“The Lists seemed to enjoy our family,” Jean recalled of those visits. “We’d go sightseeing and take the kids to the beach. The List kids, Patty and John and Freddy, just loved having our kids to play with.” The Syferts were Patty’s godparents.
Jean also liked having the opportunity to spend time alone with her sister. But she was beginning to notice just how seriously Helen was taking her newfound financial status. Helen seemed to see money as a validation, not just a way to buy something.
It was quite apparent one afternoon when they went shopping together, leaving John to watch the kids. Helen had just bought a number of pricy accessories when she tapped her younger sister on the shoulder.
“Did you notice the way the saleslady was looking at my shoes?” she asked brightly.
Jean shook her head. She hadn’t noticed any such thing.
“Well,” pouted Helen, bustling along, “you know, you can tell a lot about a person by how much they spend on their shoes.”
Years later, Jean laughed at the memory of the differences between herself and her sister, who often drove her to distraction. “We were very close, at least after we grew up, but we were totally opposite,” Jean said. “We were both Capricorns, but as to likes and dislikes, we were worlds apart. Helen liked to read. She would rather read than do housework anytime. Oh, did she read a lot! Myself, I would rather do something that when I got through, you could say, ‘Well, I did something, I made a dress or something.’ Helen wasn’t that way at all.
“She was an excellent cook, a gourmet cook really. When she died, she had 350 cookbooks in her house. I counted them.
“I remember as a child,” Jean said, recalling a childhood in North Carolina when Helen often announced she was in charge of dinner. It had not been an easy childhood for any of them. Helen was a child who kept to herself as much as possible; only in the kitchen, really, did she seem to blossom. “She loved to cook—and I always had to help afterward in the kitchen. Guess who did all the clean-up work. What she cooked was really wonderful. But when she got through you thought, ‘My gosh, it’ll take an hour to clean all that up.’”
But Jean also admired Helen for her brains. “My sister was a very intelligent woman,” she said. “She really had a lot on the ball. In a lot of ways, she was smarter than John was.”
Helen was a reader, not a television watcher, but one television show she did enjoy was the quiz program Jeopardy, on which contestants had to have knowledge of a wide range of subjects. “Once, in 1963, she wrote a letter applying to be a contestant, and they wrote back accepting her,” Jean said. “She kept the letter on her dresser.”
As they had anticipated, the Syferts saw with growing concern over the years that John was having difficulties coping with such a strong partner.
Helen’s first husband “was probably the type of person she needed as a husband,” said Jean, who believed that Helen never really stopped mourning for Marvin. “She seemed to be a different person with him. I think she needed someone who was—I won’t say domineering, but more than held his own with her. She never really made this point about defying Marvin. But with John, it was starting to look like a different story.”
For his part, John did what he always did when involved in anything having a potential for confrontation. He sought advice from a trusted third party, invariably a woman. On their vacations with the Syferts, he began confiding in Jean, whose marriage he saw as a model for the one he wished he and Helen had.
“John would talk over things to me about the family, things that I could see and that he could see were going wrong, even when the kids were little. Where he wouldn’t talk with Helen about it,” Jean said.
John envied the equality of their partnership. “I’ve been married since I was sixteen, and I think Gene and I have kind of grown up together and had a fairly easy life,” Jean said. “There have been times when we didn’t have as much as we would liked to have. But when I was twenty-one years old, we knew where we were going. We planned it right then. We said, well, when the twenty years in the air force is up, this is what we’re going to go. Gene is going to go to school to get his teacher’s certificate, and he is going to be a schoolteacher. Then he is going to retire again, and we will enjoy each other’s company for the rest of our lives. We walked it together every step of the way.”
Nevertheless, Jean wouldn’t let John feel sorry for himself when they discussed their respective marriages. “The Lists can have that kind of marriage,” she told him bluntly. “It takes two people working together.”
“But she doesn’t seem to want to work together,” he replied.
