On the morning of Wednesday, April 24, Ruth Paine drove from Irving to Dallas and arrived on Neely Street with her two children, ready for another outing with the Oswalds, something like their picnic a few days before.1 She was surprised to find the three of them, Lee, Marina, and little June, perched on a mountain of luggage.
The Oswalds explained that they had decided to move to New Orleans. Lee was going ahead to look for work, while Marina and the baby would stay on Neely Street, keeping only a minimum of possessions and waiting until Lee could send for them.
Lee asked Ruth to take him to the bus terminal. She agreed, and all six of them, children and grown-ups, crowded into Ruth’s station wagon around Lee’s gear. They drove to the Continental Trailways terminal, where Lee went inside to check his bags and buy two tickets, one for him to use that night and one for Marina when she came to join him.
Ruth sat in the station wagon gathering her thoughts. It would be hard for Marina on Neely Street without a telephone, knowing only a few words of English and with no easy way of reaching Lee. And the bus trip to New Orleans would be an ordeal. It was twelve or thirteen hours long, and Marina was pregnant. She would have a small child in tow, and although Lee was plainly carrying everything he could, she would still have clothing, dishes, a playpen, a stroller, and a crib to get on board.
Ruth had been worried about Marina almost from the moment they met.2 She felt that Marina was lonely, troubled, and in need of a friend. She started worrying a good deal more after one of their outings in March, when Marina confided that Lee meant to send her back to Russia and she did not want to go. Marina had not mentioned it since, and Ruth was mystified as to where the Oswalds’ marriage stood. But both she and Michael felt that it was “cruel” of Lee not to let Marina learn English. They were appalled that she might have to go back to Russia against her will. It had occurred to them that they might be able to offer her an alternative if the need became acute. As Michael was to put it later: “I thought out of the largesse of this country it should be possible for her to stay here if she wanted to.… She struck me as a somewhat apolitical person and yet true, just, and conscientious, so it was agreeable to me to look forward to financing her stay until she could make her own way here.”3
Ruth had already done more than just think about helping out. Fearful that she might offend and that, with her limited Russian, she might not be able to find the proper words in conversation, she had sat down on April 7, taken out her English-Russian dictionary and, with enormous effort, written a letter to Marina. In it she suggested that if things became too difficult between her and Lee and they were not able to work out their problems, then she and June would be welcome to stay at the Paines’ for as long as they needed.4 Ruth placed one condition on her offer: that she be able to speak to Lee directly about it and that Marina’s acceptance be agreeable to him. She had talked to Michael about her offer, but the fact is that Ruth was willing and able to make it because Michael was not living at home, there was an extra room, and she was lonely.
Ruth did not mail the letter. To come between the Oswalds was the last thing she wanted to do. But now, as she sat in the car, it occurred to her that she might be able to help during the days just ahead. Having summoned up language to write the letter, she realized that she had the words at her command to make her invitation in Russian, so that Marina, as well as Lee, would understand.
When Lee returned to the car, Ruth made her suggestion. Instead of going back to Neely Street, why didn’t Marina and June stay with her in Irving? As soon as Lee sent for them, she would drive them to New Orleans.
Lee did not hesitate. It is not even clear that he consulted Marina. He accepted, strode back into the terminal, redeemed Marina’s ticket, returned to the car, and handed Marina part of her fare to use as spending money. He did not offer to contribute to groceries or other costs of the suddenly expanded Paine household.
As they were driving back to Neely Street to pack up Marina’s and the baby’s possessions, Lee asked Ruth if she would stop for a moment at the central post office. Ruth noticed as he emerged that he was carrying a stack of magazines.5 Lee had not closed his post office box; he merely cleared out what was in it. The “magazines” Ruth noticed may have included the fifty leaflets that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had mailed on April 19 from New York.
When they got back to the apartment, Lee began to load the baby things into Ruth’s car—the playpen, the crib, the stroller. He packed up a box of dishes and laid Marina’s and the baby’s clothing loosely over them. Since the suitcases were going with him, Marina had at most an overnight bag.
