— 35 —

The President’s Visit

Ruth Paine had a lot on her mind. She was teaching part time and, besides attending to her own children’s needs, she was busy ferrying Marina and her children to the dental and medical clinics where they had appointments. Lee’s presence throughout the long Veterans Day weekend had been a strain on her. And on top of that had been her discovery of Lee’s letter to the Soviet embassy and her perplexity about what to do.

Ruth now had two copies of Lee’s letter: the one she had made and the handwritten original that Lee had left on her desk, either out of carelessness or because he wanted her to see it. She decided to consult Michael. The next time he came to the house, probably on Tuesday, November 12, she handed him Lee’s letter. “I never knew he was such a liar,” she said, and she asked Michael to take a look.

Michael was sitting by the picture window in the living room, gazing outside and reading Time. He was daydreaming, he later said, of another job and another wife—“another fate and another mate.” The harder Ruth tried to claim his attention, the harder he resisted.1 Finally, he glanced at the letter, but he read the opening not as “Dear Sirs” but as “Dear Lisa.” What on earth was Ruth doing, he thought, reading Lee’s mail? He resented her being so nosy. He read on, however, and saw that Lee was writing about an encounter with the FBI. Michael imagined that he was boasting of his fictional exploits to some friend.

“Yes, it is shocking that he’ll make up stories like that,” Michael said, handing the letter nonchalantly back to Ruth. He, too, thought the letter was an example of Lee’s “colossal lying.”

Ruth asked whether he thought they ought to do something about it.

“Let’s have another look,” Michael said.

“Oh, never mind.” Ruth was annoyed. “If you didn’t get it the first time, forget it.”

Michael’s lack of interest deflated Ruth. Had he responded, she might have taken the initiative and gone to the FBI herself. As it was, she did nothing, although if Hosty had come by again that week, she would probably have given him the letter.

Would it have made any difference? Between them the Paines knew a lot about Lee. He was not just an angry misfit; they both suspected there was more to it than that. Suppose they had been on better terms with each other and had pooled everything that between them they now knew or guessed about Lee. Suppose they had decided to give Lee’s letter to the FBI. Would it have changed anything?

The answer appears to be no. The FBI had opened its file on Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1959, at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union; when he returned to the United States in 1962, FBI agents interviewed him twice in Fort Worth. It was decided that he was not a security risk, and in August 1962, his case was closed. The FBI continued to gather such information about him as came its way, but there were no further investigations. As a Soviet citizen, however, Marina remained of interest to the FBI, and she, as a “pending, inactive case,” was assigned to Agent Hosty of the Dallas office. In checking on her whereabouts in March 1963, Hosty learned of her troubled marriage. When he reviewed Oswald’s file and found that he was subscribing to the Worker, a Communist publication, he recommended that his case be reopened.

From that time on, the FBI kept a check on Oswald, but it was consistently six weeks to three months behind his movements. He was traced to New Orleans, for example, but jurisdiction over his case was transferred to the New Orleans office only in September, as Oswald was getting ready to leave for Mexico. After the bureau learned through the CIA in October that he had been in touch with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, it intensified its search for his whereabouts; but it was not until the end of that month that Marina was traced to the Paines’. When Hosty visited Ruth and Marina in the first week of November, he learned where Oswald worked in Dallas, but he still did not know where he lived, and jurisdiction over the case had not yet been transferred from New Orleans back to the Dallas office.

When jurisdiction had been transferred, and when he had learned Oswald’s home address, Hosty, who was usually assigned to watch right-wing activists and members of the Ku Klux Klan, meant to follow up on Oswald. But as far as he was concerned, Oswald was a small fish, about one of forty or so cases that he was carrying in November.2 Moreover, the FBI’s primary interest was in subversion. As a malcontent who had defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife, there was always the chance that Oswald had been recruited as a spy and posed a threat to the political security of the United States. Hosty had accumulated enough evidence to warrant watching him for security reasons, yet there was nothing to suggest that he might pose a threat to the life of the president. It never crossed Hosty’s mind to cite Oswald to the Secret Service, the agency specifically charged with protecting the safety of the president.

