A host of controversies has arisen about the months that Lee Harvey Oswald spent in New Orleans, in particular the time from July 19 onward, when he was unemployed, and the two days between Marina’s departure for Texas on September 23 and Lee’s own departure for Mexico City on September 25. Clandestine meetings and conspiratorial relationships, have been attributed to Oswald during this period. But the available evidence suggests that both were unlikely, if not impossible. Taking Marina’s recollections of her husband’s activities, the testimony of the Oswalds’ neighbors, the minimum number of visits Lee paid to the public library—occasions when he actually checked out a book (twenty)—his visits to the Louisiana Employment Office (sixteen); the times he went looking for jobs between July 22 and the middle of August (an unknown but considerable number); occasions when he was out picketing or at the radio station (five); his forays to printing establishments (perhaps a dozen); his visits to Winn-Dixie and his post office box; his trips with Marina and June to the Murrets’ (four or five times), to Lake Pontchartrain, the zoo, the botanical garden, or just exploring the French Quarter; to say nothing of times when he spent the entire day reading in the public library or when Marina sent him to the movies so she could catch up on housework or have a little time to herself—all of these added together account for most of Oswald’s time in New Orleans while he was not actually at work. Only one, and possibly two, people whom he may have known slightly during these months remain unidentified: one of the two young men to whom he paid $2 on August 16 to help him pass out handbills; and a “Negro” at Reily with whom he told Marina he used to go drinking, a man whom she never saw and who may have been a creature of Lee’s imagination, since Marina reports that Lee never came home late and never drank anything stronger than Coke, iced tea, or Dr. Pepper.
Lee was, of course, highly secretive. He had wanted to be a spy, and he was, in fact, a nearly successful assassin. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative, it cannot be established that conspirators did not ever contact him, or he them. But for anyone who was contemplating something serious, Oswald would appear to have been too conspicuous, especially in the Southwest, for he was an ex-defector to Russia who flaunted his Russian and had a Russian wife, he was an almost inevitable magnet for the FBI’s attentions, and he was a young man who blatantly sought publicity instead of avoiding it. And if his outer characteristics rendered him an unlikely recruit, his personality rendered him unlikelier still, for he was so incapable of cooperating with anyone that he had been unable even to establish the loosest of relationships with the FPCC, fifteen hundred miles away. Apart from the rare occasions when their living arrangements forced him to admit to Marina what he was doing, or when a momentary breach in the armor of his mistrust allowed him to confide in her, he trusted no one with his secrets. He had proven that he was capable of taking drastic actions and dangerous risks—but always alone.
As to whether or not he was susceptible to influence, a few months before in Dallas, eager for George de Mohrenschildt’s approval, he does appear, without his or de Mohrenschildt’s being aware of it consciously, to have been influenced to shoot at General Walker. But after April he had no George de Mohrenschildt. With the possible exception of Marina, there was no one in his environment whose love and approval he craved. Even if there was an attempt to influence him by someone who might have known him casually—and there appears to have been no such person in his life—the metaphor of the pool hall seems appropriate. Someone desiring to influence Lee might shoot a ball, an idea, at him, but there was no way to predict how it might come caroming off.
Judging by the eagerness he had shown to be off for Mexico, one might expect that Lee would have left on Monday, the 23rd, the same day that Ruth and Marina left New Orleans. He did not leave until Wednesday, the 25th, and his movements over the next two days have given rise to conflicting testimony, even among eyewitnesses, as well as to much controversy.1
On Sunday, while Lee was loading Ruth’s station wagon, Jesse Garner, spotting nearly all the Oswalds’ belongings in the car, asked him if he was leaving.2 Lee, who owned two weeks’ rent, said no. His wife was going to Texas to have her baby and would return. He was staying there. He did stay in New Orleans for two more days, but his movements were so furtive that neighbors could not agree on when they saw him actually leave the apartment. Two of them reported later that they saw Lee racing to catch a bus on the corner, carrying a piece of luggage in each hand, at five or six in the evening. But one of them thought it was Monday, the other that it was Tuesday evening. On Wednesday Jesse Garner entered the Oswalds’ apartment and found it empty. Lee was gone.
