Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  Marina told him. There was a long silence at the other end. “Oh, damn. I don’t live there under my real name.”

  Why not? Marina asked.

  Lee said he did not want his landlady to know he had lived in Russia.

  “It’s none of her business,” Marina retorted.

  “You don’t understand a thing,” Lee said. “I don’t want the FBI to know where I live, either.” He ordered her not to tell Ruth. “You and your long tongue,” he said; “they always get us into trouble.”

  Marina was frightened and shocked. “Starting your old foolishness again,” she scolded. “All these comedies. First one, then another. And now this fictitious name. When will it all end?”

  Lee had to get back to work. He would call later, he said.

  Marina, of course, told Ruth about the alias. She was tired of it, she said, tired of Lee’s fears and suspicious, tired of his attempts to cover up the fact that he had lived in Russia. It wasn’t the first time she had felt caught between “two fires,” loyalty to Lee and a conviction that what he was doing was wrong.

  Ruth could make nothing of the alias, either.

  Lee called back that evening while Ruth was fixing supper. It was she who picked up the telephone. Marina did not want to talk to him, but Ruth said she could not tell Lee that his own wife refused to speak to him. Reluctantly, Marina came to the telephone.

  Lee started right off by addressing her as devushka or “wench,” a word that in Russian has such an insulting ring that a man might use it to a servant, perhaps, but not to his wife. When spoken by a husband to a wife, it suggests that everything is over between them. It is a word designed to annihilate intimacy.

  “Hey, wench,” he said, “you’re to take Ruth’s address book and cross my name and telephone number out of there.”

  “I can’t,” Marina said. “It’s not my book, and I have no right to touch it.”

  “Listen here.” Lee was angry. “I order you to cross it out. Do you hear?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  Lee started to scold Marina in as ferocious a voice as she had ever heard. She hung up the telephone.

  Marina told Ruth what Lee had asked her to do. The two of them were puzzled: why had Lee given them a number they weren’t supposed to use? And why was he using an alias? Marina said he had mentioned the FBI. “I don’t think it’s worth living under an assumed name just for that,” Ruth said in a mystified tone.

  Until their argument on the telephone, Lee and Marina had been on good terms, and the significance of this quarrel, only one of hundreds they had had, seems to have lain in its timing—after Hosty and before Kennedy. Because of his fear of the FBI, Lee had been living under an alias since October 14. Now he had been found out. Hosty was closing in on him, and Marina had discovered his alias. With Ruth in on the secret as well, it would be no time before the FBI tracked him to his lair. Most significant of all, after the Hosty visits and their shattering impact on his emotions, any falling out with Marina was bound to have an amplified, and destructive, effect on Lee.

  But how was Marina to know? She, too, was furious—furious at her discovery that Lee had an alias and was again living a lie. After the string of surprises Lee had been springing on her ever since their arrival in the United States, Marina had been continually anxious. Despite her hopes of a more peaceful life, she had not, since Walker, had an easy moment. It did not now cross her mind that he might be up to his old tricks, to anything like a new Walker attempt—that was too frightening even to think about—but the alias obviously meant no good. It might even mean danger.

  Lee did not call Marina the next day, Tuesday, or the day after. “He thinks he’s punishing me,” she said to Ruth.

  Lee went to work as usual on Tuesday, November 19. That day, for the first time, both Dallas papers, the Morning News and the afternoon Times-Herald, published the route of the presidential motorcade. The president would go from Love Field via various lesser streets to Main Street, then “to Houston, Houston to Elm, and Elm under the Triple Underpass to Stemmons Freeway, and on to the Trade Mart.”8 President and Mrs. Kennedy, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, would pass under the windows of the School Book Depository Building, which lay at the northwest corner of the intersection between Houston and Elm.

