Bouhe had brought with him a huge album with maps of St. Petersburg from 1710 to 1914. This he spread out on the floor and, inviting Marina to join him there, peppered her with questions about whether this or that old school, church, or outdoor market was still standing. Marina felt that she was being examined, and not only for her intelligence. She was from a district in which members of the working class and the new Soviet intelligentsia lived, whereas Bouhe was asking about the heart of Old St. Petersburg, where the aristocracy used to live, and where descendants of the Old Intelligentsia, of people like Bouhe himself, were still living. Marina thought he was an aristocrat, and because she was not she felt anxious and self-conscious. She wondered what these people would think of her when they found out where she really came from.
If it was a test, Marina passed it, for Bouhe liked her very much. He felt stirrings of protectiveness toward her, the beginnings of what was to become a father-daughter relationship.4 As for Lee, everyone tiptoed around the question in all their minds: Why, having defected to Russia, did he decide to come back? They guessed that his decision signified failure, if only the failure of having to admit that he had been wrong, then leaned over backward not to embarrass him. The venturesome Bouhe teetered up to it, indeed, by praising people with the courage and good sense to change their minds. At this he felt Lee bristle and draw away.
Politics was touchy for them all, for no one was certain whether or not Oswald had renounced his Communist proclivities. The émigrés asked many questions about living conditions, prices, wages; about the smaller freedoms and how life had changed in little ways. And in Lee’s answers they took soundings as to where he really stood. Some of those present considered him a trifle quick to protest the virtues of the USSR They sensed in him a trace of the nashi luchshe mentality, a special Soviet attitude that “ours is better,” that anything Soviet—a head of cabbage, a pair of shoes, life in general—is better than its counterpart anywhere else simply because it is Soviet. It was only a feeling, of course. But there was no doubt in the mind of anybody there that, of the two, Marina was far more critical of Russia. They agreed with her, and they liked her for it.
By the end of the evening, the verdict on her was favorable. As for him, they found him well mannered but cold. He was, in any case, much better than the émigrés expected of a man who had once been fool enough to defect to Soviet Russia.
Lee had his own feelings about the party. Marina sensed in him that grudging edge of ungraciousness that told her he was doing it for her, so she could meet her countrymen—it was not an evening he would go through for himself alone. In fact, a failure of sympathy between Lee and the émigrés appears to have had its origins that night. In Russia Lee had grown accustomed to being asked about conditions in America, and he expected to be asked similar questions here. But in his heart of hearts he was scornful of people who appeared to be interested mostly in money and material things. In his scheme of things, they were “bourgeois.” Besides, he wanted to talk about bigger things, about political differences between Russia and America, about Castro, Khrushchev, and de-Stalinization. But the émigrés had politely avoided such discussions.
In Minsk Lee had been able to condescend. He was no better educated than his listeners, but he had spent his life outside Russia, and they were eager to hear anything he had to say. Here it was the reverse. The émigrés were better educated, more widely traveled, and more experienced than he was. Apart from information about wages and prices, he did not have much to tell them—that they wanted to hear, anyway. They sized him up as a half-educated American boy, and they would have considered his Marxist views gauche—if he still held them. To them such opinions were painfully naïve. Besides, the émigrés were encrusted with good manners. Evenings such as this were a time for polite feeling out, not open confrontation. They wanted no offense to anyone’s feelings—his or hers.
The evening was a turning point for Lee and Marina. It might be supposed that Lee would have a rough go in Texas. There he was, a former defector to Russia, in an anti-Communist corner of the United States, encumbered by a Soviet wife and an undesirable discharge from the US Marines. Surely he would meet hostility everywhere, have trouble finding work, and suffer one rejection after another until he became hopeless and embittered. The reality was altogether different. Because of his meeting with the Russians, especially George Bouhe, Lee’s homecoming was warmer and more welcoming than anyone might have supposed. The Russians were to be extraordinarily kind to him. They would surround him and his wife with concern. They would place at his service a flourishing grapevine and see to it that he found a job he liked. They helped Lee as much, and as long, as he would allow—and as they could stand.