Whether or not he stayed in the apartment Monday or Tuesday night, Lee was obviously trying to cheat the Garners out of the rent. That appears to have been the only secret activity in which he was engaged during those two days. Moreover, money was also the reason he waited until Wednesday to leave for Mexico City. He had only about $150 for his trip, and by staying in New Orleans on Tuesday, he was able to visit the Louisiana Employment Commission and file claim for the next to last of the thirteen unemployment compensation checks to which he was entitled from the State of Texas. He filed the claim, and the check was forwarded to him the following week in care of Michael Paine in Irving.
By waiting until Wednesday morning, Lee was also able to go to his post office box at the Lafayette Square substation and pick up the $33 unemployment compensation check for which he had filed a claim the week before. While there, he popped a change-of-address card in the mailbox, and it was stamped at the main post office at 11:00 A.M. According to postal officials, this meant that Lee had picked up his check at the Lafayette Square post office station no later than 10:20 that morning. He then went to the Winn-Dixie store on Magazine Street (on his street, but not the branch store he generally patronized) and cashed the check sometime before noon. He had, in all probability, already deposited his baggage at the bus terminal, which gave him freedom to complete all his business on Wednesday morning without risking a return to the apartment and a confrontation with Mr. Garner. And by cashing his $33 check at a store where he was not known, he also hoped to avoid being seen or recognized by his neighbors. He owed Mr. Garner for fifteen or sixteen days, one-half of his monthly rental of $65. He therefore saved almost exactly $33, the same amount as his unemployment check.
Lee’s departure from New Orleans resembled his departure nearly five months earlier from Dallas. Both times Ruth and Marina left ahead of him, and both times he stayed at the apartment and checked his luggage at the bus terminal prior to his departure. Lee probably left New Orleans at 12:20 P.M. on Wednesday by Continental Trailways Bus No. 5121, bound for Houston. There were no eyewitnesses to his arrival there, but after that he blazed a fairly conspicuous trial.
That night in Houston, a woman named Estelle Twiford, the wife of a merchant seaman named Horace Elroy Twiford, received a telephone call at her home from a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that he was on his way “by air” to Mexico, would be in town a few hours, and would like “to discuss ideas” with her husband. Mrs. Twiford told him that her husband was out of town. Lee left his name and said that he was with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Mrs. Twiford relayed the message to her husband the next time he was home.
Twiford was a member of the Socialist Labor Party. Earlier in the summer, in response to a request for literature from Oswald, the Socialist Labor Party in New York had passed on Oswald’s name to Twiford. He then mailed Oswald at least one issue of a small paper he put out called the Weekly People. That was the only knowledge the Twifords had of Oswald, and his telephone call was their only contact.3
Lee left Houston about 2:35 on Thursday morning, September 26, aboard Continental Trailways Bus No. 5133, transferred to Mexican Red Arrow Bus No. 516 at Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and arrived in Mexico City about 10:00 A.M. on Friday, September 27. He made no secret of his identity or the reason for his trip. He told Dr. and Mrs. John B. McFarland, an English couple who were fellow passengers, that he was secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. He was going to Mexico to evade the American ban on travel to Cuba, he said, and was on his way to Cuba to see Castro if he could.4
Lee also got into conversation with two Australian girls on the bus. He asked if they had been to Russia, took out his old US passport to show them his Soviet visa, and said he had lived there two years. While he acted very much the world traveler, the girls noticed that he was at a loss with the Spanish menus. Thus, every two hours, when the passengers disembarked for a food and rest stop, Lee was unable to pick and choose—he just pointed at something on the menu and had to eat a full meal. He told the girls he loved Mexican food. Their nickname for him was “Texas.” Although “Texas” ate every meal alone, he did make an exception for the McFarlands, with whom he had breakfast as they were approaching Mexico City on Friday morning.5
Less than an hour after his arrival, Lee was installed in Room 18 of the Hotel del Comercio, four blocks from the bus terminal. The room cost $1.28 a day, and the maid was impressed not only by the paucity of his personal effects but by the fact that he did his own laundry, leaving a few items to dry in the bathroom each time he went out.6
He lost no time getting about his business and spent most of Friday and Saturday bouncing back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies, which were located at some distance from his hotel but within a few blocks of one another.7 At the Soviet embassy he told the consular official with whom he spoke, probably Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, that his wife, a Soviet citizen, had applied several months earlier to return to the USSR with their child. He said that he had been in touch with the Soviet embassy in Washington about a reentry visa for himself, and he displayed various pieces of evidence of his prior residence in the USSR and his membership in a pro-Castro organization in the United States.
