“Save it as a keepsake. I’ll hide it somewhere.”
“Some keepsake! It’s evidence! For God’s sake, Alka, destroy it.”5
She left the room so that he could make up his mind by himself.
The next thing she knew he was standing by the toilet with some sheets of paper in his hand and a box of matches. Slowly he tore the sheets in half, crumpled them into balls, and one by one touched a match to them. As each ball of paper caught the flames, he dropped it into the toilet. He did this thoughtfully, with great reluctance, as if it were the funeral pyre of his ideas. But apparently he destroyed only the details of his plan. He did not burn the handwritten pages that contained his political philosophy and program.
Afterward, they ate their lunch in silence. Lee was so sorry to part with his papers, and Marina so relieved, that neither could think of anything to say. Lee seemed withdrawn, and fearful for the first time that he might be caught. Marina had seen how reluctant he had been to burn his papers. “I wonder if he burned them,” she asked herself, “because he does not trust me?”
That night, twenty-four hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Lee suffered anxiety attacks in his sleep. He shook all over from head to toe four times at intervals of a half hour or so, but without waking up.
The following day, Friday, he was still frightened, yet not too frightened to go downtown and file a claim for unemployment compensation. His claim was refused a few days later on grounds that his earnings at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall were too low for him to qualify, a ruling that was later reversed. That night he again suffered convulsive anxiety attacks in his sleep.
Marina, meanwhile, was grateful that she had chores to do, anything to keep her from thinking. She now knew that Lee took his politics far more seriously than she had ever, in her wildest dreams, supposed. She knew, for the first time, that he was capable of killing in cold blood, merely for the sake of his ideas. But her fears for the future started and ended with General Walker. She saw that Lee was bitterly disappointed by his failure to kill Walker, that he still was keyed up and tense, and that his desire to do the deed had by no means burned itself out. She was afraid, terrified, that he would take another shot at Walker. It never occurred to her, then or at any time thereafter, that he would try to shoot anybody else.
With her ear still cocked for the yelping of police dogs, Marina immediately began to beg Lee, and try to force him to promise, to never do such a thing again. She told him that when Walker moved his head at the last minute it had been a sign from fate. “If God saved him this time, He will save him again. It is not fated for this man to die. Promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”
“I promise.”
His promise was not enough. “Look,” Marina said, “a rifle—that’s no way to prove your ideas. If someone doesn’t like what you think, does that mean he has a right to shoot you? Once people start doing that, no one will dare go out of doors. In Russia you used to say that there was freedom of speech in America, that everyone can say what he pleases. Okay, go to meetings. Say what you want to say there. Or are you afraid you have so little brains you can’t make anybody listen?
She scolded Lee on personal grounds as well. “Even if you didn’t think of me,” she said, “you ought to have thought about Junie.”
“I did,” he said coldly. “I left you enough money for a while.” And he added, with a touch of malice in his tone, “The Russians here like you. They’d have helped.”
Somehow Marina and Lee got through Thursday and Friday, but they still had one more ordeal. It occurred on Saturday, the eve of Easter, which happened to fall on the same day that year in both Western and Orthodox churches. They were not expecting callers and were getting ready for bed when they heard a sudden commotion at the door—the very thing they had been dreading. But instead of police dogs barking, it was George de Mohrenschildt, booming out a loud hello. Hugely relieved, Marina and Lee went downstairs to let the de Mohrenschildts in.
Jeanne came in first, dressed to the nines and clutching a pink plush rabbit for June. Handsome and hearty, George shouldered his way in behind her. The first words out of his mouth struck the Oswalds with the impact of a bomb.
“Hey, Lee,” he roared out in Russian. “How come you missed?”
Lee and Marina, standing at the foot of the stairs as their guests went up with their backs to them, stared at one another in horror. Which of them had told George about Walker? Each one supposed the other had.
Lee was the first to recover. “Shhh,” he said as they reached the landing. “Junie’s sleeping.”
