Lee spent most of the day and the early evening, until the light began to fade, reading on the screened-in side porch of his apartment. As summer lengthened and dusk came on earlier, he carried a lamp onto the porch so he could read a little later. But the seriousness and even the quantity of his reading had fallen off. During the first part of the summer, he had read political books, biographies, and books about Russia and Communism, from one of which he confronted Marina one night with the surmise that she must be illegitimate. She blushed deeply and denied it. But after the beginning of August, most of his reading consisted of a lighter diet of spy novels and science fiction. Marina had no idea what he was reading, but from indoors she could see that sometimes Lee was not reading at all. He was just sitting on the porch looking out on the street. “He’s been inside all day and wants to see the people out walking,” she said to herself.
One evening during the last week of August, she and June went for a stroll. Arriving home about twilight, they found Lee on the porch perched on one knee, pointing his rifle toward the street. It was the first time she had seen him with his rifle in months—and she was horrified.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Get the heck out of here,” he said. “Don’t talk to me. Get on about your own affairs.”
A few evenings later she again found him on the porch with his rifle.
“Playing with your gun again, are you?” she said, sarcastically.
“Fidel Castro needs defenders,” Lee said. “I’m going to join his army of volunteers. I’m going to be a revolutionary.”
After that, busy indoors, Marina frequently heard a clicking sound out on the porch while Lee was sitting there at dusk. She heard it three times a week, maybe more often, until the middle of September. Often she saw him clean the rifle, but this did not worry her because she knew that he had not taken it out of the house to practice. “So it’s Cuba this time. If he’s got to use his gun,” she thought to herself, “let him take it to his Cuba. They’re always shooting down there anyway. Just so he doesn’t use it here.” But just in case, she exacted a promise from him that he would not use the rifle against anybody in the United States. “Ya ne budu”—“I won’t”—he promised her in a quiet voice. Marina felt reassured.4
In the early days of September, Lee increasingly concentrated on one thing—Cuba. He was anxious to be on his way. When he was able to leave for Mexico, however, would depend on the one person whom both the Oswalds now looked on as their “savior”—Ruth Paine. “When is Ruth coming?” he kept asking. Or, “How many days before Ruth is due to arrive?”
Ruth and Marina had been exchanging letters all summer. Ruth was sedulous about Lee’s feelings. She always asked how he was, and whenever there were decisions to be made, she addressed sections of her letters, in English, to him. Ruth was not certain that she liked Lee, but she thought he was a vulnerable man, and she respected his feelings. So long as the Oswalds stayed together, Lee was very much a part of her friendship for Marina. She went out of her way not to hurt him.
About the middle of July, more than a month after two letters had arrived from Marina announcing that things were not going well between her and Lee, Ruth wrote renewing her invitation to Marina to stay with her in Irving before and after the new baby’s birth. But now, for the first time, she extended an indefinite invitation: Marina could stay as long as she needed if it would save her from going back to Russia against her will. Ruth told Marina that she was welcome to stay “for two months or two years.”5
Before issuing the invitation Ruth talked it over with her husband, Michael. He tended to favor it since Marina’s earlier visit had worked out well and had contributed to Ruth’s happiness, but he decided to consult Frank Krystinik, his best friend at work, about whether Lee might turn out to be a “violent person,” capable of taking out on Ruth such displeasure as he might feel at Marina’s being there. Michael and Krystinik concluded that if Lee were handled in a “gentle and considerate” manner, so that his feelings were not offended, he would not be a danger.6 They decided that Lee was not “going to stab Ruth or Marina.” Only after they had considered the possibility that Lee might be violent and rejected it did Ruth go ahead and invite Marina for the longer stay.
