Marina was very happy. Contrary to later reports, she had not asked him for a washing machine. Lee thought of it himself. To her it was another sign that he valued her and might really be willing to settle down and put his family life first.
The whole day was a happy one. In the evening, after supper, Lee asked Marina to sit with him and watch TV. They ate a banana together, and later she curled up on the floor with her head in his lap and dozed. Marina was tired of being pregnant. “I do so want to go to the hospital,” she said. Lee rubbed her stomach and said, “Don’t worry, it won’t be long, it will be any day now.” Every now and then after that she felt him sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited. She had very little idea what he was watching.
Lee saw two movies that night, both of them saturated in violence. One was Suddenly (1954), starring Frank Sinatra, which is about a plot to kill the president of the United States. In the film Sinatra, a mentally unbalanced ex-serviceman who has been hired to do the job, drives into a small Western town where the president is due to arrive by train, debark, and get into a car that will drive him into the High Sierras for some mountain fishing. Sinatra finds a house overlooking the railroad station and seizes it, subduing its occupants. He leans out of a window and gets the railroad tracks into the crosshairs of his rifle sight. He waits and waits; finally, the train comes into view. But it chugs through town without stopping, and in the end Sinatra is killed.
Marina dozed through the first movie, and the one that followed—We Were Strangers (1949). This, too, was about assassination. Based on the actual overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in Cuba in 1933, the movie stars John Garfield as an American who has come to help the cause of revolution. He and a tiny band of cohorts plot to blow up the whole cabinet, including the president, at a single stroke. The plot fails and Garfield dies, but the people rise up in small groups all over Cuba and overthrow the dictatorship.
Marina remembers the movie’s end—people were dancing in the streets, screaming with happiness because the president had been overthrown. Lee said it was exactly the way it had once happened in Cuba. It was the only time he showed any interest in Cuba after his return from Mexico.
Later, as they lay in bed talking, Marina remarked: “You know what, Alka? I never think of Anatoly any more but last night I dreamt about him.”
“And what did you dream?”
“We kissed, as we always did. Anatoly kissed so well it made me dizzy. No one ever kissed me like that.”
“I wish I did.”
“It would take you your whole life to learn.”
Without a trace of the jealousy he always showed when Marina spoke about her boyfriends, he put his hand over her mouth and said to her with surprising gentleness: “Please don’t tell me about the others. I don’t want to hear.”
He kissed her, they made love, and Marina was exceedingly happy. It was the last time they had full intercourse.
Ruth made a Chinese supper on Sunday, and Marina started feeling sick the moment she saw it.
“Eat,” she said, as she got up from the table. “I’ll get ready to go.”
“Oh,” Lee said, his eyes large and frightened, “maybe it’ll be today. Where are the pains?”
“I haven’t any.”
“Oh, maybe it won’t be today, after all.” He was very disappointed.
But Marina did have labor pains later in the evening, and she got ready to drive with Ruth to Parkland Hospital.
“I have to stay home and babysit,” Lee said, “and I do want to go with you.”
“There’s nothing you could do anyhow.”
Thus it was Ruth who sat with Marina until she was ready for the labor room. Then she drove home and found that Lee had put the children to bed and had gone to bed, too. Although his light was on and Ruth thought he was not yet asleep, he did not come out of his room to ask for news. Again, it was Ruth who sat by the telephone, called the hospital, and, shortly after eleven, was told that Marina had been delivered of a baby girl. Lee’s light was out by then, and Ruth, taking her cue from him, did not wake him with the news. She told him in the morning before he left for work.21
He returned to Irving that afternoon with Wesley Frazier but for some reason seemed reluctant to visit the hospital. Puzzled, Ruth guessed that he was afraid to go lest someone at the hospital find out that he had a job and charge him with expenses of the birth. So Ruth told him that the hospital already knew he had a job; she had been asked the night before at the admissions office and had told the truth. But it did not make any difference. The delivery and maternity case still were free. After learning that, Lee agreed to go.22
Marina never knew of his reluctance. “Oh, Mama, you’re wonderful,” he said, as he sat down on the bed. “Only two hours. You have them so easily.” He had tears in his eyes.
