A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (70 page)

Had she sold herself for the sake of her children, they might have been less troubled by shame, given the grimness of the times. Except for Dorothy Lee’s weekly hot dog treat, the only sight of the money they ever had was on Myrtle. She spent it all on herself—for stylish clothes, for jewelry and makeup, and for whiskey. A wardrobe in the bedroom she shared with Frank Vann was full of pretty dresses and suits, and she had hats and shoes and silk stockings and handbags to match. One of her suits was in black velvet with a fox-fur collar. At a time when rent for a whole house was $6 a month, its cost would have paid the rent for several months. She also had an evening gown and enough jewelry to have kept the family in rent and groceries for many months—a solitaire diamond ring (the stone was large, almost a carat), a diamond-studded wristwatch and band to go with the ring, a gold-and-diamond bracelet for her other arm, and a white-gold dinner-ring set with diamonds and contrasting black stones. Eventually she completed her outfit with a fur coat and hat of gray squirrel. More money went to the hairdresser to keep her hair in a permanent wave. She did not want to be bothered setting it herself. She painted her fingernails and toenails while sitting in the rocker on the porch. She would also move the rocker into the front yard to tan herself in the sun. The porch and front-yard sitting had another purpose; she was attracting more clients. A woman posed in fancy clothes before a shabby house is an advertisement that requires no caption.

Frank Vann not only acquiesced in what Myrtle did, he also gave her most of the money he earned when he was working, and she spent it too. This and his passive pattern of behavior helped to explain why the Vann children suffered so grievously. There was more and better food available from charity organizations than he brought home, and there was more work to be had than he found. One of Johnny’s acquaintances whose father was also often without a job wondered why the Vanns didn’t have more food until it struck him that his father was constantly foraging at the relief centers and searching for work of any kind, while
Frank Vann could usually be found at home. He liked to sit and read in his rocker in the living room. The explanation was not that he was physically lazy. He would work when work was offered to him. (During the manpower shortage of World War II he held down two jobs simultaneously—as a carpenter at the Norfolk Naval Base by day and a city fireman by night—and Myrtle managed to spend both salaries as fast as he could hand her his paychecks.) What he would not do was aggressively seek work. He never attempted to use his education to better himself with a white-collar position, instead gravitating to manual labor and ultimately retiring in the mid-1960s with a medical disability from his carpentry job at the naval base. He did seem to have a craving to be humiliated, and Myrtle satisfied that.

She would curse him for not finding more work and bringing her more money and taunt him with her promiscuity. She ordered him about like a servant, and he obeyed. She addressed him as Vann rather than Frank. For a wife to call her husband by his last name was a custom in the South of the period. Myrtle’s tone when she said “Vann!” was what made the difference. Dorothy Lee was given to nightmares and leg cramps. If she woke her mother with her cries at night, Myrtle would call to her husband from her twin bed: “Vann, get up and see what’s the matter with Dorothy Lee.” She never nursed the children when they were ill. Frank Vann was a compassionate nurse. He turned Myrtle’s empty whiskey bottles into hot-water bottles, wrapping them in cloth and placing them next to Dorothy Lee’s legs to ease the cramps. The children feared Myrtle’s rages; her temper and tongue were also of the gutter. Frank Vann normally sat silent while she cursed him. His silence enraged her further. Her voice became shriller and her language viler as she tried to provoke him into reacting. Only rarely did he fight back. Once he picked up a hatchet and shouted at her to get out. She left, but returned in a couple of days and the relationship resumed. She apparently strengthened her hold on him by letting him make love to her once in a while.

Frank Vann’s passivity exposed Johnny and his sister and brothers to the full extent of Myrtle’s cruelty. The Vann children grew up without ever having a Christmas tree. Frank Junior and Gene found a discarded tree one year about a week after Christmas in an alley where another family had left it for trash. They dragged it home, determined to put it up in the living room. The tree still had bits of tinsel the other family had not bothered to remove amid the green needles on the boughs. Myrtle caught them while they were trying to figure out how to get the tree to stand up on the floor and shouted and cursed and made them
drag it back to the alley. The boys in other families kept the street noisy with their new cap pistols on Christmas morning and paraded in their new cowboy suits. The girls had dolls to show off. Christmas morning for the Vann children was four stockings Frank Vann hung behind the potbelly stove, each holding an apple, an orange, some nuts, and a few pieces of hard Christmas candy. Not until the end of the 1930s when he began working more did the boys get a cowboy suit and Dorothy Lee a doll.

