Anna Meller was a large, handsome woman with faded blonde hair. Her husband, Teo, was small and dark, with an expression at once winsome and observant. On his arm he had a tattoo acquired in a Nazi concentration camp. A professor of philosophy back in Poland, he was employed at the Sanger-Harris department store. His wife had a full-time job, too, as draftswoman for the Dallas Power and Light Company. Both were gone all day, and they invited Marina to stay in their apartment until she decided what she would do next. Marina was grateful to be alone and to rest. But the apartment was small, she and the baby were sleeping on makeshift beds in the living room, and once again she felt “in the way.”
The Mellers were anxious about her health. Marina was “skinny and undernourished and had pains all over her body.” Bouhe and Mrs. Meller took her to a gynecologist, Dr. Paul Wolff, who confirmed what they wanted to know, that she was not pregnant, but he added that she was “very undernourished” and needed to gain weight right away.1
It was soon decided among the Russians, probably after a request from Lee to George de Mohrenschildt, that Lee and Marina should meet and decide for themselves whether their separation would be permanent. Bouhe had given up on Lee. He sensed such “inner resistance” in him that it seemed useless to go on helping. He excoriated his treatment of Marina, considering it “crude and cruel,” and was eager to pry her away from him. But he did not want to be present at the meeting, did not want to confront Lee face to face. “He’s such a wild man,” Bouhe explained to Marina, “that I don’t want to listen to his threats. If he sticks his fists in my ears it will suit neither my age nor my health.” He was frankly afraid of Lee. He and the Mellers spoke of him among themselves as “megalomanic,” “unbalanced,” a “psychopath.”2
“I am scared of this man,” he said to de Mohrenschildt. “He is a lunatic.”3
De Mohrenschildt, possessor of a universally admired physique, replied: “Don’t be scared. He is just as small as you are.”4
Everyone knew that Lee stood in awe of the “size and weight and muscles”—Bouhe’s words—of George de Mohrenschildt. The meeting of husband and wife was accordingly set for Sunday morning, November 11, at the de Mohrenschildts’ apartment. “Don’t worry,” Bouhe reassured Marina as he drove her to the rendezvous. “George will be a good shield for you. He is big and strong. I’m not. He’ll protect you like a wall.” Bouhe escorted Marina inside, conferred a moment with de Mohrenschildt, and quickly left.
When Lee arrived, he was nervous, pale, and obviously embarrassed to be having such a scene in front of the de Mohrenschildts. George immediately started to lecture him. “Look,” he said, “do you think it’s heroic to beat a woman who is weaker than you? I’ve beaten women myself. I can see it once or twice, for something serious, but not all the time.” Lee was discomfited and did not answer.
Jeanne, who adored her husband, joined him in all his enthusiasms and backed him in everything. Now she was feeling parental. “You have to grow up,” she told Lee and Marina. “You cannot live like that. This is not a country that permits such things to happen. If you love each other, behave. If you cannot live with each other peacefully, without all this awful behavior, maybe you should separate, and see. Maybe you really don’t love each other after all.”5 She was speaking Russian, although, Marina says, she had lived so many lives and knew so many languages that she now used all of them badly, speaking each as if it were English.
“You seem to love one another,” George added. “What I can’t figure out, God damn it all, is why you can’t find a common language?” Both the de Mohrenschildts used profanity a good deal, but they used it so naturally, it was so much the coin of their personalities (especially Jeanne’s), that it came out sounding like a caress.
Marina entered the conversation. “I’m tired of his brutality, George,” she said. “I can’t take it any more.”
“I’m not always in the wrong,” Lee spoke up at last. “Marina has such a long tongue, sometimes I can’t hold myself back.”
“The two of you talk,” de Mohrenschildt told them. “I don’t want to interfere.” He and Jeanne left them alone.
Lee was subdued and ready to make up. “I have nobody now,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if you leave me. I don’t want to go on living.”
“No,” said Marina. “I don’t want to live with you. I want a divorce.” On one hand she was afraid Lee would believe her. On the other she wanted him to, wanted to hurt him for the hurt he had done her.
He pleaded with her to come back to him.
“No,” she answered a second time.
When the de Mohrenschildts returned, she told them that she was not going back and she wanted to take her clothing from the apartment. The de Mohrenschildts agreed that separation for a few months might be best until they could decide whether they really loved each other. As Jeanne said, it was “absolutely useless to continue the way they were.”
