Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  She did not write to Anatoly again. She repented her foolishness and was relieved that he had not received her letter. But from now on, nearly everything she wrote went through Lee. She handed each of her letters to him in an unsealed envelope. Then no matter to whom it was written, but especially if it was to a girlfriend who knew Anatoly, he would scan it for a hidden or separate message inside. Marina accepted his censorship like a child. Once in a while she did slip a letter past Lee to one of her girlfriends in Minsk requesting news of Anatoly, exactly as Lee feared. But aside from these breaches of discipline, she lapsed into helplessness. Stamps were expensive, and she depended on Lee for them, except for such change as she could scrounge from his bureau.

  There were ten apartments in the building at Nos. 602 and 604 Elsbeth Street, and Lee avoided his neighbors whenever he could. He hated to run into any of them, hated being seen coming or going, refused to exchange pleasantries in the hallway, and invariably used the back door of the building, although there was a perfectly good entrance in front.

  Marina was more gregarious. One day she stopped by to visit Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, the wife of the elderly, white-haired manager of the building. She did not speak English, of course, but when Mrs. Tobias remarked that “your husband says that you’re Czech,” Marina understood enough to shake her head vigorously—“No, no, I’m Russian.”4 Again, she had caught Lee in a lie and she demanded an explanation. He told her that he was afraid he would be fired or that the landlord would throw them out if Marina was known to be Russian. In fact, the owner of the building at Nos. 602 and 604 Elsbeth Street, William Martin Jurek, was of Czech origin, and Lee, who could be clever about such things, probably knew it. If so, he may have thought that Mr. Jurek would prefer a Czech to a Russian tenant.

  When Lee was at home on the weekends, the Tobiases noticed that he seldom let Marina out of his sight. He even came with her to fetch the vacuum cleaner, use of which was shared by all the tenants.5 What they and the other neighbors did not know was that it was Lee who vacuumed the apartment, carried out the garbage, did most of the dishes, and turned down the bed every night. He rarely refused a household chore. He was not only dutiful but an affectionate husband, and there were periods when he would follow Marina around all day. At such times, she says, he literally “wore me out with his kisses.” He allowed her, besides, two indulgences. One was deciding whether and when they would have children. The other was letting her sleep in the morning. He got up by himself very early, made his breakfast, and left the coffee on the stove for Marina. On weekends he very often served her breakfast in bed. On Sundays, and Saturdays if he did not go to work, it was Lee who made up their beds.

  He played with the baby daily, and most evenings it was he who gave the baby her bath. He did not trust Marina and was afraid she would drown the child. He drew the water and tested its temperature with great care before he lowered the baby into the bathtub. Then, to Marina’s horror, he would step in himself, utterly naked, with the exception of a washcloth over his private parts. Then he would splash June and play with her as if he longed to be a little child himself.

  “Mama,” he would shout to Marina, “we got water on the floor.” Marina would tell him to mop it up himself. “I can’t,” he would shout back to her. “I’m in the bathtub with Junie.”

  “Mama,” he would call out again, “bring us our toys.” And she would bring them.

  “Mama,” came the call a third time, “you forgot our rubber ball.” And to the baby’s delight he would splash the rubber ball in the water.

  “Mama,” he would call out one last time, “bring us a towel, quick. We have water on our ear.” Junie could not have cared less, but Lee was squeamish about his ears (he had had a mastoid operation as a child) and tenderly wiped the water off the baby’s ear, as if she were squeamish, too.

  The first weeks of the New Year were fairly peaceful for Marina. Lee was happy in his work and able to control himself at home. He continued to hit Marina, but their battles were within limits both could bear. Toward the middle of January, however, things somehow, subtly, began to change. Marina’s letter to Anatoly may by itself have been the cause. But a series of other events occurred at about this time that may have led to what was to be a dramatic shift in his behavior.

  One morning at the beginning of January, George de Mohrenschildt came by the Elsbeth Street apartment for a brief visit. Lee was at work, George was in Oak Cliff on business, and he felt like gossiping. He and Marina chatted about the Fords’ party, and as he was leaving, George asked her how she found Lee sexually?

  “Oh, nothing special,” she answered cheerily.

  “How about I show you sometime?” George said.

  It was a parting remark, the only one of its kind ever to pass between them. As George’s suggestions to women went, it was nothing, a mere way of getting out the door. But Marina remembered it long afterward.

  Lee was fiercely jealous of his wife. Marina never told him of George’s remark, but since he suspected everyone, Lee may have suspected that George, too, was attracted to Marina. Whenever they were going to the de Mohrenschildts’ and Marina put on a dress, Lee told her to take it off; a sweater and slacks were enough. It was the same when they went anywhere, to the park or even the grocery store; Lee was taking no chances. So jealousy may have been still another of the emotions he felt for George de Mohrenschildt.

  On January 10 Marina suddenly was afraid that she was pregnant. She sat in the kitchen and sobbed, while Lee tried to comfort her. “It’s nothing to cry about,” he said. “I’ll be glad if we have another.” In fact, he told her, he would be glad to have a child every year, “enough for a whole football team.” The scare came to nothing, however.

