Marina hated the new apartment. She took one look at the high ceilings and the cockroaches and could barely hide her disappointment. Lee tried to show her how nice it was—the screened-in porch and the yard with wild strawberries growing in it. He had mopped the floor and cleaned the place, hoping she would like it. Marina knew it, knew his desire to please, but her feelings showed through. Seeing them together, it occurred to Ruth that Lee might or might not care about Marina, but he certainly cared about her opinion.
Marina and Ruth had arrived earlier that afternoon at the Murrets’. The five of them—two tired women and three small children—tumbled out of the station wagon and created chaos. Lee was beside himself with pride as he introduced Marina and the baby. He carried June on his shoulders and was ecstatic to see her walking for the first time.
Marina, too, was pleased, thinking that this house was to be her home. It was clean, cozy, neat—everything she had ever wanted. Then the truth reached her; she was going to have to live somewhere else. The Murrets were very kind to her, but Marina was miserably self-conscious. She thought she looked ugly and pregnant.
After an hour at the Murrets’, they drove to Magazine Street, and once Marina recovered from her initial shock, the five of them settled in fairly quickly. Ruth and the three children slept in the living room and a small extra room beside, it, while Lee and Marina used the bedroom in back.
They were happy to be together again—“I’ve missed you so,” Lee said again and again—and they made love three times that night and the next morning. It was the first time they had made love since March 29 or 30, the weekend when Marina had taken Lee’s photograph with the rifle. In the morning Ruth, on her way to the bathroom, passed by as they were making love.
“Do you think she saw?” Marina asked anxiously.
“Of course,” said Lee.
They were both embarrassed. Lee hardly dared face Ruth in the kitchen, and Marina felt the same way.
As for Ruth, she noticed that, pleased as Lee and Marina had been to see one another at first, irritation and even anger flared up quickly between them, very often over nothing at all. She and Marina had bought blackberries as they drove across Louisiana, and on Sunday Lee tried to make blackberry wine. Marina was sharp with him—“What are you doing, wasting all those good berries?” Lee kept on with it, but he was disheartened by Marina’s anger, and when she was not looking, he threw the whole mess out, berries, wine, and all. Shrewish as Marina was, Lee was even worse. He was in a bad temper the entire time. “Shut up,” he would say whenever Marina opened her mouth, and Ruth thought he was “rude” and “discourteous” to Marina throughout her visit.1 So ferocious was their bickering that Ruth decided the presence of three extra people must be adding to the strain. She and her children left on Tuesday, a day or so ahead of schedule.
But the bickering went on, for it was the currency of their relationship. Marina says that even on quiet days the marriage was a succession of “tears and caresses, arguments and reconciliations.” Lee did not beat her, but their fights were amplified in Russian, an unfamiliar tongue, and their neighbors in New Orleans were soon in nearly the same condition of shock as their neighbors in Dallas. The state of the marriage, the state of mind of the principals, had to be measured by something other than the decibel count. With the Oswalds, ordinary conversation sounded like argument, and a real argument like a fight to the finish. What counted was the mood of the marriage, and in New Orleans the first couple of months were hard. Marina was depressed and Lee preoccupied. They fought constantly, with little humor in their battle.
They fought about everything. A week or so after Marina’s arrival, Lee bought some crabs, brought them home, and left them simmering on the stove. Not knowing that he meant to cook them his own way, Marina added spices, the ones she knew from Russia. Lee was furious.
They fought about cockroaches, too. Marina sometimes got up at night and went to the kitchen for something cold to drink. The place would be swarming with cockroaches.
“Come in and admire your handiwork,” she would call out toward the bedroom—it was “his” handiwork because Lee did not allow her to use the spray.
He would run in naked from the bedroom, brandishing a can of roach spray and squirting it everywhere. Marina laughed, because he was too stingy to buy decent spray and too stingy to use enough of it and because he put it in the wrong places.
“You woke me up, and now you’re laughing at me.” He was hurt.
