by John Darnton
Increasingly, without work and a wide circle of friends, Mom led a solitary life. She visited museums and took an occasional meal out, but mostly she stayed home, reading, knitting sweaters, and watching television. From time to time she wrote magazine articles and took up exotic hobbies like mixing potpourri—collections of herbs, dried flowers, and spices, which were given names like “Walpurgis Night” and “Ophelia’s Bouquet.” She lived for the days when I would come home on vacation. Then she would pour out observations and thoughts bottled up over months and regale me with stories of her encounters with New Yorkers. My friends loved to sleep over, taking the roll-away bed, while I took the couch, so that they could talk late into the night with her. She’d sit on the edge of her winged easy chair, her elbows resting on her knees, smoking and drinking scalding coffee, dispensing worldly wisdom and helping them sort out their lives.
I noticed age tugging at her. Her hair thinned and turned gray, rising in a nimbus around her head. She put on enough pounds to be called plump, her skin began to loosen, and she had bags under her eyes. But those eyes still sparkled with mischief. Her face was so open and welcoming that strangers often talked to her on buses or in coffee shops, and when she told of these meetings—or recounted any story for that matter—she acted them out, moving her hands swiftly, like a conjurer.
By the time I was in college, our relationship evolved into an easygoing, bantering friendship. I called her by the nickname “Darty.” We played Scrabble and drank no-cal ginger ale. She taught me a parlor trick she had learned long ago, a way to startle onlookers—how to stick a pin in your thigh without it hurting (the trick is to tighten the muscle). I taught her the “Gypsy lady” card trick, in which the fall guy picked a card at random, called a number I provided, and she guessed it (there was a code in the name he asked for). I sometimes used the trick to astound a barroom full of strangers and win a night’s worth of drinks. She’d ham it up, speaking in some kind of half-French, half-Balkan accent and demanding that the card be held close to the receiver so she could “read” it. Once she muffed the code—she pronounced the card to be the queen of diamonds and it was the jack—but she quickly recovered with a witty excuse: “Zee moustache—eet does not come across zee long distanz.”
These are the times, and this is the way, that I now like to remember her.
Sometime in the late fall of 1966, Mom began to feel run-down and experienced vaginal bleeding. She went for a checkup and had a Pap smear, something she had neglected to do for many years. It was positive for cervical cancer.
At this point Bob and I, both newly married, were starting out on our careers. He had gone to Harvard as a junior fellow. I had started as a copyboy in August and Nina was working as an editorial assistant at Random House. We had taken over Mom’s apartment on East Sixty-third Street after convincing the landlord that we could handle the rent, which went up to $108 a month, ten dollars more than my weekly paycheck.
We had thought long and hard, before the illness struck, about where Mom should live. By now she wanted to luxuriate in a full-fledged retirement, somewhere outside the city, preferably in a small town with character. It also had to be an inexpensive place, so that Bob and I could support her with modest contributions from our piddling incomes. That was a tall order, but we hit upon a solution. She could move in with her eldest brother, Ernest Choate, himself a widower. During the depths of the Depression, Ernie, the most responsible and conscientious of his siblings, who for years had banked his teacher’s salary in Philadelphia, had had the foresight to purchase a vacation house in Cape May Point in southern New Jersey. It was a spacious and attractive three-story cottage divided right down the middle into two sections connected by a single door. And best of all, it was only one block from the Atlantic Ocean. We presented the idea to Ernie and his two daughters and they approved it. He was probably lonely, the daughters said, and Tootie would certainly provide lively company. She could even cook him meals. Though they hadn’t been close over the years, living together would give them a chance to repair their relationship. And the partitioning of the house was ideal: If they got on each other’s nerves, they could go off to their separate domains and sulk in privacy. We would pay something for her upkeep.
We went down to investigate. The cottage seemed perfect. It had a large screened porch, which caught a breeze on long summer evenings. At night a lighthouse a quarter of a mile away cast luminous beams across the bedroom ceilings. Seagulls cruised the sky above, the driveway was lined with seashells, and on windy days the crashing of the surf could be heard from the front doorstep. A stone’s throw away was a sandy beach. Mom would love taking walks on it. The deal was done and she moved in. For months, from the reports we got—largely from her—everything seemed to be going just fine. Then, after spotting the bleeding, she saw her doctor in New York and discovered that she was ill.
She underwent surgery at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. The operation seemed to go okay, though the doctors were cautious in predicting a full recovery. Take it one step at a time, they advised. Clearly, the prognosis would have been better if she had had regular screenings and they had caught it earlier, they said, but still they insisted, in that balancing act of dispensing hope alongside truth, that these things sometimes took an unpredictable course. Bob helped her check out of the hospital and was shocked to see that when she signed her name, she wrote “Eleanor Hill”—her name when she was married to her first husband. “Why did you do that?” he asked. She looked down, shocked and flustered by what she had done, and quickly changed it to “Darnton.”