Even if Ruth and Michael had given the FBI Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy, the most they might have accomplished was to cause the FBI to step up its surveillance of Oswald as a possible security threat. Hosty had, in fact, received a note that he suspected was from Oswald, but it did not alarm him or attract his particular attention. For the all-important missing ingredient was violence. Oswald was not known ever to have uttered a threat against the president or vice president. He was not known ever to have shot at anyone. That secret—the secret of Oswald’s attempt on General Walker—was locked up inside two people, Oswald himself and Marina.

There was one last irony. During the week following Hosty’s visit to the Paine household, the Secret Service and the FBI were busy with President Kennedy’s forthcoming visit. The visit had been announced on September 13, nearly two months before, but final confirmation that the president was to be in Dallas on November 22 was published only on November 8. On November 12 the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service arrived in Dallas and, working with the FBI and the local police, began to investigate possible threats to the president’s safety, which were, of course, believed to come from the right. Final details of the president’s visit were made known only on November 19. Hosty was not aware until the night of November 21 that the president was to have a motorcade through Dallas the next day. And not until the afternoon of November 22 did he realize that the motorcade had passed beneath the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, the place where he had discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald worked.

Marina thought that living at Ruth’s house was “wonderful.” It made her realize how hard her life was with Lee—she never had any good times with him, really. Marina enjoyed little things, like sitting and having coffee with the neighbors, visiting, doing favors, treating other people with decency. She had discovered that there was such a thing as suburban, middle-class American life, and she liked it. She knew she would have to give it up when Lee, with his angry and mistrustful nature, took her to live with him in Dallas.

And there was Ruth herself. Marina did not want to lose her. They had a good time together; they confided the details of their marriages to one another and gave each other much-needed moral support. And yet they were not so close that it was a strain for either of them to be with the other all the time. Marina found that Ruth had a way of respecting distances and leaving the other person alone. Her house was an oasis of serenity.

In short, Marina was in no hurry to go back to Lee. She missed him during the week when they were apart, but minutes after he appeared on the weekends there was friction again. Marina knew all too well what living with him was going to mean. He would try to cut her off from everyone. She hoped to prolong her stay at Ruth’s until after the holidays, and in the meantime build up her bargaining power with Lee. Maybe if she stayed away long enough, he would make concessions and not force her to give up her other friends. Marina could not bear to let that happen, to lose touch with what was decent and sane in her life.

And it was a matter of principle. Marina simply would not do to Ruth what Lee had forced her to do her émigré friends the year before—cut her off. She was not going to have that on her conscience. After all that she had done for her, Marina was not going to turn her back on Ruth Paine.

Marina expressed the worry that was nibbling at her in a way that was disconcerting to Ruth. When she moved to Dallas, Marina of course meant to give Ruth her address. But one evening as they were standing at the sink doing dishes, Marina said suddenly: “When we have our apartment, please, Ruth, our address is private. Don’t give it to anyone.”3

Ruth failed to connect the remark to Hosty or the FBI. Not knowing Marina’s train of thought, she was surprised by the remark. She was surprised, too, at the hint of asperity in Marina’s tone.

Lee called on Friday, November 15, at lunchtime, to ask if he could come out that day. Marina hesitated. She sensed that he had overstayed the weekend before. “I don’t know, Lee,” she said. “I think it’s inconvenient for Ruth to have you come every time.” Marina added that it was the birthday of Lynn, the Paines’ little girl, and they were going to have a party the next day.

“Will Michael be there?” Lee asked.

Marina said that he would.

“Well, it’s a family celebration. I don’t want to be in the way.”

Marina does not know whether Lee acceded as readily as he did because he no longer liked Michael; whether, to the contrary, he respected the Paines’ privacy and thought they ought to have a chance to be alone; or whether he had other things to do. He simply said: “Fine. There’s plenty for me to do here. I’ll read and I’ll watch TV. Don’t worry about me.”

Marina says that Lee did not get angry or withdrawn, as he did when his feelings were hurt. Lee liked to be alone, and Marina recalls that on an earlier weekend either he had stayed in Dallas until Saturday, giving as a reason, or pretext, that he was looking for a job in photography, or he had mentioned to her that one of these weekends he would be staying in alone on Friday night. This weekend, in any case, he gave none of his familiar signs of feeling rebuffed. He even called again that night.

