Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  Marina’s handwriting, which is usually neat, was sloppy and the message brief and casual, almost to the point of disrespect. She must have been distraught and seems also to have been seeking to sabotage her husband’s purpose. She adored America and had constantly pleaded with Lee: “Do anything. But don’t ever, ever make me go back!” She had no idea of her husband’s motive, nor did he say a word to enlighten her. And so she simply supposed that he no longer loved her and that she had become to him what she had been to nearly everyone else all her life, unloved and “in the way.” She would be going back to relatives who did not want her and with the stigma of her husband’s rejection. All this, plus her pregnancy, was very nearly more than she could bear.

  Marina was waking up to how calculating Lee could be—and how far ahead he laid his plans. But she merely suspected that he wanted her out of the way in time for expenses of the new baby’s birth to be paid by the USSR, and, in part, she was probably right.

  Yet Lee usually had several objectives at once. For one thing, he seldom slammed a door. He always left it open a crack just in case he decided to pass through again. When he defected to Russia, he failed to take the oath renouncing his American citizenship, a simple act that would have irrevocably prevented his return. And when he did return, he hinted to officers of the FBI, the Soviet Embassy—and Marina herself—that he might want to go back to Russia. That was a major reason he refused to allow Marina to learn English or become too attached to American life. His restlessness can perhaps be traced to an incapacity to accept responsibility, for Marina, his children—or himself. He had expected the Soviet government to take care of him while he was in Russia, and he had expected the American government to pay for his journey home. In Texas, he had maneuvered the Russian émigrés into helping him, and now it was once again the government’s turn. His actions had a thread of consistency. Only days after he learned of Marina’s first pregnancy in Minsk, he had set in motion the machinery for their return to America. The day after he learned of her second pregnancy, in Dallas, he began to prepare for her return to Russia.

  This time, however, it was different. A pregnant Marina, and June, were to go back to Russia alone. It fitted with Lee’s plan to kill Walker. On the day he ordered his revolver, January 27, he first hinted to Marina that he was thinking of sending her back to Russia—to get her used to the idea. And the week he seems to have decided that he would actually carry out the scheme, he took the initial steps for her return.

  At first, Lee had probably assumed that a close-up assault on Walker would immediately result in his own death. Then it seems to have occurred to him that he might be captured alive. Killing Walker would be perceived by everyone as a political statement against “fascism” and the American right. From his prison cell, or in a trial, he could enunciate that statement, and the Soviet government would approve. He would ask for asylum in Russia. With Marina and his child already there, the American government might agree to expatriate him, and the Soviet government might agree to accept him. By sending Marina and June to Russia, then, he would be creating his own asylum in advance.

  The plan was unrealistic—but it was Lee.

  The week after Lee forced Marina to write to the Soviet Embassy was the most violent in all their married life. As his anxiety mounted, she was increasingly the object of his rages. He showed no concern for her pregnancy and treated her in a manner that reached the point of ferocity. One day he hit Marina so hard across the face that her nose started bleeding. The moment Lee saw blood, his arms fell motionless to his sides. “Oh my God. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that.” He made Marina lie down. But his anger was not spent. He slammed the door and went out. He found the front and back doors locked when he came home. Quietly, he smashed a pane of glass in the kitchen door, then coolly reached in and unlocked it. He scooped up the pieces of glass and piled them neatly on top of the kitchen trash. He strode into the bedroom and, without a word to Marina, lay down on the bed with his back to her.

  As baffling as his anger were his repentances, for sometimes his fury departed quickly. Then he would burst into tears and beg Marina’s forgiveness. At the sight of his tears, she, too, would burst into tears, and the two of them would cling to one another and cry. Marina, of course, saw that Lee was in terrible inner turmoil. She had no idea what was causing it and told herself that perhaps he struck out at her because he had to hold himself in at work and she was the only person he could get angry at. She also told herself that she was to blame, that she brought on many of their quarrels, and that her punishments were the least she deserved. She continued to beg for affection—he had none to spare.

  Marina, too, was at the breaking point, and her tongue lost none of its acerbity. Lee warned her to watch out, begged her not to egg him on. “You know my terrible character,” he pleaded with her after one of their fights. “When you see I’m in a bad mood, try not to make me mad. You know I can’t hold myself in very long now.” But Marina continued to lash out at him. Her sharp words probably brought on a few beatings, but they also helped keep her intact, helped her feel that she was still a human being in spite of humiliations that imperiled her fragile self-respect.

  “You weak, cowardly American,” she would say to him, bitter at the choice she had made. “What a fool I was! I was afraid to marry a Russian because Russian men beat their wives. You! You’re not worth the soles of their feet. How I wish I had woken up sooner!”

  Lee, of course, hit her. “I’ll make you shut up,” he said.

  “Of course you can shut me up by force. But you’ll never change my mind. It’s better to be a drunkard than what you are. When a drunken man beats you, it’s one thing. When a sober one does it, it’s something else.”

  Marina survived Lee’s beatings, she struggled to survive them, but what did not survive was her respect for Lee. She went on loving him, in a way. But she was beginning to see him as a sick man who needed help.

