Marina woke up the next morning exhausted and with a headache. Lee was in the living room, leaning over the radio. He turned to her, crestfallen. “I missed. They don’t say much. Just that somebody unidentified took a shot at General Walker.”
Marina was hugely relieved, but she was still too nervous to touch her morning cup of coffee. Lee went out to buy a paper. When he came home he was angry. “Oh, hell!” he said. “Walker moved his head at the last minute. That’s the only thing that saved him. My aim was perfect. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina now asked the question she had been wondering about all along. Who was Walker? She had heard the name before but she had no idea what he had done that might make Lee want to kill him.
Lee did not go into details. He merely said that Walker was a “Fascist” and a former general, a madman and the leader of a Fascist organization.
Marina objected that no matter who he was, Lee had no right to kill him. Maybe he had a wife and children.
“He lives alone,” Lee answered sharply. “If someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.”
That stopped Marina. All her life she had heard about Hitler’s atrocities, and she could not think how to respond. She asked Lee how he had escaped and where he had left his rifle.
General Walker, he told her, had been sitting at the back of his house near a window, working at his desk. Lee aimed and fired only one shot. He did not wait to see whether he had hit his mark. The church meeting next door was breaking up. Plenty of people, plenty of noise. Lee ran. By the time he heard the wail of police sirens, he was far, far away.
It is not clear from Marina’s account whether Lee rode one bus home that night or two. It is logical that he would have run straight through the woods to his hiding place, buried the rifle, then hurried to a bus stop and ridden home. But it is not certain he did it that way. Marina, for some reason, was haunted by the idea of police dogs. They would pick up Lee’s scent and trace the rifle to its hiding place. “Don’t worry about the dogs,” Lee reassured her. “Lots of people go by that house. So they trace it as far as the bus. That’s where they lose the scent. I buried it a long way off.” From that remark it could be inferred that Lee boarded a bus near Walker’s house actually carrying his rifle, hopped off close to his site in the woods, buried the rifle, then took another bus home. He did tell Marina that the bus he took was not the one he generally rode when he went to General Walker’s.1
The Dallas papers of Thursday, April 11, ran front-page stories about the attempt on Walker’s life. Lee left the apartment to buy both morning and afternoon editions and lay on the sofa listening to news bulletins on the radio. It was reported that the police had identified the bullet as a 30.06. It was also reported that an aide to the general had noticed two men in a “late-model, unlicensed car” in the alley behind Walker’s house on the night of his return. After the shooting, a fourteen-year-old boy, Kirk Newman, who was a neighbor of Walker’s, claimed that he had seen two cars, one with one man in it, the other with several, speed away from the scene.
Reading that, Lee roared with laughter. “Americans are so spoiled!” he said, proud of his escape. “It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs. They always think you have a car. They chased a car. And here I am sitting here!” Once again he said that before any car left the scene, “my legs had carried me a long way.”2
Lee also laughed at the police identification of the badly smashed bullet.3 “They got the bullet—found it in the chimney,” he said. “They say I had a .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all. They’ve got the bullet and the rifle all wrong. Can’t even figure that out. What fools!”
Low as his opinion of the police was, Lee was angry at himself and disappointed. “It was such an easy shot,” he said again and again. “How on earth did I miss? A single second saved him. I fired and he moved. A perfect shot if only he hadn’t moved!”4
That Thursday morning, only a few hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Marina saw Lee thumbing through the blue looseleaf notebook in which he kept his typing lessons. She noticed that he stopped now and then to read a page.
“And what is that?” she asked.
“And those pictures?”
“Walker’s house.”
He was sitting on the sofa with the notebook in his lap. Marina stood facing him across the coffee table. “May I see?”
He handed it to her. She saw photographs of a house from various angles, and the book was filled with lined sheets covered with handwriting. There were pages of typing, too, and Marina guessed—correctly—that some of the handwriting, all of which was in English, was the political justification for Lee’s act.
“I had it so well figured out,” he boasted. “I couldn’t make a mistake. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina realized that he was proud of himself. “And what do you mean to do with this book?” she asked.
“Save it as a keepsake. I’ll hide it somewhere.”
“Some keepsake! It’s evidence! For God’s sake, Alka, destroy it.”5
She left the room so that he could make up his mind by himself.