It was Ruth who spoke to him first. She apologized for being unable to take him to get his learner’s permit the next day. But she told him that he could go back to the Driver’s Station in Oak Cliff and take his test without a car. Lee was surprised that he did not need a car.4 Then Marina talked to him. She urged him not to stay alone in his room the whole weekend but to get out and take a walk in the park. Their conversation was friendly and warm.

Lee called again the next day, Saturday, November 16, in fine humor. He claimed that he had been to the Driver’s Station, but there was a long line ahead of him and he was informed that his turn would not come before closing time. Lee did not wait. He told Marina that he had taken her advice instead and sat in the park. “Do you remember?” he asked. It was the park they had been to in the spring.

“Only, Papa, be sure and eat better,” Marina begged, worried that if he was alone he would starve himself as usual.

Lee called that night again, this time to ask if the children were enjoying the party. Marina said yes. Was “his” Junie having a good time? She was.

“I ate very well,” he assured Marina. “I found a good place where you can get a fine meal, steak, French fries, salad, and dessert, for only $1.25. Don’t be worried about me.”

Marina missed him. She wanted to ask what he was going to do the next day, but she refrained.

Lee’s landlady said later that he never left his room for more than a few minutes all weekend except to carry his laundry to the Washeteria across the street.5 Someone else saw him there reading a magazine.

Lee’s reading that weekend is a matter of enduring curiosity, but he almost certainly read a good deal about President Kennedy’s visit, which was to take place the following Friday. The Dallas papers were full of it, and Lee had more newspapers around him, and more time to read them, than if he had been at the Paines’. Although the visit had been announced two months before, the atmosphere in Dallas was so hostile to the president that there had been some question as to whether he ought to come. On October 24 Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the United Nations, had been in Dallas for a meeting and had been struck and spat upon by a right-wing crowd armed with placards that had been stored in the home of General Walker. The police had lost control of the crowd, and there was widespread doubt as to whether they could cope with a visit by President Kennedy. Stevenson himself advised the president not to go. In the wake of the Stevenson affair, the mayor called upon the city to redeem itself. The police were stung by all the criticism, and statements by Police Chief Jesse Curry began to appear, claiming that the local police would be in charge of arrangements to protect the president. Reading about the thoroughness of their preparations, Lee may well have laughed that scoffing laugh of his; for he, too, had had nothing but contempt for the Dallas police ever since they missed him by a long mile following his attempt on General Walker.

On Friday, November 15, at about the hour that Lee was leaving work, the Dallas Times-Herald reported that the Dallas Trade Mart might be chosen as the site where the president would have lunch the following Friday. On the next day, Saturday, the Times-Herald reported that the presidential party was likely to “loop through the downtown area, probably on Main Street,” on its way to the Trade Mart. If Lee saw the story, it would have been his first hint that the motorcade might come close to the building in which he worked.

Sharing the front pages with the Kennedy visit that weekend was another story in which Lee was interested. It concerned Frederick C. Barghoorn, a Yale political science professor who had been arrested for “espionage” during a visit to the USSR. The story broke on November 12. Two days later, on Thursday, President Kennedy made the Barghoorn case the centerpiece of what was to be his last press conference. The president asserted vigorously that Professor Barghoorn was not a spy, and he broke off the cultural exchange negotiations with the Soviet Union that were then in progress until Barghoorn was released. On Saturday, November 16, one of the Dallas dailies featured on its front page an AP story reporting Barghoorn’s release, together with the White House announcement that the presidential motorcade would loop through downtown Dallas.

Lee told Marina about Barghoorn’s arrest, apparently over the telephone, shortly after the story broke on November 12, adding that he had read about it in the newspapers and heard about it on the radio as well. He was sorry for Barghoorn. “Poor professor,” Lee said. “He’s the victim of a Russian provocation. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

Nor was it the first time Lee had taken an interest in the plight of Americans caught in the USSR. He had followed the case of Francis Gary Powers. First Powers and now Barghoorn were accused of being spies, both were imprisoned in Soviet jails, both attracted worldwide publicity, and both touched the politics of the presidency. Lee felt that he, too, had been trapped inside Russia, but he was different from Powers and Barghoorn in that no publicity surrounded his name, and no one had come to his rescue. President Kennedy went all out for Barghoorn. No one cared about the fate of Lee Oswald.6

On Sunday, November 17, Lee failed, uncharacteristically, to call Marina. She missed him, and when she saw Junie playing with the telephone dial, saying “Papa, Papa,” she decided impulsively, “Let’s call Papa.”