The helter-skelter nature of his packing differed sharply from the careful job he had done the night before. Then, he gave everything the most sedulous attention and refused to let Marina help. It wasn’t woman’s work, he said. He had traveled more and had more practice. The result was that Marina forgot about the rifle. She forgot to ask what he was going to do with it—leave it with her or take it to New Orleans? But Marina was not as worried as she had been. Lee was calmer than she had seen him in months. He was subdued, even downcast, over their separation and the uncertainty ahead. Marina’s fears that he might try to shoot someone had subsided. She felt that his agreement to move signified a renunciation of violence—as, in a way, it did.
Ruth, Marina, and the children set off for Irving about four in the afternoon, leaving Lee behind in the apartment. Once again, just as when he moved from Fort Worth to Dallas, he had found someone to take care of Marina and June while he got settled in a new city. Ruth had been expected that day, and Lee knew that she would agree to drive him and his baggage to the bus station. Her last-minute offer to take Marina to Irving came as a convenient surprise; but Lee, in confronting Ruth with his helpless wife and child, must at least have been counting on her to watch out for them on Neely Street. He had, as usual, taken her help for granted. He stayed only a few hours in the Neely Street apartment after Marina and Ruth left, then boarded an evening bus for New Orleans.
Early the next morning, April 25, Mrs. Lillian Murret’s telephone rang at 757 French Street, New Orleans.
“Hello, Aunt Lillian.”
“Who is this?”
“Lee.”
“Lee?” She was very much surprised.
“Yes,” was the laconic answer.
“When did you last get out? When did you get back? What are you doing?” The last Mrs. Murret had heard of her prodigal nephew, he had defected to the USSR with considerable publicity, to the great embarrassment of them all. They thought that what he had done was reprehensible, and they supposed that they would never be seeing him again.
“Well, I’m glad you got back,” Mrs. Murret said.
Lee asked his aunt if she could put him up for a while, and she agreed. When he arrived at the house, “he was very poorly dressed,” Mrs. Murret said later. He had no jacket, just a sport shirt, “and a very poorly pair of pants.”
“Lee,” she said, “you don’t look too presentable. I am going to buy you some clothes.” No, no, he protested. He had everything he needed. He had checked his luggage at the bus terminal.6
Lee was overjoyed by his reception. He had written the Murrets from Russia but had not had an answer. They were extremely conservative, they disapproved of his going to Russia, and he was afraid they might not welcome him to New Orleans. Anticipating this, Lee had confided to Marina that he suspected the Murrets lived beyond what his uncle’s earnings would support. Lillian’s husband, Charles Ferdinand, or “Dutz,” Murret, as he had been known since his prizefight days, was a steamship clerk, and Lee thought that his uncle might be engaged in some other activity on the side, like bookmaking. There is no evidence that this was so, but that was Lee’s way of accounting for their discomfiture at his going to Russia and the possibility that they might not be glad to see him. He thought they did not want to do anything that might bring attention to them. By confiding his suspicions to Marina, Lee had covered in advance his own embarrassment in case they refused to help him.
Lillian Murret had taken care of Lee both as a child and as a teenager, and if her own children had been jealous of him, they had never once shown it. The Murrets were a close-knit Catholic family, and the children were raised to be kind. They considered Lee different from other children and felt sorry for him. But Mrs. Murret says that they “loved Lee.… They have always loved him.”7
Only two of the five Murret children were at home now—John, or “Bogie,” four years older than Lee, who had attended Loyola and St. Louis Universities, had been a professional basketball player, and was working as a salesman for E. R. Squibb and Company; and Marilyn, Lee’s favorite cousin. Marilyn was a schoolteacher, tall, thin, and thirty-five, with straight dark hair. Marilyn shared Lee’s love of travel. She had spent three and a half years roaming the world on tramp steamers and had taught in places as far away as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. She liked Lee, Lee liked her, and they were pleased to see each other again.
