Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  Just before Ruth was due to arrive, they were playing a game of poker. Lee promised Marina he would lend her money to play with, and when she won she started jumping around the room for joy.

  “No, no, you didn’t win,” Lee protested. “I loaned you the money to begin with. If you win the next game, you can have the money. If you lose, then you’ll owe me again.”

  Furious, Marina threw down the money and the cards and said: “Play by yourself, you greedy pig!”

  “Why are you so angry?” He followed her as she stormed out of the room. “It’s only a game.”

  “I’m sorry, Alka. I see this game in real life every day. Even in games, even in little things, you’re always greedy for money. You know I don’t have a cent. Supposing I do owe you money, where will I get it? Steal it from you? You know I can’t steal.”

  “Then you didn’t have to play by those principles.”

  “I’m tired of your principles,” she said. “Even in games I see your petty spirit. I see it in the grocery store. We go in, and you give me thirty cents. Afterward you want to know what I spent it on. I earned thirty dollars teaching Russian and spent all but four of it on you. I wasn’t sorry I spent it on you—I was glad. Lyolya Hall gave me twenty dollars, and I spent every penny of it on you.”

  All Marina’s grievances came pouring out. It was as if she had been storing them up like firecrackers in her mouth and Lee had touched a match to them. She exploded.

  “On your principles I breast-fed Junie until she was ten months old just to save you money. I’m sick of your principles. Even in a simple game, you can’t change them. I spare nothing to help you. Just what do you think you look like—like a skeleton, that’s what. That’s your principles, too. It’s greed, not principles at all. You save on everything. What for? To buy a dress for your wife? Food or a toy for your child? No. You have money for a gun. You have money for your Mexico. But for your own baby, no! What joy is your Cuba, your Mexico, your Castro, to me? You never even think about our new baby. I have to ask Ruth to help because Papa has got something more important on his mind. I’m tired of your ‘important’ things. When will you start to think the way normal people do? You imagine that you’re a great man. Nobody thought that up but you.”

  Marina was so angry, and her words poured out so rapidly, that Lee was silent. Then she started to pack all her clothes in a suitcase. She was going to the Murrets’ until Ruth came.

  He pushed her gently on the bed. “My God,” Lee said. “Out of such tiny things she makes such a fight. That’s women for you!”

  “Ah, women again,” said Marina. “There’s not a woman who would stay with you more than one day. Any other woman would have run away the day after she married you.”

  Lee took Marina’s clothes out of the suitcase and hung them back in the closet. She took them out and packed them again. “I’m the only one who’s fool enough to do it,” she went on. “I try to put up with you. And the whole time you’re giving me hell and saying I never ‘support’ you. What on earth do you mean by that? That I ought to carry you in my arms? With a normal man it would be the other way around. He would carry his wife in his arms.”

  “I can carry you in my arms,” Lee said and started to lift her.

  She pulled away from him and kept on packing, while Lee tried to soothe her and begged her not to leave.

  “Alka,” she said, “what is it, what more do you want from me? Never again say to me that I ‘never support you.’ I can’t even bear to hear those words. I do more for you than I should and more than I can.”

  Lee tried to calm her. He apologized. He had not meant to make her angry, he said. He offered to give back the money she had won at cards, but Marina refused to touch it.

  “Go choke on your lousy money.”

  After she had packed and been unpacked twice, Lee kissed her, and she finally quieted down. She went to bed, and Lee disappeared into the bathroom to read. Later, he stole into the bedroom and asked if he might lie down.

  “Unhappily, I have no choice,” she said.

  He crept cautiously into bed, afraid to take up an extra inch. Then he got bolder and asked if he might move over a little.

  “No,” she said. “Go sleep on the floor.” But after a few minutes she weakened and moved over.

