Reclaiming History (155 page)

The moment Marguerite left, Lee scolded his wife and told her again never to let his mother in the house. Marina, who felt sorry for Marguerite, protested that Lee had no right to turn his back on his mother, but he warned her that Marguerite would try to move in—“You’ll be sorry then.” He ordered her to obey. When she refused, he slapped her four or five times across the face. About a month later, Lee took the bird outside and let it fly away.
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While Lee was immersed in his new job and life in America with his new wife, he did not jettison his old interests. On August 12, 1962, he wrote to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in New York City, a party aligned with the ideology of Leon Trotsky, the Russian political leader and colleague of Lenin who espoused a Communism based on the power of the proletariat (working class) of all nations rather than the domination of the Soviet Union. Stalin forced Trotsky into exile in the late 1920s and had him assassinated in Mexico City in 1940. In his letter, Oswald asked the SWP to “send me some information as to the nature of your party, its policies, etc., as I am very interested in finding out all about your program.” On August 23, he received back a pamphlet titled
The Socialist Workers Party—What It Is, What It Stands For
by Joseph Hansen, who reportedly had been a secretary to Trotsky.
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On August 28, Oswald ordered a copy of
The Teachings of Leon Trotsky
from Pioneer Publishing in New York, a subsidiary of SWP at the same address, enclosing twenty-five cents. The company wrote back saying the “book” (actually a thirty-five-page booklet by Jack Warwick written in 1944) was out of print but telling him he had a twenty-five-cent credit due on any other purchase.
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(The booklet, as of 2004, was in only two libraries in America.) Author Albert Newman writes, perhaps correctly in view of Oswald’s subsequent attempt to get to Cuba in search of a purer form of Marxism, that “turning thus towards Trotskyism in disillusionment with the Soviet Union, Oswald was following a path well-worn by more than a few American Communists in 1939. Horrified at the Nazi-Soviet friendship pact of late August that year which triggered World War II and left Poland a helpless victim of dismemberment by both signatories, these ideological refugees sought asylum and comfort in the ‘purer,’ more revolutionary form of Marxism embodied in the
Manifesto of the Fourth International
of the Trotskyites.”
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Lee also, though always strapped for money, continued his subscription to at least three Russian journals. He received literature from the Soviet embassy in Washington too, having asked the embassy to send him “any periodicals or literature which you may put out for the benefit of your citizens living, for a time, in the U.S.A.,” suggesting an ambivalence on his part as to the wisdom of his return to America.
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M
arina remembered the early days on Mercedes Street as idyllic. “Alka, do anything,” she began saying to Lee, “but don’t ever, ever make me go back.” Often, she would take June and walk down the road to meet Lee coming home from Leslie Welding in the evening. Seeing them a long way off, he’d wave, and when they’d meet, he’d pick up June in one arm, and with his other arm around Marina, they’d happily walk back to their home together. Sometimes Lee took her to a delicatessen, where they found some of the kinds of food she had known in the Soviet Union, even caviar. Though he loved caviar himself, he could not really afford it, so he bought it only for Marina and lovingly watched her eat it. She often went to Montgomery Ward across the street to marvel at the profusion of products on display, even if she had no money to buy them—Lee rarely let her have as much as two dollars at a time. After the first couple of weeks, he stopped giving her any money at all.
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The beatings also resumed, sometimes to the point of leaving obvious bruises. When Marguerite, on a visit one day, saw that Marina, who was nursing Junie, kept her head down, she came around to Marina’s front and noticed she had “a black eye.” Marguerite called her son on it: “Lee, what do you mean by striking Marina?” He told her to mind her own business, and she did. As she told the Warren Commission, there were occasions when her son would come home from work and there would be no supper waiting for him, and “there may be times that a woman needs to have a black eye.”