  The crisis came on February 23, General Walker’s last Saturday in Dallas. Lee did not go to work. He was gone the whole day; his whereabouts and activities are unknown. He may have been spying on Walker, but he was not stalking him—the revolver had not arrived.

  Before going out that morning, Lee has asked Marina to fix him something special for dinner, a Southern dish called red beans and rice. Marina had never heard of it. But Hungarian dishes have a good deal of rice, so she took her Hungarian cookbook off the shelf and pored over it. She found nothing helpful there and fell back as usual on Mother Russia. She put everything in a skillet and cooked it with onions.

  Lee started scolding her the second he got home. He told her that she ought to fix the rice separately and then pour the beans over it.

  “What on earth difference does it make?” she asked. “You mix the whole thing into a mess on your plate anyway.”

  “I work,” Lee complained. “I come home, and I find you can’t even do a simple thing like this for me.”

  “And of course I sit home all day with nothing to do but spit on the ceiling,” Marina threw down her cooking spoon, told Lee to fix it himself, and stomped out of the kitchen.

  Lee came after her and ordered her to fix his dinner.

  “I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll force you to.”

  Marina stomped back into the kitchen and threw the whole dinner out.

  The next thing she knew she was in the bedroom and he was about to hit her. “You have no right,” she said. “If you lay a finger on me, I’ll throw this at you.” She was holding a pretty wooden box, a present from a friend in Minsk. It was heavy with jewelry: Lee’s cufflinks and watch and all Marina’s beads and pins.

  He hit her hard across the face, then whirled and started to leave the room. Marina hurled the box as hard as she could, and it grazed Lee’s shoulder. He spun around and came at her white with rage. His lips were pressed together, and he had an inhuman look of hate on his face. He hurled h
er onto the bed and grabbed her throat. “I won’t let you out of this alive.”

  Just at that second the baby cried.

  Lee suddenly came to his senses. “Go get her,” he ordered.

  “Go get her yourself.” Another second, Marina thinks, and he would have strangled her. She had never seen him in such fury.

  Lee went to the baby and sat alone with her in the next room for a long time while Marina lay on the bed and sobbed. She was shocked and ashamed. Why go on living if Lee would not spare her even while she was carrying his child? And why bear children to be witnesses of such a life? Lee did not treat her like a human being. For five minutes he was kind to her—then cruel. Why on earth had he brought her to America if he only meant to send her back? A hundred thoughts went through her head, then turned to apathy. The baby cried, and she scarcely heard. She went into the bathroom, glanced into the mirror, and saw bruises all over her face.

  “Who on earth needs me?” she wondered. “The one person I came to America for doesn’t need me, so why go on living?”

  She picked up the rope she used for hanging the baby’s diapers, tied it around her neck, and climbed onto the toilet seat.

  Lee came in from the living room. A glance at Marina and his face became horribly twisted. Even at that moment he could not control his rage. He hit her across the face.

  “Don’t ever, ever do that again,” he said. “Only the most terrible fools try that.”

  “I can’t go on this way, Alka. I don’t want to go on living.”

  Lee lifted her off the toilet seat and carried her gently to bed. He went back to the baby in the living room, with the door open so he could watch Marina. Then he sat beside her on the bed and tenderly stroked her hair.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do what I did. It’s your fault. You saw what a mood I was in. Why did you make me so mad?”

  “I only tried to do to myself what you tried to do to me. I’m sick of it, Alka. Every day we fight, and for no reason. We fight over things so tiny, normal people wouldn’t speak of them at all.”

  Lee lay down and took her in his arms. “I never thought you’d take it so hard. Pay no attention to me now. You know I can’t hold myself back.”

  They both began to cry like babies. “Try to understand,” he begged. “You’re wrong sometimes, too. Try to be quiet when you can.” He started kissing her as though he were in a frenzy. “For God’s sake, forgive me. I’ll never, ever do it again. I’ll try and change if you’ll only help me.”

  “But why, Alka, why do you do it?”

  “Because I love you. I can’t stand it when you make me mad.”

  They made love the whole night long, and Lee told Marina again and again that she was “the best woman” for him, sexually and in every other way. For Marina, it was one of their best nights sexually. And for the next few days, Lee seemed calmer, as if his attempt to strangle Marina had been a substitute for killing Walker. In conflict over his plan, frustrated by the failure of the gun to arrive as the day approached when Walker would be leaving Dallas, Lee had taken out his rage on Marina.

  For weeks the Oswalds’ neighbors had been troubled by the sounds of discord from their apartment. As far back as December, a comparatively peaceful time, the noise already was ominous enough so that one neighbor went to Mahlon Tobias, the building manager, and complained, “I think he’s really hurt her this time.” Mrs. Tobias cooked up a pretext and dropped by to see if Marina was all right.8

  When the noise grew even louder, and the frightened baby began to wake up, wailing, in the middle of the night, another neighbor complained to Tobias: “I think that man over there is going to kill that girl.”9

  Tobias went to Mr. and Mrs. William Martin Jurek, the owners of the building, who in turn paid a call on Lee, warning him that he and his wife would have to stop fighting or move. Lee tried to shrug it off, but the visit told him what he was uncomfortably aware of already. He had too many neighbors on Elsbeth Street, too many eyes and ears upon him. His movements were being observed. People knew he was beating his wife. What might they notice next?

