by John Darnton
Preparing for the funeral meant running a gauntlet of chores. At the nursing home we discovered that someone on the staff had stolen her watch, the one fine piece of jewelry remaining to her. We were too distraught to demand an inquiry. The funeral home director made a hard sell for an expensive casket and service. He didn’t understand that we weren’t willing to go into debt to give her a grand send-off. “The Italians,” he said, “now there’s a people who do it right. They really love their mothers.” Bob was instructed to go to her apartment and bring back her clothes, the best ones he could find—and told not to forget the stockings. He didn’t. When he dropped them off, he walked by a half-opened door; there was a young man—someone he recognized from junior high school—holding the leg of another corpse in the air, trying to slide a stocking down a lifeless limb.
The service was held at the picture-postcard Saugatuck Congregational Church, the very one Bob had been confirmed in. I had never been confirmed, and now we were both atheists. The church was not as filled as I would have liked. But some old friends, including Mr. and Mrs. Kuhner, turned up. The minister had not known Mom, and at Bob’s request, he did not deliver a eulogy, instead reading passages from the Bible.
Sitting in the front pew, staring at the coffin a few feet away and imaging my mother’s body inside it, I felt peculiar—I was not crying, but I couldn’t see properly. Wherever I looked, rays of blinding light poured in, forcing my sight into a narrow tunnel. The rays of light seemed to have weight—they were pressing in on me from the sides. I couldn’t take in much of what was happening around me. The sensation disappeared after the service, but it came back at the grave site as we sat on folding chairs on a grassy slope and watched her casket being lowered into the ground.
Afterward, a dozen or so people came to the tiny backyard outside Mom’s apartment. Among them was Uncle Ernie. We served lemonade, and family and guests sat around on chairs sinking into the damp grass and reminisced. After an hour or so, most of them left, but Ernie stayed on and began, with a strange grin, tossing up unpleasant memories. He talked about the Japanese houseboy and the money Mom never paid back. Did he want us to compensate him? I looked at his glass. He wasn’t drinking scotch and he was turning nasty without it. He cleared his throat to get our attention and then looked meaningfully at us. “You know,” he said loudly, “your parents were never married.”
I looked at him and, depriving him of the pleasure of disillusioning us, said, “We’ve known that for years.”
When I returned home, I found that a company had sent me a laminated copy of my mother’s obit and a bill for it. I took the prepaid return envelope, attached it to a box, filled the box with heavy rocks from Central Park, and dropped it in a mailbox.
CHAPTER 16
Three months after my mother died, I was made “staff” at the Times—which is to say, I was promoted to reporter. I was distinctly a novice (no one there used the term cub reporter). I’ve often thought how much pleasure the knowledge of that promotion would have given Mom. For one thing, she would have seen it as a vindication of my talent and of her faith in me, the slow starter. But even more significantly, she would have seen it as a step toward assuming Barney’s mantle, which my brother had cast aside.
After several months I began receiving a byline on my stories. As a result, some people who had known my parents learned of me and my whereabouts. One day a letter arrived at the paper. I opened the envelope, to find elegant old-fashioned penmanship on thick cream-colored stationery—perfumed. It began: “How wonderful to see the Darnton byline again!” I skipped to the signature at the bottom: “Mildred Blake.” Then I read the letter. She explained that my father had been a close friend, that she and her former husband had been newspaper people, too, and had known him on various papers a long time ago. Would I be interested in meeting her? I replied immediately. And so it was that Nina and I found ourselves one cold Sunday afternoon in the late fall taking a train to Dobbs Ferry. We climbed a steep hill to an immense stone and cedar-shingled house. It sat on a bluff of denuded foliage high above the Hudson. We stepped onto a stately porch with fluted columns and white railings. As I rang the bell, I looked at the door anxiously. It was flung wide open. Standing in the frame was a plump, matronly-looking woman in her seventies with glasses and thick white hair. The moment she saw me, she stepped back, peered at me from head to toe, and said, “Ah, yes, I see it—you are Barney’s son.” I mumbled something—I don’t remember what—feeling both pleased and embarrassed.
