After the dinner party at the Gregorys’, George Bouhe and Anna Meller drove to Fort Worth nearly every weekend to see the Oswalds. They noticed immediately that the refrigerator was bare, that Marina and the baby looked ill-fed and ill-clothed, and that the baby was sleeping in a bureau drawer. They appealed to all their friends for hand-me-downs and gave them to the Oswalds. They noticed, too, that Marina’s front teeth were rotting, and they drove all the Oswalds to see Mrs. Elena (“Lyolya”) Hall, a Russian émigré who lived in Fort Worth and worked as a dental technician. Mrs. Hall told them where they could obtain low-cost dental care, and she also started soliciting her friends and her employer’s wife for money and clothes for the Oswalds. One day, during her lunch hour, she took Marina shopping and bought her a couple of dresses. Bouhe and Mrs. Meller, meanwhile, decided that Marina needed training as an American housewife, and they took her to a supermarket to show her the way around.
On Sunday, September 9, using $5 given them by George Bouhe, the three Oswalds took a bus to Dallas. Bouhe met them and drove them to the apartment of Anna Meller and her husband, Teofil, where they had lunch and spent the afternoon. They were joined by Declan and Katya Ford, an American geologist and his Russian wife, and by their baby, Gregory. The Oswalds had brought photographs of themselves and their friends in Minsk, and there was talk about how people lived there.
Lee liked Katya Ford, a dark-complexioned, down-to-earth woman in her early thirties. At first, she was impressed by him, too, especially when with utmost politeness he insisted at the end of the afternoon on carrying her baby’s paraphernalia to the car. As for her husband, Declan Ford, he felt “like a piece of air whom Oswald was looking around.”1 The Fords were struck, as people often were, by Lee’s eyes. He looked at you with a steady, wide-open stare. He never seemed to blink, but from time to time it was as if clouds moved across his eyes and the expression in them changed.
The afternoon contained an eye-opener for George Bouhe. As tactfully as he could, he asked Lee whether the bus fare he had given him had been sufficient. “Oh, yes,” Lee answered. But he offered no thanks and no change.
Bouhe and Mrs. Meller continued to visit the Oswalds’ Mercedes Street apartment, and on one occasion Lee’s ingratitude became even more apparent. Bouhe brought him a pair of old shirts, and Lee looked at them appraisingly, measuring and remeasuring them. Bouhe suggested that he wear them a few times to work, then throw them away. Lee folded the shirts and handed them back to Bouhe. “I don’t need them,” he said.
One day Lee came in while Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were at the apartment, peered into the refrigerator, noted that it was full, and asked where the groceries came from. When Marina said they were from Bouhe, Lee was openly displeased. Indeed, he looked displeased so much of the time, and maintained such an air of disapproving quiet, that Bouhe and Mrs. Meller rather quickly learned to come at three in the afternoon on Saturdays, their free day, and stay only an hour or so in hopes of missing Lee, who returned home from work about five.
Bouhe soon realized that Lee resented being helped. It was Marina, of course, who bore the brunt of his resentment. After every visit he pointed to some item that Bouhe or Mrs. Meller had brought and warned her: “They’ll want payment for that.”
When Marina asked what sort of payment, he replied: “You watch. They’ll make you dependent on them.”
Lee could not conceive that anyone might be generous and kind-hearted without any ulterior aim. In his view Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were helping Marina to humiliate him. “It’s not that I don’t want to buy you things,” he told her in one angry session, “but I can’t. I haven’t any money to spare.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “You can’t right now. So what’s wrong with accepting their help? They only do it to be kind.”
“I can’t let them buy my wife. Besides, they’re spoiling you.”
“Since you can’t spoil me,” Marina said, “why shouldn’t they?”
He hit her, hard, across the cheek. “Don’t ever say that again.”
“What did I say wrong?”
“I’ll be the one to spoil you—when I can. I don’t want you depending on other people any more. You chase after anyone who’ll spoil you.”
The beatings, which began on a regular basis when Marina opened the door to Lee’s mother, now continued because of her friendship with the Russians. He reproached her constantly, accused her of “never supporting” him, complained that her friendship with other people was itself a “betrayal.” Yet, curiously, he did not forbid her to see them. Nor did he tell them to stop bringing gifts.
