by John Darnton
That summer I finally got my fill of hitchhiking. I thumbed my way to Lake Tahoe, California, to meet up with my friend Steve. When I arrived and he wasn’t there, I turned around in a huff and hitchhiked back to New York. I had run out of money, rides were scarce, and truck drivers, worried about insurance, had stopped taking on passengers. Some of my encounters were dicey. A car driven by two African-Americans, who were drunk, plowed into another car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Before the police arrived, I tossed away a bottle from the backseat and, my head aching, walked to a service area to thumb another ride.
Back home, I worked for a while as a soda jerk at a Walgreens. Then I went to Cape Cod and got a job at a summer camp in exchange for steamship fare to Europe. I had enrolled by mail at Lycée Henri-IV in Paris; my intent was to spend a year there, learn French, and reapply to Harvard, which had advised me to spend the year in “a constructive way.” My time abroad didn’t work out as I had planned. I lasted only one week at the lycée. I found the boys there immature—they threw spitballs when the teachers’ backs were turned—and the rote learning dull. But I soon immersed myself in the language and culture. I obtained a certificate from the Alliance Française and haunted the cafés and parks and museums. I walked the Left Bank streets at all hours, smoked pot, read the classics, fell in bed with a Parisian named Jacqueline and multiple others, tried passing myself off as French, and wrote a couple of bad poems. Most of all, I matured. It was a time for introspection, and I wallowed in it. I had been lucky that stealing cars hadn’t landed me in trouble. It was time to look to the future. In short, I felt myself beginning to grow up.
I reapplied to Harvard, filling my application with a laundry list of books I had read in French and an essay arguing that French culture was superior to American. Only a French poet, I insisted, could write a poem about eating a seagull. Harvard turned me down. A friend recommended Wisconsin, which had rolling admissions, and I applied there and was accepted. That summer I got a job in New York, working as a medical attendant for paralyzed patients at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine on Thirty-fourth Street. While I was there, my childhood hero, Roy Campanella, the man who had commemorated my birthday, was admitted; he had been in a car crash and was paralyzed from the shoulders down. His room was in a private area on the third floor, and we were all told not to bother him—he was said to be depressed. I had visions of talking to him, encouraging him, inspiring in him the will to carry on. Several times I slipped up to the third floor, but each time his door was closed. Then, one afternoon, I found it open just a crack. I pushed against it and peered inside. Campy was lying on his back, surrounded by machines, his eyes closed. He was inert, his large bulk covered by a blanket. I looked at him for a moment, listening to the machines. I was on the threshold of a great moment, but I didn’t know what to do. I decided not to wake him. He was beyond my help. I backed out quietly, drawing the door closed, and never saw him again.
I entered Wisconsin in the fall of 1961. I hitchhiked to school, again with a single suitcase. At the first lecture, I spotted a beautiful young woman with dark hair, worn long and straight in the bohemian style. She entered the lecture hall late, mounting a side aisle and trying to appear inconspicuous. I looked at my watch and shook my head; she smiled. I gave her my seat. She sat on my raincoat, and when I picked it up after the lecture, it was flattened and wrinkled. She was flustered when she handed it back to me. We didn’t speak. But by chance we found ourselves in the same English section two days later. We went out to lunch. And so I met Nina Lieberman from Brooklyn.
I played it cool and didn’t ask her out for weeks, though we often seemed to fall in together after classes. We walked in step, I remarked. Our first date was memorable. I convinced her one evening that it was permissible to borrow one of the rowboats that were stacked upside down at the boathouse—not all of them were padlocked—for an outing on Lake Mendota. She packed a picnic basket. She was sitting in the boat, waiting patiently as I clamored over a pile of lumber to look for something to use as a paddle, when a police cruiser came around the bend. The officers threatened arrest and put us in the cruiser. On the way, I was showing off, wisecracking, until one of them turned around and blurted, “What’s a matter? Don’t you want to be treated like a white man?” “No,” I countered, “just a man.” At the station house we were given a lecture about the inviolability of private property and then released. The police drove us back to campus and, suddenly friendly, put the siren on at my request. It was still sounding as we drew up to her dormitory, and the housemother, who happened to be standing in front, dropped her mouth in surprise and glared at us. All in all, I thought, it was an auspicious beginning.