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Marina hoped that Robert might intervene, and Robert did see her at least once when she had an obvious black eye, but he said nothing. The beatings became routine—as frequent as once or twice a week after Marguerite’s first visit. What followed was the by-now-familiar, dreary pattern of wife battering. Each time Lee physically abused Marina, he would offer an abject apology and assure her of his love, and Marina would eagerly seize on the assurance of his love, forgiving and no doubt to some extent accepting the blame for the incident herself. With the progressive loss of her self-esteem, she lost more and more of the will to resist. She began to collaborate in fabricating the excuses offered to others for increasingly serious injuries. Underlying it all was Lee’s need to control Marina, with alternating abuse and tantalizing offers of affection.
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His control of her world, however, would soon be threatened by a new group of friends, who not only noticed and deplored the beatings but also were able to speak to Marina in her native tongue. Near the end of August, Peter Gregory arranged a small dinner party at his residence to introduce Lee and Marina to a couple of friends from the tiny Russian-speaking community in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. In those days, before the advent of large-scale immigration from the Eastern Bloc countries, there weren’t many Russian-born people in the United States, and those who were tended to know and socialize with each other. They naturally were interested in new arrivals who could give them firsthand accounts of present-day conditions in their countries of origin.

Gregory had mentioned to his friend George Bouhe, a Dallas accountant, that Marina had lived and studied in Leningrad, where Bouhe had been born and raised when the city was still called St. Petersburg. Bouhe wanted to meet her, and so Gregory arranged a dinner. Bouhe brought along a friend from Belgorod, a Russian town on the Ukrainian border, Anna Meller, whose husband was unable to attend.
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Bouhe had become proficient enough in English early on, thanks to an English governess, to work as an office boy for Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Commission in Leningrad after the revolution. Denied permission to leave the Soviet Union, in September 1923 he waded across a river into Finland in the middle of the night and made his way to the United States. In his first years in Dallas he knew only three Russian people, but the early 1950s saw a small wave of immigration that brought in as many as fifty more. There were Estonians, Lithuanians, and Poles as well as Russians, but all spoke the Russian language. Bouhe took a very active interest in them, helping them to find jobs and directing them to English language classes in night school. He organized a congregation of the Greek Orthodox Church for anyone who wished to worship in the Russian or Slovenian languages. Now he was prepared to be very helpful to Marina and her husband.

He came to the Gregorys’ dinner with an album called
Plans for St. Petersburg
, which held maps of the city at every phase of its development from its creation in 1710 by Peter the Great to the present, and for a while he sat on the floor with Marina, asking her about the old places and buildings he had known as a boy. He found her engaging, well mannered, and well spoken, a testament to the education and culture of her grandmother. Lee he found less engaging, someone with a “diseased” mind. Nevertheless, he continued to play an important role in the Oswalds’ lives, as did Anna Meller.
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When the German forces retreated from Russia back to Germany in 1943, they forcibly took many Russians with them to work in the war effort. Anna Meller was among those taken by train, at the age of twenty-six, against her will, though she never cared for the repressive Russian regime anyway. She met her husband in Germany and emigrated with him to America in 1952, becoming a citizen in 1959. Meller had trained as a dentist in Russia, but the war started before she got her “main diploma,” so at the time she met Marina she had been working as a “draftsman” for ten years with the Dallas Power and Light Company. Like Bouhe, she liked Marina but not Lee. “The first impression of Lee Harvey is a man absolutely sick. I mean mentally sick…He’s against Soviet Union. He’s against United States. He made impression he did not know what he likes, really.” Like Bouhe, she felt that Lee spoke Russian well, “better,” Meller said, “than I would expect.” Meller would see the Oswalds several times in the next year. When she noticed the Marxist and Communist literature of Lee’s in their home, it made her “real upset,” and she also disapproved of Lee’s not wanting Marina “to speak English, not a single word,” claiming he wanted to learn better Russian and “she doesn’t need English.”
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The circle of Russian-speaking acquaintances of the Oswalds rapidly expanded. Before the end of August, Lee and Marina were invited to lunch at Anna Meller’s. Other guests were invited for cocktails afterward, and the young couple met Declan Ford, a consulting geologist in the Dallas area, and his Russian-born wife, Katya, who, like Anna Meller, was taken to Germany by the German army.
