom was able to whip up three-course dinners.
Our lives centered on AA. The meetings were held in a church in the Murray Hill section, and Mom insisted on taking us to some of them (this was before there were separate sessions for AA family members). I found them excruciating. I was embarrassed by everything—by being there, by her being an alcoholic, by mingling with other self-described alcoholics. People fussed over me, which only made me feel more conspicuous and out of place. At the first meeting, Mom told me later, a man looked me over and cracked, “He’s either a midget or an arrested alcoholic.” When she was called upon to recount her problems with drink, Mom’s spiel was eloquent. She skewered the rationalizations and self-deceptions of the down-and-out alcoholic. One bit, delivered with theatrical timing, brought down the house. She would hold up her right hand, curling her fingers around an imaginary tumbler, and say, “One day I finally realized that what was poisoning my life was right inside this glass. And so I changed from well water to bottled water.”
Most of her friends, at least the new ones we saw most frequently, were from AA. They were a varied lot. One, a first mate in the merchant marine, visited us every time he was in port; he promised to get me a union card and a berth on a freighter—my dream from an early age—and only after my mother’s death did he confess that she had buttonholed him and told him in no uncertain terms not even to think of it. Another, a big-boned, sexy, redheaded actress who kept slipping off the wagon, became almost like a daughter to her. Once, a small army of six—myself included—was assembled to rescue a distressed drinker from an abusive husband on Staten Island; we plotted our strategy on the ferry on the way out: We would set up a protective circle around her while she packed her bags—like defensive linemen for the Giants, I thought. Luckily, her husband was not at home, so the extraction was easy. Whenever a “pigeon”—a newcomer to the program—called, Mom would stay on the phone for what seemed like hours, talking slowly and gently, as if she were persuading a suicide to come in from a ledge, helping the person regain some glimmer of hope, an inkling of control over a life spiraling downward.
That first year, when Bob came home on vacations, it felt good to have our family together again. And it was a relief to acknowledge the invisible, or not so invisible, hand that had been dragging us down. But typically, we didn’t talk about the hard times we had been through or the reasons for them—carrying on, in theory, the illusion that they had been little more than temporary setbacks. We fell into our respective roles: Mom as mentor, Bob as prodigy, and me as wise guy. But something had changed, something that made our old triad impossible to sustain. Bob had grown beyond us, so that even when he was there, part of him seemed to be elsewhere. Around the dinner table he and Mom still carried on their wide-ranging discussions—about F. Scott Fitzgerald, El Greco, obscure points in Christian theology—but the passion seemed to have evaporated. He didn’t appear to expect much from the exchange; he was simply going through the motions to humor her. His sights were trained on a distant horizon. Psychologically, he had already left home for good.
Recently I came across a letter that Mom wrote during those hard years in Washington. It was to a Darnton relative in Michigan, and typically, she spent a certain amount of ink bragging about us. “Bob is at Phillips Andover and doing amazingly well. They’ve put him ahead two years in English, one in French, one in math. So he’ll have at least one year of col
lege under his belt before he gets there. He’s getting honors, too, which means a scholarship along with his athletics, school paper and class officer activities.” She went on for quite a while in this vein and then turned to me: “Our lovable Johnnie, I’m afraid, will bloom too late to have such returns as he goes along. We tried for a scholarship for him—at Bob’s insistence—but he didn’t make it. I am just as well pleased because I think he needs home a bit more. Barney used to say he was one of the Darntons who matured late. And John is indeed very much like his father in many ways. If he matures into anything close to the person his father was, my cup will run over.”
Bob and I had fallen into a division of labor that had been marked down for years. His role was to excel and to replace Barney. Mine was to rebel and to become Barney.
In reading the letter now, I realized that one of Mom’s major achievements was to provide me with an essential love and acceptance. No matter what happened, or what I did, I never doubted that I was loved. In instilling this, she lessened my feelings of being overshadowed by my brother’s accomplishments—as Bob was my shield from her and her alcoholism, she was my shield from him and his success.
At the time, I did not understand this dynamic, and my feelings toward her were changing. I loved her, of course, but the bonds that had bound me to her had broken. The hard truth was that she had failed conspicuously in her heroic attempt to provide us with a mythic ideal childhood. I accepted the fact that she was an alcoholic and felt stupid for denying such an obvious truth for so long. Now, looking back, I could see clearly the mileposts I had missed all those years. Seeing them made me feel idiotic and deceived. I didn’t think of alcoholism as a sickness—the idea of its being a disease was not yet current—but as a weakness, even as moral depravity. I had seen her helpless, flailing about on the floor, and the image was burned into my brain. As a result, I had cut myself off. I could no longer accept her as a parent or as an authority. I was, at the age of fourteen, a free agent, responsible only to myself. No one could tell me what to do. It was frightening, but even more, it was invigorating—exhilarating. I was on my own and would forge my own way.
Soon I was to experience the sensation—callow, selfish, and unspeakably delicious—of a young man who at long last was leaving home.
CHAPTER 13
When Bob and I left for Phillips Academy Andover in September 1956, we had no money, and so we had to hitchhike to Massachusetts from New York. We got hold of a map, marked the route in pencil, and set out, each of us carrying a suitcase. I had packed a couple of neckties and wore an old herringbone jacket that I had picked up somewhere—jackets and ties were mandatory at Andover—along with a new pair of chinos. I was excited. I had never hitchhiked before. And here was I, my thumb out on a busy highway, on the threshold of a bold adventure.
