AROUND THE MIDDLE of August, young Paul Gregory returned from his summer trip to San Francisco. Eager to improve his Russian, he started showing up twice a week in the late afternoons or evenings for Russian lessons with Marina. His visits quickly became a pleasure and a resource to both the Oswalds.
At twenty-one, Paul Gregory was a year and a half younger than Lee and a full-time college student.1 Lee may have envied him, for he was out on the evening Paul arrived for his first lesson and returned home brandishing a catalogue of night courses he said he hoped to attend at Texas Christian University. Other evenings, too, Lee used to come home late, laden with books from the public library. He said he wanted to go to college, to Texas Christian or Arlington State, and get a degree in history, philosophy, or economics. Both Lee and Paul had attended the same high school, Arlington Heights in Fort Worth. Lee implied that he had graduated, when, in fact, he had been there only a few weeks in the tenth grade. The barrier to a college education for him, Lee suggested, was the need to support his family. But both in the United States and in Russia, where Lee also had to work, he appears to have lacked motivation to study at night to obtain first a high school and then a college degree.
When Lee was out, Paul’s “lessons” consisted largely of Russian conversations with Marina, during which she told him all about how she met Lee and their courtship in Minsk. Paul got the impression that she had been a rebel and a nonconformist, and that this was one of the main reasons for her early interest in Lee. Marina also corrected Paul’s grammar in an essay he was writing on a play called Man with a Gun, by Nikolai Pogodin. She and Paul huddled together over the dining room table while Lee sat reading Lenin on the sofa. When all three of them spoke Russian together, Paul noticed that Lee’s Russian, while fluent, was “very ungrammatical” and that he spoke with “a very strong accent.” When Marina corrected his errors, “he would get peeved at her. He would wave his hand and say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ ” But according to Paul, he was able to “express any idea he wanted to in Russian.”
Inevitably, they talked about politics, and as far as Paul could tell, Lee thought the world’s troubles were caused not by “the people,” but by leaders. When it came to specific leaders, however, he did not seem to harbor grudges. He expressed no hostility toward any of them. He was enthusiastic about Castro, and, remarkably, continued to respect Paul in spite of their differences over Cuba. As for Khrushchev, Lee described him as “simply brilliant.” He was “rough” and “crude,” but “you cannot read a speech of his without liking the man.” He also liked John F. Kennedy. On their living room table, the Oswalds kept, more or less permanently, a copy of Life magazine with a cover photo of the president. Marina pointed at it once and said, “He looks like a nice young man.” Lee added that Kennedy was “a good leader.”
One evening as they were all leaving the house together, Paul got a glimpse of how Lee often treated Marina. She fell off the steps, and she and the baby sprawled on the ground. The baby began to cry, and Paul thought Marina had hurt her back. But Lee did not even notice her. He rushed over and picked up the baby, furious at Marina for allowing his baby to fall. Marina thought he was going to kill her. It was “a real hot moment,” Paul recalls, but husband and wife ran indoors, consulted a Russian book on baby care, and together applied a Band-Aid to Junie’s head.
In sum, Paul considered Lee “hot tempered, not very smart, and slightly mixed up.” He was “a small person” who was “always ready to flare up.” In his normal conversations with Marina, he “would always shout.” Paul thought that Lee had an “inability to grasp things.” And yet he could not say that he “disliked” Lee. “I enjoyed being with him,” although “I enjoyed Marina more. She was a very pleasant person, very pleasant to be with, interesting.”
On Friday nights Paul used to take them shopping in his car. They would go to Leonard’s department store, noted for its low prices, to buy groceries. Paul was amazed at how little the Oswalds bought. Lee always haggled over the meat, to be sure they got “the cheapest possible cut.” They were, in fact, getting by on very little. They did without milk because Marina was nursing the baby, and they had fashioned a crib by putting two chairs together between their bed and the wall. True, the baby once fell into the crack between the chairs, but Lee wanted to save money more than he wanted to buy a crib. Marina says that he treated his financial obligations to Robert and the Department of State, which he was not under pressure to repay quickly, as “a holy debt.” During the month of August, for example, when he netted about $200, Lee spent two-thirds on living expenses and nearly one-third in partial payment of his debts.
