Michael tried to argue with Lee by pointing out that there are other values beside material ones. There is science, there is art, and there are spiritual values. These, too, and not just politics and economics, affect the way men look at things and the way they organize their lives. Lee would not listen. None of it made any difference. Capitalism must be destroyed. In one of their more animated discussions, Michael got the impression that Lee was dreaming of “revolution in the United States—crowds storming the Winter Palace.”8
On Friday night, October 25, the conversation turned from politics to religion, with the Paines, who belonged to a Unitarian congregation, describing how their church worked and trying to explain to Lee that it, at least, had no interest in keeping any one political group in power. But Lee again refused to listen. He insisted that the church, all churches, are merely an arm of the state, and their function is to keep people blind.9 Marina did not understand what they were saying, but she detected a nastiness and anger in Lee’s tone that she had not heard from him in months. She did not see how the Paines could be so nice to him. They were so polite that she thought, with some surprise, that they must really like Lee.
The Paines were polite; but that night, and other nights, too, they got angry at Lee’s dogmatic was of arguing. Ruth was the more offended. Talking to Lee, she thought, was like talking to a stone wall. He refused to listen to logic, refused to listen to facts, and when he was up against a fact that appeared to refute what he believed, he repeated the same old arguments as if that was all there was to it. Michael tried to check himself and felt, with some shame, that he showed his anger more openly than Lee did. He could tell, of course, that Lee was very angry, too, saw that his hands were even trembling, but it looked to him as if Lee was a fellow who had had a good deal of practice at keeping his feelings under control.10
After that evening in late October, Ruth gave up trying to talk to Lee about religion or politics, but Michael did not. When Lee mentioned over supper that two nights ago he had been to hear a speech by General Walker, Michael remarked that that was odd: he had attended a meeting of the John Birch Society that same evening. Michael, a liberal, wanted to understand the workings of the right-wing mind. He was interested in better communication between “right” and “left,” what little “left” he could find in Dallas. He told Lee that he went to meetings, too, first one group and then the other.
As a matter of fact, Michael was going to one that very night. It was a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a liberal organization to which he and Ruth belonged. It was to be held on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and he invited Lee to come along. Lee accepted. He whispered to Marina as they were leaving: “If only Michael knew what I wanted to do to Walker! Wouldn’t he be scared!”11
Michael asked Lee to the meeting because he sensed his bitterness. He wanted to “make him a little happier” and help him see that the gulf between what he desired and what might actually be achieved was not so unbridgeable as he supposed.12 He also wanted to give Lee a sense of participation, a feeling that he, too, could be effective in bringing about change in quiet ways. And he wanted to encourage in Lee a more generous attitude toward those whom he conceived to be his “enemies.” In Michael’s view the world was complex. He hoped that Lee, too, would some day see it that way and accept the fact that “his enemies, the employers, were not so fully in control of the situation as he made out.”13
One of the speakers at the meeting happened to say that the mere fact of a man’s being a Bircher did not necessarily mean he was an anti-Semite. Lee rose. “I disagree with that,” he said, adding that he had been to a right-wing meeting two nights before at which spokesmen for the John Birch Society had made anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic statements. Michael said later that Lee spoke “loud and clear and coherently,” out of keeping with the mood of the meeting, but intelligibly nonetheless.14
After the meeting Lee talked with two of the men who had been there. One was a fellow worker of Michael’s, the other an older man. They talked about Cuba and civil rights. The president’s name came up, and Lee said, with what Michael’s friend subsequently considered to be a certain, special emphasis, that President Kennedy was doing a “real fine job” in civil rights.15
On the way home Michael and Lee talked about the people they had met. As the son of a Trotskyite who had tried to shield him from knowledge that could hurt him later, Michael had learned not to pry, not to ask another man outright what his opinions might be. And this is how he was with Lee. He was curious as to whether Lee might be a Communist, but he preferred to guess for himself from such signals as Lee chose to send out rather than ask him directly. A week or so earlier, Lee had hinted that he was a Communist. He showed Michael a copy of the Worker and said you could tell what “they” wanted you to do if only you read between the lines. Now Lee asked Michael whether, in his opinion, one of the men at the meeting was a party member. Michael did not think so. “I think he is,” Lee said, on the grounds that the man was pro-Castro. “If that’s the way Lee is meeting his Communists,” Michael said to himself, “then he hasn’t found the real group here in Dallas—supposing there is one.”16 Michael concluded that Lee could not be a Communist after all, for his “communications,” his way of meeting like-minded people, were too tenuous.17 Neither Lee’s judgment nor his way of going about things seemed to be those of a Communist.
