Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  They talked a little about Russia, but the Murrets noticed that Lee seldom spoke of the country unless they asked. They, for their part, did not pry. The person from whom he would take more frank talk than from anyone else was his sixty-three-year-old aunt Lillian. She was a small woman, a little plump, with a calm, unruffled look. She saw the faults of others but did not hold them to account for them. It was to Lillian that Lee owed most of his happy memories, and there was little she could say that would put him off. As soon as he arrived from the bus terminal, it was to her that Lee confided his plans. He wanted to stay with her a few days while he looked for work. When he found a job, he would send for Marina and the baby. Lillian asked what Marina was like. “Just like any American housewife,” came the reply. “She wears shorts.” Lillian was impressed by Lee’s eagerness to bring her to New Orleans.

  He began looking for jobs right away. He got dressed, skipped breakfast, scanned all the want ads in the morning paper, and started off about 8:30 in the morning. He was out all day and came home just in time for supper at 5:30 or 6:00 P.M. After supper he sat down with the rest of the family and watched television. He generally went to bed early.

  On one of his first evenings with the Murrets, Dutz drove Lee to the Continental Trailways terminal to pick up his bags. When they were home again, Lee refused to allow his uncle to touch anything. He unloaded everything himself and stacked it in the Murrets’ garage. The family attributed his insistence on doing it all himself to his being the old Lee they knew so well, the proud, independent Lee who did not need anything from anyone. But Lee may have had another motive. His rifle, and perhaps his pistol, were in the luggage.

  On Sunday morning, three days after Lee’s arrival, they were talking about relatives. Suddenly, Lee turned to his aunt Lillian.

  “Do you know anything about the Oswalds?”

  She did not. “I don’t know any of them other than your father, and I saw your uncle one time. I don’t know anything about the family.”

  “Well, you know,” Lee said, “I don’t know any of my relatives. You are the only one I know.”11 He added that he had been embarrassed when Marina’s family in Russia had asked about his relatives and his descent. He had to admit that he did not know. After that, he realized that he missed not being close to his family and not knowing anyone on his father’s side.12

  That very morning he boarded the streetcar that ran past the Murrets’ house to the end of the Lakeview line and the cemetery where his father was buried. The cemetery keeper helped him find his father’s grave.

  Later that same Sunday the conversation turned again to the Oswalds. Lee sat down with a telephone directory and called every Oswald in the book to ask how he could contact his grandfather, Harvey Oswald.13 Finally, he reached an elderly lady in Metairie who was able to answer his questions. Harvey Oswald was dead, she said, and so were all his four sons: Thomas, Harvey N., William Stout, and Robert E. Lee Oswald, Lee’s father. Her name was Hazel, the widow of William Stout Oswald. She had a large, framed photograph of R. E. Lee Oswald, which Lee was welcome to have.14

  That was enough for Lee. Using the street map he carried with him at all times, he figured out how to get to 136 Elmeer Street in Metairie. Hazel Oswald received him graciously. She gave Lee his father’s photograph and explained who his relatives were. It turned out that the Oswalds, like Lee’s family on his mother’s side, the Claveries, were of French and German descent. Although his uncles were dead, Hazel said that his father had three sisters, all alive and in New Orleans. Lee also had six first cousins in New Orleans and at least one first cousin once removed. But the family had drifted away from Lee’s father. R. E. Lee Oswald had been separated from his first wife for some time when he met Marguerite, and he got a divorce only when he decided to remarry. As Catholics, most of the family did not like it and saw little of R. E. Lee after that.15 A few of them continued to see him and his new family, but his funeral in August 1939 had been the end of it. Only Hazel had seen Marguerite since, but she had never met Lee.

