For Marina the two weeks she stayed at Ruth Paine’s were like a vacation. She was tired; she was still trying to absorb the horrifying new facts she had only just learned about her husband. It was a relief to be taken care of and have no responsibility other than looking after June. It was a relief not to have to anticipate Lee’s moods every second and try to guess what new and dreadful surprise might be lurking around the corner.
Marina was very grateful. But Ruth Paine was of all Americans the very last whom Marina’s experience could have equipped her to understand. Like the de Mohrenschildts, the Paines were an extremely unlikely couple to have befriended the Oswalds. Even seeing Ruth and Marina together was a study in contrasts.
Ruth was tall, slender, lithe, with a figure like a dancer. She had a thin, longish face with freckles and short, slightly wavy brown hair. The appearance of seriousness she gave was enhanced by a pair of rimless glasses. And she had a tendency to go around singing. Like many people who have been serious even as children, she had a good deal of unexpended child in her. Ruth could be a little bit fey.
Ruth Avery Hyde grew up in the Middle West, the daughter of parents who felt strongly about the value of education and good works. When she was only thirteen, Ruth spent a summer on a truck farm in Ohio as her way of contributing to the effort to win World War II. The next summer she was with a traveling Bible school, teaching in Ohio and Indiana. At nineteen, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio, she became a Quaker, a convinced Quaker, often the most dedicated kind. She wanted to be a teacher, and by the time she graduated, she had held an astonishing array of jobs. She had taught in elementary schools in the East and the Middle West and had been a recreation leader at Jewish community centers in Ohio and Indiana, at a club for elderly immigrants in Philadelphia, and at a Friends’ work camp in South Dakota. Whatever the job, Ruth was liked and respected and was always asked to come back.
She was a teacher, aged twenty-five, at the Germantown Friends’ School in Philadelphia when she met and married Michael Paine. The marriage was not only suitable, it appeared inevitable, so much did Ruth and Michael share. They met through a common love of madrigal singing and folk dancing; both were children of divorce, and both came from families of exceptional social conscience. But their marriage was in trouble from the start, before the start, really, because Michael was not sure about his capacity for love. They moved to Texas, and in September 1962 they separated. Michael was now living alone in an apartment in Grand Prairie, Texas, and came home two or three times a week. This, the break with Michael, which she was hoping against hope to mend, was the sorrow of Ruth’s life. It was the aching place that Marina, slightly and for a while, was to fill.
Ruth had spent her life helping others, but charitable though her every instinct was, she had mixed feelings about Lee. She sensed that Lee was using her. On the morning of April 24, when Lee was on his way to New Orleans, he had simply taken it for granted that she would ferry him to the bus terminal. Lee did not ask, he expected. But her awareness of this did not deter Ruth from inviting Lee’s wife and child to stay with her. And when he accepted without even offering to help with their expenses, Ruth’s concern, characteristically, was for Marina, not herself. Marina was not a sponger. She had pride. Ruth thought that Lee must not love his wife at all if he could place her in so awkward a situation and go to so little trouble to take care of her.
She was right on the mark. Marina genuinely liked Ruth. She liked her company and loved being at her house. But she had qualms of conscience. She hated being a burden, hated being in a position where she had little to give. On April 24, even before the two women left for Irving, Marina seems to have sought reassurance. Lee gave it, telling her that she had nothing to be ashamed of. “Ruth is lonely,” he said. “You’ll be company for her. And you can teach her Russian.”
Still, Marina hardly had a penny, she contributed nothing to the household, and she was ashamed. She helped with the cleaning and washing up. And she helped Ruth with her Russian. Marina tried to tell herself that she was doing more for Ruth than Ruth was doing for her, and Ruth, too, told her the same thing many times. But it would not wash. Marina was deeply in Ruth’s debt, and she knew it.
The relationship had its other angularities. Ruth was thirty-one, Marina twenty-one, and to Marina the gap was enormous. She was in Ruth’s home, dependent on her, and it was natural to place her in the role of mother. Whenever she and June were talking, Marina spoke of Ruth as Tyotya, or “Aunt Ruth,” an ordinary way of speaking in Russia, where close women friends of the family are called “aunt.” But to Ruth the word had an unwelcome sound. She wanted to be a friend and an equal. Not only that. Ruth guessed that Marina’s feelings toward her mother had been very mixed, compounded of hate as well as love. She sensed that any relationship in which she was cast in the role of mother could turn out to be a minefield of complications.
There was also the language barrier between them. Ruth had a splendid education, but in Russian she was only a beginner. There was a huge, frustrating gap between what this thoughtful, sensitive woman might be thinking and what she could say in Russian. Ruth later recalled that her lack of Russian was “a terrible impediment to talking and to friendship” with Marina; it was “a terrible embarrassment” and an ironic one as well.[22] Here she was in her own house, commanding the telephone, recruiting lawn mowers and babysitters, making arrangements with marvelous efficiency, yet linguistically she was on Marina’s turf. Ruth felt as helpless as a child.
Marina for her part kept enormous reticences. But they were reticences of loyalty, not of language. She chattered freely about her life in Russia, her girlfriends, her aunts, her boyfriends. But she said no more about Lee’s plan to send her back to Russia. She never mentioned that Lee beat her. She did not know that Ruth was a pacifist, nor even what a pacifist is, but she had the wit not to mention that Lee had a rifle and had attempted to kill General Walker. Nor did she say that she had persuaded Lee to move to New Orleans out of fear of his using it again. Ruth had said that knowledge of the Walker attempt would have altered all her actions toward the Oswalds. She would have gone to the police and found a psychiatrist for Lee, or done both, as soon as she learned of it.
With such portentous silences on Marina’s side, it is scarcely a wonder that Ruth eventually concluded that Marina was a bit of “an enigma,” that they were “different sorts of people.”[23] But her awareness was a long time coming, and meanwhile the two of them trotted along, like a pair of tired ponies, in easy harness. It was a friendship of shared exhaustion. Doubt as to whether their husbands loved them and would ever want to live with them again—this was the rock on which their companionship was built. Both of them, after the ordeal of their marriages, required a rest. Ruth was later to say that she and Marina gave each other “great moral support” at a difficult time for both.[24] As for the difference between them—lack of language, their fundamental incongruousness as friends—even these made for a restful distance, a feeling of live and let live, and respect for each other’s privacy.