Rape in a Time of Denial

Her name was Marguerite. Her nieces called her Aunt Peggy.  Her friends called her Martie. The man who watched her die called her Margy. But her brother, my grandfather, never uttered her name.     

She died just after I was born, passing away in her late forties.  From my childhood perspective that was old, so I never thought to question what had caused her untimely death.  The sum total of what I knew about her was that she was unmarried, that she lived in San Francisco, and she taught.  She was a relative swathed in a gray mist that I never thought to penetrate.  How could I know that what had happened to her, while special to her in its circumstances, was generic in its frequency, as today’s society is slowing recognizing?

It was on a college spring break while visiting my grandparents I found out what I thought was the whole story.  At dinner one night I was regaling them with my hopeful plans for the summer.  I and a group of my friends were going to rent a VW bus and tour some of the national parks in the west.  We would do it on the cheap, camping out and eating lots of hot dogs around the campfire.  It was a sophomoric plan which would never have gotten off the ground, but I was full of it. 

 The reaction from my usually equitable grandfather took me by surprise.  He did not raise his voice, he would never have done that, but he was sterner that I had ever seen him. Under no circumstances was I to pursue this plan.  I was so surprised at his reaction that I was silenced.  My grandmother took me aside after dinner, settled me on the sofa in the porch, far away from my newspaper reading grandfather in his den.  I can see my grandmother’s strained face as she told me in a low pained voice that Marguerite had been murdered, and then in a lower choked whisper she uttered the word that shocked   --- rape.  Marguerite in the summer of 1944 had been vacationing in Yosemite National Park.  She had been raped and murdered in her cabin.

It is hard today to conjure up what a forbidden and violent word that was in 1944 when the act took place, or even in 1963 when it was first uttered to me.  It was the crime that was never spoken of, never acknowledged, never brought into the light of day.  It was one of the most heinous crimes against person, yet the victim of that crime was the one who suffered the public’s scorn, the perpetrator allowed to scuttle away in the dark while a complacent society looked the other way.  The question on minds then, as now, always ‘what did she do to deserve that?’     

 As horrifying as the revelation had been, Marguerite was no more fleshed out to me than she had been before.  Added to her marital status, her job, and her city of residence was her tragic death, the woman remaining a two dimensional cardboard figure in my family portrait gallery.  Amazingly I could comprehend murder, but I, no more than the society around me, did not want to know about that other murky crime overlaid with confused sexual overtones.

 For years she remained that misty figure. She stood off from the rest of the family, her loneliness symptomatic of the loneliness that all victims of that word rape. It was not until I was researching a book on her brother, a famous Marine general from the Korean War, that I got an idea of Marguerite’s place in the family circle.  She was the youngest of three and the only girl. Her mother was a widowed seamstress, and her youth in Carmel, California was spent in a family in financially strained circumstances.  The two boys worked at odd jobs to help out with the family expenses, and Marguerite assisted her seamstress mother with the sewing.  Her oldest brother went right to work upon graduation from high school.  Her next oldest brother, my grandfather, put himself through the University of California at Berkeley working 40 hours a week as a gardener in addition to his studies. 

It was then that Marguerite was given an opportunity not granted to many women in her generation.  My grandfather moved both mother and sister to Berkeley, and put Marguerite through college after he finished his own education.  Marguerite was to live there with her mother until her mother’s death in the 1930s whereupon she moved across the bay to live with various roommates in the city of San Francisco.  

From pictures in family albums it seemed she kept close to her family.  She was pictured on their holiday trips, visited Hawaii with a cousin, even traveled to France to see her Marine Corps brother and his family when they were stationed there.  When in turn her nieces went to the University of California at Berkeley, she was the glamorous city aunt who lent them evening dresses for their college functions.   

The blow dealt her family at the news of her death during the destruction and upheaval of World War II was devastating.  Her brother, now a Marine brigadier general, was preparing for the bloody landing on the island of Peleliu, a battle which would last two months with 1000 casualties.  It was then that he received the first indication that his sister was dead in a letter from my grandmother, who obviously could not bring herself to actually write down what had happened to Marguerite.  She said only that she had died in her cabin at Yosemite.  This was followed a few days later by a letter from his older brother which gave him the full story.  Marguerite had been found dead in her cabin at Yosemite, and the FBI was investigating it as it had occurred on federal property.  They were calling it a death under suspicious circumstances.  He also said she had been “interfered with.”