It never entered Marina’s head that her husband was penurious. From her excursions to Montgomery Ward, she knew that all kinds of things such as nice dresses, cribs, and playpens existed. But it did not occur to her to want them. And when Paul Gregory, shortly before leaving for college, handed her a check for $35, she was overwhelmed. She had never in all her life had so much money. She felt that she did not deserve it. She suspected that the Gregorys, father and son, simply wanted to help her and, rather than offend by giving her money, had devised the pretext of the lessons. Marina knew what she wanted to do with it. She went across the street to Montgomery Ward and bought a pair of shoes for herself ($3.98) and for Alka green work pants, two flannel shirts, and another pair of shoes ($11).
Marina was right, the Gregorys did want to help. Peter Gregory, Paul’s father, had been in the Oswalds’ apartment, and the sight of it evoked his sympathy. He found the living room “practically bare … and the rest of the house was the same way.”2 During his visit Gregory suggested that Marina start to study English. Lee would have none of it. He did not want Marina to learn English, he said, lest he lose his own fluency in Russian. To Gregory, Oswald’s answer signified that he cared nothing for his wife, only for himself. But Gregory was a fair man, and slow to judge.
Meanwhile, news of the Oswalds’ arrival had spread like a prairie fire among the twenty-five or thirty Russian émigré families in Dallas and Fort Worth. Into that landscape of freeways and flat red earth, of live oak trees and wide Texas sky had come, a decade earlier, fifty or sixty refugees from various parts of Eastern Europe. Some were Russians, a handful were Poles or Rumanians, the rest were from the fringes of the Soviet Union: Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians. Displaced or uprooted during World War II, every one of them had preferred anything, any fate at all, over a return to the countries or territories dominated by Communism. Eventually, after years of hardship and uncertainty, they had made their way to the United States. A few of the women had married American soldiers in West Germany; the rest came by other routes. But the point was that they had arrived, they were on American soil, and the Russians would never lay hands on them again.
Some of the men were lucky. They had geology or engineering in their backgrounds and were able to find jobs in what was then the major industry of the Dallas–Fort Worth area—oil. The others, many of them men and women of some education who would have had fine professional careers back home, had to settle for such jobs as they could find. But before they could even do this, they had a major obstacle to overcome. Most of them had arrived in the United States unable to speak a word of English.
It was at this point that George Bouhe stepped into the lives of many of the émigrés. Bouhe, who had grown up in St. Petersburg as a member of the educated middle class of czarist Russia, had been living in the United States since 1924, and in Dallas since 1939. A lively, inquiring man of fifty-eight, he had become the trusted personal accountant of one of the most powerful men in Dallas, Lewis W. MacNaughton, chairman of the board of the huge and immensely wealthy geological and engineering firm of DeGolyer and MacNaughton.
Bouhe knew very well that it was impossible to get by in America without speaking English. He had personally taken several of the émigrés “by the hand” and led them to Crozier Technical High School, where they learned the rudiments of the language. He had helped them in other ways, too, and over the years he had become the patriarch of the Russian émigré community.
In spite of the hardships that lay behind them, the émigrés had made a remarkable adjustment to Texas life and to what must, to them, have been a totally incongruous world of suburbs, supermarkets, and air-conditioned ranch houses. They were tearfully grateful to the United States, the country that gave them life when they had lost it. But in one sense, the political sense, the section of the country to which they had gravitated was not incongruous at all. It could hardly have been more congenial. For this was deep anti-Communist country, and the émigrés, with an exception or two, were virulent anti-Communists. For them it had not been a case of arriving in the Southwest, then adapting to its extreme political conservatism. They were conservatives when they came and would have remained so anywhere on earth. The political climate of Texas may actually have helped them adjust to American life. It was certainly a feature of the country that they liked.
It was an extraordinary community. Nearly all its members were generous, outgoing, and warm. Because they had suffered so much themselves, they could not see another person suffer without doing what they could to help. While they embraced wholeheartedly the American ethos of individualism and hard work, they had also kept the values they brought over from Eastern Europe: the spirit of community, of sharing, of the responsibility of each for all. And they were curious about the country they had left behind. When word got around of the Oswalds’ arrival, many of the émigrés were curious to meet them, especially Marina, a member of the younger Soviet generation, with whom none of them had had any contact.
The Gregorys decided to introduce the Oswalds to two members of the émigré community. Marina and Lee were invited to a dinner party on Saturday, August 25, at the Gregorys’ home in Fort Worth. There they met Anna Meller, forty-five years old, a large and dramatically handsome blonde from Belgorod, southern Russia, who had been living in the United States since 1952. She had driven over from her home in Dallas with the Gregorys’ other guest, George Bouhe.