  Marina’s outburst had been caused in part by her sorrow and anxiety about the parting that lay ahead. Realizing that she might never see Lee again, she begged him to take her with him. “Where on earth can I take you?” he said. “You’re in the last stages of pregnancy.” He promised to bring her to Cuba or else rejoin her in Russia. Marina hated both choices, but she knew it was useless to protest. In the meantime she was not to tell Ruth where Lee was, nor would he write to her at Ruth’s. But if she had not heard from him in two weeks (his Mexican tourist visa was good for two weeks), then she would know he was in Cuba.

  On Friday afternoon, September 20, Marina went out to buy a few last-minute groceries. By the time she got back, Ruth and her children had arrived, and Lee was greeting them on the porch. He was overjoyed to see Ruth, and she, for her part, was impressed by the change in him. He seemed to be in good spirits, “very outgoing and warm and friendly.”15 She had never seen him in such a good mood before.

  Ruth and her children stayed the weekend, and they all had a pleasant time. Lee appeared genuinely concerned about Marina’s welfare and where she would have the baby. He was grateful to Ruth for taking over the arrangements. He gave her a duplicate tax form from Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, his Dallas employer from October 1962 to April 1963, to present to Parkland Hospital in Dallas as proof that Marina was a one-year Texas resident, hence entitled to care based on her ability to pay. In case the hospital authorities asked, he was anxious that Ruth avoid any suggestion that he had “abandoned” his wife. He, of course, made no mention of his plans to go abroad. He told Ruth that he was going to Houston or Philadelphia to look for work; as soon as he found it, he would be back to fetch Marina. Thus Ruth assumed that Marina was coming to stay with her for only a few weeks.

  Contrary to his usual contempt for anyone who helped him, Lee had a grudging admiration for Ruth. She was “too tall” and “a fool”—Lee called everyone “a fool”—but he was sympathetic to her marital troubles. In a reversal of his customary moralistic stance, Lee, prompted by Marina, declared that Ruth would be “a fool” not to take a lover. It would help her forget Michael. So when Ruth wrote them a postcard from New York announcing ruefully that she had not yet succeeded in her mission, Lee was tickled a good deal. He laughed and said that Ruth was “really something.”

  That weekend Marina wanted to take Ruth on a tour of the nightclubs on Bourbon Street. They urged Lee to come with them, but he refused. He hated nightclubs and had never, in all the time Marina knew him and in spite of much cajoling on her part, been inside one. So Marina and Ruth made the tour, “a tall Quaker lady,” as Marina describes it, holding a small boy and girl by either hand, and a small, very pregnant woman, holding her tiny daughter by the hand. They did not go into any of the clubs. They just peeked through the swinging doors, while the children tried to dance to the striptease music.

  When they got back, they found Lee in a marvelous mood. He had washed the dishes, straightened up the apartment—and started packing. Ruth was impressed by Lee’s insistence on doing every bit of packing himself. She had never seen him such a gentleman before. What she did not know was that among the items he was loading with such care in her car was, almost certainly, his rifle, dismantled, wrapped in brown paper and a blanket, and tied up in heavy string. Somehow he led the Paines to understand that it was “camping equipment.”16

  The parting on Monday morning, September 23, was hard for both Lee and Marina. Lee tried to conceal his distress by doing chores. When he had finished loading the car—again, all by himself—he assured Marina that he knew he did not have to worry about her so long as she was with Ruth. “She is good, and she will help you.” But when he kissed Marina goo
dbye, his lips were trembling, and it was all he could do to keep from crying. Marina thought that he might be wondering, for the first time, whether he had a right to act in a way that could hurt his wife and baby. Marina remembers that he looked at her “as a dog looks at its master.” And in that pathetic look she thought she could see that he loved her.

  Marina, too, was close to tears and tried to conceal from Ruth how much the parting was costing her—the pain of perhaps leaving Lee forever. She was ashamed at being dumped on Ruth, ashamed most of all that she could not tell the truth even to the friend who had come to her rescue.

  No sooner had they said their good-byes and driven off than Ruth noticed a rumbling in one of her tires. She pulled up at a gas station one block from the apartment to have it changed. Lee, in his sandals, followed them there. Marina took him to one side, and they parted all over again. She was tender to him, telling him to be careful and eat properly.

