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it—although he later said that she sometimes deserved it; but he seemed happy—delighted, even—to play the part of the innocent and righteously angry husband. In letters to his family and friends, he wallowed in self-pity, splashing in his own tears as he bewailed the terrible injury that had been done him. Trying to find money to please Lillie Mae was what had led to his problems with the law, he said; it was her “greed and unprincipled actions” that had led him astray. “I am the deserted boy,” he concluded, complaining that she had been both disloyal and ungrateful. In everything that had transpired he believed himself to be blameless. The supreme salesman, he was his own best customer, and his capacity for self-delusion verged on the pathological.
    Lillie Mae’s lawyer formally filed for divorce August 2, and at the end of August, three weeks after she had returned to New York, Arch was presented with legal papers. In a letter to John he once again bemoaned his unlucky fate. Lillie Mae, he reported, had phoned to tell him “that she wanted to marry Joe at once, and that she loved him, and that I had never meant anything to her. So that’s that. She was just as cruel and heartless about it as possible. Girls are sure a pain.” There was a short delay in the proceedings when, out of pique and spite, he spent a couple of days dodging a sheriff who was trying to serve him with papers. But by November 9, 1931, the divorce was final and that really was that. Arch and Lillie Mae were no longer man and wife.

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    U NDER the terms of the divorce settlement, Lillie Mae was to have custody of Truman nine months of the year, Arch the other three, from June 1 through August 31. But for the time being, and for some time to come, that was merely a paper agreement, with neither one assuming the duties of a full-time parent. As far as Truman was concerned, the divorce scarcely mattered; he remained in Monroeville and his parents saw him only occasionally, as they had before.
    If she had wanted to do so, Lillie Mae could have taken him with her to New York at the end of the year, when she and Joe moved into their own apartment. She did not do so, however, and the bedroom he might have had was given to her sister Marie—Tiny was her nickname—who came north to become Joe’s personal secretary. Finally, Joe’s own divorce came through on March 18, 1932, and less than a week later, on Thursday, March 24, he and Lillie Mae were married. Yet even then, secure in her new home and assured of the support of a doting, hardworking husband, Lillie Mae did not send for Truman.
    Arch, for his part, often spoke about his “little angel,” but the time he actually spent with him could be counted in hours, rather than days. At the end of February, he did treat him to a long weekend in New Orleans, and in April he grandly talked about spending the summer with him in Colorado. But when the first of June, the day he was supposed to assume custody, came around, he was, as usual, busy elsewhere. During the entire three months he had charge of him, Arch spent exactly two days with his little angel. That did not prevent him from being outraged when Lillie Mae brought Joe down to Monroeville in July. His feelings toward her, which had warmed considerably after the divorce, had turned frigid again after she remarried. When she sent him a conciliatory letter, he scrawled on it “not interested” and mailed it back. When she accused him of failing to provide the required forty dollars a month in child support, he dispatched a letter of such vituperation that both John and his mother warned him that he might be violating postal regulations.
    He soon had other, more pressing matters to occupy his thoughts. In early August he was in jail once again, confined to New Orleans Parish Prison for writing eighteen hundred dollars’ worth of bad checks. This time John put up bail, wryly remarking to his mother that what Arch really needed was a guardian