Libra

by Don DeLillo

  He tells Chief Justice Earl Warren at the commission hearings that he has been used for a purpose, that he wants to tell the truth and then leave this world. But first they have to take him to Washington. He will tell the truth to President Johnson.

  He lives in a cell in an isolated area of the county jail, a small square room with a toilet bowl and a mattress on the floor. A guard reads the Bible to him. Jack believes this man has a listening device in his clothes. They safely store away all his incriminating remarks and then erase all the remarks that prove his crime was unpremeditated, a spasm of personal conscience.

  When he is feeling totally morose, a nothing person, he rereads the telegrams he received in the first days after the shooting. HOO-RAY FOR YOU JACK. YOU ARE A HERO MR. RUBY. WE LOVE YOUR GUTS AND COURAGE. YOU KILLED THE SNAKE. YOU DESERVE A MEDAL NOT A JAIL CELL. I KISS YOUR FEET BORN IN HUNGARY LOVE. Then he remembers the guilty verdict, the death penalty, the reversal on flimsy technicalities. He knows that Dallas wants him dead and gone just like Oswald. He knows that people regard all the shootings of that weekend as flashes of a single incandescent homicide and this is the crime they are saying Jack has committed. He is worried that he has been miscast. He runs across the room and butts his head.

  He wears white jail coveralls and scribbles notes when his lawyers come to the interview room, where the walls are bugged. He insists on taking a lie-detector test because the sincerity and authenticity of the truth are precious qualities to Americans. “It seems as you get further into something,” he scribbles on a pad, “even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow, brainwashes you, that you are weak in what you want to tell the truth about.” Authorities arrange a polygraph exam in July 1964. Results are inconclusive.

  He begins to hear voices. He hears one of his brothers screaming as people set him on fire outside the county jail.

  He believes all his brothers and sisters will be killed because of what he did.

  He believes people are distorting his words even as he speaks them. There is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to mean what they want.

  He believes the Jews of America are being put in kill machines and slaughtered in enormous numbers.

  He is miscast, or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together.

  The lawyers leave, the doctors come waltzing in. The cancer is spreading. He can smell it on the hands of his examiners. Jack Ruby reads his telegrams.

  Does anyone understand the full measure of his despair, the long slow torment of a life in chaos, going back to Fanny Rubenstein toothless on Roosevelt Road, screaming in the night, going back in time to the earliest incomprehension he can remember, a truant, a ward of the state, living in foster homes, going back to the first blow, the shock of what it means to be nothing, to know you are nothing, to be fed the message of your nothingness every day for all your days, down and down the years?

  You have lost me, Chief Justice Warren.

  He begins to merge with Oswald. He can’t tell the difference between them. All he knows for sure is that there is a missing element here, a word that they have canceled completely. Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President’s assassin. He is the man who killed the President.

  This is why Jews are being stuffed in machines. It is all because of him. It is the power and momentum of mass feelings.

  Oswald is inside him now. How can he fight the knowledge of what he is? The truth of the world is exhausting. He lowers his head and runs into the concrete wall.

  And Nicholas Branch studies the psychiatric reports. He reads into the night. He sleeps in the armchair. There are times when he thinks he can’t go on. He feels disheartened, almost immobilized by his sense of the dead. The dead are in the room. And photographs of the dead work a mournful power on his mind. An old man’s mind. But he persists, he works on, he jots his notes. He knows he can’t get out. The case will haunt him to the end. Of course they’ve known it all along. That’s why they built this room for him, the room of growing old, the room of history and dreams.

  Sunday night. Beryl Parmenter sat watching TV in her little house in Georgetown. They were showing reruns of the shooting.

  Over and over. The screen is full of broad-shouldered men in hats, all around Oswald, who is bare-headed, his features whited out by glare except for his left eye, shining darkly. Jack Ruby comes into the frame, bulky and hunched. His hand is bright static around the gun. The picture jumps. The surprise and pain in Oswald’s face remove him from the company around him. He is alone, already far away, the only one not wondering what has happened. A cold moment of stillness after the shot. Then everything flies apart.

  She didn’t want these people in her house.

  The camera doesn’t catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies. Each new showing reveals a detail. This time she sees that Ruby carries dark-rimmed glasses folded in his breast pocket. Oswald dies unchanged.

  Why do they keep running it, over and over? Will it make Oswald go away forever if they show it a thousand times? She knew exactly what Ruby was thinking. He wanted to erase that little man. He wanted him out of here. He didn’t want to see him or hear him or think about him. Just like the rest of us, Jack. We want him out of here too. And now he’s gone but it isn’t helping at all.

  Beryl had admired President Kennedy. She’d even felt a small personal involvement in his rise, a sort of landed interest, inasmuch as the Kennedys had lived for a time in a brick house on N Street, practically around the corner, when Jack was a senator. She wanted to feel a satisfaction in the death of Oswald, some measure of recompense. But this footage only deepened and prolonged the horror. It was horror on horror.

  She didn’t want these people here. But she felt morally bound to watch. They kept on showing it and she kept watching. She had the sound turned down because the voices of reporters made her cry.