Marina was helpless with a telephone dial, so it was Ruth who made the call. She dialed the number Lee had given her weeks before while they were awaiting Rachel’s birth, and a man answered.

“Is Lee Oswald there?” Ruth asked.

“There is no Lee Oswald living here.”

“Is this a rooming house?” Ruth wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“Is it WH 3–8993?”

“Yes.”

Ruth thanked the man and hung up. “They don’t know a Lee Oswald at that number,” she said. Marina looked distinctly surprised.7

The next day, Monday, November 18, Lee called as usual at lunchtime. “We phoned you last evening,” Marina said. “Where were you?”

“I was at home watching TV. Nobody called me to the phone. What name did she ask for me by?”

Marina told him. There was a long silence at the other end. “Oh, damn. I don’t live there under my real name.”

Why not? Marina asked.

Lee said he did not want his landlady to know he had lived in Russia.

“It’s none of her business,” Marina retorted.

“You don’t understand a thing,” Lee said. “I don’t want the FBI to know where I live, either.” He ordered her not to tell Ruth. “You and your long tongue,” he said; “they always get us into trouble.”

Marina was frightened and shocked. “Starting your old foolishness again,” she scolded. “All these comedies. First one, then another. And now this fictitious name. When will it all end?”

Lee had to get back to work. He would call later, he said.

Marina, of course, told Ruth about the alias. She was tired of it, she said, tired of Lee’s fears and suspicious, tired of his attempts to cover up the fact that he had lived in Russia. It wasn’t the first time she had felt caught between “two fires,” loyalty to Lee and a conviction that what he was doing was wrong.

Ruth could make nothing of the alias, either.

Lee called back that evening while Ruth was fixing supper. It was she who picked up the telephone. Marina did not want to talk to him, but Ruth said she could not tell Lee that his own wife refused to speak to him. Reluctantly, Marina came to the telephone.

Lee started right off by addressing her as devushka or “wench,” a word that in Russian has such an insulting ring that a man might use it to a servant, perhaps, but not to his wife. When spoken by a husband to a wife, it suggests that everything is over between them. It is a word designed to annihilate intimacy.

“Hey, wench,” he said, “you’re to take Ruth’s address book and cross my name and telephone number out of there.”

“I can’t,” Marina said. “It’s not my book, and I have no right to touch it.”

“Listen here.” Lee was angry. “I order you to cross it out. Do you hear?”

“I won’t do it.”

Lee started to scold Marina in as ferocious a voice as she had ever heard. She hung up the telephone.

Marina told Ruth what Lee had asked her to do. The two of them were puzzled: why had Lee given them a number they weren’t supposed to use? And why was he using an alias? Marina said he had mentioned the FBI. “I don’t think it’s worth living under an assumed name just for that,” Ruth said in a mystified tone.

Until their argument on the telephone, Lee and Marina had been on good terms, and the significance of this quarrel, only one of hundreds they had had, seems to have lain in its timing—after Hosty and before Kennedy. Because of his fear of the FBI, Lee had been living under an alias since October 14. Now he had been found out. Hosty was closing in on him, and Marina had discovered his alias. With Ruth in on the secret as well, it would be no time before the FBI tracked him to his lair. Most significant of all, after the Hosty visits and their shattering impact on his emotions, any falling out with Marina was bound to have an amplified, and destructive, effect on Lee.

But how was Marina to know? She, too, was furious—furious at her discovery that Lee had an alias and was again living a lie. After the string of surprises Lee had been springing on her ever since their arrival in the United States, Marina had been continually anxious. Despite her hopes of a more peaceful life, she had not, since Walker, had an easy moment. It did not now cross her mind that he might be up to his old tricks, to anything like a new Walker attempt—that was too frightening even to think about—but the alias obviously meant no good. It might even mean danger.