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Later, the Oswalds were introduced to Elena Hall, born in Teheran to Russian parents. She worked as a technician in a dental factory. In order to obtain dental aid for Marina, George Bouhe had brought the Oswalds to Miss Hall’s home in Fort Worth, offering to pay fifty, even seventy-five dollars if she could find a dentist for Marina. But this was not nearly enough money for what Marina needed.
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In early September, the Oswalds met Alexander Kleinlerer, a Polish survivor of Buchenwald who was fluent in several languages, including Russian. He was then courting Miss Hall, who was between marriages to the same husband.
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Gali Clark—the woman Oswald had telephoned based on information from the Texas Employment Commission that she spoke Russian, but did not meet—was eventually introduced to Marina by George Bouhe and Anna Meller, and Gali’s husband, Max, met the Oswalds later.
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The Oswalds also came to know George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum engineer born of nobility in czarist Russia who was such a fascinating character that Warren Commission assistant counsel Albert Jenner, incredibly, ate up fifty-eight pages in a Warren Commission volume just talking to de Mohrenschildt about his background and life before even getting into a discussion about Lee Harvey Oswald. “You are an interesting person,” Jenner at one point told de Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt had first heard of Lee and Marina from Bouhe, who told him of this “interesting couple,” the woman a pretty young girl from Russia, living in “dire poverty somewhere in the slums of Fort Worth.” In Fort Worth on business one day, he and an associate stopped by the Oswalds’ residence in the late afternoon and met Lee and Marina. The description de Mohrenschildt had been given had not been an exaggeration, recalling that the two were living in “horrible surroundings” in a “very poorly furnished, decrepit…little shack” on a dusty, unpaved road.
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De Mohrenschildt would come to play a major role in the lives of the Oswalds, and an even more consequential one in the fancies and fantasies of conspiracy theorists. He introduced the Oswalds to his fourth wife, Jeanne, who was born in northern China to Russian parents.
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By and large, to the small Dallas–Fort Worth Russian emigré community, Marina was the sensation, the genuine article, “a relic of their old and much loved homeland that had suddenly been dug out of the Russian earth.” Her physical and emotional fragility evoked the desire in them to help and nurture her. Lee was someone they could have very easily done without. Though he had recently come from Russia, he had little to say that they were interested in hearing—Marxism was a dated and worthless philosophy to them. Besides, they were older, more cultured, and more worldly than young Lee, and their social life was set aside for rich and interesting discourse, not confrontation, Lee’s raison d’etre.
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Oswald’s Russian-speaking acquaintances had any number of reasons to dislike him, neatly summed up by Alexander Kleinlerer as “his political philosophy, his criticism of the United States, his apparent lack of interest in anyone but himself and because of his treatment of Marina.”
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Katya Ford believed that all of them thought he was “mentally unstable.”
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But because they felt sorry for Marina and the child, they were willing to put up with Oswald’s boorish behavior to continue to help his wife.
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For his part, Lee felt the emigrés, with the exception of de Mohrenschildt, whom he liked, were a superficial lot who measured everything by money. But Marina wondered if he was just envious of what they had, a notion he angrily rejected when she suggested it.
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In the half-dozen weeks Oswald worked at Leslie Welding, he was intent on trying to pay off his two debts, one to his brother and the other the loan from the State Department, and the couple hadn’t a dime to spare. On a visit to the Oswalds’ home, one of the emigrés was “shocked to find that [June] had no baby crib or bed but was kept on the floor in the bedroom either in a suitcase or between two suitcases.”
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Many in the emigré group were generous with gifts of small amounts of money, groceries, clothing, and furniture. George Bouhe, Anna Meller, and Elena Hall were the primary contributors, but others also helped with transportation and groceries when they’d see the icebox was empty. Bouhe, in particular, adopted a fatherly attitude toward Marina and even prepared some simple English lessons that she could do at home and mail to him for correction. Several of these new friends visited Marina in Fort Worth all through September, and the Oswalds in turn visited some of them in Dallas.
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