The next thing she knew he was standing by the toilet with some sheets of paper in his hand and a box of matches. Slowly he tore the sheets in half, crumpled them into balls, and one by one touched a match to them. As each ball of paper caught the flames, he dropped it into the toilet. He did this thoughtfully, with great reluctance, as if it were the funeral pyre of his ideas. But apparently he destroyed only the details of his plan. He did not burn the handwritten pages that contained his political philosophy and program.
Afterward, they ate their lunch in silence. Lee was so sorry to part with his papers, and Marina so relieved, that neither could think of anything to say. Lee seemed withdrawn, and fearful for the first time that he might be caught. Marina had seen how reluctant he had been to burn his papers. “I wonder if he burned them,” she asked herself, “because he does not trust me?”
That night, twenty-four hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Lee suffered anxiety attacks in his sleep. He shook all over from head to toe four times at intervals of a half hour or so, but without waking up.
The following day, Friday, he was still frightened, yet not too frightened to go downtown and file a claim for unemployment compensation. His claim was refused a few days later on grounds that his earnings at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall were too low for him to qualify, a ruling that was later reversed. That night he again suffered convulsive anxiety attacks in his sleep.
Marina, meanwhile, was grateful that she had chores to do, anything to keep her from thinking. She now knew that Lee took his politics far more seriously than she had ever, in her wildest dreams, supposed. She knew, for the first time, that he was capable of killing in cold blood, merely for the sake of his ideas. But her fears for the future started and ended with General Walker. She saw that Lee was bitterly disappointed by his failure to kill Walker, that he still was keyed up and tense, and that his desire to do the deed had by no means burned itself out. She was afraid, terrified, that he would take another shot at Walker. It never occurred to her, then or at any time thereafter, that he would try to shoot anybody else.
With her ear still cocked for the yelping of police dogs, Marina immediately began to beg Lee, and try to force him to promise, to never do such a thing again. She told him that when Walker moved his head at the last minute it had been a sign from fate. “If God saved him this time, He will save him again. It is not fated for this man to die. Promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”
“I promise.”
His promise was not enough. “Look,” Marina said, “a rifle—that’s no way to prove your ideas. If someone doesn’t like what you think, does that mean he has a right to shoot you? Once people start doing that, no one will dare go out of doors. In Russia you used to say that there was freedom of speech in America, that everyone can say what he pleases. Okay, go to meetings. Say what you want to say there. Or are you afraid you have so little brains you can’t make anybody listen?
She scolded Lee on personal grounds as well. “Even if you didn’t think of me,” she said, “you ought to have thought about Junie.”
“I did,” he said coldly. “I left you enough money for a while.” And he added, with a touch of malice in his tone, “The Russians here like you. They’d have helped.”
Somehow Marina and Lee got through Thursday and Friday, but they still had one more ordeal. It occurred on Saturday, the eve of Easter, which happened to fall on the same day that year in both Western and Orthodox churches. They were not expecting callers and were getting ready for bed when they heard a sudden commotion at the door—the very thing they had been dreading. But instead of police dogs barking, it was George de Mohrenschildt, booming out a loud hello. Hugely relieved, Marina and Lee went downstairs to let the de Mohrenschildts in.
Jeanne came in first, dressed to the nines and clutching a pink plush rabbit for June. Handsome and hearty, George shouldered his way in behind her. The first words out of his mouth struck the Oswalds with the impact of a bomb.
“Hey, Lee,” he roared out in Russian. “How come you missed?”
Lee and Marina, standing at the foot of the stairs as their guests went up with their backs to them, stared at one another in horror. Which of them had told George about Walker? Each one supposed the other had.
Lee was the first to recover. “Shhh,” he said as they reached the landing. “Junie’s sleeping.”
“You always forget the baby,” Jeanne reproved her boisterous husband. “Let’s go out on the balcony.”
Luckily for Marina and Lee, it was dark out of doors and hard for the de Mohrenschildts to see their faces, or so they hoped. George and Jeanne had just come from a party. They were euphoric, on top of the world, and Marina reflected gratefully that they both seemed a little bit high. Maybe they would not notice her discomfort. Lee, for his part, rushed back and forth carrying chairs for all of them to sit on.
George seemed at first to have only one thing on his mind: the attempt on General Walker. He had read every morsel in the Dallas papers and was eager to discuss it with Lee. He knew so many of the details that Marina concluded that Lee, uncharacteristically, had taken George into his confidence.
Lee scarcely uttered a word. He continued to jump up and down and kept running in and out with cups of coffee. “Oh, yes,” he at last remarked with apparent detachment, “wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who did it and why and how?”
