Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  “He’d rather be with a man,” Lee said. “He’s tired of you women. A boy needs a father to play with.”

  In spite of small spats, the relationship between Lee and Marina continued, as of the last weekend in October (25–27), to be “unusually good,” in Marina’s words. Lee was happy with his new baby and his new job. Marina remembers him on the floor in front of the television set with a pillow between his legs and Rachel on the pillow. During the commercials, if she wasn’t asleep, he talked to her in Russian.

  “See, baby, it’s your papa. See Papa?”

  “Look,” he said to Marina, “she doesn’t smile at me.”

  “To her,” Marina answered, “Papa probably looks upside down.”

  He held the baby to his shoulder and stroked her head. “She’s the prettiest, strongest baby in the world,” he boasted. “Only a week old, and already she can hold up her head. We’re strong because Mama gives us milk and not a bottle that’s either too hot or too cold. Mama gives us only the very best.” He studied her fingers, her “tender little mouth,” and her yawn. He was delighted with them all and proclaimed that his baby was getting prettier every day. “She looks just like her mama,” he said.

  — 34 —

  Agent Hosty

  On Friday, November 1, Lee went to the post office in Dallas. There he dropped into the mail a membership application that he had picked up at the October 25 meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union, the meeting he had attended with Michael Paine. With the application he sent in a $2 membership fee. The application was processed in New York on November 4, and Lee formally became a member of the organization he had only just told Michael he would never join because it was not political enough.

  He also transacted an item of business at the post office. He rented a box for the period of November 1–December 31 for a total fee of $3. The boxes were rented at $1.50 per month, and Lee, who counted every penny, probably would not have rented a box for a two-month period unless he expected to be in Dallas the entire time. The box was not at the main post office, which he had used before, but at the terminal annex station, near his job. He took it in his name and Marina’s, a sign that he expected that by the end of the year they would be living in Dallas. He listed as nonprofit organizations entitled to receive mail at his address the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union.

  And he mailed another letter to the Communist Party. Arnold Johnson, information director, had long ago answered Lee’s letter from New Orleans requesting information about how to contact the party when he moved to the Northeast. He had suggested that Oswald get in touch with the party in New York when he moved, and the party would find a way to contact him in Baltimore or wherever he might be.1

  Lee’s new letter, postmarked November 1, was a continuation of the earlier correspondence. He announced that he had not moved north after all but had settled for the time in Dallas. He went on to report that he had been to a right-wing meeting “headed” by General Walker on October 23, and to a meeting of the ACLU on the 25th. “As you see, political friction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is very great here,” he wrote. He added that the ACLU was in the hands of liberal, professional people, including a minister and two law professors; “however, some of those present showed marked class awareness and insight.” Lee’s question was this: “Could you advise me as to the general view that we had on the ACLU and to what degree, if any, I should attempt to highten its progressive tendencies?”2 It was an unreal and remarkable letter, suing “we” as if he were a party member and seeking advice in the same spirit.

  That same day, in Irving, Ruth and Marina had a visitor. A day or two earlier, they had come home from their errands to be told by a neighbor that a strange man had been asking for them. The neighbor, Dorothy Roberts, informed Ruth that the man paid a call on her and asked who was living at the Paines’. Ruth translated for Marina, and the two decided that it must be someone from the FBI.

  Marina was frightened of the FBI, partly because she equated it with the KGB in Russia, of which she had been afraid all her life, and partly because she knew that Lee desperately feared the FBI. But she noticed that Ruth took the news calmly and that her conscience was clear. Therefore Marina did not worry much about the visit, even though the man had said to Mrs. Roberts that he would be coming by again.

  On the afternoon of Friday, November 1, the children were sleeping, Marina was using Ruth’s hair dryer to beautify herself for Lee’s arrival, and Ruth was doing jobs around the house when the visitor reappeared.3 Ruth was not surprised to find a dark-haired stranger at the door who introduced himself as Agent James P. Hosty of the FBI. She greeted him cordially, asked him in, and the two sat in the living room talking pleasantries. Hosty said that, unlike the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI was not a witch-hunting organization.

  Gradually, Hosty switched the conversation to Lee. Was he living at Ruth’s house? Ruth answered that he was not. Did she know where he was living? Once again the answer was a surprising “No.” Ruth did not know where Lee was living, but it was in Dallas somewhere, and she thought it might be Oak Cliff. Did Ruth know where he was working? Ruth hesitated. She explained that Lee thought he had been having job trouble on account of the FBI. Hosty assured her that it was not the FBI’s way to approach an employer directly. At this Ruth softened, told him where Lee was working, and together they looked up the address of the book depository in the telephone book. Lee worked at 411 Elm Street.

  While they were talking, Marina wandered in. She was frightened and a little repelled when Hosty introduced himself and showed her his credentials. He saw that she was alarmed, was aware that she had lately had a child, and tried to calm her. He explained, with Ruth translating, that he was not there to embarrass or harass her. But should Soviet agents try to recruit her by threatening her or her relatives in Russia, she had a right to ask the FBI for help. Marina was delighted. She liked this plumpish, pleasant-looking dark-haired man who was talking to her about her rights and offering to protect her. No one had given her so much attention in a long time, much less offered to protect her rights.

