Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  Besides, he is now obliged to come down from the monumental high of knowing that he had taken a shot at a General. Now, he will only be lubricating big-bellied machines.

  He may also be losing the freedom of his daylight hours. It is possible he had been having a lively time for himself in New Orleans until he found work. There is certainly some testimony from Dean Adams Andrews to contemplate. How true it may be is another matter. As described by Gerald Posner, Andrews was a “three-hundred-pound, forty-four-year-old jive-talking attorney with a reputation for exaggeration and showmanship.”8

  MR. LIEBELER. I am advised by the FBI that . . . Lee Harvey Oswald came into your office . . .

  MR. ANDREWS. I don’t recall the dates, but briefly, it is this: Oswald came in the office accompanied by some gay kids. They were Mexicanos. He wanted to find out what could be done in connection with a discharge, a yellow paper discharge, so I explained [that] when he brought the money, I would do the work . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. The first time he came in he was with these . . . gay kids. By that, of course, you mean people that appeared to you to be homosexuals?

  MR. ANDREWS. Well, they swish. What they are, I don’t know. We call them gay kids . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Have you seen any of them since? . . .

  MR. ANDREWS. Yes . . . . First district precinct. Police picked them up for wearing clothes of the opposite sex.

  MR. LIEBELER. How many of them were there?

  MR. ANDREWS. About 50 . . . . I went down for the ones I represented. They were in the holding pavilion. I paroled them and got them out . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. You say that some of the gay kids [that] the police arrested . . . were the ones that had been with Oswald?

  MR. ANDREWS. Yes . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Let me try and pin down how long it was after the first time Oswald came in that these kids all got arrested . . . . Was it a month? . . .

  MR. ANDREWS . . . . Ten days at the most.

  MR. LIEBELER. I suppose the New Orleans police department files would reflect the dates these people were picked up?

  MR. ANDREWS. I checked the first district’s blotter [and] they wear names just like you and I wear clothes. Today their name is Candy; tomorrow it is Butsie; next day it is Mary . . . . Names area very improbable method of identification . . . . You know them by sight mostly.

  MR. LIEBELER. Do you remember what date it was that that large arrest was made?

  MR. ANDREWS. No; every Friday is arrest day in New Orleans . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. In May of 1963?

  MR. ANDREWS. Yes . . . 9

  MR. LIEBELER. Did Oswald appear to you to be gay?

  MR. ANDREWS. You can’t tell. I couldn’t say. He swang with the kids. He didn’t swish, but birds of a feather flock together . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. When you say he didn’t swish, what do you mean by that?

  MR. ANDREWS. He is not effeminate; his voice isn’t squeaky; he didn’t walk like or talk like a girl; he walks and talks like a man.

  MR. LIEBELER . . . . Was there anything striking about the way he carried himself?

  MR. ANDREWS. I never paid attention. I never watched him walk other than into and out of the office. There’s nothing that would draw my attention to anything out of the ordinary, but I just assumed that he knew these people and was running with them. They had no reason to come. The three gay kids he was with, they were ostentatious. They were what we call swishers. You can just look at them. All they had to do was open their mouth . . . . With those pronounced ones, you never know what the relationship is with anyone else with them, but I have no way of telling whether he is gay or not, other than he came in with what we call here queens. That’s about it.10

  The enigma of Oswald’s homosexuality might now be clarified to a degree, except that we are being told all this by a man whose word, according to Posner, is not considered reliable. We have, then, no more than another question to add to our understanding of Lee’s relation to Marina now that she is arriving and his vacation from marriage is over.

  It is worth reminding ourselves, however, of a paradox concerning Oswald. If to some degree he will always remain mysterious, that contributes nonetheless to our developing sense of him. He is a man we can never understand with comfort, yet the small mysteries surrounding him give resonance to our comprehension. An echo is less defined than the note that created it, but our ear can be enriched by its reverberation. If he is homosexual at all, if the inner drama of his marriage is that he is only half connected to Marina and the other half of him is drawn toward having sex with men, and if this need has been intermittently expressed in his adolescence, his Marine Corps years and, covertly, in Russia and perhaps in Dallas, then the picture offered by Dean Adams Andrews takes on credibility. It certainly helps to explain those periods of desire for Marina that alternate in him with a lack of interest in Marina so complete that she complains aloud about it to people she does not even know well. In the sexual sense, it could be said that he seems married to her no more than fifteen weeks in the year.

  3

  Forbidden Strings

  One of those weeks begins on the night of May 11, when Ruth Paine arrives in her station wagon with her two children and Marina and June. According to McMillan, that night Lee and his wife

  were happy to be together again—“I’ve missed you so,” Lee said again and again—and they made love three times that night and the next morning. It was the first time they had made love since March 29 or 30, the weekend when Marina had taken Lee’s photograph with the rifle.1

  Since we are speaking of Lee and Marina, it was not necessarily so loving as that. The groundwork for new disagreements in New Orleans was established as soon as Marina saw the apartment.

