Reclaiming History (165 page)

J
ust five days later, Ruth Paine sat down to write Marina a letter, which she had been mulling over ever since the night of the dinner party. She knew that Marina was expecting another child and that Lee was insisting that she return to the Soviet Union. Even worse, Lee would not divorce her, leaving her abandoned in the Soviet Union but not free. Ruth also knew that Marina was very much opposed to leaving the United States, and she was angry that Lee would so cavalierly shrug off his responsibilities to his wife and children. She had talked the matter over with Michael and decided she had to intervene somehow, but she was afraid her Russian was not up to such a serious discussion. She wanted to offer Marina the chance to come live with her in Irving, and she wrote the letter as a way to gather her thoughts and hoped she was expressing them in passable, although halting Russian.
¹¹²³

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 and letters, I would be very happy. It is so helpful for me that I would consider it proper to buy all which we need from the grocery store: food, soap, etc. Lee would have 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 rather quiet here, but not so quiet as at your place. You and June would be by yourselves in the room which fronts on 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 [on Lee’s] workdays and return home on 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 high chair for June, etc.

Please think about this invitation and tell me (now or later) what you think. If you are interested in coming here earlier than September or October (about which we have already spoken), I want to write an official letter to you and Lee, and I want him to know all that 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.

She signed the letter “Your Ruth” and then added a postscript: “Do you have the book by Petrov: Self-Teacher in English Language? My neighbor has promised us a bassinette after the birth of the baby.”
¹¹²⁴

It had not been an easy letter to write. It was not an easy letter to send either. In fact, Ruth never mailed it. For the time being she kept it in her purse, thinking she might give it to Marina personally, but she never did. Eventually, she turned it over to the Warren Commission, with the notation “Not sent” on it.
¹¹²⁵

A
ccording to Marina, Lee cleaned his rifle on four or five occasions during the short period between the time he received the rifle in the mail and the attempt on General Walker’s life on April 10.
¹¹²⁶
It is not known precisely where or when Oswald practiced shooting the new gun, only that he did it. Marina said she thought Lee had practiced with his rifle “once or twice” before the Walker shooting.
¹¹²⁷
And she told the FBI that Lee, before the shooting, had told her he had been practicing, the implication being that it was more than once.
¹¹²⁸
The Warren Commission never even hazarded a guess as to when and where he might have done so.
¹¹²⁹
So we are left with only one occasion we can rely on since Marina vividly recalls it. And again, we don’t know the date except Marina says it was “shortly before” the attempt on Walker’s life, which would put it sometime in early April.
¹¹³⁰
Marina recalls that Lee had arrived home from work just as she was taking the baby out for a ride in her stroller. He told her to go ahead and he would catch up to her so they could all walk together. When he caught up though, he was carrying the carbine underneath his green Marine Corps raincoat. He told her he was going to practice with the rifle, which upset her because he had led her to believe that he would accompany them on their walk.

“Instead of coming with us,” she complained, “you just go someplace to shoot.”

“It’s none of your business,” he snapped. “I’m going anyway.” The bus was coming, and he ran to catch it.

“Don’t bother to come home at all,” she shouted. “I won’t be waiting for you. I hope the police catch you there.”
¹¹³¹

No one knows exactly where Oswald went, but Trinity River is the most likely place. The river cuts through Dallas from the northwest to the southeast and is bounded by high levees on both sides. Certain stretches of the levees were popular with gun owners for shooting practice, using them as safe backstops for their bullets. The bus that Marina saw Lee get on had a Love Field sign on its front, and at one point she told the Warren Commission that Lee told her when he returned that evening that he had practiced at Love Field,
¹¹³²
but at another point in her testimony she was less sure about Love Field.
¹¹³³
The FBI checked the whole area out and found that part of the route of the Love Field bus lay along the Trinity River, and Oswald could have gotten off the bus at West Commerce and Beckley and easily gotten down into the sandy riverbed—if there was any water there it would have been restricted to a narrow channel down the middle of the bed. But the FBI could find no area at Love Field itself or immediately adjacent thereto that would have been suitable for rifle practice.
¹¹³⁴

Lee checked out of work between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. during the first week of April, his last week of work, and sundown was around 6:45 p.m., so he didn’t have too much time to take the bus home, get his rifle, and take the bus to his practice site.
¹¹³⁵
But he didn’t have to do much. To “sight in” a rifle all one has to do is fire several rounds to determine how far off the target the bullets are hitting and then adjust the iron or telescopic sight to accommodate for “windage”—horizontal error—and “elevation”—vertical error. Marines were expected to sight in their rifles with just three shots. Oswald also needed some time and a few shots to get a feel for the carbine’s bolt action and trigger pull and to get used to the telescopic sight, since there’s no evidence he had any experience with that. One of the Marine Corps’ top marksmen, Master Sergeant James A. Zahm, told the Warren Commission that an ex-marine like Oswald could easily have done all he needed to do with just ten shots.
¹¹³⁶

