Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  He put his handbills away and spent the rest of the day playing with June, doing housework, and making up to his wife in every way he could.

  They spent a lot of evenings after that with Marina sitting in the rocking chair and Lee, seated at the coffee table, stamping leaflets. Marina was not happy to see him busy with “politics” again, but she told herself that as long as it had to do with papers and not a gun, she need not worry too much. It got so she hardly noticed.

  Besides, Marina was preoccupied by troubles of her own, especially her fear that Lee would force her to go back to Russia. Night after night she sat rocking June to sleep with tears cascading down her cheeks.

  Sometimes Lee pretended not to notice. Sometimes the sight of her tears actually put him in good spirits, and he would break out singing or whistling. “Why are you crying?” he would ask.

  “How can you be so cruel?”

  “I’m not cruel. I’ve thought it out. It’ll be better for you there.”

  “Why did you bring me here if you were only going to send me back with two children? You know what a disgrace it is to go back without a husband.”

  “You have a husband,” he said icily. “I’ll send you money. I thought it would be a disgrace to come back here. But it wasn’t.”

  He kept her under unremitting pressure to write the Soviet Embassy and ask for her visa to be speeded up, and she unremittingly refused. He tried to force her to write the embassy whenever she did or said anything that displeased him, and nearly every night when he got home from work he asked whether she had written yet. Every night she answered that she had not. One night he twisted her wrist to try to make her give in.

  But what hurt Marina most was something she only suspected: that Lee’s coldness was only a mask, and that it took all his cruelty and self-command to keep it from slipping off. She believed it was his family, June and her, whom he loved in his heart, but that in accordance with his lofty ideas about himself, he disguised his real feelings and forced himself to put politics above everything else. It seemed to her that Lee was not being true to himself. Marina longed to cry out to him: “Why do you torture us so? You know you don’t believe half what you are saying.” For some reason she stifled her own cry.

  Marina could understand someone’s giving her up. But she did not see how, for the sake of his “foolish politics,” Lee could give up June, whom he loved above everyone, and a new baby he had never even seen.

  “Oh, I’ll see it sometime,” he said airily.

  “Do you think you are such a great man?” Marina asked. “Do you think you are the only one who can do anything for ‘little Cuba’?”

  Indeed, Lee did give Marina grounds for suspecting that, icy and indifferent as he tried to appear, underneath his feelings were not so cold. He obviously loved June, and every so often, on an impulse, he would put his arms around Marina and kiss her, too. Marina was glad of his kisses. She says she was like a “blind kitten” who, for the sake of one caress, keeps coming back to the person who hits it.

  But it was not long before the poor blind kitten put her tail up. Sometimes Lee’s cruelty so repelled Marina that she could not bear to be in the same room with him. She would pick the baby up and go to another room to cry.

  Suddenly one night she piped up: “Okay, I’ll go back to Russia so long as you give me a divorce.”

  “And whom would you be planning to marry?” Lee asked with a little leer. “Anatoly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “There’ll be no divorce,” Lee said in a hard voice. “I may want to come to you sometime. I won’t give you a divorce.” He put down the book he was reading. “You’re my wife and you’ll stay my wife. The children are mine. You’ll wait for me just as long as I want. There will be no divorce. That’s it. The conversation is over.”

  Sometimes Marina had moods in which she thought she might go back to Russia if it would please Lee. But she did not want to go. She wanted to keep Lee and stay in America. She counted on time, Soviet red tape, and a change in their relationship to save her. But now she had hit upon another device. She saw that Lee, for some reason she could not comprehend, would not allow her to go back to Russia without legal ties to him. And it worked. Each time she mentioned the word “divorce,” Lee balked. If she continued to insist on a divorce, perhaps he would change his mind entirely.

  Meantime an explosive new element had been introduced into their arguments: the name of Anatoly and, with it, jealousy. Once the name was out of the bag, it came up again and again, and it was Lee who kept bringing it up. He reminded Marina of the letter she had written to Anatoly the previous winter and told her he would never forget. He mentioned Anatoly every time they had a fight. If Marina reminisced about some escapade she had had in Minsk, he assumed that she had been with Anatoly. “Stop it,” he would say. “I can’t stand it.” And if she herself spoke of Anatoly, he would say: “Shut up. I don’t want to hear about your boyfriends.”

