A wave of nausea engulfed Big D. The city became physically ill. Hospitals and sanitariums were subject to an inordinate number of emergency calls. The Vern Oneal ambulance service had three vehicles racing through the city with red lights winking, sirens shrieking, to pick up citizens who thought they were sustaining heart attacks, strokes, fainting spells, and ulcer attacks. Parkland Hospital had two nurses standing inside the emergency room door to wheel the patients in for treatment. Doctors were making emergency house calls. A large part of it was hysterical reaction, but the community reflexes also turned in the opposite direction—some of the people were glad that Kennedy was dead, although regretful that it had happened in their city.
Gloom dominated joy. Dallas, Southern in emotion and Western in speech, was jealous of itself. The city was hypersensitive to criticism. It saw itself as rich and righteously Christian. No dust of civic scandal was permitted to cling to its boots. The world was going to give this story a lot of front-page attention and Dallas was being soiled by a lone communist who was not even a Dallasite—a native of New Orleans, perhaps, or Fort Worth. In Dallas he was a cheap laborer, a roomer in a boarding house. He had drawn a bloody scar across the beautiful face of the city and, even if it healed, the scar would show and people would always say: “Dallas—oh, yes. Where Kennedy was assassinated.”
In a bare room at Parkland Hospital, Bardwell D. Odum sat watching. The work was almost complete. Doctor Earl Forrest Rose was sewing together what was left of Officer J. D. Tippit. Cool and professional, he completed his work notes on the autopsy. The dead frame on the table was almost the same size and configuration as the President. The hair was dark brown and thick; the body was muscular and well nourished. The face was broad and serene. He was a fairly young Caucasian male who should have had productive years ahead of him. Life had fled in a barrage of bullets when least expected. The pain, the bitterness would be in the eyes of a widow and children.
Agent Odum of the FBI continued to watch and to make his personal notes. Dr. Rose completed his work, sighed, and peeled the rubber gloves from his hands. He studied his notes for a moment, added an observation or two, and nodded to an orderly. A sheet was tossed over the body of Tippit, and the stretcher was wheeled out. The cop could go home now.
Odum got to his feet. The doctor fished into a small stainless steel tray. There was a battered uniform button in it and some bullets. When lifted, they rolled around the tray and made a musical sound. The doctor took an instrument and made a small indentation on each object. “This is my mark,” he said to the FBI man. “I will be able to identify it in court.” Bardwell Odum opened an envelope. The doctor dropped three .38 bullets into it. They had been taken from Tippit’s chest. So had the uniform button. There was one additional bullet which Doctor Paul Moellenhoff had found when Tippit arrived at the Methodist Hospital earlier.
Lieutenant Day would be interested in these slugs. He and his men were still working on the fourth floor at police headquarters. As evidence came in, they studied it, analyzed, made notes and photographs. The Dallas crime laboratory was doing well. Day and his assistants had found two smudgy fingerprints on the side of the rifle close to the trigger guard. A palm print was raised from the underside of the barrel. There was a good palm print from a packing case. In some instances, they photographed their finds without completing comparison tests so that they could work on new evidence.
On the third floor, the crush of journalists was worse. Newspapers had flown in extra men, and they were arriving in groups, demanding to be brought up to date on the status of the case. The crowd was so dense that movement became difficult. When someone like Captain Will Fritz uttered a few words publicly, only those in front could hear it, and they had to shout it over their shoulders until the quotation rippled the length of the long corridor.
Seth Kantor was certain that he had never been in a situation like this. He had covered many stories, big and small, but he had never been party to a stampede. In the long dull periods, reporters often stared at each other for periods of time, uttering solitary words periodically: “In-CRED-ible!” “UN-believ-able!” “IM-poss-ible!” The tide of writers engulfed the corridor and spilled over into police offices, where they appropriated typewriters and paper and used the telephones.
Detectives sought corners in which to question witnesses. Radio reporters, hungering for news, fell back on the cannibalistic practice of interviewing news reporters. Lack of information made the demands more strident. Getting to the men’s room near the elevators was a time-consuming assignment. No man dared to leave for a snack unless he had a reporter substituting for him. An air of acrimony was detectable. Early deadlines for the morning newspapers were passing, and Fritz refused to reveal what Oswald had said or what evidence he had against the man.
In the Burglary and Theft office, a lieutenant and three detectives worked a telephone, running down assignments for Homicide. The glass door opened, and Detective A. M. Eberhardt looked up. Jack Ruby was smiling. “Hi, Mike,” he said. Ruby shook hands. Eberhardt said: “What are you doing here, Jack?” The nightclub owner was in good spirits. He said he had brought some kosher sandwiches—“nice lean corned beef”—to the reporters.
Eberhardt, like most of the Dallas department, knew Ruby as a nightclub owner who would stake a cop to a drink or a free strip show. He was a “police buff,” one who enjoyed standing on the fringe of excitement. The other policemen exchanged greetings, and Ruby displayed a notebook and a pencil. “What’s that?” they asked. He said he was acting as translator, or interpreter, for the newspapers of Israel. Detective Eberhardt didn’t know whether this was a joke or not. He was aware that Jack Ruby could speak Yiddish, but didn’t the people of Israel speak Hebrew?
“Isn’t it terrible, the assassination?” Ruby said. The men were back at work. They nodded. Two stenographers were checking statements before asking for attested signatures. “Mike,” he said, using Eberhardt’s middle name—“it is hard to realize that a complete nothing, a zero like that, could kill a man like President Kennedy.” Ruby asked how the detective’s family was. He pointed to his lapel and said: “I am here as a reporter.” The police knew that this was not true. There were no reporters from the newspapers of Israel. The statement was a pleasant excuse in the event that a young policeman, not aware of Jack Ruby’s generosity to the department, should ask questions.
He had an hour before going to temple services for the President. When a phone booth was empty, he phoned his nightclub. Larry Crafard answered. Ruby never identified himself on a telephone if he could avoid it. “Any messages for me?” he said. The handyman said there weren’t. Ruby didn’t say he was at police headquarters. He hung up.
Almost every community has an assortment of indefinable personages who are referred to as “characters.” Most of them are neurotics who are anti-social. They strive for unknown goals, reach for an equanimity which is never grasped. The majority of them are sensitive and emotional, rising to hilarity or anger quickly and returning to a mildly depressive state within minutes.