 Upon my grandfather’s death, I found a small leather case among his personal effects.  In it carefully saved, but creased and faded with age, were a few newspaper clippings about his sister’s death, all wildly inaccurate as to circumstances and family facts, and a short final report from the FBI dated months later saying that Marguerite Marie Smith had died of natural causes and that the case was closed.   

 Now, too many years later, my curiosity was finally aroused. I contacted the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act and the whole picture changed in a way that was both disturbing and poignant.  From then on a mystery that had remained sealed in the past, suddenly began raising its head and demanding attention.  The material, which could have leapt off the page from a current newspaper, came in a brown envelope.  It was filled with a sheaf of grainy pictures and typed reports from the long-ago investigation.  They were arranged in chronological order so that in reading through the 49 pages, one followed the course of the investigation as it unfolded to the  FBI agents from the opening statement “Marguerite Marie Smith, victim, murder on government reservation,” to the last report “Since the investigation conducted failed to reflect that the Subject met with any foul play and indicated that she apparently died from natural causes after having suffered a stroke, no further investigation is being conducted into this matter and this case is being considered closed.”  Between these two pieces of paper lay an operatic snarl of human failings, cruelty, sadness, and societal conventions, and the searing hope, perhaps unfounded, that if the investigation were conducted in the light of today’s mores the result would have been substantially different. 

 The first FBI report is of necessity a bare outline of what was discovered the day after her death on July 16, 1944.  Marguerite had arrived at Yosemite on July 7 by bus with the plan of staying for the summer.  She had checked into cabin number 14-C alone, and was found ten days later by the maid, dead in her double bed.  She was clad only in a dress, and covered partly by a blanket.  There was vomit on the floor around the bed and on the bed itself, and it was evident that some unknown person had used a towel to wipe her face.  There was suspicion of sexual activity as a condom wrapper sat on the bedside table.  In addition it was discovered that at 3 a.m. on the sixteenth an unknown sailor had  told a porter at the lodge that he had had a date with a woman whose name he did not mention, but that she had gotten “sick or had a stroke.” The sailor then asked about transportation back to the Navy Rehabilitation Hospital located in the park about a mile from the lodge.  When informed there was no transportation, he found a ride with two army men in their car. 

 By the nineteenth, three days later, the wheels of bureaucracy had begun to turn.  The local coroner had performed the autopsy.  He estimated Marguerite’s age at about forty, finding nothing wrong with any of her organs except her uterus which had large fibroid tumors. Some of the items in her room had been sent off to the FBI lab: her dress, the pillowcase, a towel, a whiskey bottle, a glass, and two bottles of hair dye found in her suitcase.  In addition various organs from the autopsy were also sent.  The agents from the San Francisco office requested that a toxicology examination be given to these submissions in order to determine the cause of death as, according to them, the local coroner had been unable to find one.   

By the twenty-second the FBI had found the unknown sailor at the Naval Convalescent Hospital located two miles down the road from Marguerite’s cabin in what had been the Ahwahnee Hotel.  At the outbreak of the war, the hotel had been converted into a convalescent facility filled with young men on the mend who, according to a history of Yosemite, were bored and restless with the lack of entertainment in that remote location in its opening days in 1944.  

In his first statement the sailor admitted that he had been with Marguerite shortly before her death.  He claimed he had had sexual intercourse with her, and about one half hour after that she had had a stroke.  He said the right corner of her mouth was screwed up and she made jerking motions with right arm and leg.  The left side of her face, he noted, was unmovable.  She was unable to stand and then had some vomiting spells.  The sailor said Marguerite refused to let him call a doctor, and he finally left her lying on the bed after the spells had passed.

 By the twenty-ninth the results were back from the lab with no poisons having been found.  Her brain was analyzed to determine blood alcohol content and this was “found to be 0.003% which indicates that the victim had been drinking but was in full possession of her faculties.” 

But the FBI was not satisfied yet.  In a memo dated August 2 from the Senior Agent in Charge at the San Francisco office to Edgar Hoover it was suggested that “discreet inquiries be made with regard to the past reputation of the victim and any statements made by her with regard to her anticipated activities while on vacation in the Yosemite National Park.”  In addition the sailor was to be “vigorously” questioned concerning all aspects of the case as well as all parties in the immediate vicinity of the cabin. 

