Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  “Why are you crying?” she asked. Then, “Cry away. It’ll be better that way.” Finally she said: “Everything is going to be all right. I understand.”

  Marina held him for about a quarter of an hour, and he told her between sobs that he was lost. He didn’t know what he ought to do. At last he stood up and returned to the living room.

  She followed him, and he was quiet at first. Then he said suddenly, “Would you like me to come to Russia, too?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You mean it? You’re not just joking?”

  “I do.”

  Marina danced around the room for joy, then curled up in his lap.

  “I’ll go with my girls,” he said. “We’ll be together, you and me and Junie and the baby. There is nothing to hold me here. I’d rather have less, but not have to worry about the future. Besides, how would I manage without my girls?”

  A while later they were in the kitchen together. Lee held her by the shoulders and told her to write the Soviet Embassy that he would be coming, too. He would add his visa request to her letter.

  In bed that night they spent hours talking about where they were going to live. Marina was for Leningrad; she wanted to show him her city. But he preferred Moscow, and she gave in. She was afraid he wouldn’t come at all if she insisted.

  That weekend, the 29th or 30th of June, Marina wrote her longest, warmest, and so far her only uncoerced letter to Nikolai Reznichenko, head of the consular section of the Soviet Embassy in Washington. She joyfully announced that her husband wished to accompany her to the USSR and begged him to hurry up their visas. She added that they were too poor to visit the embassy in Washington (as the embassy requested) and could not even pay their medical bills. They would need financial help from the embassy to get back to the USSR.

  Lee told Marina what to write—“more tears and fewer facts,” he ordered. But fairly certain that he would not bother to read her letter when she had finished, Marina added a sentence or two of her own. She made a formal request that they be allowed to live in Leningrad on the grounds that she would have a better chance of finding a job as a pharmacist there.

  “Make us happy again,” she closed the letter. “Help us win back what we by our foolishness lost.”10

  If Marina played a trick on Lee by asking to live in Leningrad, he tricked her as well. Before he mailed her letter to the embassy, he appended one in English of his own:11

  Dear Sirs:

  Please rush the entrance visa for the return of Soviet citizen Marina N. Oswald.

  She is going to have a baby in October, therefore you must grant the entrance visa and make the transportation arrangements before then.

  As for my return entrance visa please consider it separtably.

  Thank you

  Lee H. Oswald

  (husband of Marina Nicholeyev)

  The letter was startlingly similar in tone and content to Lee’s correspondence with the American Embassy in Moscow years before. Once again he was asking a government, this time a foreign government that was under no obligation whatsoever to him, to make his travel arrangements and pay his bills. Again he sought to place the responsibility for his wife and child on somebody else. Confronted with problems in his life, he repeatedly sought the same old solutions. His peremptory demands had worked in the past. He still expected, still felt, that he deserved special treatment.

  Lee asked the Soviet Embassy to consider his application separately from Marina’s because he knew that Marina, as a Soviet citizen who had requested a visa nearly five months before, might receive it much sooner than he, and he did not want to delay her return. But he was not deceiving her entirely. He does appear to have been considering a return to Russia himself, or at least holding it open as a place to fall back on. He had told Marina that he wanted to go to Cuba or China, but as yet he did not have any definite plans. With Marina and the baby in Russia, he might travel anywhere he liked, and return to them when it suited his convenience.

  The Oswalds had maintained a lively correspondence with relatives and friends in the USSR ever since their arrival in America, and apparently they both took their plan to return to Russia seriously enough to write friends in Leningrad and Minsk that they had applied to come back. Their friends seemed surprised—and shocked. In their replies they welcomed the Oswalds on one hand and warned them on the other. One couched his warning in the strongest terms. He urged Lee to think it over, advising that this next Atlantic crossing, if he made it, was certain to be his last. For the friend to have written so explicit a warning, aware that it would be read by authorities on both sides, was a testament to the very great loyalty he bore the Oswalds. The risk he was running was a real one.12

  On Monday, July 1, the same day he wrote the embassy, Lee paid another visit to the Napoleon Branch of the New Orleans Public Library. He had recently been reading a spy novel, space fiction, a few volumes on Communism and on Russia. Today he borrowed only one book. It was William Manchester’s Portrait of a President, a biography of John F. Kennedy.

  — 29 —

  Arrest

  Marina’s spirits lifted the moment Lee said he would go back with her to Russia. In her euphoria it made no difference to her what country they lived in, just so the two of them could be together, and with the children. Marina had told Lee that she could not go on living if he left her, and she meant it. Now he had, by his actions, reassured her, had shown that he needed her and was not going to throw her away. She realized that he loved her as best he knew how.

  No longer as afraid as she had been that he was going to send her to Russia alone, or that he might, without warning, kill someone, Marina was able to be more understanding. She saw that Lee was torn and confused and did not know what to do. She felt sorry for him. She decided to try to be more kind and affectionate so that he would confide in her and express his feelings more openly. She knew that she, too, was responsible for their fights, and she resolved to turn over a new leaf and not be so quick to take offense.

