Oswald's Tale (46 page)

2

Mama’s Boy

Taking up service as a literary usher, the first guest to escort to her place has to be the mother of our protagonist:

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . Chief Justice Warren, I will start with Lee as a baby . . .

Lee was born October 18, 1939, in New Orleans, Louisiana . . . His father’s name was Robert Edward Lee; he was named after General Lee . . .

Lee was born 2 months after the death of his father, who died from a heart attack, coronary thrombosis.

Lee was a very happy baby.

I stayed home with the children as long as I could, because I believe that a mother should be home with her children.

I don’t want to get into my story, though.

Lee had a normal life as far as I, his mother, is concerned. He had a bicycle, he had everything that other children had.

Lee has wisdom without education. From a very small child—I have said this before, sir, and I have publicly stated this in 1959—Lee seemed to know the answers to things without schooling. That type child, in a way, is bored with schooling because he is a little advanced.

Lee used to climb on top of the roof with binoculars, looking at the stars. He was reading astrology. Lee knew about any and every animal there was. He studied animals. All of their feeding habits, sleeping habits . . . that is why he was at the Bronx Zoo when he was picked up for truancy—he loved animals.

Lee played Monopoly. Lee played chess . . . Lee read history books, books too deep for a child his age. At age 9 he was always instructed not to contact me at work unless it was an emergency, because my work came first—he called me at work and said, “Mother, Queen Elizabeth’s baby has been born.”

He broke the rule to let me know that Queen Elizabeth’s baby had been born. Nine years old. That was important to him. He liked things of that sort . . .
¹

Robert E. Lee Oswald was Marguerite Claverie Oswald’s second husband. Her first had been Edward John Pic, who lived with Marguerite in New Orleans long enough to father a child, Lee’s half-brother, John Pic, who would join the Coast Guard in 1948, when Lee was nine years old.

By that year, however, Marguerite had already come to the end of two other marriages, the last being to Edwin A. Ekdahl. Between Pic and Ekdahl came the six-year interval, starting in 1933, when she was married to Robert E. Lee Oswald, and they soon had a son, Robert Lee Oswald, Lee’s middle brother. Five years later, Robert E. Lee Oswald died while Marguerite was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Lee Harvey Oswald was born, therefore, fatherless.

So much for the natal and nuptial facts. The impact of Robert E. Lee Oswald’s death was borne in isolation by Marguerite, and that was characteristic of her. She was proud of her Southern manners, which were self-acquired. The youngest sister in a large New Orleans working-class family, she had developed airs and aspirations in her adolescence, and even achieved a measure of gentility through her second marriage. After the death of Robert E. Lee Oswald, Marguerite was, however, reduced to penury. Her life became a journey through stunted little commercial enterprises—moves from low-paying jobs to business ventures so small that the heart of the profit was chewed out before she began. But we can leave these details to John Pic, Lee’s oldest brother.

MR. PIC.
Well, while we lived on Bartholemew Street, my mother opened in the front room a little store called Oswald’s Notion Shop. I think she sold spools of thread and needles and things like this.

MR. JENNER.
Did she sell any sweets or candy for children?

MR. PIC.
Yes, sir; I remember we used to go there and swipe it. [The store] was [in] the very front room . . . we had a dog and the dog’s name was Sunshine . . .

MR. JENNER.
Was it a nice neighborhood? . . .

MR. PIC.
Well, digging back in my Sociology courses, I would say it was upper-lower class, if there is such a classification . . .

MR. JENNER.
Now, I ask you again to recall the circumstances under which you entered the Bethlehem Orphanage, you and your brother Robert?

MR. PIC.
. . . I think properly the notion store wasn’t a booming business, and she had to go to work and since we were reminded we were orphans all the time, the right place to be would be in an orphan home . . .
²

Marguerite had an older sister, Lillian Murret, who had five children, and Lillian would take Lee into her household for periods when he was two years old.

MRS. MURRET.
. . . he was a very beautiful child . . . I would take him to town, and . . . he would have on one of these little sailor suits, and he really looked cute, and he would holler “Hi” to everybody, and people in town would stop me and say, “What an adorable child he is.” [My children] liked him . . . I had 5 in 7 years, . . . had to get my own five children ready for school, and I didn’t have any help on that and it kept me pretty busy, and that’s why I guess it was that Lee started slipping out of the house in his nightclothes and going down the block and sitting down in somebody’s kitchen. He could slip out like nobody’s business. You could have everything locked in the house, and he would still get out. We lived in a basement house, and we had gates up and everything, but he would still get out.
³

Lillian Murret’s daughter Dorothy is more than ready to corroborate her mother’s description.

MISS MURRET.
. . . He had a certain manner about him that other children never had. I mean he was very refined, he really was, and extremely well-mannered . . . he was darling, and very outgoing and a very pretty child. He was adorable . . .
⁴

Relations, however, between Marguerite and Lillian were frequently on edge.

MRS. MURRET.
She was very independent . . . She didn’t think she needed anyone at any time, . . . no matter how much anyone would try to help or how much they would try to do for her, she never thought that anyone was actually helping her . . . Sooner or later it seemed like she would just take one little word or something that she would think was wrong, and we would have these little differences.
⁵

While his brothers, John Pic and Robert Oswald, were in Bethlehem Orphanage, Lee would, for thirteen months, go back and forth from the orphanage to the Murrets’. John Pic remembers his presence well.