Bouhe was a bachelor, or a grass widower, with time and sympathy to spare. But he was also cautious. He looked and listened before he leaped. He was eager to attend the dinner party and hear about conditions in his homeland, but he all but burned up the telephone wires between Dallas and Fort Worth before accepting the Gregorys’ invitation. Was it prudent to meet Oswald? Was there a danger that this defector, who had accomplished the supposedly impossible feat of leaving the Soviet Union and bringing a Russian wife with him, might turn out to be a Soviet spy?
The man to whom he directed these questions was Max Clark, the Fort Worth lawyer whose wife had had a brief and abrasive contact with Oswald shortly after he arrived in Texas. By virtue of the respect in which he was held in Fort Worth and his marriage to a member of the princely Shcherbatov family (the family that Leo Tolstoy rechristened “Shcherbatsky” and used as models of the Moscow nobility in Anna Karenina), Clark was like a highly placed in-law to all the Russians. He and his wife Gali stood at the very apex of the émigré community, maybe a touch above it, and were often called upon as arbiters of its frequent clashes of politics and personalities. Moreover, Clark, as a lawyer for General Dynamics, was thought to have dealings with the FBI. Did the FBI have anything against Oswald? That was what Bouhe wanted to know. If so, Bouhe, who was as anti-Soviet as was humanly possible, and a super-patriot for Texas besides, wanted nothing to do with him.
Clark spoke from common sense and experience only. He did not work for the FBI, nor had he talked with anyone in the FBI about Oswald. But he could see no risk in meeting the man. Doubtless, Oswald was under FBI surveillance and would not be back in this country if he were thought to present any danger. Thus assured, Bouhe accepted the Gregorys’ invitation.
From a social standpoint it was the Oswalds’ finest hour. No one who was there that evening has forgotten the picture they presented as they came in: Lee, immaculate in jacket, tie, and a white shirt with French cuffs, and Marina, his pretty, frail-looking wife, holding their baby daughter in her arms. Everyone was aware that Lee was a poor man, and they were impressed at his being so meticulously dressed. They were impressed, too, by his quiet manner and his grave, courteous air. They were prepared to respect him as a man who had taken the Soviet Union seriously enough to go and see it, yet was sensible enough to come back. And they were impressed by his affection for his baby, whom he held all evening on his lap.
But Marina was the real sensation. Not only did she appear a childlike, innocent waif, but her use of Russian—and Russians tend to judge other Russians by the way they speak the mother tongue—was very cultivated. Bouhe immediately surmised that Marina had been well brought up, that she had “received good care from some person of the Old Regime,” someone “religious, well-mannered and such.”3 His good impression was in no way diminished when Marina told him that she had indeed been taught to speak Russian by her grandmother, who had also taught her to be religious.
The Russians were surprised. They expected Marina, as a member of a generation that grew up long after they left the country, to be what they thought of as “Soviet”: sturdy and purposeful; literal, direct, and not very well educated; self-consciously “proletarian,” with scorn for good manners and good speech. In every one of their expectations they were confounded. Marina was tiny and thin. She chain-smoked and drank a little wine. She was well mannered, and above all, she spoke that pure Leningrad Russian, innocent of jargon or slang, that to them bespoke intelligence and education. She was like a fragile fossil, a relic of their old and much-loved homeland, that had suddenly been dug out of the Russian earth.
Marina was equally intrigued. To her, meeting these people was like seeing the characters in the plays of Chekhov and the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy come to life. If they were sizing her up, she was doing the same. “At first,” she said to herself of one of the women, “you’d think she was from a good background—but only at first. Peter Gregory does not speak a very pure Russian. He must have come ‘up’ from somewhere. Bouhe—he’s from the Old Intelligentsia.” In manner and speech Bouhe reminded Marina of her beloved aunt, Maria Yakovlevna, and she liked him right away. She liked him even better when he told her, in a way that probed and divined her thoughts, that he did not work for any intelligence service and she could therefore speak to him frankly.
Bouhe had brought with him a huge album with maps of St. Petersburg from 1710 to 1914. This he spread out on the floor and, inviting Marina to join him there, peppered her with questions about whether this or that old school, church, or outdoor market was still standing. Marina felt that she was being examined, and not only for her intelligence. She was from a district in which members of the working class and the new Soviet intelligentsia lived, whereas Bouhe was asking about the heart of Old St. Petersburg, where the aristocracy used to live, and where descendants of the Old Intelligentsia, of people like Bouhe himself, were still living. Marina thought he was an aristocrat, and because she was not she felt anxious and self-conscious. She wondered what these people would think of her when they found out where she really came from.