  Lee learned of the route either on Tuesday, November 19, the day it was published, or Wednesday, November 20, when he might have entered the domino room first thing in the morning and read the announcement in the previous day’s paper. Whenever he learned of it, it was the most important day of Lee’s life. He now knew, if he had not pieced it together from the weekend’s reports, that history, fate, blind accident—call it what you will—had placed him above the very route that John F. Kennedy would take two or three days hence.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of this realization on Lee. Seven months earlier, before his attempt to kill a leader of the American right, he had composed a document predicting a “crisis” that would destroy capitalist society forever. Without his having been able to foresee it, an opportunity had now been vouchsafed to him, of all men, to deal capitalism that final, mortal blow. And he would strike it not at the right or at the left, but, quite simply, at the top. It had become his fate to decapitate the American political process. He was history’s chosen instrument.

  The announcement of the president’s route was the last in a chain of twelve or fifteen events without any one of which Lee might have approached his decision in a very different frame of mind. The first of these events, curiously, appears to have been the attempt on Nikita Khrushchev’s life in Minsk while Lee was living there in January 1962. Another was Lee’s failure to receive any sort of punishment on his redefection to the United States later that year. Still another was Marina’s letter of January 1963 to her former suitor, Anatoly Shpanko, who in her eyes and possibly in Lee’s as well, bore a resemblance to President Kennedy. There had been the failure of Lee’s attempt on General Walker and the heightened sense of immunity that he carried away from that episode. When Lee had moved to New Orleans, there was the murder, in June 1963, of Medgar Evers, in a town nearby, and only a few hours after a speech by Kennedy. Then there was the passage in William Manchester’s book, comparing Kennedy to a president who had been assassinated; and the death of the Kennedy baby at a time when the Oswalds, too, expected a baby. There was Lee’s brief incarceration in New Orleans, an interlude during which he had two enjoyable conversations with Police Lieutenant Francis Martello and realized that prison could be an excellent forum from which to proclaim his political ideas. And there was the fiasco of Lee’s visit to Mexico and his failure to obtain a Cuban visa, which, curiously, may have turned Castro into a negative constituent. Far from wanting to fight for Castro, Lee may now have wanted to show him, as he almost always did after he was dealt a rebuff, what a good fighter he had missed out on.

  During that very month of November 1963, several events occurred that were profoundly disturbing to Lee, by far the most shattering being the visits of Agent Hosty to Marina. Only the week before, there had been the Barghoorn affair. And now the bitter quarrel with Marina over the alias. Lee’s wildly disproportionate anger at Marina was a symptom that, while he was able to cope, just barely, with the demands of his life on the outside, he was on the point of coming apart within. Lee himself was like a rifle that has been loaded and cocked and is ready to go off. Now, suddenly, unforeseeably, he had been placed in a situation in which he had an opportunity to alter the course of history.

  On Wednesday, November 20, at about one o’clock, a small but seminal incident took place at the book depository. Warren Caster, a textbook company representative who had an office in the building, went to Roy Truly’s office to show off a pair of purchases he had made during the lunch hour. Caster proudly drew from their cartons two rifles, one a Remington .22 that he had bought as a Christmas present for his son, and the other a sporterized .30–06 Mauser, which he had bought to go deer hunting. Trul
y picked up the Mauser and, without cocking it, lifted it to his shoulder and sighted it. He handed it back to Caster and said it was a handsome thing.9 A number of men were present in Truly’s office. Lee Oswald happened to be among them. Marina thinks that this could have been the decisive moment. Lee now knew the route, and he had seen guns in the building. If anyone should accuse him later of keeping a rifle there, he had a pretext. There were two rifles in the building already, so why should he be under suspicion?10

  Still, he had not made up his mind. Marina had not noticed in him anything like the “waves” of tension that she had seen three times earlier: before his visit to the American embassy in Moscow in 1961, when he expected to be arrested; before his attempt on General Walker; and before his visit to Mexico City. Each time he had been nervous and irritable for weeks in advance, each time he had talked in his sleep and suffered convulsive anxiety attacks at night, and each time he had lost weight. This time he showed none of those signs. Lee was even seven pounds above his lowest New Orleans weight, a certain indication that he had not been worrying or preparing anything momentous. Even now, on Wednesday, he did not do what he could easily have done. He did not telephone Marina, make up with her, and go out to Irving to fetch his rifle at a moment when bringing it into town would be far less conspicuous than it would be later in the week. And it is clear that he made no plan of escape.