Jacob Rubenstein was a character. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, his aspiration was to become well known. Oswald selected a swift and desperate path. Ruby tried to ingratiate himself with those whom he regarded as his betters. Above all, he hoped to be accorded respect. When he got it, he accorded it quickly. He found criticism to be insufferable; a challenge to his virility led to a fistfight. He paid stripteasers $110 a week and enjoyed posing with them in their brief costmes.
There was a hint of homosexuality in his belligerence. In most brawls, he made certain that his quarry was intoxicated or smaller than he. He was in trouble with the unions for underpayment of scale wages, for complaining about other nightclubs which featured amateur night stripteasers. As an automobile driver, he was arrested or subpoenaed twenty times. He blackjacked an employee, kicked customers in the groin, slapped girls, threatened to throw a customer down a flight of stairs, and asked a stripper named Jada to move into his apartment “platonically”—to prove his manhood.
Cash was his god. His two bank accounts seldom showed more than $200, but on his person and in the trunk of his car he often carried over $2000 in bills. At times he wrote invalid checks. The Internal Revenue Service had a claim of delinquent taxes in the amount of $44,000. Still he regarded himself as a strong patriotic American, a religious Jew, a gentleman of “class.”
He was ingratiating himself with men he regarded as big-time reporters from New York, Chicago, and Washington when a phone rang in a nearby office. Lieutenant T. P. Wells picked up the receiver. A woman announced that she was Mrs. Barbara Jeanette Davis. He listened. She lived at 400 East Tenth Street. Her sister-in-law, Virginia Davis, had found an empty .38 shell on the lawn.
Wells knew that the address was close to the spot where Tippit had been killed. He checked the name and address and asked if her sister-in-law would mind coming down to police headquarters to make a statement. Mrs. Davis said that she and her sister-in-law had seen the shooting of the policeman from their screen door. They saw the man walk off fast, holding his gun up in the air and emptying it.
“I’ll be right there,” Wells said. “We’ll pick you up.”
There was a desk outside the suite on the seventeenth floor. Behind it sat the handsome man with the wavy hair, Clint Hill. Although the Kennedy family would be at Bethesda only a matter of hours, the Secret Service man ordered direct lines to the White House. A naval officer came up from the main deck with a blank, ordering an autopsy on John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It was typed, and the name Mrs. John F. Kennedy was typed where her signature was to go. Hill had used good judgment all day. He was not going to ask Mrs. Kennedy to sign the order.
It was shown to Paul Landis, who stood leaning against the suite door. He was sent inside to ask the Attorney General to step out for a moment. Robert F. Kennedy left the group and came outside. He, too, realized that it would be distressing to ask Mrs. Kennedy to sign such an order, so he took his pen and scrawled “Robert F. Kennedy” on the left side.
It was an improper signature, but the United States Navy would not quarrel with the Kennedys. They had tried to convince the family that the medical and surgical complex did not perform embalming, but this had led to mass frowns and acidulous barks from O’Donnell and McHugh. The autopsy order was returned to Captain R. O. Canada, commanding officer. Robert Kennedy returned to the suite, where he crouched on the kitchen floor, chatting with Robert McNamara.
Grief, like ecstasy, is impossible to maintain at a high level for considerable periods of time. Tears, shock, hysterics are concomitants of grief, but they fall like thunderous waves on a beach, slide quietly up the sands of memory, and recede in ripples. There were tears in that sacrosanct suite. There was laughter too. There was a wistful penchant for “Remember-the-time-Jack-said . . .” There was speculation about Lyndon Johnson. His name, mentioned among the men, wrung no applause. It is doubtful that any successor to Kennedy could have won the endorsement of the people on the seventeenth floor. Johnson stood less of a chance because Robert Kennedy had never bothered to mask his animosity from the moment his brother had picked Johnson as his running mate.
Among the women, someone recalled that Caroline and John-John would have birthdays within a few days, but this was stifled. It is difficult to say whether the sight of the bloody Mrs. Kennedy was more of a shock to the women or the men. Now and then she repaired to the bedroom to watch the television set and, when she turned the corner to return to the living room, conversation sometimes died in mid-phrase. It seemed that everybody wanted to make a phone call.
This led to the disclosure by the Washingtonians that the District of Columbia lines had been so tied up that afternoon that panic ensued. Edward Kennedy, for example, jumped into his car and tried to use the phones of other residents because he could not get an outside line on his own phone. He did not realize, at first, that the situation was common everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people were calling other hundreds of thousands with the shocking news, and these in turn were calling mothers, brothers, cousins, and uncles. Trunk lines were exhausted throughout the city and most of the Eastern Seaboard. Even emergency calls could not get through.
At dusk the situation had eased. The Kennedys and their friends had many calls to make. Until the tie lines with the White House were established, many calls were dialed to NA8-1414. Most of them were “idea” calls. Sargent Shriver, working in Dungan’s office, took them one by one. An invitation list to the funeral was being drawn up, and names of the great and near-great, crowned heads and premiers, were being bandied as though the personages were divided into two sharp camps: grata and non grata. The funeral would be held Monday. This was a fixed point from which to work. There would be a mass, probably at St. Matthew’s Procathedral.
How many would it hold? Who would be invited? How about diplomatic cables tonight? De Gaulle? Yes. Queen Elizabeth? Yes. Harold Wilson? Yes. Richard Cardinal Cushing? Oh yes. He would say the Mass; it didn’t matter that Archbishop O’Boyle was the ranking Roman Catholic churchman in Washington. He would step aside for a family friend. Who else? Barry Goldwater? Who said that? Governors? Indeed. The Senate would send a delegation. So would the House. Did anyone know why the Church of Rome insisted on five conditional absolutions over the casket? No one knew. How about the apostolic delegate? What was his name? Something Italian.
The diplomatic corps? Well, not the whole group. Those ambassadors could fill a church. The Supreme Court? Now why didn’t somebody think of them before? The Supreme Court, of course. Who from the United Nations? Who from civil rights? Did the State Department have a list of its own? It would have to pass family scrutiny. Was General Wehle taking care of the military side? There would be a big military side, with honor guard, caisson, muffled drums, a horse with reversed stirrups, representatives of each of the branches of the armed services. Musn’t forget the Green Berets—they were Jack’s favorites. How about the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
Casket opened or closed? Closed. How about the lying-in-state at the Capitol? Time had to be made for the people to file past the bier in the rotunda. Saturday or Sunday? Let Jackie make that decision. All over the White House men were thinking. And, because the death had come when death was least expected, no one was prepared. Notions, ideas, and suggestions were being tossed in air to be shot down or caught delicately and approved. For a proper funeral everyone was going to have to think at top speed because something, or someone, was certain to be overlooked.
