Stonewall by Martin Duberman Read Free Book Online Page A

within a three-year period in the mid-forties to three boys (one of whom died in infancy); ever after, she deflected all questions about that period of her life.
    When Connie, not yet eighteen, decided to leave James Fouratt and start over, she went to the state of Washington to live with her own mother, Florence. Descended from an upper-class French family, Florence, too, had early realized that her first marriage was a mistake, had divorced Connie’s father (a butcher whom she accused of beinga drunk) and had quickly remarried. When Connie went to live with Florence, she left young Jim in New Jersey with James, telling the boy that she would be sending for him shortly.
    But she and Florence soon concluded that leaving Jim with his father had been a mistake, that James might not later be willing to give the boy up. Deciding to take no chances, they concocted a kidnaping. Florence and her husband simply appeared one day when Jim was on his way home from school, and told him to get in the car. Since he knew his grandmother, he obliged; but later, safely resettled in Washington, he cried bitterly over the new puppy he had been forced to leave behind. It was only some thirty years later, in the seventies, that Jim reconnected with his father—briefly, since the hoped-for knight in shining armor turned out to be a bookie and an alcoholic, an ill, bigoted old man who lectured Jim about his “sick” values.
    Connie’s new life in Washington started well. Still young, and very attractive, she entered a state beauty contest—and won. Then it was discovered that she had two sons and had been “divorced” (to conceal Connie’s nonmarriage, Florence had somehow arranged bogus divorce papers). Stripped of her crown, Connie nonetheless had a millionaire suitor to fall back on. That is, a conditional suitor: He wanted to marry her but refused to raise her children. Florence urged Connie to accept the proposal and offered to adopt the two boys herself—a solution that would not have sat well with Jim, who had developed considerable antipathy for his grandmother.
    Just as Connie was agonizing over her options, her own father, whose second wife had recently died and left him with a daughter younger than Jim—is it any wonder that the confusions of Fouratt family history fed the need for plausible invention?—invited her to live with him in Rhode Island. Connie decided that was her way out, and, leaving the younger boy with her mother, she took Jim, now aged five, and understandably bewildered at yet another shift in the family configuration, to her father’s house in East Providence.
    He lived in a neighborhood that was basically working-class Irish-Portuguese-Italian, and strongly Catholic. (Connie herself, though a believer, only became devout later in life.) Within two years of moving in with her father, Connie married Bill Malone, a short-order cook, the son of an Irish cop and a telephone operator. In adulthood, Jim would come to think of his immediate family as having been dysfunctional—his mother doting on him more than on her husband.
    But Connie and Bill tried to do well by him, pinching pennies to send him to a good (and as it turned out, liberal) parochial school. Clever, bright, eager to learn, Jim took to his new school immediately and, encouraged by some of his more freethinking teachers, was soon reading the progressive Catholic publication America , as well as materials put out by Dorothy Day’s radical Catholic Worker movement. Precociously articulate, Jim could stand on his feet and talk rings around his contemporaries., and he also had highly developed social skills that quickly thrust him into leadership positions. Yet, puzzlingly, he was behind his peers in spelling and writing and had trouble committing anything to paper. Only years later, in his twenties, did he finally discover that he was dyslexic.
    That was not the only way he was different. His family,