Lee did not call Marina the next day, Tuesday, or the day after. “He thinks he’s punishing me,” she said to Ruth.

Lee went to work as usual on Tuesday, November 19. That day, for the first time, both Dallas papers, the Morning News and the afternoon Times-Herald, published the route of the presidential motorcade. The president would go from Love Field via various lesser streets to Main Street, then “to Houston, Houston to Elm, and Elm under the Triple Underpass to Stemmons Freeway, and on to the Trade Mart.”8 President and Mrs. Kennedy, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, would pass under the windows of the School Book Depository Building, which lay at the northwest corner of the intersection between Houston and Elm.

Lee learned of the route either on Tuesday, November 19, the day it was published, or Wednesday, November 20, when he might have entered the domino room first thing in the morning and read the announcement in the previous day’s paper. Whenever he learned of it, it was the most important day of Lee’s life. He now knew, if he had not pieced it together from the weekend’s reports, that history, fate, blind accident—call it what you will—had placed him above the very route that John F. Kennedy would take two or three days hence.

It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of this realization on Lee. Seven months earlier, before his attempt to kill a leader of the American right, he had composed a document predicting a “crisis” that would destroy capitalist society forever. Without his having been able to foresee it, an opportunity had now been vouchsafed to him, of all men, to deal capitalism that final, mortal blow. And he would strike it not at the right or at the left, but, quite simply, at the top. It had become his fate to decapitate the American political process. He was history’s chosen instrument.

The announcement of the president’s route was the last in a chain of twelve or fifteen events without any one of which Lee might have approached his decision in a very different frame of mind. The first of these events, curiously, appears to have been the attempt on Nikita Khrushchev’s life in Minsk while Lee was living there in January 1962. Another was Lee’s failure to receive any sort of punishment on his redefection to the United States later that year. Still another was Marina’s letter of January 1963 to her former suitor, Anatoly Shpanko, who in her eyes and possibly in Lee’s as well, bore a resemblance to President Kennedy. There had been the failure of Lee’s attempt on General Walker and the heightened sense of immunity that he carried away from that episode. When Lee had moved to New Orleans, there was the murder, in June 1963, of Medgar Evers, in a town nearby, and only a few hours after a speech by Kennedy. Then there was the passage in William Manchester’s book, comparing Kennedy to a president who had been assassinated; and the death of the Kennedy baby at a time when the Oswalds, too, expected a baby. There was Lee’s brief incarceration in New Orleans, an interlude during which he had two enjoyable conversations with Police Lieutenant Francis Martello and realized that prison could be an excellent forum from which to proclaim his political ideas. And there was the fiasco of Lee’s visit to Mexico and his failure to obtain a Cuban visa, which, curiously, may have turned Castro into a negative constituent. Far from wanting to fight for Castro, Lee may now have wanted to show him, as he almost always did after he was dealt a rebuff, what a good fighter he had missed out on.

During that very month of November 1963, several events occurred that were profoundly disturbing to Lee, by far the most shattering being the visits of Agent Hosty to Marina. Only the week before, there had been the Barghoorn affair. And now the bitter quarrel with Marina over the alias. Lee’s wildly disproportionate anger at Marina was a symptom that, while he was able to cope, just barely, with the demands of his life on the outside, he was on the point of coming apart within. Lee himself was like a rifle that has been loaded and cocked and is ready to go off. Now, suddenly, unforeseeably, he had been placed in a situation in which he had an opportunity to alter the course of history.

