Lee’s arrival in Fort Worth did not go unnoticed. He had several calls from newspapermen, with whom he declined to talk. And he had a call from the FBI, which he could not so easily put off. He agreed to an interview at 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday, June 26, at the FBI office in downtown Fort Worth.
Lee arrived ten minutes early, but Special Agent John W. Fain and his assistant, B. Tom Carter, sat him down and started pelting him with questions.1 From the outset they found him “tense, kind of drawn up, and rigid. A wiry little fellow, kind of waspy.” The question to which they returned again and again was why Oswald had gone to Russia. Finally, in what they took to be a “show of temper,” Lee said that he did not “care to relive the past.” He would say only what he had told the Russians when they asked him the same question: “I came because I wanted to.”
The agents’ real purpose that day was to try to find out whether Oswald had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence, possibly as the price for bringing out Marina. Again and again Lee denied it, stressing how hard it had been to get Marina out, how long it had taken, and how much paperwork it had required. He sketched Marina’s life for them but refused to give names and addresses of any of her relatives, lest it get them in trouble.
The interview lasted about two hours, and in the course of it, Lee repeated familiar untruths, among them that he never sought Soviet citizenship and never offered radar information to the Russians. He stated that because his wife held a Soviet passport, he would be getting in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Washington within a few days to give them her address. But he said that he held “no brief for the Russians or the Russian system” and promised to get in touch with the FBI if Soviet Intelligence made any effort to contact him.
When he filed his report a week or so later, Agent Fain described Oswald as “impatient and arrogant during most of the interview.” He felt that Oswald had been “evasive” and recommended that he be interviewed again. Later, looking back at a distance of two years, it occurred to Fain that behind the “arrogance” and the “coldness,” Oswald might have been “just scared.”
That night, Robert asked Lee how the FBI men had treated him. “Just fine,” Lee answered. He then told Robert the most staggering untruth he had perpetrated in quite a while. The FBI, he said, wanted to know whether he was an agent of the United States government. “Don’t you know?” Lee said he had asked them. And he laughed as he told Robert how he had turned the tables on the FBI.2
As for Marina, he told her nothing at all, not even that the interview had taken place. She thought he was putting all his energies into job hunting and asked every night how it was going. But after a few days she stopped, for she could see that he was getting nowhere. Marina was not surprised. She had heard all her life that unemployment was a problem of crisis dimensions in the United States, and Lee did nothing to disabuse her of the idea. He stressed it, in fact, since it gave him a built-in excuse. Marina did not hound him; she accepted his explanations and gave him her sympathy and support.
But Lee had liabilities in the job market. He had no high school diploma. He had an undesirable discharge. And he had spent three years in the Soviet Union, a fact he probably did not confide to would-be employers, which left him with an abbreviated job history. The skills he had—radar training, the ability to speak Russian—were not in demand in Fort Worth. He did not want blue-collar work of the kind he had had in Minsk, yet he lacked the education for the white-collar work he would accept, to say nothing of the intellectual work he really wanted. Nor is it clear how hard he was looking for a job. Vada noticed that he spent a good deal of time at home, working for “hours at a stretch going over his notes and adding to them.”3
Lee and Marina had been living with Robert and Vada for four or five weeks when Marguerite Oswald once again appeared on the scene. She gave up her job in Crowell and took an apartment in Fort Worth so that she, her Prodigal Son, and her Russian daughter-in-law could be united under one roof. According to Robert, Lee was “not overjoyed.” He told his mother that he would soon be working, and he and Marina would then want to live on their own.4 But Marguerite got her way, not so much by arguing the point as by acting as if it were already settled. So it was that Marina, Lee, and the baby moved to the Rotary Apartments at 1501 West Seventh Street in Fort Worth and settled in a two-room apartment Marguerite had found for them. Lee did not leave a forwarding address at the post office. It was a sign that he did not expect the new arrangement to last.
Marguerite paid the rent. She slept in the living room, while Lee, Marina, and the baby had the bedroom to themselves. Marina found her mother-in-law a superb housekeeper, meticulously neat, and one who used up every scrap of food. Moreover, it was she and she alone who held the key to Lee’s appetite. With everyone else, his wife included, he was a finicky eater. But he demolished everything Marguerite cooked for him. Had the way to Lee’s heart lain through his stomach, relations between mother and son would have been peaceful indeed.