“But it’s a girl again,” she apologized.
“Two girls are wonderful,” he said. “We’ll keep trying. The next one will be a boy.”
“No, Alka, there’ll be no next one. I can’t go through ten babies just to get a boy.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Whatever you say. Besides, a girl doesn’t cost so much. She gets married. You’ve got to educate a boy.”
He asked Marina if she had had any stitches or anesthetic and praised God that she had not needed either. He treated her like a heroine.
They had already talked about a name. If it was a boy, he was to be David Lee (no more “Fidel”), and Lee had promised that in the choice of a girl’s name he wouldn’t interfere. But he now asked Marina what name she had put down on the baby’s certificate. She had chosen “Audrey Rachel,” “Audrey” for Audrey Hepburn and “Rachel” because Ruth had a niece called Rachel and Marina liked the name very much.23
Lee took exception to Rachel. “It sounds too Jewish,” he said. “Please call her Marina. Do it for me. I want our little girl to have your name.”
The next day Marina simply added “Marina” to the certificate—“Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.” But from the outset the baby was called Rachel, and Rachel she is to this day.
— 33 —
Lee and Michael
After the baby was born, to save money, Marina and Lee continued to live apart. Marina and the children stayed with Ruth, while Lee, using the alias “O. H. Lee,” was already installed in a rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas where he and Marina had lived before.
If the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Carl Johnson; the housekeeper, Mrs. Earlene Roberts; or the other roomers noticed “Mr. Lee” at all, it was for his extreme apartness. “That man never talked. That was the only peculiarity about him. He would never speak,” Mrs. Johnson said later. Not every evening, but once in a while, he joined the other roomers and watched television. He might sit there as long as thirty or forty minutes and not speak to anyone.
Mrs. Johnson remembers that he came home at the same hour every night, 5:30, and made a phone call in a foreign language (to Marina). He switched to English if anyone happened to be nearby, but no one was fooled. Marina was annoyed by these digressions into English. She did not understand what he was saying, and she thought his effort to cover up the Russian was foolish.
During the week Lee was alone in his room all evening, every evening, and he never, in the five or six weeks he was there, had a visitor. Mrs. Johnson, the landlady, estimates that he spent 95 percent of his evenings alone in his room and the other 5 percent watching television.
He was allowed to keep food in the refrigerator. That is how Mrs. Johnson came to notice that this particular roomer drank half a gallon of “sweet milk” a day. He kept peanut butter, sweet preserves, and lunch meat there, too. Sometimes he had supper in his room, and occasionally, “if there was no one in the kitchen, he would sit in the kitchen, but if there was anyone there, he would take it in his room.” Mrs. Johnson describes him as “spotless. He never kept anything cluttered.”1
Once in a while Lee had b
reakfast (“eggs over, light”) at the Dobbs House restaurant across the street, and once or twice he told Marina that he had supper there, too, for about $1.25. Except for weekends, that was the only change in his lonely and austere routine.
Lee was an order filler for the School Book Depository, mostly for Scott-Foresman textbooks, which were located on the first and sixth floors of the building. He wrote several orders on his clipboard, found the books, then brought them to a first-floor room where the orders were processed. It was a job that did not require teamwork. He made an occasional mistake in his orders, but Mr. Truly calls Lee “a bit above-average employee,” who “kept moving” and “did a good day’s work.” He paid attention to the job, did not spend time talking to the other men, and did his work by himself. “I thought it was a pretty good trait at the time,” Truly said later.
Truly saw him every day. “Good morning, Lee,” he would say.
“Good morning, sir.”