  Proudly, Lee showed his aunt a photograph of Marina. Hazel, like the rest of the family, had read of Lee’s defection in the papers but had been too tactful to bring it up. On seeing Marina’s photograph, however, her curiosity involuntarily slipped out. “Is she Russian?” Hazel asked. Lee flinched and said, “Why do you ask that?”16 When he got back to the Murrets’ that night, he reported that his aunt had been “very nice,” “very, very happy” to see him, and had invited him to come back again.17

  He never did. Nor did he look up his cousins or his aunts or go back to visit his father’s grave. Perhaps he had discovered all he wanted to know; perhaps Hazel’s question put him off; perhaps his father’s photograph was a disappointment; perhaps his interests simply shifted. But he had made at least an attempt to trace his father’s history, to find out where he came from, to whom he belonged. In the city of his birth, he had gone back to the beginning of his life in search of the father he had lost, a loss that was perhaps in the forefront of his mind since he had said goodbye to George de Mohrenschildt only two weeks earlier. He found a grave and a photograph, nothing more. He did not tell Marina that he had visited his father’s grave or gone to see Hazel Oswald. He did not show her his father’s photograph. The picture did not turn up later among his possessions.

  Lee continued his search for a job by answering newspaper ads and through the Louisiana State Employment Office, where characteristically, he lied about his previous job history and claimed, on his unemployment compensation forms, to have applied for jobs he had not applied for at all. His references, too, were works of imagination. He often used his Uncle Dutz Murret’s name, although he had not asked his permission. Occasionally he listed “George Hidell,” whom he described as a “college student” at “705 Polk Street.”18 The address and occupation were fictitious, while the name “George Hidell” appears to have been made up of his own alias, “Hidell,” and the first name of de Mohrenschildt. Lee also fell back for references on William S. Oswald Jr., Alice Barre, and William S. Oswald III, an uncle, aunt, and cousin, respectively, whom he did not know and did not bother to look up and whose addresses he sometimes gave incorrectly.

  Finally, two weeks to the day after his arrival in New Orleans, Lee found a job as a greaser and maintenance man at the William B. Reily Company, distributor of Luzianne coffee. On his brief application there, he may have set his own record for lies. He said that he had been living at 757 French Street (the Murrets’) for three years and that he had graduated from a high school that he had attended for only a few weeks; and he gave as references his cousin John Murret, whose permission he did not ask; Sergeant Robert Hidell (a composite of his brother Robert and his own alias “Hidell”), “on active duty with the US Marine Corps” (a fiction from beginning to end); and “Lieutenant J. Evans, active duty US Marine Corps” (the surname and first initial of a man he was to look up later that day, combined with a fictitious Marine Corps rank and identification).19

  The job was manual labor, but at $1.50 an hour it paid more than his last job at $1.35. Lee had applied for photography jobs, or so he claimed on his unemployment compensation forms, but when the Louisiana State Employment Office actually arranged a job interview in photography, Lee did not bother to show up. On the morning he got his new job, he came back to the Murrets’ waving his newspaper in the air, grabbed Aunt Lillian around the neck, kissed her, and triumphantly announced, “I got it, I got it!”

  Lillian was not impressed. “You know, Lee,” she said, in one of those remarks that only she could get away with, “you are really not qualified to do anything too much. If you don’t like this job, why don’t you try to go back to school at night and see if you can’t learn a trade?”

  “No,” Lee said. “I don’t have to go back to school. I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.”20

  The same day he found the job, Lee also found an apartment. Myrtle and Julian Evans had known Lee and his mother when he was growin
g up, and Marguerite had once rented an apartment from them. Lee went to their building, and Julian Evans, who was seated at breakfast drinking his last cup of coffee, recognized him right away. He had known Lee both as a child and as a teenager, and there was something about him that neither he nor Myrtle liked. Julian finished his coffee, shook hands with the caller, and left for work. His wife Myrtle, a heavy-set woman in her fifties, who wore glasses and had reddish hair in a bun, peered at Lee closely. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “Sure, I am Lee Oswald. I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.”

  “Lee Oswald! What are you doing in this country? I thought you were in Russia.”21

  He explained that he was back, that he had a Russian wife and a child, and was looking for an apartment. There was nothing available at the Evanses, but Myrtle volunteered to help him look. It occurred to her that if he was going to work at the Reily coffee company, they might as well try on Magazine Street so Lee could live close to his job. They drove up and down Magazine Street looking for “For Rent” signs. Lee spotted one and they went in.

