He got up, protesting as he did so that he refused to get up until she forgave him. Both of them were in tears.
“My little fool,” she said.
“You’re my fool, too,” he said.
Suddenly, Lee was all smiles. He covered the baby with kisses and said to her: “We’re all three going to live together again. Mama’s not going to take Junie away from Papa any more.”
After supper Frank Ray drove the three of them back to Elsbeth Street.
Greatly relieved, Lee wrote his brother that very night: they would be happy to come for Thanksgiving.11 He had engineered the reconciliation in the nick of time—Thanksgiving was only four days away.
The Russians were furious. Even Katya Ford said to Marina: “You mean you took advantage of all your friends just to teach Lee a lesson?” Still, they had qualms about consigning her completely to the tender mercies of her husband, and among themselves they discussed what they ought to do next. But one thing was clear: Bouhe had had it. “George,” he said to de Mohrenschildt, “I cannot go on. This guy is nuts, and we are going to have trouble.”
“Oh, come on,” George said. “You’re too critical. You’re a snob. Just because he didn’t come from St. Petersburg, you drop them like a hot cake. They are nice young people.”
“All right, George,” said Bouhe. “You carry the ball.”
Which is precisely what happened. After that the Russians, with the exception of the de Mohrenschildts, saw very little of the Oswalds. Nevertheless, there were bulletins from the battlefront. “They’re off, they’re on, he’s beating her, they’ve broken up”—so it went.13 One day the de Mohrenschildts seemed to favor separation, while the next they favored reconciliation. Rumors about the Oswalds flew all the way to Fort Worth, where Max Clark heard that de Mohrenschildt “got hold of Oswald and threatened him—picked him up by his shirt and shook him like a dog and told him he would really work him over if he ever laid another hand” on Marina.14
A still more colorful story concerned the scene of reconciliation at the Rays’. No sooner had the couple made up, the story went, than Lee plucked the cigarette from his wife’s lips and snuffed it out on her shoulder. The Russians recalled that in the early days of the Bolshevik régime, officers of the Cheka, as the secret police were called, used to extinguish a cigarette on human flesh when they were trying to break a prisoner. Marina denies that her husband did any such thing to her ever. But the Russians believed that he did—stunning testimony as to how they felt about Oswald.
Distracted by the sounds of battle and utterly repelled by Lee’s violence, the Russians, with the exception of Katya Ford, misunderstood the heart of the relationship between Marina and Lee, which was founded on a mutual willingness, indeed a mutual need, to inflict and accept pain. They were deeply and reciprocally dependent. The Russians were puzzled and angered by Marina’s decision to return to her husband because they misunderstood her motive for marrying him in the first place. They thought she had married him to come to the United States, and far from considering such a motive reprehensible, they approved and respected it. Several of the women among the émigré group had done the same. Having come to the United States, they had tried their best to make their marriages work; if they had divorced, it was only because the marriage was impossible. But not one of them would have stayed five minutes in Marina’s marriage. They underestimated the strength of the tie that bound her to Lee.
Marina had married Lee not to come to America, but because he was an American. His choice of her had bolstered her self-esteem and confirmed her feeling that she was special. Marriage to an American gave her a way of expressing her rebelliousness and her lack of conformity to Russian ways. Once she was in the marriage, however, Marina’s motives for staying in it were deep indeed. Language, the question of whether or not Marina would learn English, tells a good deal of the story. It is virtually a paradigm of their marriage. Marina was quick. She could easily have learned English if she had wanted to. And yet after only a few weeks she gave up her lessons with Bouhe. The de Mohrenschildts gave her a small Victrola with some language records, and she never used them. She abandoned any effort to learn English because Lee did not want her to, and she was afraid of him. Moreover, she sensed that he wanted her to be dependent on him, and she was content to leave it that way. Dependence and low self-esteem had carried her into the marriage, and together with a willingness to suffer, they were enough to make her stay.
