Reclaiming History (126 page)

J
ohn and Robert were already planning to leave home at the first opportunity. Both were fed up with Marguerite. Money, John said, was “her God,” and she was constantly trying to get as much as she could out of him and Robert. More importantly, even as a ninth grader, Robert had become keenly aware that their mother felt the world owed her a living. Although she worked, and worked hard, to support them, she made it clear that she resented the responsibility, felt the children should be grateful to her for her taking care of them, and now that they were teenagers, wanted them to take on some of her burden, though the latter would not seem to be unreasonable. Their education was of little importance to her—college was never even mentioned. Marguerite had gotten by with a ninth-grade education and assumed that her boys could do as well or better with or without high school diplomas.
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Food was no great priority for Marguerite either. Though John felt that with their contributions Marguerite had enough money to provide better food, he remembered that “we didn’t eat that good.” John, who had to figure out how to feed himself from leftovers from the others’ dinner when he came home from work, had weighed around 130 or 140 pounds in military school. But now at home his weight fell precipitously to 118, and it was only after he left home for good that it shot back up to 145.
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Marguerite has a slightly different take on the food issue. “I never neglected my children,” she would later recall. “Oh, yes, we didn’t have steak, but we never even thought about steak—I didn’t anyway, I was always grateful to eat. And the children never really and truly complained. I know of one or two occasions when the boys said, ‘Mother, why don’t you have a platter of chops? I was at such and such a house yesterday and they served seconds,’ and I said, ‘Well, now, honey, this is all Mother can do.’ If, say, three days before payday, I had a dollar and a half to my name, I would cook up a big pot of beans and cornbread or a big pot of spaghetti and meatballs and make it last, but I happen to know some women in that position who would take that dollar and a half and go to the corner restaurant and come home with hamburgers and Coke, and there’s the difference. I have always done what I thought was right, and I always did it in a true Christian way. And even though we were poor and I was a widow and I had to support myself and three children, I always seemed to manage.”
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Even though John was working full-time, Marguerite pressed him to join the Marine Corps Reserve to bring in a little income to supplement the fifteen dollars a week he was giving her, probably not more than another two or three dollars for each monthly meeting. John resisted—he had his eye on the Coast Guard and he was too young anyway. And he still deeply resented not being able to finish high school. Marguerite won the argument: she took John to a notary and signed an affidavit saying he was born in 1931 rather than 1932, and in October 1948 he entered the Marine Corps Reserve, where he served with Fort Worth’s 155th Howitzer Battalion.
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In January 1949, John enrolled in Arlington Heights High School as a junior without asking his mother for permission. He could not continue in his full-time job, but he found another part-time job at Burt’s Shoe Store, working afternoons and Saturdays.
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Robert was equally disenchanted with his mother’s idea of discipline. Both boys had lived apart from Marguerite for a good many years and both had submitted easily to the discipline at the Bethlehem Children’s Home and Chamberlain-Hunt Academy. Marguerite, though, threw tantrums about everything, trivial or serious, and either ranted at them or gave them “the silent treatment.” When Robert was about sixteen, a friend gave him two or three Danish cigarettes to try. When he came home from school, he laid them on the table with his books, seeing no reason to keep them secret, since his mother already knew he smoked from time to time. Marguerite was incensed. “Now you’re on dope!” she screeched. “I’m going to take those cigarettes to the police and have them analyzed. I’ll find out what’s in them! You can’t get away with this in my house!” Robert, accustomed to Marguerite’s constant threats to call the police for one thing or another, told her to go ahead. She took the cigarettes and he heard no more about it.
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While the older boys could shrug off Marguerite’s tirades, it wasn’t so easy for Lee. Robert recalls that Lee would get very upset. He would sulk and pout, but he never talked back to Marguerite. He would often go off on his own to brood for hours, although he usually recovered his spirits by the next morning. At the same time, though, Marguerite would hear no criticism of her youngest son. Any dispute among the three boys was always the fault of John and Robert, never Lee.
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In January 1950, just three days short of graduating from high school, John, now eighteen, quit school and joined the Coast Guard and left for Cape May, New Jersey.