In Russia Lee Oswald had been a guest, the Russian people his hosts, and he was given the full measure of that country’s magnificent hospitality. Incredibly, the same thing was now to happen again—and in his own corner of his native Texas. For no other reason than the breadth and generosity of the Russian soul, Oswald was once again to be treated, in his own country, as if he were the guest and this handful of émigrés, some of them hardly any better off than he, the hosts. Far from encountering hostility and rejection because of his past, he was accepted more readily than if he had never been to Russia at all.
The evening was a turning point for the Oswalds in another way as well. Their marriage had been undergoing a sea change from the moment they stepped aboard the Maasdam. The encounter with the émigrés helped crystallize that change, and the relationship between Lee and Marina was never to be the same again.
— 16 —
Ingratitude
After the dinner party at the Gregorys’, George Bouhe and Anna Meller drove to Fort Worth nearly every weekend to see the Oswalds. They noticed immediately that the refrigerator was bare, that Marina and the baby looked ill-fed and ill-clothed, and that the baby was sleeping in a bureau drawer. They appealed to all their friends for hand-me-downs and gave them to the Oswalds. They noticed, too, that Marina’s front teeth were rotting, and they drove all the Oswalds to see Mrs. Elena (“Lyolya”) Hall, a Russian émigré who lived in Fort Worth and worked as a dental technician. Mrs. Hall told them where they could obtain low-cost dental care, and she also started soliciting her friends and her employer’s wife for money and clothes for the Oswalds. One day, during her lunch hour, she took Marina shopping and bought her a couple of dresses. Bouhe and Mrs. Meller, meanwhile, decided that Marina needed training as an American housewife, and they took her to a supermarket to show her the way around.
On Sunday, September 9, using $5 given them by George Bouhe, the three Oswalds took a bus to Dallas. Bouhe met them and drove them to the apartment of Anna Meller and her husband, Teofil, where they had lunch and spent the afternoon. They were joined by Declan and Katya Ford, an American geologist and his Russian wife, and by their baby, Gregory. The Oswalds had brought photographs of themselves and their friends in Minsk, and there was talk about how people lived there.
Lee liked Katya Ford, a dark-complexioned, down-to-earth woman in her early thirties. At first, she was impressed by him, too, especially when with utmost politeness he insisted at the end of the afternoon on carrying her baby’s paraphernalia to the car. As for her husband, Declan Ford, he felt “like a piece of air whom Oswald was looking around.”1 The Fords were struck, as people often were, by Lee’s eyes. He looked at you with a steady, wide-open stare. He never seemed to blink, but from time to time it was as if clouds moved across his eyes and the expression in them changed.
The afternoon contained an eye-opener for George Bouhe. As tactfully as he could, he asked Lee whether the bus fare he had given him had been sufficient. “Oh, yes,” Lee answered. But he offered no thanks and no change.
Bouhe and Mrs. Meller continued to visit the Oswalds’ Mercedes Street apartment, and on one occasion Lee’s ingratitude became even more apparent. Bouhe brought him a pair of old shirts, and Lee looked at them appraisingly, measuring and remeasuring them. Bouhe sugg
ested that he wear them a few times to work, then throw them away. Lee folded the shirts and handed them back to Bouhe. “I don’t need them,” he said.
One day Lee came in while Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were at the apartment, peered into the refrigerator, noted that it was full, and asked where the groceries came from. When Marina said they were from Bouhe, Lee was openly displeased. Indeed, he looked displeased so much of the time, and maintained such an air of disapproving quiet, that Bouhe and Mrs. Meller rather quickly learned to come at three in the afternoon on Saturdays, their free day, and stay only an hour or so in hopes of missing Lee, who returned home from work about five.
Bouhe soon realized that Lee resented being helped. It was Marina, of course, who bore the brunt of his resentment. After every visit he pointed to some item that Bouhe or Mrs. Meller had brought and warned her: “They’ll want payment for that.”
