Marguerite was exceedingly reluctant to talk to a social worker at all. She complained to Miss Strickman that the truant officers were making a “criminal out of” Lee. She could manage him if they left him to her. She saw nothing wrong in his seclusiveness, saying she was not gregarious herself and had never felt the need to make friends. She was more interested in Lee’s physical than his psychiatric examination. She was dissatisfied with an examination of his genitalia, but on being told that they appeared normal, “she looked at once relieved and disappointed.” Miss Strickman concluded that “she didn’t seem to see him as a person at all, but as an extension of herself.”[28]
These reports were forwarded to the chief psychiatrist at Youth House, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, who interviewed Lee and wrote that he had a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power.” Lee told the psychiatrist that he was “very poor” in school, a remark that impressed Hartogs, since Lee’s performance, despite his truancy, was not poor. To Hartogs the contrast between Lee’s actual grades and his evaluation of them showed the “low degree of… self-esteem at which this boy has arrived, mainly due to feelings of general inadequacy and emotional discouragement.”[29]
Concluding that Lee was not psychotic, Hartogs recommended that he be released from Youth House and placed on probation by the Juvenile Court on condition that he be treated by a male psychiatrist and Marguerite be urged to seek psychotherapy. But Marguerite refused help for either of them. Instead, she condoned Lee’s truancy, claiming that she saw nothing wrong with it and that in Texas children stay out of school for months at a time. On this as on other occasions she was to prove that she preferred Lee intact, preferred to keep him as he was rather than afford him a chance either to grow or to change. Again and again, faced by a choice between what was unhealthy and what was healthy for her son emotionally, Marguerite reached for the unhealthy. Time was to show that Lee did not have a single antisocial impulse to which she did not, in one way or another, lend her sanction and support.
Lee was scheduled to report at intervals to the Juvenile Court, but Marguerite repeatedly telephoned his probation officer that she and Lee could not be there. In school the following fall, Lee was disruptive and belligerent, and his probation officer, having concluded that he had nothing whatsoever going for him in his home environment, tried unsuccessfully to place him in a children’s home. Finally, the judge referred Lee’s case to a social agency called the Big Brothers. On January 4, 1954, a representative of the Big Brothers called on the Oswalds. Marguerite informed him that her boy did not need counseling, and besides, they were going to New Orleans. The visitor reminded her that she was not free to leave the city without permission of the court because Lee was still on probation. Less than a week later, on January 10, 1954, mother and son arrived in New Orleans.
Marguerite rented an apartment from Myrtle and Julian Evans, whom she had known while she was married to Ekdahl. The Evanses observed that fourteen-year-old Lee was even more “spoiled,” more “arrogant,” and more difficult to control than he had been as a little boy. Mrs. Evans recalls Lee’s behavior when he came home from school. “Margie would be downstairs talking to me and he would come to the head of the stairs. He would just stand up there and yell, ‘Maw, how about fixing something for me to eat?’ and she would jump up right away and go running upstairs to get something for him.” Mrs. Evans added that Lee used to “holler” and “scream like a bull.” Marguerite never objected. “Her whole life was wrapped up in that boy and she spoiled him to death.”[30]
In New Orleans Lee gave up his truant ways and attended school regularly. He began to visit the public library and read. With most people he was quiet and aloof. Only with his mother was he demanding and loud. Like his mother, and unlike his brothers, Lee left school after the ninth grade. But like John and Robert he could not wait to leave home. With his mother’s connivance he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at sixteen. The attempt failed, and for a year after that, he held jobs as an office boy or messenger boy. The following fall mother and son were in Fort Worth. There, Lee briefly attended the tenth grade but dropped out to enlist in the Marines on October 24, 1956, six days after his seventeenth birthday.
Lee’s decision to enter the Marine Corps was a dress rehearsal for every other major turning point in his life, and it contained the same elements—rejection of Marguerite and those aspects of her character that he perceived to exist within himself. Throughout his childhood Lee had been exposed to one person unremittingly: Marguerite. The impact of her rigid and unyielding personality upon his emerging one had been undiluted. He had no one else, and especially no man, on whom he could pattern himself. And so he did the only thing he could. He conquered his mother. He took over her personality, and he became very like her.
He sensed it—and he loathed it. By joining the Marine Corps, he would not only get away from her but would find a sheltering substitute that would also make up for his lack of a father. But the Marine Corps, too, failed him as a parent, and Lee defected to Russia.
Marina once commented with insight that Lee must have been rejected as a child or he would not have become a Marxist. It is true. In Russia, in what he conceived to be a perfect Marxist society, Lee was again looking for an impersonal mother, a society that would give to him “according to his needs,” without subjecting him to the angry vagaries of his real mother. Russia was, moreover, a society that was supposed to have ended “exploitation,” such as he and Robert and John had known at the hands of Marguerite. But once again the substitute failed. Lee rejected Russia and came back to his mother country and the real mother who was at the heart of it all.
By then each of Lee’s decisions, including his suicidal gestures, was in part a reenactment of his original attempt to reject his mother and that aspect of himself that was like her. Each time, of course, a new layer of experience had been added; the attempt was a compound of the old and the new; the emotional fallout was heavier; and the debris was more difficult to decipher. But underneath it was the same decision, and there is a sense in which, after he was seventeen, Lee never did anything new. For the truth is that he had lost his chance. Marguerite’s upbringing; the combination of neglect, resentment, exploitation; the surfeit of some things and starvation of others that is known as spoiling; a spoliation of the emotions—all this had done its work.
John Pic once said that from the moment Lee was born he had the feeling that “some great tragedy” was going to strike him.[31] And of course he was right. Lee’s tragedy lay in the double conquest of the mother he despised. He had conquered her first by becoming like her. And he had conquered her again by winning the battle for her affections. She loved him better than Ekdahl, better than his brothers. She made him feel that he was special. Yet his chances of achieving maturity rested on his perceiving that it was one thing to be special to Marguerite, quite another to be special in the world outside. The fact that he had unlimited prerogatives with is mother did not mean he had unlimited prerogatives with everybody else. If Lee was ever to grow up, he had to relinquish the feeling that he was special, that he was at the center of the universe, and trade it for another and better incentive system. But far from giving up that feeling, he was to spend the rest of his life proving that he meant it.