Marina did not want to touch it; she was afraid that it might go off. She merely motioned to the mattress. Lee drew the pistol out and put it where he usually kept it, on the top shelf in his office. But curiously, he left her in possession of the “evidence” against him that she had mentioned to him that day. It was the note he had left her, in Russian, on the night he went to shoot General Walker. Marina allowed Lee to have his pistol back. But she kept the note, moving it from place to place, until it finally came to rest among her cookbooks.
With the “Nixon” drama over, Marina sensed a falling off, an easing of her husband’s tension. Since his attempt on Walker, he had been hanging over an emotional precipice. He had geared himself up to kill, to be captured, and face trial and punishment. The failure of anything to happen had been a fearful anticlimax. And so Lee poured his energy on the nearest person, the safest person—and it worked. He could easily have won the battle of the bathroom if he had wished. Instead, he spent himself in the struggle and emerged harmless. With Marina as his tool, he disarmed himself emotionally.
Exactly what he had in mind when he said he was going to “look” at Nixon will never be known. From the painstaking way he had laid the paper face up, on the coffee table, perhaps he hoped to be caught at something and make a show of his concern for Cuba. But Nixon was not in Dallas. The very next day, Monday, Governor John Connally of Texas, with whom Lee had corresponded in a fruitless effort to alter his “undesirable” discharge, was due in Dallas to speak at the Marriott Hotel. And the day after that, Vice President Johnson would be at the same place. He might have tried to shoot either of them, but Lee had lost his keenness to kill.
Marina later observed that their little charade had been aimed not at “Nixon” but at her. She sensed that it had been Lee’s purpose to wound her or test her in some way. She was right. Lee was testing her to see whether, when he reached a certain frame of mind, he could count on her to stop him. She passed the test with flying colors. But she failed his other test. Lee mentioned Nixon, the one American politician whose name he knew she might recognize because Nixon had been to Russia, in order to warn her that he might kill somebody else, not just Walker. Lee sent that message—but Marina did not understand. It was too terrible. She continued to cling to the idea that General Walker was the only political figure who might be in danger from Lee.
But Marina had learned a lot about Lee, knowledge she would rather not have had. She now knew the full extent of his interest in politics, which she had not measured before. Not only that, she saw that he was willing to act on his ideas. She had also learned how calculating he could be. Isolated phenomena that she had been trying for months not to notice suddenly fell into place—Lee’s maps, his guns, his bus schedules, even the photograph for June. Lee had been planning his attempt on General Walker for at least two months, had planned and foreseen every detail, and had lied unblushingly to her. And she had learned that he wanted to be caught. She began to see that her husband was, in his own eyes, a great man who was unjustly ignored by the world and would do anything to wrest its attention.
Yet Marina’s worst discovery by far was her awareness that Lee would kill abstractly, for the sake of his ideas. He had tried to strangle her, of course, and for months she had been afraid of him. But to kill your wife in a fit of rage was nothing new. To kill someone you did not know, had never met, a man who had done you no harm, all for the sake of politics—to her that was unbelievable. It was sick. To learn that Lee was capable of that, Marina says, was “a terrible shock and discovery, like all the shocks in the world put together, a volcano.” It took a while to sink in, and she never got over it.
Marina was not a coward. Even Lee’s beatings had done nothing to temper the audacity of her tongue. “You’d be the greatest wife in the world,” he often said, “if only you couldn’t talk.” Yet her outspokenness had saved her. Lee could beat up her body, but he could not beat up her spirit, nor alter in the slightest what she thought. Thus far Marina had survived. But now it was another matter. Now she knew that she was in danger. It was a cataclysmic revelation. “I tried not to think about it much and I didn’t change quickly. But I began, really, to be afraid.”
What was she to do? Something in Marina, something commonsensical, resisted getting inside Lee’s head and “making her brain spin the way his did.” Already she had learned more about him than she could handle, and she saw that if she thought deeply about the Walker affair and all it told her about Lee, she would go out of her mind. It was with relief that she turned to the baby, the cooking, the cleaning. They save her from dwelling too long on the new knowledge of which she was now the uneasy possessor.
And yet she had to do something. Should she leave Lee? Take the baby and live alone? Or stay with Lee and try to change him. Just as her decision not to go to the police after the Walker shooting bore the stamp of her Soviet upbringing, so did the decision she came to now. In true Russian fashion, she decided that she was, indeed, her husband’s keeper; he was her responsibility, and it was up to her to straighten him out. In a phrase that could have come directly from a Soviet tract on family morality, she told herself that “I must apply all my strength to help correct my husband and put him on the right path.” She saw that she would have to use as her tools sympathy, affection, and understanding, and not so many of the harsh words that flooded all too readily from her tongue. They only made Lee pull away from her. Now it would be her task to draw him out. She must enter into his world and help him see where he was wrong.
After the Nixon episode they decided to move to New Orleans right away. Lee would go on ahead and look for work while Marina stayed on Neely Street until he sent for her. She was heartened by his willingness to move. Walker and Dallas appeared synonymous to her, and the two together spelled violence. Lee’s agreeing to leave Dallas must mean that he was giving up violence and choosing a peaceful life instead. Moreover, Marina hoped for succor from his family in New Orleans. They would help Lee find a job and would serve as a moral influence and a restraint. Their influence, on top of hers, would deter him. Marina was sure that he would be ashamed to shoot anybody in a city where he had a right-thinking family looking on. Things would be different in New Orleans, and once they were settled in their new home, she would figure out how to go about remaking him. “There, on the spot,” Marina said to herself, “I’ll see better how to do it.”
Marina could not have known it, but with the Walker attempt over, the cruelest and most poignant days of her marriage were over, too. That attempt, and the Nixon episode that followed, sealed a curious compact between husband and wife. Marina had not gone to the police after Walker, and in her significant motion at the mattress on the night of April 21, she had allowed Lee to have his pistol back. He for his part never asked her for the note he had left behind on the night he attempted to shoot General Walker. It was an odd sort of trust—she trusting him with his weapon, he trusting her with evidence she could use to stop him in the future. Yet with that compact, if that is what it was, things did change a little between them.
Slowly, very slowly, Lee began to admit Marina to the more daring and private of his two worlds. Where before he had kept her confined to the mundane, family side of his life only, now he would occasionally permit her a glimpse of the world that meant most to him, what Marina calls the “high-flying world of his ideas.” She says that she was still “an obstacle in his way, but he no longer showed it as openly as he had before. I was someone with whom he could take off his mask,” and whom, for a moment now and then, he could trust.