Cuba, as always, was in the news, with calls for a new invasion and the overthrow of Castro being sounded by the nest of exiled leaders in Miami and their powerful supporters in Congress and at intermediate levels of the Pentagon. These calls from the right to which Lee was steadily exposed in the two Dallas dailies were mirrored on the left by two of the weeklies he subscribed to, the Militant and the Worker, which were demanding a “hands-off” policy toward Cuba on the part of the Kennedy administration.
Lee, moving his preoccupation with Cuba from the back of his mind to the front, decided to act. In his little “office” he fashioned a placard: “Hands Off Cuba! Viva Fidel!” He hung it around his neck and went out, quite possibly on the day after digging up his rifle, to stand on a street corner and hand out pro-Castro leaflets. He wrote with pride to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a pro-Castro organization based in New York, that he had distributed all his leaflets—some fifteen or so—in forty minutes. “I was cursed as well as praised by some,” he reported and asked to have forty or fifty more pamphlets sent to him at his Dallas address. The committee mailed them at the end of the week, on Friday, April 19.13
Thus, only days after his attempt on General Walker, Lee had once again invited the attention of the Dallas police—and in a manner that must have seemed guaranteed to obtain it. Once again he failed. Not a clue came to light that linked him to the Walker affair, and his demonstration on behalf of Castro went unnoticed.
Marina did not know about the picketing. But she heard Lee talk in his sleep again that week, and she watched as he scanned every edition of the Dallas papers looking, as she knew, for his name. He longed for publicity and attention. From this, from the reluctance with which he had burned his papers about the Walker attempt, and from his refusal to get rid of the rifle that might incriminate him, she also understood that Lee had wanted to be caught.
Marina was now aware that Dallas was a dangerous place for Lee, dangerous because it was full of temptation, and by “temptation” she meant General Walker. If she had failed in her effort to make Lee get rid of his rifle, she could try to do the next best thing—get him out of town. Just as quickly as she could, she would remove him from proximity to his target. She told him that she longed to move to New Orleans. New Orleans was a port city, she pointed out, and she had been raised in one, too—Archangel. “I’d like to see the city you were born and grew up in,” she said, adding that she had heard a lot about his relatives there, especially his “good” aunt Lillian Murret, and was eager to meet them.
Lee hesitated. He doubted the Murrets would want to see him. They had failed to answer a letter he had written them from Russia, and he was afraid they disapproved of him for going there. But he did not turn Marina down. She found him instead curiously receptive, as if he half-welcomed the idea.
From Easter Sunday on, Lee and Marina discussed what they ought to do next. Ostensibly, Lee was looking for a job. But when Lyolya and John Hall drove over from Fort Worth to attend Easter services at one of the Orthodox churches and afterward went to see the Oswalds, they noticed that Lee was discouraged. He complained about the lack of job security in America and hinted that he was thinking of going back to Russia.14 Marina tried to cheer him up. She pointed out that in America unemployment compensation is as high as an engineer’s salary in Russia. “You’ll have a rest,” she said, “and we’ll all have a paid vacation.” When that failed to cheer him up, she volunteered to go to work. She would take in ironing or find a job polishing silver. “No,” said Lee. “You’re my wife and it’s up to me to support you.”
Conceivably, it was Lee who subtly suggested the move to New Orleans and allowed the idea to sink in, rather than, as Marina supposed, she who suggested it and he who gradually picked it up. Either way, they were talking about it during the evening of Wednesday, April 17, when Lee suddenly agreed to move. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll show you New Orleans.” They did not set any date. But it is significant that Lee now knew that the de Mohrenschildts were soon to leave Dallas. With George gone, it would be easier for Lee to move, too.
