Oswald's Tale (97 page)

5

The Widow’s Elegy

First, Jacqueline Kennedy was a widow, and then Marina. As the second widow, she can no longer know what it is she knows. She has passed through thirty years of interviews, more than a thousand hours of interviews, and the questions never cease. She may be the last living smoker to consume four packs a day. How can it be otherwise? The past is filled with guilt—the future is full of dread. Only the present is clear; she always suspects the motives of the new people to whom she speaks. How innocent can be their motive for approaching? These days she feels that the walls are coming closer. If she starts thinking about what has happened to her, not with pity, she will say, or sorrow for herself, but just hoping to lessen stress, she feels she is choking. She still thinks of the night Lee sat in the dark on their porch in New Orleans and he was weeping. It was such a heavy burden for him. Something, and she does not know what it was.

It is hard for her to remember details. After her Warren Commission testimony, everybody accused her of lying, but she was just a human being and if she was lying, it was honestly—because she was floating through a foggy world. Memories kept coming, going. Maybe it was some self-protective mechanism. To keep her psyche from collapsing. People were saying to her, “You’re so strong”—but it was not heroic effort. “It is in every one of us—you just decide not to die, that’s all. You dare not to die.”

Now that she is fifty-two, Marina would agree that one doesn’t need to approach her with such labels as good woman, bad woman, villainess, heroine, someone-who’s-been-treated-unfairly, someone-treated-too-well. “You can be all of that in one person,” said Marina. “One can be a villain, and next time a hero.

“If we go through Lee’s character, I myself would like to find out: Who is he? Was he really that mean of a person?—which I think he was—but it’s a hard road for me to take because I do not want to understand him. I have to tell you in advance that, as far as Lee is concerned—I don’t like him. I’m mad at him. Very mad at him, yes. When a person dies, people have such anger. They loved their husband or wife for a long time so they say, ‘How dare you die on me?’ Okay, but that’s not my reason. For me, it’s, ‘How dare you abandon me? In circumstances like that? I mean,
you
die but I’m still here licking my wounds.’

“All the same, I’m definitely sure he didn’t do it, even if I’m still mad at him. Because he shouldn’t involve a wife and family if he was playing those kinds of games. Yes, I do believe he was on a mission, maybe even when he went to Russia, but first I have to figure out what he was doing here. It wasn’t just happening here all of a sudden in America. It was a continuation. In my mind, I’m not trying to convince you or the American public—I have to resolve it for myself. But I think he was sent over to Russia, maybe. I think so. I have no proof. I have nothing. I do think he was more human than has been portrayed. I’m not trying to make an angel out of him, but I was interested in him because he was different, he would broaden my horizon, and all the other men I wanted had been taken or didn’t want me.”

Every time she watches a film and sees an actor playing Lee, the actor is nothing like him. He turns his head like Lee or waves his hair the same way, but, she says, your American public knows Lee only from a few photographs, and that is what this actor is copying. She sees another Lee, and she does not know the psyche of that fellow. She still has it to discover.

Her interviewers asked how she would have felt if a truck had hit Alik in Minsk—if she had been his widow then, would she have thought of him fondly? She said yes. She would have thought it was just a stormy beginning but they were breaking ground that they would later stand on in their marriage. After all, she took a chance. She had crossed the ocean for him. Of course, she was afraid of him already, even if little by little she had been learning that she did not know, never knew, where she stood. Not with him. But at least you could hope.

She will never forget that on their last night in Irving, he had kept making advances to her until he went to bed, and she had refused. She had said to herself, “No, if I don’t teach him this lesson right now, this lying will continue. O. H. Lee will continue. Don’t butter up to me.” She tried to discipline him.

Afterward, she had to think, What if he really wanted to be close to me? What if I put him in a bad mood? It torments her. What if they had made love that last night? But she is the wrong person to talk to about this, she would say, because she is not a sexual person. Sensuous but not sensual. She didn’t like sex, she would say. She was not expert, nor could she tell you how grandiose something had been, because she had never experienced that. No Beethoven or Tchaikovsky for her, not in bed, no grand finale.

MARINA:
In Texas, sun is very intense for me and very harsh, very bright. I love moon. It’s cool and it’s shiny and that’s my melancholy period. And some people are shining and they are bright and they burn. You know what I mean? I’m not sun. I’m a moon . . .

I look at America, it’s all wonderful. But you go to the damn grocery store and it’s 200 varieties of cereal. And basically it’s only oats, corn, how many things . . . Just so somebody going to make extra million off that. It’s so unnecessary. If that’s progress, if that’s abundance, how stupid for us to want it. 300 bags of poison, maybe only two or three good [well,] that kind of progress I don’t think we should strive for . . . Do I make any sense to you? Or I’m just complaining?

INTERVIEWER:
No, I agree with you.

After the assassination, there were times when she was close to ending her life. She wondered when her breaking point would come. She had crossed that ocean for nothing. Still, she tried to survive. It was a lonely life. Every day. The worst of the pain was that maybe she loved him more by the end than in their beginning. Maybe grieving was just starting to happen now! Maybe! Because she had never really had such a process. Just numb, with pain always there.

She doesn’t know whether they would have stayed married, but still, Lee was the person she would have liked to have been able to make it with. Through life. There was some goodness in him to hold on to, and on that last unexpected Thursday when he came to visit, he was kind of sheepish because of that big lie, O. H. Lee.

And when he came in, he said, “Hi,” nice and everything, and she said, “What are you doing here?”—cold and rude.