  “Stop,” he said. “I can’t stand it. Do you want me to cry in front of Ruth?”

  For him, too, the hardest thing was to conceal from Ruth that the parting might be forever. So while the two of them fought back their tears, Lee held Junie in front of the Coke machine to help them gain their composure. “Come on, Junie,” he said. “Show me with your fingers what you want.” Then, when he had a grip on himself, he warned Marina that, above all, she was not to tell Ruth he was going to Cuba.

  — 32 —

  A New Disappointment

  A host of controversies has arisen about the months that Lee Harvey Oswald spent in New Orleans, in particular the time from July 19 onward, when he was unemployed, and the two days between Marina’s departure for Texas on September 23 and Lee’s own departure for Mexico City on September 25. Clandestine meetings and conspiratorial relationships, have been attributed to Oswald during this period. But the available evidence suggests that both were unlikely, if not impossible. Taking Marina’s recollections of her husband’s activities, the testimony of the Oswalds’ neighbors, the minimum number of visits Lee paid to the public library—occasions when he actually checked out a book (twenty)—his visits to the Louisiana Employment Office (sixteen); the times he went looking for jobs between July 22 and the middle of August (an unknown but considerable number); occasions when he was out picketing or at the radio station (five); his forays to printing establishments (perhaps a dozen); his visits to Winn-Dixie and his post office box; his trips with Marina and June to the Murrets’ (four or five times), to Lake Pontchartrain, the zoo, the botanical garden, or just exploring the French Quarter; to say nothing of times when he spent the entire day reading in the public library or when Marina sent him to the movies so she could catch up on housework or have a little time to herself—all of these added together account for most of Oswald’s time in New Orleans while he was not actually at work. Only one, and possibly two, people whom he may have known slightly during these months remain unidentified: one of the two young men to whom he paid $2 on August 16 to help him pass out handbills; and a “Negro” at Reily with whom he told Marina he used to go drinking, a man whom she never saw and who may have been a creature of Lee’s imagination, since Marina reports that Lee never came home late and never drank anything stronger than Coke, iced tea, or Dr. Pepper.

  Lee was, of course, highly secretive. He had wanted to be a spy, and he was, in fact, a nearly successful assassin. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative, it cannot be established that conspirators did not ever contact him, or he them. But for anyone who was contemplating something serious, Oswald would appear to have been too conspicuous, especially in the Southwest, for he was an ex-defector to Russia who flaunted his Russian and had a Russian wife, he was an almost inevitable magnet for the FBI’s attentions, and he was a young man who blatantly sought publicity instead of avoiding it. And if his outer characteristics rendered him an unlikely recruit, his personality rendered him unlikelier still, for he was so incapable of cooperating with anyone that he had been unable even to establish the loosest of relationships with the FPCC, fifteen hundred miles away. Apart from the rare occasions when their living arrangements forced him to admit to Marina what he was doing, or when a momentary breach in the armor of his mistrust allowed him to confide in her, he trusted no one with his secrets. He had proven that he was capable of taking drastic actions and dangerous risks—but always alone.

  As to whether or not he was susceptible to influence, a few months before in Dallas, eager for George de Mohrenschildt’s approval, he does appear, without his or de Mohrenschildt’s being aware of it consciously, to have been influenced to shoot at General Walker. But after April he had no George de Mohrenschildt. With the possible exception of Marina, there was no one in his environment whose love and approval he craved. Even if there was an attempt to influence him by someone who might have known him casually—and there appears to have been no such person in his life—the metaphor of the pool hall seems appropriate. Someone desiring to influence Lee might shoot a ball, an idea, at him, but there was no way to predict how it might come caroming off.