At this point, about mid-July, Marina wrote that her marriage was going better; she no longer felt the need of rescue but would like to hold the invitation in reserve in case “Lee gets rough with me again.” Despite a false assurance from Marina that she had been to see a doctor, and despite a postscript from Lee about the cost of maternity care in New Orleans, Ruth somehow divined that she was going to be needed even before the new baby arrived. Accordingly, she wrote Marina that, after a roundabout tour of relatives in the East and the Midwest, she would stop in New Orleans about September 18. Marina could make up her mind then whether she wanted to stay in New Orleans, drive back to Dallas with Ruth to await the baby, or come later on her own closer to the due date.
But during the first ten days of August, Lee’s thoughts must have turned decisively toward adventure—or at least toward divesting himself of responsibility for his wife and children—for he told Marina to write Ruth that he had lost his job and they were out of money. She was not to speak of Cuba in the letter or say that he had agreed to go with her to Russia. Marina was not to mention him at all if she could help it.
Marina did as she was told, and her letter (postmarked August 11, the day after Lee’s release from the police station) contains a ring of embarrassment or evasion.7 This time, unlike the previous spring when she omitted to tell Ruth anything about the Walker affair, Marina was not, on her own initiative, withholding information out of loyalty to Lee. Instead, she consciously allowed Lee to use her as an instrument to get what he wanted out of Ruth. Marina was embarrassed because Lee was so obviously appealing to Ruth to take her off his hands. But what was she to do? The baby was due before long, Lee wanted to be rid of her, and she had nowhere else to turn. Ruth was her one hope of staying in America.
On August 25 Ruth mailed a letter from Paoli, Pennsylvania, promising to be in New Orleans on September 20 exactly, and during the daylight hours if she could make it. Coming from Ruth, the promise might have been written on granite. From the day it arrived, about August 27 or 28, Lee knew that he would be free to leave for Mexico within a few days of September 20, and he started making his plans. He was already, that last week of August, dry-firing his rifle on the porch. But as if to underscore the connection between his plans and Ruth, he stopped dry-firing the gun, Marina says, “a few days before Ruth arrived.” It was as if Ruth Paine was his conscience.
While he waited for Ruth’s arrival, Lee wrote three remarkable letters. In one, dated August 31 and addressed to Mr. E. Bert, managing editor of the Worker in New York City, he applied for a job as a photographer and announced that he and his family would be “relocating” into the area “in a few weeks.”8 The letter was accompanied by a sample of Lee’s work and was incorrectly addressed.
Also on August 31 Lee wrote a letter (misdated September 1) to the Socialist Workers Party in New York, announcing that he and his family were moving to the Baltimore-Washington area in October and asking how to get in touch with party representatives there.9 And on September 1 he wrote a letter to the Communist Party asking how to “contact the Party in the Baltimore-Washington area, to which I shall relocate in October.”10
Although Lee was obsessed by his desire to go to Cuba and had no intention of returning to the United States, where this time he would surely face prosecution, these letters apparently represented an alternative in case he never got there at all. In that event perhaps he thought he might move to the Northeast and try to establish himself as a left-wing activist. Why did he choose New York, Baltimore, or Washington? They were, first of all, the cities with Russian-speaking communities that Ruth had mentioned where Marina might be able to find a job. Lee had scolded Marina for even considering a visit to those cities with Ruth, but now, characteristica
lly, he picked up the very same idea. If there was not much prejudice against people who knew Russian and had been to Russia, then perhaps he, instead of Marina, could find work there.
Lee may still have hoped to get a job with the Militant or the Worker, and probably expected that he could form a more active link with either the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party in the Northeast than in Texas or Louisiana. And because the civil rights activities that were most heavily covered in the press, including the Militant, that summer—such as the highly publicized March on Washington in August and the unremitting racial turmoil in Cambridge, Maryland—had occurred in the Baltimore-Washington area, Lee may also have decided that it was in the Northeast that he would have the best chance of putting together a politically oriented life.