Jean realized Helen wasn’t pulling her share of the load. But she had seen a different Helen with Marvin. She suspected part of the problem was that John was just as content to retreat into himself and sulk—exactly the sort of behavior that brought out the very worst in Helen.
One thing was clear. The Syferts could certainly see Helen’s point that John was decidedly odd.
There was that funny way he always stood with his shoulders squared, and walked as if he were in a parade, for one thing. And the way he read the newspaper sitting at stiff attention.
“For a real kick, you’d watch him reading the paper,” Jean said. “He read every page, front to back. He’d get to the funny pages and he’d laugh out loud, such an odd, funny little laugh that you’d come in from the other room to see what was the matter with him.”
The part of this routine that intrigued her, however, was his fastidiousness. He would start with the Sunday paper in a neat stack on one side of the chair. Then he would carefully pick a section up by the margin of the pages, to avoid getting ink on his fingers, and read it. Every page, top to bottom, right to left, like an automatic scanner. Then he’d put each section down, one by one, right side up, on the other side of the chair. “When it got done, it would be lying there on the other side, perfectly rearranged as if nobody had ever touched it, like it was new,” Jean said.
She also noticed something else on those visits from her sister and brother-in-law. For a man who was supposedly doing so well at Xerox, he seemed to be having certain cash-flow problems, and a fairly cavalier attitude about how to cover them up.
Jean was going to her bank one afternoon when John took her aside and asked if he could go along to cash a personal check because he was short of cash. Jean said that would be fine. But at the bank, the teller wouldn’t cash an out-of-state personal check unless Jean guaranteed it with her own bank balance. She agreed readily.
The check bounced before the Lists’ vacation was over. “It was only for forty dollars, but forty dollars was a fair amount of money then,” Jean said. When she told John about the returned check, she could tell that he was lying when he replied in an, uncharacteristically haughty manner: “Oh, that money is in my account. Your bank has obviously made a terrible mistake. I’ll straighten them out when we get home.” He never mentioned it again. More than the loss of forty dollars, the incident stayed with Jean because it had shown her a side of John—a man capable of casual deceit—that she hadn’t seen before.
At Xerox, John prospered as the company’s fortunes swelled. In 1964, he earned $25,000, including a $7,900 bonus. He and Helen raised their standard of living in turn, going into debt to buy appliances and other things for the house. The same year, Xerox sent him to a convention in Mexico, and he paid for Helen to come along. On their way back, they stopped in Kalamazoo to see Brenda; John took the occasion to visit Sutherland, where he told Slesdet and several other colleagues that Xerox had rewarded him for helping to solve one of its most nagging problems in the early days of its workhorse 914 copier: exactly how to bill customers.
During his scant leisure time, John added to his military-strategy-game collection. He even brought simple versions of some games in to play with coworkers in the Xerox cafeteria at lunchtime.
“He was a superb strategist,” his boss, Clayton Hutto, noted. “He won every battle.”
In
the lunchroom, that is. But Hutto knew better than anyone that John was beginning to lose points where it counted, in the office.
By the end of 1964, John was telling associates that he had his eye on a vice presidency at Xerox, and sooner, rather than later. His superiors, when they heard of this, were amazed and uneasy. No one else seemed to foresee such a future for John List. After the extraordinary five-year rocketship ride in the early sixties, Xerox executives were managing to catch their breath and assess what they had, before going on the next growth spree. And a closer look at John over those years was not sufficiently impressive to warrant his expectations of a big title.
The company had barely known what it was doing four years earlier when John was among thousands of good-looking candidates swept up in the hiring net it flung overboard. Now, with the need to take a second look, some of those people were adjudged less flexible, less promising than had been hoped. Xerox was undergoing constant shifts in emphasis, in executive duties, as it found its footing. Some people inevitably would be locked in place on the wrong path.
This finally became clear to John, who was, however, not the sort of man who looked in the mirror first when things went wrong. Instead, his gaze fixed on the next closest image. Helen.
True to form, she was certainly giving him cause for discomfort.