Down in the big stainless steel kitchen of the White House, sad-eyed cooks and assistants, lugubrious in white puffy hats, made sandwiches by the score. A lot of distinguished ladies and gentlemen probably would be coming to the mansion tonight with the body, and sandwiches and rich hot coffee would be in order. The personnel, domestic and official, invented tasks. A Secret Service man in Evelyn Lincoln’s office stood looking through an open door into the President’s private office. The new rug, a surprise from a doting wife, was on the floor. The desk, a gift from Queen Victoria and fashioned from the ribs of a British polar icebreaker, gleamed in the half light of the empty office. The drapes were new and the office had an empty majesty. It was waiting for a man worthy of grandeur. A special man. He would not enter this office again, shoes gleaming, a hand jauntily in the pocket of the jacket, the back a little too straight, the face youthful and tilted, ready for the tasks as though he had been born for this particular office. As though all else had been orchestral overture, the difficult days, the indenture, behind him. No man had been this young in this place; no man had been as remorseless in purpose; no man, no matter how untried and naïve, felt more attuned to the problems—not merely of his nation—but of the world.
The Secret Service man guarded the emptiness of the place. The rocker between the couches was already gone. The book of mementos of the trip to Ireland had been taken from the table behind his desk. The American flag flanked the window, but no breeze stirred the folds. The silver stand-up appointment calendar said “White House.” No name was on it, no time. All the people and all the minutes had run out in a shattering sound of shots.
On a lower floor, Chief James Rowley sat in the Navy mess with Secret Service agents who had flown in from Texas. The white hair, the scrubbed Irish face, was tilted toward the table. The questions were uttered softly, but they were endless. He wanted to know everything about everything. Step by step, he took them over the entire trip, the work of the advance men with the Dallas Police Department, the PRS file of dangerous persons in the area. He asked each man what he did, what hours he worked, where he was stationed. He wanted to know what orders Jerry Behn had issued as agent-in-charge of the White House. Could this thing have been prevented? Did any agency have any record on the suspect who was arrested?
The men knew how Rowley felt. His administration of the Secret Service had sustained the worst possible blow—it had lost a President of the United States. No matter how well the service had done its work, it had lost the man. Rowley clasped his fingers behind the coffee cup on the table. He realized that some of the politicians would demand his head for the deed. The defense, that every precaution had been taken, that no one but God could have foreseen and prevented it, would be discounted in some places. Someone would have to pay, and who is a better target than the chief of the Secret Service? He made no excuses to his men; he asked none. “I want every one of you to make a detailed report now—tonight—before you go home. I know you’ve all worked long hours, and I know every man feels depressed. But I want those reports on my desk tonight.”
Upstairs on the main floor, artist William Walton consulted the book on the Lincoln funeral. It was replete with old-fashioned steel-point engravings. The catafalque looked bigger than it should in the East Room, but that was probably artistic license. In the White House warehouse, the dustbin of many administrations, the Lincoln catafalque had been found. Walton would have it set up in the East Room. The drapes, the wall candelabra, the huge center chandelier, he noted, had been draped in deepest black.
Well, that was a little too much black for this century and this man. Some small tiebacks of black could adorn the drapes, perhaps even the candelabra. But it would be gauche to blacken that crystal chandelier with dusty black. As he pored over the drawings and some old daguerreotypes of the Lincoln funeral train, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Goodwin passed by on their way to the Library of Congress. Someone had been found who had keys to the enormous collection of history. The place would be opened for the two men, who would seek the books on Lincoln and make notes on how the final rites had been conducted for America’s sixteenth President and first martyr.
At Andrews Air Force Base, a huge C-130 plane stopped on the ramp and the pilot killed the big engines. The back of it opened as though it would lay an egg. Washington motorcycle police gathered expectantly. Slowly down the ramp came SS-100-X, the big Lincoln in which Kennedy had been killed. Behind it the heavy convertible follow-up car bumped easily to the concrete. Secret Service agents Hickey, Taylor, and Kinney started the motors.
The police escort asked the route. Both cars were going to the White House garage. Agents were waiting to cover both cars with plastic and to guard them. The motorcycles started from Andrews in an inverted V. By short wave, Secret Service headquarters knew that both cars were on their way. The presidential car was the one they wanted to examine carefully. Unknown to them, the FBI also wanted to take an unhurried look at that automobile tonight.
On the other side of the city a military guard of honor drew up before the pale brick façade of Gawler’s Funeral Home. Someone in the White House had said that the President’s body would be brought there. Joseph Gawler was surprised. So was his manager, Joseph Hagan. They had been contacted by the White House and asked to handle the dressing of the body and to help in the selection of the casket, but no one had told them when or where or even who. There was a double line of servicemen in dress uniform, and perhaps they knew more than Gawler.
Clients were entering and leaving the funeral home, paying their respects to less noted dead. It was embarrassing to have that military braid outside the door. Along Wisconsin Avenue, automobiles began to slow down, some to stop. Neighborhood people collected. The word passed from lip to lip: “They’re bringing Kennedy here. Let’s wait awhile.” It wasn’t true. The military order was countermanded, and the men were told to board their waiting bus and return to the White House.
In far-off Ireland, the lateness of the hour found solemn men drinking and thinking. Television was rare in the southern tier of counties, but some had paid it “more mind” that night than before. John F. Kennedy was dead indeed but they had seen him on the opaque screen as he had visited the villages of Wexford and tipped a cup of tea with his cousins. Scores of millions of Americans had seen him on television, but none had thought to phrase it in the manner of an old man in Dublin: “Ah,” he said, “it would make you lonesome to see him talking and him being dead.”
Three automobiles paused at the head of the concrete ramp, then idled down to the basement of Dallas police headquarters. The lead driver waved the others into a corner. Marina Oswald had dark thoughts. “Isn’t it true,” she said in Russian to Ruth Paine, “that the penalty for shooting someone is the electric chair?” “Yes,” Mrs. Paine said. “That is true.” The answer wasn’t sufficiently detailed. “Your Russian has suddenly become no good at all,” she said.