Marina thought that Lee’s behavior was fairly composed under the circumstances. George said later that even in the dark Lee “shriveled,” was “tense” and wore a “peculiar” look.6 But it is not clear how much George really noticed. Even by his soaring standards he was unusually ebullient, and the conversation soon shifted to another topic. George had just returned from a trip to New York, where he had clinched a new job in Haiti, prospecting for oil and other resources for “Papa Doc” Duvalier in return for the right to live in the government compound in highest luxury and operate a sisal plantation for such profit as he could reap from it. He and Jeanne would be leaving within the month for Port-au-Prince. After being down for so long, the de Mohrenschildts were on their way up again.
Sitting in the dark, still numb with shock, Marina was scarcely able to follow the conversation. Even years later, remembering how close George had come with his opening remark, she shook all over with fear. Finally, at about ten o’clock, the de Mohrenschildts got ready to leave, and Marina went into the backyard, picked an armful of roses, and handed them to Jeanne.
The instant they were out the door, Lee turned to her. “Did you telephone them and tell them it was me?”
“Of course not,” Marina said. “I thought you did.”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “But isn’t it amazing how he guessed? It’s a lucky thing he couldn’t see my face. I was hardly able to speak. Maybe he was only kidding, but he sure hit the nail on the head.”
Lee believed Marina’s disclaimer, she believed his, and they were both right. No one had told George that it was Lee who shot at General Walker. He had simply guessed.
George later denied any responsibility for influencing Lee’s actions and explained why he had made his remark. “I didn’t want him to shoot Walker,” he said. “I didn’t want him to shoot anybody. But if somebody has a gun with a telescopic lens, you see, and knowing that he hates the man, it is a logical assumption, you see.”7
That evening was the last time Lee Oswald ever saw George de Mohrenschildt. On April 19 the de Mohrenschildts left Dallas; made their round of farewells in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia; and returned to Dallas at the end of May. There they commenced packing; they were taking some of their belongings with them to Haiti, and the rest were going into storage in Dallas. They wanted to see the Oswalds one more time but heard that they had already left town. Jeanne was to remember, however, that before their departure in early June, they received something in the mail from Lee, and that it bore a New Orleans address.8
The de Mohrenschildts did not return to Dallas for more than three years. They came back in 1966, and when they got around to retrieving their possessions from storage, in early 1967, they had an enormous surprise. There, among all the boxes and bundles, they found one that they could not recall having received at all. It was wrapped in brown paper and contained a stack of records that they had loaned to Marina in an effort to help her learn English. They were unable subsequently to remember whether the bundle bore a postmark or not.
But the greatest surprise was still to come. It was not the bundle of records itself, but something that had been laid neatly and purposefully on top—a photograph of Lee with his guns and dressed in black, one of the two Marina had taken.9 The back of the photograph bore two inscriptions. Across the top, in Russian, were the words: “Hunter for the Fascists—ha-ha-ha!!!” Under the inscription, which was bold and clear, was a small sketch of a terrier, of the kind the de Mohrenschildts owned. Marina today, fourteen years later, has no recollection of having written it. But the writing and the sketch both appear to be hers. And in the lower left-hand corner, catty-corner and in English, was another message in handwriting that appears to be Lee’s. It read: “For my friend George from Lee Oswald.” Beneath the inscription was the date written, as Lee might have done it, in a combination of Latin and Arabic script: “5/IV/63.” The date was probably supposed to be May 4, 1963, and Lee had, as nearly as can be guessed, mailed the records—and the photograph—from New Orleans.10
What happened, apparently, is that after George’s lucky guess on April 13, Marina, half idly, and half as a warning to Lee that he must not go around shooting people or he would be found out, simply took one of the photographs and wrote on it, mocking Lee, “Hunter for the Fascists,” a word she had heard both Lee and George use, and “ha-ha-ha,” an expression that was characteristic both of her and of George. The sketch of a little dog links her inscription to George’s remarkable guess. She must have done it, characteristically, to warn Lee and simultaneously to mock him, to laugh him out of further dangerous adventures.
Lee’s choosing a copy of the photograph that had this inscription on it to send to George was itself a message that contained a whole world of meaning. George, and George alone, had made a guess that it was Lee who tried to kill General Walker. Those who knew them both, notably Samuel Ballen, had observed “a mutuality,” “an emotional complicity,” between Lee and George, and of course Ballen was right.11 Each of them, Lee and George, during that winter of 1962–1963, knew perfectly what the other was thinking politically. And Lee wanted to seal their understanding. As the days following the Walker episode passed without discovery and Lee realized that there was going to be no evidence, not even a clue, to link him to the attempted killing, he decided to let George know that his uncanny guess had been on the mark. It was to George that Lee made his confession.