Every day while he was at work, Marina scrubbed the floor and the furniture. But the apartment was old and dark, and no matter how hard she tried to clean it, the place still got her down. But she loved to go walking at night with Lee, letting him show her New Orleans, even though she sometimes felt that he did it because he thought it was his duty and not because he wanted to. Strolling through one neighborhood or another, Lee would sometimes wave at a building and crow, “I went to that school.” It happened often enough that Marina began to wonder just how many schools he had been to.
What she enjoyed most were their walks along Bourbon Street. She adored the lights and the music and the glimpses of strippers dancing. She begged Lee to take her inside. He refused, said Bourbon Street was “a dirty place,” and put on a show of inattentiveness as they walked past the famous swinging doors. Marina thought that he liked Bourbon Street just the same.
Marina made no secret of her interest in sex. At the newsstands, where they fairly often found themselves at night, she would pick out the most unwholesome-looking magazines she could find and pore over the photographs of nude men and women. Lee affected to be above it all. He read the news magazines. But more than once she spied him flicking through a girlie magazine.
Aside from June, whom they both adored, sex was again the brightest feature of their marriage. For all his Puritanism, Lee enjoyed making love. After intercourse he would go into the bathroom to wash off, emerge singing one of his arias, and lie down with his back to Marina.
“Don’t touch me,” he would say. “And don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”
There was a mirror at the foot of their bed, and Lee would pile up pillows at the head of the bed so he could watch them making love. Marina did not like it. She pulled the pillows down or turned her head away. She was hurt that the mirror seemed to excite Lee more than she did.
Sometimes when she was sitting in front of the mirror brushing her hair, he would bend down to kiss her, looking into the mirror, and call her “Mama” or “my little girl.”
“Who are you kissing me for—me or the mirror?”
“You mean you don’t like it?”
“Of course not,” she would answer and give him a little rap on the rear end.
Although Marina insists that their sexual life was improving right up to the end and that, well over a year after Lee’s death, she still would have chosen him over any other man, the fact is that the balance had shifted. In Russia it was Lee who wanted sex more; now it was Marina. Sometimes when Lee came home hot and tired from work, he would beg off making love on the ground that he would be unable to keep it up long enough to satisfy Marina. But even when her pregnancy made intercourse uncomfortable for her, Marina was glad to give him satisfaction even if she did not receive it in return.
For she was no longer sure that Lee loved her, and she wanted to be needed and reassured. Every day she expected to hear that he still meant to send her back to Russia. Waiting for the ax to fall, her fears abated only when they were walking along Bourbon Street at night. Then the lights and the music and the sight of people enjoying themselves lifted her spirits a little.
On May 12, the day after Marina arrived in New Orleans, Lee made out a change-of-address card, closing his post office box in Dallas and giving his new home address. The change became effective May 14, and Lee once again began to receive the magazines and newspapers to which he subscribed, among them Soviet Belorussia, a daily subsidized by the Soviet government, and the Militant. News of Fidel Castro, then on a month-long tour of the Soviet Union, was featured in both papers, and the Militant in particular was critical of recent speeches by President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, hinting that the United States government was working for Castro’s overthrow.2
Lee had not forgotten Fidel Castro. The move to New Orleans, and the search for a new job and a new apartment, had distracted him from politics only briefly. Now he was to become more deeply involved in the Cuban cause than he ever had been and was to identify himself more strongly than ever with this particular revolution and its heroes. On May 22 he paid his first visit to the New Orleans Public Library, applied for a borrower’s card, and took out his first book. It was Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, by the biographer Robert Payne. Marina says that Lee compared himself to the great men he read about in books and genuinely believed that he was one of them.3
At this moment, however, Lee was thinking more about changing the society he was in than about building a new one, as Mao and Castro had done. And what he hoped to change first was United States policy toward Cuba. On May 26, therefore, he wrote again to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at its national headquarters, 799 Broadway, New York, announcing that he wanted to form a New Orleans chapter. He requested a charter for his chapter and formal membership for himself, said he was thinking of renting an office for $30 a month, and asked how he might acquire membership blanks and bulk literature. For the office he was hoping to set up, he added that “a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing, would be a welcome touch.”4
Without waiting for a reply, Lee then set about printing his own literature. On May 29, after he had apparently scouted several similar establishments, he walked into the Jones Printing Company of 422 Girod Street and handed the secretary an eight-by-ten-inch looseleaf sheet on which he had sketched a handbill:5
HANDS OFF CUBA!
Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
New Orleans Charter Member Branch
Free Literature, Lectures
Location:
Everyone welcome!
He said his name was Lee Osborne, and two days later he returned to put down $4 cash on the order. On June 4 he paid the remaining $5.89 in cash and picked up a thousand copies of the handbill. He also ordered, from the Mailers’ Service Company on Magazine Street, five hundred copies of a yellow, 4-by-9-inch membership application for his New Orleans “chapter” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, once again under the name of Lee Osborne. He picked up that order, paying $9.34 in cash, on June 5. Finally, about the same time, he ordered three hundred copies of a 2½-by-3½-inch membership card in the same New Orleans “chapter.” John Anderson, who took the order at Mailers’ Service, recalled that “Osborne” at first was not satisfied because he wanted heavy, “card-type” paper for his membership cards rather than the “thick paper” the company had used. However, he accepted the order, paid $3.50 in cash, and went off with the cards.6
Vincent T. Lee, national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, replied to Lee’s letter on May 29. It was the longest, warmest letter he had ever received from the head of any organization. It offered him, for the first time in his life, a real chance to work with a political group. And it offered advice.
Vincent Lee counseled Lee against opening an office and suggested that he work out of a private home instead, using a post office box as his address. He also suggested that Lee used only first-class mail on committee business and never put a full name on the return address on the envelope. He sent Lee a membership card in the FPCC, a copy of its constitution and bylaws, and he closed his letter: “Naturally I would like to communicate with you a great deal more concerning yourself so that we can get to know you and possibly be of some assistance.… We hope to hear from you very soon and are looking forward to a good working relationship for the future.… Fraternally, V. T. Lee.”7
Lee, of course, did not tell Marina about the letter right away—she as yet had no idea what he was up to—but he was elated by it. In one regard, however, the letter must have been a disappointment. Vincent Lee wrote that he had gone through the committee’s files and could scarcely conceive of a chapter “with as few members as seem to exist in the New Orleans area,” but he would gladly issue a charter if Lee could come up with enough members. Nor did he send the application forms and membership cards that Lee had requested. It was probably just after he received the letter that Lee decided to print up his own forms and cards.
Marina might have guessed that he was again becoming involved in “politics,” for the blow she was dreading had fallen. Less than two weeks after her arrival in New Orleans, and even before he wrote to the FPCC, Lee told her that he did not love her. She was “in his way,” he said, and he still meant to send her back to Russia.
“I’ll go to Cuba, then China, and you will wait for me in Russia,” he told her in his coldest tone. “I love to travel and with you I can’t.”
But his behavior was inconsistent. Sometimes he went a whole day without speaking, then spent the next day making up to her. He would take her and Junie to the park, do the laundry, mop the floor. He would even hang up the wash, while Marina leaned out the window and shouted directions, and Junie waved at her “Papa.” He often told Marina how much he had missed her. And he was proud of her when he took her to the Murrets. They thought that Marina and Lee were a “cute,” “family-conscious” and “devoted” couple.8 But Marina was anxious. She was afraid that Lee was nice to her only because he would soon be getting rid of her.
She was not entirely helpless, however—she did have a friend. Two weeks after her arrival in New Orleans, Marina wrote to Ruth Paine: “As soon as you left, all ‘love’ stopped. I feel very hurt because Lee’s attitude toward me is such that every minute I feel as if I am tying him down. He insists that I leave America, and this I don’t want at all. I like America very much and I think that even without Lee I would not be lost here. What do you think?”9
Ruth had invited Marina to stay with her in October, when the new baby came. So far she had said nothing about a more permanent haven. But Marina was intuitive. Ruth was her hope of salvation.