On Wednesday, November 20, at about one o’clock, a small but seminal incident took place at the book depository. Warren Caster, a textbook company representative who had an office in the building, went to Roy Truly’s office to show off a pair of purchases he had made during the lunch hour. Caster proudly drew from their cartons two rifles, one a Remington .22 that he had bought as a Christmas present for his son, and the other a sporterized .30–06 Mauser, which he had bought to go deer hunting. Truly picked up the Mauser and, without cocking it, lifted it to his shoulder and sighted it. He handed it back to Caster and said it was a handsome thing.9 A number of men were present in Truly’s office. Lee Oswald happened to be among them. Marina thinks that this could have been the decisive moment. Lee now knew the route, and he had seen guns in the building. If anyone should accuse him later of keeping a rifle there, he had a pretext. There were two rifles in the building already, so why should he be under suspicion?10

Still, he had not made up his mind. Marina had not noticed in him anything like the “waves” of tension that she had seen three times earlier: before his visit to the American embassy in Moscow in 1961, when he expected to be arrested; before his attempt on General Walker; and before his visit to Mexico City. Each time he had been nervous and irritable for weeks in advance, each time he had talked in his sleep and suffered convulsive anxiety attacks at night, and each time he had lost weight. This time he showed none of those signs. Lee was even seven pounds above his lowest New Orleans weight, a certain indication that he had not been worrying or preparing anything momentous. Even now, on Wednesday, he did not do what he could easily have done. He did not telephone Marina, make up with her, and go out to Irving to fetch his rifle at a moment when bringing it into town would be far less conspicuous than it would be later in the week. And it is clear that he made no plan of escape.

Indeed, it appears certain that Lee’s decision was an impulsive one, not only because the route had been announced at the last minute but because the deed was so momentous and Lee’s feelings about it apparently so ambiguous that if he had had time to prepare he might very possibly have failed, as he did in the case of General Walker, or he might somehow have slipped and given his plan away.

Lee was still hesitating on the morning of Thursday, November 21. When he dressed that day and left the rooming house, he did not take his pistol with him, as he is likely to have done had he made his mind up and realized that he would need his revolver for self-defense. On the other hand, he broke his routine that morning in a way that suggests he was coming to a decision. Instead of making breakfast in the rooming house, as he generally did, he went across the street to the Dobbs House restaurant and treated himself to a special breakfast. He complained that his eggs were cooked “too hard,” but he ate them anyway.11

At last, after his arrival at the book depository, Lee took a decisive step. Between eight and ten in the morning, he sought out Wesley Frazier, who lived near the Paines with his sister Linnie Mae Randle, and asked for a ride to Irving that afternoon. He said he was going “to get some curtain rods. You know, put in an apartment.”12 Later that day Lee took time to fashion a bag 26 or 27 inches long, made of the brown paper and tape that were used by the book depository employees.

Marina was in her bedroom with Rachel late in the afternoon when Lee arrived unexpectedly. He had not called her ahead of time, and ostensibly they were still angry at one another because of their fight over Lee’s alias. Marina saw Frazier’s car stop at the house and Lee get out. She did not go to greet him. She looked sullen as he entered the bedroom. Inwardly she was pleased that he had come.

“You didn’t think I was coming?”

“Of course not. How come you came out today?”

“Because I got lonesome for my girls.” He took her by the shoulders to give her a kiss.

Marina turned her face away and pointed at a pile of clothes. “There are your clean shirts and socks and pants. Go in and wash up.”

Lee did as he was told. “I’m clean now,” he said, as he emerged from the bathroom. “Are you angry at me still?”

“Of course,” she said, turning aside another kiss.

Marina tried to leave the bedroom, but he blocked the door and would not let her go until she allowed him to kiss her. With utter indifference, like a rag doll, she acceded.

“Enough,” Lee said, angry that she was not glad to see him. “You get too much spoiling here. I’m going to find an apartment tomorrow and take all three of you with me.”

“I won’t go,” Marina said.

“If you don’t want to come, then I’ll take Junie and Rachel. They love their papa, and you don’t love me.”

“That’s fine,” said Marina. “Just you try nursing Rachel. You know what that’s like. It’ll be less work for me.”

Lee then spoke of the FBI. “I went to see them,” he said. “I told them not to bother you any more.”

Marina left the bedroom and went outside to bring the children’s clothes in off the line. Lee went to the garage for a few minutes, then the two of them came inside and sat on the sofa in the living room folding diapers. “Why won’t you come with me?” Lee begged. “I’m tired of living all alone. I’m in there the whole week long, and my girls are here. I don’t like having to come all the way out here each time I want to see you.”