Why should it have been the loudmouthed George to whom Lee chose, above all other men, to confess? The answer is simple. Lee had done the deed for George. George was the one friend he had, the one person whose respect, admiration, even affection, he coveted—and it was George whom he had wanted to impress. George had been Lee’s “constituent” in the sense that Lee believed he had been acting as George himself might have wanted to do, and in a manner that would win George’s approval.
In his attempt on General Walker, Lee had other constituents as well. He told Marina that he was sending a copy of his photograph to the Militant, to show that he was “ready for anything.” In the picture, he was holding the issue of the Militant that contained the letter from him, signed “L.H.” He had expected that by the time the editors received the photograph, Walker would be dead and the initials “L.H.” would be famous. They would then see how right they had been to print his letter; they would see that their intrepid Dallas correspondent had indeed been “ready for anything.”
De Mohrenschildt and the Militant, then, were Lee’s two chief constituents when he fired at General Walker, with de Mohrenschildt, the flesh-and-blood friend whose approval he desired, far and away the more important. But Lee appears to have had still other inner, or emotional, constituents: the American Communist Party, whose newspaper, the Worker, he was also holding in the picture; and possibly the Soviet Embassy in Washington, whose help he desired for himself and Marina.
In the photograph Lee was dressed in black, the color of death, and he was bristling with guns. If there was in the picture a message to George of boastfulness, love, and pride, there was a message of a very different sort as well: a message of hate. George had allowed himself to become a father to Lee. Yet without a scruple of remorse, without a twinge of regret, indeed, with insulting jubilation, he was leaving Dallas, leaving Lee. Like his father and like Edwin A. Ekdahl, the stepfather Lee genuinely cared about, George was abandoning him. And now Lee wanted to avenge himself on everyone who had ever let him down in that way.12 One means of doing so was to leave town before George did—abandon George, rather than be abandoned by him. Another way was to send the photograph. For the photograph, with its black and its guns, conveyed the message that in addition to the profoundly favorable feelings Lee had for George, he had murderous feelings as well.
Envy is another of the emotions Lee appears to have harbored toward his friend. George had been born to a title, where Lee only felt entitled. George, unlike Lee, had known and loved his father and had grown up close to him. And George, the possessor of a powerful physique, had called Lee “puny” and treated him as if he could be trifled with. At the request of George Bouhe and Anna Meller, he had intervened in Lee’s private affairs and “liberated” Marina a few months before. The de Mohrenschildts noted at the time that Lee “boiled and boiled,” then meekly gave in. But Lee was not meek, and he was not the man to forget. Now he was saying to George what he had forborne to say in November, that, armed with weapons, he was as powerful as any man. Belatedly, he was expressing resentment at George’s interference and warning him not to try his physical superiority again—not on him and not on Marina.
Lee was making still another statement. He was saying that in politics as in physical strength, he was as good a man as George, a better one, in fact. “You talk—I act,” Lee seems to have been saying. He had even made an attempt to act out George’s ideas for him. And now he was declaring that no matter where it might lead, even to death, the plebeian son was prepared to go his aristocratic father one better.
In addition to the many meanings implicit in the photograph, George may have played other roles in Lee’s fantasy life. George was the only person Lee knew who had connections “at the top,” to President and Mrs. Kennedy. By virtue of his acquaintance with Jacqueline Kennedy and her mother, George had written to the president and asked him to provide a preface for his book about his adventures in Mexico. He supposed that these adventures fitted admirably with the president’s physical fitness campaign. Throughout the winter when Lee and George knew one another, George was awaiting a reply. Thus it is possible that George was an emotional lightning rod linking Lee’s fantasies about the presidency—clearly, he had such fantasies, since he wanted his “son” to be president and even wanted to be president himself—to the real human being who was president. Anything George said about the Kennedys in Lee’s presence, although Marina recalls that it was very little, could have helped bring the president within Lee’s emotional range.
Finally, it is conceivable, although mere speculation, that the feelings Lee had for George were an emotional profile, a shadow, a clue, to feelings that he was later to develop for the president. For there were resemblances between the two. Both Kennedy and de Mohrenschildt were dashing and well-born men. Both had fathers who had loved them. Both were masters at keeping others at a distance. As George himself vanished from Lee’s life to recede into the jungles of Haiti, Lee may, without being aware of it, have taken the feelings he had for George and displaced some of them onto President Kennedy.