The detectives herded the witnesses into a group. A detective told Michael R. Paine that he would be taken to a separate office for questioning. His wife, tall and stately, helped Mrs. Oswald to take care of the babies. A policeman gathered the evidence from the car. Marina pointed to Adamcik, the Czech-descent policeman. “Translate to English for him.” Guy Rose phoned from the jail office to ask Captain Fritz where to take these people. Fritz said that they would have to find space in Forgery or elsewhere; the third floor was crawling with humanity. He did not want Oswald to see his wife or the children. Rose was advised to detail one man to guard the evidence and to take it to Day on the fourth floor and remain with it.
Marina submitted to the ordeal with little grace. It is possible that her chronically deprecating assessment of her husband was on her mind. In the Soviet Union, she had had a small and secure place in the society of Minsk. She was a qualified pharmacist and the niece of a man who was a colonel in the security police. No matter what one’s private opinions might be, members of her family did not say or do things which would draw the attention of the police. To be picked up for questioning was debasing. There was a standing to be maintained in the community. Had she been slightly more callous—or more practical, perhaps—she might have been relieved that her husband had been arrested, that he stood an excellent chance (if guilty) of dying in the electric chair and freeing her. There was always the odd chance that, in the process, the United States government might choose to deport her to the Soviet Union. If she had a poignant regret, it was embraced in the prospect of having to take the children and “go home.” She had written the letters which Lee demanded that she pen to the Soviet embassy in Washington, asking to be repatriated. But Marina Oswald did this because of her European notion that the wife must always be subservient to the wishes of the husband.
A room in Forgery was cleared, and Mrs. Oswald, in plaid slacks and a head kerchief, sat with Rachel on her knee. Outside, reporters yelled: “Who are these people? Is this Oswald’s family? Which woman? How about an interview?” Ruth Paine sat on the opposite side of the desk, but she couldn’t hold June. The little one kept breaking away and running back to her mother.
A dignified middle-aged Russian stepped into the room. He was Ilya A. Mamantov. He bowed, smiled, extended his hand. It would be impossible for Mrs. Paine to serve as interpreter for Mrs. Oswald, he explained, because Mrs. Paine was also a witness. Therefore he, a geologist living in Dallas with a Latvian wife and mother-in-law, had been summoned by friendly policemen with shrieking sirens and revolving red lights to attend Mrs. Oswald. He hoped the ladies would not be nervous—as he was. He assured Marina that he would do his best to translate her thoughts into impeccable English.
A stenographer was called and the interrogation started. Mrs. Oswald’s life stood at its true crossroads in this room. She could, if she chose, protect Lee by lying, lying which would be difficult to disprove. She could say that her husband admired few politicians but that John F. Kennedy was one. She could say that, to her knowledge, he never owned a rifle. She could say that her Russian was misunderstood when she pointed to the blanket in the garage as the storage space of his rifle. She meant to say that the blanket “looked” like a rifle, had the conformation of a rifle. They had disagreed, yes, but they had made up this morning, and he had left $170 with her and had promised to return to her tonight.
The other road was to tell the truth as Marina saw it. It would help the police to hang her husband. If she chose this road, the marriage would die in this room at this hour. Her little girls would bear a stigma as daughters of an assassin all their lives. The American government might return them to Russia. She could hardly support the children in the United States even if the government was favorably inclined toward her. She could not work because her husband had prevented her from learning any English.
Mr. Mamantov listened to each response, stared at the ceiling in silence, and tried to think it out in precise English. The work was difficult because he also had to translate the questions of the police—sometimes spoken in idioms—to Russian. Captain Will Fritz stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He told the detectives that Lieutenant Day was coming down with the rifle. Paine, he said, was being questioned across the hall in a room with Robert Oswald.
Day came down the corridor holding the rifle high with a finger inside the leather sling. The press was upon him, shooting pictures and demanding to know if this was the gun which had killed the President. Day shouted, “Out of my way!” He had been testing this weapon when Fritz asked for it to be brought down for identification. The lieutenant did not like to stop in the middle of his work, but the captain ranked him.
Did Marina Oswald recognize the weapon? She and Mrs. Paine studied it with curiosity. Even to those who neither understand nor appreciate rifles, this one would appear to be cheap. Black paint had worn off the fibers of the wood stock. The telescopic sight was twisted to the left side. The leather sling, with its pad of soft leather in the center for shoulder-carrying was dirty. Marina stood to examine it. She didn’t touch it. Then she shrugged. In Russian she said it could be the rifle owned by her husband. One detective reminded her that she had said her husband owned a rifle in Russia. Could this be it? It could be, she said. Obviously, she did not know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun.
Mr. Mamantov felt obliged to volunteer the information that no citizen in Russia is permitted to own a rifle. A shotgun yes, but not a rifle. Mr. Mamantov subsided. He was not a witness; his function was to translate. “When did he buy his gun?” Mrs. Oswald shifted the squirming baby to the other knee. “I don’t know. He always had guns. He always played with guns even in the Soviet Union. He had a gun and I don’t know which gun was this.” “Would you recognize his gun—do you know it by color?” “All guns are dark and black as far as I am concerned.”
Fritz told his detectives to question her about the telescopic sight. A detective touched it. “Is this what you saw?” he asked. “No,” she said. “No. I saw the gun. I saw a gun. All guns are the same to me—dark brown or black.” He pointed to the sight again. “No,” she said. “I have never seen a gun like that in his possession.” She pointed dramatically to the sight. “This thing.” The questions stopped. “No. I have only seen this part of the gun,” pointing to the stock. “The end of the gun.” They asked if she had seen it rolled up in that blanket. “Yes. Dark brown, black.”
More questions were asked. The rifle went back to the laboratory. Fritz said, “Excuse me” and returned to his prisoner. Marina answered everything candidly but volunteered no additional information. She might have told them about her husband’s confession to her that he had tried to kill Major General Edwin Walker at his home. She could, if she chose, have told them about the day he wanted to assassinate the Vice-President of the United States and of how she had locked him in the bathroom. She confined herself to the questions.
Mrs. Paine told of her relationship with the Oswalds and her trip to New Orleans in a station wagon to return Marina to Dallas. None of it was exciting material. Still it added bits and chips of information to the rapidly augmented pile. The affidavits were typed and ready for signature. Mrs. Paine read hers—it stated, among other things, that she heard Marina say, in the garage this afternoon, that her husband had kept a rifle in that blanket. She signed it. Marina’s, written in English, had to be retranslated in Russian word by painful word. She said: “Da” and signed.