As for Lee, he wanted Marina dependent on him because it enhanced his control over her. He even wanted control over every penny she spent. He did not allow her to buy groceries, and he no longer took her to the grocery store with him. Instead, he had her make out a shopping list and bought everything himself. Lee wanted control not only over their money but absolutely over Marina herself. For him there was no in-between: either he controlled everything or he controlled nothing at all.
Lee was right in one thing. His control over Marina was precarious. She had entertained telephone calls from her old boyfriends most of the time they had lived in Minsk. Even in the United States she had only to meet a handful of her compatriots and they were willing to rush to her rescue. As Lee looked at it, if Marina mastered English, her life might become one long escape hatch from him. She would have neighbors to appeal to; she would have friends; she might even meet other men. His control over her would be jeopardized, and he might easily lose her. Indeed, he had nearly lost her to her Russian friends already.
Lee had other reasons for keeping Marina from learning English. He truly did want to keep his command of Russian. Even in Minsk before coming to the United States, he had in the back of his mind the idea that he might return to live in Russia, and he wanted to keep his Russian for that. Moreover, knowing Russian gave him a reputation for being intelligent, and that helped make up for the profound feeling, stemming from his reading disability, that his intelligence did not receive its due.
Finally, apart from his desire to control all circumstances of his existence, including his wife, he needed to keep Marina ludicrously, outlandishly dependent on him to mask the fact that he was deeply and humiliatingly dependent on her. Indeed, in the view of those who knew them best, Marina, not Lee, was the fulcrum of their marriage. Dependent as they both were emotionally, he seems to have been even more dependent on her than she was on him. He was exasperated by the fact that for the second time in his life he found himself dependent on a woman. And at times it made him so angry that he was driven to strip Marina not only of autonomy in the matter of language but, by his beatings, of any sense that she was a human being at all. The beatings, in turn, depressed her and made her even less capable of breaking away from him than she had been before.
Dependence was, indeed, the glue of the Oswalds’ marriage, and it held them together to the very end. But in the meantime Marina had temporized and had lost her advantage. She had lingered with her Russians to gain leverage and make her life more bearable with Lee. But typically, she had lost more than she had gained, for she had now relinquished their support. Even the de Mohrenschildts, who were the most sympathetic to the marriage, were “disgusted” when she failed to make a real separation of it and stay away two or three months. “We wasted the whole day,” Jeanne says. “So much aggravation, and then she dropped the whole thing. So why bother, you know?”15 As for her truest friends, Bouhe, Mrs. Meller, and the others who had been willing to open their homes to her, they were no longer standing by for the rescue. They had offered her a way out, they had given her her chance—and she lost it. Lee had her in his power once again.
At first, after their reconciliation, Marina and Lee were like children together, and like children they had a good time. Grinning, holding aloft a cup of cocoa in one hand and a doughnut in the other, Lee did the twist in the kitchen a night or so after her return. “Come dance with me,” he said. “I can do it without spilling.” Marina declined out of fear of looking ridiculous.
Every night he took her walking and bought
her doughnuts and coffee. He escorted her to a bowling alley down the street and suggested that he teach her to bowl. Again she declined, this time because the balls were too heavy. He played “Moscow Evenings” on the jukebox while they watched others bowl, and he crooned the words to her in Russian. “No one but us here speaks Russian,” he said, well pleased with himself.
For a few days he approved nearly everything she did. Fired by a new spirit of independence, Marina refused to draw his bath. It was three days before he objected. “Do you think you’re a prince?” she told him. “You always complain, anyway. First I make it too hot, then I make it too cold. Jeanne doesn’t draw George’s bath.”
And that was that. Except for a few occasions when she felt like “spoiling” him, Marina never drew his bath again.
Thanksgiving fell on Thursday, November 22. They went to the bus station that morning. They had to wait, so the three of them squeezed into a booth and had themselves photographed.
“In real life you’re not bad to look at,” he said, examining the result, “but you take a terrible picture. You’ve no idea how to pose.”
Marina responded with a criticism of his hair. He had had it cut short in back and long on top in imitation of his brother Robert.