George’s stunning and insightful “How come you missed?” was the true end of the Walker affair for Lee because it stripped away the layers of rationalization and hit him full in the face with what it was he had really been after. Lee’s bullet had missed General Walker—but it had found its mark. Something George had said on the evening of February 13 caused Lee to feel that George had given him the sanction he required to go ahead and shoot General Walker. Now, on April 13, George had given him the recognition, the token of admiration Lee desired. By his uncanny remark as he came in the door on that excruciating Easter eve, George had shown that a part of him understood “who did it, and why, and how.” That was what Lee had wanted.
And so the next day, Easter Sunday, April 14, just after supper but before dark, Lee returned to his hiding place by the railroad tracks, dug up his rifle, and carried it home. The publicity and the manhunt that followed the attempt had subsided anyhow, with disappointing speed as far as Lee was concerned.
Marina knew her husband well. She saw that he still was keyed up and tense and that, because of the failure of his attempt, he had a reservoir of unexpended inner energy and was casting about for a way to use it. She was afraid that he would take another shot at Walker. When he came home that night, she begged him to sell the rifle. “We need the money for food,” she said.
“Money evaporates like water,” Lee answered. “I’ll keep it.”
Marina felt helpless to change his mind, and she did not nag him. She was correct in her fear that Lee might be dangerous still, but what she did not understand was that his mind was like a stove: he might have one pot bubbling away on the front burner, taking up nearly all his attention, but he generally had another pot or two simmering away at the back; and when his obsession with the front pot eased or when he met resistance, he was quite capable of moving one of those pots up front. That is what he briefly did now.
Cuba, as always, was in the news, with calls for a new invasion and the overthrow of Castro being sounded by the nest of exiled leaders in Miami and their powerful supporters in Congress and at intermediate levels of the Pentagon. These calls from the right to which Lee was steadily exposed in the two Dallas dailies were mirrored on the left by two of the weeklies he subscribed to, the Militant and the Worker, which were demanding a “hands-off” policy toward Cuba on the part of the Kennedy administration.
Lee, moving his preoccupation with Cuba from the back of his mind to the front, decided to act. In his little “office” he fashioned a placard: “Hands Off Cuba! Viva Fidel!” He hung it around his neck and went out, quite possibly on the day after digging up his rifle, to stand on a street corner and hand out pro-Castro leaflets. He wrote with pride to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a pro-Castro organization based in New York, that he had distributed all his leaflets—some fifteen or so—in forty minutes. “I was cursed as well as praised by some,” he reported and asked to have forty or fifty more pamphlets sent to him at his Dallas address. The committee mailed them at the end of the week, on Friday, April 19.13
Thus, only days after his attempt on General Walker, Lee had once again invited the attention of the Dallas police—and in a manner that must have seemed guaranteed to obtain it. Once again he failed. Not a clue came to light that linked him to the Walker affair, and his demonstration on behalf of Castro went unnoticed.
Marina did not know about the picketing. But she heard Lee talk in his sleep again that week, and she watched as he scanned every edition of the Dallas papers looking, as she knew, for his name. He longed for publicity and attention. From this, from the reluctance with which he had burned his papers about the Walker attempt, and from his refusal to get rid of the rifle that might incriminate him, she also understood that Lee had wanted to be caught.
Marina was now aware that Dallas was a dangerous place for Lee, dangerous because it was full of temptation, and by “temptation” she meant General Walker. If she had failed in her effort to make Lee get rid of his rifle, she could try to do the next best thing—get him out of town. Just as quickly as she could, she would remove him from proximity to his target. She told him that she longed to move to New Orleans. New Orleans was a port city, she pointed out, and she had been raised in one, too—Archangel. “I’d like to see the city you were born and grew up in,” she said, adding that she had heard a lot about his relatives there, especially his “good” aunt Lillian Murret, and was eager to meet them.
Lee hesitated. He doubted the Murrets would want to see him. They had failed to answer a letter he had written them from Russia, and he was afraid they disapproved of him for going there. But he did not turn Marina down. She found him instead curiously receptive, as if he half-welcomed the idea.