Milly ushered us inside to a couch in a book-lined parlor, where a blaze was going in the fireplace. Two other elderly people were there. One was Vincent Riorden, her former husband. She had divorced him in 1935, she told us later that afternoon, and the split-up had been amiable—so much so that even after she remarried (her second husband was deceased), she and Vinnie got together to commemorate it. Laughing, she said she had proposed an article to Ladies’ Home Journal on how to celebrate the “silver anniversary of your divorce” and had received a polite but very firm rejection. The other person in the room was Mary Francis, a slender woman with shimmering white hair that fell to her shoulders, Vinnie’s longtime partner. As we took our places on the cozy couch, Nina and I felt that we had entered a tight circle of people who knew one another so intimately they could communicate with the raising of an eyebrow.
Vincent, who had multiple nicknames, including “Vinnie,” “Binny,” and “Speed,” had the look of a man who had lived hard. His rugged Irish face was flushed with the pink-and-purple spider veins of a heavy drinker. In fact, he already seemed pretty much in his cups on this early afternoon. He didn’t say much as Milly talked, recounting how their lives had intersected with my father’s when they were all young in Michigan and then wove in and out over the next twenty years.
That afternoon she told an abbreviated story of their friendship. (I’ve filled it in from many meetings since and from talks my brother had with her later.) As a beginning reporter in Adrian, Michigan, Milly had known of the Darnton family. My paternal grandfather, Robert Darnton, as postmaster and head of the school board, qualified as an eminent town father—important enough to be interviewed every time he arrived at or departed from the train station, which she staked out for the Adrian Daily Telegram. She had met Vinnie while on the Michigan Daily, the university’s student paper. They were married in 1920, became reporters, and met Barney at a boardinghouse in Port Huron. He helped them both get jobs on the Times Herald. It was a lively town, where sailors and lumberjacks mixed it up in the bars, to the delight of the city editor, whose mantra, Milly wrote in a delightful sketch, was: “Give us this day our daily crime.” When Barney went to Baltimore to join Mencken’s irreverent circle, he enticed the two of them to join him, sending back letters describing the joys of what Milly, following Mencken, called the “Maryland Free State” (because it never passed a state law supporting Prohibition). With bootleggers, the Ku Klux Klan on the Eastern Shore, and an iconoclastic editor who thumbed his nose at the “boobocracy,” Baltimore was even more wild and wide open than Port Huron.
As Milly talked, I got a stronger sense of my father, or at least one side of him. He was catnip to women, she seemed to suggest, and he loved to drink. This picture seemed to bring together pieces I had already known—those letters home eulogizing cocktails, the hints from acquaintances that he was a bon vivant, Mom’s description of him as a self-described “lapsed Catholic.” Except that this time around the portrait was more complete: I was getting it directly from people who had lived with him—and before he had met my mother. As Milly talked, a question struck me: Had she been in love with him? Had he loved her? She was vivacious, intelligent, scintillating—much like my mother. She would have been Barney’s kind of woman. I tried to envision her in her twenties, thin and bright-eyed and eager. I imagined the two of them having martinis in a bar somewhere, Barney getting high, beginning to look at her more as a woman than a friend. I imagined the talk turning more intimate, Barney r
eaching over to touch her knee. I looked over at Vinnie. Did he seem more reserved because of drink—or were his memories of Barney not quite as congenial as Milly’s?
Milly continued the trajectory of their past. She told of Barney’s moving on to Philadelphia to work on the Ledger. There he met his first wife, Ann Hark. It was hardly a match made in heaven. Ann was six years older, straitlaced, the daughter of a Moravian minister, and she was deeply interested in the Pennsylvania Amish. One weekend, Barney and his new wife came to visit them in Baltimore. As usual, the newspaper crowd was drunk. One inebriated scribbler fantasized staging a burlesque of the Virgin Mary, complete with a chorus of nuns. Ann was shocked. The next morning, she and Barney slipped away early. Their marriage fell apart shortly afterward.