The four of them then drove to the Oswalds’ apartment on Elsbeth Street in George’s big gray convertible. Marina smoked cigarette after cigarette, nervous but triumphant, knowing Lee was powerless to stop her smoking now that she was under George’s protection. Nobody said a word. Lee made a perceptible effort to control himself. But he was unable to contain himself once they reached the apartment. He showed “real nastiness” and became “a little violent,” according to Jeanne; “a little bit uppity,” according to George. They later said that he swore he would “get even” and grew so ugly that de Mohrenschildt threatened to call the police.6 He said, again according to the de Mohrenschildts, he would smash the baby’s toys and tear up all Marina’s dresses if they took her away.
“And where would that get you?” Jeanne inquired. “Then you lose her forever.” Lee was quiet, but Jeanne later said that he “boiled, and boiled.”7
Suddenly, to their surprise, he caved in and promised that he would do nothing violent. As George says, “He completely changed his mind.” He trotted obediently after George, who was loading the car, and helped carry out Marina’s and the baby’s belongings. “Lee did not interfere with me,” George said. “He was small, you know, a rather puny individual.”8
Marina denies that Lee grew violent and made threats. But as they packed up her belongings, his voice quavered and he was holding back tears. Marina was sorry for him, but she was afraid to show it.
Lee drew her into the kitchen. “I’m asking you one last time to stay.”
“No,” she answered a third time, feeling such pity that she longed to stay. “I was good to you,” she thought. “Now you can come after me.”
“Go this minute,” he said in a loud, angry voice. “I don’t want to see you another second.”
The de Mohrenschildts delivered Marina and her possessions to the Mellers’, and that same day George Bouhe drove her, the baby, and their most needed belongings to the house of Declan and Katya Ford. The Fords had a young baby and a big house. Mr. Ford would be away that week at a geology convention. It would be easier for Katya to have them for a few days than for the Mellers.
Katya Ford had grown up in Rostov-on-Don and escaped Russia during the war. She married an American GI and came to the United States. Eventually, she was divorced and then married a second time, to Declan Ford, a consulting geologist. Scrupulous and realistic in her relationships, Katya had a devastating eye for character. She had been favorably impressed by Lee at their first meeting, but her impression had quickly changed.
Marina had been at the Fords’ for two days when Lee went to George de Mohrenschildt and found out where she was staying. Lee then telephoned and, when Katya answered, asked to speak to Marina. Or rather, he refused to hang up until he had spoken to Marina. Marina did not want to talk to him. “You’d better tell him yourself,” said Katya.
Marina was very curt with Lee. She told him it was no use calling any more; she was not going to come back.
Lee persisted. He started to call once or twice an evening after that Marina was abrupt for a night or two, but the third night she allowed herself to be drawn in. Lee had something on his mind: his brother Robert had invited them to spend Thanksgiving in Fort Worth. “Go by yourself,” Marina told him. It was a prospect that humiliated him, and she knew it. She felt herself weaken, wondered how he would manage without her, wondered what Robert would think of her for running away. She asked Katya whether she ought to go back.
Katya considered Lee a brute. She felt that there was something strange, something not quite right about him. In her view, hitting Marina was like hitting a frail, skinny kitten, and Katya could not forgive him. But she felt that Marina, too, was to blame. If Lee was unstable, Marina was immature. With a husband as highstrung, as ready to erupt as Lee, Katya thought it foolhardy and provocative to talk back as sharply as Marina did. A wife, the one person who is privy to all a man’s weaknesses, simply has to have tact, Katya believed, and Marina did not have an ounce of it.
Besides, Katya was practical. Marina was no good at housework. It seemed out of the question for her to find a job and a home as a live-in domestic helper, her best hope until she learned English. Until Marina could stand on her own feet, Katya thought, she had no choice but to go back to Lee. She advised Marina to start studying English right away and equip herself to hold a job. She could break away when the baby was old enough for nursery school.9
Marina was of two minds. She felt that she could not go on living off other people forever, but she did not see, although her friends were doing their best to make her see, that she actually had a choice and could live alone. She missed Lee, and she missed home. Of their quarrelsome, nearly hungry, existence she thought: “It’s a poor home, but it’s home all the same.” But she would not go back right away. She would hold out a while and teach Lee to value her more.