From Easter Sunday on, Lee and Marina discussed what they ought to do next. Ostensibly, Lee was looking for a job. But when Lyolya and John Hall drove over from Fort Worth to attend Easter services at one of the Orthodox churches and afterward went to see the Oswalds, they noticed that Lee was discouraged. He complained about the lack of job security in America and hinted that he was thinking of going back to Russia.14 Marina tried to cheer him up. She pointed out that in America unemployment compensation is as high as an engineer’s salary in Russia. “You’ll have a rest,” she said, “and we’ll all have a paid vacation.” When that failed to cheer him up, she volunteered to go to work. She would take in ironing or find a job polishing silver. “No,” said Lee. “You’re my wife and it’s up to me to support you.”
Conceivably, it was Lee who subtly suggested the move to New Orleans and allowed the idea to sink in, rather than, as Marina supposed, she who suggested it and he who gradually picked it up. Either way, they were talking about it during the evening of Wednesday, April 17, when Lee suddenly agreed to move. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll show you New Orleans.” They did not set any date. But it is significant that Lee now knew that the de Mohrenschildts were soon to leave Dallas. With George gone, it would be easier for Lee to move, too.
Marina was greatly relieved, and on Saturday, April 20, she, Lee, and June went to a lake nearby to have a picnic with Ruth Paine and her children. But the next morning, Sunday, April 21, all her fears were revived. Lee went out early to buy a newspaper and some doughnuts, the two had breakfast together, and afterward—while Marina was doing the dishes, straightening the apartment, and dressing the baby—Lee sat in the living room and read the newspaper. It was the Dallas Morning News, which had a banner headline that day: “Nixon Calls for Decision to Force Reds Out of Cuba.” The lead story, accompanied by a front-page photograph of the former vice president, reported a speech that Richard Nixon had delivered the day before in Washington, accusing President Kennedy of being too soft on Castro and demanding a “command decision” to force the Russians out of Cuba. The speech could have been interpreted as a call for a new invasion.
Marina had no idea what Lee was reading. But she noticed after finishing her chores that he had laid the paper carefully on the coffee table as if he wanted her, or someone, to see it. Then she noticed that the door to his office was open, which was unusual. Suddenly Lee stood before her, dressed in his gray slacks, white shirt, and a tie. He had his pistol at his waist and was about to put on his best jacket. His face was white.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Nixon is coming to town. I am going to have a look.” He spoke slowly and with deliberation.
“I know what your ‘looks’ mean.”
Marina had no idea who Nixon was and she did not care.15 She knew his life was in danger and that was enough. Thinking fast, she went into the bathroom and asked Lee to follow her there. Once he was inside, she squeezed herself out and shut the door. It was a door that could only be locked from inside, but Marina held it as hard as she could, bracing her feet against the wall.
“Let me out. Let me out,” Lee screamed. “Open the door!”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Marina said. “How can you lie to me after you gave me your word? You promised me you’d never shoot anyone else and here you are starting in all over again. I’m pregnant. I can’t take it all the time. I could lose the baby and you wouldn’t even care.” Marina was hurt, angry, and in tears, with red nervous splotches all over her face, a frowsy little figure in her housecoat.
“Let me out!”
“Over my dead body I will. I have evidence against you. I’ll take it to the police.”
“You just try.”
Their tug of war lasted three minutes, with the advantage sometimes on her side, sometimes on his. Although she weighed less than one houndred pounds, Marina could summon up a wonderful, concentrated energy at moments like this. She had held Lee in the bathroom before at least once in their apartment in Fort Worth, and she was to do so three or four times again, in New Orleans, almost always to avoid a beating.
But her words seemed to unman him this time: “I could lose the baby because of you. You’ll have killed your own child.”
Lee relented. “Okay, I won’t do it. Open up.”
“Only if you give me your gun.”
“Okay. Only open the door.”
She opened it, and Lee came out. His face was red from exertion, and his eyes had the angry glitter she knew well.
Marina was trembling all over. She eyed him like a watchful bird.
“Give me the gun,” she said.
He handed it to her.
“Take off your clothes.”
He stripped to his T-shirt and shorts.
Marina went quickly into the bedroom carrying the revolver. She shoved it under the mattress without looking to see if it was loaded.
“If you’re going to keep me here all day,” he yelled, “at least give me something to read.”
She looked around for his book.
“Over there, on the coffee table,” he said.
She brought it to him. Then she took away his shoes. For two or three hours Lee sat on the toilet seat, reading with the door closed. Marina could not see him, but she kept her eyes on the door and her ears alert for any sound.
