Reclaiming History (127 page)

Marguerite found a one-room basement apartment at 1455 Sheridan Avenue, just off the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. The single room was quite large, and Lee had his own bed while Marguerite slept on a studio couch.
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Within days she also found a job at one of the Lerner Shops, the same chain of dress shops for which she had worked briefly in Fort Worth.
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John dutifully kept trying to maintain relations with his mother. He dropped in on her from time to time at the Lerner Shops store on East 42nd Street where she was working—at least once with Marge, although Marge did not really care to see his mother—and he inquired about Lee to little avail. “He is okay,” Marguerite would say, “but he doesn’t have an older brother to talk to or no one to do anything with.” She did not tell him until much later that Lee had virtually quit going to school. By January of 1953, Lee would be absent for an astonishing forty-seven out of sixty-two days of school. He was, naturally, failing in all his classes.
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What was he doing during all his absences from school? Sometimes just watching television in his apartment. Sometimes spending the whole day exploring the subways to see how far he could travel on one dime. Other days he spent at the Bronx Zoo.
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That January Marguerite moved once again, to an apartment in a four-story brick building in the Bronx at 825 East 179th Street, and Lee was transferred to a school in his new district, P.S. 44, but continued his truancy. Although years later Marguerite would tell an author that “boys do play hooky. I don’t say it’s the right thing to do, but I certainly don’t think it’s abnormal,”
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at the time she wasn’t nearly as blasé. She used to talk to a neighbor, Mrs. Gussie Keller, all the time and cry about Lee’s conduct, including his insisting on playing by himself. “If he had a father,” she would tell Mrs. Keller, “maybe he wouldn’t act that way.”
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On January 16, 1953, before Lee’s transfer to P.S. 44, Marguerite, after consulting the Federation of Protestant Welfare agencies, had applied to New York’s Community Service Society for help. She had earlier been summoned to a hearing by P.S. 117’s Attendance Board and warned that she would have to do something about getting Lee to school,
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although the board stopped short of threatening suspension. Although Marguerite told the Service Society that since the Attendance Board hearing she hadn’t been able to get Lee back to school and he was “nearly driving me crazy,” the society, unfortunately, had a substantial backlog and could not grant her an appointment before the end of January. In the meantime, however, a caseworker for the society called P.S. 117 and talked with an assistant principal, a Miss Kahn, who was not able to provide much information since she had only seen Lee at school once or twice. Kahn volunteered, though, that she thought the boy was rather withdrawn.

The caseworker went on to talk with a Mr. Keating of the Attendance Bureau of the city’s Board of Education. Keating had spoken with Marguerite, and told the caseworker that she had complained to him that she simply could not handle Lee, that he refused to go to school and wanted to return to Texas, where he was more at home. She also admitted that she nagged Lee a great deal and said she would try to ease up on that to see if it would help.

Responding to Lee’s truancy at his new school, P.S. 44, a “visiting teacher” was dispatched to see Lee at home. Lee told the teacher that he would think about going to school but hadn’t made up his mind yet. On January 30, 1953, the Community Service Society file on the case was closed with the unexplained notation that on that date “Appointment failed,” perhaps signifying that Marguerite had failed to show up for the appointment she had sought with the society.
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Meanwhile, Marguerite and Lee had failed to appear at two hearings, on January 13 and 20, before the Board of Education’s Bureau of Attendance, and on January 27 Lee was finally placed on probation until June 20 and warned that failure to attend school in the interim would result in truancy charges being brought against him.
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But Lee’s truancy continued to the extent that between January 15, 1953, and March 11, 1953, he never attended one class.
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In February, John, with his wife and infant son, visited Marguerite and Lee at their Bronx apartment for Sunday dinner, but as they arrived, Lee walked out, probably, according to Marguerite, on his way to the Bronx Zoo. Marguerite finally broached the subject of Lee’s truancy to John and told him that the school officials had advised her to seek psychiatric help for him.