  The talk turned to Castro. Hosty remarked that from what he had read in the American papers, he thought Castro was a threat to the interests of the United States. Marina said she doubted that the American press was being fair. Hosty said he knew of Lee’s activities passing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and asked whether he was doing anything similar in Dallas. Marina thought of the series of childhood diseases her husband had lately been passing through and said cheerily: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s just young. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He won’t do anything like that here.”

  Before Hosty left, Marina begged him not to interfere with Lee at work. She explained that he had had trouble keeping his jobs and thought he lost them “because the FBI is interested in him.” (He had, in fact, blamed the loss of his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall on the FBI, but not the loss of his job in New Orleans.)

  “I don’t think he has lost any of his jobs on account of the FBI,” Hosty said softly.

  Ruth and Marina urged the visitor to stay. If he wanted to see Lee, they said, he would be there at 5:30. But Hosty had to get back to the office; and since he did not have a second man present (as is the FBI custom during an interview), and since the New Orleans office had jurisdiction over the case until it was established that Oswald had a residence in Dallas, he was not eager to see Lee. But he asked Ruth to find out where he was living. Ruth thought that would be no problem; she would simply ask Lee.

  Hosty had another reason for not being anxious to see Lee. The FBI had learned of his visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and was now worried about him as an “espionage case.” The bureau did not want to give away to him either what it knew of his trip or the techniques by which it had acquired knowledge. “We would be telling him more than he would be telling us,” Hosty said.4

  Hosty’s vis
it ended as it began, on a friendly note. Marina was all smiles. She would be glad to have such a pleasant visitor any day. Hosty wrote out his name, office address, and telephone number for Ruth to give to Lee. Since Ruth was sure Lee had nothing to hide, she expected that he would go straight to the FBI himself.

  Lee arrived late that afternoon in a fine, outgoing frame of mind. But when Marina told him about Hosty’s visit, his face darkened. He wanted to know everything—what Ruth had said, how long the man stayed, and what he had said. Marina explained that she had not understood much, and Lee scolded her. Marina was astonished at how nervous he had suddenly become, and at the effort he was making to conceal it.

  While they were at supper Ruth, too, told Lee about Hosty’s visit. “Oh,” said Lee, elaborately casual, “and what did he say?” Ruth described their conversation and handed Lee the slip of paper with Hosty’s telephone number and address.

  Ruth realized that both Lee and Marina were afraid. She had heard that fear of the FBI was typical of many people coming out of Russia, especially if they were Russian. To reassure them and show that she was not afraid, she told them of her experience during World War II, when her brother and many of his friends were conscientious objectors. Ruth had been only a high school student, but she realized that the FBI was visiting the neighbors and asking about her brother and his friends. So far from threatening their rights, she concluded that the FBI had protected them. She told Lee and Marina that the FBI men she had seen were “careful and effective.”

  Ruth was certain that Lee was not an agent and knew nothing of interest to a foreign power. It seemed clear to her that he was “neither bright enough nor steady enough to have been recruited” by anyone.5 Since he had nothing to hide, she thought by far the best thing he could do was go to the FBI office, preempting their initiative, and tell them everything they wanted to know. Only in this way would they, too, see that he had nothing to hide.

  Marina was watching Lee’s reactions. To her eye he was a changed man. He was sad and subdued throughout supper, and he scarcely spoke a word all evening long. For the first time since his return from Mexico, there was no sex at all between them that weekend, not even the limited sex that had been possible since Rachel’s birth. The next day he again asked Ruth about the visit. Marina could tell that he was straining to catch every word, yet at the same time trying not to betray his nervousness.

  He put diapers in the washing machine for Marina, hung them on the line, and tried to carry on his family life as usual. No one but Marina understood how distraught he really was. During the afternoon he watched a football game on television, and his spirits seemed to improve. Then he drew Marina aside and instructed her that the next time the FBI came she was to study the car with care, note what color it was, what model, and write down the license number. They might send a different agent, he explained, but the car would still be the same. He even told Marina where to look for it. If the car was not across the way from Ruth’s, he said, it would be down the street in front of the neighbors’. Marina was puzzled by his behavior. Again she could see that he was calculating at great speed, trying to think of everything, yet at the same time hide his anxiety. Still, telling her what to do seemed to calm him.

  On Sunday Ruth gave Lee his second driving lesson—parking. He wanted to take June along, but Marina forbade it. “If you want to break bones, break your own,” she said.

  He came back to the house pleased with himself. “I haven’t practiced much,” he boasted, “and look how well it’s going.”

  His elation was momentary, however, and for the rest of the weekend Lee was withdrawn, taken up with thoughts of his own. Marina tried to leave him in peace, but by now she, too, was annoyed at the FBI. Not at Mr. Hosty—she knew he was only doing his job—but at the astonishing change his visit had wrought in Lee and in their relationship. Everything between them had been wonderful, or nearly wonderful, for a month. Now he would hardly speak to her.