  Indeed, it appears certain that Lee’s decision was an impulsive one, not only because the route had been announced at the last minute but because the deed was so momentous and Lee’s feelings about it apparently so ambiguous that if he had had time to prepare he might very possibly have failed, as he did in the case of General Walker, or he might somehow have slipped and given his plan away.

  Lee was still hesitating on the morning of Thursday, November 21. When he dressed that day and left the rooming house, he did not take his pistol with him, as he is likely to have done had he made his mind up and realized that he would need his revolver for self-defense. On the other hand, he broke his routine that morning in a way that suggests he was coming to a decision. Instead of making breakfast in the rooming house, as he generally did, he went across the street to the Dobbs House restaurant and treated himself to a special breakfast. He complained that his eggs were cooked “too hard,” but he ate them anyway.11

  At last, after his arrival at the book depository, Lee took a decisive step. Between eight and ten in the morning, he sought out Wesley Frazier, who lived near the Paines with his sister Linnie Mae Randle, and asked for a ride to Irving that afternoon. He said he was going “to get some curtain rods. You know, put in an apartment.”12 Later that day Lee took time to fashion a bag 26 or 27 inches long, made of the brown paper and tape that were used by the book depository employees.

  Marina was in her bedroom with Rachel late in the afternoon when Lee arrived unexpectedly. He had not called her ahead of time, and ostensibly they were still angry at one another because of their fight over Lee’s alias. Marina saw Frazier’s car stop at the house and Lee get out. She did not go to greet him. She looked sullen as he entered the bedroom. Inwardly she was pleased that he had come.

  “You didn’t think I was coming?”

  “Of course not. How come you came out today?”

  “Because I got lonesome for my girls.” He took her by the shoulders to give her a kiss.

  Marina turned her face away and pointed at a pile of clothes. “There are your clean shirts and socks and pants. Go in and wash up.”

  Lee did as he was told. “I’m clean now,” he said, as he emerged from the bathroom. “Are you angry at me still?”

  “Of course,” she said, turning aside another kiss.

  Marina tried to leave the bedroom, but he blocked the door and would not let her go until she allowed him to kiss her. With utter indifference, like a rag doll, she acceded.

  “Enough,” Lee said, angry that she was not glad to see him. “You get too much spoiling here. I’m going to find an apartment tomorrow and take all three of you with me.”

  “I won’t go,” Marina said.

  “If you don’t want to come, then I’ll take Junie and Rachel. They love their papa, and you don’t love me.”

  “That’s fine,” said Marina. “Just you try nursing Rachel. You know what that’s like. It’ll be less work for me.”

  Lee then spoke of the FBI. “I went to see them,” he said. “I told them not to bother you any more.”

  Marina left the bedroom and went outside to bring the children’s clothes in off the line. Lee went to the garage for a few minutes, then the two of them came inside and sat on the sofa in the living room folding diapers. “Why won’t you come with me?” Lee begged. “I’m tired of living all alone. I’m in there the whole week long, and my girls are here. I don’t like having to come all the way out here each time I want to see you.”

  “Alka,” Marina said, “I think it’s better if I stay here. I’ll stay till Christmas, and you’ll go on living alone. We’ll save money that way. I can talk to Ruth, and she’s a help to me. I’m lonesome by myself with no one to talk to all day.”

  “Don’t worry about the money,” Lee said. “We have a little saved up. I’ll take an apartment, and we’ll buy you a washing machine.”

  “I don’t want a washing machine. It’ll be better if you buy a car.”13

  “I don’t need a car,” he said. “I can go on the bus. If you buy a used car, you have to spend money to get it fixed. It’s not worth it. I don’t want my girl to have to do all the laundry in the bathtub. Two babies are a lot of work.” Lee pointed to the pile of clothing. “See what a lot of work it is? With two babies you just can’t do it all alone.”