“You always forget the baby,” Jeanne reproved her boisterous husband. “Let’s go out on the balcony.”
Luckily for Marina and Lee, it was dark out of doors and hard for the de Mohrenschildts to see their faces, or so they hoped. George and Jeanne had just come from a party. They were euphoric, on top of the world, and Marina reflected gratefully that they both seemed a little bit high. Maybe they would not notice her discomfort. Lee, for his part, rushed back and forth carrying chairs for all of them to sit on.
George seemed at first to have only one thing on his mind: the attempt on General Walker. He had read every morsel in the Dallas papers and was eager to discuss it with Lee. He knew so many of the details that Marina concluded that Lee, uncharacteristically, had taken George into his confidence.
Lee scarcely uttered a word. He continued to jump up and down and kept running in and out with cups of coffee. “Oh, yes,” he at last remarked with apparent detachment, “wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who did it and why and how?”
Marina thought that Lee’s behavior was fairly composed under the circumstances. George said later that even in the dark Lee “shriveled,” was “tense” and wore a “peculiar” look.6 But it is not clear how much George really noticed. Even by his soaring standards he was unusually ebullient, and the conversation soon shifted to another topic. George had just returned from a trip to New York, where he had clinched a new job in Haiti, prospecting for oil and other resources for “Papa Doc” Duvalier in return for the right to live in the government compound in highest luxury and operate a sisal plantation for such profit as he could reap from it. He and Jeanne would be leaving within the month for Port-au-Prince. After being down for so long, the de Mohrenschildts were on their way up again.
Sitting in the dark, still numb with shock, Marina was scarcely able to follow the conversation. Even years later, remembering how close George had come with his opening remark, she shook all over with fear. Finally, at about ten o’clock, the de Mohrenschildts got ready to leave, and Marina went into the backyard, picked an armful of roses, and handed them to Jeanne.
The instant they were out the door, Lee turned to her. “Did you telephone them and tell them it was me?”
“Of course not,” Marina said. “I thought you did.”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “But isn’t it amazing how he guessed? It’s a lucky thing he couldn’t see my face. I was hardly able to speak. Maybe he was only kidding, but he sure hit the nail on the head.”
Lee believed Marina’s disclaimer, she believed his, and they were both right. No one had told George that it was Lee who shot at General Walker. He had simply guessed.
George later denied any responsibility for influencing Lee’s actions and explained why he had made his remark. “I didn’t want him to shoot Walker,” he said. “I didn’t want him to shoot anybody. But if somebody has a gun with a telescopic lens, you see, and knowing that he hates the man, it is a logical assumption, you see.”7
That evening was the last time Lee Oswald ever saw George de Mohrenschildt. On April 19 the de Mohrenschildts left Dallas; made their round of farewells in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia; and returned to Dallas at the end of May. There they commenced packing; they were taking some of their belongings with them to Haiti, and the rest were going into storage in Dallas. They wanted to see the Oswalds one more time but heard that they had already left
town. Jeanne was to remember, however, that before their departure in early June, they received something in the mail from Lee, and that it bore a New Orleans address.8
The de Mohrenschildts did not return to Dallas for more than three years. They came back in 1966, and when they got around to retrieving their possessions from storage, in early 1967, they had an enormous surprise. There, among all the boxes and bundles, they found one that they could not recall having received at all. It was wrapped in brown paper and contained a stack of records that they had loaned to Marina in an effort to help her learn English. They were unable subsequently to remember whether the bundle bore a postmark or not.