When Marina asked what sort of payment, he replied: “You watch. They’ll make you dependent on them.”
Lee could not conceive that anyone might be generous and kind-hearted without any ulterior aim. In his view Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were helping Marina to humiliate him. “It’s not that I don’t want to buy you things,” he told her in one angry session, “but I can’t. I haven’t any money to spare.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “You can’t right now. So what’s wrong with accepting their help? They only do it to be kind.”
“I can’t let them buy my wife. Besides, they’re spoiling you.”
“Since you can’t spoil me,” Marina said, “why shouldn’t they?”
He hit her, hard, across the cheek. “Don’t ever say that again.”
“What did I say wrong?”
“I’ll be the one to spoil you—when I can. I don’t want you depending on other people any more. You chase after anyone who’ll spoil you.”
The beatings, which began on a regular basis when Marina opened the door to Lee’s mother, now continued because of her friendship with the Russians. He reproached her constantly, accused her of “never supporting” him, complained that her friendship with other people was itself a “betrayal.” Yet, curiously, he did not forbid her to see them. Nor did he tell them to stop bringing gifts.
Marina was in a quandary. Just as she had been as a child with her mother and stepfather, she felt again that she was “between two fires,” too torn to steer a tactful middle course. But she would not give up her new friends any more than she would give up Lee. She was grateful for their kindness. She felt lucky to have found in George Bouhe an older man who was good to her, whom she trusted, and with whom she could be utterly frank.
During one visit Bouhe noticed that Marina had a black eye. “Did you run into the bathroom door?” he inquired sympathetically. That was what she had told Anna Meller.
“Oh, no,” Marina answered matter-of-factly. “Lee hit me.”
Bouhe was shocked. “Can it be,” he asked himself, “that a civilized man in this day and age would hit his wife?”
Bit by bit the Russians woke up to the reality of Lee’s treatment of Marina. They were indignant. And the more they saw of it, the more indignant they became. They sensed Lee’s contempt for them, his feeling that they were people of petty, material interests, whereas he cared for higher things. They saw, too, that he had by no means given up his romance with the Soviet Union and with Communist ideas. They spotted volumes by Lenin and Marx on the Oswalds’ coffee table and current Soviet magazines that they knew he could ill afford. There was something in Lee’s attitude, moreover, that led them to believe that he hated anyone in a position of authority simply because he wanted to be there himself. They joked in their Russian idiom—to them it was a joke—that he wanted to be “at the top” and “a big wheel.” He was not really for anything. He was, Mrs. Meller later said, “all anti, anti- the Soviet Union, anti- the United States, anti- society in general and anti- us.”2
They went on helping, nevertheless, but it was Marina and the baby they tried to help, not Lee. Bouhe saw storm signals in the marriage, and he gave Marina some advice: “If you are a brave girl, if I were you, I would prepare to stand on my own feet before long. But before you start anything, you have to speak English.”3 He asked if Lee would object if he tried to teach her. “Let’s try,” Marina said, and they did. Bouhe gave her a first-rate dictionary compiled by Russian émigrés in the United States during World War II as a guide for American officers. He wrote out a few sentences in Russian; under each sentence she was to write a translation and mail the result to him in Dallas. Each week Marina mailed Bouhe a lesson, and he mailed it back, corrected and with a new lesson. This went on for five or six weeks until Marina gave up, largely because she felt that Lee did not approve.
Other men besides Lee might have resented the Russians’ help. It was said that Bouhe, who had been an accountant all his life, had a way of making some people feel accountable for his acts of kindness. He was free with his advice, exhorting Lee to get an education and lift himself up by his bootstraps. As Bouhe said later, “I think he began to hate me very early.”4
Lee felt the Russians were bending his priorities. They thought that he ought to take better care of his wife and child, that he ought to feed them and clothe them better. Lee, on the other hand, wanted to spend as little on his family as he could and save the rest to pay off his debts. What the Russians took to be necessities, he considered luxuries, and he resented having to thank them for presents that he did not want and that he thought his family did not need. Thus, when the Russians brought a crib and mattress for June, he accepted it. But when Bouhe and Mrs. Meller drove up a week later with a playpen, he was furious. “I don’t need it,” he said and condescended only with reluctance and an air of affront to help unload it from the car.
