Reclaiming History (124 page)

As Lee’s third birthday approached in October of 1942, Marguerite again inquired about his admission into the Bethlehem Children’s Home, offering to contribute ten dollars a month toward his upkeep as well as provide his shoes and clothing, and he was accepted. When John and Robert went back to the children’s home after the Christmas holidays in December of 1942, three-year-old Lee went with them.
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Marguerite took a job as a telephone operator for, it is believed, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.
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Eight-year-old Robert in particular enjoyed having Lee with them at what they called the orphanage. Used to the protection of his older brother, John, Robert now became the protector of Lee, and the two of them began to feel a brotherly closeness for the first time, a feeling that persisted throughout their lives. Robert thought he and Lee were always closer than Lee and John, or, for that matter, Lee and their mother. It was to Robert that Lee turned when he had something important to discuss.
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Robert remembers Lee “as a happy baby and a happy little boy” at that time, “not too quiet nor too rambunctious,” and filled with curiosity about how things worked. He didn’t seem to miss his mama all that much, but Robert didn’t find that surprising—he had spent more time with babysitters, housekeepers, and aunts than with his mother anyway, and it wasn’t as if the boys didn’t get to see Marguerite. Once a week they would take a streetcar over to Canal Street to visit their mother at her latest job as manager of the newly opened Princess Hosiery Shop. They would have lunch there and then go to a movie. And on weekends she would go to the Children’s Home to visit them.
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Lee remained in the Bethlehem Home until late January of 1944, about thirteen months, but according to John, he left on several occasions to spend short periods of time with his mother or the Murrets.
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Marguerite also seemed to like her new job; she was given a free hand and was able to hire four girls in six days to help her.
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Her employer, Edward Aizer, remembered her as a neat, attractive, and hardworking woman, a “very aggressive individual” who would make a good manager, but she was not good with figures—she apparently could not even add or subtract—and after a few months he had to discharge her.
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By this time, however, Marguerite—looking much younger than her thirty-seven years and a “remarkably pretty and vivacious woman,” according to her son Robert, with dark hair worn long and vivid blue eyes—had begun dating Edwin Ekdahl, an electrical engineer from Boston who was then working for the Texas Electrical Service in New Orleans. Ekdahl, a tall, white-haired, well-educated man with a Yankee accent, was much older than Marguerite. The boys liked him because he seemed to like them. He was good-natured and friendly, and he seemed to know how to talk with them. He also had a car, a 1938 Buick, which was important.
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By the time Marguerite brought Ekdahl out to the orphanage to meet her three children, she had already been seeing him for several months and he had asked her to marry him.
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He had one powerful advantage in the eyes of the hard-strapped widow. He was a “ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account,”
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excellent remuneration in those war years, when a worker might be glad to pull down forty or fifty dollars a week. However, Ekdahl was not only a good bit older, he had been married to a woman to whom he was only separated, his job required him to travel a lot, he had a bad heart, and Marguerite was not overly eager to marry him. She took her time to decide, even after Ekdahl’s sister came to New Orleans to urge his suit, telling Marguerite he was lonely.
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Marguerite dithered, the affair continued, and finally, in January of 1944, she decided to marry Ekdahl. She made an arrangement with Bethlehem to leave the two older boys there until they completed the school year, and took Lee with her to Dallas, where Ekdahl had been transferred. There, however, she changed her mind about marriage, and using money from the sale of her Alvar Street property in New Orleans,
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and possibly help from Ekdahl, for a very small downpayment she bought her own place, a white, two-story duplex on Victor Street in Dallas with rooms lined up like railroad cars—living room, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen. She settled down in one of the apartments, while renting the other.
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When the two older boys finished the school year at Bethlehem in June of 1944, they moved to Dallas to reunite with Lee and their mother. They were enrolled in a summer school and then, in the fall, in a public school three blocks away, Davy Crockett Elementary. Marguerite dropped Lee off at a nursery school on her way to work in the morning and picked him up when she came home in the evening. Robert was now ten, John twelve, and Lee not quite five.