  A few days later, on January 14, Lee signed up for a nighttime typing course at Crozier Technical High School, which was to start at the end of the month. But he did not commit himself; he did not pay the enrollment fee.

  Then one night after the middle of January, Lee and Marina had an extraordinary conversation, another in the chain of events that may have harmed Lee’s peace of mind. They were lying in bed together, the light out, in a companionable mood. It was one of those times when it seemed as if there was an alliance between the two of them against the rest of the world. Speaking Russian, they were using the lingo of children, and Lee was describing his old girlfriends. Marina asked him to tell her in advance if ever he was planning to be unfaithful. “If I were planning it, I wouldn’t tell you,” he said, teasing. Suddenly he scrunched up his eyes. “Have you been with any other man since we got married?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “When?”

  “When you were in Moscow.”

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  “You took the plane to Moscow. Leonid phoned the same day. We made a date for the evening. We had a wonderful dinner. He had bought wine at the French exhibition, and we had a very good time.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it was a very sad story. He wasn’t able to do a thing. He was impotent.”

  “Why?” Lee asked.

  Marina noticed that he was smiling and appeared uncertain whether to believe her or not. He was straining to catch every word.

  “Because he was a virgin. And I wasn’t about to be his teacher. I never wanted to see him again.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “I ran into him once or twice on the street.”

  “And nothing happened?”

  Marina, laughing: “You were home. Where on earth could we go?”

  “You’re making the whole thing up.”

  “No, I’m not,” Marina said, adding that there had been nothing good in the experience. It had been a lesson to her for the whole of her life and had killed her desire for anyone but Lee.

  Lee switched on the light and leaned over her. He had a skeptical, untrusting expression. “Look at me,” he said. “Do you give me your word of honor that it really happened?” They had a game that whenever eith
er of them said “word of honor,” the other had to tell the truth.

  “Word of honor,” she answered.

  “Enough of your lies,” Lee said. “I want to sleep.”

  The next morning, as he was dressing for work, he brought up the subject again. “Is it true what you told me last night?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe it. You women are all alike. You want to make a man jealous.” Then, suddenly: “If ever I see you with another man, I’ll kill him right off.”

  “And what will you do to me?” Marina was amused.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Marina made her confession out of a desire to bid up her own value, a wish to make a clean breast of things, and a momentary lapse into the old trust and frankness that cropped up from time to time between them, especially on her side. Lee, for his part, refused to believe a word she had told him. He decided that her letter to Anatoly had been a ruse and her infidelity with Leonid a lie, and that both had been concocted by Marina to make him jealous. As usual he denied the plain truth and thought up other “truths” instead.

  Lee loved working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He signed in promptly every morning by 8:00 or 8:15 and stayed until 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon, often later.6 He begged for overtime because it meant extra pay, and he came to work eagerly every Saturday whenever he was asked. He never missed a single day’s work. Marina for the life of her could not understand what he did there, although he explained it in detail.

  He would point to an ad in a Dallas paper. “See that!” he would exclaim. “I did that! Isn’t Papa wonderful?”

  “Why boast?” she would ask. “Why not leave it to others to praise you? Nice people don’t’ praise themselves.”

  About mid-January, however, Lee began to have trouble at work—trouble with the job itself and trouble with the other men. Everything had been going smoothly up until then. For his first three months there, he had been a trainee, and as promising as any other. But in January his status became about the same as that of any other employee. He was expected to take more responsibility for the company’s clients and see each piece of work through from start to finish. According to his supervisor, John G. Graef, who had hired him and had a stake in keeping him, Lee started to make mistakes—“too many mistakes.” “It wasn’t that he lacked industry or didn’t try,” Graef recalls; “he somehow couldn’t manage to handle work that was that exact.” Moreover, in the extremely tight confines of the darkroom, Graef concedes, Lee’s “personality began to come out.”7

  Dennis Hyman Ofstein, who was a year younger than Lee and the closest thing he had to a friend at the plant, described Lee’s behavior in more detail: “Well, we work in a rather tight area. There is little room to move around in the darkroom, just about enough room for a man to stand by the developing trays and allow one person to squeeze behind him and get by, and he would make it a habit of just bursting through there head-on with no regard to who was in the room … I think he thought he had the right of way in any case—either that or he was just in a hurry to get through, and through his hurrying he made no regard for anyone else’s well-being or anyone else’s jobs.”8

  At home, too, Lee began to make more trouble than usual. His quarrels with Marina now occurred over trifles. He was often cruel and capricious and treated her harshly without any pretext. Sometimes he got so angry that he would stalk out, cursing her in English. “That’s lovely, Alka,” Marina laughed. “Go right ahead. You can swear at me that way all night and all day, and I won’t understand a word.”

  Marina was more and more puzzled. One day Alka was the perfect husband, affectionate with her and the baby, while the next day he hit her for no reason. “I don’t see how you can kiss me one day and beat me the next,” she complained.

  “We’re young,” Lee said. “We haven’t yet learned to give in to each other yet. All couples quarrel over something.”

  “I know,” she answered, commonsensically. “But not all husbands beat their wives.”

