by John Darnton
QUESTION: What did you do then?
ANSWER: We took the elevator to the 14th floor and I knocked at the door.… I heard Mr. Hill’s voice from within the room. He said: “Just a minute.” He opened the door.… I pushed against it. I saw him with a woman. She had on a dressing gown. His legs were bare. He had no shirt or undershirt on. She was part sitting, part lying on the bed. She was wearing some sort of negligee and attempted to pull the cover over herself.
QUESTION: Had they been drinking?
ANSWER: Yes. The bed was in disarray.
Adultery. An open-and-shut case. Interlocutory judgment was entered October 17, 1938. A ruling was made October 25. Three months later, it became official. As a result, according to the law of that time, it was “not lawful for the defendant to marry any person other than the plaintiff during the lifetime of the plaintiff except by express permission of the court”—a punishing requirement. New York State made adultery the only grounds for divorce in 1787, just after the Revolution, and, incredible as it seems, that outdated stipulation remained law until 1967.
My father’s case was a bit more intriguing, if that’s the word. He, too, was being divorced because of adultery, but in this instance, he was actually the guilty party. He didn’t appear in court, but his ghost seemed to hover over the proceedings. The summons was served on him on November 23, 1938, and the person who served it, in Grand Central Station no less, was Cedric Worth. Cedric Worth! That was a name I had encountered before—in fact, twice. He was Barney’s buddy from the New York Evening Post and the fellow quoted in The Dictionary of Misinformation, the one who remembered my father’s crack, “Anybody who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.” Worth, according to Bill MacKaye, the son of my father’s best friend, was the very same man who had been courting my mother shortly before Barney won her hand in not-quite marriage. (I later checked Worth’s obit. After his newspaper days he became a screenwriter and went on to ignominy as a central figure in a phony scandal about the B-36 procurement program.)
I imagined that Worth had served the papers on Barney as a friendly act, maybe even a truce offering. In any case, there was certainly an overlapping array of characters in this drama—and no small amount of playacting in this divorce, too.
Pollie took the stand. She said they had been separated about fourteen months, that they had had no children, and that she wanted no alimony. There followed a couple of witnesses who testified to my father’s licentious behavior while he lived at a residential hotel, the Hotel Murray, at 66 Park Avenue. A room-service waiter, one James A. Iver, was shown a photo of Barney and identified him as the man who lived in 5A, a two-room apartment with a kitchenette. He also identified six room-service checks for breakfast that Barney had signed (cost: one dollar for two people). “I gave him the pencil to sign it,” testified the bellhop. The defendant was “in the company of a woman who was not Mrs. Darnton.” He was, according to Iver, dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe and the woman was in a negligee. Looking off to the left, the bellhop saw a bedroom with twin beds that “had been slept in.” A night elevator operator, one George Geehan, testified that he had seen the couple, too, taking them up to the room but not down.
But one exchange with the bellboy gave me pause:
QUESTION: How many different women who were not Mrs. Darnton did you serve breakfast to?
ANSWER: At least two.
That stopped me. At least two different women. Given the time period, from November 1937 to February 1938, one of them could well have been Mrs. Hill, who four years later would become my mother. But there was another woman as well—perhaps more than one. I looked at the room chits with my father’s signature and then at his photo, a studio portrait, airbrushed so that the background looked like a spray of mist. He was gazing at the camera, deadpan. I thought back to my mother’s letters to him, the one in which she said she had to learn to trust him all over again. Had she found out that he was sleeping around? I remembered one other tidbit that Pollie had given my brother—that after my mother, Clarkson Hill had remarried, unaware that Barney had seduced his fiancée. So Barney had betrayed him twice—with his wife and with his wife to be. All this jumping in and out of bed: What had my father been looking for? Pollie had claimed he was “a deeply unhappy man,” someone who reached out for the nearest woman after a couple of drinks. I looked at the photo again. I wouldn’t have called it the face of a contented man. I wondered if he would have settled down with my mother and us two boys after he returned from the war, and whether he would have been content to live a conventional, reasonably circumscribed life in a house in the suburbs.
The divorce records did help to fill in one blank. My father’s decree was filed February 15, 1939. It thus became final three months later, or on May 15. That was five days after my brother was born, on May 10 of that year. So my mother’s explanation of why they’d never married was probably true. It was against the law for my father to wed again in New York State. Their wounds from the legal disentanglement of two divorces were still raw. They could have run off to some place like Maryland, but Bob had already been born. It would have been embarrassing for her to stand before a justice of the peace if that came out. And perhaps some reporter would have filed an item on it. Then the scandal, only now beginning to fade, might rise up again. Or at least this is probably what they told themselves, living in the hothouse atmosphere of the New York City press. They probably just let it slide. Hell, they were practically married. They told everyone they were married. They felt married.
That’s one version. They fell in love and had to be together, to hell with the outside world. The other—for anything is possible when it comes to filling in a blank space—is what Pollie had hinted at but never stated outright: that Mom snared Barney, that she got herself pregnant, and that he had little choice but to marry her. Eventually, according to this version, he came around, accommodating himself to the facts. In truth, he had always wanted children. Pollie couldn’t produce any. But it took a while for him to arrive at this decision and that’s why he postponed getting a divorce until the last-possible minute.