Barney moved on to the big leagues, New York, in 1925. Hard-pressed for money, he shared a ratty apartment with two other reporters. It had only one bed, and since each of the three worked a different shift, each could claim it for eight hours and not a minute longer. One of the three, Milton MacKaye, was, like Barney, a newly arrived reporter on the Evening Post. “Mac” was a large man, ruddy-faced, with a stutter, and he was a bon vivant with a wicked sense of humor and the magnetism of a born raconteur. He was drawn to women and women liked him. He and Barney were to become inseparable. The Riordens followed Barney to New York—once again, he gave Vinnie a boost, this time onto the Post. Barney moved in with them. They shared a four-room apartment on the second floor of 80 MacDougal Street, a platonic ménage à trois. Living there was pleasant. Their row house had a tranquil backyard that joined the gardens of neighboring brownstones in a common courtyard. Barney stayed with them there for two years, from 1926 to 1928.
They worked hard and played hard, wading deep into the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties. They palled around with fellow newspaper people. At the time, New York had seven morning papers and four evening papers, so there were plenty of like-minded people for friendship. My father’s crowd included a number of reporters who harbored aspirations of becoming well-known writers. They felt sophisticated and liberated, having sloughed off midwestern rectitude and Babbittry. They drank a great deal, making the rounds of mid-Manhattan hot spots and Village speakeasies. Getting plowed on Saturday nights was a social obligation and a point of pride.
At this point Milly paused in her recitation and poured me another drink. She had come to where my father met his second wife, Eleanor Pollock. Vinnie nodded knowingly and looked into the fire. Eleanor Pollock—“Pollie,” as she was called—was spirited and exuberant, even wild. She was not beautiful in the traditional sense, but she had so much animation that she was irresistible. She cursed—which was unusual for a woman in those days—and drank only brandy. Like Milly, she was a working woman, holding her own in the world of advertising and magazines, accustomed to dealing with men in a flirtatious workplace. At the time Pollie was engaged to be married to Lindesay Parrott, a reporter on the Post who, like my father, was soon to migrate to the Times. Barney and Lindesay were friends. Parrott was tough and proud of it, specializing in seedy crimes and trials. He covered the Lindbergh kidnapping and many of the other famous criminal trials of the twenties and thirties. During the Snyder-Gray murder trial (Ruth Snyder hired Judd Gray to kill her husband for insurance money), Parrott remarked that he was looking forward to witnessing the first electrocution of a woman. He moved on to the Morning World, which died, and then to the International News Service, the agency founded by William Randolph Hearst. Sometime in 1929, INS assigned him to Moscow. Barney and Pollie saw him off at the pier. Parrott took Barney aside to ask a favor. “Take good care of her until I return,” he said.
“That,” pronounced Milly, “turned out to be a mistake.” As she said this, Vinnie took a deep sip of his scotch. She continued the story. When Parrott returned a year later, Barney and Pollie met him dockside, holding hands. They told him that they had fallen in love and were engaged. And sure enough, in April 1932, they were married. Parrott was deeply wounded and carried a lifelong grudge against Barney. Ironically, after he moved over to the Times, the paper assigned him to my father’s job after Barney was killed in the Pacific.
I was astounded. This was certainly a more detailed—and intriguing—version of my father’s second marriage than I had ever imagined. But what about his subsequent marriage to my mother? How did that happen? Here Milly demurred. She didn’t know much. During the mid-1930s, Barney drifted away from her and Vinnie. (Other people subsequently filled in the parts she was reluctant to spell out.) Vinnie was still covering the courts and there was the hint that alcohol was hurting his career; meanwhile, Barney was forging ahead and hanging out with a group of big-time reporters and accomplished writers. Mac MacKaye, having covered the Seabury Commission, which exposed widespread judicial and police misconduct, wrote a book about it, The Tin Box Parade, and was becoming a successful freelancer. There was a general sorting out between those who were moving up and those who were getting stuck.