Marina was greatly relieved, and on Saturday, April 20, she, Lee, and June went to a lake nearby to have a picnic with Ruth Paine and her children. But the next morning, Sunday, April 21, all her fears were revived. Lee went out early to buy a newspaper and some doughnuts, the two had breakfast together, and afterward—while Marina was doing the dishes, straightening the apartment, and dressing the baby—Lee sat in the living room and read the newspaper. It was the Dallas Morning News, which had a banner headline that day: “Nixon Calls for Decision to Force Reds Out of Cuba.” The lead story, accompanied by a front-page photograph of the former vice president, reported a speech that Richard Nixon had delivered the day before in Washington, accusing President Kennedy of being too soft on Castro and demanding a “command decision” to force the Russians out of Cuba. The speech could have been interpreted as a call for a new invasion.
Marina had no idea what Lee was reading. But she noticed after finishing her chores that he had laid the paper carefully on the coffee table as if he wanted her, or someone, to see it. Then she noticed that the door to his office was open, which was unusual. Suddenly Lee stood before her, dressed in his gray slacks, white shirt, and a tie. He had his pistol at his waist and was about to put on his best jacket. His face was white.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Nixon is coming to town. I am going to have a look.” He spoke slowly and with deliberation.
“I know what your ‘looks’ mean.”
Marina had no idea who Nixon was and she did not care.15 She knew his life was in danger and that was enough. Thinking fast, she went into the bathroom and asked Lee to follow her there. Once he was inside, she squeezed herself out and shut the door. It was a door that could only be locked from inside, but Marina held it as hard as she could, bracing her feet against the wall.
“Let me out. Let me out,” Lee screamed. “Open the door!”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Marina said. “How can you lie to me after you gave me your word? You promised me you’d never shoot anyone else and here you are starting in all over again. I’m pregnant. I can’t take it all the time. I could lose the baby and you wouldn’t even care.” Marina was hurt, angry, and in tears, with red nervous splotches all over her face, a frowsy little figure in her housecoat.
“Let me out!”
“Over my dead body I will. I have evidence against you. I’ll take it to the police.”
“You just try.”
Their tug of war lasted three minutes, with the advantage sometimes on her side, sometimes on his. Although she weighed less than one houndred pounds, Marina could summon up a wonderful, concentrated energy at moments like this. She had held Lee in the bathroom before at least once in their apartment in Fort Worth, and she was to do so three or four times again, in New Orleans, almost always to avoid a beating.
But her words seemed to unman him this time: “I could lose the baby because of you. You’ll have killed your own child.”
Lee relented. “Okay, I won’t do it. Open up.”
“Only if you give me your gun.”
“Okay. Only open the door.”
She opened it, and Lee came out. His face was red from exertion, and his eyes had the angry glitter she knew well.
Marina was trembling all over. She eyed him like a watchful bird.
“Give me the gun,” she said.
He handed it to her.
“Take off your clothes.”
He stripped to his T-shirt and shorts.
Marina went quickly into the bedroom carrying the revolver. She shoved it under the mattress without looking to see if it was loaded.
“If you’re going to keep me here all day,” he yelled, “at least give me something to read.”
She looked around for his book.
“Over there, on the coffee table,” he said.
She brought it to him. Then she took away his sho
es. For two or three hours Lee sat on the toilet seat, reading with the door closed. Marina could not see him, but she kept her eyes on the door and her ears alert for any sound.
Finally, at three or four in the afternoon, he came out of the bathroom and sat in the living room, reading in the undershorts that were all Marina would allow him. They did not exchange a word. Toward evening, he carried the baby to her bath and sat with her, naked, in the tub. They played more quietly than usual, and he did not use baby talk.
It was only now, when he was naked and in the bathtub, that Marina let him out of her sight. She ran downstairs and bolted all the doors, including the backyard gate. She wanted to make sure that if she was busy later on, cooking or getting the baby to bed, she would hear him if he tried to get out, hear him fiddling with the locks.
Marina ate her supper first, eyeing Lee warily the whole time. Then, with a contemptuous air, as if she were keeping a prisoner, she allowed him to come to the table—“You may eat if you wish.”
He brought his book to the table, and neither of them spoke for the rest of the evening.