“Alka,” Marina said, “I think it’s better if I stay here. I’ll stay till Christmas, and you’ll go on living alone. We’ll save money that way. I can talk to Ruth, and she’s a help to me. I’m lonesome by myself with no one to talk to all day.”

“Don’t worry about the money,” Lee said. “We have a little saved up. I’ll take an apartment, and we’ll buy you a washing machine.”

“I don’t want a washing machine. It’ll be better if you buy a car.”13

“I don’t need a car,” he said. “I can go on the bus. If you buy a used car, you have to spend money to get it fixed. It’s not worth it. I don’t want my girl to have to do all the laundry in the bathtub. Two babies are a lot of work.” Lee pointed to the pile of clothing. “See what a lot of work it is? With two babies you just can’t do it all alone.”

“We’ll see,” Marina said.

Just then Ruth drove up to the house. The car was filled with groceries, and Lee, followed by Marina, went out to help. He picked up a load of groceries and went in the house, while Marina lingered outside and apologized to Ruth for his unexpected arrival. The two women guessed that Lee had come to make up.

As Ruth went into the house, she said to Lee: “Our president is coming to town.”

“Ah, yes,” Lee said and walked on into the kitchen. He used the expression so often that Ruth paid no attention to his extraordinary casualness.14

Marina had also mentioned the president’s visit. While they were sitting on the sofa folding diapers, she had said: “Lee, Kennedy is coming tomorrow. I’d like to see him in person. Do you know where and when I could go?”

“No,” he said blankly.

Just for a second it crossed Marina’s mind that it was odd that Lee, who was so very interested in politics, was unable to tell her anything about the president’s visit.

Lee went out on the front lawn and played with the children until dark—the Paine children, the neighbors’ children, and June. He hoisted June to his shoulders, and the two of them reached out to catch a butterfly in the air. Then Lee tried to catch falling oak wings for June.

Marina stood nearby as Lee and June sat on a red kiddie cart together. Lee spoke with all the children in English, then turned to Marina and said in Russian. “Good, our Junie will speak both Russian and English. But I still don’t like the name Rachel. Let’s call her Marina instead.”

“Two in one family are too many.”

It was while they were outside, Marina thinks, that Lee asked her for the third and last time to move in to Dallas with him. His voice was now very kind, quite different from what it had been in the bedroom. Once again he said that he was tired of living alone and seeing his babies only once a week. “I’ll get us an apartment, and we’ll all live peacefully at home.”

Marina, for a third time, refused. “I was like a stubborn little mule,” she recalls. “I was maintaining my inaccessibility, trying to show Lee I wasn’t that easy to persuade. If he had come again the next day and asked, of course I would have agreed. I just wanted to hold out one day at least.”

Marina expected to be with Lee after the New Year. But she enjoyed being in a position where Lee for once had to win her over, persuade her, prove again that he loved her and that she was not utterly at his mercy. He had given her a horrible scare with his alias, and she wanted to teach him a lesson.

The evening was a peaceful one. Lee told Ruth, as he had Marina, that he had been to FBI headquarters, tried to see the agents, and left a note telling them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their visits.15 Marina did not believe him. She thought that he was “a brave rabbit,” and this was just another instance of his bravado.16 After that, the conversation at supper was so ordinary that no one remembers it; but Ruth had the impression that relations between the Oswalds were “cordial,” “friendly,” “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.”17

After supper Marina stacked the dishes by the sink. Ruth bathed her children, then read to them in their bedroom for an hour. Marina nursed Rachel, and Lee put Junie to bed. Then he cradled Rachel in front of the television set and got her to sleep, while Marina put away the toys. Lee went on watching television, a movie about World War II, and Marina went in to do the dishes.

Despite the banality of the evening, there was an undercurrent of tragedy, a ludicrous lack of symmetry between what husband and wife were doing. They were apart. In the kitchen, engaged in her tasks at the sink, Marina was no longer angry at Lee over his use of an alias, although she still could not understand why he bothered with such childish games. She was wondering as always whether Lee loved her. And Lee—what was he thinking? Marina had refused his pleas that she move in to Dallas with him “soon.” He would not be looking for an apartment “tomorrow.” He now had no need for “curtain rods,” but earlier in the evening he had spent time in the garage. Did his requests to Marina have a deeper meaning, a desperation, even, that was masked by his calm acceptance of her refusals? Alone that evening for the first time and staring at the television, what were Lee’s thoughts?