His job required attending business parties in the company of his wife, who hated being dragged along and expected to perform like a trained seal. To overcome nervousness, she would have a few quick drinks before they went out, and more than a few after they arrived. Early on in an evening, Helen always made a fine impression. An attractive, shapely woman with a sharp wit and the ability to disarm stuffed shirts, she was delighted to be out of the house and away from the kids; what’s more, she scorned the other timid, frightened wives and didn’t hesitate to become the life of the party. She liked flirting, and she didn’t care who knew it.
As John sulked, other men clustered around his wife, lighting her cigarette, looking into her eyes, offering her the last thing she needed, which was another drink. And Helen, seeing his long face with that basset-hound look on it, and fully aware that she would have to suffer through an hour of his whining on the way home in the car, “would say the hell with it and have a few more drinks, obviously just for spite,” a woman who knew her said.
With John seeming to invite her wrath with every drink she took, the inevitable moment would arrive when Helen would attack. “Helen would get drunk, and then she would start talking about Marvin, her first husband,” recalled Hutto. “John’s face would get blotchy; he would grit his teeth, steer her away, and take her home.”
En route, he would complain about her making “advances” to other men.
From time to time, even as long as twenty-five years later, long after Helen’s death, John would manage to convey to friends his impression that Helen had been the cause of the trouble that always seemed to leap out from hiding to nip his career in the bud.
But corroborating evidence was not easy to unearth. Most men who knew Helen at least liked her as a genuine human presence who knew how to talk about something other than office politics. If she drank too much at social events, one man said, so did others. “It was the middle of the sixties,” he said. “It wasn’t real unusual to get shitfaced at a party.” At the end of the night, few people even seemed to have noticed, he said.
There was another recurring theme, moreover. After a few years, in job after job, John invariably would manage, evidently quite on his own, to wear out his initially enthusiastic welcome.
In August 1965, John’s title at Xerox was director of accounting services, and that was as high as he would go. It wasn’t just a deficiency in management skills that held him back, though this was a factor. The truth was, he didn’t have the necessary presence.
“At conferences, when he had to talk under stress, his face would suddenly break out into big red welts,” said Hutto, his boss. “I imagined they were hives. His face was always blotchy, and when he did talk, his face would twitch, his head would fall forward, and he would shift his body from side to side, like a kid volunteering an answer at a spelling bee on television.”
In an aspiring vice president, this was not a valuable trait. John had hit the end of the road in Rochester.
“What he really wanted was a big title,” Hutto said. “And when he kept asking for advancement, we had to tell him to look for another job.”
Chapter Six
In many ways, John List emblemized the fifties: materially acquisitive; rigidly controlled; timid in the face of authority; proud for no reason that would be readily apparent in hindsight. With pursed lips and eyes that were quick to judge, John’s countenance projected the attitude that while the world was a somewhat offensive, morally inferior place, it nevertheless owed him a living.
But it was no longer the fifties, which should have been his time. In 1965, John was forty years old, at the brink of middle age, and unlike many of his contemporaries, utterly unable to adapt. He was a man whose doors were slowly being squeezed shut by forces, inside his family and out, that he was unable to control.
Exacerbating tensions, Helen’s health had deteriorated again. Though it would be years before her illness was diagnosed, Helen was suffering from the early stages of cerebral atrophy, a degenerative shrinkage of the brain tissues that can be symptomatic of a variety of ills, including the viral infection that had caused her to be rushed home from Korea and led to full-blown syphilis. Alcohol and depressants such as tranquilizers only aggravate symptoms, which can include sporadic mental disorientation and paranoia.
For several weeks in the early summer of 1965, Helen was confined to bed. “John did everything,” one neighbor said. “He’d cook dinner, take them out to social things.”
Patty, now ten and a half, was expected to fill in the gaps and look after her brothers, who followed her around like anxious puppies. In fact, Patty had begun to act more in the role of parent as her mother, sometimes heavily medicated, drifted in and out of the household’s daily routine.
