Lee also got into conversation with two Australian girls on the bus. He asked if they had been to Russia, took out his old US passport to show them his Soviet visa, and said he had lived there two years. While he acted very much the world traveler, the girls noticed that he was at a loss with the Spanish menus. Thus, every two hours, when the passengers disembarked for a food and rest stop, Lee was unable to pick and choose—he just pointed at something on the menu and had to eat a full meal. He told the girls he loved Mexican food. Their nickname for him was “Texas.” Although “Texas” ate every meal alone, he did make an exception for the McFarlands, with whom he had breakfast as they were approaching Mexico City on Friday morning.5
Less than an hour after his arrival, Lee was installed in Room 18 of the Hotel del Comercio, four blocks from the bus terminal. The room cost $1.28 a day, and the maid was impressed not only by the paucity of his personal effects but by the fact that he did his own laundry, leaving a few items to dry in the bathroom each time he went out.6
He lost no time getting about his business and spent most of Friday and Saturday bouncing back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies, which were located at some distance from his hotel but within a few blocks of one another.7 At the Soviet embassy he told the consular official with whom he spoke, probably Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, that his wife, a Soviet citizen, had applied several months earlier to return to the USSR with their child. He said that he had been in touch with the Soviet embassy in Washington about a reentry visa for himself, and he displayed various pieces of evidence of his prior residence in the USSR and his membership in a pro-Castro organization in the United States.
At the Cuban embassy Lee fell into the sympathetic hands of Sylvia Duran, a twenty-six-year-old Mexican woman who was a Cuban consular official. He displayed a sheaf of documents, including his new and his expired passports, which showed that he had lived in the USSR; the labor card he had had in Minsk, showing that he had worked there; his marriage certificate; his correspondence with the US Communist Party and the Soviet embassy in Washington, some of which was in Russian; his two Fair Play for Cuba cards, one signed by “A. J. Hidell,” the other by Vincent T. Lee; and his “résumé,” the several looseleaf, handwritten sheets on which he had summarized his life as an “Organizer,” “Marxist,” “Defector,” and so on.
Mrs. Duran was impressed by all this, especially the fact that Oswald was the leader of an organization calling for “Fair Treatment for Cuba.” “Admittedly exceeding [her] responsibilities,” as she put it later, she “semi-officially” telephoned someone at the Soviet consulate to see if she could facilitate issuance of a Soviet visa to Oswald but was told that it would take at least four months. When she informed Lee that a Cuban visa could not be issued until he had a Soviet visa, he became annoyed and said he had a right to go to Cuba in view of his background and loyalty and his activities in behalf of the Cuban movement. Mrs. Duran told him that she could do nothing more.
On Saturday morning Lee returned to the Cuban embassy, and Mrs. Duran put him into direct contact with one or two persons at the Soviet embassy, probably by telephone. The story was still the same, and Lee became so excited and angry that Mrs. Duran begged the Cuban consul, Señor Eusebio Asque, to come out of his office and talk to Oswald himself. Asque likewise called the Soviet consulate and confirmed that there would be a waiting period of four to six months. He suggested to Oswald that he leave Mexico and return when he had a Soviet visa, at which point he would be given a Cuban transit visa.
At that, Lee again became furious and demanded his rights in a scene that may have resembled his behavior at the American embassy in Moscow in 1959. Exasperated, Asque finally told him that if it were up to him he would not give him a visa at all, and that “a person of his type was harming the Cuban Revolution rather than helping it.” But Mrs. Duran apparently took pity on Lee. She handed him a slip of paper with her name and telephone number on it, and she went ahead and processed his visa application. Fifteen to thirty days later, a routine reply arrived from Havana approving Oswald’s visa application on condition that the Soviet visa be obtained first.
