Almost a Family Read online

  · · ·

  Eventually, it struck me that Mom’s working hard under a burden of responsibilities wasn’t a sufficient explanation for the changes in her behavior. I tried not to think too deeply about it, but she seemed different, and our family life seemed different. Our weekend excursions fell away and we didn’t seem to do much of anything. I would wander through the woods with my hound dog. She slept late in the mornings and still seemed sleepy by the afternoon. We had a special name for this condition. We called it “groggy.” The house began to fall apart; a bog of neglect descended. Milk in the fridge was often rancid. Foodstuffs ran out. Things needed repairing and cleaning—a cracked window, a spot on the rug, a fallen tree in the backyard, a lightbulb that had burned out in the living room. But no one did anything about them.

  One Sunday morning, after I had been up for three or four hours, Bob called me upstairs, looking worried. He took me into Mom’s room, where she was still sound asleep, and pointed to her bed. The blankets had fallen off on one side and there, halfway down the mattress, was a hole six inches wide. It cut deep into the material, like a crater. The edges were black and brown, burned. Mom’s cigarettes were there on a night table. I realized with a shock what had happened. She had fallen asleep while smoking in bed. “She’s lucky she didn’t burn up,” Bob said. “The whole house could have caught fire. We could have all been killed.” I was horrified. We woke her, but she had no recollection of the fire and didn’t seem to place much importance on it.

  One particular Christmas stands out from all the rest because it was such a disaster. I had a devotion to Christmas, regarding it with nostalgia as a time of merriment and excess. And as our situation worsened, I looked more and more to the holidays for an infusion of joy, as an indication that things were still normal and functioning. But this Christmas was so miserable it couldn’t be whitewashed. I was nine years old. For several years now, I had not believed in Santa Claus, and Mom had given up the pretense that he was responsible for the tree and the trimmings. Hanging the lights and the balls and the tinsel had always been a family affair, and in previous years we had made a production of it, joking and singing. A booby prize went to the person who broke the first ball. But this year, everything seemed off track. We couldn’t get it together to buy the mistletoe, find enough wrapping paper, or replace the electric bulbs that had burned out. We couldn’t find all the ornaments or the hooks to hang them with. We couldn’t even get the tree to stand upright, and when we finally did, it was crooked. But we plowed ahead, an old record of Christmas carols spinning on the turntable. Mom seemed unsteady as her hand wavered over the box of Christmas balls. She picked one, approached the tree, and lunged—and the tree fell over, a jumble of cracking branches and splintering ornaments. Bob helped her up and we got the tree upright again. We resumed, but this time I didn’t join in—I retreated to the top of a sofa, lying on the edge, trying to comprehend what I had witnessed, the disparity between what I had dreamed of and what had happened. Then Mom lost her footing and fell face-first into the tree. I opened my throat and did something I hadn’t done for years—burst out crying.

  But I still had no inkling of what was going on. I had come to rely upon repression as the first line of defense. It’s astounding how repression can blot out pain and confusion and be effective even when flying in the face of contradictory facts that are undeniable. It’s a willful blindness. The wind can be blowing the trees sideways, the rain pelting down like bullets, the timbers of the house shaking, and yet you’re unable or unwilling to admit that you’re being battered by a hurricane. My own private hurricane revolved around my mother. But at the time, I was incapable of recognizing that.

  Not long after that Christmas, Raisin and I were walking through the woods on one of our typical excursions. We stopped under a tree and sat down to have a snack. We munched on sandwiches and Fig Newtons. We were silent for a while and then began to talk. Our conversation was curiously intimate. I had the feeling that Raisin wanted to tell me something. I looked over at him. Wiping his mouth, he turned to me and said in a voice that sounded different from his usual voice—different enough for me to sit up and pay attention—that he had overheard his mother talking with a neighbor of ours. “They were talking about your mother,” he said. “What about?” I asked with a sense of foreboding. He nodded his head in the general direction of the house occupied by the neighbor, a genial white-haired widow. “She said, ‘You know what the trouble with Tootie Darnton is?’ And before my mother could answer, she said, ‘She’s a drunk.’ And my mother said she knew it, too.” I was too shocked to reply for a moment. I was mortified. A drunk! Who does she think she is, saying a thing like that? But then I resolved, with a certainty that surpassed any certainty I had ever known, that she was mistaken—deeply mistaken.

  “It’s a lie,” I said. “A dirty lie.” And I told him never to repeat it.

  And that ended the matter.

  CHAPTER 9

  Another memory boils up, this one from a later time. I was perhaps eleven. It was late in the afternoon on a fine summer day, the sky a cloudless blue. I was lying on a blanket at Compo Beach and my mother was lying on a blanket not two feet away, when abruptly she sat up and out of nowhere delivered a warning. “Watch out for The New York Times. They use you like a sponge. They squeeze you dry and then they toss you away.”

  The remark, uncharacteristically bitter, was a total non sequitur. We hadn’t been talking about the Times; we hadn’t been talking about anything, in fact. She didn’t explain herself and I didn’t ask her to. Her observation just seemed to drop unbidden out of a blue sky on a summer afternoon—which is probably why it stayed with me through the years.

