Lee spent the weekend at the Paines’. Ruth left them alone as much as she could and even tried to keep June out of their way. Carefree as children, they sat on the swings in the backyard.
“Is Ruth good to you?” Lee asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Marina, adding that Ruth had taken her to a doctor and arranged for the baby to be delivered free.
Lee told Marina a little about his adventures in Mexico City, and she got the impression that, apart from his one great disappointment, he had enjoyed his stay. All weekend he showed the greatest solicitude toward her, trying to get her to eat more, especially bananas and apples, to drink juices and milk, things that would strengthen her before the baby came. But Marina saw that he was distracted—worried about finding a job. As Ruth drove him to the bus station at noon on Monday, Lee asked if Marina could stay until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.
Lee had some job interviews that week but failed to turn up anything. He rented a room from a Mrs. Mary Bledsoe and paid her $7 for the week. Against her wishes he kept milk in her refrigerator and ate sardines, peanut butter, and bananas in his room, another thing she did not like. He used her telephone to fuss and scold at someone (his ordinary tone when he was talking to Marina) in a foreign language. Mrs. Bledsoe commented to a friend: “I don’t like anybody talking in a foreign language.” Most bothersome of all, he was in and out during the daytime and at home all day on Friday, disrupting her nap.
On Saturday morning, before leaving for Irving, Lee told Mrs. Bledsoe that he wanted his room cleaned and clean sheets put on his bed. She announced that she refused to rent to him any more. Without pausing to ask why, he demanded $2 of his $7 back. Mrs. Bledsoe refused.[14] Evidently, Lee concluded that the FBI had been asking for him. He had used his real name at Mrs. Bledsoe’s, and the next week when he rented a room, he took it under the alias “O. H. Lee.”
Lee was again a good husband and houseguest that weekend. The baby was due any day now, and Lee told Marina not to worry. He insisted that he was not discouraged; he had only just started looking for a job. He again asked Marina if Ruth was good to her. “Does she make you do extra housework because I don’t have a job and don’t help with the expenses?” he asked. Ruth gave Lee his first driving lesson; and when she asked him to plane down a door for her, he removed it from his hinges and took real pleasure in doing a good job for her.[15] He played with her little boy, Chris; watched football on TV; and, as Ruth wrote happily to her mother afterward, “added a needed masculine flavor” to the household.[16]
For the second weekend in a row not a single harsh word passed between Lee and Marina.
Everybody noticed the change. Ruth thought Lee had improved greatly. He showed affection for Marina and June and seemed to want to find a job and provide for them.[17] When Michael Paine visited the house that weekend, he found Lee “quite a reasonable person.” He was “nice” to Ruth and his children, and above all nice to Marina. “It looked to me,” Michael said afterward, “as if the strain was off the family relationship. They were not quarreling. They billed and cooed. She sat on his lap and he said sweet nothings in her ear.”[18]
Even Marina thought her “prodigal” might be getting ready to settle down. She was encouraged by his concern for her and the new baby, and she felt that the weight of his interests had shifted away from politics toward family life, a sign that he might be growing up. For Marina looked on her husband as a mere boy, who had married too soon and had a series of childhood diseases to go through before he arrived at maturity. Lately, he had had two especially horrid ones—Walker and Cuba. Now, perhaps, he had been through them all and the two of them could start making plans for a peaceful life together.
Ruth and Michael shared Marina’s hope. But each of them sensed Lee’s terrible fragility, and each, in a different way, drew back from probing too far. Ruth stepped all around Lee’s prickly places and points of special vulnerability. Out of loyalty to Marina and her marriage, and out of her own great quality of charity, she tried not to see Lee’s darker side. Michael, it is true, did try to draw him out and soften his bitterness. But Lee would have none of it. Encountering a solid wall of rejection, Michael gave up and later blamed himself for having done so too soon. But Lee could not have tolerated a real relationship with Michael or with anyone, and so overwhelming was Michael’s respect for the privacy of others that he honored Lee’s right to turn him away even in his own house.