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Ekdahl visited Marguerite on weekends and stayed at Victor Street with her and the boys.
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Early in the following year, 1945, Marguerite decided she would marry Ekdahl after all, and she tried, in February, to return the older boys to the Bethlehem Children’s Home. Although she knew the home did not accept children with two parents, Marguerite explained that her prospective husband’s work would require her to travel a great deal.
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When the home refused them, she made other plans, enrolling both of them, for the fall semester of 1945, in Chamberlain-Hunt Academy, a military school in Port Gibson, Mississippi. She paid the tuition herself from what remained of the proceeds from the sale of the Alvar Street house in New Orleans the previous year.
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With that taken care of, she and Ekdahl married on May 7, 1945.
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After a honeymoon that may have lasted only a day or two, Ekdahl moved into the Victor Street house.
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Ekdahl got along well with the boys, and they thought it a treat to have a stepfather who had a genuine interest in them, talked to them, took them out for ice cream, and made every little excursion a special event. He asked them to call him Ed, and it made them feel very grown-up to do so. Robert would later say that both he and John could remember having “a father to play with us when we were little and picking us up when we fell, but Lee had never known a normal family life” and he was thrilled to have a father at last. Robert also thought that their mother was easier to please when Ekdahl was around.
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In early September 1945, Ekdahl, with Marguerite and Lee, drove Robert and John to Port Gibson, Mississippi, dropping them off for their first year at Chamberlain-Hunt on their way to visit Ekdahl’s son by a previous marriage, who lived in Boston.
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Chamberlain-Hunt would be John and Robert’s home over the next three years. It was a small school, with about 110 boys, each of whom got a good deal of individual attention. The commandant, former Marine captain Herbert D. Farrell, taught them math as well as military science and became something of a substitute father and role model. Listening to his stories of life in the corps, the boys formed an early predilection for military life that would resonate with Lee in later years.
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In the meantime, Lee traveled the country with his mother and new stepfather on his stepfather’s business trips. The boys at school got letters from Boston and snapshots from Arizona.
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Traveling with a small child did put something of a strain on the marriage, though. Marguerite’s friend from New Orleans, Myrtle Evans, who visited the Ekdahls in Dallas around this time, thought that Marguerite would have had a better life if she could have put Lee into a boarding school with the other two boys. As opposed to Lee’s brother Robert, who always said that Marguerite acted as if all three children were a burden to her, Evans felt that Marguerite “loved [Lee] to death and spoiled him to death…She was too close to Lee all the time and I don’t think Ekdahl liked that too much” and she feels it “contributed” to their eventual divorce.
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Sometime that fall of 1945, the Ekdahls moved to Benbrook, a suburb just northwest of Fort Worth that at the time was not much more than a “wide spot in the road,” according to Robert. They leased a comfortable stone house on a rural mail route. It was on a large plot of land and there was a creek four or five hundred yards from the house. Lee entered first grade at the Benbrook Common School on October 31, 1945, a few days after his sixth birthday—although his application gives July 9, 1939, as his birth date instead of October 18, presumably to satisfy the age requirement that he be six by September 1. He did well there—all As and Bs, including an A in citizenship.
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It was not until Christmas of 1945 that John and Robert, on vacation from military school, saw their new home. They were impressed. John recalled that one of President Roosevelt’s sons was supposed to have a house nearby.
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Over the holidays, Lee’s cadet brothers taught him close order drill with wooden practice rifles and marched him around, and he tagged along with them whenever they would let him. He also liked to play cowboys and Indians, and his brothers obliged him, even though they felt too old for such games. Lee’s older brothers were almost unaware of the rapid erosion of their mother’s marriage, the arguments, disagreements, and separations. Ekdahl began to spend more and more time away from home. Lee, who was around the house far more than his brothers, was more upset by these conflicts. Robert thinks he was more sensitive than they realized at the time, being worried over “the danger of losing the only father he had ever known,” but the six-year-old was already learning to keep his feelings to himself.
