Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  As she got to know Marina, Ruth’s reservations about Lee grew to active dislike. It looked to her as if Lee “just wanted to get rid of his wife.”25 He had not even taken her to a doctor although she was three months pregnant. Ruth had made almost a life’s work out of finding the best in people, but she had yet to find anything good in Lee.

  Talking with Marina, Ruth came away with the impression that although she was troubled about Lee, she was committed to their marriage and would give her all for its survival. But Ruth had no inkling of how frightening Marina’s worries were. To Marina the Walker affair and its “Nixon” sequel meant that Lee loved “politics” more than he loved her and June. She feared that he could not wait to ship them both off to Russia so he could resume the political activities they had unwittingly interrupted. Life, or Lee, she limply supposed, would carry her as far as New Orleans. After that, Russia loomed like an iceberg.

  As for Ruth’s feelings about Michael, Marina had the evidence of her own eyes. On the days when Michael was expected, Ruth hummed with happiness. She went skipping, almost airborne, about the house, singing madrigals in anticipation. And at suppertime—Michael generally came on Tuesday and Friday evening—she set the table with great care and served dinner by candlelight. Ruth was in love with Michael. She would do anything to patch up their marriage.

  It was Michael whom Marina could not figure out. She was familiar enough with the ways of anger, but coldness she could not understand. To her it appeared that Michael had no feelings for anyone, not for Ruth, not even for his own children. What Marina could not have known was that Michael blamed himself bitterly. He yearned to be in love with his wife. He, too, would mend the marriage if he could. And what Marina could never have guessed was that underneath Michael’s reserve, his icily intellectual New England exterior, lay considerable compassion for her.

  Marina and Lee were in touch. She had a happy note from him, written the day after his arrival in New Orleans, announcing that his aunt Lillian had taken him in warmly, that he was looking for work and would write to her as soon as he found it.26 Marina was pleased that he signed the letter with the Russian Tseluyu—“I kiss you” or “Love”—a greeting he did not use even with his own mother. Maybe in spite of all that had happened he really did love her after all.

  Once she called him on the telephone. And another time she wrote him a letter in which she mentioned that Ruth was driving east on her vacation and had offered to take her along. Marina wondered if she ought to go, ought to scout job possibilities in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia where there were Russian-speaking communities and where her language might be a help, not a hindrance, in finding work. Ruth had said that Marina was “quite excited” by the idea.27 Her enthusiasm was in contrast with the passivity she had shown a few months earlier when George Bouhe and Katya Ford had tried to show her that she was not bound to Lee, that she could find a job and free herself. Now, for the first time, she seemed open to the idea.

  The fact that she was at a distance from Lee and living in the household of a woman who was preparing to be self-supporting probably had something to do with the change. But Marina may also have been suggesting, as she had done before, that she could try to find work and help support them if Lee was unable to get a job. Or she may have been offering him an “out.” If he really did not love her and did not want to live with her again—or if he had any more horrors in store—then here was a chance to get rid of her without forcing her to go back to Russia.

  And yet, for Marina, writing to Lee about finding a job was also the sort of ploy she used when she was trying to win somebody’s love. By hinting that she, too, had choices, that other people thought she could find a job, she was bidding up her own value to win back Lee’s love. She knew that it would make him jealous, and that for his jealousy she would have to pay. But it was utterly like her to get him to love her now—and pay later.28

  Then came another cheerful letter from Lee in which he said that he still had not found a job, but his uncle had offered him a loan of $200.29 Finally, on May 9 he called with triumph in his voice to announce that he had found a job and an apartment, and to ask them to come to New Orleans right away. Lee’s voice told Marina what she had been longing to hear: he loved her, he missed her, he wanted to pick up their family life again. Once more she began to have hope.

  Overcome with joy, she cried out: “Papa loves us! Papa loves us!” to little June as if she did not believe it herself.

  By noon the next day Marina, Ruth, and the three children were off in Ruth’s station wagon on the five hundred-mile journey to New Orleans.

  — 27 —

  Magazine Street

  Marina hated the new apartment. She took one look at the high ceilings and the cockroaches and could barely hide her disappointment. Lee tried to show her how nice it was—the screened-in porch and the yard with wild strawberries growing in it. He had mopped the floor and cleaned the place, hoping she would like it. Marina knew it, knew his desire to please, but her feelings showed through. Seeing them together, it occurred to Ruth that Lee might or might not care about Marina, but he certainly cared about her opinion.

  Marina and Ruth had arrived earlier that afternoon at the Murrets’. The five of them—two tired women and three small children—tumbled out of the station wagon and created chaos. Lee was beside himself with pride as he introduced Marina and the baby. He carried June on his shoulders and was ecstatic to see her walking for the first time.

  Marina, too, was pleased, thinking that this house was to be her home. It was clean, cozy, neat—everything she had ever wanted. Then the truth reached her; she was going to have to live somewhere else. The Murrets were very kind to her, but Marina was miserably self-conscious. She thought she looked ugly and pregnant.