It was six or seven years since Dutz had seen Lee. “He looked older,” he recalled, “but he hadn’t changed too much.”8 But in Bogie’s view Lee had changed. He seemed really intelligent. Bogie thought Lee had grown intellectually, especially in his vocabulary, although he realized that Lee purposely picked his words to impress people. Still, Bogie says, “he was impressive.”9 As for Marilyn, she had noticed even as a child that Lee would read an encyclopedia where anybody else would read a novel. She conceded that he was not outgoing, that he would be liked by some and “hated” by others, but she had always respected him precisely because he was “different.” He was “refined,” he loved nature, he liked to “sit in the park and meditate.”10 And so once again, the whole Murret family was ready to help Lee if they could. Lee, as usual, stood on his pride, appeared to ask nothing, acting as if he did not want help and yet, as usual, accepting it.
They talked a little about Russia, but the Murrets noticed that Lee seldom spoke of the country unless they asked. They, for their part, did not pry. The person from whom he would take more frank talk than from anyone else was his sixty-three-year-old aunt Lillian. She was a small woman, a little plump, with a calm, unruffled look. She saw the faults of others but did not hold them to account for them. It was to Lillian that Lee owed most of his happy memories, and there was little she could say that would put him off. As soon as he arrived from the bus terminal, it was to her that Lee confided his plans. He wanted to stay with her a few days while he looked for work. When he found a job, he would send for Marina and the baby. Lillian asked what Marina was like. “Just like any American housewife,” came the reply. “She wears shorts.” Lillian was impressed by Lee’s eagerness to bring her to New Orleans.
He began looking for jobs right away. He got dressed, skipped breakfast, scanned all the want ads in the morning paper, and started off about 8:30 in the morning. He was out all day and came home just in time for supper at 5:30 or 6:00 P.M. After supper he sat down with the rest of the family and watched television. He generally went to bed early.
On one of his first evenings with the Murrets, Dutz drove Lee to the Continental Trailways terminal to pick up his bags. When they were home again, Lee refused to allow his uncle to touch anything. He unloaded everything himself and stacked it in the Murrets’ garage. The family attributed his insistence on doing it all himself to his being the old Lee they knew so well, the proud, independent Lee who did not need anything from anyone. But Lee may have had another motive. His rifle, and perhaps his pistol, were in the luggage.
On Sunday morning, three days after Lee’s arrival, they were talking about relatives. Suddenly, Lee turned to his aunt Lillian.
“Do you know anything about the Oswalds?”
She did not. “I don’t know any of them other than your father, and I saw your uncle one time. I don’t know anything about the family.”
“Well, you know,” Lee said, “I don’t know any of my relatives. You are the only one I know.”11 He added that he had been embarrassed when Marina’s family in Russia had asked about his relatives and his descent. He had to admit that he did not know. After that, he realized that he missed not being close to his family and not knowing anyone on his father’s side.12
That very morning he boarded the streetcar that ran past the Murrets’ house to the end of the Lakeview line and the cemetery where his father was buried. The cemetery keeper helped him find his father’s grave.
Later that same Sunday the conversation turned again to the Oswalds. Lee sat down with a telephone directory and called every Oswald in the book to ask how he could contact his grandfather, Harvey Oswald.13 Finally, he reached an elderly lady in Metairie who was able to answer his questions. Harvey Oswald was dead, she said, and so were all his four sons: Thomas, Harvey N., William Stout, and Robert E. Lee Oswald, Lee’s father. Her name was Hazel, the widow of William Stout Oswald. She had a large, framed photograph of R. E. Lee Oswald, which Lee was welcome to have.14
That was enough for Lee. Using the street map he carried with him at all times, he figured out how to get to 136 Elmeer Street in Metairie. Hazel Oswald received him graciously. She gave Lee his father’s photograph and explained who his relatives were. It turned out that the Oswalds, like Lee’s family on his mother’s side, the Claveries, were of French and German descent. Although his uncles were dead, Hazel said that his father had three sisters, all alive and in New Orleans. Lee also had six first cousins in New Orleans and at least one first cousin once removed. But the family had drifted away from Lee’s father. R. E. Lee Oswald had been separated from his first wife for some time when he met Marguerite, and he got a divorce only when he decided to remarry. As Catholics, most of the family did not like it and saw little of R. E. Lee after that.15 A few of them continued to see him and his new family, but his funeral in August 1939 had been the end of it. Only Hazel had seen Marguerite since, but she had never met Lee.