Lee acquired the Bulletin of the New York School for Marxist Study for the fall term of 1963. And he spent time composing a detailed résumé of his life, including his various activities: “Radio Speaker and Lecturer,” “Street Agitation,” “Organizer,” “Photographer,” “Marxist,” “Defector,” and “Resident of U.S.S.R.”11 It was handwritten on looseleaf paper, and he evidently took it with him to Mexico. In one of the appendices included with the section called “Photographer” were the photographs he had taken of tax returns of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, perhaps to prove to some intended recipient that his Marxist convictions were so strong he was not above rifling even the most private files of his capitalist employer.
It is fruitless to try to make the fragments of Lee Oswald’s mind fit together as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. It is better to leave the puzzle loose, with fragments scattered here and there. But it is noteworthy that since his return form Russia, Lee had exchanged somewhere between fifty and seventy items of correspondence with the Soviet embassy in Washington (a necessity, since Marina was a soviet citizen), with the left-wing bookstore in Washington through which he subscribed to Soviet periodicals, and with left-wing newspapers and organizations in New York.12 Much of the correspondence was routine—change of address cards, requests for speeches by Trotsky or for the words of the Communist hymn, “The Internationale.” But the volume of his correspondence was significant, and certain of his letters were very revealing. In October 1962, only five months after his return from Russia, Lee requested membership in the Socialist Workers Party, clearly his first choice. The party turned him down because it had no branch in Texas. He next applied for freelance photographic work in the Southwest for both the Militant and the Worker. Both responded politely, but nothing came of it. The FPCC, after one encouraging letter, proceeded to ignore him.
Obviously, these affiliations mattered to Lee. He had shot at General Walker partly to establish himself as a hero of the American left. And he was still trying to attach himself to left-wing causes. He needed a cause to belong to, something outside himself that was bigger than he was and could be reflected back into his inflated self-image to help sustain it. Yet the very same quality that required him to seek recognition also made any sort of real belonging wholly impossible. His self-image was so far out of line with reality that he was unable to see himself as others saw him or to deal with them on a real footing—as either an equal or a subordinate.
Lee had another difficulty, and it, too, arose out of his estrangement from reality. There was a flaw in his signal system, his antennae, his equipment for receiving messages. Lee picked up countless signals from newspapers and people and books, but somehow they were distorted in transmission. He was unable to understand what others were trying to say to him. Instead, he heard only what he wanted to hear. He lacked that capacity for communication that is at the heart of working with other people. The most he was capable of was a sort of pseudo-belonging to something very far away that existed only in his mind.
Yet here he was, on the eve of his departure for Cuba, trying, as he had been since boyhood, to belong to something—the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, one of their newspapers. And they scarcely knew who he was. Their letters were distant, polite, the sort of letter an organization writes to someone it is not actually rebuffing but with whom it has no relationship. To the American left, Lee Oswald did not exist. Yet this was the community he yearned to belong to and whose hero he hoped to become.
On Labor Day Lee called the Murrets and asked if he and his family could come for a visit. There, for the first time in two months, he saw his favorite cousin Marilyn. She had just returned from a two-month bus trip through Mexico, Central America, and Panama, and Lee soaked up everything she said.13 He told no one that he intended to go to Mexico, let alone Cuba. The fact that three of the people he liked best, Marilyn and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, had all been to Mexico, must have made an impression on Lee, but he gave no hint of that either.
The Murrets once again challenged Lee for discouraging Marina from learning English. His answer was as usual—he wanted to keep up his own Russian. His Aunt Lillian wanted to know why. “Do you intend to go back to Russia?” she asked.14 Luckily for Lee, somebody broke into their conversation, and he was spared from having to meet his aunt’s perspicacity head on.
John Murret took Lee and Marina home that night. On the way he drove them past the church in which he was soon to be married and the large house in which his fiancée lived. Lee did not say anything, but Marina could tell that his fists were clenched in anger. Lee, she says, did not hate the owners of these houses, but he did hate the system that made it possible for anyone to be so wealthy. Stingy as he was, and forever saving up in little ways, Lee did not want a lot of money for himself. That was not where his ambition lay. Like virtually everyone who knew him, Marina, too, believes that her husband could not have been “bought.” What she sensed in him that night—an impression so strong that it was almost palpable—was his hatred of American capitalism.