Marina was in a quandary. Just as she had been as a child with her mother and stepfather, she felt again that she was “between two fires,” too torn to steer a tactful middle course. But she would not give up her new friends any more than she would give up Lee. She was grateful for their kindness. She felt lucky to have found in George Bouhe an older man who was good to her, whom she trusted, and with whom she could be utterly frank.
During one visit Bouhe noticed that Marina had a black eye. “Did you run into the bathroom door?” he inquired sympathetically. That was what she had told Anna Meller.
“Oh, no,” Marina answered matter-of-factly. “Lee hit me.”
Bouhe was shocked. “Can it be,” he asked himself, “that a civilized man in this day and age would hit his wife?”
Bit by bit the Russians woke up to the reality of Lee’s treatment of Marina. They were indignant. And the more they saw of it, the more indignant they became. They sensed Lee’s contempt for them, his feeling that they were people of petty, material interests, whereas he cared for higher things. They saw, too, that he had by no means given up his romance with the Soviet Union and with Communist ideas. They spotted volumes by Lenin and Marx on the Oswalds’ coffee table and current Soviet magazines that they knew he could ill afford. There was something in Lee’s attitude, moreover, that led them to believe that he hated anyone in a position of authority simply because he wanted to be there himself. They joked in their Russian idiom—to them it was a joke—that he wanted to be “at the top” and “a big wheel.” He was not really for anything. He was, Mrs. Meller later said, “all anti, anti- the Soviet Union, anti- the United States, anti- society in general and anti- us.”2
They went on helping, nevertheless, but it was Marina and the baby they tried to help, not Lee. Bouhe saw storm signals in the marriage, and he gave Marina some advice: “If you are a brave girl, if I were you, I would prepare to stand on my own feet before long. But before you start anything, you have to speak English.”3 He asked if Lee would object if he tried to teach her. “Let’s try,” Marina said, and they did. Bouhe gave her a first-rate dictionary compiled by Russian émigrés in the United States during World War II as a guide for American officers. He wrote out a few sentences in Russian; under each sentence she was to write a translation and mail the result to him in Dallas. Each week Marina mailed Bouhe a lesson, and he mailed it back, corrected and with a new lesson. This went on for five or six weeks until Marina gave up, largely because she felt that Lee did not approve.
Other men besides Lee might have resented the Russians’ help. It was said that Bouhe, who had been an accountant all his life, had a way of making some people feel accountable for his acts of kindness. He was free with his advice, exhorting Lee to get an education and lift himself up by his bootstraps. As Bouhe said later, “I think he began to hate me very early.”4
Lee felt the Russians were bending his priorities. They thought that he ought to take better care of his wife and child, that he ought to feed them and clothe them better. Lee, on the other hand, wanted to spend as little on his family as he could and save the rest to pay off his debts. What the Russians took to be necessities, he considered luxuries, and he resented having to thank them for presents that he did not want and that he thought his family did not need. Thus, when the Russians brought a crib and mattress for June, he accepted it. But when Bouhe and Mrs. Meller drove up a week later with a playpen, he was furious. “I don’t need it,” he said and condescended only with reluctance and an air of affront to help unload it from the car.
In reality Lee was accepting the Russians’ help, and in his own backhanded, ungracious manner, he even encouraged it. On September 22, at Lee’s request, Robert Oswald cosigned an application by Lee for a charge account at Montgomery Ward. His first purchase was a surprise—a television set. He told Marina that he had bought it to keep her from being lonely, and that weekend they had an orgy of television watching. But on Monday Lee took the set back to the store. The Russians, he said, would be critical: they would think the Oswalds were “playing poor to get help, yet all the time they could afford a TV.”