  I disregarded her warning. I ended up working for the Times for almost four decades, beginning as a copyboy and moving through various departments and assignments. Others in my family went to work for the Times, too—my brother for a year, before I did, and later my wife, Nina, who began writing articles when we were abroad and then worked in New York as a freelance Arts & Leisure reporter, movie critic, and movie columnist. A decade ago, when the paper began whittling down its morgue, the voluminous file of clippings sorted by subject, writer, and other categories, I was sent the collection of Darnton family bylines: my father’s, my mother’s, my brother’s, my wife’s, and my own. It arrived at my home in a carton that measured three feet by four feet, so heavy that the postman struggled to carry it. I used to joke that when it came to the Times, we were like a coal-mining family in West Virginia, unable to break away from the company store. In short, our lives have been interwoven with the paper from that day in April 1934 when my father first pushed through the revolving door of what was then called the Times Annex at 229 West Forty-third Street down to the present.

  During my forty years there, I thought back from time to time to my mother’s warning and wondered what had prompted it. Among newspaper folk the Times has never been known as a happy shop—there are too many ambitious and clever people crammed into a single city room—but I never had cause for complaint. True, I saw any number of instances of corporate injustice: deserving people cast aside while incompetents were promoted, reputations trashed by rivals, credit given to the wrong people, and editors who nurtured a bullying streak. But to me, these negative aspects were outweighed by gestures of thoughtfulness and generosity and acts of courage and integrity, especially on the part of collegially minded reporters. I’m grateful because the place provided me with a solid paycheck and an adventurous life.

  So why was my mother bitter that summer afternoon? Was it because she was aware of slights meted out to others? (Shortly before, a friend of hers, a foreign correspondent named Tania Long, married to the brilliant wartime London bureau chief, Raymond Daniell, had been exiled to a backwater assignment in Canada.) That seemed unlikely. Was it because of all the sexual intrigue, expressed by the well-known dictum “Drink is the bane of the Herald Trib and sex is the bane of the Times”? (On one occasion, she had told me
, Mike Berger’s wife, upset over an infidelity, had barged into the bank of telephone operators, threatening to cut out her tongue to dramatize a vow that she would suffer in silence.) No, that didn’t seem likely, either.

  It wasn’t until I began doing research for this book in 2006, trying to figure out what my mother’s working life was like when I was a child, that I came upon the likely answer. I was burrowing deep into the Times’ archives in the hulking old building that had housed the block-long third-floor newsroom since 1913. This was at the time that the paper was preparing to move three blocks away to a modern skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. The archives, a vast compendium of correspondence and personnel records going back more than a hundred years, were temporarily stashed in a makeshift room in the basement, where the presses had been. The floor was fissured with metal tracks that used to carry the plates to the presses, and the smell of ink was embedded in the cavernous walls. As a young reporter, I used to go there to watch the rumbling presses, which sent vibrations through the whole fifteen-story building. They fed off an endless webbed stream of newsprint roaring up from the subbasement, tended by pressmen dressed in dirty overalls and wearing giant earmuffs to protect their hearing. Now, the place was cold and quiet and eerily deserted.

  An assistant in the morgue told me how to find records, which were cataloged by the dates of the reigns of publishers, as if they were monarchs. Then he disappeared. After a while, I managed to locate my mother’s file, a single thin manila envelope. I took it over to a small wooden table, sat down, and slowly read through it. Clearly, many documents were missing. Mostly those spawned by the demands of bureaucracy, when she changed departments or jobs, were there, along with snatches of correspondence saved at the whim of various editors. There were memos and transfer slips, which gave a skeletal outline of her brief trajectory at the paper—her time as a Washington reporter, the summons to New York to be women’s editor, and her departure. There were also half a dozen letters written by her. The correspondence did not tell the whole story of her time there. Nor was it balanced. On her side there were letters in which she laid down her views about women’s news and fleshed out her arguments for coverage and tried to persuade editors to go along. On the other side there were the editors’ responses—succinct notes to the publisher, dashed off quickly because they were pressed for time, or remarks slotted into the margins of her letters, seemingly written to preserve a record in case problems developed down the line.

  Sitting there, reading these exchanges, I envisioned her as a thirty-seven-year-old woman with two children, undergoing the grind of a daily commute, stepping on the morning train as a mother and stepping off as a working woman doing battle in a man’s world. I could see her trying to contend with powerful figures at the paper, men with demanding jobs who didn’t believe in coddling employees and who, for that matter, didn’t have all that much empathy to begin with. They hadn’t gotten to where they were by being soft or sentimental, and if they felt an obligation to my mother because of her dead husband, they quickly managed to suppress it.

  Piecing together a coherent narrative from these scattered bits of paper was impossible. But they at least provided a sense of what she’d been up against. At first she wrote warm notes, expressing gratitude for being hired. She didn’t lose her equilibrium when the Times’ bureaucracy fouled up, as it so often did, assigning her on the very first day to a new job without informing the person she was to replace and later failing to come through with a promised raise. She was so grateful to be there that she didn’t raise a fuss. But over time, her letters showed more and more frustration as they recounted her struggles and confrontations with the top editors, and they grew lengthier as the grievances piled up.