“You don’t like my haircut?” he asked.
“On Robert it’s fine,” she said, “but on you it’s no good at all. You look like a squashed frog.”
He laughed.
Still staring at the picture, she added: “Anyone can see you ran away from Russia. You look frightened to death.”
Again he laughed, and then he played the title song from the movie Exodus four or five times on the jukebox.
Robert Oswald and John Pic met them at the Greyhound station in Fort Worth. John was now an air force sergeant stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and he, his wife, and his children were staying with Robert for the holidays. It was the first meeting of the three brothers since Lee’s childhood and the only time they would all be together with their wives and children. Marguerite Oswald, mother of all three boys, their opposing object and unifying force, was not present that day. None of them wanted her.
All of Lee’s life, John had expected “some great tragedy to strike” his youngest brother. Now that Lee had defected to Russia and come back, John supposed that he had had his tragedy and was curious to see how he had come out of it. John found his brother thinner and balder than he expected, with eyes somewhat sunk in his head. John was slightly bemused. He had not really talked to him since that day ten years before in New York City when Lee, who was then only twelve years old, had threatened John’s wife, Marge, with a knife. Lee and John had seen each other once or twice and could have met other times, but Lee, still steaming over the family quarrel, had refused to speak to his elder brother. John wondered if Lee still remembered.16
Lee at first gave no sign. The brothers greeted each other warmly and chatted amicably in the car. They were welcomed at Robert’s by the two wives, Marge Pic and Vada Oswald, and the four children, John’s two and Robert’s two. All afternoon the children played together. Lee seemed happy to see his brothers and especially to tell John about his experiences in Russia and the Marine Corps. Marina noticed that her husband did not have that “What am I here for?” attitude he displayed on most social occasions. But Marge Pic picked up a different signal. Lee was friendly enough when he greeted her. But in a way that was quite unmistakable he omitted to address another word to her all day.17
Marina was bored. She longed for someone she could talk to without Lee’s having to interpret. She telephoned her old pupil, Paul Gregory, who was home in Fort Worth for the holiday, and at six in the evening he came over.
It was at this moment that Lee’s hostility came into the open. As Paul Gregory appeared in the doorway, Lee introduced John as his “half brother,” a designation the three boys had been at pains all their lives to avoid. They had always stood together as full brothers and fellow sufferers at the hands of Marguerite. Suddenly, John was aware that Lee was still smoldering with the old antagonism. He was not one to forget.18
Marina and Lee said goodbye to the family. They spent the evening at the Gregorys’, where they spoke Russian and ate turkey sandwiches. Then they took a late bus back to Dallas, arriving at one in the morning. It would be a year and a day before Lee saw any of his family again—on November 23, 1963, when Robert visited him in a jail cell in Dallas.
— 20 —
Lee and George
With Marina’s return to the Elsbeth Street apartment, the Oswalds began their new life together in Dallas. It was a lonely life for Marina, with Lee at work all day and only infrequent contacts with her Russian friends. One day shortly after Thanksgiving, Gary Taylor dropped by to return a copy of Lee’s essay “The Collective.” He intended to stay only a few minutes, but so warm was his welcome—Marina ran down the street and bought doughnuts for the three of them—that he stayed for an hour or two. The Oswalds hardly ever had callers, and Marina was overjoyed to see a face from outside. Gary thought husband and wife were getting along well.1
Another visitor after Thanksgiving got a very different impression. She was Lydia Dymitruk, a friend of Anna Meller’s and a fellow émigré. Marina had called Mrs. Meller, upset because the baby was ill and Lee would not take her to the doctor because he was afraid he could not pay the bill. Mrs. Meller did not have a car, but Mrs. Dymitruk did, and she could provide transportation.2
Marina was distraught when Mrs. Dymitruk arrived. The baby was burning with a fever of 103 degrees, and they drove immediately to the emergency room of Parkland Hospital, where the nurses gave the baby medicine for her fever and announced that a pediatrician would be in at five in the afternoon. They would do nothing more. Lydia, who had never had a child of her own, was frightened because the baby seemed to be having trouble breathing and embarrassed because Marina kept telling her the undoubted truth—that in her country such callousness toward a sick child would be unthinkable. They drove on to a clinic, where they were dismayed to find forty sick children ahead of them. Lydia begged the nurses to take little June right away. She had a fever; her case was an emergency. She would have to take her turn, the nurses said, and that might not be for three or four hours. Lydia told them that she would hold them legally responsible if anything happened to the baby. Still they refused to give treatment.