  She’d been crying all weekend, crying and watching. She couldn’t shake the feeling she’d been found out. These men were in her house with their hats and guns. Pictures from the other world. They’d located her, forced her to look, and it was not at all like the news items she clipped and mailed to friends. She felt this violence spilling in, over and over, men in dark hats, in gray hats with dark bands, in tan Stetsons, in white caps with shiny visors and badges pinned to the crowns. The little hatless man said “Oh” or “No.”

  After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead.

  Larry was in the cellar cataloguing wines.

  She began to cry again. She wanted to crawl out of the room. But something held her there. It was probably Oswald. There was something in Oswald’s face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes—a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel, that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us. This is what kept Beryl in the room, this and the feeling that it was cowardly to hide.

  He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying.

  They replayed the sequence into early morning. Beryl stayed in the room and watched. The telephone rang for the twentieth time. She didn’t move. The pain entered Oswald’s face. She wasn’t taking any calls this particular wintry
weekend.

  25 November

  The road curved uphill through the burial ground, past jack oaks and Chinese elms, above grassy swales tracked with grave markers, and two dusty police cars moved slowly along, unaccompanied, an incongruous stately pace. At the top of the rise they stopped outside a pretty sandstone chapel to release the mourners to their organized grief. But it seemed at once that something was wrong. The family climbed out of the cars and there were Secret Service men and cemetery staff gathered in the archway, showing the grim pride that low officials take in a despised duty. The wind began to sing in the east, sweeping out of the reaches of industrial prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth, and Marguerite Oswald stood outside the chapel in a black dress and black-rimmed glasses, holding the new baby in her arms, the granddaughter whose birth they had kept from her, and her face wore a look of helpless pain. Because somebody canceled the service. Somebody ordered the body removed from the chapel. Because the chapel was empty. The body was not there.

  They called many ministers, Lutheran men of God, but no one wanted to pray over Lee Harvey Oswald. This is the reason, your honor, they were in the utmost sheepish hurry to put my boy in the earth. Robert was crying bitterly, trying to get them to return Lee’s body to the chapel for a brief service, an appearance in a holy place. So then I intervened and said, “Well if Lee is a lost sheep and that is why you don’t want him in church, it escapes the purpose of a church. The good people do not need to go to church. Let’s say he is called a murderer. It is the murderers who need a church. Isn’t this what Jesus teaches?” They were in such a hurry to bury Lee Harvey Oswald they forgot to notify the men who carry the coffin to the graveside, so news reporters teamed up to move the body. I have many stories, your honor. I have stories I am sure you do not know. I am the mother in the case.

  Hurrying clouds now. The wooden coffin rested on a bier above the open grave, with a massive concrete vault below, vandal-proof, a thousand years of peace. The family sat in dented metal folding chairs under a faded canopy. Robert Oswald was between the widow and the mother, each woman holding one of the little girls. Reporters were restricted to the far fringes. No friends or well-wishers allowed, not that any were clamoring to attend. Secret Service men and uniformed police stood around the canopy, many with hands folded in front of them, dipping their knees in turn, and there were armed guards stationed along the cemetery fence. The joke among reporters was that Fort Worth was taking better care of Oswald dead than Dallas did when he was alive. Robert was trying not to break down again. He was a man of earnest bearing, dark-browed, with neatly trimmed hair, a sales coordinator, a hard worker, looking older and more responsible than any twenty-nine-year-old from here to Texarkana, as if young Lee’s truancy, the defection, the undesirable discharge, the lost jobs, all of it, had planted him in a stiff shirt for life.

  Your honor, I cannot state the truth of this case with simple yes and no. I have to tell a story. This is a boy the other children teased. It was torn, torn shirts and a bloody nose. Listen to me. I will write books about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have information pertinent to the case. I am all over the world. I have struggled to raise my boys on mingy sums of money and today I am everywhere, newsreel and foreign press, but where are the funds for a decent burial? There are stories inside stories, judge. Lee collected stamps in a book and practiced chess alone at the kitchen table and they sent him to Russia to infiltrate. I will wear a camera and make a photographic record of Lee’s life, getting houses and rooms on the record. I will tell how I worked at many jobs to raise my boys, leading up to practical nurse. I know what sickness looks like. I know low pay. I have worked for nine dollars a day, live-in, twenty-four hours’ duty. I wore my nurse’s uniform three days, sneaking from hotels with the secret police of different branches, with Life magazine running alongside, and a translator, and a photographer, and the Russian daughter-in-law, and the two sick babies. Marina stands and smokes a cigarette plain as day. I am in my uniform and they bring clothes for her. There are diapers hanging everywhere. TV gave the cue and Lee was shot. They kept it from us, being women, and then in the car to the next hotel something came over the radio and the agent said, “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” And I said, “Is that my son?” And he didn’t answer. So then I said, “My son is shot, isn’t he?” And he said into the mike, “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” So then I said, “Answer me, I want to know.” “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” So then they showed it on television in the room but Marina and I were not shown the sequence. They made us sit behind the television and the agents all crowded around in front and watched. And the back of the television was to us. And fifteen to eighteen men crowded in to watch on the other side. They gave us coffee and they watched.