Marina was still at the sink when Lee turned off the television set, poked his head in the kitchen, and asked if he could help. Marina thought he looked sad.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I probably won’t be out this weekend.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too often. I was here today.”

“Okay,” Marina said.

Ruth was aware of Lee padding back and forth between his bedroom and the bathroom getting ready for bed. It was about ten o’clock, an hour earlier than was usual for him before a workday. Ruth went to the garage and painted blocks for her children for half an hour or so. Someone had been there before her, left the light on, and moved a few things around.18 She supposed that Lee had gone there to fetch some clothing, for the weather was turning cool and the Oswalds had their warm clothes in the garage. But Ruth did think it careless of Lee to have left the light on.19 When she returned to the living room, she and Marina sat on the sofa, folded more laundry, talked of nothing in particular, and said good night.

Marina as usual was the last to bed. She sat in the tub for an hour, “warming her bones” and thinking about nothing in particular, not even Lee’s request that she move in to Dallas. Lee was lying on his stomach with his eyes closed when she crept into bed. Marina still had pregnancy privileges; that is, she was allowed to sleep with her feet on whatever part of his anatomy they came to rest. About three in the morning, she thinks, she put a foot on his leg. Lee was not asleep, and suddenly, with a sort of wordless vehemence, he lifted her leg, shoved her foot hard, then pulled his leg away.

“My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thought. She realized that he was sleepless, tense, and she believed that he was so angry at her for refusing to move to Dallas right away that it was no use trying to talk to him. She thinks that he fell asleep about five o’clock in the morning.

Lee usually woke up before the alarm rang and shut it off so as not to disturb the children. On the morning of Friday, November 22, the alarm rang, and he did not wake up.

Marina was awake, and after about ten minutes she said, “Time to get up, Alka.”

“Okay.”

He rose, washed, and got dressed. Then he came over to the bed. “Have you bought those shoes you were going to get?”

“No. I haven’t had time.”

“You must get those shoes, Mama. And Mama, don’t get up. I’ll get breakfast myself.”

Lee kissed the children, who were sleeping. But he did not kiss Marina, as he always did before he left in the morning. He got as far as the bedroom door, then came back and said, “I’ve left some money on the bureau. Take it and buy everything you and Junie and Rachel need. Bye-bye.” Then Lee went out the door.

“Good God,” thought Marina. “What has happened to my husband that he has all of a sudden gotten so kind?” Then she fell back to sleep.

During the days and weeks that followed, Marina realized that there had been several small, out-of-the-way occurrences during Lee’s brief visit. He had played much longer than he usually did with Junie out of doors the day before. Could he have been saying good-bye to the creature whom he loved more than anyone else on earth? It seemed to Marina, looking back, that there had been a farewell quality to his playing, something valedictory almost, in the way he reached out for the falling oak wings. He had never reached for them before. And his being unable to tell her anything about President Kennedy’s visit had been out of character, to say the least.

He had been angry and tense in bed that night, and it was nearly morning before he fell asleep. Marina supposed he was just angry at her for refusing to give in to him. Later on she wondered, what had he been thinking about?

There was the odd circumstance of his telling her not to get up to fix his breakfast. There was no danger that she would—she had never done so before. Why would he tell her not to? Could it be that he did not want to run the tiniest risk of her seeing him enter the garage—and leave it?

Then there was his telling her with unaccustomed gentleness to buy everything she and the children needed. He had never told her such a thing before. When she got up that morning and looked into the bureau, she found the extraordinary sum of $170. It must have been nearly everything Lee had.

And Marina also remembered that twice after his arrival in the afternoon, he had tried to kiss her and she had turned him away. It was only on the third try, when he had his arm around her, that she relented and allowed him an obligatory kiss. He had tried to be tender with her, and she had been obdurate with him.

Finally, she remembered one more thing, the most earthshaking of all. Three times he had begged her to move to Dallas with him “soon.” Three times she had refused. And he had tried to kiss her three times. Everything had happened in threes. That, for Marina, was the key.