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Marguerite wondered how she could get him to a psychiatrist. John told her just to take him. But Marguerite told him that she couldn’t control Lee and he simply would not see a “head shrinker or nut doctor,” and it was evident to John that Lee had become the boss. Shortly thereafter, John’s ship went to sea, and he heard nothing further about Lee’s problems during that time.
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Finally, on March 12, the attendance officer in charge of Lee’s case filed a petition in New York City’s Domestic Relations Court, Family Division (referred to as “Children’s Court”), which declared that the boy had been “excessively absent from school” and was “beyond the control of his mother.” Marguerite appeared alone before a Justice Delaney that day, and reported that Lee refused to attend the court proceeding.
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Indeed, one spring day an attendance officer for the school district, Victor Connell, found Lee at the Bronx Zoo. He noted that Lee was clean and well dressed but surly—he called Connell a “damned Yankee.” Connell returned Lee to school.
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On April 16, with Lee present (having been picked up pursuant to a warrant), Justice Delaney declared Lee a truant and remanded him to Youth House for three weeks of “psychiatric study.”
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This time it was serious. Two bailiffs took Lee from Marguerite right there in the courtroom. She saw him briefly a few minutes later, when the officers gave her a Marine Corps ring that Robert had sent to Lee, along with Lee’s other personal effects. They also gave her a slip of paper to inform her of the location of Youth House and when she might visit him there.
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A few days later, Lee’s probation officer, John Carro, interviewed Lee and found him to be “friendly and likable” and “fairly bright,” but indifferent to the situation. Lee told him he didn’t like his teachers or his classmates and just wanted to be left alone. Carro had a lower opinion of Marguerite, whom he interviewed on April 21, finding her “self-involved,” someone who blamed everyone else for Lee’s problems, and was reluctant to get involved in Lee’s treatment, seeing herself “as removed, as this having nothing to do with her.”
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Youth House, New York City’s detention home for delinquent boys who were remanded by the courts for a brief period of diagnostic study, was a dingy, jail-like building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, between First and Second Avenues, with barred windows looking out on tenements of the teeming city.
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Youth House ran its own school, P.S. 613, and maintained workshops for the children, a recreation department, facilities for group therapy, even its own hospital.
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Marguerite disliked Youth House intensely from her visit there with Lee. She complained that she had to wait in line with Puerto Ricans and Negroes and that her pocketbook was emptied by a guard because “the children in this home were such criminals and dope fiends and had [committed] criminal offenses.” They even removed the wrappers from the sticks of chewing gum she had brought for Lee. Lee didn’t like it either, according to Marguerite. He cried when he saw her. “Mother, I want to get out of here,” he said. “There are children in here that have killed people, and smoke. I want to get out.”
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A psychologist, Irving Sokolow, subjected Lee to several tests, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Monroe Silent Reading Test, and Human Figure Drawings. Lee scored 118 on his IQ test, some fifteen points higher than on the earlier test administered in Fort Worth, and indicating, per Sokolow, “present intellectual functioning in the upper range of bright normal intelligence.” All of Lee’s scores, Sokolow’s report of May 7, 1953, said, were above average for his age group, “appreciably so in verbalization of abstract concepts and in the assembly of commonly recognizable objects.” Sokolow thought “his method of approach was generally an easy, facile and highly perceptive one.” (As indicated earlier, the dyslexia from which Lee suffered was not yet recognized as a common disability, and it is impossible to tell how much higher he might have scored on an IQ test if he had not had this problem.)
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By contrast, the report said that “the Human Figure Drawings are empty, poor characterizations of persons approximately the same age as [Lee]. They reflect a considerable amount of impoverishment in the social and emotional areas.” Sokolow went on to note that Lee exhibited “some difficulty in relationship to the maternal figure suggesting more anxiety in this area than any other.”
