Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  Lee was shouting now. “I have a right to tell you what to do! I told you not to open the door!”

  “I will not obey.”

  “You will not open the door!”

  “I will, too.”

  He hit her four or five times across the face.

  One day, about a month later, Marina came home to find the parakeet gone. Lee had taken it outdoors and let it fly out of the cage.

  Despite her son’s hostility, Marguerite came to the apartment fairly often. On one visit she found Marina in the bedroom, nursing the baby with her head down. Eventually, she looked up, and Marguerite saw that she had a black eye.

  “Mama—Lee,” was all Marina was able to say.

  Marguerite strode out to the living room, where her son lay reading. “Lee, what do you mean by striking Marina?”

  “Mother, that is our affair,” he answered.

  Marguerite, on balance, agreed. “There may be times,” she remarked later, “that a woman needs a black eye.”16 Just as Lee had hit her when he was growing up, now he was hitting his wife. And Marguerite Oswald, as she had done then, condoned it.

  In fact, from the moment of Marguerite’s first visit to Mercedes Street, the beatings had become routine—once or twice a week. Typically, after Lee had beaten her, Marina would say: “Alka, I am not your maid. I am good enough not to have you hit me.” He, after an hour or two, would repent and beg Marina to forgive him. And the next day he would buy her caviar or a trinket for the baby.

  At the smallest sign that he valued her and the baby, Marina forgave him. She forgave and forgot, until the next time. Their sexual relationship also began to deteriorate. Worn out by heavy physical work in hot weather, Lee did not want sex more than once a week or so, and Marina, dispirited at the turn things were taking, did not want sex much, either.

  Still, there were happy moments. Marina was grateful for the good times, fatalistic about the bad. Her stepfather, after all, had beaten her, and he had done it exactly as Lee did, with the flat of his hand, across her face. He, too, had had an icy, inhuman anger in his eyes. But he had hit her once, then stopped; Lee hit her again and again. Marina decided that it was God’s judgment on her for having been cruel to her mother.

  The beatings were a humiliation. They devalued Marina in her own eyes, and she feared that they would devalue her in the eyes of anyone who knew of them. Thus she tried to make light of them. She told herself, and later told others as well, that she had a fair skin that bruised easily and exaggerated the effect of every blow. If they suggested that she had brought the beatings on herself by talking too sharply to Lee when he was under strain, she agreed. In a way, Marina believed that she deserved to be beaten.

  She took the very Russian view that beatings are a private affair between man and wife, as private as sex. Still, she hoped that Robert might intervene, just as members of Russian families often did. But in this Robert disappointed her. He had dropped by to see them one day, and Marina, who had a black eye, lingered unobtrusively in the kitchen. But she thinks Robert saw her black eye. If he did, he chose to do, and say, nothing. Robert had suffered from Lee’s anger in the past, and whether he was loath to invoke his brother’s wrath again or was simply the nonintervening sort, he stayed out of Lee’s marital affairs. Any thoughts he may have had about his brother’s harshness to Marina, Robert kept to himself.

  But by this time Marina was no longer bereft. All her life she had been charming people, attracting them to her, and making them want to look out for her. Her charm had given her nine lives already: it was about to give her a tenth.

  — 15 —

  The Émigrés

  AROUND THE MIDDLE of August, young Paul Gregory returned from his summer trip to San Francisco. Eager to improve his Russian, he started showing up twice a week in the late afternoons or evenings for Russian lessons with Marina. His visits quickly became a pleasure and a resource to both the Oswalds.

  At twenty-one, Paul Gregory was a year and a half younger than Lee and a full-time college student.1 Lee may have envied him, for he was out on the evening Paul arrived for his first lesson and returned home brandishing a catalogue of night courses he said he hoped to attend at Texas Christian University. Other evenings, too, Lee used to come home late, laden with books from the public library. He said he wanted to go to college, to Texas Christian or Arlington State, and get a degree in history, philosophy, or economics. Both Lee and Paul had attended the same high school, Arlington Heights in Fort Worth. Lee implied that he had graduated, when, in fact, he had been there only a few weeks in the tenth grade. The barrier to a college education for him, Lee suggested, was the need to support his family. But both in the United States and in Russia, where Lee also had to work, he appears to have lacked motivation to study at night to obtain first a high school and then a college degree.