  After an hour at the Murrets’, they drove to Magazine Street, and once Marina recovered from her initial shock, the five of them settled in fairly quickly. Ruth and the three children slept in the living room and a small extra room beside, it, while Lee and Marina used the bedroom in back.

  They were happy to be together again—“I’ve missed you so,” Lee said again and again—and they made love three times that night and the next morning. It was the first time they had made love since March 29 or 30, the weekend when Marina had taken Lee’s photograph with the rifle. In the morning Ruth, on her way to the bathroom, passed by as they were making love.

  “Do you think she saw?” Marina asked anxiously.

  “Of course,” said Lee.

  They were both embarrassed. Lee hardly dared face Ruth in the kitchen, and Marina felt the same way.

  As for Ruth, she noticed that, pleased as Lee and Marina had been to see one another at first, irritation and even anger flared up quickly between them, very often over nothing at all. She and Marina had bought blackberries as they drove across Louisiana, and on Sunday Lee tried to make blackberry wine. Marina was sharp with him—“What are you doing, wasting all those good berries?” Lee kept on with it, but he was disheartened by Marina’s anger, and when she was not looking, he threw the whole mess out, berries, wine, and all. Shrewish as Marina was, Lee was even worse. He was in a bad temper the entire time. “Shut up,” he would say whenever Marina opened her mouth, and Ruth thought he was “rude” and “discourteous” to Marina throughout her visit.1 So ferocious was their bickering that Ruth decided the presence of three extra people must be adding to the strain. She and her children left on Tuesday, a day or so ahead of schedule.

  But the bickering went on, for it was the currency of their relationship. Marina says that even on quiet days the marriage was a succession of “tears and caresses, arguments and reconciliations.” Lee did not beat her, but their fights were amplified in Russian, an unfamiliar tongue, and their neighbors in New Orleans were soon in nearly the same condition of shock as their neighbors in Dallas. The state of the marriage, the state of mind of the principals, had to be measured by something other than the decibel count. With the Oswalds, ordinary co
nversation sounded like argument, and a real argument like a fight to the finish. What counted was the mood of the marriage, and in New Orleans the first couple of months were hard. Marina was depressed and Lee preoccupied. They fought constantly, with little humor in their battle.

  They fought about everything. A week or so after Marina’s arrival, Lee bought some crabs, brought them home, and left them simmering on the stove. Not knowing that he meant to cook them his own way, Marina added spices, the ones she knew from Russia. Lee was furious.

  They fought about cockroaches, too. Marina sometimes got up at night and went to the kitchen for something cold to drink. The place would be swarming with cockroaches.

  “Come in and admire your handiwork,” she would call out toward the bedroom—it was “his” handiwork because Lee did not allow her to use the spray.

  He would run in naked from the bedroom, brandishing a can of roach spray and squirting it everywhere. Marina laughed, because he was too stingy to buy decent spray and too stingy to use enough of it and because he put it in the wrong places.

  “You woke me up, and now you’re laughing at me.” He was hurt.

  Every day while he was at work, Marina scrubbed the floor and the furniture. But the apartment was old and dark, and no matter how hard she tried to clean it, the place still got her down. But she loved to go walking at night with Lee, letting him show her New Orleans, even though she sometimes felt that he did it because he thought it was his duty and not because he wanted to. Strolling through one neighborhood or another, Lee would sometimes wave at a building and crow, “I went to that school.” It happened often enough that Marina began to wonder just how many schools he had been to.

  What she enjoyed most were their walks along Bourbon Street. She adored the lights and the music and the glimpses of strippers dancing. She begged Lee to take her inside. He refused, said Bourbon Street was “a dirty place,” and put on a show of inattentiveness as they walked past the famous swinging doors. Marina thought that he liked Bourbon Street just the same.

  Marina made no secret of her interest in sex. At the newsstands, where they fairly often found themselves at night, she would pick out the most unwholesome-looking magazines she could find and pore over the photographs of nude men and women. Lee affected to be above it all. He read the news magazines. But more than once she spied him flicking through a girlie magazine.

  Aside from June, whom they both adored, sex was again the brightest feature of their marriage. For all his Puritanism, Lee enjoyed making love. After intercourse he would go into the bathroom to wash off, emerge singing one of his arias, and lie down with his back to Marina.

  “Don’t touch me,” he would say. “And don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”

  There was a mirror at the foot of their bed, and Lee would pile up pillows at the head of the bed so he could watch them making love. Marina did not like it. She pulled the pillows down or turned her head away. She was hurt that the mirror seemed to excite Lee more than she did.

  Sometimes when she was sitting in front of the mirror brushing her hair, he would bend down to kiss her, looking into the mirror, and call her “Mama” or “my little girl.”

  “Who are you kissing me for—me or the mirror?”

  “You mean you don’t like it?”

  “Of course not,” she would answer and give him a little rap on the rear end.