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After John left, Lee moved out of his mother’s bed and into John’s bed, sharing a room with Robert, and the two brothers grew even closer. Lee followed Robert around more than ever, trying to identify more and more with him, even trying to read Robert’s books, some of which were heavy-going for a ten-year-old. They often worked together on John’s stamp collection, which Robert eventually passed on to Lee. Robert noticed his brother’s love of fantasy. Lee watched the clock to be sure not to miss
Let’s Pretend
, a Saturday-morning radio show dramatizing fairy tales, and he seemed to stay enmeshed in the story long after the program was over. “All of us had our dreams and fantasies,” Robert recalls, “but Lee’s always lingered a little bit longer.” When Marguerite bought a television set, Lee was fascinated with it. One of his favorite programs was
I Led 3 Lives
, the dramatized adventures of Herbert A. Philbrick. The opening narrative is, “This is the fantastically true story of Herbert A. Philbrick, who for nine frightening years led three lives: average citizen, high-level member of the Communist Party, and counter-spy for the FBI.”
*
Lee watched
I Led 3 Lives
every week without fail. Robert wondered whether he had taken on a suspicious cast of mind from their mother, who saw “a spy behind every door and tree.”
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Meanwhile, Marguerite’s constant complaints about money had their effect on Robert. Although she was selling insurance at that point, and doing well enough to put food on the table, he knew she was under great strain to provide for them. In June of 1950, after he completed the tenth grade, he left Arlington Heights High School and got a full-time job at an A&P Supermarket, starting at forty dollars a week. By the fall he had been granted one raise and was expecting another, since he was soon to be made a checker, at which he would earn sixty-five or seventy dollars a week. He contributed almost all of his earnings to the family.
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Around this time Marguerite was having a harder time of it financially than usual, and she reached out to her sister Lillian for help. Lillian offered to assist by taking Lee off Marguerite’s hands once again until Marguerite “got on her feet,” and Uncle Dutz—Lillian’s husband Charles—wired Marguerite seventy-five dollars. She sent Lee to New Orleans by train and he stayed with the Murrets for a few weeks.
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Lillian found it a trying experience. They wanted to take Lee out to ball games and to entertain him, but he never wanted to leave the house. He would take a little radio of his into a back room and listen to it for hours while reading comic books. Lillian didn’t think this was healthy and did her best to encourage him to go out and play with other kids in the neighborhood, and he would make a stab at it, but after a day or two he would hole up in the back room again. Lillian saw the letter he wrote to Marguerite telling her that nobody there liked him, which astonished Lillian since, to her mind, they were “knocking themselves out for him.”
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Robert, after a year of working full-time, came to understand John’s feelings about being forced to drop out of school, and like his older brother, he went back to Arlington Heights High School as a junior in the fall of 1951. He continued, though, to work afternoons and Saturdays at the A&P. He completed his junior year, but by the following July he too had had enough, and three months after his eighteenth birthday he joined the Marine Corps. Lee, who was twelve, was fascinated and full of questions for his older brother about the Marines. Soon after Robert left home to fulfill his military obligation, Lee bought a copy of the Marine Corps handbook. He wanted to learn everything Robert was learning in boot camp.
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Eventually, he too would take the same escape route as his brothers.

The following month, August of 1952, Marguerite sold the Ewing Street house and moved with Lee to New York City. She did not want Lee to be alone while she was working, which he would be with no brothers at home anymore. Her eldest son, John Pic, by now a staff sergeant in the Coast Guard, was living in New York with his wife of one year, Margaret, or Marge, and a three-month-old baby. “The main thing was,” she said, “to be where I had family. And I moved to New York for that reason.”
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New York turned out to be a disaster from the outset. For one thing, John and Marge had understood that Marguerite and Lee were just coming for a visit, which was fine with them—Marge’s mother, in whose apartment they were living, was visiting Marge’s sister in Norfolk, Virginia, so they even had a room free for a time. They were, however, disconcerted when Marguerite and Lee turned up in Marguerite’s 1948 Dodge not only with a lot of luggage but also with their own TV set.