But the greatest surprise was still to come. It was not the bundle of records itself, but something that had been laid neatly and purposefully on top—a photograph of Lee with his guns and dressed in black, one of the two Marina had taken.9 The back of the photograph bore two inscriptions. Across the top, in Russian, were the words: “Hunter for the Fascists—ha-ha-ha!!!” Under the inscription, which was bold and clear, was a small sketch of a terrier, of the kind the de Mohrenschildts owned. Marina today, fourteen years later, has no recollection of having written it. But the writing and the sketch both appear to be hers. And in the lower left-hand corner, catty-corner and in English, was another message in handwriting that appears to be Lee’s. It read: “For my friend George from Lee Oswald.” Beneath the inscription was the date written, as Lee might have done it, in a combination of Latin and Arabic script: “5/IV/63.” The date was probably supposed to be May 4, 1963, and Lee had, as nearly as can be guessed, mailed the records—and the photograph—from New Orleans.10
What happened, apparently, is that after George’s lucky guess on April 13, Marina, half idly, and half as a warning to Lee that he must not go around shooting people or he would be found out, simply took one of the photographs and wrote on it, mocking Lee, “Hunter for the Fascists,” a word she had heard both Lee and George use, and “ha-ha-ha,” an expression that was characteristic both of her and of George. The sketch of a little dog links her inscription to George’s remarkable guess. She must have done it, characteristically, to warn Lee and simultaneously to mock him, to laugh him out of further dangerous adventures.
Lee’s choosing a copy of the photograph that had this inscription on it to send to George was itself a message that contained a whole world of meaning. George, and George alone, had made a guess that it was Lee who tried to kill General Walker. Those who knew them both, notably Samuel Ballen, had observed “a mutuality,” “an emotional complicity,” between Lee and George, and of course Ballen was right.11 Each of them, Lee and George, during that winter of 1962–1963, knew perfectly what the other was thinking politically. And Lee wanted to seal their understanding. As the days following the Walker episode passed without discovery and Lee realized that there was going to be no evidence, not even a clue, to link him to the attempted killing, he decided to let George know that his uncanny guess had been on the mark. It was to George that Lee made his confession.
Why should it have been the loudmouthed George to whom Lee chose, above all other men, to confess? The answer is simple. Lee had done the deed for George. George was the one friend he had, the one person whose respect, admiration, even affection, he coveted—and it was George whom he had wanted to impress. George had been Lee’s “constituent” in the sense that Lee believed he had been acting as George himself might have wanted to do, and in a manner that would win George’s approval.
In his attempt on General Walker, Lee had other constituents as well. He told Marina that he was sending a copy of his photograph to the Militant, to show that he was “ready for anything.” In the picture, he was holding the issue of the Militant that contained the letter from him, signed “L.H.” He had expected that by the time the editors received the photograph, Walker would be dead and the initials “L.H.” would be famous. They would then see how right they had been to print his letter; they would see that their intrepid Dallas correspondent had indeed been “ready for anything.”
De Mohrenschildt and the Militant, then, were Lee’s two chief constituents when he fired at General Walker, with de Mohrenschildt, the flesh-and-blood friend whose approval he desired, far and away the more important. But Lee appears to have had still other inner, or emotional, constituents: the American Communist Party, whose newspaper, the Worker, he was also holding in the picture; and possibly the Soviet Embassy in Washington, whose help he desired for himself and Marina.
In the photograph Lee was dressed in black, the color of death, and he was bristling with guns. If there was in the picture a message to George of boastfulness, love, and pride, there was a message of a very different sort as well: a message of hate. George had allowed himself to become a father to Lee. Yet without a scruple of remorse, without a twinge of regret, indeed, with insulting jubilation, he was leaving Dallas, leaving Lee. Like his father and like Edwin A. Ekdahl, the stepfather Lee genuinely cared about, George was abandoning him. And now Lee wanted to avenge himself on everyone who had ever let him down in that way.12 One means of doing so was to leave town before George did—abandon George, rather than be abandoned by him. Another way was to send the photograph. For the photograph, with its black and its guns, conveyed the message that in addition to the profoundly favorable feelings Lee had for George, he had murderous feelings as well.
