“I’m not cruel. I’ve thought it out. It’ll be better for you there.”
“Why did you bring me here if you were only going to send me back with two children? You know what a disgrace it is to go back without a husband.”
“You have a husband,” he said icily. “I’ll send you money. I thought it would be a disgrace to come back here. But it wasn’t.”
He kept her under unremitting pressure to write the Soviet Embassy and ask for her visa to be speeded up, and she unremittingly refused. He tried to force her to write the embassy whenever she did or said anything that displeased him, and nearly every night when he got home from work he asked whether she had written yet. Every night she answered that she had not. One night he twisted her wrist to try to make her give in.
But what hurt Marina most was something she only suspected: that Lee’s coldness was only a mask, and that it took all his cruelty and self-command to keep it from slipping off. She believed it was his family, June and her, whom he loved in his heart, but that in accordance with his lofty ideas about himself, he disguised his real feelings and forced himself to put politics above everything else. It seemed to her that Lee was not being true to himself. Marina longed to cry out to him: “Why do you torture us so? You know you don’t believe half what you are saying.” For some reason she stifled her own cry.
Marina could understand someone’s giving her up. But she did not see how, for the sake of his “foolish politics,” Lee could give up June, whom he loved above everyone, and a new baby he had never even seen.
“Oh, I’ll see it sometime,” he said airily.
“Do you think you are such a great man?” Marina asked. “Do you think you are the only one who can do anything for ‘little Cuba’?”
Indeed, Lee did give Marina grounds for suspecting that, icy and indifferent as he tried to appear, underneath his feelings were not so cold. He obviously loved June, and every so often, on an impulse, he would put his arms around Marina and kiss her, too. Marina was glad of his kisses. She says she was like a “blind kitten” who, for the sake of one caress, keeps coming back to the person who hits it.
But it was not long before the poor blind kitten put her tail up. Sometimes Lee’s cruelty so repelled Marina that she could not bear to be in the same room with him. She would pick the baby up and go to another room to cry.
Suddenly one night she piped up: “Okay, I’ll go back to Russia so long as you give me a divorce.”
“And whom would you be planning to marry?” Lee asked with a little leer. “Anatoly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“There’ll be no divorce,” Lee said in a hard voice. “I may want to come to you sometime. I won’t give you a divorce.” He put down the book he was reading. “You’re my wife and you’ll stay my wife. The children are mine. You’ll wait for me just as long as I want. There will be no divorce. That’s it. The conversation is over.”
Sometimes Marina had moods in which she thought she might go back to Russia if it would please Lee. But she did not want to go. She wanted to keep Lee and stay in America. She counted on time, Soviet red tape, and a change in their relationship to save her. But now she had hit upon another device. She saw that Lee, for some reason she could not comprehend, would not allow her to go back to Russia without legal ties to him. And it worked. Each time she mentioned the word “divorce,” Lee balked. If she continued to insist on a divorce, perhaps he would change his mind entirely.
Meantime an explosive new element had been introduced into their arguments: the name of Anatoly and, with it, jealousy. Once the name was out of the bag, it came up again and again, and it was Lee who kept bringing it up. He reminded Marina of the letter she had written to Anatoly the previous winter and told her he would never forget. He mentioned Anatoly every time they had a fight. If Marina reminisced about some escapade she had had in Minsk, he assumed that she had been with Anatoly. “Stop it,” he would say. “I can’t stand it.” And if she herself spoke of Anatoly, he would say: “Shut up. I don’t want to hear about your boyfriends.”
Once Marina went too far and remarked that Anatoly used to kiss so well it had made her head spin. Lee literally clapped his hand over her mouth to hush her up. “You’re my wife,” he said. “You’re not to speak of any other man ever again.”
But another time, when she again had the temerity to mention Anatoly’s kissing, Lee asked her to teach him how. At that moment Marina felt the full sweetness of revenge. Anatoly, she replied, half in humor, kissed so well that if Lee spent his whole life trying he would never learn to kiss that way.
Marina’s talk of Anatoly was not just a ruse to make Lee jealous. Her life with Lee had been so hard that anyone who had ever been good to her now seemed like an angel. Anatoly had been good to her, and she had been “crazy” about him. After Lee intercepted her letter to him and read it aloud, she had resolved to forget him. But Marina was not in full control of her thoughts. Anatoly started cropping up at night, in her dreams. If she did go back to Russia, he was the man she would marry—if he would have her.
Marina gave up trying to forget Anatoly. In fact, she bought a photograph of President Kennedy to remind her of him. An attentive observer of physical characteristics, a girl who was constantly drawing comparisons between the features of this person and that, Marina saw a resemblance between the two men: the ruffled, unruly hair; the heavy, slightly hooded eyelids; the nose; the lips; the lower half of the face—except for the generous Kennedy allotment of teeth. Nor was Kennedy the only man whose features reminded her of Anatoly’s. The film actor Mel Ferrer, who played Prince Andrei in the film version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, reminded her of Anatoly, too.
As far as Marina is aware, Lee never knew that in her eyes the president’s features were a prized reminder of the love she had lost. She did not tell him of the resemblance. Yet knowing her capacity to arouse jealousy, and Lee’s proclivity to be jealous, it could very well be that she somehow telegraphed her feeling that Kennedy resembled Anatoly and that her message got through to Lee. In any case Lee had seen Anatoly on the night he first met Marina, and if a resemblance truly existed and was marked, he may have observed it for himself. He was, justifiably, jealous of Anatoly. And he was jealous of Kennedy, whether he had seen a resemblance or not. Once Marina said casually: “He is very attractive—I can’t say what he is as president, but, I mean, as a man.” Lee’s response was as usuaclass="underline" “You mustn’t like any other man but me.”
In the summer of 1963, both Lee and Marina, like so many others in America, had special feelings about the Kennedys. The names of the president and his wife were a staple item of their household conversation. Lee appears to have had a small, special feeling for Mrs. Kennedy. He admired her, he said, for accompanying her husband on his travels (a reproach to Marina), and from reading Time and the newspapers, he seemed to have about as detailed a knowledge of her obstetrical history as he had of Marina’s. He told Marina that, in addition to Caroline, John Jr., and the child she was due to have that autumn, Mrs. Kennedy had lost two children, one a miscarriage and one a stillbirth. Marina was very, very sorry.[8]
As for the president, Lee said that he was Roman Catholic, one of a large family of brothers and sisters, and a Democrat and that his father was a millionaire who made money in the whiskey business. “His papa bought him the presidency,” Lee remarked, and to Marina’s surprise she failed to detect resentment in the way he said it. “Money paves the way to everything here,” Lee added, and she thought she did hear resentment in that remark—not against the president but against capitalism. Lastly, he told her that in spite of his father’s help, Kennedy was equipped to be president and deserved it.
8
Mrs. Kennedy’s pregnancy was announced during the week after Easter, which was on April 14. It was Oswald who told Marina about it. Thus, between Walker and the “Nixon” episodes and in the ten-day period before Oswald left Dallas for New Orleans, he and Marina were looking at photographs of the president and Mrs. Kennedy attending church services in Palm Beach to see if the pregnancy was visible.