  Once Marina went too far and remarked that Anatoly used to kiss so well it had made her head spin. Lee literally clapped his hand over her mouth to hush her up. “You’re my wife,” he said. “You’re not to speak of any other man ever again.”

  But another time, when she again had the temerity to mention Anatoly’s kissing, Lee asked her to teach him how. At that moment Marina felt the full sweetness of revenge. Anatoly, she replied, half in humor, kissed so well that if Lee spent his whole life trying he would never learn to kiss that way.

  Marina’s talk of Anatoly was not just a ruse to make Lee jealous. Her life with Lee had been so hard that anyone who had ever been good to her now seemed like an angel. Anatoly had been good to her, and she had been “crazy” about him. After Lee intercepted her letter to him and read it aloud, she had resolved to forget him. But Marina was not in full control of her thoughts. Anatoly started cropping up at night, in her dreams. If she did go back to Russia, he was the man she would marry—if he would have her.

  Marina gave up trying to forget Anatoly. In fact, she bought a photograph of President Kennedy to remind her of him. An attentive observer of physical characteristics, a girl who was constantly drawing comparisons between the features of this person and that, Marina saw a resemblance between the two men: the ruffled, unruly hair; the heavy, slightly hooded eyelids; the nose; the lips; the lower half of the face—except for the generous Kennedy allotment of teeth. Nor was Kennedy the only man whose features reminded her of Anatoly’s. The film actor Mel Ferrer, who played Prince Andrei in the film version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, reminded her of Anatoly, too.

  As far as Marina is aware, Lee never knew that in her eyes the president’s features were a prized reminder of the love she had lost. She did not tell him of the resemblance. Yet knowing her capacity to arouse jealousy, and Lee’s proclivity to be jealous, it could very well be that she somehow telegraphed her feeling that Kennedy resembled Anatoly and that her message got through to Lee. In any case Lee had seen Anatoly on the night he first met Marina, and if a resemblance truly existed and was marked, he may have observed it for himself. He was, justifiably, jealous of Anatoly. And he was jealous of Kennedy, whether he had seen a resemblance or not. Once Marina said casually: “He is very attractive—I can’t say what he is as president, but, I mean, as a man.” Lee’s response was as usual: “You mustn’t like any other man but me.”

  In the summer of 1963, both Lee and Marina, like so many others in America, had special feelings about the Kennedys. The names of the president and his wife were a staple item of their household conversation. Lee appears to have had a small, special feeling for Mrs. Kennedy. He admired her, he said, for accompanying her husband on his travels (a reproach to Marina), and from reading Time and the newspapers, he seemed to have about as detailed a knowledge of her obstetrical history as he had of Marina’s. He told Marina that, in addition to Caroline, John Jr., and the child she was due to have that autumn, Mrs. Kennedy had lost two children, one a miscarriage and one a stillbirth. Ma
rina was very, very sorry.8

  As for the president, Lee said that he was Roman Catholic, one of a large family of brothers and sisters, and a Democrat and that his father was a millionaire who made money in the whiskey business. “His papa bought him the presidency,” Lee remarked, and to Marina’s surprise she failed to detect resentment in the way he said it. “Money paves the way to everything here,” Lee added, and she thought she did hear resentment in that remark—not against the president but against capitalism. Lastly, he told her that in spite of his father’s help, Kennedy was equipped to be president and deserved it.