Needless to say, I found this version most depressing. It was the antithesis of my mother’s romantic fairy tale.
I decided to reread their letters.
There are more of hers to him than his to her. The dates are uncertain. A slip of paper falls out of the stack, reading in Mom’s handwriting “1937–38,” but which letters it refers to is not clear. They are dated only by days of the week.
The early ones, from his time visiting his family in Michigan, are loving. In one, he provided her with family news—glimpses from that confusing group of brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews—and ended, “Have I told you this trip that I love you? Why must I always be telling you that? Don’t you know? … If by this time you don’t know it you are indeed Mrs. Choate’s little dullard. Darling, I’m happy!” Another ended:
Long ago I talked to you about our having a little area in time in which we might learn to love each other naturally, without outside pressures of any kind. This separation is providing me with that quiet, and I have learned to love you very much indeed. Oh, very much indeed, Darling.
Goodnight, my Sweet.
She replied:
Darling, darling, darling, darling—
I got two letters this morning! Two whole beautiful letters. And all my days are so mixed up—they all run into each other backwards and forwards in such a lovely flow—that I can’t for the life of me keep straight what letters of mine you have now—or had when you called or will have or will have had or what I will have had—you see what a lovely mix-up it can be.
The next batch of letters were written much later, after Bob was born and while Barney was traveling around the country. In November 1939, he covered California’s “Ham and Eggs” elections, a controversial proposition to establish a thirty-dollar-a-week old-age pension, which had inspired a thunderous populist movement. (It was defeated.) Barney returned to the West to
do a seven-part series on the plight of migrant workers the following year, the same year that John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.
These letters are very different. Barney’s are businesslike, casual, and affectionate. He told her he was having a problem with a tooth and filled her in on minor complaints about work—that it was hard to get around Los Angeles, that he’d come cold onto a story right on deadline and that he’d filed “a very late and very lousy piece.” He hastened to add, “All this sounds like a tale of woe. It isn’t. I’m having a swell time, although it is nothing but work.”
Mom’s letters are chatty and supportive. She wrote to encourage him, told him his stories were terrific but that he shouldn’t get his hopes up for a Pulitzer. She kept him posted on developments at home, especially Bob’s every smile and gesture and ounce of weight gained. She seemed genuinely taken with watching her son grow. She bragged about how well she was coping—renewing license plates, paying bills, and cooking food in the fireplace during an ice storm. Her underlying theme: I’m keeping the home fires burning while you’re off in the big world doing important things. She was content with being a “newspaper wife,” she said. She was trying hard not to be demanding but wanted him to know that when he was away, there was a hole in her life. At one point, she asked, “Is Orion over the orange groves?”
Their letters restored me. I believed that their love was the real deal.
When I read hers, in that same handwriting I had come to know so well from her flood of letters to me at boarding school, I couldn’t help but conjure up her younger self. There was a flame to her of which I later saw only the embers. She was trying so hard for happiness. I felt sad for my mother, her hope and energy, her youthful optimism as she tried to finally connect with the right person. I lingered over her long sentences, the dashes that she poured on in a gush of expression to capture what she wanted to say. I felt compassion for her belief in the future, for her experiencing the exquisite joy of a teenager at the age of thirty-two, and for her missing her beloved, giving up her job, and relinquishing herself to another for the first time.
And I felt sad for my unknown father—he did indeed have a way with words, a casual wit, an ability to bare his soul if need be—and I felt sad for myself and the fact that I would never know him. My mother used to say during her down times, “If only you had known him—you especially, you’re so much like him—the two of you would have gotten on so.” And finally I mourned for the whole dream they had concocted together, the cozy house in the country and the Tom Collins under the tree and the jeep to drive to the railroad station, the loss of it all, so unimaginable at the time of their writing the letters. A piece of shrapnel comes screaming out of the sky, and irreversibly it overturns lives, reducing four to three, changing everything, ending joy and dreams.
CHAPTER 21
In March 2009, I was flying from New York to Michigan and reading a book called Weller’s War, a collection of the war dispatches of George Weller, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Weller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for a story about an emergency appendectomy performed on a nineteen-year-old seaman with no operating room, no anesthesiologist, and no surgeon—in a submarine in enemy waters. It’s a story of Yankee improvisation with a happy outcome (the patient survived).
There I was, not deep in the ocean but high in the sky, turning pages, when I came upon a dispatch that knocked me back in my seat. It was headlined WRITER MOURNS DARNTON, KILLED IN NEW GUINEA. It said:
“Barney” Darnton of The New York Times, buried yesterday in New Guinea, was among the best-loved, as well as most respected, of war correspondents in the Pacific area. His plump but debonair figure, his large head with the slightly graying hair of 44 years and his gentle and sensitive voice were the accouterments of a spirit well equipped for his task.