If it was a test, Marina passed it, for Bouhe liked her very much. He felt stirrings of protectiveness toward her, the beginnings of what was to become a father-daughter relationship.4 As for Lee, everyone tiptoed around the question in all their minds: Why, having defected to Russia, did he decide to come back? They guessed that his decision signified failure, if only the failure of having to admit that he had been wrong, then leaned over backward not to embarrass him. The venturesome Bouhe teetered up to it, indeed, by praising people with the courage and good sense to change their minds. At this he felt Lee bristle and draw away.
Politics was touchy for them all, for no one was certain whether or not Oswald had renounced his Communist proclivities. The émigrés asked many questions about living conditions, prices, wages; about the smaller freedoms and how life had changed in little ways. And in Lee’s answers they took soundings as to where he really stood. Some of those present considered him a trifle quick to protest the virtues of the USSR They sensed in him a trace of the nashi luchshe mentality, a special Soviet attitude that “ours is better,” that anything Soviet—a head of cabbage, a pair of shoes, life in general—is better than its counterpart anywhere else simply because it is Soviet. It was only a feeling, of course. But there was no doubt in the mind of anybody there that, of the two, Marina was far more critical of Russia. They agreed with her, and they liked her for it.
By the end of the evening, the verdict on her was favorable. As for him, they found him well mannered but cold. He was, in any case, much better than the émigrés expected of a man who had once been fool enough to defect to Soviet Russia.
Lee had his own feelings about the party. Marina sensed in him that grudging edge of ungraciousness that told her he was doing it for her, so she could meet her countrymen—it was not an evening he would go through for himself alone. In fact, a failure of sympathy between Lee and the émigrés appears to have had its origins that night. In Russia Lee had grown accustomed to being asked about conditions in America, and he expected to be asked similar questions here. But in his heart of hearts he was scornful of people who appeared to be interested mostly in money and material things. In his scheme of things, they were “bourgeois.” Besides, he wanted to talk about bigger things, about political differences between Russia and America, about Castro, Khrushchev, and de-Stalinization. But the émigrés had politely avoided such discussions.
In Minsk Lee had been able to condescend. He was no better educated than his listeners, but he had spent his life outside Russia, and they were eager to hear anything he had to say. Here it was the reverse. The émigrés were better educated, more widely traveled, and more experienced than he was. Apart from information about wages and prices, he did not have much to tell them—that they wanted to hear, anyway. They sized him up as a half-educated American boy, and they would have considered his Marxist views gauche—if he still held them. To them such opinions were painfully naïve. Besides, the émigrés were encrusted with good manners. Evenings such as this were a time for polite feeling out, not open confrontation. They wanted no offense to anyone’s feelings—his or hers.
The evening was a turning point for Lee and Marina. It might be supposed that Lee would have a rough go in Texas. There he was, a former defector to Russia, in an anti-Communist corner of the United States, encumbered by a Soviet wife and an undesirable discharge from the US Marines. Surely he would meet hostility everywhere, have trouble finding work, and suffer one rejection after another until he became hopeless and embittered. The reality was altogether different. Because of his meeting with the Russians, especially George Bouhe, Lee’s homecoming was warmer and more welcoming than anyone might have supposed. The Russians were to be extraordinarily kind to him. They would surround him and his wife with concern. They would place at his service a flourishing grapevine and see to it that he found a job he liked. They helped Lee as much, and as long, as he would allow—and as they could stand.
In Russia Lee Oswald had been a guest, the Russian people his hosts, and he was given the full measure of that country’s magnificent hospitality. Incredibly, the same thing was now to happen again—and in his own corner of his native Texas. For no other reason than the breadth and generosity of the Russian soul, Oswald was once again to be treated, in his own country, as if he were the guest and this handful of émigrés, some of them hardly any better off than he, the hosts. Far from encountering hostility and rejection because of his past, he was accepted more readily than if he had never been to Russia at all.
The evening was a turning point for the Oswalds in another way as well. Their marriage had been undergoing a sea change from the moment they stepped aboard the Maasdam. The encounter with the émigrés helped crystallize that change, and the relationship between Lee and Marina was never to be the same again.