George Bouhe had Marina’s promise that she would not go back to Lee. The week of November 12, while she was at Katya’s, he took her to lunch with Mrs. Frank (Valentina, known as “Anna”) Ray. Mrs. Ray was a Russian married to an American, and they had three small children. Immediately, she invited Marina to stay at her house. Mrs. Ray would teach Marina English and put her in night school. Marina would live with the Rays until she could manage on her own. To George Bouhe, it was the answer to a prayer. It was Marina’s chance to break away, and she accepted.
That weekend Declan Ford delivered Marina and the baby to the Rays’. Marina had told Lee where she was going. Within minutes of her arrival, he telephoned and begged her to see him. “I’m lonely,” he said. “I want to see Junie and talk to you about Thanksgiving.”
Marina caved in. “All right,” she said, “come over.”
Declan Ford and Frank Ray picked him up at the bus stop.
“I think you know Mr. Ford,” Ray said, starting to introduce them.
“I believe I do,” Lee answered.
Ford disliked him for that remark and for the cold way in which it was spoken, when they had, in fact, spent an afternoon at the Mellers’ in September. He made a mental note about Lee: This guy is looking for someone to support him, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be me. Twice, Frank Ray asked Lee where he was working, and twice Lee changed the subject and avoided an answer.10
Marina’s heart jumped when she saw her husband. They went into a room by themselves.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m sorry. Why do you torture me so? I come home and there’s nobody there. No you, no Junie.”
“I didn’t chase you out,” Marina said. “You wanted it. You gave me no choice.”
He loved her, he said. It wasn’t much, he knew, but he loved her the best he know how. He begged her to come back to him. Robert, he added, had invited them for Thanksgiving, and it would be terrible to show up without her.
Marina realized that Lee needed her. He had no friends, no one to count on but her. Harsh as his treatment was, she knew he loved her. But she brushed him away when he tried to kiss her. He went down on his knees and kissed her ankles and feet. His eyes were filled with tears, and he begged her forgiveness again. He would try to change, he said. He had a “terrible character,” and he could not change overnight. But change he would, bit by bit. He could not go on living without her. And the baby needed a father.
“Why are you playing Romeo?” Marina said, embarrassed at his being at her feet. “Get up or someone will come in the door.” Her voice was severe, but she felt herself melting inside.
He got up, protesting as he did so that he refused to get up until she forgave him. Both of them were in tears.
“My little fool,” she said.
“You’re my fool, too,” he said.
Suddenly, Lee was all smiles. He covered the baby with kisses and said to her: “We’re all three going to live together again. Mama’s not going to take Junie away from Papa any more.”
After supper Frank Ray drove the three of them back to Elsbeth Street.
Greatly relieved, Lee wrote his brother that very night: they would be happy to come for Thanksgiving.11 He had engineered the reconciliation in the nick of time—Thanksgiving was only four days away.
The Russians were furious. Even Katya Ford said to Marina: “You mean you took advantage of all your friends just to teach Lee a lesson?” Still, they had qualms about consigning her completely to the tender mercies of her husband, and among themselves they discussed what they ought to do next. But one thing was clear: Bouhe had had it. “George,” he said to de Mohrenschildt, “I cannot go on. This guy is nuts, and we are going to have trouble.”
“Oh, come on,” George said. “You’re too critical. You’re a snob. Just because he didn’t come from St. Petersburg, you drop them like a hot cake. They are nice young people.”
“All right, George,” said Bouhe. “You carry the ball.”
Which is precisely what happened. After that the Russians, with the exception of the de Mohrenschildts, saw very little of the Oswalds. Nevertheless, there were bulletins from the battlefront. “They’re off, they’re on, he’s beating her, they’ve broken up”—so it went.13 One day the de Mohrenschildts seemed to favor separation, while the next they favored reconciliation. Rumors about the Oswalds flew all the way to Fort Worth, where Max Clark heard that de Mohrenschildt “got hold of Oswald and threatened him—picked him up by his shirt and shook him like a dog and told him he would really work him over if he ever laid another hand” on Marina.14
A still more colorful story concerned the scene of reconciliation at the Rays’. No sooner had the couple made up, the story went, than Lee plucked the cigarette from his wife’s lips and snuffed it out on her shoulder. The Russians recalled that in the early days of the Bolshevik régime, officers of the Cheka, as the secret police were called, used to extinguish a cigarette on human flesh when they were trying to break a prisoner. Marina denies that her husband did any such thing to her ever. But the Russians believed that he did—stunning testimony as to how they felt about Oswald.