  MRS. PAINE . . . . Lee showed her, of course, all the virtues of the [place] he had rented . . . He was pleased . . . it was large enough that he could invite me to stay . . . And he pointed out this little courtyard with grass, and fresh strawberries ready to pick, where June could play. And a screened porch entryway. And quite a large living room. And he was pleased with the furniture and with how the landlady said this was early New Orleans style. And Marina was definitely not as pleased as he had hoped. I think he felt—he wanted to please her. This showed in him.

  MR. JENNER. Tell us what she said. What led you to this conclusion?

  MRS. PAINE. She said it is dark, and it is not very clean. She thought the courtyard was nice, a grass spot where June could play, fenced in, but there was very little ventilation. We were immediately aware there were a lot of cockroaches.

  MR. JENNER. Was she aware of this and did she comment on that?

  MRS. PAINE. I don’t know as anything was said. He was pretty busy explaining. He was doing his best to get rid of them. But they didn’t subside. I remember noticing that he was tender and vulnerable on this point, when she arrived.

  MR. JENNER. He was tender?

  MRS. PAINE . . . . hoping for approval from her, which she didn’t give.2

  Priscilla Johnson McMillan remarks: “ . . . it occurred to Ruth that Lee might or might not care about Marina, but he certainly cared about her opinion.”3

  Indeed he did. In Russia he had promised that he would provide for them in America; he had not done too well. Now, he was hoping that she would love the new apartment. Once again, fresh hope for his marriage was corroded by the acid animosity of Marina’s equally deep but equally contrary heart.

  MRS. PAINE . . . . they argued most of that weekend. I was very uncomfortable in that situation, and he would tell her to shut up, tell her, “I said it, and that is all the discussion on the subject.”

  REPRESENTATIVE FORD. What were the kinds of discussions that prompted this?

  MRS. PAINE. I . . . I do recall feeling that the immediate things they were talking about were insufficient reason for that much feeling being passed back and forth, and I wondered if I wasn’t adding to the strain in the situation, and did my best to get back to Texas dir
ectly.4

  Ruth Paine had arrived on Saturday and was gone by Monday, and we can only surmise the inner range of her feelings. Thirty years later, Marina was asked by the interviewers whether she had ever suspected Lee of homosexual activity, and she replied that she had never seen evidence of it. Yet, it was also true of Marina that she wished to accommodate whoever was questioning her, and so after some thought, she remarked that when Ruth Paine had stayed over in New Orleans those two nights in May, Lee had been making love in a new way. With some embarrassment, Marina implied that he had mounted from the rear, an act which he had never initiated before, and at that moment, their door ajar, Ruth Paine had passed. Probably, thinks Marina, Ruth saw them. “Lee,” Marina recalled, “was not embarrassed at all,” and that to her now seemed some small evidence, perhaps, of homosexual behavior (as if his lack of dismay at being glimpsed in the act was not to be seen as natural heterosexual behavior.)

  In any event, it may have been uncomfortable for Ruth Paine.

  Perhaps it is time to describe her: She was tall, she was thin, she had a long narrow freckled face and was a converted Quaker. She and her husband, Michael, were devoted to madrigal singing and folk dancing. It had helped to bring them together.

  Ruth wore rimless glasses. She was serious. In the hundreds of pages of her testimony before the Warren Commission, there are not a great many humorous remarks. Much the same can be said of Michael Paine. A highly respected helicopter engineer, dry, tall, slim man, quite as serious as Ruth in his testimony—one does get a picture of two exceptionally decent people living under the curse of true gentry: They have been brought up to be so decent to others, so firm and uncompromising about not allowing the greedy little human animal within ever to speak, that one can almost hear strings snapping. Needless to say, it was not a happy marriage. They were respectful of each other, always respectful of each other, but their personal relations, by the time they encountered the Oswalds, had gone cold in the water.

  Marina had met Ruth Paine at a party in Dallas given the previous February by a geologist named Everett Glover. De Mohrenschildt, small surprise, had managed the meeting. This would later cause considerable suspicion of Ruth Paine until the nature of her careful open testimony, so responsible to the need for certifying, then fortifying, the smallest detail, made it evident that she could not possibly be an agent in American or Soviet intelligence: She had no instincts for prevarication. Indeed, we would have to put her up in lights as a great actress if the person she presented to the Warren Commission was no more than a role she was playing.

  The emotional facts she offered to explain the friendship were not complex. Ruth had responded to Marina as only a woman who loves her husband and is not loved in return would respond to an attractive waif of a girl who spoke no English inasmuch as her husband did not wish her to learn the language because then—so Marina explained—he might lose his Russian.