Mr. Truly would ask how his new baby was, and Lee’s face just broke wide open into a smile.2
The depository was an easygoing, live-and-let-live sort of place. The men mostly gathered in a small, first-floor recreation room they called the “domino room.” There they ate sandwiches at noon, made coffee, and played dominoes. Lee sometimes ate a sandwich there alone, then went outside. But two or three times he came in with raisins or a bunch of grapes and ate with the other men. And occasionally Mr. Truly glanced up and saw him swing across Dealey Plaza, the park in front of the Book Depository Building, about noon and come back a few minutes later with a newspaper or a sack of potato chips in his hand. Most days Lee made a point of getting to work early and reading newspapers that had been left in the domino room the day before. One of the men, Bonnie Ray Williams, noticed that Lee did not read about sports, as the others did. “One morning I noticed he was reading something about politics and he acted like it was funny to him. He would read a paragraph or two, smile or laugh, then throw the paper down and get up and walk out.”3
Several influences Lee was not aware of himself could have affected the way he was looking at things, could even have affected what it was that caught his attention in the newspaper and made him smile or laugh in that derisory way of his. One of these influences was place. He was back in Dallas. Exactly one year before, in October of 1962, Lee had been living in a rooming house that has never been identified but was probably on Beckley or North Beckley Street, the very same area in which he was living now. Then as now he had been living alone to save money—Marina was at Lyolya Hall’s in Fort Worth—and then as now he had no family with him to ground his fantasies in reality. It was during that earlier period in Dallas that he may first have thought of killing General Walker. And Lee had a way of repeating things.
Another influence could have been the time of year—what psychiatrists call “anniversary reaction.” Many, if not most, of the critical events in Lee’s life had taken place about this time: his birthday (October 18), his enlistment in the Marine Corps (October 24), his self-inflicted gunshot wound in Japan (October 27), his arrival in Russia (October 16), and his attempt at suicide in Moscow (October 21). He had last seen his mother on October 7 of 1962; Marina had left him, ostensibly never to return, on November 11–17 of the same year; and Lee had last seen his favorite brother Robert on November 22 the year before. Because so many important events in Lee’s life, mostly sad ones or events that signified failure, were clustered in October and November, the autumn may have been a troubled time for him.4
And now there was something else, the birth of Rachel, which not only added to Lee’s burdens but placed him in a position that was curiously similar to the position his own father would have been in had he been alive when Lee was born. For Rachel was a second child, as Lee had been. She was a girl following a girl, while Lee had been a boy following a boy, but in each case a child of the opposite sex had been desired. And what Lee’s father had done to him by dying before his birth, Lee was to do to Rachel shortly after hers.
Whatever the subtle influences on Lee’s thoughts may have been, it is clear that now that he was settled, with a job, a place to live, and the baby’s birth out of the way, he had time for politics again. On Wednesday, October 23, only two nights after his first glimpse of Rachel in the hospital, he went to a right-wing meeting at which General Walker addressed thirteen hundred people.
Two nights later, at the Paines’, Marina remembers that Michael attempted to draw Lee out on the subject of politics. Michael was there each Friday when Lee came to Irving. He sensed that Lee needed an older brother or a friend, and he tried to reach out to him. Michael knew that Lee called himself a “Marxist,” and yet he had turned his back on Russia. Why, Michael wondered? How had Lee’s values changed; what were his ideals and his vision of a better society? Lee refused to say. He refused to talk about the better world that might lie ahead but only about what was wrong with the world today. Michael kept asking how the changes Lee wanted were to come about—and Lee never answered. Michael inferred that Lee had given up on changing things peacefully, since he never mentioned any sort of peaceful, evolutionary change he might favor. He did not consider it worthwhile “fussing around” trying to change anything.