On our second date, we went to an Italian eatery. Still flush in my road warrior, “I’m from New York City” stage, I remarked over a cup of coffee that I wouldn’t mind dating a young Wisconsin girl: “You know, somebody who works in an ice-cream parlor … somebody who’s never heard of Kerouac.”
Nina smiled and joked, “Who’s Kerouac?”
When I walked her to her dormitory that evening, she went to fetch a blanket for me—it was already getting cold at night—and when she handed it over, I covered us, and standing underneath it, I kissed her. We began going out and soon spent most of every day with each other. I was, I realized, for the first time in my life, in love. But it took a long, long while for me to be able to say that out loud.
In one of our first classes, an introduction to anthropology, the professor assigned us to write our autobiographies. Taking a leaf from my mother’s book, I wrote a sunny version of my childhood, skirting over the rough spots and emphasizing the times of spontaneous fun. When the paper was returned, I wouldn’t show it to Nina. She entreated me; I refused. She grabbed for it; I held it out of her reach. We proceeded like this down the sidewalk until, coming to a mailbox, I dropped it in. That settled the matter. For years afterward, years in which she helped me deal more honestly with my past, she asked me why I had done that. I came to realize that, on a level not quite conscious, I hadn’t wanted to present her with a pack of lies.
We were cultural opposites. Nina grew up in an attached house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the daughter of a furrier who emigrated from Russia, by way of Cuba, as a boy of thirteen. She went to the High School of Performing Arts, hoping to become an actress. She had never tasted an artichoke or stepped inside a church. I had gone to a fancy prep school, had a home address that sounded rich until you saw it, and had never tasted a bagel or seen the inside of a synagogue. She came to my house for Christmas and I went to hers for Passover.
I was schooled in repression and had never, to my knowledge, known anyone who had been to a shrink. Nina was a believer in ferreting out secrets and the truth, and over time she relentlessly pried me out of my shell. In courting Nina, I realized years later—she, of course, was the one who pointed it out—I was incorporating the rituals of my parents. Orion was our constellation. I took to asking her, “Have I told you today?” On our first vacation together in New York, we went to the Oyster Bar, where my mother and father used to meet. And we talked of how we had been destined for each other. I was convinced that the relationship between my mother and father had been perfect and that any relationship I had would be perfect also. Later, the attempt to replicate the ideal made for problems. When Nina and I had arguments—often because I would turn up hours late or disappear somewhere without calling—they caused me to question the strength of our bond. I was sure my parents had never fought; after all, I had never witnessed such a thing. It took years for me to learn how people who love each other actually behave.
My major was experimental psychology. I spent untold hours in the laboratory running experiments on rats, gradually ascending the evolutionary scale as high as monkeys. Eventually, I would become more interested in Elizabethan literature than in a Skinner box. I hung out in the Rathskeller, the basement of the student union, which was frequented by New York radicals. I lived off campus, had littl
e money, and didn’t eat regularly. For two years I subsisted on meager food and meals Nina bought me. When we ate out, we instituted an elaborate charade: I would claim not to be hungry and she would be famished, so famished that she would order for two. When the food came, she would quietly push one plate in front of me.
I lived by my wits. I shoplifted at the Kroger supermarket, slipping packages of hot dogs into my pants. I scammed the two bookstores on State Street, stealing textbooks from one and selling them back to the other, and vice versa the following day. Finally, I got a part-time job in the psych lab and earned honest cash. During summer vacations, I worked in New York: as a souvenir salesman at the top of the Empire State Building, a Sky Ride attendant at Coney Island, a mail sorter in the bowels of the General Post Office on Eighth Avenue. But invariably I had to hand over my earnings to pay Mom’s households expenses and rent. In my third year, I couldn’t scrape up $362.52 for out-of-state tuition. The parents of a classmate from Long Island lent me the money and Bob helped pay them back.