There was a commotion in the next office, and Marina looked up in time to see a stout middle-aged woman coming into the Forgery Bureau. She gave a cry and arose to hand Rachel to her paternal grandmother. Marguerite Oswald looked down at the tiny face in her arms. Tears glistened behind her glasses. The women fell into each other’s arms, neither one able to communicate except by embraces and kisses. Marguerite was moaning: “I didn’t know I was a grandmother again. Nobody told me.”
Policemen glanced up from their work and returned to the study of affidavits. Ruth Paine stood and extended her hand. “Oh, Mrs. Oswald,” she said. “I am so glad to meet you. Marina wanted to contact you, but Lee didn’t want her to.” The grandmother stopped weeping. She rocked the baby back and forth in her arms and turned the large eyes of the inquisitor upon Mrs. Paine. “You speak English,” she said. “Why didn’t you contact me?” Mrs. Paine felt embarrassed. “Well,” she said, “because of the way they lived. He lived in Dallas and came home on weekends. I didn’t want to interfere.”
The grandmother began to dominate the scene. She told Mrs. Paine to tell her daughter-in-law that she had been on her way to work in her car when she heard on the radio that Lee had been arrested. The police had asked her about a rifle that Lee was supposed to have, but she as a mother knew of no such weapon. The inference could have been that she hoped that no one else would recall a rifle.
Then she heard the admissions in Marina Oswald’s affidavit as Mr. Mamantov read them slowly. The grandmother may have felt that Marina did not understand the question. Besides, who would know what the young woman said when the police had their own interpreter? Ruth Paine wasn’t paying much attention to Marguerite Oswald’s debate with the police. She recalled that six weeks ago her friend Marina had said: “It is only proper to tell the woman of the coming baby.” Her husband did not want Marina to contact his mother. He said he didn’t even know her address. He ordered his wife to leave his mother out of family matters.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Marguerite Oswald said, turning her gaze upon Mrs. Paine. “I want to stay in Dallas and be near Lee, so that I can help with this situation.” Mrs. Paine gave the proper response. “You are welcome in my home,” she said, “if you care to sleep on the sofa.” The grandmother was grateful. “I’ll sleep on the floor to be near Dallas,” she said.
She asked the police if the ladies could leave. The men phoned Fritz. All had made statements and signed them. They could go. In the next office Michael Paine was signing his words. Robert Oswald had concluded his interrogation. Mrs. Oswald pulled her white uniform skirt out from her side. “It’s all I brought,” she said. She had demanded to see her son Lee, but this privilege had been denied “until later.” He was thirty feet away.
A policeman escorted Robert Oswald to meet his family. His mood was depressed. His younger brother was involved in an infamous crime. The name Oswald, which Robert had carried with honor, would be anathema all over the world. The situation, beyond doubt, would affect Robert’s life and his career. In addition, he did not get along well with his mother. She masterminded every family difficulty, and Robert felt that, in the main, she was concerned solely with herself. Then there was this Russian woman and a baby—who would take care of them? Robert?
He walked into the office and saw Marina with two babies. Robert was surprised. Neither could understand the other, so he nodded. A tall, slender woman stepped between them and said: “I’m Ruth Paine. I’m a friend of Marina and Lee. I’m here because I speak Russian, and I’m interpreting for Marina.” Robert Oswald felt little interest. He had just met her husband in the next office, and, when they shook hands, Oswald felt an instant dislike for Michael Paine.
He was still trying to greet his sister-in-law when his mother said: “I would like to speak to you—alone” and took him into an empty office. The jowly face quivered, the eyes stared around the room, and Marguerite whispered: “This room is bugged. Be careful what you say.” The young man thought: All my life I’ve been hearing her tell me about conspiracies, hidden motives, and malicious people.
“Listen,” he said loudly. “I don’t care whether the room is bugged or not. I’d be perfectly willing to say anything I’ve got to say right there in the doorway. If you know anything at all about what happened, I want to know it right now. I don’t want to hear any whys, ifs, or wherefores.”
Apparently this speech caused her to forget to whisper. She began to speak swiftly and dynamically. She wanted Robert to know that she was sure his baby brother Lee had been carrying out official orders, if he had done anything wrong. When he went to Russia, she said, she was convinced that he was a secret agent for the United States government. He could have been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still in the Marine Corps. If so, and if he was involved in some act today, well, the boy was probably under orders.
Robert was half listening, half meditating. His mother had learned that her son was a possible assassin of a President of the United States with no sense of shock. He felt her reaction was that she was about to receive the kind of attention she had craved all her life. She would never again be regarded as an unknown woman among millions of them. And yet he knew he must stand here and listen. It was his mother. The chronic sorrow was that, of her children, he and his half brother John Pic were hardworking responsible citizens, whereas she and the little loner made harsh and inexorable demands of life. They wanted recognition. Now they had it. It was such a joy that neither mother nor gunman had time to devote a moment of grief for the man who had fallen among the roses.
The doctors stepped away from the body on the table. Alone, it had more dignity under the white light. The supple arms, the strong hands were at his sides. The radiologist, from outside the area, called out his orders. The enlisted men moved the body at his whim. The large X-ray plates numbered fourteen. Among them were a front shot of the head, a lateral shot, a posterior picture. The positions were repeated for the thoracic cavity and the abdomen. Several pictures were made of the complete head and torso.
Before the next phase of the autopsy began, the doctors waited for the wet plates to be developed. A Navy photographer used the pause to get on a ladder and make color photographs and black and white pictures of the body as it appeared—front, side, and back—when received at the hospital. The commanding officers explained that these negatives would not be developed or printed. It did not occur to them that there was no point in ordering photographs if they were not to be used to support and augment the findings of the autopsy itself. The cassettes of film would go to the Secret Service, which was expected to make them a shocking gift to the widow. The philosophy of the Navy, on the night of November 22, 1963, was to play it safe and survive. The death of a President is a sensitive political event.
The witnesses sat quietly. The doctors waited. They had schematic drawings of a male body, front and back; they had drawings of the human head looking down at the top of the skull. They made terse notes, early impressions, and dots to represent wound punctures. None of these were exact; they did not even agree precisely with each other. Neither Humes nor Boswell realized that, outside this room, in the world of darkness, were laymen writers who could and would distort the early misconceptions, the burning of erroneous notes, the underdeveloped photographs into a malicious and mysterious plot to deny the American people its right to know the truth about the wounds.