Then began a thorough investigation of the all the possible witnesses involved in the case.  The first was the night porter at the Yosemite Lodge who said that a sailor approached him about three in the morning looking for a ride back to the hospital.  He was told there were no more rides that night, and he chatted with the porter for about five minutes.  He told the porter he had a date with a woman in one of the cabins but that she had “had a stroke or gotten sick on him.”  He asked the porter not to say anything about it because he did not want to get mixed up in anything.  A car then came by and he hitched a ride back to the hospital.

The people occupying the surrounding cabins had heard nothing the night of her death or, in fact, any disturbance on any other night.  None of them was aware of Marguerite keeping late hours, all noting that because it was summer they were sleeping with their windows open. One neighbor, who had met her a few times around the park, described her as “a very nice lady.”  She had seen Marguerite with a sailor at the Lodge and said Marguerite told her later that “her brother would laugh if he heard that she was going around with the young kids at the Park.”  Another neighbor said she had met her in the Park a few times, and Marguerite had mentioned later that “the boys in uniform looked lonely and pitiful and that she felt sorry for them.”

Her roommate was interviewed in San Francisco and upon hearing of her death thought it must have been “heart disease.”  She said that Marguerite had been working very hard, was a member of the Sierra Club, and the University Club, as well as making frequent visits to the USO and the Junior Officers Club.  She intended to be away for two months in the summer and had sublet her apartment in her absence.  

 The next statement was from the sailor and was taken two weeks later.  This statement has a curious beginning.  The interview starts with the following declaration. “A signed statement was obtained……which is obscene and is being retained in a sealed envelope in the San Francisco office.”  This obscene statement was not in the packet received from the FBI as it was probably destroyed years ago.

The substance of this obscene statement was then retold in writing by the agent who had interviewed the sailor. On July 13, he and another sailor had met Marguerite by the river in Yosemite Park.  She was alone, and they had approached her.  Apparently arrangements were made for a date, as that night he took Marguerite to a dance at Camp Curry (now called Curry Village) along with his friend who “got another girl.” Camp Curry was not a military installation, but a tent camp that had been founded in the early 1900s and in 1944 included a dance pavilion which hosted dances every night during the summer months.  After the dance Marguerite took the sailor home in a taxi.  Home would have been the hospital, and after dropping him off, Marguerite continued in the taxi to her own cabin.  By taking him home one supposes that Marguerite paid for the taxi perhaps out of kindness, perhaps out of a desire to be in control of the evening, or perhaps as a way to make herself more attractive to this man who had suddenly arrived on her summer horizon.  At this remove there is no way to know.  All the locations, Camp Curry, the hospital, and her cabin are about two miles distant from each other.

     The next night, the fourteenth, the evening was repeated with the two sailors attending the dance at Camp Curry with the same two women.  At that time Marguerite invited them all to a picnic the next day, and again returned the sailor to the hospital in a taxi before continuing on to her cabin.

     On the fifteenth the sailor testified that he and his friend obtained 48 hour passes from the hospital. They both went to Marguerite’s cabin where they stayed for one or two hours that morning, and where they had two or three drinks of whiskey.  He said at Marguerite’s suggestion, the three of them then went to a bar. They stayed there until 12:30 pm at which time the friend left to get another girl as Marguerite assured them she had plenty of picnic supplies.  Marguerite and her sailor then went back to her cabin arriving a little after 1:00 pm.  They were alone until the friend arrived with another sailor and two more girls in tow at 1:45 pm.  They then adjourned to the river where they had their picnic, not returning to her cabin until 7:30 that evening. 

The sailor testified that the picnic party waited on Marguerite’s porch while she got dressed for dinner, and then they all repaired to the Lodge at about 8:00 where they had dinner together.  The dance that night was at the Naval Hospital, but first Marguerite needed to return to her cabin to get her coat.  She left for her cabin about 9:15 and the sailor hung around the Lodge for a while using the washroom and buying cigarettes.  About 9:25 he went to Marguerite’s cabin to pick her up.  He knocked and in an “indistinct” voice she told him to come in.  The sailor then stated he opened the door and found Marguerite lying across the bed.  At that point he says she was talking out of the side of her mouth, and that during the rest of the evening she talked “indistinctly through one side.”  He also noted that her face was paralyzed.  (Note, in the first interview he had said she was not sick when he first arrived at her cabin.) He offered to get a doctor but she refused. And now comes the most incredible and incredulous part of the sailor’s story.  Marguerite then stated that she desired to have sexual relations with him. 