At the Cuban embassy Lee fell into the sympathetic hands of Sylvia Duran, a twenty-six-year-old Mexican woman who was a Cuban consular official. He displayed a sheaf of documents, including his new and his expired passports, which showed that he had lived in the USSR; the labor card he had had in Minsk, showing that he had worked there; his marriage certificate; his correspondence with the US Communist Party and the Soviet embassy in Washington, some of which was in Russian; his two Fair Play for Cuba cards, one signed by “A. J. Hidell,” the other by Vincent T. Lee; and his “résumé,” the several looseleaf, handwritten sheets on which he had summarized his life as an “Organizer,” “Marxist,” “Defector,” and so on.
Mrs. Duran was impressed by all this, especially the fact that Oswald was the leader of an organization calling for “Fair Treatment for Cuba.” “Admittedly exceeding [her] responsibilities,” as she put it later, she “semi-officially” telephoned someone at the Soviet consulate to see if she could facilitate issuance of a Soviet visa to Oswald but was told that it would take at least four months. When she informed Lee that a Cuban visa could not be issued until he had a Soviet visa, he became annoyed and said he had a right to go to Cuba in view of his background and loyalty and his activities in behalf of the Cuban movement. Mrs. Duran told him that she could do nothing more.
On Saturday morning Lee returned to the Cuban embassy, and Mrs. Duran put him into direct contact with one or two persons at the Soviet embassy, probably by telephone. The story was still the same, and Lee became so excited and angry that Mrs. Duran begged the Cuban consul, Señor Eusebio Asque, to come out of his office and talk to Oswald himself. Asque likewise called the Soviet consulate and confirmed that there would be a waiting period of four to six months. He suggested to Oswald that he leave Mexico and return when he had a Soviet visa, at which point he would be given a Cuban transit visa.
At that, Lee again became furious and demanded his rights in a scene that may have resembled his behavior at the American embassy in Moscow in 1959. Exasperated, Asque finally told him that if it were up to him he would not give him a visa at all, and that “a person of his type was harming the Cuban Revolution rather than helping it.” But Mrs. Duran apparently took pity on Lee. She handed him a slip of paper with her name and telephone number on it, and she went ahead and processed his visa application. Fifteen to thirty days later, a routine reply arrived from Havana approving Oswald’s visa application on condition that the Soviet visa be obtained first.
There was nothing more Lee could do. On Sunday he apparently visited museums and did some sightseeing in Mexico City.8 On Monday he went to a travel agency and purchased bus tickets from Mexico City to Laredo and thence to Dallas. And on Tuesday, October 1, he attempted a final assault on the fortress of Soviet bureaucracy. He somehow contacted the Soviet military attaché and asked whether a reply had been received to a telegram that the Soviet consul had promised to send the embassy in Washington. The military attaché referred to him to the consulate. A guard outside the consulate went inside and returned with the message that the telegram had been sent but no reply had been received.9
His visit a failure, Lee left Mexico City by bus on Wednesday, October 2. Even his departure was troubled. In the middle of the night he was pulled off the bus at the border by Mexican officials because of a supposed irregularity in his tourist papers and was heard to grumble as he climbed back on, “My papers were in order before and I don’t know why they bother me now.” At the US customs station in Laredo at 1:30 in the morning of October 3, he was seen “gulping down” a banana. A customs official reassured him that he would be allowed to take it into the United States and did not have to eat so fast.10
By 2:30 on the afternoon of October 3, Lee was in Dallas, only one week and one day after leaving New Orleans. He had spent perhaps $100 on the trip, but its cost to him could not be measured only in money. The real cost was the destruction of his hope. He had yearned to belong, to join a cause, to become a revolutionary, a volunteer for “Uncle Fidel.” He had wanted to deploy his shooting skills in behalf of a tiny, embattled country that surely needed him. Instead, he was told by no less a figure than the Cuban consul that people like him were harmful to the cause of revolution. He must have suffered a grave new wound to his self-esteem.