  Marina admired Kennedy in his own right—not only as a reminder of Anatoly. The more she saw of him the better she liked him, and it got so that she would flip through the pages of every magazine she could lay her hands on, asking: “Where’s Kennedy? Where’s Kennedy?” With a patience that was utterly unlike him, Lee translated everything for her, every article and every caption—about the president, his wife, their children, and the Robert F. Kennedy family. He did not balk, as he did when she asked him to read about movie stars, nor did he scold her for being unable to read it herself. He seemed nearly as interested in the Kennedys as she was, and if the article was favorable, he seemed to agree with it. About three times that summer they heard Kennedy give a speech over the radio (they still did not have a TV). Lee listened intently and said “Shh” once when Marina asked him to translate while the president was still speaking. After one speech, probably the one of July 26 when Kennedy announced the signing of a nuclear test-ban treaty in Moscow, Lee told her that the speech had been an appeal for disarmament. But generally he refused to tell Marina what the speeches were about. He went quietly back to his book without a comment.

  Marina got the impression that her husband liked and approved of the president and believed that for the United States in 1963, John F. Kennedy was the best president the country could hope to have. His only reservation seemed to be that socialism was a better system. Lee did say that some critics blamed Kennedy for “losing” Cuba. He added, however, that Kennedy would like to pursue a better, more gentle policy toward Cuba but was not free to do as he wished. A president, he explained, had to reckon with the opinions of others.

  As for Marina, her reactions were entirely personal. If anything, she thought more about Mrs. Kennedy than about the president because Mrs. Kennedy, like Marina, was a wife and mother, and both of them were pregnant. To Marina Jacqueline Kennedy was a latter-day goddess. She might conceivably have passionate feelings underneath, but Marina supposed that, being Catholic and upper class, she must have been taught to restrain them. Indeed, Marina wondered whether the First Lady, unlike herself, was not a bit of a “cold fish.” But she was aware of “Jackie” as a human being, too. She was interested in what she wore and how she fixed her hair, and she was concerned about her pregnancy.

  Marina’s feelings for the president were once again utterly personal. She loved photographs of Kennedy that showed him with his face wide open in a smile. Most of all she loved the pictures of him walking along a beach or on the golf course, his hands thrust into his pockets and wearing an old sweater and a pair of khaki pants, just like anybody else.9 She was astonished that in this country such photographs of the president were allowed to appear. It seemed odd to her that the president’s picture could be taken “in such an informal pose.”

  “They take his picture in all poses,” Lee said.

  In her admiration for Kennedy, Marina had only one reservation: he was in “politics.” When she thought of Lee or of other men she had known, it was clear to her that anyone who cared about politics, especially any man who was even slightly tempted to place politics over his own family, must be sick or trying to escape personal unhappiness. To her, President Kennedy’s interest in politics meant that something was missing in her life.

  Marina speculated—to herself, not to Lee—about the president as man and lover. Since he looked like Anatoly, she wondered if he kissed like Anatoly. The resemblance suggested that he did. Marina did her best to convince herself that because he had a bad back he probably wasn’t much of a lover. Even so, the words Marina now uses to sum up her feelings toward the president are identical to the words she uses of only two other men in her life until then, Anatoly and Lee. The words are: “I was in love with him.”

  Marina had her photograph of President Kennedy, and Lee had his of Fidel Castro, which he clipped out of the Soviet magazine Ogonyok and pinned to the living room wall. Marina did not know what he planned to do with all his leaflets; she did not know that on the afternoon of June 16 he had passed some of them out at the Dumaine Street Wharf. But she did notice that Lee’s habits were beginning to change. He was getting very sloppy. By late May and early June, he had become alarmingly indifferent to the way he looked and went around wearing only sandals, work pants, and a dirty T-shirt. Marina would beg him, when they were going out, please to put on a fresh shirt. He refused—and she would cry. She was ashamed to be seen on the street with him.

  When he went to work, he looked even worse. “My work isn’t worth getting dressed for,” he told Marina.

  “Do it for yourself, then,” she said. “Or if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

  “I simply don’t care,” he replied.

  He stopped shaving on weekends and by mid-July shaved only every other day. Where formerly he had brushed his teeth three times a day, now he brushed them only at night. He stopped washing his face in the morning. And when he took a bath, he even stopped using soap. He just sat listlessly in the bathtub until he could stir himself to get out. “I’m not dirty,” he would say.