As they were getting ready to go to bed, he asked if he might have his pistol back.
“No.”
He rummaged through all the drawers. “Where did you hide it?”
“You can have it—but only if you promise you’ll never do that again.”
“I promise.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if our baby is born insane. I can’t stand it any more. Either the baby will be crazy or I will.”
“Okay, give me my gun and I’ll put it back where it belongs.”
Marina did not want to touch it; she was afraid that it might go off. She merely motioned to the mattress. Lee drew the pistol out and put it where he usually kept it, on the top shelf in his office. But curiously, he left her in possession of the “evidence” against him that she had mentioned to him that day. It was the note he had left her, in Russian, on the night he went to shoot General Walker. Marina allowed Lee to have his pistol back. But she kept the note, moving it from place to place, until it finally came to rest among her cookbooks.
With the “Nixon” drama over, Marina sensed a falling off, an easing of her husband’s tension. Since his attempt on Walker, he had been hanging over an emotional precipice. He had geared himself up to kill, to be captured, and face trial and punishment. The failure of anything to happen had been a fearful anticlimax. And so Lee poured his energy on the nearest person, the safest person—and it worked. He could easily have won the battle of the bathroom if he had wished. Instead, he spent himself in the struggle and emerged harmless. With Marina as his tool, he disarmed himself emotionally.
Exactly what he had in mind when he said he was going to “look” at Nixon will never be known. From the painstaking way he had laid the paper face up, on the coffee table, perhaps he hoped to be caught at something and make a show of his concern for Cuba. But Nixon was not in Dallas. The very next day, Monday, Governor John Connally of Texas, with whom Lee had corresponded in a fruitless effort to alter his “undesirable” discharge, was due in Dallas to speak at the Marriott Hotel. And the day after that, Vice President Johnson would be at the same place. He might have tried to shoot either of them, but Lee had lost his keenness to kill.
Marina later observed that their little charade had been aimed not at “Nixon” but at her. She sensed that it had been Lee’s purpose to wound her or test her in some way. She was right. Lee was testing her to see whether, when he reached a certain frame of mind, he could count on her to stop him. She passed the test with flying colors. But she failed his other test. Lee mentioned Nixon, the one American politician whose name he knew she might recognize because Nixon had been to Russia, in order to warn her that he might kill somebody else, not just Walker. Lee sent that message—but Marina did not understand. It was too terrible. She continued to cling to the idea that General Walker was the only political figure who might be in danger from Lee.
But Marina had learned a lot about Lee, knowledge she would rather not have had. She now knew the full extent of his interest in politics, which she had not measured before. Not only that, she saw that he was willing to act on his ideas. She had also learned how calculating he could be. Isolated phenomena that she had been trying for months not to notice suddenly fell into place—Lee’s maps, his guns, his bus schedules, even the photograph for June. Lee had been planning his attempt on General Walker for at least two months, had planned and foreseen every detail, and had lied unblushingly to her. And she had learned that he wanted to be caught. She began to see that her husband was, in his own eyes, a great man who was unjustly ignored by the world and would do anything to wrest its attention.
Yet Marina’s worst discovery by far was her awareness that Lee would kill abstractly, for the sake of his ideas. He had tried to strangle her, of course, and for months she had been afraid of him. But to kill your wife in a fit of rage was nothing new. To kill someone you did not know, had never met, a man who had done you no harm, all for the sake of politics—to her that was unbelievable. It was sick. To learn that Lee was capable of that, Marina says, was “a terrible shock and discovery, like all the shocks in the world put together, a volcano.” It took a while to sink in, and she never got over it.
Marina was not a coward. Even Lee’s beatings had done nothing to temper the audacity of her tongue. “You’d be the greatest wife in the world,” he often said, “if only you couldn’t talk.” Yet her outspokenness had saved her. Lee could beat up her body, but he could not beat up her spirit, nor alter in the slightest what she thought. Thus far Marina had survived. But now it was another matter. Now she knew that she was in danger. It was a cataclysmic revelation. “I tried not to think about it much and I didn’t change quickly. But I began, really, to be afraid.”