Proudly, Lee showed his aunt a photograph of Marina. Hazel, like the rest of the family, had read of Lee’s defection in the papers but had been too tactful to bring it up. On seeing Marina’s photograph, however, her curiosity involuntarily slipped out. “Is she Russian?” Hazel asked. Lee flinched and said, “Why do you ask that?”16 When he got back to the Murrets’ that night, he reported that his aunt had been “very nice,” “very, very happy” to see him, and had invited him to come back again.17
He never did. Nor did he look up his cousins or his aunts or go back to visit his father’s grave. Perhaps he had discovered all he wanted to know; perhaps Hazel’s question put him off; perhaps his father’s photograph was a disappointment; perhaps his interests simply shifted. But he had made at least an attempt to trace his father’s history, to find out where he came from, to whom he belonged. In the city of his birth, he had gone back to the beginning of his life in search of the father he had lost, a loss that was perhaps in the forefront of his mind since he had said goodbye to George de Mohrenschildt only two weeks earlier. He found a grave and a photograph, nothing more. He did not tell Marina that he had visited his father’s grave or gone to see Hazel Oswald. He did not show her his father’s photograph. The picture did not turn up later among his possessions.
Lee continued his search for a job by answering newspaper ads and through the Louisiana State Employment Office, where characteristically, he lied about his previous job history and claimed, on his unemployment compensation forms, to have applied for jobs he had not applied for at all. His references, too, were works of imagination. He often used his Uncle Dutz Murret’s name, although he had not asked his permission. Occasionally he listed “George Hidell,” whom he described as a “college student” at “705 Polk Street.”18 The address and occupation were fictitious, while the name “George Hidell” appears to have been made up of his own alias, “Hidell,” and the first name of de Mohrenschildt. Lee also fell back for references on William S. Oswald Jr., Alice Barre, and William S. Oswald III, an uncle, aunt, and cousin, respectively, whom he did not know and did not bother to look up and whose addresses he sometimes gave incorrectly.
Finally, two weeks to the day after his arrival in New Orleans, Lee found a job as a greaser and maintenance man at the William B. Reily Company, distributor of Luzianne coffee. On his brief application there, he may have set his own record for lies. He said that he had been living at 757 French Street (the Murrets’) for three years and that he had graduated from a high school that he had attended for only a few weeks; and he gave as references his cousin John Murret, whose permission he did not ask; Sergeant Robert Hidell (a composite of his brother Robert and his own alias “Hidell”), “on active duty with the US Marine Corps” (a fiction from beginning to end); and “Lieutenant J. Evans, active duty US Marine Corps” (the surname and first initial of a man he was to look up later that day, combined with a fictitious Marine Corps rank and identification).19
The job was manual labor, but at $1.50 an hour it paid more than his last job at $1.35. Lee had applied for photography jobs, or so he claimed on his unemployment compensation forms, but when the Louisiana State Employment Office actually arranged a job interview in photography, Lee did not bother to show up. On the morning he got his new job, he came back to the Murrets’ waving his newspaper in the air, grabbed Aunt Lillian around the neck, kissed her, and triumphantly announced, “I got it, I got it!”
Lillian was not impressed. “You know, Lee,” she said, in one of those remarks that only she could get away with, “you are really not qualified to do anything too much. If you don’t like this job, why don’t you try to go back to school at night and see if you can’t learn a trade?”
“No,” Lee said. “I don’t have to go back to school. I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.”20
The same day he found the job, Lee also found an apartment. Myrtle and Julian Evans had known Lee and his mother when he was growing up, and Marguerite had once rented an apartment from them. Lee went to their building, and Julian Evans, who was seated at breakfast drinking his last cup of coffee, recognized him right away. He had known Lee both as a child and as a teenager, and there was something about him that neither he nor Myrtle liked. Julian finished his coffee, shook hands with the caller, and left for work. His wife Myrtle, a heavy-set woman in her fifties, who wore glasses and had reddish hair in a bun, peered at Lee closely. “I know you, don’t I?”
“Sure, I am Lee Oswald. I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.”