There was nothing more Lee could do. On Sunday he apparently visited museums and did some sightseeing in Mexico City.8 On Monday he went to a travel agency and purchased bus tickets from Mexico City to Laredo and thence to Dallas. And on Tuesday, October 1, he attempted a final assault on the fortress of Soviet bureaucracy. He somehow contacted the Soviet military attaché and asked whether a reply had been received to a telegram that the Soviet consul had promised to send the embassy in Washington. The military attaché referred to him to the consulate. A guard outside the consulate went inside and returned with the message that the telegram had been sent but no reply had been received.9
His visit a failure, Lee left Mexico City by bus on Wednesday, October 2. Even his departure was troubled. In the middle of the night he was pulled off the bus at the border by Mexican officials because of a supposed irregularity in his tourist papers and was heard to grumble as he climbed back on, “My papers were in order before and I don’t know why they bother me now.” At the US customs station in Laredo at 1:30 in the morning of October 3, he was seen “gulping down” a banana. A customs official reassured him that he would be allowed to take it into the United States and did not have to eat so fast.10
By 2:30 on the afternoon of October 3, Lee was in Dallas, only one week and one day after leaving New Orleans. He had spent perhaps $100 on the trip, but its cost to him could not be measured only in money. The real cost was the destruction of his hope. He had yearned to belong, to join a cause, to become a revolutionary, a volunteer for “Uncle Fidel.” He had wanted to deploy his shooting skills in behalf of a tiny, embattled country that surely needed him. Instead, he was told by no less a figure than the Cuban consul that people like him were harmful to the cause of revolution. He must have suffered a grave new wound to his self-esteem.
Lee was left with nowhere to go. If he ever had real thoughts of moving to the Northeast and becoming a political activist, those thoughts evaporated now. He lacked emotional energy to strike out for any place new. It was the most he could do to crawl back to the old places and attempt to do what he had done before: get a job, save money, support Marina and his children.
He did not even call Marina when he arrived in Dallas. He went straight to the offices of the Texas Employment Commission, filed a claim for the last of his unemployment compensation checks, and announced that he was once again looking for a job.11 He then went to the YMCA—the same Y where he had stayed one year before—registered as a serviceman so he would not have to pay a membership fee, and spent the night there.12
Next morning he went to Padgett Printing Corporation in response to a newspaper advertisement and applied for a job as a typesetter in the composing room. Theodore Gangl, the plant superintendent who interviewed him, said he was “well dressed and neat” and “made a favorable impression” on the foreman. Gangl was inclined to hire him, especially since he already had experience at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. But after he spoke to Robert Stovall on the telephone later in the day, he made the following notation at the bottom of Oswald’s job application: “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker. Has communistic tendencies.”13 Lee did not get the job.
He called Marina only after his interview. She was very happy to hear his voice and relieved beyond measure that he had not gone to Cuba. He asked to have Ruth drive to town to pick him up. Marina explained that Ruth had just given blood at Parkland Hospital in case it was needed during the baby’s birth and was not up to the long drive to Dallas. So Lee hitchhiked and got a ride all the way to the Paines’ house with a black man. He was there before lunch.
Marina stood in the bedroom and stared at the prodigal who had come home to her. He kissed her and asked if she had missed him? Then he started right in: “Ah, they’re such terrible bureaucrats that nothing came of it after all.” He d
escribed his shuttling from embassy to embassy, how each one told him he had to wait and wait, and see what the other one did, and how the whole time he had been worried about running out of money. He was especially vociferous about the Cubans—“the same kind of bureaucrats as in Russia. No point going there.” Marina was so delighted that she could scarcely believe her ears. Indeed, Lee’s disenchantment with Castro and Cuba was complete. He never again talked about “Uncle Fidel,” nor sang the song “Viva Fidel,” as he used to do, nor used the alias “Hidell.”
In spite of his disappointment, Marina thought he seemed happy, his spirits vastly improved over what they had been before he went to Mexico. He followed her like a puppy dog around the house, kissed her again and again, and kept saying, “I’ve missed you so.”
Lee spent the weekend at the Paines’. Ruth left them alone as much as she could and even tried to keep June out of their way. Carefree as children, they sat on the swings in the backyard.