Distracted by the sounds of battle and utterly repelled by Lee’s violence, the Russians, with the exception of Katya Ford, misunderstood the heart of the relationship between Marina and Lee, which was founded on a mutual willingness, indeed a mutual need, to inflict and accept pain. They were deeply and reciprocally dependent. The Russians were puzzled and angered by Marina’s decision to return to her husband because they misunderstood her motive for marrying him in the first place. They thought she had married him to come to the United States, and far from considering such a motive reprehensible, they approved and respected it. Several of the women among the émigré group had done the same. Having come to the United States, they had tried their best to make their marriages work; if they had divorced, it was only because the marriage was impossible. But not one of them would have stayed five minutes in Marina’s marriage. They underestimated the strength of the tie that bound her to Lee.
Marina had married Lee not to come to America, but because he was an American. His choice of her had bolstered her self-esteem and confirmed her feeling that she was special. Marriage to an American gave her a way of expressing her rebelliousness and her lack of conformity to Russian ways. Once she was in the marriage, however, Marina’s motives for staying in it were deep indeed. Language, the question of whether or not Marina would learn English, tells a good deal of the story. It is virtually a paradigm of their marriage. Marina was quick. She could easily have learned English if she had wanted to. And yet after only a few weeks she gave up her lessons with Bouhe. The de Mohrenschildts gave her a small Victrola with some language records, and she never used them. She abandoned any effort to learn English because Lee did not want her to, and she was afraid of him. Moreover, she sensed that he wanted her to be dependent on him, and she was content to leave it that way. Dependence and low self-esteem had carried her into the marriage, and together with a willingness to suffer, they were enough to make her stay.
As for Lee, he wanted Marina dependent on him because it enhanced his control over her. He even wanted control over every penny she spent. He did not allow her to buy groceries, and he no longer took her to the grocery store with him. Instead, he had her make out a shopping list and bought everything himself. Lee wanted control not only over their money but absolutely over Marina herself. For him there was no in-between: either he controlled everything or he controlled nothing at all.
Lee was right in one thing. His control over Marina was precarious. She had entertained telephone calls from her old boyfriends most of the time they had lived in Minsk. Even in the United States she had only to meet a handful of her compatriots and they were willing to rush to her rescue. As Lee looked at it, if Marina mastered English, her life might become one long escape hatch from him. She would have neighbors to appeal to; she would have friends; she might even meet other men. His control over her would be jeopardized, and he might easily lose her. Indeed, he had nearly lost her to her Russian friends already.
Lee had other reasons for keeping Marina from learning English. He truly did want to keep his command of Russian. Even in Minsk before coming to the United States, he had in the back of his mind the idea that he might return to live in Russia, and he wanted to keep his Russian for that. Moreover, knowing Russian gave him a reputation for being intelligent, and that helped make up for the profound feeling, stemming from his reading disability, that his intelligence did not receive its due.
Finally, apart from his desire to control all circumstances of his existence, including his wife, he needed to keep Marina ludicrously, outlandishly dependent on him to mask the fact that he was deeply and humiliatingly dependent on her. Indeed, in the view of those who knew them best, Marina, not Lee, was the fulcrum of their marriage. Dependent as they both were emotionally, he seems to have been even more dependent on her than she was on him. He was exasperated by the fact that for the second time in his life he found himself dependent on a woman. And at times it made him so angry that he was driven to strip Marina not only of autonomy in the matter of language but, by his beatings, of any sense that she was a human being at all. The beatings, in turn, depressed her and made her even less capable of breaking away from him than she had been before.
Dependence was, indeed, the glue of the Oswalds’ marriage, and it held them together to the very end. But in the meantime Marina had temporized and had lost her advantage. She had lingered with her Russians to gain leverage and make her life more bearable with Lee. But typically, she had lost more than she had gained, for she had now relinquished their support. Even the de Mohrenschildts, who were the most sympathetic to the marriage, were “disgusted” when she failed to make a real separation of it and stay away two or three months. “We wasted the whole day,” Jeanne says. “So much aggravation, and then she dropped the whole thing. So why bother, you know?”15 As for her truest friends, Bouhe, Mrs. Meller, and the others who had been willing to open their homes to her, they were no longer standing by for the rescue. They had offered her a way out, they had given her her chance—and she lost it. Lee had her in his power once again.