We left early in the morning and made good time. By midafternoon we had reached Boston and found ourselves entangled in the web of highways encircling the city. A timid man with a small mustache picked us up and took us to his house for lunch. My suspicions were on alert. Growing up in the 1950s, we didn’t discuss homosexuality, but somewhere along the line boys learned about “queers” and we warned one another to avoid them. I was mistaken. Our host, a professor at MIT, gave us homemade soup and sandwiches on thick slabs of bread and engaged us in lively, avuncular talk. Learning that we were students at Andover, he impressed upon us the importance of science and the rewards of choosing it as a career. How he envied us, he said, posed as we were on the brink of adult life. Decisions we made now would have a cascading effect throughout the years to come. Then he escorted us to the entrance ramp of the route north of Boston and left us there. As the cars whizzed by, I stood on the roadside, well fed and excited about the future. I was in thrall to the infinite possibilities ahead. It was dizzying to contemplate them, the twists and turns to come, each one leading to new twists and turns. I felt impervious to harm, filled with blind confidence.
When we arrived at Andover, I got my first view of the campus. Both sides the road gave way to great green seas of pristine grass and perfect stone walls. In the distance were ivy-covered brick buildings and windows with creamy white trim. As if on cue, a bell tower clanged majestically. Other students were arriving in cars driven by their parents. They parked in front of dormitories, unloading trunks and stereos and soft armchairs.
I wasn’t nervous about starting school. I had Bob with me. He was to be a senior and I a freshman. As I already knew but soon was to see for myself, he was a star on campus—the head of a student civic organization, on the honor roll, a deacon in church, a member of the debating team. As always, his accolades were oppressive to me, since I had little hope of matching them, but at the same time a source of pride. I didn’t mind being “Darnton’s younger brother.” Standing in his reflected glory would bolster my own status. Now that I had been transported to a new place, I had been given the gift of a fresh start—the opportunity to put Washington behind me and carve out a new identity. I felt as if I were walking out of a dank cave into a sun-splashed meadow.
I found my dormitory, an old white house on the edge of campus. Half a dozen other boys lived there. One of them, a lad from Texas named John Daniel, became an instant friend and roommate. We shared an interest in reading—he introduced Dylan Thomas to me, and I Sean O’Casey to him—and we talked long after lights-out from our beds, which were on opposite sides of the room. Our friendship was strengthened by a rare bond—the fact that his father, too, had died.
During this time of my life, I stopped thinking about my father altogether. I had more immediate concerns—making new friends, fitting in to a new place, going to classes, and studying. I was working on my new identity, becoming more extroverted. I didn’t think of myself in relation to my family or my past, but was immersed in the present. I fell in step with Andover and took to its traditions and challenges. New arrivals were subjected to hazing by seniors, who had only to utter two words—“Hey, prep”—to get them to haul their furniture upstairs. Rivalry with Phillips Exeter Academy was intense; their school colors were red (ours were blue), and every morning we filed out of daily chapel chanting, “Whadda we eat? Whadda we eat? Red meat! Red meat!”
Life was regimented. The regimen was enforced by the ringing of chapel bells from a wooden steeple, which dominated the campus. In the mornings, we had to dress quickly to make it to breakfast in the Commons, the building that housed the four dining halls. There was a fifteen-minute window, between 7:05 and 7:20, to check in and so escape a demerit (five demerits and you were placed on probation). The bells started ringing about once a minute and then sped up progressively, so that by the end, as you were running full out, sweating even in winter, your lungs burning, they came at you like a machine gun. After breakfast, there was the same clanging choreography to reach the mandatory chapel service. Then classes started with bells and buzzers of their own. And so it went throughout the day.
The odd part was that I liked almost everything about it. I liked studying in the library, sitting at a long wooden table with green lamp shades. Around me, bookshelves mounted to the ceiling and high overhead windows let in slanting rays of sunlight. Sometimes, deep in a book, I’d hear a familiar cough and know my brother was in the same room. I liked the cavernous gymnasium, the clanging locker room and steaming showers, and the long afternoon break for sports, galloping down a soccer field, trying to learn tennis and get the hang of pole vaulting. I liked the late-afternoon classes—English in Bulfinch Hall, a jewel box of a building, designed in the style of the great architect. We sat in wooden chairs set in a circle, listening to teachers in tweed jackets expound on the crafts of reading and writing and inculcate respect for literature. (“You don’t judge great books—great books judge you.” “Never say: ‘The author is trying to say …’ The author is saying—you’re trying to figure it out.”)
On Saturday nights we attended first-run movies in the assembly hall. On Wednesdays guest speakers were imported to inspire
us; most were worldly businessmen who confided the secrets of their success. They were introduced by the dean of students, G. Grenville Benedict. Benedict, balding, face flushed, given to wearing pinstripe suits, was the most charismatic figure on campus. Loving the limelight, and in love with himself, he paced up and down the stage when he talked, jangling the change in his pockets and speaking in rotund sentences that resisted colloquial grammar. I liked listening to him; he could make a routine announcement of a change in schedule sound like a summons to battle.
I was bursting with school spirit. The night before the single greatest event—the football game with Exeter—we congregated on a hilltop, standing around a huge bonfire. As embers flew up into the night sky, the football team would arrive on a flatbed truck, like Greek warriors, and we underlings would let loose in bloodthirsty chants and screams. Our faces, glistening in the reflected flames, were frenzied. We lost ourselves in the mob, a primal submersion to tribe that, with only a small tweak of the dial, could lead young men to sign up for war.