“Is Ruth good to you?” Lee asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Marina, adding that Ruth had taken her to a doctor and arranged for the baby to be delivered free.
Lee told Marina a little about his adventures in Mexico City, and she got the impression that, apart from his one great disappointment, he had enjoyed his stay. All weekend he showed the greatest solicitude toward her, trying to get her to eat more, especially bananas and apples, to drink juices and milk, things that would strengthen her before the baby came. But Marina saw that he was distracted—worried about finding a job. As Ruth drove him to the bus station at noon on Monday, Lee asked if Marina could stay until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.
Lee had some job interviews that week but failed to turn up anything. He rented a room from a Mrs. Mary Bledsoe and paid her $7 for the week. Against her wishes he kept milk in her refrigerator and ate sardines, peanut butter, and bananas in his room, another thing she did not like. He used her telephone to fuss and scold at someone (his ordinary tone when he was talking to Marina) in a foreign language. Mrs. Bledsoe commented to a friend: “I don’t like anybody talking in a foreign language.” Most bothersome of all, he was in and out during the daytime and at home all day on Friday, disrupting her nap.
On Saturday morning, before leaving for Irving, Lee told Mrs. Bledsoe that he wanted his room cleaned and clean sheets put on his bed. She announced that she refused to rent to him any more. Without pausing to ask why, he demanded $2 of his $7 back. Mrs. Bledsoe refused.14 Evidently, Lee concluded that the FBI had been asking for him. He had used his real name at Mrs. Bledsoe’s, and the next week when he rented a room, he took it under the alias “O. H. Lee.”
Lee was again a good husband and houseguest that weekend. The baby was due any day now, and Lee told Marina not to worry. He insisted that he was not discouraged; he had only just started looking for a job. He again asked Marina if Ruth was good to her. “Does she make you do extra housework because I don’t have a job and don’t help with the expenses?” he asked. Ruth gave Lee his first driving lesson; and when she asked him to plane down a door for her, he removed it from his hinges and took real pleasure in doing a good job for her.15 He played with her little boy, Chris; watched football on TV; and, as Ruth wrote happily to her mother afterward, “added a needed masculine flavor” to the household.16
For the second weekend in a row not a single harsh word passed between Lee and Marina.
Everybody noticed the change. Ruth thought Lee had improved greatly. He showed affection for Marina and June and seemed to want to find a job and provide for them.17 When Michael Paine visited the house that weekend, he found Lee “quite a reasonable person.” He was “nice” to Ruth and his children, and above all nice to Marina. “It looked to me,” Michael said afterward, “as if the strain was off the family relationship. They were not quarreling. They billed and cooed. She sat on his lap and he said sweet nothings in her ear.”18
Even Marina thought her “prodigal” might be getting ready to settle down. She was encouraged by his concern for her and the new baby, and she felt that the weight of his interests had shifted away from politics toward family life, a sign that he might be growing up. For Marina looked on her husband as a mere boy, who had married too soon and had a series of childhood diseases to go through before he arrived at maturity. Lately, he had had two especially horrid ones—Walker and Cuba. Now, perhaps, he had been through them all and the two of them could start making plans for a peaceful life together.
Ruth and Michael shared Marina’s hope. But each of them sensed Lee’s terrible fragility, and each, in a different way, drew back from probing too far. Ruth stepped all around Lee’s prickly places and points of special vulnerability. Out of loyalty to Marina and her marriage, and out of her own great quality of charity, she tried not to see Lee’s darker side. Michael, it is true, did try to draw him out and soften his bitterness. But Lee would have none of it. Encountering a solid wall of rejection, Michael gave up and later blamed himself for having done so too soon. But Lee could not have tolerated a real relationship with Michael or with anyone, and so overwhelming was Michael’s respect for the privacy of others that he honored Lee’s right to turn him away even in his own house.