Marguerite had a car, and the first few mornings she drove Lee around, tracking down leads he got from newspaper ads and the state employment commission. Marguerite would later claim that her son “met obstacles all the way.”5 But on July 17, only a few days after moving in with his mother, Lee started work as a sheet metal helper for the Leslie Welding Company, manufacturers of louvers and ventilators in Fort Worth. He stated falsely on his application that he had had sheet metal experience in the Marine Corps. Lee did well in the job. The manager of the Louv-R-Pak Division of the company for which Lee worked later recalled that he was “one of the best employees” he ever had.6 Lee’s foreman, however, remembers him as a laconic fellow: “He didn’t talk to nobody about nothing, so nobody ever messed with him.” But he came to work on time and might have become “a pretty good sheet metal man” if he’d stayed in it.7
Lee loathed the job, which, like his work in Russia, was heavy manual labor. But he earned $1.25 an hour, worked up to nine hours a day, and took home $45 to $55 a week. He told Marina again and again that he must pay off his debts to Robert and the Department of State as quickly as he could. Living rent-free with his mother helped, a major reason he did it, and he started paying back Robert right away.
With Lee gone all day, Marina stayed at home with Marguerite. Although they could hardly speak to one another, the two got along well at first. Marina was overjoyed to have a home and someone she could look to as a mother. She noted with appreciation that Marguerite was good to the baby, although not as lavishly fond of her as her Russian relatives had been. Above all, Marina was pleased by the sudden lift in her husband’s spirits. Since finding work, he was no longer so irritable and depressed. Marina almost forgot his behavior on the boat and his hitting her at Robert’s.
Marina washed dishes and tended the baby. But she was unfamiliar with the ways of an American household and was not on easy terms with domesticity anyhow. The lion’s share of chores fell on Marguerite, who did all the cooking and the cleaning and claims to have helped with the baby.8 She got out of the apartment only rarely, to see a movie or a friend, and seems to have felt stirrings of resentment. Of these Marina was at first blissfully unaware. But when Marguerite discovered that her daughter-in-law recognized Gregory Peck on television and could sing a few words of “Santa Lucia,” she began to suspect that Marina, and even Lee, might be a spy. Lee made no effort to include his mother in his conversations with Marina. He huddled over books with her and sat with her at the dining room table by the hour, playing a sort of Russian tic-tac-toe. In the late afternoon or early evening, husband and wife went out walking, leaving Marguerite at home as babysitter. Before long, Marguerite complained.
To Marina’s surprise Lee paid little attention to her complaints. He was cool to his mother and had very few words for her. Marina began to fear that Marguerite might blame her for alienating Lee’s affections. And she was right. After a fortnight or so, Marguerite started scolding her daughter-in-law when they were at home alone. Marina could not understand her words. She thought Marguerite resented having to cook for her, or that somehow she had displeased her mother-in-law. But one day there was a scene with much weeping and screaming and slamming of doors, and Marina was afraid her mother-in-law was going to hit her. This time she caught the words, and she repeated them that evening to Lee—“You took my son away from me!” Mother and son had it out the same night, once again with screaming and slamming of doors. Afterward Lee told Marina to forget it; they would be leaving soon, anyhow.
Marina knew nothing of the relationship between Lee and his mother. She did not know that Marguerite had also fought with her other two sons over their wives. She knew only that Marguerite had three sons, and not one of them wanted to live with her. To Marina Marguerite’s jealousy was natural; it was Lee whose feelings seemed unnatural. Furthermore, she still regretted the way she had treated her own mother, and she did not want Lee to behave as she had done. Toward Marguerite she continued to show deference and a readiness for affection. She felt sorry for her and urged Lee to show more warmth toward his mother. “How will you feel,” she asked, “if Junie won’t speak to you when she grows up?”
“Don’t meddle,” he growled. “You know nothing about it.”
On Saturday, August 10, less than a month after they had moved in with Marguerite, Marina and Lee moved out. Lee had found an apartment. Accustomed as he was to the family ways, Robert was astonished to hear loud sounds of discord when he drove up that morning to help them move. Marguerite was screaming, her hair mussed and her eyes red from crying. Lee was calm, but Marina looked bewildered.9 There was very little luggage, a few boxes, and a couple of old suitcases, and Lee and Robert quickly carried them to the car. They confronted their mother’s outcries with silence, creating a vacuum into which she poured even louder protestations. When the young people clambered into the car and drove off, Marguerite ran a short way after them.