  When Lee was out, Paul’s “lessons” consisted largely of Russian conversations with Marina, during which she told him all about how she met Lee and their courtship in Minsk. Paul got the impression that she had been a rebel and a nonconformist, and that this was one of the main reasons for her early interest in Lee. Marina also corrected Paul’s grammar in an essay he was writing on a play called Man with a Gun, by Nikolai Pogodin. She and Paul huddled together over the dining room table while Lee sat reading Lenin on the sofa. When all three of them spoke Russian together, Paul noticed that Lee’s Russian, while fluent, was “very ungrammatical” and that he spoke with “a very strong accent.” When Marina corrected his errors, “he would get peeved at her. He would wave his hand and say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ ” But according to Paul, he was able to “express any idea he wanted to in Russian.”

  Inevitably, they talked about politics, and as far as Paul could tell, Lee thought the world’s troubles were caused not by “the people,” but by leaders. When it came to specific leaders, however, he did not seem to harbor grudges. He expressed no hostility toward any of them. He was enthusiastic about Castro, and, remarkably, continued to respect Paul in spite of their differences over Cuba. As for Khrushchev, Lee described him as “simply brilliant.” He was “rough” and “crude,” but “you cannot read a speech of his without liking the man.” He also liked John F. Kennedy. On their living room table, the Oswalds kept, more or less permanently, a copy of Life magazine with a cover photo of the president. Marina pointed at it once and said, “He looks like a nice young man.” Lee added that Kennedy was “a good leader.”

  One evening as they were all leaving the house together, Paul got a glimpse of how Lee often treated Marina. She fell off the steps, and she and the baby sprawled on the ground. The baby began to cry, and Paul thought Marina had hurt her back. But Lee did not even notice her. He rushed over and picked up the baby, furious at Marina for allowing his baby to fall. Marina thought he was going to kill her. It was “a real hot moment,” Paul recalls, but husband and wife ran indoors, consulted a Russian book on baby care, and together applied a Band-Aid to Junie’s head.

  In sum, Paul considered Lee “hot tempered, not very smart, and slightly mixed up.” He was “a small person” who was “always ready to flare up.” In his normal conversations with Marina, he “would always shout.” Paul thought that Lee had an “inability to grasp things.” And yet he could not say that he “disliked” Lee. “I enjoyed being with him,” although “I enjoyed Marina more. She was a very pleasant person, very pleasant to be with, interesting.”

  On Friday nights Paul used to take them shopping in his car. They would go to Leonard’s department store, noted for its low prices, to buy groceries. Paul was amazed at how little the Oswalds bought. Lee always haggled over the meat, to be sure they got “the cheapest possible cut.” They were, in fact, getting by on very little. They did without milk because Marina was nursing the baby, and they had fashioned a crib by putting two chairs together between their bed and the wall. True, the baby once fell into the crack between the chairs, but Lee wanted to save money more than he wanted to buy a crib. Marina says
that he treated his financial obligations to Robert and the Department of State, which he was not under pressure to repay quickly, as “a holy debt.” During the month of August, for example, when he netted about $200, Lee spent two-thirds on living expenses and nearly one-third in partial payment of his debts.

  It never entered Marina’s head that her husband was penurious. From her excursions to Montgomery Ward, she knew that all kinds of things such as nice dresses, cribs, and playpens existed. But it did not occur to her to want them. And when Paul Gregory, shortly before leaving for college, handed her a check for $35, she was overwhelmed. She had never in all her life had so much money. She felt that she did not deserve it. She suspected that the Gregorys, father and son, simply wanted to help her and, rather than offend by giving her money, had devised the pretext of the lessons. Marina knew what she wanted to do with it. She went across the street to Montgomery Ward and bought a pair of shoes for herself ($3.98) and for Alka green work pants, two flannel shirts, and another pair of shoes ($11).