“The kids would say, ‘Mom doesn’t feel good. She’s in bed,’” said the neighbor, who noticed that the List children had a “very protective attitude” toward their mother, a woman whom she had never seen much of, but now saw hardly at all. “Patricia would say, ‘I’m going to clean the house today because my Mom doesn’t feel good.’”
Her impression of the List children was clear over the years. On several summer nights, when her husband started a barbecue out back after work, the List kids, waiting for their father to come home, would drift over to the fence, looking so forlorn that they usually were invited to come over.
It wasn’t that Patty, Johnny, and Fred were deprived. There was food in their house; Patty was perfectly capable of fixing something quick if they were too hungry to wait for their father to get in. No, the children were mostly just lonely.
By the end of the summer, however, Helen was back on her feet again. More importantly, John had been diligently dispatching his résumés across the country. The résumé, by itself, reflected none of the realities of his career problems. Xerox, like Sutherland before it, was only too happy to send John off with a glowing endorsement to become someone else’s problem.
His dogged persistence paid off. And it looked like the best job offer yet. Not only was the money, $25,000 a year, comparable to his Xerox salary, but this time the title had the right resonance: vice president and comptroller, First National Bank of Jersey City, New Jersey.
Ecstatic, John left for New Jersey, renting an apartment in Jersey City that he used as a base to look for a new house while Helen prepared the household for the move from Rochester. Confident about the future again, John quickly located the ideal new town to match the impressive new title.
Westfield, New Jersey, twenty-five miles southwest of Manhattan, was settled in the seventeenth century by Dutch and English burghers from nearby Elizabeth who built their country homes there, at the foo
t of the Watchung Mountain range and alongside the well-traveled Minisink Trail, which Lenni Lenape Indians used on their annual warm-weather trek from the Delaware River across central New Jersey to the seashore fishing grounds.
For most of its early history, Westfield was a placid and sleepy place where a wide brook flowed through the center of the town, crossing Broad Street near Elm. As the town grew, the brook was bridged and finally covered completely; today, few people even know that it is underfoot.
Westfield’s biggest growth didn’t begin until after the Civil War, when the Jersey Central Railroad bridged its tracks over the swampy North Jersey meadowlands, offering direct service by the 1870s to Jersey City. From there, the burgeoning financial world of Wall Street was only a short ferry ride away.
The railroad eventually enabled Wall Street to find Westfield as land agents touted the country life to tycoons who were weary of the choking smoke and insufferable congestion that even the privileged had to suffer in late-nineteenth-century Manhattan. Printed bills plastered all over the financial district touted the advantages of pastoral Westfield, which “indeed hath charms. Where in the wide, wide world is the grass greener, the sky bluer or the air purer? Why, the very exhilaration of such an atmosphere sets every nerve a-tingle and the whole world aglow.”
The enticement appealed to John Samuel Augustus Wittke, a rich manufacturer of business forms, who fled the city for the country and began a daily commute from Westfield that he would continue until his death almost a half-century later. By the 1920s, the town would be known for its lively contingent of such Wall Street worthies, rushing back by train after their offices closed at noon on Saturdays to get a starting time at the exclusive Echo Lake Country Club, where the subsequent Saturday night parties were legendary.
At first, Wittke lived in a cottage on Broad Street, near the brook. But the town was growing rapidly, and Wittke disliked congestion. In 1895, he bought twenty-two acres of land a few miles northwest, and built a grand Victorian house atop a gentle knoll on the highest point between the Watchung Mountains and the Port of Elizabeth, ten miles to the east. Wittke, who had an eye for landscaping, set his estate amid tall trees and left a portion of the grounds wild, with paths carved through thick clusters of wisteria and honeysuckle, whose blossoms scented the summer air. As time passed and his fortunes grew, Wittke also amassed a fine art collection and built a ballroom extension on the house to display it. He called the ballroom his “art room.” The parties held there in the twenties were major events on the local social calendar.
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