At first, after their reconciliation, Marina and Lee were like children together, and like children they had a good time. Grinning, holding aloft a cup of cocoa in one hand and a doughnut in the other, Lee did the twist in the kitchen a night or so after her return. “Come dance with me,” he said. “I can do it without spilling.” Marina declined out of fear of looking ridiculous.
Every night he took her walking and bought her doughnuts and coffee. He escorted her to a bowling alley down the street and suggested that he teach her to bowl. Again she declined, this time because the balls were too heavy. He played “Moscow Evenings” on the jukebox while they watched others bowl, and he crooned the words to her in Russian. “No one but us here speaks Russian,” he said, well pleased with himself.
For a few days he approved nearly everything she did. Fired by a new spirit of independence, Marina refused to draw his bath. It was three days before he objected. “Do you think you’re a prince?” she told him. “You always complain, anyway. First I make it too hot, then I make it too cold. Jeanne doesn’t draw George’s bath.”
And that was that. Except for a few occasions when she felt like “spoiling” him, Marina never drew his bath again.
Thanksgiving fell on Thursday, November 22. They went to the bus station that morning. They had to wait, so the three of them squeezed into a booth and had themselves photographed.
“In real life you’re not bad to look at,” he said, examining the result, “but you take a terrible picture. You’ve no idea how to pose.”
Marina responded with a criticism of his hair. He had had it cut short in back and long on top in imitation of his brother Robert.
“You don’t like my haircut?” he asked.
“On Robert it’s fine,” she said, “but on you it’s no good at all. You look like a squashed frog.”
He laughed.
Still staring at the picture, she added: “Anyone can see you ran away from Russia. You look frightened to death.”
Again he laughed, and then he played the title song from the movie Exodus four or five times on the jukebox.
Robert Oswald and John Pic met them at the Greyhound station in Fort Worth. John was now an air force sergeant stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and he, his wife, and his children were staying with Robert for the holidays. It was the first meeting of the three brothers since Lee’s childhood and the only time they would all be together with their wives and children. Marguerite Oswald, mother of all three boys, their opposing object and unifying force, was not present that day. None of them wanted her.
All of Lee’s life, John had expected “some great tragedy to strike” his youngest brother. Now that Lee had defected to Russia and come back, John supposed that he had had his tragedy and was curious to see how he had come out of it. John found his brother thinner and balder than he expected, with eyes somewhat sunk in his head. John was slightly bemused. He had not really talked to him since that day ten years before in New York City when Lee, who was then only twelve years old, had threatened John’s wife, Marge, with a knife. Lee and John had seen each other once or twice and could have met other times, but Lee, still steaming over the family quarrel, had refused to speak to his elder brother. John wondered if Lee still remembered.16
Lee at first gave no sign. The brothers greeted each other warmly and chatted amicably in the car. They were welcomed at Robert’s by the two wives, Marge Pic and Vada Oswald, and the four children, John’s two and Robert’s two. All afternoon the children played together. Lee seemed happy to see his brothers and especially to tell John about his experiences in Russia and the Marine Corps. Marina noticed that her husband did not have that “What am I here for?” attitude he displayed on most social occasions. But Marge Pic picked up a different signal. Lee was friendly enough when he greeted her. But in a way that was quite unmistakable he omitted to address another word to her all day.17
Marina was bored. She longed for someone she could talk to without Lee’s having to interpret. She telephoned her old pupil, Paul Gregory, who was home in Fort Worth for the holiday, and at six in the evening he came over.
It was at this moment that Lee’s hostility came into the open. As Paul Gregory appeared in the doorway, Lee introduced John as his “half brother,” a designation the three boys had been at pains all their lives to avoid. They had always stood together as full brothers and fellow sufferers at the hands of Marguerite. Suddenly, John was aware that Lee was still smoldering with the old antagonism. He was not one to forget.18
Marina and Lee said goodbye to the family. They spent the evening at the Gregorys’, where they spoke Russian and ate turkey sandwiches. Then they took a late bus back to Dallas, arriving at one in the morning. It would be a year and a day before Lee saw any of his family again—on November 23, 1963, when Robert visited him in a jail cell in Dallas.