Lee was left with nowhere to go. If he ever had real thoughts of moving to the Northeast and becoming a political activist, those thoughts evaporated now. He lacked emotional energy to strike out for any place new. It was the most he could do to crawl back to the old places and attempt to do what he had done before: get a job, save money, support Marina and his children.
He did not even call Marina when he arrived in Dallas. He went straight to the offices of the Texas Employment Commission, filed a claim for the last of his unemployment compensation checks, and announced that he was once again looking for a job.11 He then went to the YMCA—the same Y where he had stayed one year before—registered as a serviceman so he would not have to pay a membership fee, and spent the night there.12
Next morning he went to Padgett Printing Corporation in response to a newspaper advertisement and applied for a job as a typesetter in the composing room. Theodore Gangl, the plant superintendent who interviewed him, said he was “well dressed and neat” and “made a favorable impression” on the foreman. Gangl was inclined to hire him, especially since he already had experience at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. But after he spoke to Robert Stovall on the telephone later in the day, he made the following notation at the bottom of Oswald’s job application: “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker. Has communistic tendencies.”13 Lee did not get the job.
He called Marina only after his interview. She was very happy to hear his voice and relieved beyond measure that he had not gone to Cuba. He asked to have Ruth drive to town to pick him up. Marina explained that Ruth had just given blood at Parkland Hospital in case it was needed during the baby’s birth and was not up to the long drive to Dallas. So Lee hitchhiked and got a ride all the way to the Paines’ house with a black man. He was there before lunch.
Marina stood in the bedroom and stared at the prodigal who had come home to her. He kissed her and asked if she had missed him? Then he started right in: “Ah, they’re such terrible bureaucrats that nothing came of it after all.” He described his shuttling from embassy to embassy, how each one told him he had to wait and wait, and see what the other one did, and how the whole time he had been worried about running out of money. He was especially vociferous about the Cubans—“the same kind of bureaucrats as in Russia. No point going there.” Marina was so delighted that she could scarcely believe her ears. Indeed, Lee’s disenchantment with Castro and Cuba was complete. He never again talked about “Uncle Fidel,” nor sang the song “Viva Fidel,” as he used to do, nor used the alias “Hidell.”
In spite of his disappointment, Marina thought he seemed happy, his spirits vastly improved over what they had been before he went to Mexico. He followed her like a puppy dog around the house, kissed her again and again, and kept saying, “I’ve missed you so.”
Lee spent the weekend at the Paines’. Ruth left them alone as much as she could and even tried to keep June out of their way. Carefree as children, they sat on the swings in the backyard.
“Is Ruth good to you?” Lee asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Marina, adding that Ruth had taken her to a doctor and arranged for the baby to be delivered free.
Lee told Marina a little about his adventures in Mexico City, and she got the impression that, apart from his one great disappointment, he had enjoyed his stay. All weekend he showed the greatest solicitude toward her, trying to get her to eat more, especially bananas and apples, to drink juices and milk, things that would strengthen her before the baby came. But Marina saw that he was distracted—worried about finding a job. As Ruth drove him to the bus station at noon on Monday, Lee asked if Marina could stay until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.
Lee had some job interviews that week but failed to turn up anything. He rented a room from a Mrs. Mary Bledsoe and paid her $7 for the week. Against her wishes he kept milk in her refrigerator and ate sardines, peanut butter, and bananas in his room, another thing she did not like. He used her telephone to fuss and scold at someone (his ordinary tone when he was talking to Marina) in a foreign language. Mrs. Bledsoe commented to a friend: “I don’t like anybody talking in a foreign language.” Most bothersome of all, he was in and out during the daytime and at home all day on Friday, disrupting her nap.