In fact, Milly said, “I never met your mother. But I saw her once.” It was one Christmas at Bloomingdale’s. Looking over the selection of cards, Milly saw a young woman—dark-haired, strong features, sparkling eyes—speaking to a saleswoman. She was asking for cards to be engraved “Byron Darnton.” At this point in her story, Milly looked into the fire and her mind seemed to float back to that moment three decades earlier. “I had heard Barney had a new gal, and I thought to myself, So here she is. I looked her over. She was stylish, well dressed, seemed full of life. She looked like his type. I didn’t introduce myself.”
On the train back to the city, I tried to absorb this new portrait of my father. Alongside the family man and the patriotic idealist, another Barney Darnton was taking shape. This one was more hard-boiled—an ambitious reporter, a heavy drinker, a womanizer who seduced his friend’s fiancée—not at all the father I had grown up with. But the more I thought about it, the more real this new version seemed to be. And the odd part was that it hadn’t come as a total surprise. Without knowing all the facts, I had on some level already imagined him like this. I must have picked up clues along the way, almost subconsciously. This new, somewhat bohemian portrait was not fully fleshed out; it was still just a silhouette. But the question I now had was how to square it with the old portrait—the more conventional one of the doting father and loving husband. And what did all this suggest about my mother?
I didn’t let these questions preoccupy me. As was my habit, I shelved them for years and went on with my life, working as a newspaperman and raising a family of my own. But my brother took up the questions and began talking to people about Barney. In 1986, he gave a talk at the Princeton Club (he was then a professor at Princeton). After he spoke, he was approached by a tall, slender woman with bright blue eyes, the wife of an old Princeton grad, who inquired, “Are you Barney Darnton’s son?”
“Yes, I am,” Bob stammered. “Did you know him?”
“Very well. We used to go drinking together in Greenwich Village in the twenties.”
They sat down together in a corner and talked. The woman, Mildred Gilman Wohlforth, a former crime reporter for the New York Evening Journal, eighty-nine years old, was a fount of information. She told him about the places they drank, the books they read, their friends and lovers. Patting his knee, she said, “You know, we had no morals at all.” With a smile, she added, “But I never slept with your father.” She patted his knee again. “Too bad. Then I really could have told you something.” Bob decided on the spot that he had to know more about these people.
With her help, he made a list of thirteen names—our parents’ contemporaries. He tracked them down. Some were alive, although barely, passing dismal final days in nursing homes. Their memories, as he put it, were “clouded over.” Others retained memories, but fragmented ones; they recalled key turning points in their own lives, not in our parents’. He took notes on what they said and compiled lists of books to read, places to look for journals and o
ther source material. He became taken with the idea of doing a book about our father. We would research and write it together, the historian and the journalist, each with specialized strengths, prying out information from the not-so-dead past. Strictly speaking, the book would not be a biography; it would be a story of the times, a depiction of the world of newspapers in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. I suspected—but I didn’t tell him—the project would be therapeutic for him, that perhaps one of the reasons he’d become a historian was to ferret out the secrets of his own beginnings. I knew he would reject such an idea vehemently. He’s not one to indulge—which is how he thinks of it—in psychological soul-searching.
In any case, the project died on the vine. At the time I was the Times’ metropolitan editor, taken up with chasing daily stories about crime, race, and poverty in the city, and, as I’ve said, I wasn’t gripped by the emotional prospect of delving into our parents’ history. Then Bob gradually lost interest before he got down to writing anything. And twenty years later, in the mysterious way these things happen, I became gripped by the idea of writing about our parents. As my career as a newspaperman was coming to an end, I began to think back over my life, wondering what had influenced the choices I made. Surely it wasn’t chance that made me go into the same profession as my father. And to work for the very same newspaper. How many decisions could be traced back to those Sunday mornings when Bob and I tumbled into our mother’s bed and listened to the stories of our father? Why did his spirit keep intruding into our lives? But it was only when I went to Sanda Island and stood next to my brother, looking at what had been the hull of the SS Byron Darnton, that I began to think back on the questions left unanswered and decided to investigate them.