At Thanksgiving there was never a turkey. If the family was lucky, Myrtle might bake a cake at Thanksgiving or Christmas. She could bake delicious ones when she took a rare notion to buy the ingredients. She covered them with a thick chocolate icing. She baked no cakes for birthdays, because nobody’s birthday was celebrated. Dorothy Lee got the next-best thing to a cake on one birthday when she was sick with scarlet fever. Miss Landsladder came to see her and brought a chocolate cupcake and lit a candle on it.

Myrtle’s cruelty could also be sudden and physical. She slapped fast, across the face and hard up against the side of the head, at the slightest hesitation in response to one of her commands or at any back talk.

She was not fully conscious of her cruelty. Her selfishness was so consuming that it protected her from understanding what she did to others. Her vanity led her to buy a Kodak camera, one of the early box models, to have photographs taken of herself in her finery. She also took pictures of her children in their cast-off clothes, of the squalid houses in which they lived, of little Gene with his crooked legs, of Gene in the body cast he wore for a year after the second operation. She pasted all of the photographs into scrapbooks and displayed them freely during her lifetime. She had no awareness that what she recorded as souvenirs others might see as something else. Her ego similarly protected her from the disgrace of her trade. Being paid by men made her feel young and desirable. “Men tell me I’ve got the prettiest legs in the city of Norfolk,” she would say to her daughter in a sprightly voice.

The shame was often harder for the Vann children to bear than the deprivations. The white working-class sections of Norfolk in the 1930s were not like the urban slums that were to grow in the decayed cities of the North after World War II. They were not places of crime and moral filth, where many of the children were fatherless and had sisters and mothers who were part-time or full-time prostitutes. Many of the fathers were heavy drinkers. On Friday and Saturday nights the children would gather to watch the fistfights in front of the taverns. Some of the women also drank, battled noisily with their husbands, and strayed to
other beds like their men. Nevertheless, these poor and grubby Norfolk neighborhoods were family neighborhoods. They were safe. Rape and mugging and other street crimes were rare. Hardly anyone locked a door at night. There was also a social stratum. A few middle-class families had chosen to stay behind rather than move to better sections. They were people to look up to and normally provided the leadership in church and civic affairs. Divorce was not uncommon. One or both parties then usually married someone else. Even the less respectable women tended to be wives and mothers in between drinking bouts, and the majority of the women took their roles seriously. They busied themselves running households and caring for their husbands and offspring. Myrtle was the exception. In the Norfolk of the 1930s the Southern term “white trash” was not applied to a family on the basis of poverty alone. The term connoted a way of living more than it did income. Myrtle made the Vanns white trash.

The weight of shame was double for Johnny because of his illegitimacy. As Myrtle did not hide the circumstances of his conception, he assumed that most people he was acquainted with knew about it. The working class of Norfolk had carried the values of rural Southern culture with them to the city. To be illegitimate was to have no family, to be nothing. His birth certificate said that he was John Paul LeGay. A French sailor named Victor LeGay had never had anything to do with him. He wanted to have a real name and be a member of a real family and have a daddy. Any family and any daddy were better than none. He wanted to be called John Paul Vann.

His mother would not let him escape the disgrace of his birth. She refused to allow Frank Vann to adopt him. Had she not prevented it, Frank Vann probably would have adopted the boy at the outset of the marriage when Johnny was four and a half. He treated Myrtle’s boy with the same gentleness he showed toward his own children. He referred to Johnny as his son, never as his stepson, and saw to it that Dorothy Lee, Frank Junior, and Gene called him their brother. Although rejection is one of love’s opposites, it evokes responses as powerful as those that love arouses. Spry’s rejection of Myrtle seems to have evoked in her a need to stop any other man from claiming her “love child” with his name, because the boy was all that she had retained of the affair. She would repeatedly warn Frank Vann that he was not to try to control or discipline her Johnny. “He doesn’t belong to you,” she would say. “He’s my son. He’s not your son.”