  Such sentiment was an outrage to Ruth. So was the pressure that Lee regularly put upon Marina to return alone to Russia. Michael Paine, whose attitude toward Lee and Marina was much the same as his wife’s, thought it was next door to a crime that Lee was actually serious about sending Marina back to the USSR:

  MR. PAINE . . . . I felt that he was keeping her a vassal and since I was more eager to hear her opinions of Russia than his opinions of Russia, I was eager that she should learn English, and when—Ruth told me that Marina thought she might have to go back to the Soviet Union, and I thought out of the largesse of this country it should be possible for her to stay here if she wanted to stay here, and she quite apparently did, she struck me as a somewhat apolitical person and yet true, just and conscientious . . . 5

  The Paines might not be living together, but they still thought as one. Ruth loved the Russian language, and had been studying it devotedly. She quickly concluded that if Marina lived with her in that husbandless house in Irving, Texas, where Ruth now dwelt with her children, it might be good for both women. Michael Paine agreed entirely: “ . . . it was agreeable to me to look forward to financing her stay until she could make her own way here.”6

  It is interesting that on April 7, three days before Lee would make his attempt on Walker, Ruth Paine, with considerable difficulty, wrote a long letter in Russian to Marina. From its tone, we can be certain that Marina had already confided many a private corner of her marriage to Ruth; and quite likely, given the secret agenda of such confessions (which is to clear the bile out of one’s system so that one can love again), Marina had probably painted a portrait of her relations with Lee that was even more miserable than the reality.

  Dear Marina,

  I want to invite you to move here and live with me both now and later when the baby is born. I don’t know how things are for you at home with your husband. I don’t know what would be better for you, June and Lee—to live together or apart. It is, of course, your affair, and you have to decide what is better and what you wish to do. But I want to say that you have a choice. When you wish, for days, weeks, months, you could move here. I have already thought about this invitation a lot. It is not a quick thought.

  It seems to me that it would be pleasant and useful for us both to live together. We can easily help one another. When you converse, it helps me. If you sometimes correct my mistakes in conversation or letters, I would be very happy. It is so helpful to me that I would consider it proper to buy all which we need from the grocery store, food, soap, etc. Lee would need to give you enough money to pay for clothes and medical expenses.

  You can get rest here such as you need during pregnancy. During the day it is quiet here, but not so quiet as at your place. You and June would be by yourselves in the room which fronts the street. There you would find privacy.

  Here, I think, it would not be difficult to learn English. From me and from my children, you would learn words.

  In the course of two weeks you could learn all I know about cooking. I’m bad at housecleaning. Perhaps you could help me with this a bit.

  I don’t want to hurt Lee. Of course I don’t know what he wants. Perhaps he feels like Michael, who at one time wants and doesn’t want to live with me. You know, you could live here workdays and return home weekends. You would only need to carry back and forth clothes, diapers, etc. The other things necessary for June and you are here all the time: beds, sheets, towels, a highchair for June, etc.

  Please think about this invitation and tell me (now or later) what you think. If you are interested . . . I want to write an official letter to you and Lee, and I want him to know all I have said to you. Where you and June live—that is of course a matter which touches him deeply. Therefore I want to speak directly with him about it.

  Your

  Ruth7

  It gives a turn in our sense of Ruth that, in fact, she never did send this letter. Her conscience debated whether one had a right, no matter one’s good intentions, to come between a husband and wife.

  Then, three weeks after she did not mail the letter, Lee was off to New Orleans. By mutual agreement of all, Paines and Oswalds, Marina and Lee vacated the Neely Street apartment, and Marina lived with Ruth in Irving, Texas, for the next two weeks and enjoyed it. Her life was tranquil, and Ruth respected her.

  Now, on Magazine Street, Ruth, passing their open doorway, catches a glimpse of husband and wife in the act, and Marina is evidently not as unhappy with Lee as she has pretended. Small surprise if Ruth leaves next day and, with her dutiful conscience, tries to hope for the best for both of them.

  4

  Love, Heat, and Grease

  McMillan: Marina made no secret of her interest in sex. At the newsstands, where they fairly often found themselves at night, she would pick out the most unwholesome-looking magazines she could find and pore over the photographs of nude men and women. Lee affected to be above it all . . . But more than once she spied him flicking through a girlie magazine.

  Aside from June . . . sex was again the brightest feature of their marriage. For all his Puritanism, Lee
enjoyed making love. After intercourse, he would go into the bathroom to wash off, emerge singing one of his arias, and lie down with his back to Marina.

  “Don’t touch me,” he would say. “And don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”

  There was a mirror at the foot of their bed, and Lee would pile up pillows at the head of the bed so he could watch them making love. Marina did not like it. She pulled the pillows down or turned her head away. She was hurt that the mirror seemed to excite Lee more than she did . . .

  “Who are you kissing me for—me or the mirror?”

  “You mean you don’t like it?”

  “Of course not,” she would answer, and give him a little rap on the rear end.1

  It was infuriating. Her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, was more stimulated by the sight of himself than by her. But then, Marina had not had a mother like Marguerite to keep telling her how wonderful she was. Since his interior often felt considerably less extraordinary than Marguerite’s description of him, he was naturally eager to encounter that other person, described as so wonderful by his mother—occasionally, the mirror would be kind enough to offer agreeable sights. What an attractive fellow!

  Sometimes, in the New Orleans heat, he could get sexy. “He liked to take this pose, that pose, in front of the mirror,” Marina said, “and then he would ask, ‘Don’t you think I’m gorgeous?’ He liked to walk naked. Never ashamed of his body. It was hot and, you know, he would strip everything and sit on the screened-in porch in the air. He just liked it.”

  And, of course, they fought. From the moment Ruth left, they fought even more. Ruth Paine had hardly been aware that they had been on their best behavior with her.