LOOKING back years later, Lillie Mae often said that she had married Arch only to get away from home. Sometimes, however, when she was in a mellow mood, she admitted that she had once loved him—and that is doubtless the truth of the matter. “Arch was so romantic,” said Mary Ida. “He would always bring her a bouquet of flowers—even if he had to go to the side of the yard to pick them.” But their romance scarcely outlasted their courtship: Arch was an easy man to like, but he was not an easy man to love; the very thing that made him so charming—all those promises he passed out so freely—invariably led to disenchantment. Instead of forgiving him his feckless ways, as she might have done if he had not raised her hopes so high, Lillie Mae held them against him, convinced that he had deceived her. “She thought that she had been hooked into marrying him,” said Seabon. “She had thought she was marrying a man who would give her some security and a home life.” Arch could give her neither, and if she had not become pregnant, it is doubtful that they would have stayed together more than a year.
As it was, their marriage did not so much end as it dissolved, slowly at first and then faster and faster, like a cube of sugar dropped into an iced drink. Lillie Mae appears to have made an effort to preserve it for a few months after Truman was born, but she soon gave up and other men entered her life. “She’d take a notion to a fellow and she just couldn’t wait to get into bed with him,” said Arch. “She wanted a thrill and she would get it. Then in three or four weeks she’d be through with it and ready to go on to something else.” In the seven years they were man and wife, Arch claimed to have counted twenty-nine such affairs. His brother John, who also had been tricked and lied to by Arch, was willing to forgive Lillie Mae her adulteries; what he could not forgive her was her poor choice in men. “Invariably,” he complained in one letter, “they are either Greeks, Spaniards, college sheiks, foolish young city upstarts, or just as immature small-town habitants.”
The first on the list may have been a Central American who appeared in the summer of 1925. Matching all the stereotypes of the hot-blooded Latin lover, he was passionate, he lavished presents on her, and he threatened to kill her if he ever saw her with another man, excluding her husband, of course. Arch did not like her seeing him—or so he later said—but he did not make an issue of it. “What could I do?” he asked plaintively. “She’d slip around and see him when I was working. It was just something I didn’t talk about.”
To avoid embarrassing confrontations, Lillie Mae would usually see her Latin in the afternoon. But sometimes at night, after she had told him where she and Arch were going, he would also follow them into a movie theater. She would help Arch find a seat in the front row—he was so shortsighted that he could barely see the screen if he was farther back—and she would then join her lover in a secluded corner in the rear. When the film was over, she would return to Arch and the other man would go home to his own wife. Near-sighted as he was, Arch was usually aware of what was happening.
Several times she carried out her trysts in front of Truman, believing, no doubt, that he was too young to notice. In that she was mistaken. “She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis,” Truman recalled. “I was only two or so, but I remember it clearly, right down to what he looked like—he had brown hair. We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical. A couple of years after that, she took me to Jacksonville to leave me with my grandmother. She and my father were more or less separated by that time, and she went out with several young men while she was there. One night I could hear them doing whatever they were doing in the rumble seat of a car. Another night she brought a man right into the house. She must have been drinking, because I could hear her giggling and her voice sounded funny. Suddenly all the lights came on and she and my grandmother were yelling at each other. She then started packing and every few minutes she would come on to the porch where I was sleeping. She would cry, put her arms around me and tell me she would never leave me. Once again I became hysterical, and at that point my memory stops cold.”
Not all of her lovers were Greeks, Spaniards, or college sheiks. One, Jack Dempsey, the ex–heavyweight champion of the world, satisfied even John Persons’ exacting standards. Lillie Mae met him when she was traveling with Truman on a train from Memphis to St. Louis. “We were sitting in the coach section when a man walked up and down the aisle and looked at my mother—I was used to men looking at my mother. Then he asked us to have a drink in Dempsey’s compartment. I knew even then who Dempsey was, or at least I knew that he was somebody famous. So we went to his compartment and my mother talked to him. After a while Dempsey suggested to the man, who must have been his manager, that he take me to the observation car for a Coke, and he and I went back there and sat watching the rails for most of the afternoon. I remember saying, ‘Where’s my mother?’ But I knew where she was. Things like that happened a lot.”
One reason Arch remained so quiet all those years, methodically counting his wife’s lovers as if he were keeping score in a card game, was that he was not above using them to help him turn a dollar. When they were first married, for example, he persuaded her to cash bad checks for him, employing her good looks as a come-on. In Dempsey, for example, he saw one of his gold mines—bigger even than the Great Pasha—and with Lillie Mae as his go-between, he persuaded the ex-champ, who was still an enormously popular figure, like Charles Lindbergh or Will Rogers, to referee a wrestling match in Columbus, Mississippi. He sent out thousands of promotional fliers, had letterheads printed with both his picture and Dempsey’s, and erected wooden stands to seat 11,500. “There wasn’t a big enough place in the state to hold the people we expected!” he exclaimed. But luck eluded him yet again. A terrible storm pelted Columbus on “Jack Dempsey Day,” November 10, 1930, and even Dempsey was not popular enough to persuade more than 3,000 people to sit in the wind and rain. Arch failed to meet his expenses.
Though she was not faithful, Lillie Mae stuck by Arch in most other ways, long after most women would have dismissed him. She overlooked his failures, defended him during his increasingly frequent troubles with the law, and helped him when she could. Though their times together grew progressively shorter, neither mentioned divorce; both of them seemed content with their civilized arrangement.
The only one hurt was Truman, and if it is true, as psychologists say, that a child’s greatest anxiety—the original fear—is that he will be deserted by his parents, then he had good reason to be anxious. Between Arch’s schemes and Lillie Mae’s affairs, there was little time for him. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I would become so exhausted that I would just throw myself on the bed or on the floor until they came back. Every day was a nightmare, because I was afraid that they would leave me when it turned dark. I had an intense fear of being abandoned, and I remember practically all of my childhood as being lived in a state of constant tension and fear.” An early memory, undoubtedly the recollection of a dream rather than an actual event, is symbolic of those lonely years: as he was walking through the St. Louis Zoo with a black nurse, he heard screams—a lion was loose. The nurse ran away and he was left all by himself, with no place to hide and no safety anywhere.
Lillie Mae made sporadic attempts to keep him with her. In the winter of 1929 she even took him to Kentucky, where, still hoping to find a career for herself, she spent a few weeks in a business college. Arch also professed endless love. But neither one was willing to be a full-time parent or make any permanent sacrifice. They loved him, in short, only when they were not otherwise engaged. Sometimes they left him with Arch’s widowed mother, who had married a Presbyterian minister in Jacksonville. More often they deposited him with Lillie Mae’s relations in Monroeville. Finally, in the summer of 1930, a few months before his sixth birthday, they left him there for good—or for as long as anyone could then foresee. Arch busied himself with his projects; Lillie Mae went off to visit friends in Colorado. Truman’s fear that they would abandon him had finally come true.