It was less than three weeks before Marina would be leaving for Dallas and Lee for Mexico City. They might be parted for a short time, or forever, and those last weeks together in New Orleans contained episodes that were funny, touching, sad.
It was fearfully sultry and hot, and their only air-conditioning was an old kitchen fan. Lee went naked around the apartment a good deal of the time and sometimes spent the whole day lying on the sofa on his stomach, without a stitch on, reading a book. Marina warned him that it was bad for Junie to see him nude.
“Oh, she’s too young,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“By the time she’s that old, it will be too late.”
He played with Junie continually, took baths with her, and spent a good hour and a half putting her to bed every night. These were boisterous sessions, with Lee getting so much into the spirit that he sometimes leaped into Junie’s bed himself, as if the two of them were babies going to sleep together.
He behaved like a baby with Marina, too, competing with Junie for her attention. He might be lying on the sofa wearing a shirt. “Come here, girl,” he would summon Marina, and hold out one arm, then the other, to allow her to pull it off. It was the same way when he dressed. He would stick out one leg, then the other, and let Marina put on his underpants.
He was at his most babyish when he and Junie emerged from the tub. “Wipe my back first,” he would say to Marina in baby talk. Or, “Quick, quick, there are drops of water on my leg!” If Marina did not dry him off quickly enough or refused to mop up the puddles he and the baby made on the floor, he threatened to stay in the bathtub all day. “Stop it, Alka,” Marina pleaded. “I haven’t got time to play.”
“Our mama isn’t good to us,” he said to Junie. “She doesn’t like looking after little children.”
If Marina was busy with something else and was not able to dry him off, he strode naked through the apartment, splattering water everywhere. He knew that Marina hated that; she was afraid to have the neighbors see him naked. “If you won’t dry me off,” Lee said, “then they’ll have the pleasure of seeing me.”
Once in a while the baby was naughty, and Marina gave her a little
slap on the behind. “Come to Papa,” Lee would say. “Papa will take pity on you. Mama doesn’t love our Junie. Otherwise she’d be ashamed to hurt such a tiny girl’s feelings. Let’s go and find Mama.” Then he would go to Marina and give her a little slap on the behind.
Marina told him to stop; it undermined her authority. “I’ll never get her to obey.” Lee said the baby was too little to understand. “She understands more than you know,” Marina replied.
Junie was the joy of Lee’s life, his tie to reality, the one person, Marina thinks, with whom he came down from the clouds and behaved like a human being. He was often cruel to Marina, but never to June. “His general mood was one thing,” says Marina. “How he was with babies was another.” She frankly admits that she was jealous.
The three of them seldom went out together.
But there was one expedition they all enjoyed. Although they were living on very little money and spent almost nothing on recreation, Lee loved taking Marina and June to the amusement park at Lake Pontchartrain. There was a horse race game at the park at which he always got lucky. He considered everything he won there pure profit, and nothing made him happier than to spend all his winnings on hamburgers for his “two girls.”
He spent almost nothing else and tried to save every penny. He even starved himself to save money. During the last several weeks in New Orleans, he ate very little and became so thin that his ribs and collarbone stuck out. His face and legs were bony, too. Marina thinks he was starving himself not only to save money but also because he was in a wave of emotional tension. He had lost weight other times—just before he went to the American embassy in Moscow in July 1961, and again the month before his attempt on General Walker—but his last month in New Orleans was the worst.
Marina scolded him for being stingy. And he, in turn, scolded her for the way she spent even the small amount of money that he did give her. Lee, of course, was saving for his trip to Mexico, although neither of them spoke about it much. Marina said nothing when Lee failed to pay the $65 rent due September 9 for the following month, even though she was so ashamed that she did not dare leave the apartment during the day for fear of running into Mr. or Mrs. Garner. But finally she could contain her feelings no longer.
Marina and Lee Page 57