Oswald's Tale (69 page)

The enigma of Oswald’s homosexuality might now be clarified to a degree, except that we are being told all this by a man whose word, according to Posner, is not considered reliable. We have, then, no more than another question to add to our understanding of Lee’s relation to Marina now that she is arriving and his vacation from marriage is over.

It is worth reminding ourselves, however, of a paradox concerning Oswald. If to some degree he will always remain mysterious, that contributes nonetheless to our developing sense of him. He is a man we can never understand with comfort, yet the small mysteries surrounding him give resonance to our comprehension. An echo is less defined than the note that created it, but our ear can be enriched by its reverberation. If he is homosexual at all, if the inner drama of his marriage is that he is only half connected to Marina and the other half of him is drawn toward having sex with men, and if this need has been intermittently expressed in his adolescence, his Marine Corps years and, covertly, in Russia and perhaps in Dallas, then the picture offered by Dean Adams Andrews takes on credibility. It certainly helps to explain those periods of desire for Marina that alternate in him with a lack of interest in Marina so complete that she complains aloud about it to people she does not even know well. In the sexual sense, it could be said that he seems married to her no more than fifteen weeks in the year.

3

Forbidden Strings

One of those weeks begins on the night of May 11, when Ruth Paine arrives in her station wagon with her two children and Marina and June. According to McMillan, that night Lee and his wife

were happy to be together again—“I’ve missed you so,” Lee said again and again—and they made love three times that night and the next morning. It was the first time they had made love since March 29 or 30, the weekend when Marina had taken Lee’s photograph with the rifle.
¹

Since we are speaking of Lee and Marina, it was not necessarily so loving as that. The groundwork for new disagreements in New Orleans was established as soon as Marina saw the apartment.

MRS. PAINE
. . . . Lee showed her, of course, all the virtues of the [place] he had rented . . . He was pleased . . . it was large enough that he could invite me to stay . . . And he pointed out this little courtyard with grass, and fresh strawberries ready to pick, where June could play. And a screened porch entryway. And quite a large living room. And he was pleased with the furniture and with how the landlady said this was early New Orleans style. And Marina was definitely not as pleased as he had hoped. I think he felt—he wanted to please her. This showed in him.

MR. JENNER.
Tell us what she said. What led you to this conclusion?

MRS. PAINE.
She said it is dark, and it is not very clean. She thought the courtyard was nice, a grass spot where June could play, fenced in, but there was very little ventilation. We were immediately aware there were a lot of cockroaches.

MR. JENNER.
Was she aware of this and did she comment on that?

MRS. PAINE.
I don’t know as anything was said. He was pretty busy explaining. He was doing his best to get rid of them. But they didn’t subside. I remember noticing that he was tender and vulnerable on this point, when she arrived.

MR. JENNER.
He was tender?

MRS. PAINE
. . . . hoping for approval from her, which she didn’t give.
²

Priscilla Johnson McMillan remarks: “ . . . it occurred to Ruth that Lee might or might not care about Marina, but he certainly cared about her opinion.”
³

Indeed he did. In Russia he had promised that he would provide for them in America; he had not done too well. Now, he was hoping that she would love the new apartment. Once again, fresh hope for his marriage was corroded by the acid animosity of Marina’s equally deep but equally contrary heart.

MRS. PAINE
. . . . they argued most of that weekend. I was very uncomfortable in that situation, and he would tell her to shut up, tell her, “I said it, and that is all the discussion on the subject.”

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
What were the kinds of discussions that prompted this?