“Lee Oswald! What are you doing in this country? I thought you were in Russia.”21
He explained that he was back, that he had a Russian wife and a child, and was looking for an apartment. There was nothing available at the Evanses, but Myrtle volunteered to help him look. It occurred to her that if he was going to work at the Reily coffee company, they might as well try on Magazine Street so Lee could live close to his job. They drove up and down Magazine Street looking for “For Rent” signs. Lee spotted one and they went in.
There were two apartments for rent at 4907 Magazine Street, and the bigger one looked as if it might do. It was on the ground floor. It had a long living room, a screened-in front porch, a yard, and the kind of iron fence children can’t crawl through. The rent was $65 a month. Myrtle advised Lee that it was the best value for his money and he’d better take it.
The landlady was Mrs. Jesse Garner, and Lee gave her a month’s rent and an application for utilities along with a $5 deposit. But then he told another of his funny, pointless lies. He said he worked for the Leon Israel Company of 300 Magazine Street. The company existed, but it was not the company that had hired him.
Myrtle Evans took Lee home with her for lunch. They talked about New Orleans, about Lee’s mother and brothers, and about Russia. Mrs. Evans’s curiosity was piqued about Marina. She said she would like to meet her.
“Just come any time,” said Lee.
That was the last Myrtle Evans ever saw of him.
Lee called Marina that evening to tell her about the job and the apartment. The next day, Friday, May 10, he went to work at the Reily coffee company for the first time and spent the night in his new apartment. On Saturday he showed up early at the Murrets’. Marina was expected that day, and they decided to move Lee’s luggage before she came. Again Lee loaded the car by himself; then he and Dutz sat in front with Marilyn and her mother behind, and the four of them drove to Magazine Street together. Lee was obviously eager for Marina to arrive. And he was delighted with the apartment. The neighborhood was not good, but the apartment had been freshly painted, the icebox was new, and some of the furniture looked new. Lee was not sure that Marina would like it, however. It had high ceilings, and Marina, like many Soviet Russians, did not like high ceilings.
For Marina the two weeks she stayed at Ruth Paine’s were like a vacation. She was tired; she was still trying to absorb the horrifying new facts she had only just learned about her husband. It was a relief to be taken care of and have no responsibility other than looking after June. It was a relief not to have to anticipate Lee’s moods every second and try to guess what new and dreadful surprise might be lurking around the corner.
Marina was very grateful. But Ruth Paine was of all Americans the very last whom Marina’s experience could have equipped her to understand. Like the de Mohrenschildts, the Paines were an extremely unlikely couple to have befriended the Oswalds. Even seeing Ruth and Marina together was a study in contrasts.
Ruth was tall, slender, lithe, with a figure like a dancer. She had a thin, longish face with freckles and short, slightly wavy brown hair. The appearance of seriousness she gave was enhanced by a pair of rimless glasses. And she had a tendency to go around singing. Like many people who have been serious even as children, she had a good deal of unexpended child in her. Ruth could be a little bit fey.
Ruth Avery Hyde grew up in the Middle West, the daughter of parents who felt strongly about the value of education and good works. When she was only thirteen, Ruth spent a summer on a truck farm in Ohio as her way of contributing to the effort to win World War II. The next summer she was with a traveling Bible school, teaching in Ohio and Indiana. At nineteen, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio, she became a Quaker, a convinced Quaker, often the most dedicated kind. She wanted to be a teacher, and by the time she graduated, she had held an astonishing array of jobs. She had taught in elementary schools in the East and the Middle West and had been a recreation leader at Jewish community centers in Ohio and Indiana, at a club for elderly immigrants in Philadelphia, and at a Friends’ work camp in South Dakota. Whatever the job, Ruth was liked and respected and was always asked to come back.
She was a teacher, aged twenty-five, at the Germantown Friends’ School in Philadelphia when she met and married Michael Paine. The marriage was not only suitable, it appeared inevitable, so much did Ruth and Michael share. They met through a common love of madrigal singing and folk dancing; both were children of divorce, and both came from families of exceptional social conscience. But their marriage was in trouble from the start, before the start, really, because Michael was not sure about his capacity for love. They moved to Texas, and in September 1962 they separated. Michael was now living alone in an apartment in Grand Prairie, Texas, and came home two or three times a week. This, the break with Michael, which she was hoping against hope to mend, was the sorrow of Ruth’s life. It was the aching place that Marina, slightly and for a while, was to fill.
