Lee’s birthday fell on Friday, the 18th, his third day on the new job, and Marina and Ruth prepared a surprise birthday party. Michael was there, and Ruth had brought wine, put decorations on the table, and baked a cake. Lee was overcome. When they carried in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday,” he was so “nervous and touched and self-conscious,” Marina remembers, that he could not hold back the tears. It was his twenty-fourth birthday, but when Lee counted, there were less than twenty-four candles on the cake. Even so, he could not blow them all out at once.
They drank more wine, joked a little, and then Lee said that he would like a special present. “I’d like the baby to be born today, my birthday. I don’t like late birthday presents. I don’t accept them.”
“You won’t keep your baby?” Marina asked.
“We’ll see.”
The rest of the evening he trailed Marina everywhere, asking if she felt any pains. He was upset that there were no signs. But he was tender, too. The veins had burst in Marina’s ankles, and her legs and ankles ached. He rubbed them and kissed them and cried. He told Marina that he was sorry to put her through such an ordeal and he would never do it again.
Next day he was up bright and early scanning the secondhand ads in the newspaper. He was looking for automobiles and washing machines. “I’ll stay here awhile,” Marina said. “We’ll save money. And you’ll have to have a car.”
Lee said that a cheap car cost a lot in gas and repairs. “I don’t have to have a car. I can keep using the bus. We’ll buy you a washing machine.”
Marina was very happy. Contrary to later reports, she had not asked him for a washing machine. Lee thought of it himself. To her it was another sign that he valued her and might really be willing to settle down and put his family life first.
The whole day was a happy one. In the evening, after supper, Lee asked Marina to sit with him and watch TV. They ate a banana together, and later she curled up on the floor with her head in his lap and dozed. Marina was tired of being pregnant. “I do so want to go to the hospital,” she said. Lee rubbed her stomach and said, “Don’t worry, it won’t be long, it will be any day now.” Every now and then after that she felt him sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited. She had very little idea what he was watching.
Lee saw two movies that night, both of them saturated in violence. One was Suddenly (1954), starring Frank Sinatra, which is about a plot to kill the president of the United States. In the film Sinatra, a mentally unbalanced ex-serviceman who has been hired to do the job, drives into a small Western town where the president is due to arrive by train, debark, and get into a car that will drive him into the High Sierras for some mountain fishing. Sinatra finds a house overlooking the railroad station and seizes it, subduing its occupants. He leans out of a window and gets the railroad tracks into the crosshairs of his rifle sight. He waits and waits; finally, the train comes into view. But it chugs through town without stopping, and in the end Sinatra is killed.
Marina dozed through the first movie, and the one that followed—We Were Strangers (1949). This, too, was about assassination. Based on the actual overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in Cuba in 1933, the movie stars John Garfield as an American who has come to help the cause of revolution. He and a tiny band of cohorts plot to blow up the whole cabinet, including the president, at a single stroke. The plot fails and Garfield dies, but the people rise up in small groups all over Cuba and overthrow the dictatorship.
Marina remembers the movie’s end—people were dancing in the streets, screaming with happiness because the president had been overthrown. Lee said it was exactly the way it had once happened in Cuba. It was the only time he showed any interest in Cuba after his return from Mexico.
Later, as they lay in bed talking, Marina remarked: “You know what, Alka? I never think of Anatoly any more but last night I dreamt about him.”
“And what did you dream?”
“We kissed, as we always did. Anatoly kissed so well it made me dizzy. No one ever kissed me like that.”
“I wish I did.”
“It would take you your whole life to learn.”
Without a trace of the jealousy he always showed when Marina spoke about her boyfriends, he put his hand over her mouth and said to her with surprising gentleness: “Please don’t tell me about the others. I don’t want to hear.”
He kissed her, they made love, and Marina was exceedingly happy. It was the last time they had full intercourse.
Ruth made a Chinese supper on Sunday, and Marina started feeling sick the moment she saw it.
“Eat,” she said, as she got up from the table. “I’ll get ready to go.”
“Oh,” Lee said, his eyes large and frightened, “maybe it’ll be today. Where are the pains?”
“I haven’t any.”
“Oh, maybe it won’t be today, after all.” He was very disappointed.
But Marina did have labor pains later in the evening, and she got ready to drive with Ruth to Parkland Hospital.
“I have to stay home and babysit,” Lee said, “and I do want to go with you.”
“There’s nothing you could do anyhow.”
Thus it was Ruth who sat with Marina until she was ready for the labor room. Then she drove home and found that Lee had put the children to bed and had gone to bed, too. Although his light was on and Ruth thought he was not yet asleep, he did not come out of his room to ask for news. Again, it was Ruth who sat by the telephone, called the hospital, and, shortly after eleven, was told that Marina had been delivered of a baby girl. Lee’s light was out by then, and Ruth, taking her cue from him, did not wake him with the news. She told him in the morning before he left for work.[21]
He returned to Irving that afternoon with Wesley Frazier but for some reason seemed reluctant to visit the hospital. Puzzled, Ruth guessed that he was afraid to go lest someone at the hospital find out that he had a job and charge him with expenses of the birth. So Ruth told him that the hospital already knew he had a job; she had been asked the night before at the admissions office and had told the truth. But it did not make any difference. The delivery and maternity case still were free. After learning that, Lee agreed to go.[22]
Marina never knew of his reluctance. “Oh, Mama, you’re wonderful,” he said, as he sat down on the bed. “Only two hours. You have them so easily.” He had tears in his eyes.
“But it’s a girl again,” she apologized.
“Two girls are wonderful,” he said. “We’ll keep trying. The next one will be a boy.”
“No, Alka, there’ll be no next one. I can’t go through ten babies just to get a boy.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Whatever you say. Besides, a girl doesn’t cost so much. She gets married. You’ve got to educate a boy.”
He asked Marina if she had had any stitches or anesthetic and praised God that she had not needed either. He treated her like a heroine.
They had already talked about a name. If it was a boy, he was to be David Lee (no more “Fidel”), and Lee had promised that in the choice of a girl’s name he wouldn’t interfere. But he now asked Marina what name she had put down on the baby’s certificate. She had chosen “Audrey Rachel,” “Audrey” for Audrey Hepburn and “Rachel” because Ruth had a niece called Rachel and Marina liked the name very much.[23]
23
Audrey Hepburn, who played the role of Natasha in the Italian-American film version of