Marina’s outburst had been caused in part by her sorrow and anxiety about the parting that lay ahead. Realizing that she might never see Lee again, she begged him to take her with him. “Where on earth can I take you?” he said. “You’re in the last stages of pregnancy.” He promised to bring her to Cuba or else rejoin her in Russia. Marina hated both choices, but she knew it was useless to protest. In the meantime she was not to tell Ruth where Lee was, nor would he write to her at Ruth’s. But if she had not heard from him in two weeks (his Mexican tourist visa was good for two weeks), then she would know he was in Cuba.
On Friday afternoon, September 20, Marina went out to buy a few last-minute groceries. By the time she got back, Ruth and her children had arrived, and Lee was greeting them on the porch. He was overjoyed to see Ruth, and she, for her part, was impressed by the change in him. He seemed to be in good spirits, “very outgoing and warm and friendly.”[15] She had never seen him in such a good mood before.
Ruth and her children stayed the weekend, and they all had a pleasant time. Lee appeared genuinely concerned about Marina’s welfare and where she would have the baby. He was grateful to Ruth for taking over the arrangements. He gave her a duplicate tax form from Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, his Dallas employer from October 1962 to April 1963, to present to Parkland Hospital in Dallas as proof that Marina was a one-year Texas resident, hence entitled to care based on her ability to pay. In case the hospital authorities asked, he was anxious that Ruth avoid any suggestion that he had “abandoned” his wife. He, of course, made no mention of his plans to go abroad. He told Ruth that he was going to Houston or Philadelphia to look for work; as soon as he found it, he would be back to fetch Marina. Thus Ruth assumed that Marina was coming to stay with her for only a few weeks.
Contrary to his usual contempt for anyone who helped him, Lee had a grudging admiration for Ruth. She was “too tall” and “a fool”—Lee called everyone “a fool”—but he was sympathetic to her marital troubles. In a reversal of his customary moralistic stance, Lee, prompted by Marina, declared that Ruth would be “a fool” not to take a lover. It would help her forget Michael. So when Ruth wrote them a postcard from New York announcing ruefully that she had not yet succeeded in her mission, Lee was tickled a good deal. He laughed and said that Ruth was “really something.”
That weekend Marina wanted to take Ruth on a tour of the nightclubs on Bourbon Street. They urged Lee to come with them, but he refused. He hated nightclubs and had never, in all the time Marina knew him and in spite of much cajoling on her part, been inside one. So Marina and Ruth made the tour, “a tall Quaker lady,” as Marina describes it, holding a small boy and girl by either hand, and a small, very pregnant woman, holding her tiny daughter by the hand. They did not go into any of the clubs. They just peeked through the swinging doors, while the children tried to dance to the striptease music.
When they got back, they found Lee in a marvelous mood. He had washed the dishes, straightened up the apartment—and started packing. Ruth was impressed by Lee’s insistence on doing every bit of packing himself. She had never seen him such a gentleman before. What she did not know was that among the items he was loading with such care in her car was, almost certainly, his rifle, dismantled, wrapped in brown paper and a blanket, and tied up in heavy string. Somehow he led the Paines to understand that it was “camping equipment.”[16]
The parting on Monday morning, September 23, was hard for both Lee and Marina. Lee tried to conceal his distress by doing chores. When he had finished loading the car—again, all by himself—he assured Marina that he knew he did not have to worry about her so long as she was with Ruth. “She is good, and she will help you.” But when he kissed Marina goodbye, his lips were trembling, and it was all he could do to keep from crying. Marina thought that he might be wondering, for the first time, whether he had a right to act in a way that could hurt his wife and baby. Marina remembers that he looked at her “as a dog looks at its master.” And in that pathetic look she thought she could see that he loved her.
Marina, too, was close to tears and tried to conceal from Ruth how much the parting was costing her—the pain of perhaps leaving Lee forever. She was ashamed at being dumped on Ruth, ashamed most of all that she could not tell the truth even to the friend who had come to her rescue.
No sooner had they said their good-byes and driven off than Ruth noticed a rumbling in one of her tires. She pulled up at a gas station one block from the apartment to have it changed. Lee, in his sandals, followed them there. Marina took him to one side, and they parted all over again. She was tender to him, telling him to be careful and eat properly.
“Stop,” he said. “I can’t stand it. Do you want me to cry in front of Ruth?”
For him, too, the hardest thing was to conceal from Ruth that the parting might be forever. So while the two of them fought back their tears, Lee held Junie in front of the Coke machine to help them gain their composure. “Come on, Junie,” he said. “Show me with your fingers what you want.” Then, when he had a grip on himself, he warned Marina that, above all, she was not to tell Ruth he was going to Cuba.
— 32 —
A New Disappointment
A host of controversies has arisen about the months that Lee Harvey Oswald spent in New Orleans, in particular the time from July 19 onward, when he was unemployed, and the two days between Marina’s departure for Texas on September 23 and Lee’s own departure for Mexico City on September 25. Clandestine meetings and conspiratorial relationships, have been attributed to Oswald during this period. But the available evidence suggests that both were unlikely, if not impossible. Taking Marina’s recollections of her husband’s activities, the testimony of the Oswalds’ neighbors, the minimum number of visits Lee paid to the public library—occasions when he actually checked out a book (twenty)—his visits to the Louisiana Employment Office (sixteen); the times he went looking for jobs between July 22 and the middle of August (an unknown but considerable number); occasions when he was out picketing or at the radio station (five); his forays to printing establishments (perhaps a dozen); his visits to Winn-Dixie and his post office box; his trips with Marina and June to the Murrets’ (four or five times), to Lake Pontchartrain, the zoo, the botanical garden, or just exploring the French Quarter; to say nothing of times when he spent the entire day reading in the public library or when Marina sent him to the movies so she could catch up on housework or have a little time to herself—all of these added together account for most of Oswald’s time in New Orleans while he was not actually at work. Only one, and possibly two, people whom he may have known slightly during these months remain unidentified: one of the two young men to whom he paid $2 on August 16 to help him pass out handbills; and a “Negro” at Reily with whom he told Marina he used to go drinking, a man whom she never saw and who may have been a creature of Lee’s imagination, since Marina reports that Lee never came home late and never drank anything stronger than Coke, iced tea, or Dr. Pepper.
Lee was, of course, highly secretive. He had wanted to be a spy, and he was, in fact, a nearly successful assassin. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative, it cannot be established that conspirators did not ever contact him, or he them. But for anyone who was contemplating something serious, Oswald would appear to have been too conspicuous, especially in the Southwest, for he was an ex-defector to Russia who flaunted his Russian and had a Russian wife, he was an almost inevitable magnet for the FBI’s attentions, and he was a young man who blatantly sought publicity instead of avoiding it. And if his outer characteristics rendered him an unlikely recruit, his personality rendered him unlikelier still, for he was so incapable of cooperating with anyone that he had been unable even to establish the loosest of relationships with the FPCC, fifteen hundred miles away. Apart from the rare occasions when their living arrangements forced him to admit to Marina what he was doing, or when a momentary breach in the armor of his mistrust allowed him to confide in her, he trusted no one with his secrets. He had proven that he was capable of taking drastic actions and dangerous risks—but always alone.