Lee's mother Marguerite is the one who really gets the bad end of the deal in Libra. A single mother who was divorced twice, that was cheated on and then received not a penny of a settlement in one of the divorces even though the man she married was quite wealthy. She was then left to raise Lee on a minimum wage job that she has to work long hours at. She repeatedly is having to fight for her and Lee's livelihood, though she deserves so much better. Lee doesn't really help her out much either. All Lee does is skip school, ride the subways, and resent her and tell her things like "I am entitled to better."and "They're [Lee's brothers] in the service to get away from you." (DeLillo, 35) . Then after taking care of Lee, and working her ass off for him for years, he high tails it to Russia and gets married, without a word to his mother. Even when he gets back to the states, he avoids his mother for a while, then when he can't avoid her any longer he only begrudgingly agrees to allow her to visit himself, Marina, and her only grandchild June. Marguerite doesn't seem to be a particularity overbearing mother, or have an annoying personality, Lee just treats her badly because he can, much like he does with Marina.
When Lee is taken custody for the assassination of Kennedy, it has been a year since Marguerite has seen him and suddenly she is thrown into the chaos with Lee as reporters and F.B.I. agents hound her for information, as she tells Lee "I told them I didn't even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news everyday on the radio." (DeLillo, 423). When Marguerite was telling all of this to the F.B.I. agents they kept saying to her "But you are the mother", which adds humiliation to the event because yes, she is the mother. She raised Lee, a murderer, an assassin. Not only that but she was so out of touch in his life, granted not of her accord, that she didn't even know about one of her own grandchildren being born, so now she has to answer to why her son turned out the way he did to the whole country.
When Lee is shot just days after Marguerite sees him for the first time in a year, she has to go through the pain of not only losing her son, but having his death broadcast and played over and over on television for the whole nation to see. She has to face preachers that turn her away because they don't want to pray over a murderer. Her son, the murderer. While Marguerite is at the funeral, she is pleading her case to a judge in her head, insisting that she wasn't a bad mother, and Lee wasn't a bad boy, rather that he was the victim of a plot his whole life.
I don't think Marguerite was a bad mother, she did what she could with what little she had and she obviously cared about Lee. Now all of a sudden, Lee is dead and was found guilty of killing the President of the United States, and she is left alone in the world to carry the burden of his crime.
2 comments:
I agree that Marguerite is essentially left to carry the burden of Lee's crimes. As we talked about in class, regardless of how close a family member is to the criminal, their name is also tainted forever. Even though Marguerite (as she says) knew nothing about her sons involvement until she heard it on the news, Lee's involvement has directly brought her into the mess of the aftermath.
Yeah, it's a sad irony that she's frozen out of the short period of his American domestic life (not even being informed of the birth of her grandchild), but is completely inseparable from his legacy once he's dead.
(And while DeLillo is clearly imagining a voice and character for her in many ways, the basic lineaments of her story--her situation--are historical. I wonder whether that "testimony"-style narration is based on some actual deposition she gave to the Warren Commission.)
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