  Marina was right, the Gregorys did want to help. Peter Gregory, Paul’s father, had been in the Oswalds’ apartment, and the sight of it evoked his sympathy. He found the living room “practically bare … and the rest of the house was the same way.”2 During his visit Gregory suggested that Marina start to study English. Lee would have none of it. He did not want Marina to learn English, he said, lest he lose his own fluency in Russian. To Gregory, Oswald’s answer signified that he cared nothing for his wife, only for himself. But Gregory was a fair man, and slow to judge.

  Meanwhile, news of the Oswalds’ arrival had spread like a prairie fire among the twenty-five or thirty Russian émigré families in Dallas and Fort Worth. Into that landscape of freeways and flat red earth, of live oak trees and wide Texas sky had come, a decade earlier, fifty or sixty refugees from various parts of Eastern Europe. Some were Russians, a handful were Poles or Rumanians, the rest were from the fringes of the Soviet Union: Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians. Displaced or uprooted during World War II, every one of them had preferred anything, any fate at all, over a return to the countries or territories dominated by Communism. Eventually, after years of hardship and uncertainty, they had made their way to the United States. A few of the women had married American soldiers in West Germany; the rest came by other routes. But the point was that they had arrived, they were on American soil, and the Russians would never lay hands on them again.

  Some of the men were lucky. They had geology or engineering in their backgrounds and were able to find jobs in what was then the major industry of the Dallas–Fort Worth area—oil. The others, many of them men and women of some education who would have had fine professional careers back home, had to settle for such jobs as they could find. But before they could even do this, they had a major obstacle to overcome. Most of them had arrived in the United States unable to speak a word of English.

  It was at this point that George Bouhe stepped into the lives of many of the émigrés. Bouhe, who had grown up in St. Petersburg as a member of the educated middle class of czarist Russia, had been living in the United States since 1924, and in Dallas since 1939. A lively, inquiring man of fifty-eight, he had become the trusted personal accountant of one of the most powerful men in Dallas, Lewis W. MacNaughton, chairman of the board of the huge and immensely wealthy geological and engineering firm of DeGolyer and MacNaughton.

  Bouhe knew very well that it was impossible to get by in America without speaking English. He had personally taken several of the émigrés “by the hand” and led them to Crozier Technical High School, where they learned the rudiments of the language. He had helped them in other ways, too, and over the years he had become the patriarch of the Russian émigré community.

  In spite of the hardships that lay behind them, the émigrés had made a remarkable adjustment to Texas life and to what must, to them, have been a totally incongruous world of suburbs, supermarkets, and air-conditioned ranch houses. They were tearfully grateful to the United States, the country that gave them life when they had lost it. But in one sense, the political sense, the section of the country to which they had gravitated was not incongruous at all. It could hardly have been more congenial. For this was deep anti-Communist country, and the émigrés, with an exception or two, were virulent anti-Communists. For them it had not been a case of arriving in the Southwest, then adapting to its extreme political conservatism. They were conservatives when they came and would have remained so anywhere on earth. The political climate of Texas may actually have helped them adjust to American life. It was certainly a feature of the country that they liked.

  It was an extraordinary community. Nearly all its members were generous, outgoing, and warm. Because they had suffered so much themselves, they could not see another person suffer without doing what they could to help. While they embraced wholeheartedly the American ethos of individualism and hard work, they had also kept the values they brought over from Eastern Europe: the spirit of community, of sharing, of the responsibility of each for all. And they were curious about the country they had left behind. When word got around of the Oswalds’ arrival, many of the émigrés were curious to meet them, especially Marina, a member of the younger Soviet generation, with whom none of them had had any contact.

  The Gregorys decided to introduce the Oswalds to two members of the émigré community. Marina and Lee were invited to a dinner party on Saturday, August 25, at the Gregorys’ home in Fort Worth. There they met Anna Meller, forty-five years old, a large and dramatically handsome blonde from Belgorod, southern Russia, who had been living in the United States since 1952. She had driven over from her home in Dallas with the Gregorys’ other guest, George Bouhe.