  I am going through a death and it is hard.

  I intend to research this case and present my findings. But I cannot pin it down to a simple statement. I came home to find red welts on his legs at the age of two, where Mrs. Roach whipped him on Pauline Street, and then I placed him in a home and he slept with his brothers in a big long dormitory, one hundred little boys in rows and rows of cots. He attended six schools by the age of ten. They will search out the environmental factors, that we moved from home to home. Judge, I have lived in many places but never filthy dirty, never not neat, never without the personal loving touch, the decorator item. We have moved to be a family. This is the theme of my research.

  I am smiling, judge, as the accused mother who must read the falsehoods they are writing about my boy. Lee was a happy baby. Lee had a dog. This is the boy who spent only one month in attendance at Arlington Heights High School before he entered the Marines when we were living on Collinwood Avenue and there are three pictures of this boy in the school yearbook. Now, why do you pick out this one boy who is in school so briefly, of all the boys and girls there, and make him the subject of three photographs? People say, “Mrs. Oswald, I don’t get the point.” You don’t get the point? The point is how it goes on and on and on and on. That’s the point. The point is how far back have they been using him? He used to climb the tops of roofs with binoculars, looking at the stars, and they sent him to Russia on a mission. Lee Harvey Oswald is more than meets the eye. Already there are documents stolen from me. There are newspaper clippings stolen from my home by one of the branches of secret police. I am all over the world and they are rifling my files.

  A minister showed up, willing to say a few words at the grave. He was an executive of the Council of Churches and hadn’t conducted a service in eight years. But he wanted to help, although he’d left his Bible in the car. The undertaker opened the coffin and Marina Oswald approached and kissed her husband and placed two rings on his fingers. She wore a dark dress and pale cloth coat and she was sobbing now, and the babies were crying, and the security men dipped their knees and gazed vaguely skyward. Marina found herself thinking, how odd, that when Khrushchev visited Minsk while she was living there with Lee, there were strong rumors of an assassination attempt. If that had been Lee, if Lee had been picked up for that, they would have taken better care of him. At least say this for Russians; they can guard a suspect. These grudging minutes at the grave completed her abandonment, except for dreams. Her dreams would be incomplete for years, deprived of Alek in his early sweetness, the way he loved to play with June Lee, could sit and look at her for hours. The minister said, “O God of the open sky and of the infinite universe.” She was alone with two small children under these blowing clouds, an outcast, bent in grief and loss, living in a motel with a dozen armed men. She tried to understand how this could happen.

  Now, about Marina as Russian or French. It is amazing how her English improved right after Lee is killed. It is amazing how she suddenly has a cigarette in her hand, which I never witnessed when Lee was alive. I will research the picture of Marina to learn if it is true. I have a sixth sense, judge. People have remarked on my ESP. If Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President, why didn’t I know it at the time? It is a prevalent feeling e
very mother has when the phone rings and she knows it is her son. Why didn’t I sense he was in a window with a gun when the shots rang out? Even being his gun doesn’t mean he did the shooting. I will wear a camera. I will time his movements on the fatal day. I am ready to go round and round on this because there are stories inside stories, that the press is unaware. Marina knows English, Marina knows French. This foreign girl is trained. They brought clothes for Marina. They showed me a story in the paper where a woman has offered her a home. They want Marina to admit to his guilt and they will find her a home. Robert sides constantly with the secret police. Our dispositions do not jell. This is the heartbreak of blood relations. I am forgetting many things, your honor. Lee had a bicycle. Lee had a dog. This boy was shot handcuffed to an officer of the law. Somebody paid to have him shot on cue. TV gave directions and down he went. We have a moral issue all through this that I am fighting for. My mail is opened. There are three letters missing from my desk. Lee wrote to me from Russia, “I am lonesome to read.” In this letter he is thanking me for sending books. He is saying please. He asks for news of his homeland. This is a letter that is missing. Our government has been watching him for years. Did Lee even know he was being used? This is a question I will research. Listen to me. I have to tell a story. I have to work into this, living in the French part of town. He knew Robert’s manual by heart. He liked histories and maps. The recruiting officer said, “Mrs. Oswald, there is less delinquency in Japan and those places than we have here.” He sold a bill. He was willing to sneak Lee in at age sixteen, before the legal limit. They were preparing him. They were using him already. Three photos in the yearbook and he was only there a month. People say, “Mrs. Oswald, what is the point?” The point is how far back did it go? When did they start watching him? Did he belong to them for life? The point is what about the boy in the casket? Lee in a suit and nice tie looking completely different from the scarecrow son in the newspapers and TV, a sturdy boy, broad-faced, like a Russian. Is the person they buried the same as the person they killed? Did they really kill him? Is the person who came back from Russia the same as the person who went? I have a right to ask these questions. How tall is Lee? What are his scars? I will bring these questions out in books and appearances.