Finally, at three or four in the afternoon, he came out of the bathroom and sat in the living room, reading in the undershorts that were all Marina would allow him. They did not exchange a word. Toward evening, he carried the baby to her bath and sat with her, naked, in the tub. They played more quietly than usual, and he did not use baby talk.
It was only now, when he was naked and in the bathtub, that Marina let him out of her sight. She ran downstairs and bolted all the doors, including the backyard gate. She wanted to make sure that if she was busy later on, cooking or getting the baby to bed, she would hear him if he tried to get out, hear him fiddling with the locks.
Marina ate her supper first, eyeing Lee warily the whole time. Then, with a contemptuous air, as if she were keeping a prisoner, she allowed him to come to the table—“You may eat if you wish.”
He brought his book to the table, and neither of them spoke for the rest of the evening.
As they were getting ready to go to bed, he asked if he might have his pistol back.
“No.”
He rummaged through all the drawers. “Where did you hide it?”
“You can have it—but only if you promise you’ll never do that again.”
“I promise.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if our baby is born insane. I can’t stand it any more. Either the baby will be crazy or I will.”
“Okay, give me my gun and I’ll put it back where it belongs.”
Marina did not want to touch it; she was afraid that it might go off. She merely motioned to the mattress. Lee drew the pistol out and put it where he usually kept it, on the top shelf in his office. But curiously, he left her in possession of the “evidence” against him that she had mentioned to him that day. It was the note he had left her, in Russian, on the night he went to shoot General Walker. Marina allowed Lee to have his pistol back. But she kept the note, moving it from place to place, until it finally came to rest among her cookbooks.
With the “Nixon” drama over, Marina sensed a falling off, an easing of her husband’s tension. Since his attempt on Walker, he had been hanging over an emotional precipice. He had geared himself up to kill, to be captured, and face trial and punishment. The failure of anything to happen had been a fearful anticlimax. And so Lee poured his energy on the nearest person, the safest person—and it worked. He could easily have won the battle of the bathroom if he had wished. Instead, he spent himself in the struggle and emerged harmless. With Marina as his tool, he disarmed himself emotionally.
Exactly what he had in mind when he said he was going to “look” at Nixon will never be known. From the painstaking way he had laid the paper face up, on the coffee table, perhaps he hoped to be caught at something and make a show of his concern for Cuba. But Nixon was not in Dallas. The very next day, Monday, Governor John Connally of Texas, with whom Lee had corresponded in a fruitless effort to alter his “undesirable” discharge, was due in Dallas to speak at the Marriott Hotel. And the day after that, Vice President Johnson would be at the same place. He might have tried to shoot either of them, but Lee had lost his keenness to kill.
Marina later observed that their little charade had been aimed not at “Nixon” but at her. She sensed that it had been Lee’s purpose to wound her or test her in some way. She was right. Lee was testing her to see whether, when he reached a certain frame of mind, he could count on her to stop him. She passed the test with flying colors. But she failed his other test. Lee mentioned Nixon, the one American politician whose name he knew she might recognize because Nixon had been to Russia, in order to warn her that he might kill somebody else, not just Walker. Lee sent that message—but Marina did not understand. It was too terrible. She continued to cling to the idea that General Walker was the only political figure who might be in danger from Lee.
But Marina had learned a lot about Lee, knowledge she would rather not have had. She now knew the full extent of his interest in politics, which she had not measured before. Not only that, she saw that he was willing to act on his ideas. She had also learned how calculating he could be. Isolated phenomena that she had been trying for months not to notice suddenly fell into place—Lee’s maps, his guns, his bus schedules, even the photograph for June. Lee had been planning his attempt on General Walker for at least two months, had planned and foreseen every detail, and had lied unblushingly to her. And she had learned that he wanted to be caught. She began to see that her husband was, in his own eyes, a great man who was unjustly ignored by the world and would do anything to wrest its attention.
Yet Marina’s worst discovery by far was her awareness that Lee would kill abstractly, for the sake of his ideas. He had tried to strangle her, of course, and for months she had been afraid of him. But to kill your wife in a fit of rage was nothing new. To kill someone you did not know, had never met, a man who had done you no harm, all for the sake of politics—to her that was unbelievable. It was sick. To learn that Lee was capable of that, Marina says, was “a terrible shock and discovery, like all the shocks in the world put together, a volcano.” It took a while to sink in, and she never got over it.