It is difficult to search for sympathy for the United States Navy, the most pontifical of the American forces, because the senior officers had decreed, without warrant, that the main focus of the night must be centered on secrecy. A Marine guard was posted outside the autopsy room as though some unauthorized citizen might try to force his way into a scene which no sane layman would want to witness. Heads had been counted; names had been recorded; the mutilation of the dead, which is a scientific concomitant of a search for truth, was to be executed with such aggressive secrecy that, for years to come, no outsider would be permitted to see this room, even when it was empty.
In addition, the United States Navy did not assign the best qualified physicians to conduct the autopsy because they were not available. Commander James Joseph Humes, a product of Villanova University and Jefferson Medical College, functioned as director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School. He was an administrator. Among his confreres, Humes was known to be an excellent pathologist, an expert in the nature and cause of disease and the changes it brings to the body. It could be regarded as an imposition to order him to autopsy a body and qualify as an expert in missile trajectories and damage.
To assist Humes, Commander J. Thornton Boswell had been ordered to report to the autopsy room. Among the physicians available at the center, Boswell enjoyed the confidence of the officers, but he, too, was hardly a monumental choice for an autopsy involving violent death. This is not to say that Humes and Boswell were unqualified to conduct an autopsy; it was not their specialty. Humes was so conscious of this that, when he was offered an opportunity to secure the services of a qualified second assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck, he agreed. The colonel was chief of the Wounds Ballistics Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He had a career of four hundred cases of bullet wounds and two hundred autopsies. Although Finck was the most experienced, Commander Humes was in charge of the work.
The preparatory examination and the photography were complete by the time Colonel Finck arrived. Quickly, he gowned and masked and came into the autopsy room just as the X-rays were being placed on big illuminated opaque screens. Dr. Humes invited the laymen witnesses to come over to the screens and listen to a dissertation on the initial findings. Kellerman, Greer, Dr. Burkley, Sibert, O’Neill, and the others looked at the big negatives. A radiologist with a pointer took the frames one by one. Where there was no pathological finding, as in the abdomen, it was so stated and the doctor moved on to the more dramatic studies.
Most puzzling was the wound in the right strap muscles. It was almost certainly a wound of entry, because the hole was small and round, slightly elliptical, with no ragged serration which usually attends a wound of exit. The exit is often larger than a wound of entry because the missile, after striking the resistance of a body, sometimes begins a tumbling effect in its progress.
Humes or Boswell, on the schematic drawing of the body, seem to have made the wound of entry slightly lower on the body than it was. On the X-rays, it appeared at the lower end of the sloping muscle branch which extends from the neck toward the shoulder. It was hardly possible that a metal missile, moving at close to a half mile per second, could pierce the fleshy muscles less than one inch and stop. In addition, there was the question of what had happened to such a bullet.
The FBI and Secret Service men listened and made notes. The driver of the car, Greer, asked if he had permission to speak. The doctors listened. He said that a bullet had been found on a stretcher—or rather as it fell from a stretcher—in Parkland Memorial Hospital and had been sent on to the FBI laboratory for examination. Could this be the bullet that went into the neck and, in the jostling of the President on the stretcher, fell out?
The doctors agreed that it was a possibility. They could hardly subscribe to a thesis which depicted a dying bullet which did not have the energy to go through boneless masses of flesh, but it must be considered. If some foreign object had slowed the bullet—like hitting the back of the car—it could not have made that clean 6-millimeter circle; it would have been tumbling end over end and a large ugly entrance would have resulted.
Greer’s question should have taught caution to the doctors, because it pointed up what they did not know about the events in Dallas. The superior officers—Captain Canada and Admiral Galloway—medically oriented, could easily have recessed the proceedings for fifteen minutes or a half hour. All that would be required was to phone Parkland Memorial Hospital and ask for Dr. Clark or Dr. Carrico—whether at home or in the hospital. If not those, then any of the other attending physicians could have helped. Bethesda might have said: “You had the body of the President. What were your wound findings and what methods and treatment were employed?”
The news that an exit wound had been found in the lower front of the neck—one which frayed the back of the knot on the President’s tie—would have settled, beyond doubt, that the bullet had gone through the back of the neck muscles and out the trachea. The Texas doctors could have stated that the exit wound had been enlarged to form a tracheostomy. The mystery could have been dissolved at once. No one pursued it.
Colonel Finck studied the X-rays of the head carefully. There was a hole about 6 millimeters in size in the lower right-hand section of the back of the head. It was round and consistent with an entry wound. If this portion of the head was hit by a 6.5-millimeter bullet, the hole in scalp and skull would shrink to 6 millimeters after the missile passed. Once inside the brain, it would bevel the inside of the skull, tumble, causing the massive hole in the upper right side as the wound of exit. If, after he had been hit in the neck, his head fell forward and the body tilted to the left, as witnesses swore, then the small hole in the skull would result in the big one.
The X-rays showed the metal fragments still in the head. There was a comparatively large piece of bullet—7 by 2 millimeters—behind the right eye. There were a few grains inside the “cone effect” entrance wound. The remainder of this bullet, emerged with flying skull and hair, apparently broke into two sections, and they were found on the front seat of the car. The first bullet, which missed target and car, was torn to flying grains when it hit the roadway, nicked a curb, and peppered the face of Mr. Tague on Commerce Street.
Greer’s thesis had a supporter. Roy Kellerman, Agent-in-Charge, said he remembered a Parkland doctor astride the chest of the dead President, applying artificial respiration. Kellerman, a solemn man and a deliberate one, thought the bullet in the back of the shoulder might have been squeezed out by manual pressure. If so, the man who found a bullet on a stretcher in the hall was mistaken in thinking it came from Governor Connally’s cart.
Medical judgment was reserved. Colonel Finck was not convinced. In all of his experience with bullet wounds he could not recall a missile entering flesh and stopping short. The X-rays showed no bullet path to the throat because the shot, instead of tearing through the strap muscles, had separated two layers and furrowed between, leaving insignificant bruises on the under side of one and the upper side of another. It emerged from the throat with most of its speed intact to hit the Governor.