In reality Lee was accepting the Russians’ help, and in his own backhanded, ungracious manner, he even encouraged it. On September 22, at Lee’s request, Robert Oswald cosigned an application by Lee for a charge account at Montgomery Ward. His first purchase was a surprise—a television set. He told Marina that he had bought it to keep her from being lonely, and that weekend they had an orgy of television watching. But on Monday Lee took the set back to the store. The Russians, he said, would be critical: they would think the Oswalds were “playing poor to get help, yet all the time they could afford a TV.”
Lee had decided to continue “playing poor.” Evidently, he did feel accountable to the Russians. Moreover, he was always especially kind to Marina just before any visit from them so she would not tell them he beat her. Yet he did have a choice. He could have refused to see the Russians, or he could have consented to see them but refused to take any more help. Instead, he sank back into his familiar dependent stance: that of accepting help and even feeling entitled to it but at the same time disguising the fact that he was taking help by acting churlish toward those who gave it. What the Russians saw was his erect posture, the swagger of independence, the stiff arm that kept everybody at a distance and seemed to be saying, “Don’t help me—I don’t need it.” What they did not see at first, and what some never noticed at all, was the position of the other arm. The elbow was bent, the hand slightly outstretched, and with it Lee Oswald was taking all the help that came his way. Had he been halfway gracious, he could have had a great deal more.
The hectic Sunday of October 7 tells the story. The first to arrive that day was Marguerite Oswald, who, while still unwelcome at her son’s house, nevertheless dropped in from time to time. Next were Gary and Alexandra Taylor, a young couple who arrived from Dallas about four in the afternoon, bringing their baby son. Alexandra Taylor was the daughter of George de Mohrenschildt, an émigré in Dallas who had met the Oswalds about three weeks before. Apparently, Alexandra, too, had met Marina, but it was her husband’s first encounter with the Oswalds. The Taylors put their eight-month-old son in the playpen with Junie, who was five days younger than he. There, with varying degrees of inattention and apprehension, their mothers kept an eye on them for the rest
of the afternoon.
Gary Taylor later observed that Lee’s mother was “a plump woman, out of place in the crowd that was there that afternoon,”5 who did not seem very interested in what was going on and who left about 4:30. She was not to see her son again for more than a year.
The “crowd” that had gathered included George Bouhe and Anna Meller, and Lyolya Hall and her estranged husband John, who was also meeting the Oswalds for the first time. As usual, there was no food or drink; the Oswalds’ was simply a meeting place. But there was a lot of talk, and most of it was Russian.
At some point that afternoon, Lee announced that he had lost his job. Saturday had been his last day at work. It was “seasonal” work, he said, and he had been laid off. He had no other job in view, and his rent was overdue. In spite of their feelings about Lee, the Russians were ready to help. Since Dallas was bigger than Fort Worth, they thought Lee would have a better chance of finding work there, and John Hall, together with George Bouhe and Gary Taylor, worked out a plan to help Lee move and look for a job. It was decided that Marina, who had a dental appointment the next day in Dallas, would leave that night with the Taylors, stay there two or three days, then return to Fort Worth and stay with Lyolya Hall until Lee had a job in Dallas.
Lee did not object, and that evening, after most of the visitors had left, Marina and the baby drove with the Taylors to Dallas. The next evening Robert Oswald joined his brother at Mercedes Street and helped him pace his bigger belongings. John and Lyolya Hall then arrived, loaded the Oswalds’ possessions into a pickup truck belonging to the Patterson Porcelain Laboratory, where Mrs. Hall worked, and stored them in the Halls’ garage. On the night of Monday, October 8, Lee took the bus to Dallas.
Marina and Lee Page 32