The strain on her began to take its toll. On Saturday morning, June 1, Lee took Marina and June to the Napoleon Branch of the public library, the branch nearest their apartment, to look for books in Russian for Marina. All they found were some novels in English translation. But Lee took out two books for himself: The Berlin Wall by Dean and David Heller, and The Huey Long Murder Case by Hermann Bacher Deutsch. They walked along for a bit, with June in her stroller; then Marina and the baby waited outside while Lee ducked into a store and had his photograph taken—evidently for a passport.10 The three walked along farther and crossed the street.
“Don’t go so fast,” Marina said. “I don’t feel well.” Lee kept on walking, thinking it was only a joke. She leaned against a storefront. “Wait a minute, Lee,” she called out. Next thing she knew she was lying on the sidewalk and Lee had his arms around her. He carried her inside the store, and some strangers brought her to with ammonia.
“You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Lee encouraged her. “Can you walk?”
Marina nodded, and they went home. He put her to bed, brought her some juice, and tiptoed around the rest of the day, taking care of June. “Shhh, Junie, Mama’s sleeping,” Marina heard him say.
Later that same week, on June 4, Marina received a letter from the consular section of the Soviet Embassy in Washington. It asked that she come to Washington if possible and, otherwise, that she write the embassy her reasons for wishing to return to the USSR.11
Marina turned the letter over and stared at it a long time. What puzzled her was the address. It had been mailed directly to her at 4907 Magazine Street, New Orleans. When Lee came home that night, she asked how the embassy knew her new address. He told her that he had sent it. Marina thought she heard her death knell toll again.
Later that same night, she at last discovered what Lee was up to.
“Come here. I want you to sign something,” he said.
“What is it?”
“My card for this organization about Cuba.”
“What organization? The one with only one member?”
“It’ll help me to have this card. People will believe in me more. They’ll think I have a real organization.”
He wanted Marina to sign a membership card in the New Orleans “chapter” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, not in her own name but with the alias he had been using for several months.
“I won’t do it,” she said.
“You’ve got to.” He grabbed her and held her hard by both hands.
“Sign it yourself. I won’t,” she answered. “I’m not going to get mixed up in your affairs.”
He pleaded with her. “There have got to be two handwritings. You’re my wife. You never help. You never support me. And I ask so little of you. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
Marina remembered the letter that had arrived from the Soviet Embassy that day. “What will you do to me if I don’t sign? Will you beat me?” she asked.
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
His eyes had begun to glitter, and Marina thought she had better sign. She told herself that it was nothing but child’s play anyway, and it was better for him to be playing with bits of paper than with a gun. But she had no idea what she was signing. “It could have been my own death sentence,” she said later.
As long as she was going to sign, however, she wanted her writing to look pretty.12 Several times, on a piece of scratch paper, she practiced writing the name Lee wanted her to sign. He thrust the card in front of her, and with some care she wrote “A. J. Hidell.” He was “president” of the New Orleans “chapter” of the FPCC.
“What’s that?” she asked, commenting on the name. “An altered Fidel?”
“Shut up.” He was blushing. “Don’t meddle in what you don’t understand.”
“So America has its Fidel,” she said sarcastically. “Don’t you think you’re taking a bit too much on yourself?”
He was ashamed at being caught and admitted there was no such person as “Hidell.” But he wanted people to think he had a big organization.
“Do you mean that you have two names?” she asked in wonder.
“Yes,” he said.
Two days later he put his alias to another use. He took a standard yellow international vaccination certificate, wrote his name at the top, stamped it “Dr. A. J. Hideel” (sic) and, in his own handwriting this time, forged the name “A. J. Hidell” above the stamp. In addition to being president of the New Orleans “chapter” of the FPCC, “Hidell” was also his doctor.13 Three days after that, Lee listed “A. J. Hidell” and Marina Oswald as persons entitled to receive mail at the post office box he had opened on June 3.14
All of these things together—the handbills, his remarks to Marina about going to Cuba or China, the passport photos, the vaccination certificate, his intention to send Marina back to Russia—suggest that a multiple scenario was beginning to take shape in Lee’s head.