Wisconsin was politically active in the years I was there, from 1961 to 1966. (I stayed an extra year to mop up my incompletes.) I was arrested as a freedom rider by Spiro Agnew in Baltimore County, went to the March on Washington, and took part in innumerable demonstrations against the Vietnam War, including the levitation of the Pentagon.
For most of these years, Bob was away at Oxford, a Rhodes scholar. He obtained a doctor of philosophy degree in eighteenth-century European history from St. John’s College, and while there he married his Harvard sweetheart, Susan Glover—the same girlfriend whom I had met on that fateful Andover weekend. Mom borrowed the money to attend their wedding in an Oxford church, but I stayed home, looking for work. Before I found it—at a post office on the Upper East Side—I was desperate for money. Several times I sold my blood for ten dollars at a dingy walk-up blood bank on Forty-second Street.
Bob and Susan returned to New York and, with a heavy heart, as it turned out, he went to work at the Times, assuming the mantle that had always been his.
On a break from the university, I went to visit Bob down at the police reporters’ “shack” on Centre Market Place. He had just begun work as a reporter at the Times and was undergoing the initiation rite for beginners back in those days, the early 1960s—covering the murders, suicides, and other crimes coughed up by the city. On the police beat, he was in the belly of the beast, a scholar rubbing elbows with cops who couldn’t care less about the Enlightenment and wizened police reporters who couldn’t construct a sentence, calling their stories in to rewrite instead. He read a tome on the Italian Renaissance by hiding it inside Playboy. When I first heard him speaking on the phone with “the desk”—an editor on the city desk—it was clear to me that he didn’t belong there. He nasalized his vowels and hardened his consonants to sound like a street guy. It wasn’t really him—or, as he might put it, being grammatically correct, it wasn’t really he.
Its nickname, the shack, was not a misnomer. The place was a gritty three-story tenement across from the old police headquarters, sandwiched between bail bondsmen and storefronts that sold firearms, ammunition, and bulletproof vests. Inside were offices for the various newspapers and wire services, dingy rooms with little more than banged-up desks, linoleum floors, ratty window shades, and, of course, the essential telephones. Outside, the distinguishing feature was the dozen or so lightbulbs protruding from the façade like illuminated bumpers on a pinball machine. Each one was a different color (blue for the Post, red for the Times, and so on). When one lighted up, that was a signal to the reporter—who might be down on the sidewalk, escaping from the heat or playing poker—that someone was calling him. That way, he could dash inside to take the call.
When I entered the shack and climbed up the stairs to the Times office on the second floor, I found Bob seated behind a desk, his suit jacket hanging from a hook on the door. A police radio was blasting static into the room. From the hallway sounded the thuds of a large bell in an annoying irregular staccato—code, he explained, to indicate the location and severity of a fire. Only the old-timers could decipher it. I was blown away by it all. Ghosts of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry haunted the place. I had entered a Stygian underground, a locale where the pulse of New York City could be heard beating, in toxic fitfulness, twenty-four hours a day.
There were no women, other than the naked photos on faded calendars. I was introduced to some of the veterans, including Patrick Doyle of the Daily News, nicknamed “Inspector” for his ability to extract information from cops at crime scenes by suggesting that he was their superior, calling “from headquarters.” Some of them, I was told, employed multiple names for suicides, depending on such nuances as whether the “leaper” jumped off a bridge or a building. In my father’s years, when there were all those daily newspapers around, between twenty and thirty reporters were assigned to the “cop shop,” but now the ranks had thinned to less than a dozen at any one time. Mixed in among them were young reporters earning their chops.
