by Don DeLillo
I wrote to Mr. Khrushchev July 19, 1960, when my boy was lost in Russia. I received no reply. I went to Washington January 21, 1961, to petition President Kennedy to find my boy and bring him home. So—wait now, this is good—they write I am neglectful. I left my boys to shift for themselves. I drove all the way to New York in that old junky Dodge. I pulled up stakes in our Western slang too many times. When the truth is that the mother is neglected. If you research the life of Jesus, you see that Mary mother of Jesus disappears from the record once he is crucified and risen. Where is the mother who raised the boy? When the boy is dead, do they build a box around the mother? I played piano by ear. I was a popular child. I can’t give facts point-blank. It takes stories to fill out a life. Only think of Mr. Ekdahl, who cheated me out of a decent divorce and abandoned me to a life of scaring up dimes. Mr. Ekdahl is a story. Marina is a story where the details are lax. I strictly believe in my suspicions. Her statements, her way of life, she smokes, she does not nurse her baby. Marina has a manager. She has offers coming in and where is the mother? I am pictured in Life magazine in my uniform with hose rolled down. I have suffered like my son. We have the same construction.
It was near dusk now, stormlight forming at the edges of low-sailing clouds, dark and mobbed, and there was urgency, a wildness in the sky, everything electric. The minister finished reciting a psalm and the funeral director prepared to lower the coffin. Policemen adjusted their gun belts shyly. The family stood and watched. Robert and Marina had similar looks, soft, lost, pleading. Make it different, make it not happen, give him another chance, another life. Marguerite, holding little Rachel across her folded arms, showed a desolation so total it could be taken as the only thing left, all she had and was, all she’d given returned to her in a suit in a box, all fall and smash, a soul struck by ruin. She passed the baby to the minister and put her hands to her face, not touching but enclosing only, keeping the moment safe from every woe outside her own.
They lowered her youngest son to the red clay of Texas, burying him for security reasons under another name, the last alias of Lee Harvey Oswald. It was William Bobo.
Now Marina came forward and picked up a handful of dirt. She made the sign of the cross, then extended her arm over the grave, letting the dirt fall. Marguerite and Robert had never seen anything like this. The beauty of the gesture was compelling. It was strange and eloquent and somehow correct. They’d agreed on nothing since Robert was a boy but now they leaned together to the mound of earth and took some dirt and blessed themselves, then held their fists upright over the grave and let the dirt spill out, running through their hands like sand hurrying in an hourglass, lightly falling on the pinewood box.
I stand here on this brokenhearted earth and I look at the stones of the dead, a rolling field of dead, and the chapel on the hill, and the cedar trees leaning in the wind, and I know a funeral is supposed to console the family with the quality of the ceremony and the setting. But I am not consoled.
And this is from oldentimes, that the men will kill each other and the women will be left to stand at the grave. But I am not content to stand, your honor.
I will time his movements on the fatal day. I will interview every witness. I am not speaking just to be speaking. I know as the accused mother I must have facts. Listen to me. Do you know I took Russian classes at the library? I went and studied once a week on my one day off, hoping in my heart that Lee would contact me someday, that I could talk to Marina in a normal way. Listen to me. Listen. I cannot live on donation dribs and drabs. Marina has a contract and a ghostwriter. She refused to wear the shorts I bought. And this boy on a Sunday in Fort Worth was not packed to go anywhere and the next day was gone with his wife and baby to a job in Dallas, overnight, without notice to his former employer or his mother. A job in photography where the details are not known. You have to wonder. Who arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? It goes on and on and on. Lee had a stamp collection. Lee swam at the Y. I used to see him on Ewing Street with his hair all wet. Hurry home dear heart or you will catch your death. I am not letter-perfect but I have managed, judge. I have worked in many homes for fine families. I have seen a gentleman strike a wife in front of me. There is killing in fine homes on occasion. This boy and his Russian wife did not have a telephone or television in America. So that is another myth cut down. Listen to me. I cannot enumerate cold. I have to tell a story. He came home with a birdcage that had a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. This boy bought gifts for his mother. He was lonesome to read.
My only education is my heart. I have to work into this in my own way, starting with the day I took him home from the Old French Hospital in New Orleans. I am reciting a life and I need time.
Her hair was bright and strange in the painted glare. The first drops fell. For these final moments at the grave she was still a family. But she knew the minute they moved toward the cars, the Secret Service would separate her from the others. Think of the emptiness of going home alone. Think of not ever seeing the babies again. She was certain there was a campaign of permanent isolation. The funeral director took her arm and murmured something. She shook him off. The family clustered under umbrellas held by their protectors, moving to the cars now, slowly. Marguerite stayed with the diggers. They wanted to fill the hole before the rain got heavy and they worked in earnest, three men pitching dirt methodically. A couple of local policemen came near. The Secret Service came near with those faces made of slate. Still she did not leave. The mistake she’d made was handing over the baby. As long as she held the baby, she was still a family. They’d taken her youngest son and now they were taking the daughter-in-law and the two little girls. Marguerite felt a weakness in her legs. The wind made the canopy snap. She felt hollow in her body and heart. But even as they led her from the grave she heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald spoken by two boys standing fifty feet away, here to grab some clods of souvenir earth. Lee Harvey Oswald. Saying it like a secret they’d keep forever. She saw the first dusty car drive off, just silhouetted heads in windows. She walked with the policemen up to the second car, where the funeral director stood under a black umbrella, holding open the door. Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away—the true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.
Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I’ve altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.
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A young television executive, driven by the power of the image, gives up his job to travel the country with a hand-held movie camera and create a personal version of the American dream. ISBN 978-0-14-011948-0
End Zone
Amid collisions on the football field, a running back becomes fascinated with thoughts of nuclear conflict. As the season progresses, the barriers of language collapse and the games of football and warfare become virtually interchangeable.
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Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and popular icon, becomes jaded with the anti-culture he has created and drops out of society, holing up in a squalid East Village apartment. Nightmarish and post-apocalyptic, th
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Don DeLillo creates a complex and passionate novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the JKF assassination—an event that has indelibly altered the American psyche. Winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. ISBN 978-0-14-015604-1
Mao II
A reclusive literary celebrity abandons the failed novel he has been working on and enters a world of political violence. DeLillo’s extraordinary book is an investigation into the relentless power of terror and iconography with “images so radioactive ... they glow afterward in our minds” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. ISBN 978-0-14-015274-6
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