  “We’ll see,” Marina said.

  Just then Ruth drove up to the house. The car was filled with groceries, and Lee, followed by Marina, went out to help. He picked up a load of groceries and went in the house, while Marina lingered outside and apologized to Ruth for his unexpected arrival. The two women guessed that Lee had come to make up.

  As Ruth went into the house, she said to Lee: “Our president is coming to town.”

  “Ah, yes,” Lee said and walked on into the kitchen. He used the expression so often that Ruth paid no attention to his extraordinary casualness.14

  Marina had also mentioned the president’s visit. While they were sitting on the sofa folding diapers, she had said: “Lee, Kennedy is coming tomorrow. I’d like to see him in person. Do you know where and when I could go?”

  “No,” he said blankly.

  Just for a second it crossed Marina’s mind that it was odd that Lee, who was so very interested in politics, was unable to tell her anything about the president’s visit.

  Lee went out on the front lawn and played with the children until dark—the Paine children, the neighbors’ children, and June. He hoisted June to his shoulders, and the two of them reached out to catch a butterfly in the air. Then Lee tried to catch falling oak wings for June.

  Marina stood nearby as Lee and June sat on a red kiddie cart together. Lee spoke with all the children in English, then turned to Marina and said in Russian. “Good, our Junie will speak both Russian and English. But I still don’t like the name Rachel. Let’s call her Marina instead.”

  “Two in one family are too many.”

  It was while they were outside, Marina thinks, that Lee asked her for the third and last time to move in to Dallas with him. His voice was now very kind, quite different from what it had been in the bedroom. Once again he said that he was tired of living alone and seeing his babies only once a week. “I’ll get us an apartment, and we’ll all live peacefully at home.”

  Marina, for a third time, refused. “I was like a stubborn little mule,” she recalls. “I was maintaining my inaccessibility, trying to show Lee I wasn’t that easy to persuade. If he had come again the next day and asked, of course I would have agreed. I just wanted to hold out one day at least.”

  Marina expected to be with Lee after the New Year. B
ut she enjoyed being in a position where Lee for once had to win her over, persuade her, prove again that he loved her and that she was not utterly at his mercy. He had given her a horrible scare with his alias, and she wanted to teach him a lesson.

  The evening was a peaceful one. Lee told Ruth, as he had Marina, that he had been to FBI headquarters, tried to see the agents, and left a note telling them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their visits.15 Marina did not believe him. She thought that he was “a brave rabbit,” and this was just another instance of his bravado.16 After that, the conversation at supper was so ordinary that no one remembers it; but Ruth had the impression that relations between the Oswalds were “cordial,” “friendly,” “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.”17

  After supper Marina stacked the dishes by the sink. Ruth bathed her children, then read to them in their bedroom for an hour. Marina nursed Rachel, and Lee put Junie to bed. Then he cradled Rachel in front of the television set and got her to sleep, while Marina put away the toys. Lee went on watching television, a movie about World War II, and Marina went in to do the dishes.

  Despite the banality of the evening, there was an undercurrent of tragedy, a ludicrous lack of symmetry between what husband and wife were doing. They were apart. In the kitchen, engaged in her tasks at the sink, Marina was no longer angry at Lee over his use of an alias, although she still could not understand why he bothered with such childish games. She was wondering as always whether Lee loved her. And Lee—what was he thinking? Marina had refused his pleas that she move in to Dallas with him “soon.” He would not be looking for an apartment “tomorrow.” He now had no need for “curtain rods,” but earlier in the evening he had spent time in the garage. Did his requests to Marina have a deeper meaning, a desperation, even, that was masked by his calm acceptance of her refusals? Alone that evening for the first time and staring at the television, what were Lee’s thoughts?

  Marina was still at the sink when Lee turned off the television set, poked his head in the kitchen, and asked if he could help. Marina thought he looked sad.