As for Marina, she had trained herself to accept a great deal in Lee and had a huge stake in blindness to the rest. She must have been considerably taken up with the new life to which she was about to give birth. And she continued to be concerned most of all with the eternal question of whether Lee loved her. Preoccupied with that, she failed, as Ruth later pointed out, to realize her “own great power over” Lee.[19] The power that might have counted was that of observation.
What Marina, like everyone else, failed to observe was that far from being better after his trip to Mexico, Lee was worse. All his life he had been close to an invisible border that separated reality from fantasy in his mind, and now he was closer than ever to slipping over into a world made up entirely of fantasy. More than ever he inhabited a world of delusions held together by the frailest baling wire. Animal-like, he knew that he must keep his delusions hidden or, like an animal, he would be caught. Living alone five days a week with no one to talk to, he was not exposed to the scrutiny of those who knew him, and the strain was off him of keeping his inner world out of sight. And on weekends, in a world of women who were exhausted by the rituals of child rearing, he escaped for hours on end in front of the television set. His hosts, the Paines, were creatures of exquisite sensibility who shrank from touching his weak spots. Thus, all through October it was as if the little household in Irving was perfectly geared, indeed, existed for no other purpose but to help Lee keep his inner world whole.
Lee got a job his second week in Dallas. A neighbor of the Paines, Linnie Mae Randle, mentioned that her brother, Wesley Frazier, worked at the Texas School Book Depository and there might be a job opening there. At Marina’s urging, Ruth called Roy Truly, superintendent of the depository, and asked him to consider Lee. Mr. Truly suggested that Lee apply in person.
Lee appeared the following day and made a good impression. He was “quiet and well mannered,” called Mr. Truly “sir,” and said he had come straight from the Marines. Mr. Truly liked that because it very often happened that a young man came to him right out of the service, got on his feet working at the depository, then went on to better things. Lee looked like a “nice young fellow” with every chance of doing well. Mr. Truly told him that while he did not have a permanent opening he could offer him a temporary job at $1.25 an hour. Lee accepted gratefully and said he needed the job badly to support his family because he was expecting a second child any day. Mr. Truly told him to report for work the next day, October 16, at eight o’clock.[20]
When Lee called Marina that night, it was with a boast in his voice, as if to say that they only had to take one look at him at the depository and they could not turn him away—“they just hired me,” he said. Next day he called again and said he liked the job. He told Marina that it was “good to be working with books,” and that the work was “interesting and clean,” not dirty or greasy as many of his jobs had been. He said it did not tire him so much. He liked Mr. Truly a great deal, and the other men were nice to him, too.
20
Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, pp. 213, 214. Ironically, on October 15, the Texas Employment Commission got a call for twelve to fourteen baggage handlers from Trans Texas Airways at Love Field. The job was permanent and paid $310 a month, $100 more than Oswald would earn at the depository. Oswald was considered a good prospect, and the employment commission called him at the Paine house two days running, October 15 and 16. The second time, the person answering the telephone said that he had a job, and he was crossed off the list. (Affidavit of Robert L. Adams, Vol. 11, pp. 480–481.) Students of the assassination have noted that if Oswald had been considering killing the president as early as mid-October, this is the job he would have taken, since the one thing sure about the president’s itinerary at that date was that he would be landing and leaving at Love Field. I agree that Oswald was not thinking about killing the president at this time but doubt that his failure to try for this job is evidence. I do not know who happened to answer the telephone at the Paine house—a neighbor or a babysitter, perhaps, certainly someone who failed to inquire about the salary and apparently did not take any message—and therefore I cannot say how Lee missed this opportunity at a higher-paying job. The affidavit of Robert L. Adams, the employment officer who called the house, makes clear that Oswald was crossed off the list for the Trans Texas job on October 17, his second day of work at the depository, and it appears that he never received any message about the employment office call. If he had, and had followed up on the Trans Texas job, it seems likely that he would have considered it even though he liked the job he had, because it paid $100 more a month and was permanent, not temporary. (Asked about the job in her testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 389–390, Ruth Paine did not know about it.)