Later, she couldn’t understand. Maybe he didn’t love her, maybe he cared less for her, but he loved his little girls enormously, and even thirty years later she heard a story about how in those last days, when he lived on North Beckley, he was playing with the grandchildren of the woman who ran his last rooming house. These children called him Mr. Lee. He asked one of those boys, “Are you a good boy?” and that kid shook his head in the negative, said, “Uh-unh,” and Lee said, “Never be so bad that you hurt somebody.” This kid was now grown-up, but he still remembered that, still told that story.

The morning when Lee left, Friday morning, November 22, 1963, she did not get up with him when he arose very early. She tried to, but he said, “Don’t worry. Go back to sleep.” And he left quietly.

She had gone to bed after him the night before. He was already asleep or pretended to be. Then, when she woke up in the middle of the night to check on baby Rachel, she took a look at him. The only illumination was by nightlight, very low. But Lee scared her. She touched him with her foot and he kicked it away. Then he lay so still that it was like he had died. He didn’t move for the next hour. She said to herself, “Is he alive?” He looked so still. Absolutely gone. She couldn’t hear his breath. She had to bend over very close to feel his breathing—she thought he had died on her. Isn’t that funny? For all these years she remembered saying, “Thank goodness he’s alive.” And he made no sound all night and never moved again.

In the morning, he made himself instant coffee, drank it in a plastic cup, and went off to work.

She sits in a chair, a tiny woman in her early fifties, her thin shoulders hunched forward in such pain of spirit under such a mass of guilt that one would comfort her as one would hug a child. What is left of what was once her beauty are her extraordinary eyes, blue as diamonds, and they blaze with light as if, in divine compensation for the dead weight of all that will not cease to haunt her, she has been granted a spark from the hour of an apocalypse others have not seen. Perhaps it is the light offered to victims who have suffered like the gods.

6

The Third Widow

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
I don’t believe this letter belongs with the letters. May I see it, please? Is that a letter from Russia? I don’t think so from what I can see from here.

MR. RANKIN.
It purports to be, Mrs. Oswald. I hand it to you. Is it Exhibit 198 you are speaking of?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
Yes. I’m sorry. There was another very important letter of this size that I thought maybe had become confused with the Russian letters. You will have to forgive me, Chief Justice Warren, but this is quite a big undertaking.
¹

All day long, throughout her testimony, she has been fumbling through her file of letters, bringing forth “documents, gentlemen,” that prove nothing but that she has had her share of lonely nights filled with intolerable scenarios of suspicion. Her letters prove of little use in the lawyerly air of the Warren Commission Hearings. She is wasting their time with trivia, and all the while her possession of these letters remains as important to her as tombstones. Who is moving the tombstones in the family graveyard?

The interlocutors grow testy:

REPRESENTATIVE BOGGS.
Why did your son defect to Russia?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
I cannot answer that yes or no sir. I am going to go through the whole story or it is no good. And that is what I have been doing for this Commission all day long—giving a story.

REPRESENTATIVE BOGGS.
Suppose you just make it very brief.

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
I cannot make it brief. I will say I am unable to make it brief. This is my life and my son’s life going down in history.
²

Marguerite has taken sufficient blame, scorn, and ridicule from other people (including the barely concealed animus of the Warren Commission) that there is no need to depict her in one more unfavorable light—it seems certain at the least that every malformation, or just about, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s character had its roots in her. That much granted, it is also difficult not to feel some guarded sympathy for Marguerite Claverie Oswald. As with Lee, the internal workings of her psyche were always condemned to hard labor, and so much of what she tried, and with the best intentions, would fail—especially her obvious desire to receive some love from her sons, enough love at least to match her harsh pride. It is not agreeable to see Marguerite’s life through her eyes. The boys are always leaving her as quickly as they can, and their willful wives—willful as she sees them—have no belief in her desire to be a decent mother-in-law. Her sacrifices are many and real—but no love comes back. Merely banishment from her children, and icy silence. And then her favorite is accused of killing the President. In her heart of hearts she has to wonder whether indeed he did it—she knows how far he can go.

Denigrators of Marguerite Oswald will remark on how much she loved the limelight after he was gone, and it is true: His love of attention was equaled by hers—she spoke to large audiences for the first time in her life, and it was a great step forward from that sales job in New York where she was fired because of intractable body odor.

Yet, for all her latter-day notoriety, we have to recall that she died alone and full of a literal cancer to follow upon the bottomless cancer of those endless wounds within personal wounds—no, she had her life, and one would not want it, but somewhere in the bureaucratic corridors of Karmic Reassignment she is probably arguing now with one of the monitors, dissatisfied with the low station, by her lights, of her next placement. “I gave birth to one of the most famous and important Americans who ever lived!” she will tell the clerk-angel who is recording her story.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you have any family here at all?

MARGUERITE:
I have no family, period. I brought three children into the world, and I have sisters, I have nieces, I have nephews, I have grandchildren, and I’m all alone. That answers that question and I don’t want to hear another word about it.
³

There she stands with her outrageous ego and her self-deceit, her bold loneliness and cold bones, those endless humiliations that burn like sores.

Yet, she is worthy of Dickens. Marguerite Oswald can stand for literary office with Micawber and Uriah Heep. No word she utters will be false to her character; her stamp will be on every phrase. Few people without a literary motive would seek her company for long, but a novelist can esteem Marguerite. She does all his work for him.

Given such modest thoughts, it is time to conclude one’s sad tale of a young American who lived abroad and returned to a grave in Texas. Let us, then, say farewell to Lee Harvey Oswald’s long and determined dream of political triumph, wifely approbation, and high destiny. Who among us can say that he is in no way related to our own dream? If it had not been for Theodore Dreiser and his last great work, one would like to have used “An American Tragedy” as the title for this journey through Oswald’s beleaguered life.

THE END