  Lee also changed. Up to now, he had been keeping his feelings out of sight as only he knew how to do. But the tears he had shed in the kitchen seemed to release him a little, and he became less edgy and tense. Nor did he try quite so hard to hide what he was feeling from Marina. As a result, they became closer. Their marriage acquired a softer tone, a milder temperature.

  Neither was an angel, of course, and they had no revolution in their home. Lee still wanted exactly the right shirt at the moment he wanted it, still paced back and forth in front of the ironing board muttering to Marina, “Faster, faster, you do everything too slowly.” Like Marina’s stepfather, he still had the irritating habit of leaning back in a chair with his dirty shoes all over the kitchen table, so that Marina was forever having to wash and rewash the table. He continued to complain about her cooking, and she about his wanting to make love without brushing his teeth and about the outrageous way he spoiled the baby. They still had fights, but there was humor in their battles now, and an hour or two afterward both of them forgot what they had been fighting about.

  There were times when Lee refused to touch the last piece of meat on his plate at supper. He was saving it for Marina because she was pregnant. She put it in the refrigerator, but later in the evening she would take it out and try to get him to eat it. He would refuse and insist on saving it for her. In this and in other ways, Marina says, “We gave each other everything we had.” She realizes that perhaps it was not enough, perhaps what each had to give was not what the other needed most. Still, they leaned on one another and gave each other what they could.

  Lee remained reluctant, however, to share very much of himself. He still kept secrets from Marina, such as the type of work he did. He had told her he had a job in photography, but when he came home night after night smelling of coffee and covered with grease and coffee dust, she knew he had lied to her again. She was certain that his job had to do with coffee when he started bringing home pack
ages of coffee and coupons. They used the coupons to buy a coffee pot and a huge saucepan for cooking crabs. Marina was pleased that Lee was doing something for their home, but she begged him to stop bringing the coupons home. She knew that he had stolen them and said that his job meant more to them than coupons.

  In fact, Lee hated his job and felt degraded by it. He was one of four maintenance men at the Reily coffee company responsible for keeping the processing machines clean and oiling them after they had been in use. The man who broke him in said later that Lee from the very first day did not seem to care whether he caught on or not.1 He would squirt his can of oil here and there and more or less hope the oil landed in the right spot. He scarcely spoke to the other employees, and later it would be discovered that he was lying in his greasing log, claiming to have lubricated machines that he had not touched. Lee had been there only a few weeks when the personnel manager who hired him had already come close to firing him more than once. He refrained only because there was a shortage of men in the maintenance department.2

  Lee did not fraternize at all. He ate his lunch alone at Martin’s Restaurant down the street, and sometimes, during a break, while the other men were sitting in the driveway smoking and shooting the breeze, Lee sat on a bench by himself. He stared straight into space, and if anyone happened to speak to him, he looked right at the person and did not reply.3 Lee had another curious form of greeting. When he met Charles LeBlanc, one of the men on the maintenance crew, he would cup his fist, stick out his index finger as if it were a gun, and say, “Pow!” without even cracking a smile. “Boy, what a crackpot this guy is,” LeBlanc thought, guessing that he must have family troubles or not be quite right in the head.

  One day while LeBlanc was greasing one of the machines, Lee offered to help. Suddenly Lee asked, “You like it here?”

  “Well, I ought to,” Le Blanc replied. “I’ve been here eight and a half years.”

  “Hell, I don’t mean this place,” Lee said. “I mean this damn country.”4

  The men had a couple of breaks a day that were supposed to be fifteen minutes each. Gradually, Lee’s breaks got longer. Twenty minutes, half an hour, three-quarters of an hour—and no knew where to find him. He was next door at the Crescent City Garage, where he would get a Coke out of a machine and lose track of time.

  Lee talked with Adrian Alba, the owner of the garage (by coincidence, it was the garage the Secret Service used in New Orleans) about guns.5 He was very nearly in love with a Japanese rifle Alba owned, and when Alba told him that, as a member of the National Rifle Association, he had been able to buy a carbine for $35 that was easily worth $75 or $100, Lee begged him to sell it to him or buy another. Alba explained that he did not want to sell and under NRA rules he was entitled to purchase only one. But Lee acted as if he had not heard and hinted that he would make Alba an offer for his rifle that he could not refuse. Apparently it never crossed his mind that at the cost of only $5 he, too, could join the NRA and buy a carbine himself.

  Lee had no interest in handguns, only rifles, and he and Alba held earnest conversations about the killing power of small-caliber versus large-caliber bullets when used against a human target. Both agreed that the small-caliber bullet was deadlier, that being hit by it was like being hit by a 2- or 3-inch icepick compared with a 10-inch bread knife because there would be more internal bleeding.

  Alba had a hundred or more issues of various gun magazines—American Rifleman, Field and Stream, Argosy, Guns and Hunting—lying around his office. Lee read them there, or borrowed one or two at a time and kept them between three days and a week. Before borrowing any new ones, he always made a great point of showing Alba that he had brought back the ones he had.

  Marina was to be twenty-two on July 17, and Lee had promised her something special, a dress or a new pair of shoes. He went to work that day and returned home as usual, oblivious of the date. Over supper Marina looked morose, and he asked her why. “Today was my birthday,” she said.