The prisoner was on the private elevator heading down for another lineup. The fawn-hatted detectives hopped in beside Lee Harvey Oswald and the door was closed. They could still hear the shouts of reporters in the corridor. “Why did you shoot the President?” “Bastard!” “Son of a bitch!” None of the older reporters could remember a story in which the journalists expressed personal venom. Reporters at Rheims who had witnessed the surrender of Germany expressed no hatred. Others, aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, had watched with equanimity as the Japanese signed the document of surrender. Some had put in considerable time at the Nuremberg trials without rancor. In this case, the police had nothing more than a suspect, but the press reacted toward him as the French underground had toward the Parisian women who had slept with German officers.
Oswald neither smiled nor frowned. The sullen mask had been pasted on tight and it showed nothing. The onset of personal hostility did not alarm Will Fritz. He assumed that Chief Jesse Curry knew what he was doing. Chief Curry assumed that Captain Talbert had charge of the security of police headquarters. The chief passed an order that, if the press was admitted to any of the lineups, they would have to stand behind the witnesses in silence. He did not want them to address any questions to the prisoner.
Off the edge of the lineup room, Oswald stood quietly as Don Ables, the jail clerk, nodded to him. Two of the men were new. Both were prisoners. Again Oswald was the number two man, shackled to three others. He was intelligent and he must have known that he would again be the only man in those lights with real bruises.
In front, behind the dark curtain, Troy Lee sat watching. He had come to police headquarters with his wife and his sister-in-law. One was the former Barbara Davis; the other was Virginia Davis. They were young girls, laden with the responsibility of marriage, babies, rent, and husbands. They told the police officers, again and again, that they had been trying to doze off after lunch when Officer Tippit had been shot.
They heard the explosions and jumped up and ran to the screen door. A policeman, on the outside of his car, had fallen beside the front wheel. Through the screen door they had seen a young man, not walking but not running either, cutting cater-cornered across their lawn. One hand was held high and he was pulling empty shells from a revolver. The sisters were nervous. Troy Lee told them to be calm and to tell the policemen if there was anybody up on that stage that they recognized.
The lights went on and four men, walking in profile, trooped onstage. The women’s eyes flickered across the brightly lit faces. Virginia leaned across Barbara and whispered to the detective: “That’s him.” She nodded her head positively. “Which is him?” “That second boy.” Barbara Davis agreed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That’s the one. The second one counting from this side.” They pointed and whispered and Troy Lee leaned across the policeman to listen.
The policeman made a few notes in a small loose-leaf. “What did you see him doing?” he said. “I have to write up a statement.” The girls again told the story of the nap, the fusillade of shots, and the trotting “boy.” Onstage, a lieutenant asked each of the four men to face front, to turn left, to turn completely to the right. The Davis girls were so excited that they were giving their statements simultaneously.
The eyes of Marguerite Oswald stared at the furnishings of the Paine house. She nuzzled little Rachel to her bosom and studied the living room. To her, life was a sequence of frustrations. On the way home, she had tried to communicate with her daughter-in-law, but the best she could do was to pat Marina’s hand. There was so much that she wanted to say. She had never protested Lee’s choice of a Russian girl as a wife. But truly the girl was a foreigner.
Marguerite saw the couch she would occupy, and she looked into the kitchen on the edge of the garage. Marina was in the bathroom composing herself. The Paine children and June Oswald frolicked on the floor. Someone would have to get something to eat for the little ones. It must be close to bedtime. Two men knocked on the front door and Ruth Paine admitted them with her friendly cry.
One was holding a camera. Marina emerged into the living room looking brighter. Mrs. Paine introduced Marina to the men, Allan Grant and Tommy Thompson of Life magazine. Marguerite Oswald was not introduced. It was an affront—conscious or subconscious—which could not be dismissed. The bud of friendship between Marguerite and Ruth began to wither. Mrs. Paine dropped to the floor with the children, tucked her legs under her skirt, and said gaily: “Now, I hope you have good color film, because I want good pictures.”
This somewhat obtusely, involved another facet of Marguerite Oswald’s character. It concerned economics. She never lost sight of a dollar, real or fancied. It might be true that her son, her flesh and blood, was in dire peril on this night, but it could not be permitted to obscure the realities. She would be prepared, from time to time, to sell her story and her opinions; she would be ready to sell letters or mementos from her son, but she was not ready to give anything away.
Her glance became hard. Tommy Thompson was saying: “Tell me, are Marina and Lee separated, since Lee lives in Dallas?” Ruth Paine wore her holiday smile. “No,” she said, speaking to millions of people beyond the pages of next week’s Life, “they are a happy family. Lee lives in Dallas because of necessity. He works in Dallas, and this is Irving. He has no transportation and he comes to see his family every weekend.” “What type of family man is he?” “A normal family man. He plays with his children. Last night he even fed June. . . .”
Marina did not understand the conversation. Marguerite Oswald didn’t think it was Ruth Paine’s story to tell. “Mrs. Paine,” said Thompson, “can you tell me how Lee got the money to return to the United States?” “Oh, yes,” Ruth said. “He saved the money to come back.” Marguerite began to fume. This type of publicity was uncalled for. Her beloved son should be protected from outsiders. And yet she felt that she was on brittle footing because this was Mrs. Paine’s home. Marguerite could be expelled.
A lady can remain silent only so long. “Now, Mrs. Paine,” said Marguerite Oswald in the petulant, injured tone of her third son, “I am sorry.” All the heads in the room came up. “I am in your home. And I appreciate the fact that I am a guest in your home. But I will not have you making statements that are incorrect.” This was calculated to divert the newsmen to the place where the correct story reposed. “To begin with, I do not approve of this publicity. And if we are going to have the story with Life magazine, I would like to get paid.”
There it was. The poor can afford to be tactless. Grant and Thompson glanced at each other. Marina realized that a new and jarring note had erased the smile from Ruth’s face, but no one bothered to explain what grandmother was talking about. “Here is my daughter-in-law,” said Mrs. Oswald, pointing dramatically with her free hand, “with two small children. And I myself am penniless, and if we are going to give this information, I believe we should get paid for it.”
Lee Harvey Oswald was for sale. The type of story a writer would get would depend upon the source. Marguerite would defend her boy; Marina would give it a somber mood and gray skies; Ruth Paine could make it as cheerful as a Quaker picnic in the hills of Pennsylvania; Robert Oswald could analyze it back to the cradle; John Pic wanted to forget it.