What was she to do? Something in Marina, something commonsensical, resisted getting inside Lee’s head and “making her brain spin the way his did.” Already she had learned more about him than she could handle, and she saw that if she thought deeply about the Walker affair and all it told her about Lee, she would go out of her mind. It was with relief that she turned to the baby, the cooking, the cleaning. They save her from dwelling too long on the new knowledge of which she was now the uneasy possessor.
And yet she had to do something. Should she leave Lee? Take the baby and live alone? Or stay with Lee and try to change him. Just as her decision not to go to the police after the Walker shooting bore the stamp of her Soviet upbringing, so did the decision she came to now. In true Russian fashion, she decided that she was, indeed, her husband’s keeper; he was her responsibility, and it was up to her to straighten him out. In a phrase that could have come directly from a Soviet tract on family morality, she told herself that “I must apply all my strength to help correct my husband and put him on the right path.” She saw that she would have to use as her tools sympathy, affection, and understanding, and not so many of the harsh words that flooded all too readily from her tongue. They only made Lee pull away from her. Now it would be her task to draw him out. She must enter into his world and help him see where he was wrong.
After the Nixon episode they decided to move to New Orleans right away. Lee would go on ahead and look for work while Marina stayed on Neely Street until he sent for her. She was heartened by his willingness to move. Walker and Dallas appeared synonymous to her, and the two together spelled violence. Lee’s agreeing to leave Dallas must mean that he was giving up violence and choosing a peaceful life instead. Moreover, Marina hoped for succor from his family in New Orleans. They would help Lee find a job and would serve as a moral influence and a restraint. Their influence, on top of hers, would deter him. Marina was sure that he would be ashamed to shoot anybody in a city where he had a right-thinking family looking on. Things would be different in New Orleans, and once they were settled in their new home, she would figure out how to go about remaking him. “There, on the spot,” Marina said to herself, “I’ll see better how to do it.”<
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Marina could not have known it, but with the Walker attempt over, the cruelest and most poignant days of her marriage were over, too. That attempt, and the Nixon episode that followed, sealed a curious compact between husband and wife. Marina had not gone to the police after Walker, and in her significant motion at the mattress on the night of April 21, she had allowed Lee to have his pistol back. He for his part never asked her for the note he had left behind on the night he attempted to shoot General Walker. It was an odd sort of trust—she trusting him with his weapon, he trusting her with evidence she could use to stop him in the future. Yet with that compact, if that is what it was, things did change a little between them.
Slowly, very slowly, Lee began to admit Marina to the more daring and private of his two worlds. Where before he had kept her confined to the mundane, family side of his life only, now he would occasionally permit her a glimpse of the world that meant most to him, what Marina calls the “high-flying world of his ideas.” She says that she was still “an obstacle in his way, but he no longer showed it as openly as he had before. I was someone with whom he could take off his mask,” and whom, for a moment now and then, he could trust.
If Marina had learned a good deal about Lee from his attempt on General Walker, he, too, had drawn lessons—portentous ones. First, he had learned that if ever he was to win attention for himself and his ideas, he would have to do it on a very grand scale. He had shot at the most famous man in Dallas, he had missed him by less than an inch, and the only newspaper coverage had been a single, front-page story in each of the two Dallas papers and another tiny story inside one of them. Three stories—and not a single one mentioned his name. Next time, if it was an act of violence that was to make him famous, he would have to go after someone “at the very top.”
Second, Lee was astonished at how easily he got off and at the ineptness of the police. They had the bullet, yet they identified it wrongly and wrongly identified the type of rifle from which it was fired. Moreover, they had apparently been thrown off by rumors about cars and coconspirators, rumors Lee knew to be false. Lee concluded, as he said to Marina, that you can do anything and get away with it if only you think it out ahead. He had tried something cataclysmic—and he had not been caught. He had not even been touched.
Marina and Lee Page 47