Michael was certain that Lee’s opinions, and his way of clinging to them, were founded in his emotions, but he had no success in probing those emotional roots. In fact, something in Michael resisted understanding Lee emotionally, and he finally gave up exploring this side of his nature. For Michael sensed that, except for June, “people were like cardboard” to Lee, and this repelled him.5
The two men could not have been more unlike: they were as different as earth is from air. Michael was a brilliant man, with a quality of sunlight about him. He was tall, slender, sensitive, with gray, sad eyes that seemed to light up only when the talk turned to aerodynamics. Even Michael’s mind appeared to be airborne; he had been curious about everything all his life. It was Michael’s gift to think originally, to look at things in a way no one had thought of before. He was an inventor, and he especially loved to invent things that expressed the beauty, the harmony, the wholeness of life. As a boy of ten, hearing that there might one day be an energy crisis, he tried to invent a car that would run on a minimum of oil. Next, it was gliders, and by the time he was a teenager, he was building a hydrofoil boat.
At the time he and Lee met, Michael was working on new concepts in helicopter design. But it was his dream to quit his job, live in an old barn, and design an airplane so cheap, so functional, so exquisitely economical that people could own it the way they own cars. A visionary as well as a scientist, Michael hoped that with so many people flying over national frontiers, borders might be wiped out entirely.6
Michael came from a family of visionaries and eccentrics with roots reaching deep into the New England past. The families that produced him, the Paines and Forbeses, had fortunes derived from the China trade, railroads, and the telephone company—and consciences hammered out of guilt. Some of them, the best, perhaps, shuddered at the word “aristocrat,” but they were aristocrats and they knew it, and most arrived at an acceptance of it by embracing the thought of their common ancestor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that one’s place in life, one’s privileges even, can be redeemed by good works. Michael’s grandfather, George Lyman Paine, was a renowned clergyman, a low church Episcopalian, who had run for state office in Massachusetts as a socialist. Michael calls him “a fierce stone.” Michael’s father, Lyman Paine, was an architect who was also a political activist. During the thirties, he had been a member of the Trotskyite wing of the American Communist Party, and it is said—Michael himself is uncertain as to the truth of it—that he was one of a group of American leftists who went to see Trotsky in Norway.
Michael, like his wife Ruth, was a child of divorce. He had seen his father only half a dozen times before he reached the age of twenty, and yet he loved him devotedly. Indeed, he felt as if the two were “like one person trying to live in two bodies.” All three m
en, the grandfather who was a socialist and a clergyman, the father who was a Trotskyite and an artist, and now Michael, who was a scientist and a liberal, had come to an identical belief: that man’s material needs must be met, but that his deepest hunger is a hunger of the spirit. Each in these three generations of Paine men had in his own way come back to the Emersonian conviction that it is a necessity for every individual to do as his conscience requires.
It is one of many ironies of the situation that Lee, a steady visitor at the Paine household and a beneficiary of its generosity, never even inquired who Michael might be or knew that his father had been a member of the very same Trotskyite wing of the American Communist Party that Lee had tried to join in its later form, the Socialist Workers Party. And it is characteristic of Michael that he never told him. Nor did Lee stop to consider that Michael, a physicist at Bell Helicopter, might have a security clearance—he did, and he was continually being turned down for higher clearances because his father had been a Trotskyite—and that Lee, by receiving the Militant, the Worker, and all his Russian newspapers at Michael’s house, might be jeopardizing Michael’s job. Again, it was characteristic of Michael that he, too, did not consider it and, indeed, would have scorned to do so.
As an intellectual, Michael was accustomed to thinking in abstractions, but as an inventor he was also at home with facts. His mind was open and questioning. And he never lumped things into categories, for no sooner had he thought of a category than his mind blazed with exceptions and defiances. Lee, he discovered, was the opposite. His mind was closed and dogmatic. He was at home with nothing but categories, and into them he stuffed every fact or observation that came his way. The category he clung to hardest, and insisted on throughout their discussions, was the “exploitation of the worker” under capitalism. Lee admitted that exploitation existed everywhere, but he insisted that in the Soviet Union at least the state reaps a profit, whereas in a capitalist society only the employer gains. Under capitalism, he said, all institutions, churches, schools, everything exists to exploit the working class. Each is a part of an interlocking structure that is interested only in maintaining itself in power.7
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