During the last days of March and that first week of April, Marina knew something troubling was on Lee’s mind because he talked in his sleep a lot during that time. She had no idea what he said, since he spoke in English, but he seemed so distressed that she felt she had to wake him, sometimes as often as twice a night.
¹¹³⁷

On Saturday, April 6, Lee’s last day on the job at Jaggers, he worked until 5:30, a full day. The only one there who was sorry to see him go was Dennis Ofstein, who had made a special effort to befriend Lee. He didn’t know Oswald had been fired until that last day. Oswald was calm enough about it, though rueful. He had liked the work. Ofstein tried to be helpful, named some of the other firms around Dallas that did similar work and suggested that Oswald try to find jobs there. Lee laughed and said if he couldn’t find work in Dallas, he could always go back to Russia. Ofstein hoped they might continue to see each other, perhaps socially with their wives, and he got the number of Oswald’s post office box. About a week later he wrote to propose that they all get together, on a Saturday evening, but he never got a reply and never saw Oswald again.
¹¹³⁸

The next day, Sunday, April 7, Oswald left his Neely apartment with his rifle.
¹¹³⁹
No one knows what he did on that day, but what he eventually told Marina is probably true: he told her he went out to Turtle Creek and secreted the rifle in the isolated, wooded area by the railroad tracks he had photographed a month earlier, a spot about a half mile from General Walker’s house.
¹¹⁴⁰
It is equally probable that he spent the rest of the time watching Walker’s house and exploring the neighborhood for useful escape routes.

On Monday morning, Lee’s first day out of work, he dressed as if for work, left at the usual time, and stayed away all day. He visited the Texas Employment Commission, which had referred him to Jaggers, but this time there were no leads for him.
¹¹⁴¹
He came home for supper around six and went out again afterwards—Marina assumed he went to the typing class, not knowing he been dropped from the class because of his poor performance. He came home too early if that was where he really was, but she didn’t bother to ask him about it. Nothing else is known about his activities that day, and again it is likely he visited the scene of the crime. If so, he might have seen the hitherto empty Walker residence come back to life, since General Walker returned from Operation Midnight Ride that night, April 8.
¹¹⁴²

On Tuesday, Lee didn’t even pretend to go to work. He told Marina it was a holiday and that he was just going to collect his paycheck, but once again he was gone for the whole day. After supper he walked down the street to buy a newspaper and a Dr. Pepper, then sat out on his porch to drink it. He asked Marina to come out and sit with him, chatted amiably with her about news from their friends in the Soviet Union, and insisted she finish his Dr. Pepper. Marina was struck by his friendly demeanor, not that it was anything special in and of itself, but it was so different from his constant, grinding irritability of the past two months.

The morning of Wednesday, April 10, 1963, Lee seemed pensive and sad. He finally told Marina he had been let go at his job. “I don’t know why,” he told her tearfully. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?”

When he went out later,
*
he dressed in his gray suit and Marina assumed he would be looking for work.
¹¹⁴³

Lee did not come home for supper. At seven Marina cooked something for herself, and then spent an hour or so putting June to bed. By nine o’clock, she began to worry, even though in the past two months she had become used to his unexplained absences. She was aware that Lee was not a social butterfly nor, because he seldom drank, likely to be spending his evenings in a bar somewhere. Then, too, he had been so tense in the past weeks, plagued by bad dreams, restlessness, and a shorter temper than usual. And he was preoccupied. She knew that the loss of his job had been a blow, one that could set a match to the powder keg. Worried, unable to relax, she prowled the apartment.

It was around ten o’clock when she opened the door to Lee’s tiny study. Lying on his desk was a letter handwritten by Lee to her in Russian, with a key on top of it. It read (translated into English without Oswald’s dyslexia):

1. Here is the key to the post office box which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.
   
2. Send information about what has happened to me to the Embassy [the Soviet Embassy in Washington] and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.
   
3. I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.
   
4. I have also paid for the water and gas.
   
5. There may be some money from work. They will send it to our post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.
   
6. You can either throw out my clothing or give it away.
   Do not keep it
   . As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers from the factory), I prefer that you keep them.
   
7. Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.
   
8. My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.
   
9. We have
   friends
   here and the
   Red Cross
   will also help you.
   
10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live on $10 a week.
    
11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town. (the very beginning of town, after the bridge.)
    ¹¹⁴⁴
    

It was eleven-thirty when Lee finally returned home. Marina immediately showed him the note and asked, “What is the meaning of this?”

He was in something of a panic, sweating, out of breath. “I shot Walker,” he gasped.

“Did you kill him?” Marina asked.

“I don’t know.”

“My God. The police will be here any minute,” Marina exclaimed. “What did you do with the rifle?”

“Buried it.”

Marina was appalled, very frightened, and started to tremble, sure that the police would turn up to lay hands on her husband at any moment. Lee turned on the radio to see if the killing was reported in the late news. It wasn’t. He finally undressed and threw himself down on the bed, where he fell asleep immediately. He slept the whole night through.