Pity suddenly broke through the numbness Marina felt. “It’s cruel to leave her that way. She’ll have a heart attack and die.”
Lee was as cool as could be. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “It’s not the first time.”
And that was the beginning of their life on their own in Texas.
The apartment Lee had found was a furnished “duplex,” one-half of a shabby, single-story clapboard bungalow. It was located among other one- and two-family frame houses at 2703 Mercedes Street, Fort Worth, across the street from a Montgomery Ward retail store and down a dusty road from Lee’s job. He had paid a month’s rent in advance of $59.50.
Friends who visited the place later described it as “horrible,” a “slum,” “a shack,” “very poorly furnished,” and “decrepit.” But Marina did not feel that way. There was a bedroom, a living room with a dining area, a kitchen, and a bath, plus a yard and some grass outside. In Russia they could have worked a lifetime and not had so much space. The furniture was cheap, but the place was clean, and that meant a lot to Marina. As content as she had been to live with her mother-in-law, Marina was happier still to be alone with her husband.
They slipped into a new routine. Lee went to work in the morning, and in the afternoon, Marina might leave their supper simmering on the stove, take the baby in her arms, and walk down the road to meet him on his way home. He would spot them a long way off and wave. When he caught up with them, he would take June in one arm, and put his other arm around Marina, and they would slowly saunter home. Other afternoons she might sit on the front steps and wait for him there. The moment he caught sight of her, he would wave and break into a run.
Sometimes, Lee found her inside the house, fixing supper. “Why didn’t you meet me today?” he would ask. Then with a glint of amusement: “I know. You were in Montgomery Ward.”
Marina had, indeed, found a fount of riches, a cornucopia of daydreams, across the street. With June in her arms, she spent hours wandering through Montgomery Ward, a fairyland of treasures that could not be bought in all of Russia no matter how much money you had. Ties, trousers, notions, dresses—Marina did not want to buy them. It made her happy just to look. When they went to the store together, she would visit the toy and dress departments while Lee, with the most obvious enjoyment, made his way to the gun department. For the first week or so, he gave Marina $2 a week spending money, but except for cigarettes she never spent it. Then he stopped giving her any money at all. “I never cared about money,” she remembers. “I don’t know why.”
Marina believed that the best political system was the one that does most for the people. That was the sum total of her political theories. As she saw it, you went into a store in Russia, and there was nothing to buy; you went into a store in America, and there was a lot. It followed that the United States cared more about its people and was a better country. Marina liked America, preferred it, right away. At night she would occasionally dream that she was at home again, telling her Russian friends what a paradise America is. “Alka, do anything,” she started saying to her husband, “but don’t ever, ever make me go back.”
She loved grocery shopping. Lee would steer her to a delicatessen and say: “Look, Mama. No need to be homesick. You can get the same things as in Russia.” He bought her the foods she liked especially—sour cream, sauerkraut, pickles, kidneys, herring. “Mama, would you like some caviar?” He would lift a jar of the red variety off the shelf. And for all it cost him, he stuffed it in the shopping basket and took out something he had chosen for himself. When they got home, he sat at the dining table and looked on with a rapturous air while Marina ate the caviar. It was one of the few Russian foods he liked. But he refused to touch it, not even when she tried to feed him with a spoon; he did not want to deprive her.
A few days after their move, a ripple crossed the surface of their tranquillity—a visit from the FBI. It was a hot night, Thursday, August 16, and Marina was about to serve dinner. The front door was open, the screen door on the latch. Lee was sitting on the sofa, reading the Worker in English. She was setting the table. All of a sudden they heard a knock at the screen door. Lee got up, glanced at the door, then quickly stuffed his newspaper under the sofa cushion. He opened the screen door and invited the caller to come in. A man entered, showed his documents to Lee, and, apologizing to Marina for delaying supper, asked him to come out to a waiting car.10
Marina peered out and saw Lee in a car with two men. He was gone a long time, at least an hour, and she had to heat up their dinner, she says, “ten times.” She was furious by the time he came back. Who were those men, anyway?
Lee was gloomy and dispirited. “They were the FBI.”
“And who are they?”
“They’re the security organs. In Russia it’s the KGB. Here it’s the FBI.”
Marina was angry about dinner, angrier still to hear the dread initials KGB.