MRS. PAINE.
I . . . I do recall feeling that the immediate things they were talking about were insufficient reason for that much feeling being passed back and forth, and I wondered if I wasn’t adding to the strain in the situation, and did my best to get back to Texas directly.
⁴

Ruth Paine had arrived on Saturday and was gone by Monday, and we can only surmise the inner range of her feelings. Thirty years later, Marina was asked by the interviewers whether she had ever suspected Lee of homosexual activity, and she replied that she had never seen evidence of it. Yet, it was also true of Marina that she wished to accommodate whoever was questioning her, and so after some thought, she remarked that when Ruth Paine had stayed over in New Orleans those two nights in May, Lee had been making love in a new way. With some embarrassment, Marina implied that he had mounted from the rear, an act which he had never initiated before, and at that moment, their door ajar, Ruth Paine had passed. Probably, thinks Marina, Ruth saw them. “Lee,” Marina recalled, “was not embarrassed at all,” and that to her now seemed some small evidence, perhaps, of homosexual behavior (as if his lack of dismay at being glimpsed in the act was not to be seen as natural heterosexual behavior.)

In any event, it may have been uncomfortable for Ruth Paine.

Perhaps it is time to describe her: She was tall, she was thin, she had a long narrow freckled face and was a converted Quaker. She and her husband, Michael, were devoted to madrigal singing and folk dancing. It had helped to bring them together.

Ruth wore rimless glasses. She was serious. In the hundreds of pages of her testimony before the Warren Commission, there are not a great many humorous remarks. Much the same can be said of Michael Paine. A highly respected helicopter engineer, dry, tall, slim man, quite as serious as Ruth in his testimony—one does get a picture of two exceptionally decent people living under the curse of true gentry: They have been brought up to be so decent to others, so firm and uncompromising about not allowing the greedy little human animal within ever to speak, that one can almost hear strings snapping. Needless to say, it was not a happy marriage. They were respectful of each other, always respectful of each other, but their personal relations, by the time they encountered the Oswalds, had gone cold in the water.

Marina had met Ruth Paine at a party in Dallas given the previous February by a geologist named Everett Glover. De Mohrenschildt, small surprise, had managed the meeting. This would later cause considerable suspicion of Ruth Paine until the nature of her careful open testimony, so responsible to the need for certifying, then fortifying, the smallest detail, made it evident that she could not possibly be an agent in American or Soviet intelligence: She had no instincts for prevarication. Indeed, we would have to put her up in lights as a great actress if the person she presented to the Warren Commission was no more than a role she was playing.

The emotional facts she offered to explain the friendship were not complex. Ruth had responded to Marina as only a woman who loves her husband and is not loved in return would respond to an attractive waif of a girl who spoke no English inasmuch as her husband did not wish her to learn the language because then—so Marina explained—he might lose his Russian.

Such sentiment was an outrage to Ruth. So was the pressure that Lee regularly put upon Marina to return alone to Russia. Michael Paine, whose attitude toward Lee and Marina was much the same as his wife’s, thought it was next door to a crime that Lee was actually serious about sending Marina back to the USSR:

MR. PAINE
. . . . I felt that he was keeping her a vassal and since I was more eager to hear her opinions of Russia than his opinions of Russia, I was eager that she should learn English, and when—Ruth told me that Marina thought she might have to go back to the Soviet Union, and I thought out of the largesse of this country it should be possible for her to stay here if she wanted to stay here, and she quite apparently did, she struck me as a somewhat apolitical person and yet true, just and conscientious . . .
⁵

The Paines might not be living together, but they still thought as one. Ruth loved the Russian language, and had been studying it devotedly. She quickly concluded that if Marina lived with her in that husbandless house in Irving, Texas, where Ruth now dwelt with her children, it might be good for both women. Michael Paine agreed entirely: “ . . . it was agreeable to me to look forward to financing her stay until she could make her own way here.”
⁶

It is interesting that on April 7, three days before Lee would make his attempt on Walker, Ruth Paine, with considerable difficulty, wrote a long letter in Russian to Marina. From its tone, we can be certain that Marina had already confided many a private corner of her marriage to Ruth; and quite likely, given the secret agenda of such confessions (which is to clear the bile out of one’s system so that one can love again), Marina had probably painted a portrait of her relations with Lee that was even more miserable than the reality.