  The memos offer only a tiny window onto the Times’ newsroom of sixty years ago, when women reporters were many times scarcer than the notorious mice that skittered under the desks. Adolph S. Ochs, who took over the paper in 1896 and transformed it into the reliable “Old Gray Lady,” didn’t like the idea of women on staff. Nor did he believe women should have the right to vote. As Nan Robertson recounts in her book The Girls in the Balcony, during the forty years that he ruled the place, only four women worked as reporters in the city room. While other, less buttoned-up papers were touting their female stars, sometimes to excess, the Times remained a bastion of male privilege. The attitude carried on long after Ochs’s death in 1935, even into the early 1970s, when the women organized to press a discrimination suit and won a settlement. When I joined, in 1966, the mice still outnumbered the women many times over.

  In my mother’s day, almost all the women reporters worked for her in women’s news, a small department on the eighth floor. She sat in a glassed-off cubicle, with a deputy, Harriett Crowley, at a desk outside. They faced about a dozen or so writers sitting at desks grouped by subject, the largest cluster for fashion reporting, next to wall charts keeping track of how often items like Saks shoes or Bonwit Teller furs appeared in the paper, information useful in dealing with the ad-sales people. There were smaller clusters for beauty, child care, and home décor. One white-haired reporter covered women’s clubs for the Sunday society section. The work of the others was for the most part ghettoized on the daily “home page,” which specialized in “the four F’s”—food, fashions, furnishings, and family. As Doris Faber, then a young reporter, recalled, “It was pretty much like a cartoon of a mini city room with rows of desks—a beauty columnist at her desk intently reapplying nail polish, opposite a regal old fashion editor frowning at a batch of sandal samples being unpacked by one of her several assistants.” Some of the assignments, she told me, made her cringe: “For instance, on the day before Valentine’s Day I did a phone survey among well-known bachelors about their plans for avoiding matrimonial entrapment.” But occasionally news would break out to be offered to the more important desks in the city room. “I got a front-page story when a transit official speaking at a women’s city club talked frankly about raising the five-cent fare.”

  Five floors below, the Times’ city room, with its all-male management, was a raging pit of contending egos. First among the titans was managing editor Edwin L. James, a flashy dresser who played the horses and exulted in his reputation as a tough boss. He was the sort of man who flew into rage at a slow-moving elevator, smashing the doors with his cane to let the operator know who was being kept waiting. Another tyrant was Lester Markel, lord of the ever-growing Sunday department, a brilliant newspaperman but a man who was ruthless, scheming, and widely despised. Since Markel had worked closely with Barney, who at one point had been an editor in his department, one might have expected that he would treat Barney’s widow with a modicum of respect. He did not. Nor, apparently, did James. He began one memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, this way: “Mrs. Darnton has sent me a copy of her letter to you. It is true, as she says, that I helped her get started in a technical way, largely because I was a friend of her husband and, after all, I hired him on the Times, which probably resulted, indirectly or not, in his being killed.” The memo went on to deride her conception of women’s news.

  Her clashes with the other editors centered on this question of what constituted women’s news—how to define it and where to place it in the paper. As women’s editor, she had a broad view of women’s interests and believed strongly that stories aimed at them should reach far beyond “the four F’s.” The world was changing, she insisted. During the war, women had held down jobs in factories and other workplaces, and they would never be the same; they might return to the home, but they had an abiding interest in the cost of food, family budgets, labor laws, children, and social issues. This was a far cry from the fare that usually appeared on the home page.

  In addition to running this page, my mother was expected to generate stories for other sections of the paper, mostly the national and local news pages. At the Times, such a jerry-built arrangement has traditionally been a recipe for failure: The editor of a small outlying department ends up having to beg o
r cajole the national or city editors into running his or her stories in space consigned to their own stories, something they naturally resist. And in this case, the stories she was trying to place were these larger, thematic pieces of interest to women. Underlying the confusion over how to deal with women’s news was the sour rivalry between James and Markel. Caught in the cross fire, my mother was attacked by both, for different reasons. The Sunday editor complained that he was not getting his fair share of the spoils out of women’s news, and the managing editor resisted her initiating stories with what he derided as “sociological looking into the future.”

  Finally, in April 1945, she had had enough. She sent a five-page single-spaced memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, recapitulating her ideas. She asserted that the paper had “a particular blind spot” when it came to stories of concern to women. “The news value of these stories is not obvious to men or to desks which for years have ignored the interests of women,” she wrote. “I refer, to give a few examples, to stories on the development of shortages, among low-priced textile goods for instance; on the needs of children and young people in relation to their health, education, work and well-being and what plans and legislation were in process; on women’s new place in industry, which involves such things as equal pay legislation, how they function in the organized labor picture and what will happen to these 20 million, many of whom are heads of families, during reconversion. In my opinion, it is the printing of such stories that will bring new women readers to the paper.”