  Lee went to work on Monday morning, and on Tuesday, November 5, Hosty came again. He was on his way to Fort Worth with another agent, and he decided to stop at the Paines’ to see if Ruth had Lee’s address. He says the interview was brief: “I didn’t go in the house. I just went in the front door.” Ruth met both men at the doorstep and said that Lee had been there over the weekend but she had not gotten his address. Lee had told her he was a Trotskyite, and Ruth said to Hosty, with a trace of amusement, that she considered him “a very illogical person.” Hosty asked Ruth whether in her opinion there might be anything wrong with Lee mentally. She answered, in a fairly light way, that she did not understand the thought processes of anyone who claimed to be a Marxist.

  Hosty says he did not see Marina on this visit; Ruth says he did. Marina appeared toward the end of the visit, and both Ruth and Hosty were surprised to see her. Marina, for her part, remembers this visit as being the longer, and more charming, of her conversations with Hosty about her “rights.” She was no longer afraid. On the contrary, she was glad to see Hosty because, as she puts it, he had “a nice personality.” At the end of their conversation, however, she did appeal to him not to come again because news of his first visit had upset Lee very badly.

  Ruth had thought, while she and Hosty were talking, that Marina was in her bedroom taking care of Rachel. So she was, but at some point—it could have been while Hosty and the other agent were at the doorway before they came in the house—she slipped out of the bedroom, into the kitchen and dining area, out of the kitchen door, and around the house.6 She had no trouble finding Hosty’s car, and without the smallest feeling of being in a hurry—“I am a sneaky girl,” she laughs—she walked around and around it, trying to figure out what make it was. This she was unable to do because she could not read English. But she studied the color and memorized the license number. Then she came back inside the house. Once Hosty had gone, she wrote the number on a slip of paper and left it for Lee on their bureau.7

  Later, she and Ruth discussed whether to tell Lee about the visit. Ruth thought it might be better to wait until the weekend, and Marina agreed. Each time he called that week (he called twice a day, during his lunch break and at 5:30 in the afternoon), he started by asking: “Has the FBI been there?” Each time Marina said no.

  No sooner had he arrived on Friday than Lee went outside where Marina was hanging diapers and asked, “Have they been here again?”8

  Marina said yes.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I had a lot on my mind. I forgot. Besides, it wasn’t that important to me.”

  “How on earth could you forget?”

  “Well, it upset you last time, and I didn’t want to upset you again.”

  “It upsets me worse if you keep it from me. Why must you hide things all the time? I never can count on you. What did he want to know?”

  “Ask Ruth. She remembers better.”

  “I want to hear from you.”

  “It was the same nice man as before, darkish and very likable.”

  “I didn’t ask what he was like; I want to know what he said.”

  Marina said that through Ruth he had explained to her that if anybody from the Soviet Union or the United States harmed her or tried to use against her the fact that she was from Russia, she had a right to ask the FBI for help. “He’s such a nice man, Lee. Don’t be frightened. All he did was explain my rights and promise to protect them.”

  “You fool,” said Lee, his voice full of anger, as if it were Marina’s fault that Hosty had come at all. “Don’t you see? He doesn’t care about your rights. He comes because it’s his job. You have no idea how to talk to the FBI. As usual, you were probably too polite. You can’t afford to let them see your weaknesses. What did he say next?”

  Again, Marina told him to ask Ruth. By now she was angry at Lee for ruining her good spirits and refusing to believe the favorable things she had to say about Hosty.

  Her words had no effect at all. Lee was angry at her because she failed to rem
ember every detail and had forgotten to warn Ruth in advance that she was not to say anything to Hosty. His tone went beyond anger: he was accusing Marina.

  It is Marina’s recollection that Lee then went straight to the kitchen and quizzed Ruth, who was fixing dinner. After that he found Marina in the bedroom and started pumping her all over again. He treated her as if she were untrustworthy and had no understanding of how important the whole matter was. “You fool,” he said again. “You frivolous, simple-minded fool. I trust you didn’t give your consent to having him defend your ‘rights’?”

  “Of course not,” said Marina, “but I agreed with him.”

  “Fool,” he said again. “As a result of these ‘rights,’ they’ll ask you ten times as many questions as before. If the Soviet embassy gets wind of it and you agreed to let this man protect your ‘rights,’ then you’ll really be in for it. You didn’t sign anything, did you?”

  “Nobody asked me to, Lee. But I promise you I’ll never sign anything without your consent.”

  Suddenly he remembered something. “Did you write down the license number?”

  Marina gave a little wave. “It’s on the bureau,” she said, repeating the number out loud.

  “You’ve got a good memory,” he said, “but only for some things.”

  Marina was exhausted. She felt as if he had squeezed her dry.

  At supper Lee questioned Ruth again, and this time she saw more clearly than the previous weekend just how upset he was. She tried to be reassuring. “You have a right to your views even if they’re unpopular,” she said.