  He refused to let Marina darn his socks, preferring to go around in old, holey ones instead. She had to steal his socks if she was to mend them at all. He would burp at meals without excusing himself, and he got his hair cut at the nape of the neck so he had hair only on the top of his head. “I’ll wear it any way I like,” he said.

  Marina told him that her Russian relatives had thought he was from a good family because he was clean and good-looking. “If you’d looked this way when I met you, I never would have married you at all.”

  His breath got bad, and Marina used to beg him to brush his teeth, especially if he was going to kiss her. “You’re my wife. You’re supposed to love me any way I am,” and he would come at her, his mouth open, breathing as hard as he could. He would try to kiss her, yet his eyes were so full of hate she thought he was going to kill her instead.

  It got so he was dirty, unshaven, and unwashed nearly all the time. He knew it made Marina angry. “Ah-ha,” he would say. “You can’t stand me this way. I won’t wash and I won’t clean up just because you want me to.” But Marina saw that it had nothing to do with her. He had simply lost all desire to take care of himself.

  Lee’s behavior was also unpredictable. Often he would look up from his book to propose an outing. Marina would get dressed and would dress the baby, too. Then, at the last minute, Lee would change his mind and tell them to go without him. Sometimes it was a ploy to get rid of them so he could work on his writings alone. Yet he hated their being away for long and was distraught if they were as little as half an hour late getting home.

  By far the worst change, however, was the return for a few weeks in June of Lee’s feeling that Marina was his property, or slave, and he her owner. This meant he had the right to take her, sexually, by force any time he liked, and now and then he tried.

  Marina was outraged. “You advanced revolutionary,” she shouted at Lee as he was stamping his pro-Castro leaflets. “You have a moral code no better than that of ancient Egypt.” She now realized that Lee existed in two worlds: a fantasy, political world, of which he gave her barely a glimpse, and an everyday, down-to-earth world in which June was the one human being he truly loved. Marina, too, was part of this world, and it was her role to rear and protect his “treasure,” June.

  But there was another world she knew nothing about: the real political worl
d. Lee existed in that world, too, and from time to time it seems to have intruded upon his fantasies. Thus on June 23, a Sunday, when he had more time than usual to read the newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune carried a front-page story to the effect that President Kennedy had left Washington by air for a major journey to Western Europe.

  On the next day, Monday, June 24, Lee took the first step toward putting travel plans of his own into effect. Exactly one year after his old passport had expired, he went downtown and applied for a new one. He said on the application form that he expected to be traveling three months to a year as a tourist in England, France, Germany, Holland, the Soviet Union, Finland, Italy, and Poland. He expected to leave New Orleans between October and December 1963 on the Lykes Steamship Line, the same one he took in 1959 when he defected to the Soviet Union. And he gave Lillian Murret, not Marina, as the person to notify in case of his death. Presumably he did not know where Marina might be at such a time. He received his passport the next day.

  Marina knew nothing of his application. All she knew was that Lee was having trouble in his sleep again—the first time since February. One night he cried, yet when he woke up he could not remember what his dream had been about. He started having nosebleeds, once or twice he talked in his sleep, and one night toward the very end of June he had four anxiety attacks during which he shook from head to toe at intervals of half an hour and never once woke up. Just as in the period when he was making up his mind to shoot General Walker, these attacks appear to have presaged a decision that was causing him pain.

  Marina, too, was sleeping badly because of her fear of being sent back to Russia. She looked tired and unhappy all the time. “What’s wrong with you?” Lee would ask. “Don’t you like it here? Your face is making me nervous.” Sometimes he went a whole day without speaking to her, or if he did he would say, “Hey you,” do this or that, without ever calling her by name.

  But one night Marina was sitting in her rocker holding back her tears when she noticed that Lee looked unhappy, too. He stole a glance in her direction, and she saw a look of sadness in his eyes. He put his book down and went into the kitchen by himself. Marina waited a few minutes. Then she put the baby down and followed him. Lee was sitting in the dark with his arms and legs wrapped around the back of a chair and his head resting on top. He was staring down at the floor. Marina put her arms around him, stroked his head, and could feel him shaking with sobs.