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Marguerite began to suspect Ekdahl of infidelity and was also distressed by Ekdahl’s closeness with money. Even though they stayed in good hotels when they traveled and lived lavishly because of his expense account, he gave her only a hundred dollars a month for household expenses and demanded a strict accounting of it. She continued to use her own dwindling supply of money for the boys’ expenses at the military school.
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In early February of 1946, Lee was admitted to Harris Hospital in Fort Worth with “acute mastoiditis” on the left side, which was successfully treated by a mastoidectomy (the removal of part of the mastoid bone, behind the ear, to drain the infection). He left the hospital in four days.
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After the spring semester in 1946, arrangements had been made for Robert and John to remain at Chamberlain-Hunt to attend the summer session. They didn’t much mind, as they liked the school, and they were enjoying the two-or three-week hiatus before the summer session was to start when Marguerite showed up with Lee and told them she and Ekdahl had separated. Instead of having them attend school, she took them to Covington, Louisiana, for the rest of the summer. John thinks she may even have consulted Commandant Farrell, who was an attorney, about divorce proceedings. The four of them spent the rest of the summer in Covington, a pleasant resort town on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain (near New Orleans). Marguerite took a house on Vermont Street, where they seemed to be a “very happy family,” at least according to one observer, Marguerite’s friend Myrtle Evans. They went swimming, ate watermelon, and owned a couple of dogs, though she noticed that little Lee always preferred his own company. Myrtle admired the way Marguerite, never well-off, provided for her children, and she thought the boys were aware of how hard she worked to put them through school and give them what they needed.
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In the fall, John and Robert returned to the military academy, but Marguerite and Lee stayed on. She enrolled him in Covington Elementary School, again in the first grade since, in spite of his good record at Benbrook of all As and Bs, he hadn’t completed his first year.
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Mother and son attended the only Lutheran church in Covington, and six-year-old Lee distinguished himself by singing a solo “Silent Night” in church during the Christmas season.
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Lee did well during the four-month period he attended Covington Elementary School, receiving Bs, including one in “conduct.”
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But his mother and Ekdahl reconciled, and on January 23, 1947, Lee was withdrawn from Covington Elementary School
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and Marguerite and Lee moved back to Fort Worth to an upstairs apartment at 1505 Eighth Avenue that Ekdahl had been renting.
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Four days later, Lee was enrolled in Clayton Elementary School in Fort Worth. This was already his third school and he was still in the first grade, which he finally completed that May, although he seems to have done well enough, with Bs in every subject except physical education and health, in which he earned As.
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Whatever Marguerite hoped for from the new start, the reconciliation did not last long. She was convinced that Ekdahl was leading a double life. A day or two after she and Lee had moved into the upstairs flat on Eighth Avenue, she went downstairs to hang clothes out in the yard. There she met a neighbor to whom she introduced herself as Mrs. Ekdahl. The woman’s expression betrayed her astonishment and aroused Marguerite’s suspicion. Later the woman told her that until recently there had been another woman living in the apartment with Ekdahl, a woman whom she had thought was the engineer’s wife.
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By the time the boys returned from the military academy at the beginning of summer, the ill feelings between Ekdahl and Marguerite could no longer be hidden—they fought every other day and frequently separated. There’s no doubt the turmoil in the household had its effect on Lee. Fifteen-year-old John came home from his summer job as assistant manager of the Tex-Gold Ice Cream Parlor shortly after ten one night and found his stepfather and mother in Ekdahl’s car, on their way to spend the night at a downtown hotel—yet another reconciliation period. When John passed the word on to his seven-year-old brother, Lee was clearly delighted. Robert thought that Lee wanted more than anything else for his parents to make up their differences and get back together.
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