  There were two apartments for rent at 4907 Magazine Street, and the bigger one looked as if it might do. It was on the ground floor. It had a long living room, a screened-in front porch, a yard, and the kind of iron fence children can’t crawl through. The rent was $65 a month. Myrtle advised Lee that it was the best value for his money and he’d better take it.

  The landlady was Mrs. Jesse Garner, and Lee gave her a month’s rent and an application for utilities along with a $5 deposit. But then he told another of his funny, pointless lies. He said he worked for the Leon Israel Company of 300 Magazine Street. The company existed, but it was not the company that had hired him.

  Myrtle Evans took Lee home with her for lunch. They talked about New Orleans, about Lee’s mother and brothers, and about Russia. Mrs. Evans’s curiosity was piqued about Marina. She said she would like to meet her.

  “Just come any time,” said Lee.

  That was the last Myrtle Evans ever saw of him.

  Lee called Marina that evening to tell her about the job and the apartment. The next day, Friday, May 10, he went to work at the Reily coffee company for the first time and spent the night in his new apartment. On Saturday he showed up early at the Murrets’. Marina was expected that day, and they decided to move Lee’s luggage before she came. Again Lee loaded the car by himself; then he and Dutz sat in front with Marilyn and her mother behind, and the four of them drove to Magazine Street together. Lee was obviously eager for Marina to arrive. And he was delighted with the apartment. The neighborhood was not good, but the apartment had been freshly painted, the icebox was new, and some of the furniture looked new. Lee was not sure that Marina would like it, however. It had high ceilings, and Marina, like many Soviet Russians, did not like high ceilings.

  For Marina the two weeks she stayed at Ruth Paine’s were like a vacation. She was tired; she was still trying to absorb the horrifying new facts she had only just learned about her husband. It was a relief to be taken care of and have no responsibility other than looking after June. It was a relief not to have to anticipate Lee’s moods every second and try to guess what new and dreadful surprise might be lurking around the corner.

  Marina was very grateful. But Ruth Paine was of all Americans the very last whom Marina’s experience could have equipped her to understand. Like the de Mohrenschildts, the Paines were an extremely unlikely couple to have befriended the Oswalds. Even seeing Ruth and Marina together was a study in contrasts.

  Ruth was tall, slender, lithe, with a figure like a dancer. She had a thin, longish face with freckles and short, slightly wavy brown hair. The appearance of seriousness she gave was enhanced by a pair of rimless glasses. And she had a tendency to go around singing. Like many people who have been serious even as children, she had a good deal of unexpended child in her. Ruth could be a little bit fey.

  Ruth Avery Hyde grew up in the Middle West, the daughter of parents who felt strongly about the value of education and good works. When she was only thirteen, Ruth spent a summer on a truck farm in Ohio as her way of contributing to the effort to win World War II. The next summer she was with a traveling Bible school, teaching in Ohio and Indiana. At nineteen, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio, she became a Quaker, a convinced Quaker, often the most dedicated kind. She wanted to be a teacher, and by the time she graduated, she had held an astonishing array of jobs. She had taught in elementary schools in the East and the Middle West and had been a recreation leader at Jewish community centers in Ohio and Indiana, at a club for elderly immigrants in Philadelphia, and at a Friends’ work camp in South Dakota. Whatever the job, Ruth was liked and respected and was always asked to come back.

  She was a teacher, aged twenty-five, at the Germantown Friends’ School in Philadelphia when she met and married Michael Paine. The marriage was not only suitable, it appeared inevitable, so much did Ruth and Michael share. They met through a common love of madrigal singing and folk dancing; both were children of divorce, and both came from families of exceptional social conscience. But their marriage was in trouble from the start, before the start, really, because Michael was not sure about his capacity for love. They moved to Texas, and in September 1962 they separated. Michael was now living alone in an apartment in Grand Prairie, Texas, and came home two or three times a week. This, the break with Michael, which she was hoping against hope to mend, was the sorrow of Ruth’s life. It was the aching place that Marina, slightly and for a while, was to fill.