Marina was not a coward. Even Lee’s beatings had done nothing to temper the audacity of her tongue. “You’d be the greatest wife in the world,” he often said, “if only you couldn’t talk.” Yet her outspokenness had saved her. Lee could beat up her body, but he could not beat up her spirit, nor alter in the slightest what she thought. Thus far Marina had survived. But now it was another matter. Now she knew that she was in danger. It was a cataclysmic revelation. “I tried not to think about it much and I didn’t change quickly. But I began, really, to be afraid.”
What was she to do? Something in Marina, something commonsensical, resisted getting inside Lee’s head and “making her brain spin the way his did.” Already she had learned more about him than she could handle, and she saw that if she thought deeply about the Walker affair and all it told her about Lee, she would go out of her mind. It was with relief that she turned to the baby, the cooking, the cleaning. They save her from dwelling too long on the new knowledge of which she was now the uneasy possessor.
And yet she had to do something. Should she leave Lee? Take the baby and live alone? Or stay with Lee and try to change him. Just as her decision not to go to the police after the Walker shooting bore the stamp of her Soviet upbringing, so did the decision she came to now. In true Russian fashion, she decided that she was, indeed, her husband’s keeper; he was her responsibility, and it was up to her to straighten him out. In a phrase that could have come directly from a Soviet tract on family morality, she told herself that “I must apply all my strength to help correct my husband and put him on the right path.” She saw that she would have to use as her tools sympathy, affection, and understanding, and not so many of the harsh words that flooded all too readily from her tongue. They only made Lee pull away from her. Now it would be her task to draw him out. She must enter into his world and help him see where he was wrong.
After the Nixon episode they decided to move to New Orleans right away. Lee would go on ahead and look for work while Marina stayed on Neely Street until he sent for her. She was heartened by his willingness to move. Walker and Dallas appeared synonymous to her, and the two together spelled violence. Lee’s agreeing to leave Dallas must mean that he was giving up violence and choosing a peaceful life instead. Moreover, Marina hoped for succor from his family in New Orleans. They would help Lee find a job and would serve as a moral influence and a restraint. Their influence, on top of hers, would deter him. Marina was sure that he would be ashamed to shoot anybody in a city where he had a right-thinking family looking on. Things would be different in New Orleans, and once they were settled in their new home, she would figure out how to go about remaking him. “There, on the spot,” Marina said to herself, “I’ll see better how to do it.”
Marina could not have known it, but with the Walker attempt over, the cruelest and most poignant days of her marriage were over, too. That attempt, and the Nixon episode that followed, sealed a curious compact between husband and wife. Marina had not gone to the police after Walker, and in her significant motion at the mattress on the night of April 21, she had allowed Lee to have his pistol back. He for his part never asked her for the note he had left behind on the night he attempted to shoot General Walker. It was an odd sort of trust—she trusting him with his weapon, he trusting her with evidence she could use to stop him in the future. Yet with that compact, if that is what it was, things did change a little between them.
Slowly, very slowly, Lee began to admit Marina to the more daring and private of his two worlds. Where before he had kept her confined to the mundane, family side of his life only, now he would occasionally permit her a glimpse of the world that meant most to him, what Marina calls the “high-flying world of his ideas.” She says that she was still “an obstacle in his way, but he no longer showed it as openly as he had before. I was someone with whom he could take off his mask,” and whom, for a moment now and then, he could trust.
If Marina had learned a good deal about Lee from his attempt on General Walker, he, too, had drawn lessons—portentous ones. First, he had learned that if ever he was to win attention for himself and his ideas, he would have to do it on a very grand scale. He had shot at the most famous man in Dallas, he had missed him by less than an inch, and the only newspaper coverage had been a single, front-page story in each of the two Dallas papers and another tiny story inside one of them. Three stories—and not a single one mentioned his name. Next time, if it was an act of violence that was to make him famous, he would have to go after someone “at the very top.”
Second, Lee was astonished at how easily he got off and at the ineptness of the police. They had the bullet, yet they identified it wrongly and wrongly identified the type of rifle from which it was fired. Moreover, they had apparently been thrown off by rumors about cars and coconspirators, rumors Lee knew to be false. Lee concluded, as he said to Marina, that you can do anything and get away with it if only you think it out ahead. He had tried something cataclysmic—and he had not been caught. He had not even been touched.
Thus by far the greatest legacy Lee carried out of the Walker attempt was the conviction that he was invulnerable, that he stood at the center of a magic circle swathed in a cloak of immunity. It was a feeling that fitted dangerously with the feeling he already had that he was special, that he had particular prerogatives. He and he alone was entitled to that that was forbidden to everybody else.