Now we faced a new dilemma. She had to undergo a course of radiology and would require care during and after the treatments; we could hardly ask Ernie to take on this chore. We didn’t have enough money to hire a full-time nurse. How could we arrange transportation for further checkups or administer medication or just be by her side to bolster her morale? I was tethered to a full-time job at the paper, working nights, so it fell to Bob to relocate from Boston to Cape May. Dutifully, he assumed the lion’s share of the burden of taking care of her. When he arrived, he found that brother and sister had fallen to bickering like an old unhappily married couple. “Their relationship was horrible,” he recalled many years later. “They were just picking at each other. Ernie’s resentment was very visible in all his exchanges with her. He wanted to enlist me on his side in their little squabbles, kept feeding me stories about how badly she treated him. That’s when he told me how long before she had asked him to loan her money and when he went to give it, the door was opened by a Japanese houseboy. I resented him—here she was, dying of cancer, and he was running her down.”
Bob spent a miserable six weeks there, driving her to the county hospital for radiation sessions several times a week. “The doctor was quite frank with me. He said she was dying. I remember asking him how to cope with Mom, what to say about her illness. He said most people in her condition don’t want to know, they don’t ask, ‘Am I going to die?’ And sure enough, she did not. So that issue was never joined. She never talked about dying. And the doctor never told her.”
Mom put on a stoical front. She didn’t complain about the treatments, though they exhausted her. She approached them with a kind of forced gaiety. Once, when she lowered her drawers to lie naked on the radiation table, the technicians burst out laughing. She had painted a smiling face on her rear end.
In the evenings Bob would try to mediate across the dinner table. The situation became increasingly untenable. Ernie could not let go of his resentments—both petty ones over what he saw as day-to-day slights and long-buried ones over how she had lived her life; she was, by his lights, reckless, irresponsible, and a spendthrift. After a few scotches, a tight grin would come across his face and he would let fly sardonic comments. Mom acknowledged the sacrifices Bob was making. At one point she remarked, “Someday, in the future, you’ll be glad you did this.”
That Christmas we all gathered at the seaside compound. Nina and I drove down
in the morning, and Bob and Susan were already there. With Ernie at the table, we had an awkward meal—the joviality was distinctly forced—and then we exchanged presents. Ernie handed me a carefully wrapped gift; it was heavy, and when I opened it, I was surprised at his generosity—it was an electric carving knife. He gave Bob and Susan something equally expensive, like a new radio. Then he reached behind and handed Mom her gift—an unwrapped carton of Camel cigarettes. There was an embarrassing silence. He merely grinned.
Our family retreated to Mom’s side of the house. Someone suggested a walk on the beach. We were just about to put on our coats when we fell into an impromptu discussion about finances. Nina’s father, a generous man who had welcomed me into his family, had been paying our share of Mom’s upkeep to supplement our low salaries, and he had raised an intriguing point. For all these years, why hadn’t she arranged to receive Barney’s Social Security? Surely she could use it now. On the drive down, Nina and I had talked about it—the additional money could be a lifesaver. I asked Mom about it. At first she dismissed the idea, seeming to laugh it off. But when I insisted, she seemed embarrassed and turned defensive. Did I think that was something she hadn’t thought of? There were plenty of times she could have used that money, she said. That wasn’t the point, I insisted. She could use it now, so why not apply for it? She fell silent, looked down, then looked up, almost defiantly. “Well, there’s a reason I can’t. I won’t get it.” She stood there, eyes blazing. “You see, your father and I were never married.” For a moment, none of us spoke. My brother turned white. Susan held her breath. I looked at Nina and saw she was struggling to contain her surprise.
We asked her to explain. She turned girlish, laughing, as if it were no big deal. They were married, for all intents and purposes, she said—certainly in each other’s eyes, which is what counted. But why hadn’t they actually gotten married? What was the reason? She waved one hand. Sentences came tumbling out, but they didn’t add up to an explanation. They were already living together, so people assumed they were married. And it had taken a while for Barney’s divorce to come through. And a piece of paper couldn’t make them feel more married than they already did. Besides, it wasn’t so easy in those days for a divorced person to get remarried in New York—a lot of bureaucratic red tape was involved. They would have had to run off to some justice of the peace in Maryland, and since everyone thought they were already married, it would have been embarrassing if that had gotten out. And Barney had been cables editor at the Associated Press. He was widely known. AP reporters were everywhere and any one of them would have instantly recognized his name. Besides, they led their lives as if they were married—why, they had even picked a date to celebrate as their anniversary—the one in Who’s Who. How could they now go back and change it? And so on.
We stopped pressing her and put on our coats for the walk on the beach. It was cold, and the wind whipped up the sand. I was stunned. Bob and I looked at each other. We trudged along the sand and came to a large piece of driftwood. Mom, dressed in a thick sheepskin coat, leaned against it, already winded. We stood around in a circle and talked some more. She said she was surprised that we were taking this so seriously. “Especially you, John,” she said, looking over at me. “I always thought you’d be pleased.” I looked back. “Well,” I said, “I always identified with Edmund the bastard.” How to tell her that this one bit of news threw everything into question, that it had the potential to overturn the mythical superstructure she had so carefully assembled over the years? Did this mean they hadn’t been the ideal couple after all? Had he not loved her enough to marry her? Why in God’s name would he have gone off to war without providing her with the legal protection of a wedding certificate? And if he hadn’t loved her, did that mean, by extension, that he hadn’t loved Bob and me?