During the same drive home, Michael explained what the ACLU was all about. He told Lee that its sole purpose was to defend civil liberties—free speech and other rights of the individual. Lee was amazed that any organization could exist merely to defend a value, as Michael put it later, and not to fight for a political objective. Lee remarked firmly that he could never join an organization like that—it wasn’t political enough.18
Another time Lee confessed to Michael, exasperated, that he could not fit him into a category. He wasn’t a Communist or a capitalist or a socialist or a Bircher or anything Lee could lay his hands on.19 Soon, however, he did find a cubbyhole—Michael was religious. “He has religion, but he has no philosophy,” Lee confided to Marina with a superior air, which meant that he was now able to dismiss Michael.
As for Michael, he considered Lee’s style in relating himself to communism “Dick Tracyish.”20 But being perceptive, Michael, out of three or four long conversations, subsequently put together a picture of Lee’s ideas that almost paraphrases the program and philosophy Lee himself had spelled out several months earlier, evidently as a historical justification of his attempt on General Walker. To this day Michael has never seen what Lee wrote, but he guessed from what Lee said to him that he did not believe in the goodness or dignity of man. Lee felt, to the contrary, that the majority of men are evil, conniving, and stupid. They are blind to their lot and prefer to remain that way. Their condition needs changing, yet they are fooled by the powers that be. Thus change, if it is to occur, is rotten and yet, paradoxically, strong because everything—the church, the power structure, the educational system—is all bound together to maintain things exactly as they are. Because of capitalism’s impermeable strength, peaceful change is impossible. Nothing but revolution will do. There would, Michael explains, in his paraphrase of Lee’s beliefs, “have to be an overthrow of the whole thing.”21
What Michael did not know was that Lee had already tried to change the system, both peacefully, in attempting to organize a Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans, and violently in attempting to shoot General Walker. And he had tried to become a revolutionary by going to fight for Castro.
Now knowing any of this, Michael was unable to piece together the whole of Lee’s “logic” at the time, but he was able to do so later on. And the rest of his reconstruction is this. Revolution was unlikely because the “power structure” was too strong. Thus the most the individual, acting alone, could do was to commit an act that would help destroy society not because of any sense it contained but because of its symbolic meaning.22
; Lee had not yet followed his logic to its conclusion either, and he had no inkling that history was on the point of giving him an opportunity to act on it. But his logic, his experience since the Walker attempt, and his entire life, all were pointing him in the same direction, toward a decision to strike another violent blow, this one aimed at neither the right nor the left, but simply at the top—to decapitate the political process. Lee approved of and admired the man who happened to stand at the apex of American political life. But the better that man was, the more effective at making capitalism workable and attractive, then the more devastating the blow to capitalist society would be.23
Michael came to this fuller interpretation later on. What he did see in Lee that autumn was a quality that people had been noticing about him since his high school days and even now were noticing about him at work—his stoicism. During their discussions of October 1963, there were moments when Lee reminded Michael of nothing so much as Lawrence of Arabia holding his finger to a match. Lawrence said it was nothing—all you had to do was stand the pain. That was how Lee seemed to Michael, gritting his teeth and bearing pain.24
So, placed in what Michael calls “a duck-blind situation” in which he was unforeseeably granted a chance to alter the course of history, Lee, having despaired of peaceful change, would be able to act in only one way. But he would have to summon up all his stoicism to do it. He must not allow such kindly, personal feelings as he might harbor for the victim to stand in his way.25
Michael realized that Lee’s beliefs implied an advocacy of violence. He saw this clearly one day when he mentioned to Lee that the qualities he believed in most profoundly were diminished by violence. Lee did not answer, and Michael interpreted his silence as disagreement.26 What he did not perceive was that Lee himself was capable of acting violently.