  A few minutes later, Lee said, “Come on. Let’s go out.”

  “The stores are closed now anyway,” she answered without enthusiasm.

  He took her to the drugstore across the street and bought her face powder and Coca-Cola.

  The next day he gave her his news: “Tomorrow is my last day at work.” He had been fired by the Reily coffee company.

  Marina took it well, as usual attributing his loss of work to widespread unemployment in the United States and not to any failings in her husband. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll have a little vacation, and then you’ll find another job.”

  The loss of his job, no matter how he felt about the work, must have been a great blow to Lee, much greater than for most people, because his picture of himself was further out of line with reality. Certain that he was a great man who had been unjustly denied recognition, he now had been told that he could not even grease a coffee machine adequately. Lee could tell himself what he pleased, but with each new hurt or disappointment of this kind it was characteristic of him to draw deeper into a world of his own imagining and to retreat further from the world of reality.

  About the time he was fired from Reily, and at the same time that he had just finished reading Manchester’s Portrait of a President, Lee began to talk about himself and his future in exalted terms. It began with talk about the new baby. “I am sure this time it will be a boy,” he said. “I’ll make a president out of my son.” He had spoken this way before the birth of his first child, and again early in Marina’s second pregnancy, before he tried to shoot General Walker. But now, he went a step further. He said that in twenty years’ time, he would be President or prime minister. It did not seem to matter that America has no prime minister.

  Marina poked fun at him. “Okay,” she laughed. “Papa will be prime minister. Son will be president. And what will I be—chief janitor in the White House? Will I be allowed to clean your room, or will you tell me I’m not to touch your papers even then?”

  “We’ll have to see what kind of girl you turn out to be.” He was in earnest.

  One night as she stepped out of the bathtub, Marina held up her underclothes to show him the worn-out elastic. “Papa,” she asked, “when you are president, will you buy me a new pair of panties?”

  “Shut up.”

  Marina was laughing at her own joke. “When you’re prime minister, you can buy me something fancy, but right now I’d like something for thirty-nine cents.”

  “Shut up,” he groaned.

  Marina, too, had her dreams, much closer to reality than Lee’s. She was ashamed of Lee because he lacked a college education, and in five years or so, when the children were in school, it was her intention to go to work and support him so that he could study philosophy and economics. Those were his choices, and she approved of them, because she thought they might straighten out his thinking and help him see his mistakes.

  “Don’t you want to be the wife of a prime minister?” he would ask.

  “No, please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to be fairy godmother in your castle of air.”

  His ideas seemed so unreal, so unconnected with life, that she was ashamed of him for even daydreaming about it. She begged him to come out of the clouds, come down to earth and be like other mortals.

  “Look, Junie,” she said, pointing to Lee. “Look at our future prime minister.”

  Lee postured and struck a pose. “You laugh at me now. But I’ll watch you laugh in twenty years when your husband is prime minister.”

  “By that time,” Marina said to him, “you’ll be on Wife Number Ten. I won’t live twenty years with the life you’re giving me now. I don’t want to be the wife of a prime minister.”

  If Marina asked him to play dominoes, it was in these words that he chose to refuse: “In twenty years you can have plenty of amusements. Not now.”

  “In twenty years, when you’re prime minister, I’ll be dead.”

  Marina asked
how on earth he meant to be president when he had no training for it and had not even been to college. “I’ll teach myself,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing you learn better from practice than from reading books.”

  She told him the world was changing. Maybe it had once been that way, but these days a president had to have been to college.

  “Be quiet. You don’t understand. It’s none of your business,” he said.

  Marina recalls that Lee was reading a particular book when he began to talk about becoming president: Manchester’s biography of Kennedy. Ordinarily, Lee read books rapidly. He took his time over this one, and when he returned Portrait of a President to the Napoleon Branch of the public library, he took out two other books. In his biography Manchester mentioned, in passing, that Kennedy had recently read Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile. Lee borrowed Moorehead’s The Blue Nile. He also took out Kennedy’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, Profiles in Courage.

  That summer Lee read more about and by Kennedy than about any other political figure. And from his boast to Marina that he would become president in twenty years—when he would be forty-three, Kennedy’s age when he was elected to the presidency—it appears that Lee wanted to be like Kennedy and perhaps follow in his footsteps as closely as he could. Reading Manchester’s book may have reminded him that in some ways he was like Kennedy already. Both loved to read books, both loved foreign travel, both had served with the armed forces in the Pacific, both had poor handwriting and were poor spellers, both had very young children, and both had a brother named Robert. But there was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and of this, too, Lee must have been poignantly aware. For Kennedy not only read books, he wrote them and had received a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. Kennedy had not merely served in the Pacific, as Lee did; he had seen action and become a hero of World War II. Of the two, Kennedy was, of course, the taller and better looking and was, as far as Lee knew, a more impressive physical specimen. (Marina says that her husband did not know that the president had Addison’s disease.) Finally, Kennedy had a wealthy, affectionate father, who would do anything on earth for him and had, as Lee mentioned to Marina, “bought him the presidency.”