But the bickering went on, for it was the currency of their relationship. Marina says that even on quiet days the marriage was a succession of “tears and caresses, arguments and reconciliations.” Lee did not beat her, but their fights were amplified in Russian, an unfamiliar tongue, and their neighbors in New Orleans were soon in nearly the same condition of shock as their neighbors in Dallas. The state of the marriage, the state of mind of the principals, had to be measured by something other than the decibel count. With the Oswalds, ordinary conversation sounded like argument, and a real argument like a fight to the finish. What counted was the mood of the marriage, and in New Orleans the first couple of months were hard. Marina was depressed and Lee preoccupied. They fought constantly, with little humor in their battle.
They fought about everything. A week or so after Marina’s arrival, Lee bought some crabs, brought them home, and left them simmering on the stove. Not knowing that he meant to cook them his own way, Marina added spices, the ones she knew from Russia. Lee was furious.
They fought about cockroaches, too. Marina sometimes got up at night and went to the kitchen for something cold to drink. The place would be swarming with cockroaches.
“Come in and admire your handiwork,” she would call out toward the bedroom—it was “his” handiwork because Lee did not allow her to use the spray.
He would run in naked from the bedroom, brandishing a can of roach spray and squirting it everywhere. Marina laughed, because he was too stingy to buy decent spray and too stingy to use enough of it and because he put it in the wrong places.
“You woke me up, and now you’re laughing at me.” He was hurt.
Every day while he was at work, Marina scrubbed the floor and the furniture. But the apartment was old and dark, and no matter how hard she tried to clean it, the place still got her down. But she loved to go walking at night with Lee, letting him show her New Orleans, even though she sometimes felt that he did it because he thought it was his duty and not because he wanted to. Strolling through one neighborhood or another, Lee would sometimes wave at a building and crow, “I went to that school.” It happened often enough that Marina began to wonder just how many schools he had been to.
What she enjoyed most were their walks along Bourbon Street. She adored the lights and the music and the glimpses of strippers dancing. She begged Lee to take her inside. He refused, said Bourbon Street was “a dirty place,” and put on a show of inattentiveness as they walked past the famous swinging doors. Marina thought that he liked Bourbon Street just the same.
Marina made no secret of her interest in sex. At the newsstands, where they fairly often found themselves at night, she would pick out the most unwholesome-looking magazines she could find and pore over the photographs of nude men and women. Lee affected to be above it all. He read the news magazines. But more than once she spied him flicking through a girlie magazine.
Aside from June, whom they both adored, sex was again the brightest feature of their marriage. For all his Puritanism, Lee enjoyed making love. After intercourse he would go into the bathroom to wash off, emerge singing one of his arias, and lie down with his back to Marina.
“Don’t touch me,” he would say. “And don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”
There was a mirror at the foot of their bed, and Lee would pile up pillows at the head of the bed so he could watch them making love. Marina did not like it. She pulled the pillows down or turned her head away. She was hurt that the mirror seemed to excite Lee more than she did.
Sometimes when she was sitting in front of the mirror brushing her hair, he would bend down to kiss her, looking into the mirror, and call her “Mama” or “my little girl.”
“Who are you kissing me for—me or the mirror?”
“You mean you don’t like it?”
“Of course not,” she would answer and give him a little rap on the rear end.
Although Marina insists that their sexual life was improving right up to the end and that, well over a year after Lee’s death, she still would have chosen him over any other man, the fact is that the balance had shifted. In Russia it was Lee who wanted sex more; now it was Marina. Sometimes when Lee came home hot and tired from work, he would beg off making love on the ground that he would be unable to keep it up long enough to satisfy Marina. But even when her pregnancy made intercourse uncomfortable for her, Marina was glad to give him satisfaction even if she did not receive it in return.
For she was no longer sure that Lee loved her, and she wanted to be needed and reassured. Every day she expected to hear that he still meant to send her back to Russia. Waiting for the ax to fall, her fears abated only when they were walking along Bourbon Street at night. Then the lights and the music and the sight of people enjoying themselves lifted her spirits a little.
On May 12, the day after Marina arrived in New Orleans, Lee made out a change-of-address card, closing his post office box in Dallas and giving his new home address. The change became effective May 14, and Lee once again began to receive the magazines and newspapers to which he subscribed, among them Soviet Belorussia, a daily subsidized by the Soviet government, and the Militant. News of Fidel Castro, then on a month-long tour of the Soviet Union, was featured in both papers, and the Militant in particular was critical of recent speeches by President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, hinting that the United States government was working for Castro’s overthrow.[2]
Lee had not forgotten Fidel Castro. The move to New Orleans, and the search for a new job and a new apartment, had distracted him from politics only briefly. Now he was to become more deeply involved in the Cuban cause than he ever had been and was to identify himself more strongly than ever with this particular revolution and its heroes. On May 22 he paid his first visit to the New Orleans Public Library, applied for a borrower’s card, and took out his first book. It was Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, by the biographer Robert Payne. Marina says that Lee compared himself to the great men he read about in books and genuinely believed that he was one of them.[3]
At this moment, however, Lee was thinking more about changing the society he was in than about building a new one, as Mao and Castro had done. And what he hoped to change first was United States policy toward Cuba. On May 26, therefore, he wrote again to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at its national headquarters, 799 Broadway, New York, announcing that he wanted to form a New Orleans chapter. He requested a charter for his chapter and formal membership for himself, said he was thinking of renting an office for $30 a month, and asked how he might acquire membership blanks and bulk literature. For the office he was hoping to set up, he added that “a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing, would be a welcome touch.”[4]
Without waiting for a reply, Lee then set about printing his own literature. On May 29, after he had apparently scouted several similar establishments, he walked into the Jones Printing Company of 422 Girod Street and handed the secretary an eight-by-ten-inch looseleaf sheet on which he had sketched a handbilclass="underline" [5]
2
In a speech on April 19, 1963, President Kennedy, in what was actually an effort to soften demands for a new invasion of Cuba, predicted that “in five years’ time” it was very likely Castro would no longer be the ruler of Cuba and, in the long run, the United States would be seen to have contributed to the result. In the
3
A list of books borrowed by Oswald from the New Orleans Public Library, the main library and the Napoleon Branch, appears in Vol. 25, Warren Commission Report, pp. 929–931. A reason Oswald borrowed the Payne biography may be another article in the