Jean Stafford - A Mother in History

LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

JEAN STAFFORD: A MOTHER IN HISTORY

Copyright 2021 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.

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Published in the United States by Library of America.

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A Mother in History copyright 1965, 1966 by Jean Stafford. Reprinted by arrangement with the estate of Jean Stafford.

The contents of this eBook are drawn from Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings, volume no. 342 in the Library of America series.

Cover photograph: Bill Winfrey Collection, The Dallas Morning News/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

ISBN 9781598536829

eISBN 9781598536958

Sections of this book appeared originally in McCalls magazine, and I would like to thank Miss Barbara Lawrence of its staff for her editorial acumen. I am grateful, too, for the contributions of Mr. Lon Tinkle, Mr. Hermes Nye, Mr. Hugh Aynesworth, Mrs. Arch Swank, and Mrs. John Satton.

J. S.

I N a tidy, unexceptional little house, on an unexceptional block of similar houses (they were seedy, but they were not squalid, and in some of their front yards roses grew) in Fort Worth, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald received me one steamy May afternoon. Without preambulatory small talk, beyond asking me whether I found the air-conditioning cool or not cool enough (it was exactly right), she plunged straightaway into her memoirsor rather, into those parts of her memoirs having to do with the that catapulted her to international renown. In the recitative of this, President Kennedy was little more than the deus ex machina, essential but never on stage.

Her voice had a considerable histrionic range; in a moments time, she could shift her tone from resignation to irony, from sonorous patriotism to personal indignation, but at all times a central intelligence was at the controls, regulating the pitch and volume as she entered the successive roles of mother, citizen, widow, public figure. There was a suggestion of elocution lessons, nearly forgotton but learned well, long ago; and there was more than a suggestion of rehearsal and past performanceshe spoke almost always in complete sentences, she was never visibly caught off guard.

She declared at the beginning that she was not a mother defending her son, but was speaking for history, since history, she is persuaded, has been deformed by the press and by the report of the , which is all lies, lies, lies.

I had come to Texas to see Mrs. Oswald because she is, as she was frequently to tell me, a mother in history, and while she remains peripheral to the immediate events of the Dallas killings, she is inherent to the evolution of the reasons for them. She is inherent, that is, if we accept (as I do) the premise that her son had something to do with the assassination and accept the further premise that the child is father of the man: we need to know the influences and accidents and loves and antipathies and idiosyncrasies that were the ingredients making up the final compound. I hoped that Mrs. Oswald would be able to tell me what these had been.

For all practical purposes, she was her sons only parent, since lasted too short a time to have much effect on him. Relatives are often (perhaps more often than not) the last people on earth to know anything about each other. Still, there was the possibility, and I had come down from Connecticut to explore it.

Mrs. Oswald, an inactive Lutheran, believes that if ye seek, ye shall find, that at last truth will prevail, and to correct the false impressions of her son and herself under which most of the nation and most of the world labor, she is dedicating her life to her own investigation. From morning, when she rises early, until night, she is at work researching the case, collating newspaper stories, studying theories of conspiracy (right-wing, left-wing, wingless, Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Black Muslim, anarchist, fascist, federalist, masterminded by the cops, masterminded by the robbers) that have been propounded from Los Angeles to West Berlin; reading between the lines of the Warren Report and scrutinizing the errors of omission in it and those of commission, and the ambiguities and the garbles. She accepts any invitation anywhere to appear on platforms or on television screens to pass on her observations and to interpret them. For several months after the assassination, she was strenuously peripatetic, popping up all over in this country and in Canada. My theme is the American way of life, she said to me, and this, of course, is what I talked about.

I want the truth known, she said, sitting upright on a sofa, her hands crossed at the wrists, palm upward. I believe the American people are entitled to the truth and I believe they want to know. Now I will agree that immediately after the assassination, and while President Johnson was taking the place of President Kennedy, let me say in all respect that this was not the time to bring these truths before the public. But after his time in office most people thinkI dont agree, but thats beside the pointthat he is a very powerful President, and the assassination itself has subsided. I think these truths should be leaked now, and if in the leaking they can prove to me that my son was the assassin of President Kennedy, I wont commit suicide or drop dead. I will accept the facts as a good straight human being. But up until this day they have not shown me any proof and I have things in my possession to disprove many things they say. I understand all . Well, Ive got news for you. It will not be for seventy-five years, because if today or tomorrow I am dead or killed, what I have in my possession will be known. And I in my lifetime have got to continue what I have been doing, using my emotional stability and speaking out whenever I can. Would you like a cup of coffee?

Because there was no hiatus between the proclamation of unwavering purpose and the hospitable, colloquial question, and because both were delivered in the same tone and at the same pace, I did not immediately take it in, but in a moment I did and said I would. (The drinking of coffee in Texas is almost as involuntary as respiration. One night I went into a restaurant in Dallas where, on every table, there was a glass pot of coffee kept bubbling over a candle-warmer. One or two of my guests poured out cups for themselves at once, following this aperitif with the Jack Daniels and Johnnie Walker I had brought in a brown paper bag. I had forgotten, or had never known, that in Texas you produced your own liquor in public places and ordered setups just as in the oldentime.)

While Mrs. Oswald busied herself in the kitchen that abutted on the dinette at the end of the living room, she did not pause in her soliloquy. She asked herself questions and answered them in patient asides: All the news mediums said he was such a failure in life. A failure in life? she cried out in stunned disbelief. He was twenty-four years old when he was murdered! The attorneys that are interviewing these witnesses make a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars a day and they never lived this type life. Lee Harvey a failure? I am smiling. I think it took courage for , for whatever reason he went. I find this a very intelligent boy, and I think hes coming out in history as a very fine person.