On Saturday morning, before leaving for Irving, Lee told Mrs. Bledsoe that he wanted his room cleaned and clean sheets put on his bed. She announced that she refused to rent to him any more. Without pausing to ask why, he demanded $2 of his $7 back. Mrs. Bledsoe refused.14 Evidently, Lee concluded that the FBI had been asking for him. He had used his real name at Mrs. Bledsoe’s, and the next week when he rented a room, he took it under the alias “O. H. Lee.”
Lee was again a good husband and houseguest that weekend. The baby was due any day now, and Lee told Marina not to worry. He insisted that he was not discouraged; he had only just started looking for a job. He again asked Marina if Ruth was good to her. “Does she make you do extra housework because I don’t have a job and don’t help with the expenses?” he asked. Ruth gave Lee his first driving lesson; and when she asked him to plane down a door for her, he removed it from his hinges and took real pleasure in doing a good job for her.15 He played with her little boy, Chris; watched football on TV; and, as Ruth wrote happily to her mother afterward, “added a needed masculine flavor” to the household.16
For the second weekend in a row not a single harsh word passed between Lee and Marina.
Everybody noticed the change. Ruth thought Lee had improved greatly. He showed affection for Marina and June and seemed to want to find a job and provide for them.17 When Michael Paine visited the house that weekend, he found Lee “quite a reasonable person.” He was “nice” to Ruth and his children, and above all nice to Marina. “It looked to me,” Michael said afterward, “as if the strain was off the family relationship. They were not quarreling. They billed and cooed. She sat on his lap and he said sweet nothings in her ear.”18
Even Marina thought her “prodigal” might be getting ready to settle down. She was encouraged by his concern for her and the new baby, and she felt that the weight of his interests had shifted away from politics toward family life, a sign that he might be growing up. For Marina looked on her husband as a mere boy, who had married too soon and had a series of childhood diseases to go through before he arrived at maturity. Lately, he had had two especially horrid ones—Walker and Cuba. Now, perhaps, he had been through them all and the two of them could start making plans for a peaceful life together.
Ruth and Michael shared Marina’s hope. But each of them sensed Lee’s terrible fragility, and each, in a different way, drew back from probing too far. Ruth stepped all around Lee’s prickly places and points of special vulnerability. Out of loyalty to Marina and her marriage, and out of her own great quality of charity, she tried not to see Lee’s darker side. Michael, it is true, did try to draw him out and soften his bitterness. But Lee would have none of it. Encountering a solid wall of rejection, Michael gave up and later blamed himself for having done so too soon. But Lee could not have tolerated a real relationship with Michael or with anyone, and so overwhelming was Michael’s respect for the privacy of others that he honored Lee’s right to turn him away even in his own house.
As for Marina, she had trained herself to accept a great deal in Lee and had a huge stake in blindness to the rest. She must have been considerably taken up with the new life to which she was about to give birth. And she continued to be concerned most of all with the eternal question of whether Lee loved her. Preoccupied with that, she failed, as Ruth later pointed out, to realize her “own great power over” Lee.19 The power that might have counted was that of observation.
What Marina, like everyone else, failed to observe was that far from being better after his trip to Mexico, Lee was worse. All his life he had been close to an invisible border that separated reality from fantasy in his mind, and now he was closer than ever to slipping over into a world made up entirely of fantasy. More than ever he inhabited a world of delusions held together by the frailest baling wire. Animal-like, he knew that he must keep his delusions hidden or, like an animal, he would be caught. Living alone five days a week with no one to talk to, he was not exposed to the scrutiny of those who knew him, and the strain was off him of keeping his inner world out of sight. And on weekends, in a world of women who were exhausted by the rituals of child rearing, he escaped for hours on end in front of the television set. His hosts, the Paines, were creatures of exquisite sensibility who shrank from touching his weak spots. Thus, all through October it was as if the little household in Irving was perfectly geared, indeed, existed for no other purpose but to help Lee keep his inner world whole.