A third important letter arrived during the first week in June, this one from Ruth Paine. Much of the letter was written in English for Lee. Ruth repeated her offer for Marina to come to Texas to have her baby at clinic in Grand Prairie. She explained how much it would cost, said that Marina would have to bring her medical records from New Orleans, and expressed hope that she would go to a doctor soon to anticipate any complications in her pregnancy.
Coming so soon after Marina’s fainting spell of June 1, the letter seems to have had an effect on Lee. On Saturday, June 8, he took Marina for a medical examination at the New Orleans Charity Hospital, a large institution near their home. Unfortunately, it was a state hospital, permitted to treat only Louisiana residents or emergency cases. Marina had not lived long enough in Louisiana to qualify as a resident, nor was hers an emergency. Although Lee spent a full hour pleading to have a doctor examine her, the Oswalds were turned away.15
The impact could hardly have been more dramatic. “Everything is money in this country,” Lee said, his face contorted with anger, awash with apology and shame. “Even the doctors are businessmen. You can’t even have a baby without money.” The tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“It’s okay. I understand. Everything will be all right,” Marina said to comfort him. Lee always had an extra $10 in his pocket, and Marina later realized that he could have taken her to a doctor. But she was too sorry for him to think of it at the time. She wanted to see a doctor, but she put the idea aside and was not examined until she was in her ninth month.
The week that began two days later, on Monday, June 10, was a memorable one in the presidency of John F. Kennedy and a memorable, as well as tragic, one for the civil rights movement. On June 10 President Kennedy gave the famous “American University” speech in which he hailed the Russian people for their achievements and asked for a world “safe for diversity.” On the evening of the speech, Lee sat down and wrote a letter to the Worker, the newspaper of the US Communist Party in New York City. He announced that he had formed a Fair Play for Cuba “chapter” in New Orleans, asked for Communist Party literature for his “office,” and sent honorary membership cards in his “chapter” to Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, leaders of the party in the United States.
The following day, June 11, was a landmark in the civil rights struggle that had been raging that spring with its focus in Birmingham, Alabama. In January a governor named George Wallace had been inaugurated in Alabama with a speech promising that he “would stand in the schoolhouse door, if necessary,” to resist court-ordered desegregation. On June 11 Wallace fulfilled his promise by standing in the doorway of the registration building of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Twice Wallace held out his hand in a “stop” signal, and twice James Hood and Vivian Malone, two black students who were accompanied by the deputy attorney general of the United States, Nicholas Katzenbach, had to retreat. As the day wore on, President Kennedy, in Washington, signed an order federalizing part of the National Guard in Alabama. As guardsmen walked onto the campus, Governor Wallace walked off, and the two students were allowed to register.
That evening President Kennedy went on the air from the White House to call for a new civil rights law. But it was a night that ended in tragedy. Only a few hours after Kennedy finished speaking, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, was shot and killed by a sniper who had been lying in wait outside his home in Jackson, only two hundred miles from New Orleans.16
Lee had often spoken of the necessity for greater understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. He claimed that racial discrimination in America was the chief reason he had become a Marxist. But if he recognized that President Kennedy had that week taken major steps toward better relations with Russia abroad, and toward better relations between the races at home, he did not give the slightest sign of it. His mind appeared to be fixed on Cuba.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, the day Evers’s tumultuous funeral was reported in every newspaper in the land, Lee went, without a word to anyone, to the Dumaine Street Wharf, where the USS Wasp was berthed. There he passed out his white “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets, FPCC literature that he had received from New York, and yellow application forms for his Fair Play for Cuba “chapter” to such sailors and civilians as happened to come off the boat. Approached by Harbor Patrolman Girod Ray and asked whether he had a permit, Lee replied that he did not and he had no need of one. He was within his rights distributing leaflets anywhere he liked. Patrolman Ray informed him that he was on property of the New Orleans Port Authority and that a permit was, indeed, required. Either he must show a permit or be arrested.
Lee Harvey Oswald left.17