Envy is another of the emotions Lee appears to have harbored toward his friend. George had been born to a title, where Lee only felt entitled. George, unlike Lee, had known and loved his father and had grown up close to him. And George, the possessor of a powerful physique, had called Lee “puny” and treated him as if he could be trifled with. At the request of George Bouhe and Anna Meller, he had intervened in Lee’s private affairs and “liberated” Marina a few months before. The de Mohrenschildts noted at the time that Lee “boiled and boiled,” then meekly gave in. But Lee was not meek, and he was not the man to forget. Now he was saying to George what he had forborne to say in November, that, armed with weapons, he was as powerful as any man. Belatedly, he was expressing resentment at George’s interference and warning him not to try his physical superiority again—not on him and not on Marina.
Lee was making still another statement. He was saying that in politics as in physical strength, he was as good a man as George, a better one, in fact. “You talk—I act,” Lee seems to have been saying. He had even made an attempt to act out George’s ideas for him. And now he was declaring that no matter where it might lead, even to death, the plebeian son was prepared to go his aristocratic father one better.
In addition to the many meanings implicit in the photograph, George may have played other roles in Lee’s fantasy life. George was the only person Lee knew who had connections “at the top,” to President and Mrs. Kennedy. By virtue of his acquaintance with Jacqueline Kennedy and her mother, George had written to the president and asked him to provide a preface for his book about his adventures in Mexico. He supposed that these adventures fitted admirably with the president’s physical fitness campaign. Throughout the winter when Lee and George knew one another, George was awaiting a reply. Thus it is possible that George was an emotional lightning rod linking Lee’s fantasies about the presidency—clearly, he had such fantasies, since he wanted his “son” to be president and even wanted to be president himself—to the real human being who was president. Anything George said about the Kennedys in Lee’s presence, although Marina recalls that it was very little, could have helped bring the president within Lee’s emotional range.
Finally, it is conceivable, although mere speculation, that the feelings Lee had for George were an emotional profile, a shadow, a clue, to feelings that he was later to develop for the president. For there were resemblances between the two. Both Kennedy and de Mohrenschildt were dashing and well-born men. Both had fathers who had loved them. Both were masters at keeping others at a distance. As George himself vanished from Lee’s life to recede into the jungles of Haiti, Lee may, wit
hout being aware of it, have taken the feelings he had for George and displaced some of them onto President Kennedy.
George’s stunning and insightful “How come you missed?” was the true end of the Walker affair for Lee because it stripped away the layers of rationalization and hit him full in the face with what it was he had really been after. Lee’s bullet had missed General Walker—but it had found its mark. Something George had said on the evening of February 13 caused Lee to feel that George had given him the sanction he required to go ahead and shoot General Walker. Now, on April 13, George had given him the recognition, the token of admiration Lee desired. By his uncanny remark as he came in the door on that excruciating Easter eve, George had shown that a part of him understood “who did it, and why, and how.” That was what Lee had wanted.
And so the next day, Easter Sunday, April 14, just after supper but before dark, Lee returned to his hiding place by the railroad tracks, dug up his rifle, and carried it home. The publicity and the manhunt that followed the attempt had subsided anyhow, with disappointing speed as far as Lee was concerned.
Marina knew her husband well. She saw that he still was keyed up and tense and that, because of the failure of his attempt, he had a reservoir of unexpended inner energy and was casting about for a way to use it. She was afraid that he would take another shot at Walker. When he came home that night, she begged him to sell the rifle. “We need the money for food,” she said.
“Money evaporates like water,” Lee answered. “I’ll keep it.”
Marina felt helpless to change his mind, and she did not nag him. She was correct in her fear that Lee might be dangerous still, but what she did not understand was that his mind was like a stove: he might have one pot bubbling away on the front burner, taking up nearly all his attention, but he generally had another pot or two simmering away at the back; and when his obsession with the front pot eased or when he met resistance, he was quite capable of moving one of those pots up front. That is what he briefly did now.
Marina and Lee Page 46