MR. PIC.
. . . Robert and I enjoyed Bethlehem. I mean we were all there with the kids with the same problems, same age groups, and everything. Things for myself became worse when Lee came there . . .

MR. JENNER.
Tell us about it.

MR. PIC.
At Bethlehem they had a ruling that if you had a younger brother or sister there and they had bowel movements in their pants the older brothers would clean them up, and they would yank me out of classes in school to go do this and, of course, this peeved me very much . . .

MR. JENNER.
He was only [2 or] 3 years old?

MR. PIC.
Yes; but I was 10 . . .
⁶

In those difficult years, Marguerite met an electrical engineer, a Yankee from Boston described by John Pic as “Tall . . . over six feet. He had white hair, wore glasses. Very nice man.” He proved to be one electrical engineer who had an eye for ladies with verve, and he and Marguerite traveled together on his business trips through Texas for months, and Lee went with them until he was old enough for school, at which point Mr. Ekdahl married Marguerite and bought a house in Benbrook, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth.

Her economic situation now solved, she took John and Robert out of the orphanage and sent them to military school in Mississippi, at an academy called Chamberlain-Hunt. However, Marguerite’s good life with Ekdahl began to deteriorate. Their disputes were many, and often over money; they would quarrel and separate, come together and fight once again. During one of these separations, in the summer of 1947, at a time when John Pic was home from Chamberlain-Hunt and closing up the store in which he worked that summer, Marguerite and Mr. Ekdahl “drove up and told me that they were going downtown to the Worth Hotel. This was one of their reunions.”
⁷

MR. PIC.
. . . So, I went back and told Lee and Robert, and this seemed to really elate Lee, this made him really happy that they were getting back together. Mr. Ekdahl, while Robert and I were at the academy, would write us, he was a great one for writing poetry. He would send us a poem about ourselves or something, treated us real swell.

MR. JENNER.
. . . did Lee like him? . . .

MR. PIC.
Yes, sir; I think Lee found in him the father he never had. He had treated us real good and I am sure that Lee felt the same way . . .
⁸

The marriage, however, proceeded to come further apart. Marguerite, as John would put it, had “strong suspicions.”

MR. PIC.
. . . Mr. Ekdahl was seeing another woman and [my mother] knew where the woman lived and everything.

So, one night [my friend] Sammy, my mother and I all piled into this young couple’s car, went over to these apartments, and Sammy acted as a messenger, and knocked on the door and said, “Telegram” for this woman, whoever she was, I don’t remember the name. When she opened the door, my mother pushed her way in, this woman was dressed in a nightgown negligee, Mr. Ekdahl was seated in the living room in his shirt sleeves and [my mother] made a big fuss about this. She’s got him now and all this stuff . . .
⁹

Lillian Murret goes into further detail:

MRS. MURRET.
. . . his coat and tie and shirt was off, and he had his athletic shirt on [so Marguerite] questioned him about that, and he said he was there on business, which was absurd, because you know you don’t disrobe yourself on business, so that’s what started off the Ekdahl case, and then of course she wanted to get a divorce from him right away, you see, and that’s why I say she’s quick, you see, because I would not have gotten a divorce. I would have got a separation, because he was making a big salary, [but] she wanted a divorce [although] it seemed like he had connections [because] her pastor told her that if she would press this case against Ekdahl, that he would have a heart attack and that would make her a murderer, that she would be the cause of him dying, so he was in the hospital, I think, so she went to the hospital to see him, and I think they had a roar-up there . . .
¹⁰

Came the trial:

MR. PIC.
. . . I don’t remember my testimony completely. I do remember that my mother had made the statement that if Mr. Ekdahl ever hit her again that she would send me in there to beat him up, something which I doubt that I could have done.

I was told by her that she was contesting the divorce so that he would still support her. She lost, he won. The divorce was granted. I was also told that there was a settlement of about $1,200 and she stated that just about all of this went to the lawyer . . .
¹¹

Ekdahl died soon after, and the family was in economic trouble again.

MR. PIC.
. . . Robert and I were informed that we would not return to Chamberlain-Hunt in the fall. This, I think, was the first time that I actually recall any hostility towards my mother . . .

MR. JENNER.
How did Robert react to that?

MR. PIC.
He felt the same way, sir. He wanted to go back. But we were informed because of the monetary situation it would be impossible . . . I was 16 at this time. In September, Lee and Robert returned to school, and I went to work. I obtained a job at Everybody’s Department Store which belonged to Leonard Bros. I was a shoe stock boy at the salary of $25 a week.

MR. JENNER.
Did you pay some of that money to your mother?

MR. PIC.
I think at least $15 out of every pay check . . .
¹²

As soon as he is old enough, John joins the Coast Guard. Robert was going to school in Fort Worth and working. Marguerite was working, and Lee was alone.

MRS. MURRET.
Yes; she told me that she had trained Lee to stay in the house; to stay close to home when she wasn’t there; and even to run home from school . . . She said she thought it would be safer . . . than to have him outside playing when she wasn’t there [so] he just got in the habit of staying alone like that . . . he was with himself so much.
¹³

John Pic adds a telling detail, and not without malice:

MR. PIC.
Also, Lee slept with my mother until I joined the service in 1950. This would make him approximately 10, well, almost 11 years old.