Over the reach of all the intervening years, those words leap off the page.  Here was a woman who was in obvious distress, lying across a bed, face paralyzed, speech indistinct in the midst of what can only be the beginnings of a stroke, and she announces that she wants to have intimate relations with a man she has known for three days. It beggars the imagination to think that any woman in such a state would even be thinking about sex, much less desiring it. 

The sailor obliged her, and then when the act was over noted that her right arm and leg started moving in a jerky up and down movement.  Once again he said he offered to get a doctor, but Marguerite refused. The sailor then stayed in the cabin with this increasingly sick and helpless woman.  At 10:00 pm Marguerite began to vomit.  He made an attempt to clean up the mess, bringing her water and applying cold wet towels to her head.  She then quieted down and he sat  on a nearby chair to watch her.  He then fell asleep, and was awakened at about 2:00 am when Marguerite began vomiting again, while her right leg and arm began jerking up and down as before.  Once again he gave her water and applied cold towels to her head.  After a while, he stated that she quieted down once more, telling him it would be all right if he went home. He then put out the lights, and went up to the Lodge to get a ride back to the hospital. 

 The next morning he woke up at about 7:30.   His friend who knew he had had a 48 hour pass asked him why he was back at the hospital.  When told that Marguerite was sick, his friend questioned him as to why he had not called a doctor.  The sailor said that he thought Marguerite would be all right. He also said that he did not call a doctor “because he did not want to get mixed up in anything that would hold up his discharge.”  (In case there is a feeling of compassion for a sailor convalescing from war wounds in the deadly war then raging in the Pacific, this sailor had served on a transport that made two very safe trips to Hawaii while he was assigned to it.  His stay in the hospital and his eventual discharge from the Navy was because of a heart condition that had nothing to do with his military service.)    

 It was the friend who suggested they go to the cabin to see how she was getting along.  The friend rapped on the door and when no one answered he walked in.  The friend went over to the body, placed a hand on her leg and said, “She is dead, cold as ice.”  The two men then left and went to a nearby cafe for a cup of coffee.  They had seen the maid cleaning out a neighboring cabin, and hoped she would find the body.  After the coffee the two men adjourned to a bar across the street where they drank beer until noon.  They then decided that they would go and see if the body had been discovered yet.  When they saw a ranger standing guard at her door, they proceeded to buy some crackers, returning to the bar where they drank beer all afternoon.  They then went to Camp Curry where they watched a movie, chatted with a few people, and returned to the hospital about midnight. It was noted at the end of his statement that the sailor was extremely nervous during the entire interrogation.  It was also noted he was 37 years old and married.

The last statement in the packet was from the friend, who said that once he read in the paper that the investigation was being conducted for possible murder had come forth voluntarily to “…tell just what I knew of the situation.”   

The friend’s testimony differs somewhat from the sailor’s.  On the fateful day of the picnic, the whole group did not wait on Marguerite’s porch while she changed for dinner; only the sailor returned with her while the other women went to the Lodge to get changed as well.  The group did not eat dinner together, but Marguerite and the sailor sat at a table alone. However, all did join up on the porch afterwards, and agree to meet at the dance.  Of course, the friend saw neither one of them at the dance that night.

The friend also noted that the sailor approached him the next morning and told him that Marguerite had had either a stroke or a heart attack.  He also told him that he left her at 1:30 am when by his own admission later, and by the testimony of the night porter, it was actually 3:00 am.  The friend than testified that when they went to the cabin, the sailor opened the door and said “Let’s get out of here, we’re too late.” It was the friend who ventured into the cabin and felt her leg.  He said “The body was lying straight on the bed, covered by a blanket from the neck to about half way below the knees.  There appeared to be something that looked like cotton in her nose.”

At that point he wanted to tell a ranger, but the sailor said they would just be sticking out their necks and that the maid would find the body.  The friend does not say they went to a bar and drank, but that they took a walk and came back in an hour to make sure she was found.  Even this man, who was more honorable than his fellow sailor, was not willing to admit to a drunken afternoon in a bar after discovering the body of Marguerite.

 Some very poignant details about Marguerite emerge as one wades through all the documentation.  For all its thoroughness the FBI did not get Marguerite’s correct birth date, probably because of Marguerite herself.  According to her brother she was born in 1895, which would have made her 49 at the time of her death.  That summer of 1944 she was looking 50 in the face as a single woman in an era when the term spinster was still freely used.  At some point she had shaved some years off her age. The official documents the FBI viewed stated that Marguerite had been born in 1899, which meant she had somehow pushed that fateful fiftieth birthday back by a little, at least on paper. 

