One evening during the last week of August, she and June went for a stroll. Arriving home about twilight, they found Lee on the porch perched on one knee, pointing his rifle toward the street. It was the first time she had seen him with his rifle in months—and she was horrified.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Get the heck out of here,” he said. “Don’t talk to me. Get on about your own affairs.”
A few evenings later she again found him on the porch with his rifle.
“Playing with your gun again, are you?” she said, sarcastically.
“Fidel Castro needs defenders,” Lee said. “I’m going to join his army of volunteers. I’m going to be a revolutionary.”
After that, busy indoors, Marina frequently heard a clicking sound out on the porch while Lee was sitting there at dusk. She heard it three times a week, maybe more often, until the middle of September. Often she saw him clean the rifle, but this did not worry her because she knew that he had not taken it out of the house to practice. “So it’s Cuba this time. If he’s got to use his gun,” she thought to herself, “let him take it to his Cuba. They’re always shooting down there anyway. Just so he doesn’t use it here.” But just in case, she exacted a promise from him that he would not use the rifle against anybody in the United States. “Ya ne budu”—“I won’t”—he promised her in a quiet voice. Marina felt reassured.[4]
In the early days of September, Lee increasingly concentrated on one thing—Cuba. He was anxious to be on his way. When he was able to leave for Mexico, however, would depend on the one person whom both the Oswalds now looked on as their “savior”—Ruth Paine. “When is Ruth coming?” he kept asking. Or, “How many days before Ruth is due to arrive?”
Ruth and Marina had been exchanging letters all summer. Ruth was sedulous about Lee’s feelings. She always asked how he was, and whenever there were decisions to be made, she addressed sections of her letters, in English, to him. Ruth was not certain that she liked Lee, but she thought he was a vulnerable man, and she respected his feelings. So long as the Oswalds stayed together, Lee was very much a part of her friendship for Marina. She went out of her way not to hurt him.
About the middle of July, more than a month after two letters had arrived from Marina announcing that things were not going well between her and Lee, Ruth wrote renewing her invitation to Marina to stay with her in Irving before and after the new baby’s birth. But now, for the first time, she extended an indefinite invitation: Marina could stay as long as she needed if it would save her from going back to Russia against her will. Ruth told Marina that she was welcome to stay “for two months or two years.”[5]
Before issuing the invitation Ruth talked it over with her husband, Michael. He tended to favor it since Marina’s earlier visit had worked out well and had contributed to Ruth’s happiness, but he decided to consult Frank Krystinik, his best friend at work, about whether Lee might turn out to be a “violent person,” capable of taking out on Ruth such displeasure as he might feel at Marina’s being there. Michael and Krystinik concluded that if Lee were handled in a “gentle and considerate” manner, so that his feelings were not offended, he would not be a danger.[6] They decided that Lee was not “going to stab Ruth or Marina.” Only after they had considered the possibility that Lee might be violent and rejected it did Ruth go ahead and invite Marina for the longer stay.
At this point, about mid-July, Marina wrote that her marriage was going better; she no longer felt the need of rescue but would like to hold the invitation in reserve in case “Lee gets rough with me again.” Despite a false assurance from Marina that she had been to see a doctor, and despite a postscript from Lee about the cost of maternity care in New Orleans, Ruth somehow divined that she was going to be needed even before the new baby arrived. Accordingly, she wrote Marina that, after a roundabout tour of relatives in the East and the Midwest, she would stop in New Orleans about September 18. Marina could make up her mind then whether she wanted to stay in New Orleans, drive back to Dallas with Ruth to await the baby, or come later on her own closer to the due date.
But during the first ten days of August, Lee’s thoughts must have turned decisively toward adventure—or at least toward divesting himself of responsibility for his wife and children—for he told Marina to write Ruth that he had lost his job and they were out of money. She was not to speak of Cuba in the letter or say that he had agreed to go with her to Russia. Marina was not to mention him at all if she could help it.
Marina did as she was told, and her letter (postmarked August 11, the day after Lee’s release from the police station) contains a ring of embarrassment or evasion.[7] This time, unlike the previous spring when she omitted to tell Ruth anything about the Walker affair, Marina was not, on her own initiative, withholding information out of loyalty to Lee. Instead, she consciously allowed Lee to use her as an instrument to get what he wanted out of Ruth. Marina was embarrassed because Lee was so obviously appealing to Ruth to take her off his hands. But what was she to do? The baby was due before long, Lee wanted to be rid of her, and she had nowhere else to turn. Ruth was her one hope of staying in America.
On August 25 Ruth mailed a letter from Paoli, Pennsylvania, promising to be in New Orleans on September 20 exactly, and during the daylight hours if she could make it. Coming from Ruth, the promise might have been written on granite. From the day it arrived, about August 27 or 28, Lee knew that he would be free to leave for Mexico within a few days of September 20, and he started making his plans. He was already, that last week of August, dry-firing his rifle on the porch. But as if to underscore the connection between his plans and Ruth, he stopped dry-firing the gun, Marina says, “a few days before Ruth arrived.” It was as if Ruth Paine was his conscience.
While he waited for Ruth’s arrival, Lee wrote three remarkable letters. In one, dated August 31 and addressed to Mr. E. Bert, managing editor of the Worker in New York City, he applied for a job as a photographer and announced that he and his family would be “relocating” into the area “in a few weeks.”[8] The letter was accompanied by a sample of Lee’s work and was incorrectly addressed.
Also on August 31 Lee wrote a letter (misdated September 1) to the Socialist Workers Party in New York, announcing that he and his family were moving to the Baltimore-Washington area in October and asking how to get in touch with party representatives there.[9] And on September 1 he wrote a letter to the Communist Party asking how to “contact the Party in the Baltimore-Washington area, to which I shall relocate in October.”[10]
Although Lee was obsessed by his desire to go to Cuba and had no intention of returning to the United States, where this time he would surely face prosecution, these letters apparently represented an alternative in case he never got there at all. In that event perhaps he thought he might move to the Northeast and try to establish himself as a left-wing activist. Why did he choose New York, Baltimore, or Washington? They were, first of all, the cities with Russian-speaking communities that Ruth had mentioned where Marina might be able to find a job. Lee had scolded Marina for even considering a visit to those cities with Ruth, but now, characteristically, he picked up the very same idea. If there was not much prejudice against people who knew Russian and had been to Russia, then perhaps he, instead of Marina, could find work there.
4
Many questions have been raised about Oswald’s dry-firing in New Orleans, since it was the only time between the attempt on Walker in April and the shooting of Kennedy in November that he is known to have handled his rifle. One question is whether he pulled the trigger rapidly and at high speed. Marina believes the answer is no. She recalls a considerable interval between clicking sounds. Another question is whether he took the metal barrel and wooden stock apart when he cleaned the rifle. Marina does not remember. She remembers that he oiled and polished the rifle often and put it back in the closet, but she so disliked the sight of it that she watched as little as she could. Another question is whether he had a bench or some other sturdy rest to which he could clamp the rifle as he sighted it. Again, the answer is no. Marina remembers the porch as unfurnished. She thinks there was nothing on which he could have rested the gun. It might be added that, so far as is known, Oswald was then practicing to fight for Castro, not preparing for a particular murder.