  They had their moments of tenderness. Lee worked on Saturday, January 26, from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon. They went to bed early that evening, and about three the following morning Marina woke him, feeling sexual desire.

  “What do you want?” he mumbled.

  “I want a son,” she said.

  “But only last time you were crying. I thought you didn’t want a baby.”

  “I want you to have a son.”

  “I want a son very much.”

  Marina did not want another child. But she felt lazy. She did not want to get out of bed, and they made love without taking precautions. It was a “wonderful night” for Marina. She felt closer to Lee and closer to being satisfied by him sexually than ever before. But the next day she regretted what she had done. Nor did Lee show any happiness over the night before, or elation over the possibility of another child.9 He had his mind elsewhere.

  Lee had managed to save $600 to pay back his loans from Robert and the US Department of State. Robert had been repaid by October 7. On January 25, in the form of two postal money orders totaling $106, he paid the final installment of the State Department loan. And on Sunday, January 27, free of debt for the first time since his return from Russia, Lee filled out a form and sent it to Seaport Traders, Inc., a mail-order firm in Los Angeles. He enclosed $10 in cash and ordered the first of two weapons he was to acquire that year, a .38 special caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, whose barrel, originally 5 inches long, had been shortened to 2¼ inches. The balance of the cost of the revolver, $19.95 plus shipping charges, was to be paid on delivery.10

  Lee did not order the gun in his own name. The form was signed “A. J. Hidell.” The order had to be witnessed by someone who could attest that the signer was an American citizen and had not been convicted of a felony. The “witness” was “D. F. Drittal.” Experts later testified that the signatures of “Drittal” and “Hidell,” as well as the form itself, were in Oswald’s handwriting.11 The form contained one other lie: “Hidell” said he was twenty-eight years old. Oswald was twenty-three. The address to which the revolver was to be sent was Post Office Box 2915 at the Dallas General Post Office. From October 9, 1962, to May 14, 1963, this was the mailing address of Lee Harvey Oswald, at which he had also authorized “A. J. Hidell” and Marina Oswald to pick up mail.

  The day after he ordered the revolver, on Monday, January 28, Lee committed himself to the typing course for which he had signed up tentatively two weeks earlier. He put down his $9 enrollment fee in cash and started to attend typing classes at Crozier Technical High School, which was only a few blocks from where he worked. George Bouhe had advised him to take the course. Typing, in combination with the photographic skills he was acquiring at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, would enable him to get a better job. They might even qualify him for a newspaper job, and as a matter of fact, Lee had already put out feelers for part-time work as a stringer in photography.

  Soon after going to work at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Lee had persuaded his colleague, Dennis Hyman Ofstein, to teach him techniques he did not know, using the company’s lab and materials after hours, a practice the company tried to discourage. First, Lee made sample calling cards for himself and for George de Mohrenschildt.12 Then he made other samples of his work, which he sent to two left-wing newspapers in New York: the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyite party in the United States; and the Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party. Lee had begun corresponding with both organizations soon after his return from Russia, and he subscribed to both newspapers. Now he offered his services in printing and photographic work. In reply, the Worker thanked him for his “poster-like blow-ups” and said that “from time to time we shall call on you.”13

  The typing class, his photographic skills, and his effort to obtain freelance work on a left-wing newspaper fitted well with the peaceful expression of Lee’s political ideas. But the night typing course fitted in with something
else as well. It gave Lee a cover, so that he would not have to account for his evenings to anyone.

  The typing class met three nights a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, from 6:15 to 7:15, but when he started the course, it seemed to Marina that Lee was never home any weeknight before seven, and he often came in even later. Marina also noticed that her husband spent a great deal of time by himself in the kitchen. He did not have a typewriter to practice on, but he had a large textbook with a printed keyboard. He sat bent over the textbook and seemed to be writing out lessons. But he had a bus schedule, too, and two or three maps of Dallas. He was studying a layout of the city, and Marina, of course, asked why. He answered that he was trying to figure out the quickest way from work to night school, and he told her not to make any noise. Marina never looked closely at the maps, never realized that Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall and Crozier Tech were only a few blocks apart, and never stopped to ask herself—he had trained her that way—why it seemed to be taking him so long, hunched over the kitchen table, to puzzle out so straightforward a question. In fact, Lee now had three, not two, ports of call in downtown Dallas: his job, night school, and the main post office at Bryan and Ervay Streets, where he had his post office box. All three were within easy walking distance. The bus schedules and maps had almost certainly nothing do with his work or night school.

  It was also at about this time, toward the end of January, that Lee began to hint to Marina that he was thinking of sending her and the baby back to Russia. He complained that it was hard supporting a family in America. Alone, he would not have to worry so much about holding onto his job. He could live in a rooming house, learn how to drive, and buy a car. Then if he lost one job, he could pick up and move to another town.

  His hints made Marina feel even more miserable, guilty, and “in the way.” “Alka doesn’t love me,” she thought. She felt that she was the sole cause of his increasing irritability and that marrying her had ruined some far-reaching scheme he had for his life. “You needn’t have brought me to America,” she said. “You could have left me behind.”