  Ruth had spent her life helping others, but charitable though her every instinct was, she had mixed feelings about Lee. She sensed that Lee was using her. On the morning of April 24, when Lee was on his way to New Orleans, he had simply taken it for granted that she would ferry him to the bus terminal. Lee did not ask, he expected. But her awareness of this did not deter Ruth from inviting Lee’s wife and child to stay with her. And when he accepted without even offering to help with their expenses, Ruth’s concern, characteristically, was for Marina, not herself. Marina was not a sponger. She had pride. Ruth thought that Lee must not love his wife at all if he could place her in so awkward a situation and go to so little trouble to take care of her.

  She was right on the mark. Marina genuinely liked Ruth. She liked her company and loved being at her house. But she had qualms of conscience. She hated being a burden, hated being in a position where she had little to give. On April 24, even before the two women left for Irving, Marina seems to have sought reassurance. Lee gave it, telling her that she had nothing to be ashamed of. “Ruth is lonely,” he said. “You’ll be company for her. And you can teach her Russian.”

  Still, Marina hardly had a penny, she contributed nothing to the household, and she was ashamed. She helped with the cleaning and washing up. And she helped Ruth with her Russian. Marina tried to tell herself that she was doing more for Ruth than Ruth was doing for her, and Ruth, too, told her the same thing many times. But it would not wash. Marina was deeply in Ruth’s debt, and she knew it.

  The relationship had its other angularities. Ruth was thirty-one, Marina twenty-one, and to Marina the gap was enormous. She was in Ruth’s home, dependent on her, and it was natural to place her in the role of mother. Whenever she and June were talking, Marina spoke of Ruth as Tyotya, or “Aunt Ruth,” an ordinary way of speaking in Russia, where close women friends of the family are called “aunt.” But to Ruth the word had an unwelcome sound. She wanted to be a friend and an equal. Not only that. Ruth guessed that Marina’s feelings toward her mother had been very mixed, compounded of hate as well as love. She sensed that any relationship in which she was cast in the role of mother could turn out to be a minefield of complications.

  There was also the language barrier between them. Ruth had a splendid education, but in Russian she was only a beginner. There was a huge, frustrating gap between what this thoughtful, sensitive woman might be thinking and what she could say in Russian. Ruth later recalled that
her lack of Russian was “a terrible impediment to talking and to friendship” with Marina; it was “a terrible embarrassment” and an ironic one as well.22 Here she was in her own house, commanding the telephone, recruiting lawn mowers and babysitters, making arrangements with marvelous efficiency, yet linguistically she was on Marina’s turf. Ruth felt as helpless as a child.

  Marina for her part kept enormous reticences. But they were reticences of loyalty, not of language. She chattered freely about her life in Russia, her girlfriends, her aunts, her boyfriends. But she said no more about Lee’s plan to send her back to Russia. She never mentioned that Lee beat her. She did not know that Ruth was a pacifist, nor even what a pacifist is, but she had the wit not to mention that Lee had a rifle and had attempted to kill General Walker. Nor did she say that she had persuaded Lee to move to New Orleans out of fear of his using it again. Ruth had said that knowledge of the Walker attempt would have altered all her actions toward the Oswalds. She would have gone to the police and found a psychiatrist for Lee, or done both, as soon as she learned of it.

  With such portentous silences on Marina’s side, it is scarcely a wonder that Ruth eventually concluded that Marina was a bit of “an enigma,” that they were “different sorts of people.”23 But her awareness was a long time coming, and meanwhile the two of them trotted along, like a pair of tired ponies, in easy harness. It was a friendship of shared exhaustion. Doubt as to whether their husbands loved them and would ever want to live with them again—this was the rock on which their companionship was built. Both of them, after the ordeal of their marriages, required a rest. Ruth was later to say that she and Marina gave each other “great moral support” at a difficult time for both.24 As for the difference between them—lack of language, their fundamental incongruousness as friends—even these made for a restful distance, a feeling of live and let live, and respect for each other’s privacy.