Lee got a job his second week in Dallas. A neighbor of the Paines, Linnie Mae Randle, mentioned that her brother, Wesley Frazier, worked at the Texas School Book Depository and there might be a job opening there. At Marina’s urging, Ruth called Roy Truly, superintendent of the depository, and asked him to consider Lee. Mr. Truly suggested that Lee apply in person.
Lee appeared the following day and made a good impression. He was “quiet and well mannered,” called Mr. Truly “sir,” and said he had come straight from the Marines. Mr. Truly liked that because it very often happened that a young man came to him right out of the service, got on his feet working at the depository, then went on to better things. Lee looked like a “nice young fellow” with every chance of doing well. Mr. Truly told him that while he did not have a permanent opening he could offer him a temporary job at $1.25 an hour. Lee accepted gratefully and said he needed the job badly to support his family because he was expecting a second child any day. Mr. Truly told him to report for work the next day, October 16, at eight o’clock.20
When Lee called Marina that night, it was with a boast in his voice, as if to say that they only had to take one look at him at the depository and they could not turn him away—“they just hired me,” he said. Next day he called again and said he liked the job. He told Marina that it was “good to be working with books,” and that the work was “interesting and clean,” not dirty or greasy as many of his jobs had been. He said it did not tire him so much. He liked Mr. Truly a great deal, and the other men were nice to him, too.
Lee’s birthday fell on Friday, the 18th, his third day on the new job, and Marina and Ruth prepared a surprise birthday party. Michael was there, and Ruth had brought wine, put decorations on the table, and baked a cake. Lee was overcome. When they carried in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday,” he was so “nervous and touched and self-conscious,” Marina remembers, that he could not hold back the tears. It was his twenty-fourth birthday, but when Lee counted, there were less than twenty-four candles on the cake. Even so, he could not blow them all out at once.
They drank more wine, joked a little, and then Lee said that he would like a special present. “I’d like the baby to be born today, my birthday. I don’t like late birthday presents. I don’t accept them.”
“You won’t keep your baby?” Marina asked.
“We’ll see.”
The rest of the evening he trailed Marina everywhere, asking if she felt any pains. He was upset that there were no signs. But he was tender, too. The veins had burst in Marina’s ankles, and her legs and ankles ached. He rubbed them and kissed them and cried. He told Marina that he was sorry to put her through such an ordeal and he would never do it again.
Next day he was up bright and early scanning the secondhand ads in the newspaper. He was looking for automobiles and washing machines. “I’ll stay here awhile,” Marina said. “We’ll save money. And you’ll have to have a car.”
Lee said that a cheap car cost a lot in gas and repairs. “I don’t have to have a car. I can keep using the bus. We’ll buy you a washing machine.”
Marina was very happy. Contrary to later reports, she had not asked him for a washing machine. Lee thought of it himself. To her it was another sign that he valued her and might really be willing to settle down and put his family life first.
The whole day was a happy one. In the evening, after supper, Lee asked Marina to sit with him and watch TV. They ate a banana together, and later she curled up on the floor with her head in his lap and dozed. Marina was tired of being pregnant. “I do so want to go to the hospital,” she said. Lee rubbed her stomach and said, “Don’t worry, it won’t be long, it will be any day now.” Every now and then after that she felt him sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited. She had very little idea what he was watching.
Lee saw two movies that night, both of them saturated in violence. One was Suddenly (1954), starring Frank Sinatra, which is about a plot to kill the president of the United States. In the film Sinatra, a mentally unbalanced ex-serviceman who has been hired to do the job, drives into a small Western town where the president is due to arrive by train, debark, and get into a car that will drive him into the High Sierras for some mountain fishing. Sinatra finds a house overlooking the railroad station and seizes it, subduing its occupants. He leans out of a window and gets the railroad tracks into the crosshairs of his rifle sight. He waits and waits; finally, the train comes into view. But it chugs through town without stopping, and in the end Sinatra is killed.