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John’s job at the U.S. Coast Guard Port Security Unit at Ellis Island kept him away from home for one night and one weekend out of four, but he took ten days of his accumulated leave to spend more time with Lee. As he walked home from his subway stop to their apartment at 325 East 92nd Street, he was delighted to spot Lee in the street coming to meet him, and in the following days he took pains to introduce his little brother to some of the landmarks of the city: the Staten Island Ferry, the Museum of Natural History, and Polk’s Hobby Shop on Fifth Avenue—John had taken to building model ships.
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But the “visit” had gotten off to an unpleasant start. Twelve-year-old Lee was beginning to rebel against Marguerite, as his two older brothers had. On the first day, Marguerite came out of her room crying, saying that Lee had slapped her when she asked him to look out the window to make sure their car was all right. The house guests were particularly difficult for eighteen-year-old Marge, who was already struggling with caring for an infant son and maintaining the apartment. When Marguerite, shortly after arriving, took Marge aside and informed her that it was her desire that she and Lee live permanently with Marge and her husband, Marge immediately let Marguerite know that that would be wholly unsatisfactory with the Pics. Marguerite was taken aback by Marge’s rejection, and Marge firmly believed that from that point on Marguerite did everything to turn her husband against her.
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John was looking forward to the end of his enlistment in January 1953 and thinking of leaving the service to enter a university, so Marguerite drove him around to several colleges—Fordham and a few others. She took the opportunity to explain to him that Marge was not as good as he was.
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Marguerite thought that Marge had grown up in a very poor section of New York, “cursed like a trooper,” and was “not of a character of a high caliber.”
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John was distinctly not interested in Marguerite’s views—he put his wife before his mother any day.
¹⁴⁰

There were other irritations for John and Marge. Marguerite made no contributions to the grocery bill, and John, who was making only about $150 a month, did not find it easy to feed two extra mouths. And every night when he came home, his wife recounted a litany of the day’s arguments with Marguerite and her growing feeling that Marguerite was encouraging Lee to be antagonistic toward her. Marge liked Lee, though, and she and John discussed how they would be willing to keep Lee with them if Marguerite weren’t there, although they knew that such an arrangement would be impossible. They never even bothered to mention it to Marguerite.
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In the meantime, Lee was enrolled briefly in the seventh grade at the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School on Watson Avenue.
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On September 30, after several weeks of irregular attendance, he transferred to Public School (P.S.) 117, a junior high school in the Bronx,
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and the boys there made fun of his Texas drawl and the way he dressed.
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At about the same time, the problems at the apartment came to a head. When Marge had some kind of an argument with Lee over the television one Sunday afternoon, Lee pulled out a small pocketknife with the blade opened and moved toward her in Marguerite’s presence. Very frightened, Marge backed away, and Lee did not advance further.
¹⁴⁵
This is Marge’s version. Marguerite denies all of this. Without saying why, other than Marge’s alleged hostility toward Lee, she says Marge struck Lee, and Lee only had his pocketknife out because he was whittling a wooden ship with it at the time. “He did not use the knife,” she said, though he had “the opportunity” when he and Marge “struggled.”
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Robert Oswald, based on hearsay in the family, had a slightly different version, saying that when Lee advanced toward Marge with the knife, Marguerite intervened and Lee struck his mother.
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When John came home and heard what happened, he tried to talk it over with Lee but found him suddenly impenetrably hostile toward him. Lee ignored him, and John was never able to get to the boy after that day. John had already noticed that his youngest brother was no longer the sunny, well-behaved kid he’d left behind when he joined the Coast Guard nearly three years before. Lee, now on the verge of thirteen and adolescence, had no respect for his mother and she had no authority over him. If anything, he dominated her, to the point of hitting her. John knew that he and Robert had rebelled against their mother too, but they would never have thought to strike her—they just walked away when her nagging became intolerable. In any case, the knife incident brought about the end of any emotional intimacy between John and his brother, and the Oswalds moved out a few days later.
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