Read Online "Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald by Douglas Brode - Free Book Online

someday be me?
    â€œDon’t you have any feelings at all?” the housewife demanded of this nasty little man before her.
    â€œNo. They were taken out of me by experts.”
    Oh, I know that feeling. Experts like Dr. Hartogs.
    But how can anyone not experience feelings? she asked.
    â€œFeelings are a trap,” Sinatra/Barrows explained. “Show me a guy with feelings, I’ll show you a sucker.” She stared at him, unable to comprehend much less speak. “A weakness. Makes you think of something besides yourself. If I had any feelings left, it’d be for me . Just me.”
    That’s it. The key to ... I don’t know ... Survival? Stop worrying about Marguerite and how whatever I do impacts on her ... from now on, I’ve got to be more like Johnny Barrows.
    *
    The parallel proved far from precise. “My mother wasn’t married,” Johnny Barrows confessed. “My old man was a dipso.”
    As for his own old man, Lee had never known him. Robert E. Lee Oswald died two months before Lee's birth. Maybe that was better than growing up with an alcoholic. Likely about the same.
    Yes, Marguerite had been married, then in time remarried. Still, Lee’s experiences and those of this onscreen character still seemed pretty much congruent.
    â€œThey left me in a house,” Johnny wept. That, Lee knew all about. First there had been Bethlehem Children’s House when he was three. Most people couldn’t remember anything about what happened to them at such an early age. Lee did. Almost every night, he still experienced nightmares about being there. Dream of sleeping in that place; dream of dreaming there, too, wanting to be back with Marguerite. Sleeping beside her in one bed, as they would do, when together, until he reached the age of fourteen.
    At the time, Marguerite claimed that she couldn’t afford to support her boys. His older brother Robert and half-brother John were temporarily abandoned too. Lee would wake up in Bethlehem ... what an ironic name for a hellish hovel! ... crying for her. Other kids heard, and tagged him a Momma's boy, then beat Lee whenever Robert or John weren't around to prevent such bullying.
    He was out, now. Mentally, he’d never escaped that place.
    Later, in New Orleans, or Fort Worth, or the Bronx. Youth House, wherever he happened to be, always it was the same thing over and over again ...
    I wake up screaming! Having experienced yet another dream within a dream within a dream. There’s no one there to comfort me; I'm alone in the dark. Always have been. Always will be?
    Lee firmly believed that it couldn’t get any worse than Bethlehem until he landed in the Youth House. Purgatory well described Bethlehem only after he’d experienced the daily horrors of his next home away from home. The beatings by other boys, those who, like him, had been scooped up by authorities and dropped down here; the last, worst place for those who did not, could not fit in. Supposedly for their benefit, to somehow try and make them ‘better.’ Or so everyone in authority claimed.
    Actually, Lee came to believe, to isolate them all from everyone else. The Normals! Sacrifice the few to save the many.
    Even here, in the land of the loners, Lee became the loner. An outsider among outsiders.
    The lowest rung on the totem pole of life ...
    *
    â€œWho’s behind it?” Sterling Hayden wanted to know.
    â€œI haven’t the slightest idea,” Sinatra replied without emotion. What most fascinated Lee was that Johnny, all set to whack the president, considered himself a patriot.
    â€œI won the Silver Star!”
    That gave Lee an idea, or more correctly brought an earlier one back. He must join the service. The image of Robert in full-dress uniform, home on leave, had inspired Lee. Reading Robert's Marine Corps manual caused the impressionable child to choose that branch of the service as the only one for him.
    If they'd take him.