Marina dozed through the first movie, and the one that followed—We Were Strangers (1949). This, too, was about assassination. Based on the actual overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in Cuba in 1933, the movie stars John Garfield as an American who has come to help the cause of revolution. He and a tiny band of cohorts plot to blow up the whole cabinet, including the president, at a single stroke. The plot fails and Garfield dies, but the people rise up in small groups all over Cuba and overthrow the dictatorship.
Marina remembers the movie’s end—people were dancing in the streets, screaming with happiness because the president had been overthrown. Lee said it was exactly the way it had once happened in Cuba. It was the only time he showed any interest in Cuba after his return from Mexico.
Later, as they lay in bed talking, Marina remarked: “You know what, Alka? I never think of Anatoly any more but last night I dreamt about him.”
“And what did you dream?”
“We kissed, as we always did. Anatoly kissed so well it made me dizzy. No one ever kissed me like that.”
“I wish I did.”
“It would take you your whole life to learn.”
Without a trace of the jealousy he always showed when Marina spoke about her boyfriends, he put his hand over her mouth and said to her with surprising gentleness: “Please don’t tell me about the others. I don’t want to hear.”
He kissed her, they made love, and Marina was exceedingly happy. It was the last time they had full intercourse.
Ruth made a Chinese supper on Sunday, and Marina started feeling sick the moment she saw it.
“Eat,” she said, as she got up from the table. “I’ll get ready to go.”
“Oh,” Lee said, his eyes large and frightened, “maybe it’ll be today. Where are the pains?”
“I haven’t any.”
“Oh, maybe it won’t be today, after all.” He was very disappointed.
But Marina did have labor pains later in the evening, and she got ready to drive with Ruth to Parkland Hospital.
“I have to stay home and babysit,” Lee said, “and I do want to go with you.”
“There’s nothing you could do anyhow.”
Thus it was Ruth who sat with Marina until she was ready for the labor room. Then she drove home and found that Lee had put the children to bed and had gone to bed, too. Although his light was on and Ruth thought he was not yet asleep, he did not come out of his room to ask for news. Again, it was Ruth who sat by the telephone, called the hospital, and, shortly after eleven, was told that Marina had been delivered of a baby girl. Lee’s light was out by then, and Ruth, taking her cue from him, did not wake him with the news. She told him in the morning before he left for work.21
He returned to Irving that afternoon with Wesley Frazier but for some reason seemed reluctant to visit the hospital. Puzzled, Ruth guessed that he was afraid to go lest someone at the hospital find out that he had a job and charge him with expenses of the birth. So Ruth told him that the hospital already knew he had a job; she had been asked the night before at the admissions office and had told the truth. But it did not make any difference. The delivery and maternity case still were free. After learning that, Lee agreed to go.22
Marina never knew of his reluctance. “Oh, Mama, you’re wonderful,” he said, as he sat down on the bed. “Only two hours. You have them so easily.” He had tears in his eyes.
“But it’s a girl again,” she apologized.
“Two girls are wonderful,” he said. “We’ll keep trying. The next one will be a boy.”
“No, Alka, there’ll be no next one. I can’t go through ten babies just to get a boy.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Whatever you say. Besides, a girl doesn’t cost so much. She gets married. You’ve got to educate a boy.”
He asked Marina if she had had any stitches or anesthetic and praised God that she had not needed either. He treated her like a heroine.
They had already talked about a name. If it was a boy, he was to be David Lee (no more “Fidel”), and Lee had promised that in the choice of a girl’s name he wouldn’t interfere. But he now asked Marina what name she had put down on the baby’s certificate. She had chosen “Audrey Rachel,” “Audrey” for Audrey Hepburn and “Rachel” because Ruth had a niece called Rachel and Marina liked the name very much.23
Lee took exception to Rachel. “It sounds too Jewish,” he said. “Please call her Marina. Do it for me. I want our little girl to have your name.”
The next day Marina simply added “Marina” to the certificate—“Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.” But from the outset the baby was called Rachel, and Rachel she is to this day.