It helped her cause that she did not look as if she was nearing fifty.  The coroner listed her as forty on his autopsy report, and at 5 foot 7 inches and 140 pounds she was as lithe as the family albums portrayed her.  The touching evidence of two bottles of hair dye in her suitcase indicates that her auburn hair was being maintained by artificial means.  Her nieces always used the term glamorous when describing her, and her last formal portrait shows a woman with a classic narrow face, straight nose, and gently permed hair.  She did not look her age, and she was fighting the advancing years with everything in her power.

 She was a teacher, but not the classic spinster high school English teacher that I had imagined. She taught at the Cogswell Polytechnical College which at that time was located in the city of San Francisco.  It has since moved down the peninsula and is today located in Sunnyvale.  The college was a post high school business school, but there is no record of what subject she taught.  Her apartment in the city on Larkin Street would have been a fairly easy bus ride to the college which was then located on Folsom Street.  She did not have a car as it would have been too expensive to maintain on a teacher’s salary. For her summer vacation in Yosemite she took the train to Merced and proceeded by bus to the Lodge.

One can picture Marguerite, the school year behind her and eight weeks of vacation before her, heading out from Merced across the flat, farm land of the central valley with the towering mountains ahead of her.  Then the slow climb as the bus twisted and turned its way up into the mountains, the air becoming cooler and fresher with each turn, the mountains glorious in their unspoiled beauty.  There is no way she could have known that she was riding towards her death.

One senses that she spent the first few days of her vacation alone.  Did she hike the trails, see the Bridal Veil Falls, watch the sunsets?  We will never know.   It was not until the eighth day of her stay that she met her nemesis.  By his account she was sitting by the river alone when he approached to her. She did not seek out her fate. 

In what light did she see this man and his friend who approached her as she sat by the swift flowing waters of the Yosemite River?  Was it in the light of the comments she made to her neighbors: “poor lonely boys” who were just “kids?”  Or at 37 did the sailor look more like a potential equal, a man for a, perhaps, lonely single woman.  As she included the USO and the Junior Officers Club in her activities in San Francisco, going off with men in uniform to a dance would have been natural to her. In fact in 1944 it was considered almost a patriotic duty for women to attend social events arranged for serving military men. And what did this married man see when he approached her?  At best a chance to while away a few hours with an attractive woman, or at worst a lonely female who was a mark for more than just a dance or two.

It was clear from the start of the investigation that sex was at the heart of it all.  When FBI Headquarters sent a message indicating that more digging needed to be done into the case it was noted that the sailor should be interviewed “vigorously,” but that the victim’s reputation should be investigated.  Here we have the age old assumption about rape that is still, amazingly, floating around today.  Did this woman in some way ask for this or deserve it?  Did that condom wrapper mean she was a ‘loose’ woman?  It would be her reputation which was to be examined, not what had happened to her.

Could there perhaps have been an ongoing sexual relationship between these two?  It seems hard to picture given the timeline laid out by the FBI.  The two of them only had two and a half days together.  The first was the dance at Camp Curry where Marguerite arranged for the taxi to take them home, dropping the sailor off first at the hospital and then returning to her cabin.  The next day there is no indication that they spent any time together except once again attending the dance where the same routine with the taxi was followed.    

 It was at this point that the sailor arranged for a 48 hour pass.  He certainly had the liberty to come and go during the day and late into the night without the pass.  There can be only one reason he got that pass.  He did not plan on returning to the hospital that night.  Was that wishful thinking on his part or was it part of a plan made by the two of them?  Once again we will never know.

The next morning he and his friend showed up at Marguerite’s cabin and the day unfolded with trips to a bar, and a picnic by the river.  The two of them were never alone except for 45 minutes when the friend left them to pick up another sailor and two more women.  I cannot picture their relationship being consummated in her cabin in broad daylight with the possible return at any moment of a random group of people. 

There is a growing sense of intimacy, however, for at the Lodge that evening the rest of the group dined together while Marguerite and the sailor dined alone.  Was he pursuing her or was this mutual?  From this remove I hope that it was a special dinner and that this man was kind and attentive and whatever Marguerite wanted or hoped him to be. I hope he made her feel beautiful and unique and wonderful.  It was the last interaction she would have with someone in her life.