Ruth had spent her life helping others, but charitable though her every instinct was, she had mixed feelings about Lee. She sensed that Lee was using her. On the morning of April 24, when Lee was on his way to New Orleans, he had simply taken it for granted that she would ferry him to the bus terminal. Lee did not ask, he expected. But her awareness of this did not deter Ruth from inviting Lee’s wife and child to stay with her. And when he accepted without even offering to help with their expenses, Ruth’s concern, characteristically, was for Marina, not herself. Marina was not a sponger. She had pride. Ruth thought that Lee must not love his wife at all if he could place her in so awkward a situation and go to so little trouble to take care of her.
She was right on the mark. Marina genuinely liked Ruth. She liked her company and loved being at her house. But she had qualms of conscience. She hated being a burden, hated being in a position where she had little to give. On April 24, even before the two women left for Irving, Marina seems to have sought reassurance. Lee gave it, telling her that she had nothing to be ashamed of. “Ruth is lonely,” he said. “You’ll be company for her. And you can teach her Russian.”
Still, Marina hardly had a penny, she contributed nothing to the household, and she was ashamed. She helped with the cleaning and washing up. And she helped Ruth with her Russian. Marina tried to tell herself that she was doing more for Ruth than Ruth was doing for her, and Ruth, too, told her the same thing many times. But it would not wash. Marina was deeply in Ruth’s debt, and she knew it.
The relationship had its other angularities. Ruth was thirty-one, Marina twenty-one, and to Marina the gap was enormous. She was in Ruth’s home, dependent on her, and it was natural to place her in the role of mother. Whenever she and June were talking, Marina spoke of Ruth as Tyotya, or “Aunt Ruth,” an ordinary way of speaking in Russia, where close women friends of the family are called “aunt.” But to Ruth the word had an unwelcome sound. She wanted to be a friend and an equal. Not only that. Ruth guessed that Marina’s feelings toward her mother had been very mixed, compounded of hate as well as love. She sensed that any relationship in which she was cast in the role of mother could turn out to be a minefield of complications.
There was also the language barrier between them. Ruth had a splendid education, but in Russian she was only a beginner. There was a huge, frustrating gap between what this thoughtful, sensitive woman might be thinking and what she could say in Russian. Ruth later recalled that her lack of Russian was “a terrible impediment to talking and to friendship” with Marina; it was “a terrible embarrassment” and an ironic one as well.22 Here she was in her own house, commanding the telephone, recruiting lawn mowers and babysitters, making arrangements with marvelous efficiency, yet linguistically she was on Marina’s turf. Ruth felt as helpless as a child.
Marina for her part kept enormous reticences. But they were reticences of loyalty, not of language. She chattered freely about her life in Russia, her girlfriends, her aunts, her boyfriends. But she said no more about Lee’s plan to send her back to Russia. She never mentioned that Lee beat her. She did not know that Ruth was a pacifist, nor even what a pacifist is, but she had the wit not to mention that Lee had a rifle and had attempted to kill General Walker. Nor did she say that she had persuaded Lee to move to New Orleans out of fear of his using it again. Ruth had said that knowledge of the Walker attempt would have altered all her actions toward the Oswalds. She would have gone to the police and found a psychiatrist for Lee, or done both, as soon as she learned of it.
With such portentous silences on Marina’s side, it is scarcely a wonder that Ruth eventually concluded that Marina was a bit of “an enigma,” that they were “different sorts of people.”23 But her awareness was a long time coming, and meanwhile the two of them trotted along, like a pair of tired ponies, in easy harness. It was a friendship of shared exhaustion. Doubt as to whether their husbands loved them and would ever want to live with them again—this was the rock on which their companionship was built. Both of them, after the ordeal of their marriages, required a rest. Ruth was later to say that she and Marina gave each other “great moral support” at a difficult time for both.24 As for the difference between them—lack of language, their fundamental incongruousness as friends—even these made for a restful distance, a feeling of live and let live, and respect for each other’s privacy.