“They asked about Russia,” Lee said. “They wanted to know if Soviet agents had been here and asked me to work for them. I said no. They said, if anybody comes, please let the FBI know. I told them: ‘I will not be an informer for you. Go ahead and do it if that’s your job, but don’t ask me to do it for you.’ ”
He ate very little and talked very little, and his eyes had a troubled look. “Now it’s begun,” he said. “Because I’ve been over there, they’ll never let me live in peace. They think anyone who’s been there is a Russian spy. Let them think it. It’ll just give them more work.” He was upset, and the bad mood lingered for several days. He did not tell Marina that he had seen the FBI once before, at the downtown office in Fort Worth.
Agent John W. Fain reported on this second interview with Oswald in detail.11 He told Oswald that he had not gone to see him at work because he did not wish to embarrass him with his employer; and he chose to interview him in the car, not the house, because he did not want to upset Marina. Oswald pounced on this remark, stored it up, and later on used it again and again.
Fain was impressed by the change in Oswald, who showed no reluctance to see him and even invited him into the house. “He had gotten a job, and he wasn’t as tense.” Fain thought he talked “more freely” and not so evasively as during their previous interview. But he still refused to answer, to their satisfaction, the question of why he went to the USSR. It was “nobody’s business,” he said. “It was something that I did. I went, and I came back.”
Oswald repeated most of his old lies and added a new one: that he had moved to Mercedes Street in mid-July, and not just the week before. This time he confided his fears of prosecution on returning to the United States and admitted that he had been interviewed by officials of the MVD, the Soviet interior ministry, twice: on his arrival in the USSR and again before his departure. But noting that he was not employed in a sensitive industry and that the company he was working for had no government contracts, Oswald played down any importance he might have to the Russians. Contrary to what he told Marina afterward, he did, in fact, promise for the second time to inform the FBI should there be any undercover Soviet effort to contact him.
The interview, plus a report that he received from two confidential informants the next day to the effect that neither Lee nor Marina Oswald had anything to do with Communist Party activities in Fort Worth, led Fain to recommend that the FBI close its case on Lee Harvey Oswald.12 This the FBI did—not long after the moment when Oswald, speaking of FBI persecution, made the gloomy prediction: “Now it’s begun.”
Oswald made one pregnant remark during the interview. He said that “he might have to return to the Soviet Union in about five years to take his wife back home to see her relatives.”13 And in a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, written within a day or two of his meeting with the FBI, Oswald tossed out another hint. He asked the embassy to send “periodicals or bulletins which you may put out for the benefit of your citizens living for a time in the U.S.A.”14
Oswald said nothing to Marina about any plan to return to the Soviet Union, and it is not clear why, less than a week after moving into his first home in the United States, he suggested twice in as many days that Marina and their child, or all three of them together, might go back to Russia. It is clear, however, that his return to the United States had had a contingent character in his mind from the outset and that already he was contemplating a way out. Up to now he had always had help in caring for his family, help from the Soviet government and Marina’s relatives, help from Robert and his mother. Now he was on his own. He profoundly wanted to be, but perhaps the responsibility made him anxious. Possibly he anticipated trouble of some kind. The probable truth, that the Soviet government would never allow him, a malcontent and an ex-defector, inside its borders again, does not seem to have entered his head.
Marina’s pleas to him—“Do anything, Alka, but don’t ever make me go back”—suggest that perhaps she guessed what was in his mind. And her unconscious awareness and anxiety must have made the adjustment to her new life much harder. Thus, in involuntary ways, Oswald was ruffling the surface of his married life and rendering his existence more turbulent. The conflicts that had sent him to Russia in the first place had been resolved neither by his defection nor by his decision to come home. Emotionally, he was in the same place he had always been.
The chief source of those conflicts, his mother, soon reappeared, wholly unchastened, on the steps of his house on Mercedes Street. No one quite knew how she got there, since both Lee and Robert had been at pains to conceal the address.
Marina remembers her visit with merriment. About three days after their move, she heard a knock at the door. She looked out, and there, to her astonishment, stood “Mamochka,” looking just as blithe and unconcerned as if the hysterical scene of parting had never occurred. Marguerite brought a high chair for the baby and silverware, dishes, and utensils for Marina and Lee. Marina welcomed her in, Marguerite played with the baby, then left.
Lee was upset when he came home that night and heard that his mother had been there. He instructed Marina not to let her in next time. Marina objected. “She’s your mother, Alka. How can I not let her in?”