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Robert Oswald, who first read Sokolow’s report long after the assassination, was not surprised by it. He thought Lee had good cause to feel anxiety about “the maternal figure.” Neither he nor John had been able to cope with Marguerite either, but they at least had each other for support, and after they escaped, both tried to have as little to do with her as possible. Lee had been left to cope with her all alone, and Robert didn’t think he had the strength to do that.
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A week after Lee’s psychological test, Mr. Rainey, on the Youth House staff, recommended that Lee see a caseworker: “Lee has constituted a problem here of late. He is a non-participant in any activity on the floor. He has made no attempt at developing a relationship with any member of the group, and at the same time not given anyone an opportunity to become acquainted with him. He appears content just to sit and read whatever is available.”
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The case was assigned to Evelyn Strickman, a young New Yorker and Hunter College graduate who had earned her master’s degree from Columbia’s School of Social Work the year before.
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She wrote the most extensive and perceptive report on Lee at this period of his life. The draft runs to seven closely typed pages, the rewritten version to five and a half, and includes a detailed account of an interview with Marguerite.
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Strickman found Lee to be a “seriously detached, withdrawn” boy who was “laconic and taciturn.” She also found “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him, and it seems fairly clear that he has detached himself from the world around him because no one in it ever met any of his needs for love.” Strickman asked him what his mother’s reaction to his truancy was, and Lee told her that Marguerite had told him to go to school, “but she never did anything about it.” Strickman asked him if he wished that she might do something about it, and Lee finally said that his mother “never gave a damn about him.”
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This would not have surprised Robert either. At least since he was at Chamberlain-Hunt Academy he had been aware that the relationship between the other cadets and their parents “was not at all like the relationship we had with our mother. Maybe because she had to worry about supporting us she never had time to enjoy us. Other parents, it seemed to me, enjoyed their children. I just know that we learned, very early, that we were a burden to her.”
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Strickman’s report said that “questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.” She also persuaded him, with some difficulty, to talk about his fantasies, and he “acknowledged that some were about being powerful, and sometimes hurting and killing people, but refused to elaborate on this.”
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Strickman also interviewed Marguerite, whom she described as “a smartly dressed, gray haired woman, very self-possessed and alert and superficially affable. Essentially, however, she was revealed as a defensive, rigid, self-involved person.”
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Remarkably, Marguerite began the interview by demanding to know why Lee had been remanded, and refusing to wait for an explanation, wanted to know if he had been given a complete physical examination, and was particularly concerned about his genitalia. When she was told the examination had revealed “nothing unusual, she looked at once relieved and disappointed.” She had noticed that Lee had of late gotten big “down there,” and her worries about the genital area stemmed from the fact that Robert, on induction to the Marine Corps, had been found to have a hydrocele, a sort of watery blister in the penis of little significance.
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In the draft of her report, which she dictated, Strickman said about Marguerite, “I honestly don’t think that she sees [her son] as a person at all but simply as an extension of herself. Interestingly enough, by the way, although Lee was a planned-for-baby, because her husband [and] herself wanted a girl, I take it she was rather disappointed at having a third boy.”
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Strickman concluded that she believed “the root of Lee’s difficulties, which produced warning signals before he ever came here [New York], seems to lie in his relationship with his mother. Lee feels that while she always cared for his material needs she was really never involved with him and didn’t care very much what happened to him.” She thought Marguerite had “little understanding of this boy’s behavior nor of the protective shell he has drawn around himself in his effort to avoid contact with people, which may result in hurt for him. It is possible that her own negative attitude about casework help and probation officers may communicate itself to Lee, interfering with his chances for help.” She nonetheless recommended against placing Lee in an institution without first seeing whether he could be reached by therapy. “Despite his withdrawal,” she wrote, “he gives the impression that he is not so difficult to reach as he appears, and patient, prolonged effort and a sustained relationship with one therapist might bring results. There are indications that he has suffered serious personality damage, but, if he can receive help quickly, this might be repaired to some extent.”
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