  Judging by the eagerness he had shown to be off for Mexico, one might expect that Lee would have left on Monday, the 23rd, the same day that Ruth and Marina left New Orleans. He did not leave until Wednesday, the 25th, and his movements over the next two days have given rise to conflicting testimony, even among eyewitnesses, as well as to much controversy.1

  On Sunday, while Lee was loading Ruth’s station wagon, Jesse Garner, spotting nearly all the Oswalds’ belongings in the car, asked him if he was leaving.2 Lee, who owned two weeks’ rent, said no. His wife was going to Texas to have her baby and would return. He was staying there. He did stay in New Orleans for two more days, but his movements were so furtive that neighbors could not agree on when they saw him actually leave the apartment. Two of them reported later that they saw Lee racing to catch a bus on the corner, carrying a piece of luggage in each hand, at five or six in the evening. But one of them thought it was Monday, the other that it was Tuesday evening. On Wednesday Jesse Garner entered the Oswalds’ apartment and found it empty. Lee was gone.

  Whether or not he stayed in the apartment Monday or Tuesday night, Lee was obviously trying to cheat the Garners out of the rent. That appears to have been the only secret activity in which he was engaged during those two days. Moreover, money was also the reason he waited until Wednesday to leave for Mexico City. He had only about $150 for his trip, and by staying in New Orleans on Tuesday, he was able to visit the Louisiana Employment Commission and file claim for the next to last of the thirteen unemployment compensation checks to which he was entitled from the State of Texas. He filed the claim, and the check was forwarded to him the following week in care of Michael Paine in Irving.

  By waiting until Wednesday morning, Lee was also able to go to his post office box at the Lafayette Square substation and pick up the $33 unemployment compensation check for which he had filed a claim the week before. While there, he popped a change-of-address card in the mailbox, and it was stamped at the main post office at 11:00 A.M. According to postal officials, this meant that Lee had picked up his check at the Lafayette Square post office station no later than 10:20 that morning. He then went to the Winn-Dixie store on Magazine Street (on his street, but not the branch store he generally patronized) and cashed the check sometime before noon. He had, in all probability, already deposited his baggage at the bus terminal, which gave him freedom to complete all his business on Wednesday morning without risking a return to the apartment and a confrontation with Mr. Garner. And by cashing his $33 check at a store where he was not known, he also hoped to avoid being seen or recognized by his neighbors. He owed Mr. Garner for fifteen or sixteen days, one-half of his monthly rental of $65. He therefore saved almost exactly $33, the same amount as his unemployment check.

  Lee’s departure from New Orleans resembled his departure nearly five months earlier from Dallas. Both times Ruth and Marina left ahead of him, and both times he stayed at the apar
tment and checked his luggage at the bus terminal prior to his departure. Lee probably left New Orleans at 12:20 P.M. on Wednesday by Continental Trailways Bus No. 5121, bound for Houston. There were no eyewitnesses to his arrival there, but after that he blazed a fairly conspicuous trial.

  That night in Houston, a woman named Estelle Twiford, the wife of a merchant seaman named Horace Elroy Twiford, received a telephone call at her home from a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that he was on his way “by air” to Mexico, would be in town a few hours, and would like “to discuss ideas” with her husband. Mrs. Twiford told him that her husband was out of town. Lee left his name and said that he was with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Mrs. Twiford relayed the message to her husband the next time he was home.

  Twiford was a member of the Socialist Labor Party. Earlier in the summer, in response to a request for literature from Oswald, the Socialist Labor Party in New York had passed on Oswald’s name to Twiford. He then mailed Oswald at least one issue of a small paper he put out called the Weekly People. That was the only knowledge the Twifords had of Oswald, and his telephone call was their only contact.3

  Lee left Houston about 2:35 on Thursday morning, September 26, aboard Continental Trailways Bus No. 5133, transferred to Mexican Red Arrow Bus No. 516 at Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and arrived in Mexico City about 10:00 A.M. on Friday, September 27. He made no secret of his identity or the reason for his trip. He told Dr. and Mrs. John B. McFarland, an English couple who were fellow passengers, that he was secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. He was going to Mexico to evade the American ban on travel to Cuba, he said, and was on his way to Cuba to see Castro if he could.4