Barney Darnton had the searching eye of the reporter, without being cynical. Making no excuses for himself and working without stint, Barney was nevertheless always the first to excuse shortcomings in others. His principles as a correspondent were high; he was always ready to strip the story to its skeleton in order to keep a strict truth. His work was balanced, flexible and honest without ever being dull.
What this correspondent loved best in Barney after knowing him nearly ten years was his slow, dry wit which was completely untainted with Manhattan smartness but had, rather, a warm, fatherly quality.… He was one of the few members of the profession with whom one could be silent and yet know the silence was unwasted. Barney lies today in New Guinea’s thick soil. This last silence will be endless.
That brief description captured Barney better than anything else I had read. It struck me as another visitation, another note in a bottle washed ashore from that “undiscover’d country.” These unlooked-for nuggets of information began falling into my lap once I had decided to find out more about my father’s time in the Pacific and the bombing of the King John and the Timoshenko.
One nugget came from Robert Sherrod, the Time correspondent. He had roomed with Barney in Melbourne for a period. After his seventy-fifth birthday he wrote a letter and enclosed a photo of Barney, himself, and other correspondents posing in a slit trench. He had combed through his diary to tell my brother and me about those days, when the correspondents were desperate for stories and sharing a general sense of gloom that history was being made elsewhere and “there wasn’t going to be much war in the Southwest Pacific for a while.”
The correspondence continued, and over time Sherrod provided more intimate details. There was, for example, no small amount of sex. “We early arrivals in Australia after Pearl Harbor were astonished by the females. They were an uncommonly handsome lot, probably because they spent so much time outdoors in healthful pursuits. And they had no compunction about jumping in bed, or waiting in the lobby of the Australia Hotel in Sydney (‘the passion pit’) for an invitation to jump. I remember an Army lieutenant’s reaction: ‘We went upstairs, and I turned to close the door. By the time I looked around—jee-pers—she had her damn clothes off.’ ” Sherrod added, “But I never knew Barney Darnton to participate in the plucking of this luscious fruit.”
Another source was Lewis B. Sebring, Jr., of the New York Herald Tribune. After the war, he wrote three drafts of a book never published, “MacArthur’s Circus,” a splenetic account of the general at a time when “MacArthur for President” clubs were springing up. I found it on microfilm in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society on the Madison campus of the university, my alma mater. After filling out forms I was given a pair of white gloves in case the material included photographs. An assistant emerged from the stacks pushing a cart piled with boxes. Luckily, Sebring turned out to be something of a pack rat, having saved everything from postcards to pictures of my father’s burial.
He described the wrestling matches with the censors at great length, especially Barney’s angry attempts to deal with them. MacArthur himself he seemed to regard as a scheming, ego-driven popinjay. “He was heartily disliked, ridiculed and even hated under the wartime shroud of censorship,” he wrote.
MacArthur’s announcement of my father’s death had called it “accidental,” a vague description conjuring up a range of possibilities, most having little to do with combat.
Mom knew early on that Barney had been killed by friendly fire—that insidious oxymoron—and she learned some of the details about what had happened from correspondents who either wrote her or visited our house in Westport. Barney was the first of their cohort to die in the Pacific (and one of the first of a total of sixty-eight or so killed anywhere throughout the war). Uncovering the truth about the circumstances was compelling for them. But gradually her desire for more information gave way to a kind of fatalism and a belief that one must make concessions to the military’s need for secrecy. What good would finger-pointing do? She noted in one of her long-ago letters that she didn’t even want to learn the name of the pilot, only that she desired him to “be comforted and to real
ize that mistakes are as much a hazard of war as direct enemy action.”
I wanted to carry the research further. I knew that there had been a fateful error in communications—that the pilot hadn’t been notified to expect friendly vessels in what had come to be seen as enemy waters—but I wanted to know more about the engagement itself. Had the plane’s crew tried to identify the ships? Had the soldiers known the plane was American? Which had fired first, the ship or the plane? I wasn’t intent on establishing blame—at least I think I wasn’t—as much as simply trying to find out whatever could be found out. It seemed a sacred obligation to go back and fill out the record. So I accumulated reams of material: stacks of letters, diaries, and journals, interviews with soldiers from the 32nd Division, and enough books on the war in the Pacific and the bloody Battle of Buna, piled on the windowsill of my New York study, to block out the sunlight.
The bombing occurred in the run-up to Buna, when the army was transporting men and equipment from the south of the island to the north. The buildup, involving the first major airlifting of troops, was to be kept secret, since MacArthur was determined to keep the impending American attack under wraps. Col. Lloyd A. Lehrbas, a former AP man who had become an aide to MacArthur, set down that explanation in a letter to my mother, written five months after the bombing. Recounting just the bare bones, he added, “I realize there are questions you might wish to ask and we can now add some details. At the time the Japs didn’t know our troops had crossed to New Guinea and we, regretfully, could not permit the factual account to be made public.” He didn’t mention that the Japanese had pretty good intelligence anyway. They had the loyalty of some of the indigenous northern tribes, who presumably would have passed on information about American landings, and they also used spotter aircraft to monitor Allied troop movements.