  Lee kept the Jureks’ visit a secret from Marina. But he made up his mind to move. As usual, he scouted “For Rent” signs in the neighborhood, not newspaper ads, and before the week was out, he announced to a startled Marina that he had found them a new place to live. If she liked it as well as he did, they would move.

  It was on the second floor of a building at 214 West Neely Street, only about a block from the Elsbeth Street apartment. It was cleaner than the place they had, and the rent was less, $60 a month instead of $68. But the big attraction was a balcony. “Just like our balcony in Minsk,” Lee said. “You can plant flowers on it. And it’s healthier for Junie. She can crawl out there, and you needn’t watch her all the time.” He also pointed out one of the apartment’s other advantages. There were fewer neighbors there, fewer witnesses to their comings and goings. He would like that, he said.

  The greatest attraction, however, as far as Lee was concerned, was a tiny room, not much bigger than a double coat closet, that he could use as a study. And this “study” had a strikingly unusual feature: two entrances, one from the stairs outside the apartment and one from the living room. Lee could lock both doors and enter and leave the apartment without Marina’s knowledge.

  Marina was content on Elsbeth Street. She had fixed up the place so it suited her perfectly. Even more important, she hated to hurt the Tobiases’ feelings. They had been good to her. She knew nothing of the warning Lee had received, and it embarrassed her to leave for no reason people who had befriended her. But she gave in, as usual. “After all,” she said to herself, “it doesn’t really matter to me. And I like the balcony, too.”

  So on Saturday, March 2, they piled their belongings—Lee’s books, the baby’s things, a few dishes—on top of the baby’s stroller. With that, the clothing in their arms, and the baby herself, they walked away from Elsbeth Street, owing a couple of days’ rent.

  Tobias and his wife looked on. They were sad to see Marina go. A few days later Mrs. Tobias told the FBI that the Oswalds had moved. A report by Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., of the Dallas office of the FBI, dated September 10, 1963, contained this item:

  On March 11, 1963, Mrs. M. F. Tobias, apartment manager, 602 Elsbeth, Dallas, Texas, advised [that] on March 3, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina moved from that apartment building to 214 West Neely Street in Dallas, Texas. Mrs. Tobias advised they had considerable difficulty with Mr. Oswald who apparently drank to excess and beat his wife on numerous occasions. They had numerous complaints from the other tenants due to Oswald’s drinking and beating his wife.

  Lee’s suspicion that he was being watched was not altogether ill founded.

  — 23 —

  “Ready for Anything”

  General Walker left Dallas on February 28, two days before the Oswalds moved to West Neely Street.1 Lee’s plan had to be postponed, and the move itself may have been a welcome sidetrack. Now he had time. Walker would be gone for five or six weeks. During that breathing space, Lee could reconsider his plan; he would compose his mind as he had not been able to do before; and above everything, he could write the justification for history that appears to have been nearly as important to him as the deed itself. Now that he had decided to go ahead, but in his own way and in his own time, Lee’s behavior changed dramatically. His violence toward Marina almost stopped, and he hit her rarely, if at all. From having been absorbed by turmoil within, he now shifted to the world outside, and in that world he moved with speed and efficiency.

  Marina supposed his new calm to be a product of their move, experience having taught her that any move to a new apartment bought her a few days of peace. Sure enough, Lee devoted his first two evenings on Neely Street to fixing up the apartment. He was handy at carpentry, building window boxes for the balcony and painting them green. He also built shelves for his special room and moved in a chair and a table, creating his own tiny o
ffice. Marina realized that it was this “office,” and not the balcony he had used as bait for her, that was the reason he had moved them to Neely Street.

  “Look,” he said to her. “This is my little nook. I’ve never had my own room before. I’ll do all my work here, make a lab, and do my photography. I’ll keep my things in here. But you’re not to come in and clean. If ever I come in and find that one single thing has been touched, I’ll beat you.”

  Marina, who had been warned often enough not to pry into her husband’s affairs, of course complied.

  They again had something of a life together as man and wife. Once or twice, Lee asked her if she loved him.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “For your beautiful legs and your bottom and your ugly disposition.”

  He removed his trousers and stared at himself in the mirror. The sight seemed to please him. “Do I really have beautiful legs?” he asked.

  “You do.”

  Trousers off, he would sit with legs extended on the coffee table, or he would drape a leg and a thigh over one arm of the sofa, his way of asking for a kiss or, if they had had an argument, of asking to make up.

  When he took a bath, he would ask her to wash him. First he stretched one leg in the air. When she had finished and was ready to do the other leg, he would say no, the right one wasn’t clean yet. He made her wash one leg four or five times before he would consent to raise the other. “Now I feel like a king,” he would say, beatifically. But he cautioned her to be more gentle. “I have sensitive skin, while you have rough, Russian ways.”

  Next, he would refuse to get out of the tub, his complaint being that the floor was cold, and he told her to put a towel down for him. When she had done as he asked, she would say, “Okay, prince, you can get out now.”