Lee had decided to continue “playing poor.” Evidently, he did feel accountable to the Russians. Moreover, he was always especially kind to Marina just before any visit from them so she would not tell them he beat her. Yet he did have a choice. He could have refused to see the Russians, or he could have consented to see them but refused to take any more help. Instead, he sank back into his familiar dependent stance: that of accepting help and even feeling entitled to it but at the same time disguising the fact that he was taking help by acting churlish toward those who gave it. What the Russians saw was his erect posture, the swagger of independence, the stiff arm that kept everybody at a distance and seemed to be saying, “Don’t help me—I don’t need it.” What they did not see at first, and what some never noticed at all, was the position of the other arm. The elbow was bent, the hand slightly outstretched, and with it Lee Oswald was taking all the help that came his way. Had he been halfway gracious, he could have had a great deal more.
The hectic Sunday of October 7 tells the story. The first to arrive that day was Marguerite Oswald, who, while still unwelcome at her son’s house, nevertheless dropped in from time to time. Next were Gary and Alexandra Taylor, a young couple who arrived from Dallas about four in the afternoon, bringing their baby son. Alexandra Taylor was the daughter of George de Mohrenschildt, an émigré in Dallas who had met the Oswalds about three weeks before. Apparently, Alexandra, too, had met Marina, but it was her husband’s first encounter with the Oswalds. The Taylors put their eight-month-old son in the playpen with Junie, who was five days younger than he. There, with varying degrees of inattention and apprehension, their mothers kept an eye on them for the rest of the afternoon.
Gary Taylor later observed that Lee’s mother was “a plump woman, out of place in the crowd that was there that afternoon,”5 who did not seem very interested in what was going on and who left about 4:30. She was not to see her son again for more than a year.
The “crowd” that had gathered included George Bouhe and Anna Meller, and Lyolya Hall and her estranged husband John, who was also meeting the Oswalds for the first time. As usual, there was no food or drink; the Oswalds’ was simply a meeting place. But there was a lot of talk, and most of it was Russian.
At some point that afternoon, Lee announced that he had lost his job. Saturday had been his last day at work. It was “seasonal” work, he said, and he had been laid off. He had no other job in view, and his rent was overdue. In spite of their feelings about Lee, the Russians were ready to help. Since Dallas was bigger than Fort Worth, they thought Lee would have a better chance of finding work there, and John Hall, together with George Bouhe and Gary Taylor, worked out a plan to help Lee move and look for a job. It was decided that Marina, who had a dental appointment the next day in Dallas, would leave that night with the Taylors, stay there two or three days, then return to Fort Worth and stay with Lyolya Hall until Lee had a job in Dallas.
Lee did not object, and that evening, after most of the visitors had left, Marina and the baby drove with the Taylors to Dallas. The next evening Robert Oswald joined his brother at Mercedes Street and helped him pace his bigger belongings. John and Lyolya Hall then arrived, loaded the Oswalds’ possessions into a pickup truck belonging to the Patterson Porcelain Laboratory, where Mrs. Hall worked, and stored them in the Halls’ garage. On the night of Monday, October 8, Lee took the bus to Dallas.
So far, so good, except for one pivotal fact: Lee had not lost his job. His work was not “seasonal,” as he told the Russians, and the Leslie Welding Company had no thought of firing him. In fact, on Monday, October 8, the day after the gathering at his house, Lee turned up for work as usual, spent all day on the job, and simply walked off that afternoon without telling anyone he was quitting. Company officials were surprised when he failed to show up the next day, and more surprised still to receive a note from him a few days later asking that his last two paychecks be sent to a post office box in Dallas.
It is probable that the Russians would have helped the Oswalds whether Lee had been fired or had simply quit. But Lee was not taking any chances; he did not quit until after he was sure of the Russians’ willingness to help him out. Earlier, he had put himself in a posture to get help, “playing poor” and using Marina and the baby as bait, perhaps without even realizing it himself. But this time it was a matter of cool calculation and conscious manipulation, the timing determined, apparently, by the fact that he had just paid off one of his debts, the $170 due to Robert for the airfare the previous June.
In spite of his grumblings about the Russians and his warnings to Marina about becoming dependent, it was Lee who had made himself dependent. His move to Dallas was predicated on their offers of help in finding a job and on the certainty that they would care for his wife and child until he got on his feet. He could not have made the move without them.