One of them, Nicholas Pileggi, then working for the Associated Press, suggested it was time for an early-evening banquet. In remarkably short order a sweep of the building produced a happy band of ten, including hangers-on, which moved down Mulberry Street toward a renowned Italian eatery. They left one reporter behind to cover for them and answer their phones. I tagged along, impressed by the cohesive spirit and the “us against them” mentality—in which the “them,” I quickly learned, was not the police but their respective newspaper bosses. We commandeered a long table that was soon heaped with bottles of wine, calamari, spaghetti, veal piccata, and other Italian delicacies. We ate for two hours. From time to time a phone attached to a nearby wooden pillar would ring and someone in our party would answer it, cupping his palm over the mouthpiece so he could hear. The caller was the reporter left in the trenches. “Hold on,” our guy would say, turning to the group. “Two-alarm fire, Mott Haven, no injuries.” All agreed: not worth filing. Ten minutes later, another call: “Body in a trunk in Bed-Stuy. No ID.” Same response. And so I learned a second lesson that day: The city’s pulse could be monitored at a distance—with a little help from friends. And that could be fun. Reporters were underpaid, but they were a scrappy lot and they extracted compensations. After a year at the Times, Bob quit, returning to his first love, history, beginning a long and distinguished career.
When I graduated from Wisconsin, Nina and I got married and I needed a job. I passed a test to become a copy editor at McGraw-Hill, an entry into publishing, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. Days before I was to report for work, my mother happened to mention that when our father died she had been given a letter from the Times publisher, promising us boys a job if either of us wanted one. The letter had been lost long ago, but perhaps something could be arranged. Did I want a job there? I thought so. She placed a call to an assistant managing editor at the Times, someone she had known from the old days, and I was taken on as a copyboy. I was excited at the idea of working there, recollecting that evening I had spent with my brother down at the police shack.
In the same way that my father dated his obsession with newspaper work to the days and nights he spent in New York with his uncle Charles Darnton, the drama critic, I would later look back to that meal on Mulberry Street and regard it as the time I got hooked on the same profession.
CHAPTER 15
For twelve years, not a drop of alcohol passed my mother’s lips. At times it seemed she was teasing us: If a stranger offered her a glass of wine, she would raise it to her nose and sniff it with the ceremonial frown of an expert, appraising. On these occasions Bob could barely restrain himself from grabbing the glass out of her hand. Finally, with a judgment—“The bouquet is superb”—she would quietly put it aside. It was an odd dance. To this day, I don’t know if she was testing herself, proving that alcohol wasn’t something to be frightened of, or testing our forbearance, or sending a message to the stranger that she wasn’t a killjoy. Or perhaps, given that wine
and spirits were so meaningful to her generation, both as a touchstone and a metaphor for the good life, she simply couldn’t bear to pass up the nostalgic ritual.
In the job market she did not do as well. Here, the damage was done. She had lost too much ground in taking short-term, low-paying positions, and her résumé was filled with too many unexplainable blank spots. She never again found a job that measured up to her talents or experience, and she had trouble holding on to the jobs she did manage to land. After PR, she worked for a few years as an editor at Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement, and then got piecemeal employment wherever she could. She went long periods without a salary and was hard put to support herself. Scraping together the rent—the less than princely sum of ninety-eight dollars a month—was dicey. More than once, the landlord, who happened to be the golfing reporter at The New York Times, threatened eviction. She dreaded, in her mid- and late fifties, going out on job interviews and would often come home feeling humiliated when someone half her age treated her cavalierly. One time, while being grilled about her résumé, she left in a huff, blurting out, “Why don’t you just look me up in Who’s Who?”
We remained poor. The small neighborhood grocery store two blocks up on Madison Avenue allowed us to charge goods, and Mom invariably was way behind in paying the bill. I hated the place. When I was sent to pick up an order she’d placed by phone, I dreaded the look of the man at the checkout counter, his narrowed eyes and set jaw, as I uttered the words “Charge it, please.” Mom ran up a stack of IOUs from her friends. They covered some twenty years. A long time afterward, I found them placed in a folder, along with copies of letters she had written describing the desperation of our situation and asking for a little something “to tide me over,” along with promises to repay the sum soon. There were also four or five letters from the friends who made the loans, begging for them to be made good. I recognized the names on the letters—people who long ago had been regulars in our lives and who had probably dropped us, I concluded, as deadbeats. I doubt she ever repaid any of them.