Dear Marina,

I want to invite you to move here and live with me both now and later when the baby is born. I don’t know how things are for you at home with your husband. I don’t know what would be better for you, June and Lee—to live together or apart. It is, of course, your affair, and you have to decide what is better and what you wish to do. But I want to say that you have a choice. When you wish, for days, weeks, months, you could move here. I have already thought about this invitation a lot. It is not a quick thought.

It seems to me that it would be pleasant and useful for us both to live together. We can easily help one another. When you converse, it helps me. If you sometimes correct my mistakes in conversation or letters, I would be very happy. It is so helpful to me that I would consider it proper to buy all which we need from the grocery store, food, soap, etc. Lee would need to give you enough money to pay for clothes and medical expenses.

You can get rest here such as you need during pregnancy. During the day it is quiet here, but not so quiet as at your place. You and June would be by yourselves in the room which fronts the street. There you would find privacy.

Here, I think, it would not be difficult to learn English. From me and from my children, you would learn words.

In the course of two weeks you could learn all I know about cooking. I’m bad at housecleaning. Perhaps you could help me with this a bit.

I don’t want to hurt Lee. Of course I don’t know what he wants. Perhaps he feels like Michael, who at one time wants and doesn’t want to live with me. You know, you could live here workdays and return home weekends. You would only need to carry back and forth clothes, diapers, etc. The other things necessary for June and you are here all the time: beds, sheets, towels, a highchair for June, etc.

Please think about this invitation and tell me (now or later) what you think. If you are interested . . . I want to write an official letter to you and Lee, and I want him to know all I have said to you. Where you and June live—that is of course a matter which touches him deeply. Therefore I want to speak directly with him about it.

Your
Ruth
⁷

It gives a turn in our sense of Ruth that, in fact, she never did send this letter. Her conscience debated whether one had a right, no matter one’s good intentions, to come between a husband and wife.

Then, three weeks after she did not mail the letter, Lee was off to New Orleans. By mutual agreement of all, Paines and Oswalds, Marina and Lee vacated the Neely Street apartment, and Marina lived with Ruth in Irving, Texas, for the next two weeks and enjoyed it. Her life was tranquil, and Ruth respected her.

Now, on Magazine Street, Ruth, passing their open doorway, catches a glimpse of husband and wife in the act, and Marina is evidently not as unhappy with Lee as she has pretended. Small surprise if Ruth leaves next day and, with her dutiful conscience, tries to hope for the best for both of them.

4

Love, Heat, and Grease

McMillan:
Marina made no secret of her interest in sex. At the newsstands, where they fairly often found themselves at night, she would pick out the most unwholesome-looking magazines she could find and pore over the photographs of nude men and women. Lee affected to be above it all . . . But more than once she spied him flicking through a girlie magazine.

Aside from June . . . sex was again the brightest feature of their marriage. For all his Puritanism, Lee enjoyed making love. After intercourse, he would go into the bathroom to wash off, emerge singing one of his arias, and lie down with his back to Marina.

“Don’t touch me,” he would say. “And don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”

There was a mirror at the foot of their bed, and Lee would pile up pillows at the head of the bed so he could watch them making love. Marina did not like it. She pulled the pillows down or turned her head away. She was hurt that the mirror seemed to excite Lee more than she did . . .

“Who are you kissing me for—me or the mirror?”

“You mean you don’t like it?”

“Of course not,” she would answer, and give him a little rap on the rear end.
¹

It was infuriating. Her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, was more stimulated by the sight of himself than by her. But then, Marina had not had a mother like Marguerite to keep telling her how wonderful she was. Since his interior often felt considerably less extraordinary than Marguerite’s description of him, he was naturally eager to encounter that other person, described as so wonderful by his mother—occasionally, the mirror would be kind enough to offer agreeable sights. What an attractive fellow!