Marina and June spent three nights with the Taylors in Dallas, and Lee came to see them several times. On Monday and Wednesday of that week, Marina was driven to the Baylor University dental clinic by Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Alexandra’s stepmother, who noticed that Marina brightened at the sight of the dental assistants in their white uniforms and showed signs of wishing to return to pharmacy work herself. Marina had six teeth extracted and new ones put in. The fee of $70 was paid by George Bouhe.
After her last dental appointment, Marina and June took the bus to Fort Worth and settled in with Lyolya Hall. There, except for October 15, when Marina had a final dental appointment in Dallas and spent the night with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, she and June stayed for nearly a month. Throughout this time their grocery and other expenses were paid by the Taylors and by Mrs. Hall and others in the émigré community. Lee never asked who was paying, did not offer to contribute, and did not tender any thanks.
On Tuesday, October 9, Lee started looking for a job in Dallas. His first act was to call Anna Meller. She appealed to her husband Teofil, who had once worked with a Mrs. Helen Cunningham, now at the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas. Reluctantly, Teo Meller telephoned Mrs. Cunningham and asked her to find work for Oswald, whom he described as a Fort Worth boy who had lived in Russia, married a Russian girl, and had a child. Mr. Meller said that the need was urgent. Mrs. Cunningham was probably aware that Oswald had been a defector to Russia. But she was a kind woman, she liked and respected Mr. Meller, and she wanted to do him a favor. She said she would give Oswald the standard forms. If a prospective employer wanted to know more, he could ask.6
Through Mrs. Cunningham, Lee was referred to a graphic arts firm called Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. He made a good impression on John Graef, head of the photographic department, who thought he was “serious,” “determined,” and “likable,” with a “slight edge” over one or two competitors for the job.7 On Thursday Graef told Oswald he was hired. Lee was overjoyed. Friday, October 12, was his first day at work.
George Bouhe had tried to help Lee in Dallas. Lee was staying at the YMCA, and Bouhe stopped by to inquire how he was getting along. He may also have given him a little money to tide him over until he found work. Once Lee had a job, Bouhe encouraged him to go to Crozier Tech night school to add to his qualifications and asked him to stay in touch.
Lee’s response baffled Bouhe. The first few evenings after he started work, he called Bouhe from a pay telephone. Each time he said simply, “I’m doing fine.” With these words, and these only, he hung up. No small talk, no thanks, not a single detail about the job. When he moved out of the “Y,” he told Bouhe he was staying at the Carlton Boarding House, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Later, it turned out that he had never been there at all. Bouhe could see no reason for Lee to conceal his whereabouts. It was part, he says, of what he calls Lee’s “incessant mystery-making.”8 Lee probably wanted to drop Bouhe. He had by this time gained everything he wanted from him—a new job in a new town and temporary surcease from the responsibility of caring for Marina and the baby.
Both Bouhe and the Mellers were puzzled by his behavior. They did not know of his lies, nor did they know that without their permission he was using their names as references, going so far as to list Bouhe at a false address. But indomitably generous as he was, Bouhe made a decision “not to go all out” for Lee. He was tired of being used and of Lee’s ingratitude. “He always got what he wanted,” Bouhe remarked later.9 Anna Meller phrased it in a way that reflected her European experience. “He would trample over you in hobnail boots,” she said, “in order to get what he wanted.”10
As far as they were concerned, Lee simply violated every rule of human intercourse. He so outraged their notions of what decent conduct ought to be that he stunned them into giving him what he wanted. At first they had no way of dealing with him. But after a while they regrouped, pulled together the bits and pieces of his behavior and made sense of it, and managed to resurrect their defenses. They continued to help Marina after that. But they never helped Lee again.
There were, however, others who would. For one of the curious facts about Lee Oswald is that he always had help when he needed it without giving anything in return. As a result he has left behind two impressions: one, that of a poor, lost soul who had no style for his relationships except to exploit people, and who did not do that very well; the other, that of a cool manipulator who was pulling strings and keeping every situation more or less under his control. It is scarcely any wonder that a thread that runs through the recollections of nearly all the men and women whom Oswald met following his return from Russia was a sense of having been ill-used. Ultimately, not one of them could think of him without pain, outrage, and a feeling of personal betrayal.