For after dinner she returned to her cabin to get her coat prior to going to the dance, and her night of hell began.  Ten minutes later the sailor found her in her cabin already in the midst of a stroke.  One side of her body was paralyzed, her mouth was distorted, and she was speaking indistinctly.  However, according to him, she managed to refuse the help of a doctor and then asked him to have sex with her.  How could anyone really have believed that then or now?   There is only a remote chance that they could have had sexual intercourse before this, and I cannot imagine any woman who would want to initiate that kind of intimacy with a man when so desperately ill.  The plain fact is that she was raped.  No matter what the circumstance, that sailor was going to make use of his 48 hour pass and the condom with which he was armed.  It is the only thing that explains what follows in the next horrific hours. Yet in none of the FBI reports was the word rape used or that crime pursued.

Shortly after he finished with her, her right arm and leg begin to jerk uncontrollably, her arm hitting the side of her face.  Once again she refused to see a doctor. One can imagine this man standing at the side of the road at the scene of an accident asking the bloody victim of a crash if he wished to have medical help. But if he had called for a doctor, what would that doctor have found?   A woman who had been fully clothed at the Lodge at 9:15 now clad only in her dress with perhaps evidence of sexual activity, but still with the ability to tell what had happened to her in spite of her escalating illness.   

Then the victim began to vomit.  The FBI in its report on the crime scene reported no evidence of vomit in the bathroom, just on the bed around Marguerite.  Marguerite was at this point, according to the sailor, unable to stand so that all she could do was lay there and vomit in place.  The crime scene report noted the bedspread was crumpled at the foot of the bed with vomit in it, and there was vomit on her two pillows. The sailor made some attempts to clean it up and brought her water and cold towels for her head. She quieted down after a while, and he drifted off to sleep in a chair only to be awakened at two when the vomiting began again.  The convulsions also began again and lasted for almost 45 minutes.  At about three or so they stopped and the sailor left, leaving behind him, I firmly believe, the dead body of poor Marguerite. He carefully turned out the lights on the scene of his crime, and headed to the Lodge for a ride back to the hospital.  Her last night on earth had started with a rape and ended in a prolonged death agony watched over by the man who had violated her.  One’s heart breaks. 

There are number of reasons this scenario has to be the case.  First, the coroner gave her time of death at about three or a little earlier.  Second, her body was found on one side of the bed lying on her back.  Her legs were together and her arms by her side.  She was lying on top of the covers with the other half of the covers over her body and tucked in under her left hand side.  If she had done this herself, it would have to have been with her paralyzed right side.  In addition, this seems a very collected death posture for someone who had spent the evening in the throes of seizure after seizure.  It testifies to someone positioning her body after death.  Third, the reluctance of the sailor to return to the cabin the next day or to even enter it once his friend had insisted they check on Marguerite.  He knew full well what was there, and he did not want to see it again.  And lastly, the testimony that was too obscene to be let out of a sealed envelope in the FBI Headquarters in San Francisco.  That one bit of evidence cries out over the intervening years as once again a sexual perpetrator was put in a desk drawer, closed away and forgotten. 

 In the end The FBI was partially correct.  There was no murder here, although there might have been a case for manslaughter.   Marguerite did die of natural causes in a prolonged agony that could have been assuaged if only someone had called for help.  But what of the unmentioned, unmentionable crime? Because there was a rape, and a rape of a most vicious and disgusting variety.  And he got away with it. 

Thus the story ends for Marguerite, but there is always a denouement for the living in the face of tragic death.  The family, desperate to get justice for Marguerite, wrote a letter to the governor of California, and a special meeting was arranged for her oldest brother with a representative of the FBI.  But the family’s hands were tied by that one word – rape.  To bring all the circumstances to light would, in that day and age, have tarnished the reputation of this beloved sister.  The door was closed, and the tremendous hurt and guilt internalized forever by the brothers left behind. 

But now I am armed in a way my family members never were a half century ago.  I know who the sailor was.  I have his full name, his date of birth, his residence, and his wife’s name.  In this day and age it would not take much to track him down on the internet, and expose him to the world.  I have lawful freedom to the information, but that does not mean I have the moral freedom to exact revenge on his unsuspecting descendants.  He will remain always just “the sailor,” a man who had to live out his life with the knowledge of what really occurred in that cabin that night.  That was his burden to bear, not his unsuspecting descendants.

As for my silent grandfather, his silence was one of pain and anguish not of neglect or shame. For on his bureau where he could see it every day there was always a picture of Marguerite, a memorial to the sister for whom he was unable to get justice.              

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