I never got satisfactory answers, though I broached the subject delicately several times in the months to come. Years of learning not to question things or dig too deeply had fortified my ability to live on the edge of ambiguity, even about something as fundamental as this. Over time, I came to more or less understand her position, though research in the bowels of New York City’s marriage bureaucracy would later reveal an important piece of the puzzle.
Mom’s stay at Cape May came to an end when one of Ernie’s daughters called Bob to say her presence was just too upsetting for her father. He had seen his own wife die of cancer, and so going through it a second time, watching the deterioration of his sister, would be just too much for him, she insisted, having little idea of the real situation. To make herself perfectly clear, she ended the conversation with a straightforward demand: “Get your mother out of there.”
I found a small apartment for Mom in Westport and we moved her there. She settled in quickly and seemed glad to be back in the town that had meant so much to her. She made a new group of friends through AA; they included one or two women like her, tough, dry-eyed women who had worked at professional careers when that was no easy thing. For some months, her health even seemed to be improving. I began to nurture the hope that she might actually recover. She talked of wanting to buy a car. Much to Bob’s annoyance, she bought him an expensive present, a leather attaché case—on money that he was providing. She borrowed several hundred dollars from a friend. Nina and I had been planning a two-week trip to Europe that summer. We decided to go ahead and take it, and when I told Mom of our decision, she responded with an uncharacteristic flash of anger. “Go ahead,” she warned. “You’ll come back and find me stretched out on a marble slab.” In our ignorance, assuming she was improving, we thought she was over-dramatizing and wasn’t in any danger. She seemed so much better that her death seemed far off in the future. We stuck to our plan. I couldn’t conceive of her death or grasp the process of dying. When we returned from Paris, Rome, and Venice, Mom seemed, to my boundless relief, to be no worse.
But in the fall, she deteriorated again and her doctors ordered another operation. Bob and I accompanied her to Norwalk Hospital. “I remember her being wheeled down the hallway on a gurney,” Bob recalled. “I saw the back of her head as she was wheeled off. Then she raised her arm and waved her hand grandly in the air—that seemed so much like her. It brings to mind the expression ‘throwing your hat over the windmill,’ one of her favorites. There was something so gallant about that gesture.”
Mom came out of the operation with a colostomy bag. She seemed much worse, physically and mentally. She was dispirited and moved slowly under heavy medication. Again, we faced the question of who would look after her. Bob approached a cancer society in Norwalk to ask for assistance, explaining that we had virtually no money. An official there listened carefully, then turned to him and said, “You have a Ph.D.; you can take loans and pay them back.” Bob left, seething with anger that our society offered no help for someone poor who was so desperately ill. We obtained a list of local people, mostly African-Americans trying to scrape together a few bucks, who would move in with dying people and tend to their needs. There followed a succession of them, some better, others worse—a situation that reminded me of her attempts to find nannies for us when we were small children in Washington.
Then came months of unmitigated hell, a series of mishaps and emergencies that required us to rush to Westport in shifts. Mom would fall or a caregiver would quit. She was on heavy medication. Her discourse was rambling. She’d fill reams of copy paper with notes for a novel set in New York in the forties and fifties; people from her past surfaced as characters, with notations that captured their essence. I gave her a bath. She was so thin, her bones poked to the surface of her legs and back and hips. Her skin was wrinkled and hung loosely from her arms. That horrible brown bag was always there, attached to a brown tube that disappeared into her abdomen.
We moved her into a hospice on the Post Road. She was in a double room, her belongings reduced to essentials that fitted inside a metal cabinet next to her bed. Her coat—cloth-knit, fashionable—hung in a wall locker, looking too gay for a garmen
t never to be worn by her again. She didn’t complain, and she had moments of lucidity. Visiting her was disconcerting because she seemed so distant. We would hold her hand—her bones felt like the proverbial twigs in a glove—and not have much to say. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April, she rallied briefly to discuss politics and the sad state of the country, but soon she turned quiet again. We tried to be friendly and upbeat to the staff, in hopes that they would treat her better. One Sunday, she seemed peaceful and serene. She told me Barney had come to her in a dream. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be all right.’ He was waiting for me. He even held out his hand toward me. He said I would join him.” I thought of the story of his death—how convinced she was that he had come to her at the moment of dying, contacting her from the other side of the world. If a spirit could conquer space, why not time? Now, in the days to come, Mom was increasingly not there. She smiled at us occasionally, didn’t talk much, held our hands loosely, already occupying another space.
She died on May 15, 1968, at the age of sixty-one. Neither Bob nor I was with her at the time. Bob, at home in Boston, got the call. He phoned me. He began in a throaty voice and as soon as he got the words out, he broke down and sobbed. I did not know what to say. Soon we hung up. I was alone in the apartment. I went outside to the staircase and sat down on the top step, not knowing what I was doing, too stunned to feel anything I could put into words. I had known that she would die and that she would die soon, but I had not truly grasped the fact. I sensed the world already shifting for me, the axis tilting a bit, and I wondered if it would ever be the same.