“You know nothing about her,” he said. “You’re not to let her in again.”
The next day Marguerite came again, with a live green and yellow parakeet inside a cage. Lee had given the cage and the very same parakeet to his mother nearly seven years before, in November 1955, when he was sixteen years old, with money earned from his first real job as office boy at Tujague’s shipping company in New Orleans. Again, Marina welcomed her mother-in-law. She was sorry for her, sorry she had to live alone, and she still thought Alka was to blame.
Marguerite had a camera with her, and she was snapping a picture of the baby when Lee walked in. He started to scold her immediately. Marina thinks he told Marguerite not to come again, but she stood her ground and said she had a right to see her grandchild.
Marguerite would recall a different version of the argument. She said that Lee merely told her not to bring presents any more. She realized, she said, that he was “perfectly right. I should save my money and take care of myself.”15
The moment Marguerite was gone, Lee turned on his wife. “Why didn’t you obey? I told you not to open the door.”
“But she’s your mother,” Marina said. “I’ve no right to shut the door in her face.”
“You know nothing about it. She brings these things and is nice to you now. Next, she’ll move in. You’ll never be able to get rid of her. You’ll be sorry then.”
“You ought to be ashamed. You’ve no right to behave as if your mama didn’t exist.”
Lee was shouting now. “I have a right to tell you what to do! I told you not to open the door!”
“I will not obey.”
“You will not open the door!”
“I will, too.”
He hit her four or five times across the face.
One day, about a month later, Marina came home to find the parakeet gone. Lee had taken it outdoors and let it fly out of the cage.
Despite her son’s hostility, Marguerite came to the apartment fairly often. On one visit she found Marina in the bedroom, nursing the baby with her head down. Eventually, she looked up, and Marguerite saw that she had a black eye.
“Mama—Lee,” was all Marina was able to say.
Marguerite strode out to the living room, where her son lay reading. “Lee, what do you mean by striking Marina?”
“Mother, that is our affair,” he answered.
Marguerite, on balance, agreed. “There may be times,” she remarked later, “that a woman needs a black eye.”16 Just as Lee had hit her when he was growing up, now he was hitting his wife. And Marguerite Oswald, as she had done then, condoned it.
In fact, from the moment of Marguerite’s first visit to Mercedes Street, the beatings had become routine—once or twice a week. Typically, after Lee had beaten her, Marina would say: “Alka, I am not your maid. I am good enough not to have you hit me.” He, after an hour or two, would repent and beg Marina to forgive him. And the next day he would buy her caviar or a trinket for the baby.
At the smallest sign that he valued her and the baby, Marina forgave him. She forgave and forgot, until the next time. Their sexual relationship also began to deteriorate. Worn out by heavy physical work in hot weather, Lee did not want sex more than once a week or so, and Marina, dispirited at the turn things were taking, did not want sex much, either.
Still, there were happy moments. Marina was grateful for the good times, fatalistic about the bad. Her stepfather, after all, had beaten her, and he had done it exactly as Lee did, with the flat of his hand, across her face. He, too, had had an icy, inhuman anger in his eyes. But he had hit her once, then stopped; Lee hit her again and again. Marina decided that it was God’s judgment on her for having been cruel to her mother.
The beatings were a humiliation. They devalued Marina in her own eyes, and she feared that they would devalue her in the eyes of anyone who knew of them. Thus she tried to make light of them. She told herself, and later told others as well, that she had a fair skin that bruised easily and exaggerated the effect of every blow. If they suggested that she had brought the beatings on herself by talking too sharply to Lee when he was under strain, she agreed. In a way, Marina believed that she deserved to be beaten.
She took the very Russian view that beatings are a private affair between man and wife, as private as sex. Still, she hoped that Robert might intervene, just as members of Russian families often did. But in this Robert disappointed her. He had dropped by to see them one day, and Marina, who had a black eye, lingered unobtrusively in the kitchen. But she thinks Robert saw her black eye. If he did, he chose to do, and say, nothing. Robert had suffered from Lee’s anger in the past, and whether he was loath to invoke his brother’s wrath again or was simply the nonintervening sort, he stayed out of Lee’s marital affairs. Any thoughts he may have had about his brother’s harshness to Marina, Robert kept to himself.
But by this time Marina was no longer bereft. All her life she had been charming people, attracting them to her, and making them want to look out for her. Her charm had given her nine lives already: it was about to give her a tenth.