It is natural that it was the intellectual side of Lee that Michael, an intellectual himself, was best equipped to grasp, and that Michael, a man of reason, failed to perceive that Lee’s “reasons” were mainly on the surface. What mattered most with Lee were the tumultuous emotions underneath. But some inexplicable inner principle in Michael resisted probing any deeper. Lee was ungracious, intractable, dogmatic; so much Michael could see. He did not take the step that followed and see that Lee was irrational as well.
In this regard it was Ruth who understood Lee better. She realized that he was “primarily an emotional person” and saw that while he talked of ideology and philosophy, he acted, and reacted, emotionally. Ruth thought he was vulnerable, “tender,” and “unusually sensitive to hurt.” But she, like her husband, was not only charitable in her judgments but a devoted pacifist. Apart from a fleeting moment the summer before, when she had confided to a friend that she thought Lee might be capable of a crime of passion if he thought someone was trying to take Marina away, Ruth considered it unlikely that Lee would spill over from “mild maladjustment to active, violent hostility.”27
If Ruth inhibited her insight, cultivated the quality of opacity with respect to Lee, and kept herself from fully apprehending in him what a part of her suspected, Michael also operated under comparable restraint. During the summer he, too, had discussed with a friend whether Lee might be capable of violence. Now, the Oswalds’ belongings were stored in the Paines’ garage, and Michael was constantly moving Lee’s “camping equipment” from place to place because it was in the way of the drill press and other shop tools he came home specially to work with on Sundays. The “camping equipment” was tied up in what Michael calls a “greenish rustic blanket,” and despite himself he realized that the bundle was too heavy, and the shape not quite right, to be camping equipment of the type manufactured at that time. It was, of course, Lee’s rifle, dismantled, with its telescopic sight. Michael wondered about the bundle, suspecting nothing definite but simply that the bundle was not what it was said to be; and he was tempted to peek inside. But he never did. He had too much respect for Lee’s privacy. Michael himself was a pacifist, opposed to owning firearms. But whatever it was that Lee had in that mysterious bundle, he had a right to keep it in Michael’s garage.28
Lee was on his good behavior at the Paines’, and he treated Marina better there than at any time since the two of them left Russia. Yet his demands were still incredible. He brought his dirty laundry to the house each weekend for Marina to wash and iron, and he often refused to wear a shirt she had just ironed on the grounds that she had failed to do it exactly right. No sooner would they sit down at the dinner table than he would snap at Marina: “Why didn’t you fix me iced tea? You knew I was coming out.” Or he would put on a baby face and complain in baby talk that he couldn’t eat because Marina had forgotten to give him a fork and a spoon. He never once got up to fetch for himself or help a wife in the final stages of pregnancy, nor when she had just had a child and was nursing it.
Sometimes Lee finished eating ahead of the others and simply got up, left the table, and went into the living room to watch television. Sometimes he refused to eat what Ruth had cooked for them and demanded immediately afterward that Marina fix his favorite Russian dish, pan-fried onions and potatoes. Marina was ashamed and embarrassed. “Stop being so capricious,” she said. “You can’t carry on like that here. It’s not as if you’re in your own house. You are a guest in this house.” Sometimes she did, and sometimes she did not, fix him his pan-fried potatoes.
It was the football season, and Lee spent more time than ever watching television. He would wolf down his lunch at high speed, hoping Ruth would not notice how much of her food he was eating; and then during the game he would race to the kitchen and ransack the cupboards and refrigerator for apples, bananas, raisins, cookies, and milk. Even though Lee had a job, he still did not contribute to the household expenses.