As for Marina, she had trained herself to accept a great deal in Lee and had a huge stake in blindness to the rest. She must have been considerably taken up with the new life to which she was about to give birth. And she continued to be concerned most of all with the eternal question of whether Lee loved her. Preoccupied with that, she failed, as Ruth later pointed out, to realize her “own great power over” Lee.19 The power that might have counted was that of observation.
What Marina, like everyone else, failed to observe was that far from being better after his trip to Mexico, Lee was worse. All his life he had been close to an invisible border that separated reality from fantasy in his mind, and now he was closer than ever to slipping over into a world made up entirely of fantasy. More than ever he inhabited a world of delusions held together by the frailest baling wire. Animal-like, he knew that he must keep his delusions hidden or, like an animal, he would be caught. Living alone five days a week with no one to talk to, he was not exposed to the scrutiny of those who knew him, and the strain was off him of keeping his inner world out of sight. And on weekends, in a world of women who were exhausted by the rituals of child rearing, he escaped for hours on end in front of the television set. His hosts, the Paines, were creatures of exquisite sensibility who shrank from touching his weak spots. Thus, all through October it was as if the little household in Irving was perfectly geared, indeed, existed for no other purpose but to help Lee keep his inner world whole.
Lee got a job his second week in Dallas. A neighbor of the Paines, Linnie Mae Randle, mentioned that her brother, Wesley Frazier, worked at the Texas School Book Depository and there might be a job opening there. At Marina’s urging, Ruth called Roy Truly, superintendent of the depository, and asked him to consider Lee. Mr. Truly suggested that Lee apply in person.
Lee appeared the following day and made a good impression. He was “quiet and well mannered,” called Mr. Truly “sir,” and said he had come straight from the Marines. Mr. Truly liked that because it very often happened that a young man came to him right out of the service, got on his feet working at the depository, then went on to better things. Lee looked like a “nice young fellow” with every chance of doing well. Mr. Truly told him that while he did not have a permanent opening he could offer him a temporary job at $1.25 an hour. Lee accepted gratefully and said he needed the job badly to support his family because he was expecting a second child any day. Mr. Truly told him to report for work the next day, October 16, at eight o’clock.20
When Lee called Marina that night, it was with a boast in his voice, as if to say that they only had to take one look at him at the depository and they could not turn him away—“they just hired me,” he said. Next day he called again and said he liked the job. He told Marina that it wa
s “good to be working with books,” and that the work was “interesting and clean,” not dirty or greasy as many of his jobs had been. He said it did not tire him so much. He liked Mr. Truly a great deal, and the other men were nice to him, too.
Lee’s birthday fell on Friday, the 18th, his third day on the new job, and Marina and Ruth prepared a surprise birthday party. Michael was there, and Ruth had brought wine, put decorations on the table, and baked a cake. Lee was overcome. When they carried in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday,” he was so “nervous and touched and self-conscious,” Marina remembers, that he could not hold back the tears. It was his twenty-fourth birthday, but when Lee counted, there were less than twenty-four candles on the cake. Even so, he could not blow them all out at once.
They drank more wine, joked a little, and then Lee said that he would like a special present. “I’d like the baby to be born today, my birthday. I don’t like late birthday presents. I don’t accept them.”
“You won’t keep your baby?” Marina asked.
“We’ll see.”
The rest of the evening he trailed Marina everywhere, asking if she felt any pains. He was upset that there were no signs. But he was tender, too. The veins had burst in Marina’s ankles, and her legs and ankles ached. He rubbed them and kissed them and cried. He told Marina that he was sorry to put her through such an ordeal and he would never do it again.
Next day he was up bright and early scanning the secondhand ads in the newspaper. He was looking for automobiles and washing machines. “I’ll stay here awhile,” Marina said. “We’ll save money. And you’ll have to have a car.”
Lee said that a cheap car cost a lot in gas and repairs. “I don’t have to have a car. I can keep using the bus. We’ll buy you a washing machine.”
Marina and Lee Page 59