The grandmother had a latent suspicion that Ruth Paine had engineered a secret deal with the men from Life and was being paid. The appearance of the two men at the front door, she was sure, was not accidental. It might even have been set up with Marina’s assistance. Ruth spoke to Marina in Russian. This was an additional frustration because Marguerite could not present her motherly views to her daughter-in-law. Nor did she trust Mrs. Paine to translate her dicta accurately.
The conversation became a crossfire of two languages. One of the newsmen stood and, addressing Marguerite, said: “Mrs. Oswald, I will call my office and see what they think about an arrangement for your life story.” This was even better. Mrs. Oswald felt that her life story, one of hardships and affronts to Southern womanhood, had more drama and more appeal than Lee’s. She had not seen much of her son since he enlisted in the Marine Corps on October 26, 1956. He had been away a long while, come home for a few days, gone to Russia, come back to Texas, and avoided her. There was a question of how much information she could supply about him.
The Life man went into another room and called his superior. Mrs. Oswald dandled Rachel and, beyond doubt, had visions of real money at last falling into her hands. Private nursing cases are drudgery. She carried bedpans, changed sheets and nightclothes, brought cool glasses of water with glass straws, listened to the feeble protests of the chronically ill, snatched a little television and a nap, and hurried home to spend her waking time alone. This could be the biggest thing in her life.
The man came out and said that Life would not pay money for Marguerite’s story. He had a counteroffer. The magazine would pay hotel and food expenses for the group in Dallas. Marguerite was disappointed. She was hurt. However, she would think about it, she said. The men from Life did not leave. Allan Grant made photographs. The flash winked. Marguerite began to feel warm. She rolled her stockings below her knees and sat. The cameraman made a picture. “I am not having this invasion of privacy,” she shouted. “I realize that I am in Mrs. Paine’s home. But you are taking my picture without my consent—a picture that I certainly don’t want made public.”
The photographer followed Marina into the bedroom. The babies were going to bed. Marguerite hurried to follow and interposed herself between the family and the photographer. He continued to make pictures. “I’ve had it!” she said, waving her arms. “Find out what accommodations you can make for my daughter-in-law and I so we can be in Dallas to help Lee.” Her tone brooked no argument. “Let me know in the morning!” The men left.
Time dragged. The night was long. The people on the streets shuffled aimlessly. The clocks on the banks flicked their lights to 7:55, and a man’s mind would race with regret over broad spans of horror and, when he lifted his eyes eventually to another clock, the lights said 7:55. The eternity of time was the result of trying to turn it back to 12:29 P.M., when the roar of the downtown crowds assailed the ears of the pleased President. It did not matter, really, whether a man liked him or not; this was part of the fair and sunny world of democracy.
The dreadful thing happened and those who did not admire him mourned with those who did. A blackness had settled on the land and strangers in buses and elevators and planes and in shops said: “I was on my lunch hour . . .” “I called home to see how things were . . .” “It was Friday, I thought we’d go to a movie tonight . . .” “I slept late . . .” “I was in class . . .” “I rarely turn the car radio on . . .” “I was getting a roast for Sunday . . .” “We felt as though we knew him . . .” “We were going out to our country place for a last weekend . . .” “I saw this woman crying . . .”
The only thing which could reverse the clock was television. The commentators were solemn, the voices sometimes shaken. But there he was, alive again, the arm punctuating the words: “Let the word go forth from this place at this time . . .” “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” “. . . she takes longer, but then when she appears, she looks better than we do . . .” Robert Oswald, the lonely man, walked seven blocks to his car and it seemed as though he arrived at the same moment he had left police headquarters. Time would not dissolve. Nor would it evaporate. This frightful night would go on and on, torturing the innocent and the helpless. How long ago was it that his mind had been set in flames in that shop in Fort Worth? It must have been a long, long time because the same thoughts had been slipping in and out of the revolving door of the mind.
He drove through the downtown area. Robert Oswald wasn’t sure where he was going. He could go home, but there was nothing to say. A man does not like to plague his wife and family with this situation. He would be impelled to discuss it, but what would he say? What would he say Monday at the shop? Or, more important, what would the men say to him? Suppose it was true—suppose his brother had done this thing? What do you say: “My name is Robert Oswald—you know, the brother of the assassin.”
The car moved slowly through the almost empty streets. It came to Dealey Plaza and rolled slowly down the incline past the Texas School Book Depository building. Two policemen stood in the middle of Elm with flashlights, hurrying the flagging motorists. Robert Oswald had no desire to stop. He didn’t know where he was going, but he didn’t want to look at that building. His wheels passed near the spot where life ended and eternity began for John F. Kennedy. At the underpass, he moved out across the viaduct and over the damp bed of the Trinity River and on out on Route Eighty.
Thinking would do no good, and yet thought imprisoned him. He drove slowly, carefully, doing the right things, going west on Arcadia, staring along through the windshield. He could not go to his mother because he lacked the faith. It would be almost as difficult to try to communicate with Marina. The night was cool; that was all a man could say for it. The false summer of the sun was gone. Vaguely, a man could see the bright cat’s eyes of trailer trucks eastbound, making him squint, and then they were gone. He must have passed Cockrell Hill and Arcadia Park because they were behind the car. There were filling stations whizzing by and lights, a diner, a motel. Cars went by him showing broad braces of red lights in the back. He passed Arlington, and Robert Oswald asked himself where he was going.
Nowhere. He would not flee, even if he could. He would help Lee. Being a good brother carries a price. On this day, it was high. In random thought, he may have asked himself if there was a small key out of the past which might have triggered this deed. There were scores of scenes, unwholesome, unhealthy, which could be dredged from boyhood. To a child, a bad life is livable if he has seen no other. To an adult who has earned his own contentment, old memories can be a pit of vipers. It would seem to the Oswald boys that they never had a youth. They were always little men, doing as they were told by their mother; doing as they were told in orphanages; doing as they were told in school; eating when they were told; eating what they were told. There was a shy, timid joy when Marguerite married another man and, for a moment in time, they had a home and a bedroom and a few toys. Even that was a cruel come-on because the boys barely became acclimated to the joys of climbing a tree, throwing a ball, or breaking in a new pair of shiny shoes when it was gone.
He drove over Lancaster into Fort Worth and out near the Ridglea Golf Club and turned around. The car, like his thoughts, was on a carousel. Robert Oswald returned to Dallas. He did not know why. There was nothing he could do. And he had no place to go.