The Paines gave no sign of resenting his behavior. Ruth admits that Lee was never very gracious, but he did try to stay out of her way. Anything she asked him to do, like gluing together Junie’s training chair, he did gladly. Both Paines understood that Lee was saving money so that he could get an apartment for himself and Marina. They had no thought of his contributing to the expenses, and it never so much as occurred to Michael to resent the fact that he was supporting Lee’s family. As Michael looked at it, Marina was a companion to Ruth and a help to her with her Russian. That made it an equal exchange, not an act of altruism on his part.
Lee and Marina had no big fights during the weekends they were together at the Paines’, nothing that caused them to stop speaking, just spats. Still, there were enough minor irritations for Marina to say to Ruth: “You see that we fight and that Lee doesn’t love me at all.”
“You fight because you do love each other,” Ruth replied. “You wouldn’t fight if you didn’t care.”
Marina made no effort to hide their disagreements. Whether Lee loved her or not was a major topic in her weekday conversations with Ruth, which had now become close and confidential. She wanted Ruth to see Lee in all his guises so that she could get her opinion on this most crucial of questions. Ruth continually reassured Marina that Lee did, in fact, love her.
Lee’s attitude toward Ruth, however, had taken a turn for the worse after he came back from Mexico. He started to make fun of her. He said it was ridiculous for “such a long, tall, stringbean” to jump around and dance with her children, as Ruth did. And he made fun of her for working so hard on her Russian. “Better she should finish college than sit and study Russian all these years.” (Ruth had finished college years ago.) He thought it “stupid” of Ruth to be religious.
None of this surprised Marina, who knew that her husband considered himself an unrecognized authority on everything and felt that if others did not agree with his ideas, it was merely because they were “stupid.” Then, too, Marina knew there were times when Lee hated and despised a woman simply for being a woman. He felt that way toward her sometimes, and she could see that he felt the same way toward Ruth. But after her phone call to Truly, Lee’s attitude toward Ruth changed. He knew that it was to this
call he owed his job. And Ruth never mentioned it, never asked for his gratitude. After that, apparently, it dawned on Lee that Ruth’s kindness was genuine—she wanted nothing from him.
Marina helped the change along. “You know, Lee, you mustn’t just use Ruth,” she said to him the last weekend in October.
“Why not?”
“Ruth doesn’t need me. She doesn’t need my company or my Russian. I may even be in the way. She only has me here to help me out.”
Marina, who can be reticent with the confidences of others, now told Lee a little more than before about the Paines’ marriage. She told him of an occasion when Michael had been there for supper, then left, and Ruth cried. When the Paines were married, Marina said, Michael had not wanted children right away and had left home shortly after their second child was born. Ruth still loved Michael deeply. She did not know whether to give up or keep trying.
Up to now, Lee had liked Michael well enough in spite of his being “religious.” But now he grew angry at him. Lee thought it was a man’s obligation once married to want his wife and children. He was indignant at Michael for having married without wanting children. And he condemned Michael for coming home, eating supper, and seeing his children just like a married man, then leaving.
Besides causing Lee to be more sympathetic toward Ruth and less so toward Michael, Marina’s disclosures had other side effects as well. Lee was not ordinarily interested in other people’s private affairs. But now he regularly asked Marina, over the telephone and on his arrival for the weekend, how Ruth and Michael were getting along. For the first time he seemed aware of the Paines as human beings. He even gave signs of awareness that he and his family might be in the way in the modest, one-story ranch house, and that Ruth and Michael might need privacy in which to work out their problems. He was sorry for the Paine children, too, especially the boy, Chris, and he actually tried to make up to them for the fact that their father did not live with them. Thus, he started playing more with Chris, who was two and a half, than with June. Marina was jealous for June and asked why he played so much with Chris.
Marina and Lee Page 61