That other need that made her attack the masculinity of her men by taunting them with her promiscuity also led her to sense how vulnerable her son was about his birth. She used it as an additional weapon with which to wound him. He gave her lots of opportunities, because he would not let the argument rest, constantly begging her to permit Frank Vann to adopt him. “He’s the only daddy I’ve ever had and Vann’s the only name I’ve ever wanted,” he would say.

Myrtle would point a finger at her husband and sneer. “He’s not your daddy,” she would say. “Your name ain’t Vann. You don’t have a daddy.”

He didn’t have a daddy. Myrtle was right. He liked Frank Vann, despite his weakness, because Frank Vann was never mean to him, but Frank Vann couldn’t ever be a real daddy. If Frank Vann were capable of being a real daddy he would have somehow found them food and clothes and paid the rent and tamed Myrtle or thrown her out of the house. The boy’s ambivalence toward Frank Vann was reflected in the way he spoke of him. Within the family the boy addressed him as Daddy. To cousins and other outsiders the boy called him Vann. There was no one to whom he could turn for the kind of help that a father is supposed to give.

Spry was still in Norfolk, but he was of little comfort. The boy called him Johnny. Spry had abandoned trolley-car driving toward the end of the 1920s for the big money to be made in the Prohibition era distilling “white lightning” for bootleggers. He had also divorced his first wife. After his whiskey still was raided and he spent six months in jail, Spry decided that bootlegging was not for him. He married another young woman he had fallen in love with and curbed his wenching and gambling sufficiently so that they did not ruin his second marriage. By the latter half of the 1930s he had a steady job driving a bakery truck and was raising a new family of three boys. He was a good father to them. The requirements of this second family and what wenching and gambling he still allowed himself left him scant time or money for the two sons of his first marriage or for this other John Paul. When the boy came to him once in a while for money to buy food, he gave it to him. Spry was also occasionally able to let him earn a little by working as a helper on the bakery van. Otherwise he left the boy to survive with Frank Vann and Myrtle.

Something in the son did not let Myrtle destroy him. He told his grammar school teachers so often and so insistently that his name was John Vann, not John LeGay, that they came up with the compromise under which he was registered at school: John LeGay Vann. His high spirits showed
in his enthusiasm for basketball and track and tumbling, the last another talent he seems to have acquired from Spry, who was so strong and limber he could chin himself with one arm and walk on his hands. Johnny would amuse his sister and brothers by rolling cartwheels along the dirt paths and also by walking on his hands up and down the stairs. He would amaze visiting cousins by tossing himself off the porch roof in a backflip somersault to the ground.

He turned to anyone who offered a temporary escape from the prison of his family life. One man who did was an eccentric Salvation Army captain, a former bandmaster in the Navy, who was well liked by the youngsters in the area. He preferred not to dress in the blue-and-maroon uniform of his new religious ranks. Instead he wore a spiffy suit and a wide-brimmed soft hat of the sort favored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone. He organized and coached a basketball club to give poor boys some fun and keep them out of trouble. His best team won the championship in the Norfolk Central YMCA Junior League with five straight victories. The
Virginian-Pilot
published a photograph of the winners. The shortest member of the team was a blondish-haired boy who looked straight into the camera. His sweater had “SA” for Salvation Army lettered crudely on the front. The buckle of the man’s belt that held up his pants was so big it stuck out askew from under the sweater.

The Boy Scouts offered more hours of escape. He joined a troop that met at his grammar school in the Lamberts Point neighborhood where the family was living when he was twelve. Within four months he had climbed to assistant patrol leader, and the scoutmaster arranged for him to be given a secondhand uniform. He posed for Myrtle’s scrapbook in front of a furniture repair shop next to the house, pushing the pancake-brim campaign hat the Scouts wore back over the clipped hair above his forehead for a jaunty look. His happy eyes and smile indicate he was too proud of his uniform to think that there was anything inappropriate about the khaki shirt and flared riding breeches that enveloped his slip of a body, seventy-one pounds and four feet seven inches tall according to his Scout identification card, issued in the name of John Paul Vann.