  Although Marina insists that their sexual life was improving right up to the end and that, well over a year after Lee’s death, she still would have chosen him over any other man, the fact is that the balance had shifted. In Russia it was Lee who wanted sex more; now it was Marina. Sometimes when Lee came home hot and tired from work, he would beg off making love on the ground that he would be unable to keep it up long enough to satisfy Marina. But even when her pregnancy made intercourse uncomfortable for her, Marina was glad to give him satisfaction even if she did not receive it in return.

  For she was no longer sure that Lee loved her, and she wanted to be needed and reassured. Every day she expected to hear that he still meant to send her back to Russia. Waiting for the ax to fall, her fears abated only when they were walking along Bourbon Street at night. Then the lights and the music and the sight of people enjoying themselves lifted her spirits a little.

  On May 12, the day after Marina arrived in New Orleans, Lee made out a change-of-address card, closing his post office box in Dallas and giving his new home address. The change became effective May 14, and Lee once again began to receive the magazines and newspapers to which he subscribed, among them Soviet Belorussia, a daily subsidized by the Soviet government, and the Militant. News of Fidel Castro, then on a month-long tour of the Soviet Union, was featured in both papers, and the Militant in particular was critical of recent speeches by President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, hinting that the United States government was working for Castro’s overthrow.2

  Lee had not forgotten Fidel Castro. The move to New Orleans, and the search for a new job and a new apartment, had distracted him from politics only briefly. Now he was to become more deeply involved in the Cuban cause than he ever had been and was to identify himself more strongly than ever with this particular revolution and its heroes. On May 22 he paid his first visit to the New Orleans Public Library, applied for a borrower’s card, and took out his first book. It was Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, by the biographer Robert Payne. Marina says that Lee compared himself to the great men he read about in books and genuinely believed that he was one of them.3

  At this moment, however, Lee was thinking more about changing the society he was in than about building a new one, as Mao and Castro had done. And what he hoped to change first was United States policy toward Cuba. On May 26, therefore, he wrote again to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at its national headquarters, 799 Broadway, New York, announcing that he wanted to form a New Orleans chapter. He requested a charter for his chapter and formal membership for himself, said he was thinking of renting an office for $30 a month, and asked how he might acquire membership blanks and bulk literature. For the office he was hoping to set up, he added that “a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing, would be a welcome touch.”4

  Without waiting for a reply, Lee then set about printing his own literature. On May 29, after he had apparently scouted several similar establishments, he walked into the Jones Printing Company of 422 Girod Street and handed the secretary an eight-by-ten-inch looseleaf sheet on which he had sketched a handbill:5

  HANDS OFF CUBA!

  Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee

  New Orleans Charter Member Branch

  Free Literature, Lectures

  Location:

  Everyone welcome!

  He said his name was Lee Osborne, and two days later he returned to put down $4 cash on the order. On June 4 he paid the remaining $5.89 in cash and picked up a thousand copies of the handbill. He also ordered, from the Mailers’ Service Company on Magazine Street, five hundred copies of a yellow, 4-by-9-inch membership application for his New Orleans “chapter” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, once again under the name of Lee Osborne. He picked up that order, paying $9.34 in cash, on June 5. Finally, about the same time, he ordered three hundred copies of a 2½-by-3½-inch membership card in the same New Orleans “chapter.” John Anderson, who took the order at Mailers’ Service, recalled that “Osborne” at first was not satisfied because he wanted heavy, “card-type” paper for his membership cards rather than the “thick paper” the company had used. However, he accepted the order, paid $3.50 in cash, and went off with the cards.6

  Vincent T. Lee, national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, replied to Lee’s letter on May 29. It was the longest, warmest letter he had ever received from the head of any organization. It offered him, for the first time in his life, a real chance to work with a political group. And it offered advice.

  Vincent Lee counseled Lee against opening an office and s
uggested that he work out of a private home instead, using a post office box as his address. He also suggested that Lee used only first-class mail on committee business and never put a full name on the return address on the envelope. He sent Lee a membership card in the FPCC, a copy of its constitution and bylaws, and he closed his letter: “Naturally I would like to communicate with you a great deal more concerning yourself so that we can get to know you and possibly be of some assistance.… We hope to hear from you very soon and are looking forward to a good working relationship for the future.… Fraternally, V. T. Lee.”7

  Lee, of course, did not tell Marina about the letter right away—she as yet had no idea what he was up to—but he was elated by it. In one regard, however, the letter must have been a disappointment. Vincent Lee wrote that he had gone through the committee’s files and could scarcely conceive of a chapter “with as few members as seem to exist in the New Orleans area,” but he would gladly issue a charter if Lee could come up with enough members. Nor did he send the application forms and membership cards that Lee had requested. It was probably just after he received the letter that Lee decided to print up his own forms and cards.

  Marina might have guessed that he was again becoming involved in “politics,” for the blow she was dreading had fallen. Less than two weeks after her arrival in New Orleans, and even before he wrote to the FPCC, Lee told her that he did not love her. She was “in his way,” he said, and he still meant to send her back to Russia.

  “I’ll go to Cuba, then China, and you will wait for me in Russia,” he told her in his coldest tone. “I love to travel and with you I can’t.”