Sometimes, in the New Orleans heat, he could get sexy. “He liked to take this pose, that pose, in front of the mirror,” Marina said, “and then he would ask, ‘Don’t you think I’m gorgeous?’ He liked to walk naked. Never ashamed of his body. It was hot and, you know, he would strip everything and sit on the screened-in porch in the air. He just liked it.”

And, of course, they fought. From the moment Ruth left, they fought even more. Ruth Paine had hardly been aware that they had been on their best behavior with her.

McMillan:
Marina sometimes got up at night and went to the kitchen for something cold to drink. The place would be swarming with cockroaches.

“Come in and admire your handiwork,” she would call out toward the bedroom—it was “his” handiwork because Lee did not allow her to use the spray.

He would run in naked from the bedroom, brandishing a can of roach spray and squirting it everywhere. Marina laughed, because he was too stingy to buy decent spray, too stingy to use enough of it, and because he put it in the wrong places.

“You woke me up and now you’re laughing at me.” He was hurt.
²

During the day, he squirted grease on his machines; at night it was bug-killer on Magazine Street. He stank of oil; he stank of insect poison. He festered in the heat. Nor had he told her he was working in a coffee factory. He had pretended it was a photographic shop, but he couldn’t explain why he smelled of coffee. Finally, he told her. He had to. He not only reeked from his job, but it affected his personal habits. He went around in sandals, old work pants, and a soiled T-shirt he hardly ever changed. Marina could bedevil herself with the thought that she had been ashamed of the way Anatoly dressed in Minsk, and now Lee walked around in outright filthy condition.

McMillan:
“My work isn’t worth getting dressed for,” he told Marina.

“Do it for yourself, then,” she said. “Or if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

“I simply don’t care,” he replied.
³

The grunge at work—the grease from coffee beans and the grease from the machines, the heat, the sense of sliding into new kinds of trouble. His temper is on edge.

MRS. GARNER
. . . . I said, “Lee, why don’t you talk English to your little girl and your wife? That way she could learn to talk English and when the little girl goes to school it wouldn’t be so hard on her.”

He said, “She has time enough to learn that,” and he never had a nice word to say to me after that . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Did you have any other contact with Oswald yourself, personally?

MRS. GARNER.
Yes. One time I went for my rent. It was a few days past due, the rent, and I mean, you know, when you let them go they wait too long and they don’t ever get it . . . . he was starting out the drive to catch a bus on the corner, and when he saw me he turned around and . . . I said, “Oswald, you got the rent?” . . . He said, “Yes, I have it.”

He was fixing to go to the bus, [but] he turned around . . . and he just pushed me aside and went by me and went and got the money and handed it to me . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
He actually laid his hands on you?

MRS. GARNER.
Put his hands on me just like that and pushed me . . . . He didn’t say a thing. Came back and gave me the money and that was it.

MR. LIEBELER.
When was the next time you had any—

MRS. GARNER.
Well, I didn’t talk to him any more than that because [he] wouldn’t answer you when you say good morning or good evening . . . The only thing was at night he used to come past behind the house and always wore trunks, yellow trunks with thongs, no top shirt, and he used to stuff all my garbage cans and all the cans on the street, and never would talk to anybody, pass right by the door of the apartment of the other people and never did talk to anybody.
⁴

Usually, he is just as unresponsive at work:

MR. LE BLANC
. . . . I put him on the fifth floor and told him to take care of everything on the fifth floor and I would be back shortly to check . . . . and about a half hour or 45 minutes or so, I would go back up . . . and I wouldn’t find him., So I asked the fellows that would be working on the floor had they seen him and they said yes, he squirted the oil can a couple of times around different things and they don’t know where he went. So I would start hunting all over the building. There is five stories on one side and four on the other. I would cover from the roof on down and I wouldn’t locate him, and I asked him, I said, “Well, where have you been?” And all he would give me was that he was around. I asked him, “Around where?” He says, “Just around,” and he would turn around and walk off.
⁵

If he stays in dirty clothes once he gets home, that might be related to sitting in dirty diapers as a child. There had been so many hours when he was two and three years old and Marguerite had been away at work and the young couple she had hired did not take much care of him. Now, the dirt and grease in which he works seem to be turning him on to guns. Is it possible that the dirt and the grease—like the torpor induced by sitting in packed diapers—stimulates him to low dirty impulses?