Lydia left Marina and the baby at the Elsbeth Street apartment, promising to return. Lee was not yet home from work when she reappeared about five in the afternoon; and, afraid to go off without him, Marina asked her to wait. Lee came in, calmly ate dinner, and announced that he refused to take the baby to the hospital. “She’ll be all right, she doesn’t need it,” he said. “Besides, I can’t afford it. I can’t pay.” His attitude was the more extraordinary because he doted on “his” baby and generally trembled with fear if she so much as hiccupped or coughed.
He and Marina went into the kitchen to discuss it, and Lydia heard the sounds of a verbal battle royal. Marina won. Husband and wife soon emerged and announced that they were going to the hospital.
At Parkland a doctor took a blood test and X-rayed the baby’s lungs. When he had finished treating her, he signed some forms and told Lee to take them to the service desk. There, the nurse asked his address. Lee gave a false reply. She asked his job. He answered that he was unemployed. Did he receive unemployment compensation? “No,” he replied.
“How on earth do you live?” she asked, astonished.
“Friends help,” Lee shrugged.
Lydia did not hear the questions and answers. But she heard Marina, standing behind Lee in line, hissing at him in Russian, “You liar! What on earth are you saying that for?”
The nurse gave Lee a slip requiring a token payment to the cashier. Lee merely stuffed the paper inside his pocket and muttered, “Let’s get out of here.” They clambered into the back of Lydia’s car and immediately fell to fighting over which one would hold the baby. Marina berated Lee all the way home
. The baby was sick, had been seriously sick for three days, and Lee was lying again. Would it ever end?
Up front, Lydia heard only Marina’s shrewish, schoolteacherish tone, not the substance of the battle. She was sorry for Lee. Lydia sensed that he was angry and tense, sitting with fists clenched, trying to hold himself in until he came to his front door. The one thing he did say was that he ought not to have to pay at all, that in Russia doctors and medicines were free, and they ought to be free here, too.
Lydia was disgusted with both of them by the time she dropped them off, but much more disgusted with Marina. “No wonder he’s so mean to you,” she said to her later on. “In his place I’d be the same. I’m sorry for Lee. I don’t see how he stands it. You have a dreadful disposition. I couldn’t live with you a single second. You simply ate him alive.”
Self-critical as ever, Marina agreed. She thought she did, indeed, have a dreadful disposition and maybe a dreadful character as well. She actually liked Lydia for criticizing her to her face. But mentally she remarked: “Just you try living with Lee, and then see how you behave.”
Marina had caught her husband in another lie that afternoon, and that, in addition to the lies he told at Parkland, had been responsible for her vehement outburst. Sometime earlier Lydia had asked her to send back a pair of dictionaries loaned to her by Bouhe and Anna Meller. Marina answered, in all truthfulness as far as she knew, that Lee had already returned them. But when he came home from work, she found out that he had not returned them at all, as he had told her he had. In fact, he had even hidden them so that she would not find out.
Marina was furious. All through their marriage it was Lee’s lying and Marina’s telling him frankly what she thought of it that caused the worst fights between them. His lies were bad enough, but what made her even angrier was that he often placed her in a position where, knowingly or unknowingly, she ended up telling a lie, too. Marina hated lying; it was alien to her nature. Yet she found herself caught between two fires: either she told the truth and was a disloyal wife, by her lights, or she was compelled to lie to cover up for her husband. It was the sorest point of their life together as far as she was concerned.
Marina and Lee Page 37