  Bouhe was a bachelor, or a grass widower, with time and sympathy to spare. But he was also cautious. He looked and listened before he leaped. He was eager to attend the dinner party and hear about conditions in his homeland, but he all but burned up the telephone wires between Dallas and Fort Worth before accepting the Gregorys’ invitation. Was it prudent to meet Oswald? Was there a danger that this defector, who had accomplished the supposedly impossible feat of leaving the Soviet Union and bringing a Russian wife with him, might turn out to be a Soviet spy?

  The man to whom he directed these questions was Max Clark, the Fort Worth lawyer whose wife had had a brief and abrasive contact with Oswald shortly after he arrived in Texas. By virtue of the respect in which he was held in Fort Worth and his marriage to a member of the princely Shcherbatov family (the family that Leo Tolstoy rechristened “Shcherbatsky” and used as models of the Moscow nobility in Anna Karenina), Clark was like a highly placed in-law to all the Russians. He and his wife Gali stood at the very apex of the émigré community, maybe a touch above it, and were often called upon as arbiters of its frequent clashes of politics and personalities. Moreover, Clark, as a lawyer for General Dynamics, was thought to have dealings with the FBI. Did the FBI have anything against Oswald? That was what Bouhe wanted to know. If so, Bouhe, who was as anti-Soviet as was humanly possible, and a super-patriot for Texas besides, wanted nothing to do with him.

  Clark spoke from common sense and experience only. He did not work for the FBI, nor had he talked with anyone in the FBI about Oswald. But he could see no risk in meeting the man. Doubtless, Oswald was under FBI surveillance and would not be back in this country if he were thought to present any danger. Thus assured, Bouhe accepted the Gregorys’ invitation.

  From a social standpoint it was the Oswalds’ finest hour. No one who was there that evening has forgotten the picture they presented as they came in: Lee, immaculate in jacket, tie, and a white shirt with French cuffs, and Marina, his pretty, frail-looking wife, holding their baby daughter in her arms. Everyone was aware that Lee was a poor man, and they were impressed at his being so meticulously dressed. They were impressed, too, by his quiet manner and his grave, courteous air. They were prepared to respect him as a man who had taken the Soviet Union seriously enough to
go and see it, yet was sensible enough to come back. And they were impressed by his affection for his baby, whom he held all evening on his lap.

  But Marina was the real sensation. Not only did she appear a childlike, innocent waif, but her use of Russian—and Russians tend to judge other Russians by the way they speak the mother tongue—was very cultivated. Bouhe immediately surmised that Marina had been well brought up, that she had “received good care from some person of the Old Regime,” someone “religious, well-mannered and such.”3 His good impression was in no way diminished when Marina told him that she had indeed been taught to speak Russian by her grandmother, who had also taught her to be religious.

  The Russians were surprised. They expected Marina, as a member of a generation that grew up long after they left the country, to be what they thought of as “Soviet”: sturdy and purposeful; literal, direct, and not very well educated; self-consciously “proletarian,” with scorn for good manners and good speech. In every one of their expectations they were confounded. Marina was tiny and thin. She chain-smoked and drank a little wine. She was well mannered, and above all, she spoke that pure Leningrad Russian, innocent of jargon or slang, that to them bespoke intelligence and education. She was like a fragile fossil, a relic of their old and much-loved homeland, that had suddenly been dug out of the Russian earth.

  Marina was equally intrigued. To her, meeting these people was like seeing the characters in the plays of Chekhov and the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy come to life. If they were sizing her up, she was doing the same. “At first,” she said to herself of one of the women, “you’d think she was from a good background—but only at first. Peter Gregory does not speak a very pure Russian. He must have come ‘up’ from somewhere. Bouhe—he’s from the Old Intelligentsia.” In manner and speech Bouhe reminded Marina of her beloved aunt, Maria Yakovlevna, and she liked him right away. She liked him even better when he told her, in a way that probed and divined her thoughts, that he did not work for any intelligence service and she could therefore speak to him frankly.