MR. ALBA
. . . . employees at Reily told [the FBI] after the assassination, of course, that Lee Oswald spent as much time “Over at Alba’s Garage as he did over here at the plant.” . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
You said that he was called from your place to go back to the coffee company from time to time?

MR. ALBA.
There were anywhere from two to four different occasions that I can remember that someone would come in there and tell him, “Now, Lee Oswald, they are looking for you over there. If you keep this up, you are going to get canned.” And Oswald would say, “I’m coming. I’m coming.”
⁶

But Oswald and Adrian Alba did have interesting conversations in the front office of the garage:

MR. ALBA.
Well, we have a coffee urn and a Coke machine . . . and on the coffee table I would say that I had approximately anywhere from 80 to 120 magazines. [Oswald] requested permission to take one or two off at a time, and kept them anywhere from 3 days to a week, and would make the point of letting me know he was returning them. And then a few days later he would ask that he borrow another magazine or two magazines . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Did he strike you as being peculiar in any way?

MR. ALBA.
Yes; he did. He was quiet . . . You could ask Lee Oswald two or three questions, and if Lee Oswald wasn’t apparently interested in the course of the conversation, he would just remain paging through the book and look up and say, “Did you say something to me?” . . . but all you had to do was mention guns and gun magazines and Lee was very free with the conversation . . .
⁷

MR. LIEBELER.
I am looking at an FBI report. [Did Oswald mention] that a small calibre bullet was more deadly than the larger one, to which point you agreed.

MR. ALBA
. . . . We went into the discussion of basing the thing on the ice pick versus the bread knife—I don’t think I mentioned this part to the FBI—reflecting the whole picture that you would be better off receiving a wound from a 10-inch bread knife than you would be being gigged once with a 2- or 3-inch ice pick, and that reflecting the difference between the large calibre wound and the small calibre wound.

MR. LIEBELER.
What led you and Oswald to agree that you would be better off being hit with a bread knife than with an ice pick?

MR. ALBA.
Internal bleeding.
⁸

About this time, Marina wrote a letter in Russian to Ruth which the Warren Commission would translate into English.

25 May 1963
New Orleans

Dear Ruth! Hello!

Here it is already a week since I received your letter. I can’t produce any excuses as there are no valid reasons. I’m ashamed to confess that I am a person of moods. And my mood currently is such that I don’t feel much like anything. As soon as you left all “love” stopped and I am very hurt that Lee’s attitude toward me is such that I feel each minute that I bind him. He insists that I leave America, which I don’t want to do at all. I like America very much and think that even without Lee I would not be lost here. What do you think?

This is the basic question which doesn’t leave me day or night. And again Lee has said that he doesn’t love me, so you see we came to mistaken conclusions. It is hard for you and me to live without the return of our love—interesting, how will it all end? . . .
⁹

MRS. MURRET.
Now, what he did at home—how he acted around Marina there, I don’t know, but when he was in my presence he was very attentive to her and very well-mannered. He would, I mean, open the car door for her and so forth—very attentive. He would pull the chair out for her and things like that. He was very well-mannered. I have to say that for him.

MR. JENNER.
What was her attitude toward him?

MRS. MURRET.
Well, she seemed the same way. They seemed to get along very nicely together, I thought, when they were here in New Orleans. They would take a ride out to the French Market and buy some crabs and some shrimp and come home and boil and cook them. They got a big bang out of doing things like that.
¹⁰