As she got to know Marina, Ruth’s reservations about Lee grew to active dislike. It looked to her as if Lee “just wanted to get rid of his wife.”25 He had not even taken her to a doctor although she was three months pregnant. Ruth had made almost a life’s work out of finding the best in people, but she had yet to find anything good in Lee.
Talking with Marina, Ruth came away with the impression that although she was troubled about Lee, she was committed to their marriage and would give her all for its survival. But Ruth had no inkling of how frightening Marina’s worries were. To Marina the Walker affair and its “Nixon” sequel meant that Lee loved “politics” more than he loved her and June. She feared that he could not wait to ship them both off to Russia so he could resume the political activities they had unwittingly interrupted. Life, or Lee, she limply supposed, would carry her as far as New Orleans. After that, Russia loomed like an iceberg.
As for Ruth’s feelings about Michael, Marina had the evidence of her own eyes. On the days when Michael was expected, Ruth hummed with happiness. She went skipping, almost airborne, about the house, singing madrigals in anticipation. And at suppertime—Michael generally came on Tuesday and Friday evening—she set the table with great care and served dinner by candlelight. Ruth was in love with Michael. She would do anything to patch up their marriage.
It was Michael whom Marina could not figure out. She was familiar enough with the ways of anger, but coldness she could not understand. To her it appeared that Michael had no feelings for anyone, not for Ruth, not even for his own children. What Marina could not have known was that Michael blamed himself bitterly. He yearned to be in love with his wife. He, too, would mend the marriage if he could. And what Marina could never have guessed was that underneath Michael’s reserve, his icily intellectual New England exterior, lay considerable compassion for her.
Marina and Lee were in touch. She had a happy note from him, written the day after his arrival in New Orleans, announcing that his aunt Lillian had taken him in warmly, that he was looking for work and would write to her as soon as he found it.26 Marina was pleased that he signed the letter with the Russian Tseluyu—“I kiss you” or “Love”—a greeting he did not use even with his own mother. Maybe in spite of all that had happened he really did love her after all.
Once she called him on the telephone. And another time she wrote him a letter in which she mentioned that Ruth was driving east on her vacation and had offered to take her along. Marina wondered if she ought to go, ought to scout job possibilities in Washington, New York, and Philadelphia where there were Russian-speaking communities and where her language might be a help, not a hindrance, in finding work. Ruth had said that Marina was “quite excited” by the idea.27 Her enthusiasm was in contrast with the passivity she had shown a few months earlier when George Bouhe and Katya Ford had tried to show her that she was not bound to Lee, that she could find a job and free herself. Now, for the first time, she seemed open to the idea.
The fact that she was at a distance from Lee and living in the household of a woman who was preparing to be self-supporting probably had something to do with the change. But Marina may also have been suggesting, as she had done before, that she could try to find work and help support them if Lee was unable to get a job. Or she may have been offering him an “out.” If he really did not love her and did not want to live with her again—or if he had any more horrors in store—then here was a chance to get rid of her without forcing her to go back to Russia.
And yet, for Marina, writing to Lee about finding a job was also the sort of ploy she used when she was trying to win somebody’s love. By hinting that she, too, had choices, that other people thought she could find a job, she was bidding up her own value to win back Lee’s love. She knew that it would make him jealous, and that for his jealousy she would have to pay. But it was utterly like her to get him to love her now—and pay later.28
Then came another cheerful letter from Lee in which he said that he still had not found a job, but his uncle had offered him a loan of $200.29 Finally, on May 9 he called with triumph in his voice to announce that he had found a job and an apartment, and to ask them to come to New Orleans right away. Lee’s voice told Marina what she had been longing to hear: he loved her, he missed her, he wanted to pick up their family life again. Once more she began to have hope.
Overcome with joy, she cried out: “Papa loves us! Papa loves us!” to little June as if she did not believe it herself.
By noon the next day Marina, Ruth, and the three children were off in Ruth’s station wagon on the five hundred-mile journey to New Orleans.