Lee took exception to Rachel. “It sounds too Jewish,” he said. “Please call her Marina. Do it for me. I want our little girl to have your name.”
The next day Marina simply added “Marina” to the certificate—“Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.” But from the outset the baby was called Rachel, and Rachel she is to this day.
— 33 —
Lee and Michael
After the baby was born, to save money, Marina and Lee continued to live apart. Marina and the children stayed with Ruth, while Lee, using the alias “O. H. Lee,” was already installed in a rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas where he and Marina had lived before.
If the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Carl Johnson; the housekeeper, Mrs. Earlene Roberts; or the other roomers noticed “Mr. Lee” at all, it was for his extreme apartness. “That man never talked. That was the only peculiarity about him. He would never speak,” Mrs. Johnson said later. Not every evening, but once in a while, he joined the other roomers and watched television. He might sit there as long as thirty or forty minutes and not speak to anyone.
Mrs. Johnson remembers that he came home at the same hour every night, 5:30, and made a phone call in a foreign language (to Marina). He switched to English if anyone happened to be nearby, but no one was fooled. Marina was annoyed by these digressions into English. She did not understand what he was saying, and she thought his effort to cover up the Russian was foolish.
During the week Lee was alone in his room all evening, every evening, and he never, in the five or six weeks he was there, had a visitor. Mrs. Johnson, the landlady, estimates that he spent 95 percent of his evenings alone in his room and the other 5 percent watching television.
He was allowed to keep food in the refrigerator. That is how Mrs. Johnson came to notice that this particular roomer drank half a gallon of “sweet milk” a day. He kept peanut butter, sweet preserves, and lunch meat there, too. Sometimes he had supper in his room, and occasionally, “if there was no one in the kitchen, he would sit in the kitchen, but if there was anyone there, he would take it in his room.” Mrs. Johnson describes him as “spotless. He never kept anything cluttered.”[1]
Once in a while Lee had breakfast (“eggs over, light”) at the Dobbs House restaurant across the street, and once or twice he told Marina that he had supper there, too, for about $1.25. Except for weekends, that was the only change in his lonely and austere routine.
Lee was an order filler for the School Book Depository, mostly for Scott-Foresman textbooks, which were located on the first and sixth floors of the building. He wrote several orders on his clipboard, found the books, then brought them to a first-floor room where the orders were processed. It was a job that did not require teamwork. He made an occasional mistake in his orders, but Mr. Truly calls Lee “a bit above-average employee,” who “kept moving” and “did a good day’s work.” He paid attention to the job, did not spend time talking to the other men, and did his work by himself. “I thought it was a pretty good trait at the time,” Truly said later.
Truly saw him every day. “Good morning, Lee,” he would say.
“Good morning, sir.”
Mr. Truly would ask how his new baby was, and Lee’s face just broke wide open into a smile.[2]
The depository was an easygoing, live-and-let-live sort of place. The men mostly gathered in a small, first-floor recreation room they called the “domino room.” There they ate sandwiches at noon, made coffee, and played dominoes. Lee sometimes ate a sandwich there alone, then went outside. But two or three times he came in with raisins or a bunch of grapes and ate with the other men. And occasionally Mr. Truly glanced up and saw him swing across Dealey Plaza, the park in front of the Book Depository Building, about noon and come back a few minutes later with a newspaper or a sack of potato chips in his hand. Most days Lee made a point of getting to work early and reading newspapers that had been left in the domino room the day before. One of the men, Bonnie Ray Williams, noticed that Lee did not read about sports, as the others did. “One morning I noticed he was reading something about politics and he acted like it was funny to him. He would read a paragraph or two, smile or laugh, then throw the paper down and get up and walk out.”[3]
Several influences Lee was not aware of himself could have affected the way he was looking at things, could even have affected what it was that caught his attention in the newspaper and made him smile or laugh in that derisory way of his. One of these influences was place. He was back in Dallas. Exactly one year before, in October of 1962, Lee had been living in a rooming house that has never been identified but was probably on Beckley or North Beckley Street, the very same area in which he was living now. Then as now he had been living alone to save money—Marina was at Lyolya Hall’s in Fort Worth—and then as now he had no family with him to ground his fantasies in reality. It was during that earlier period in Dallas that he may first have thought of killing General Walker. And Lee had a way of repeating things.
Another influence could have been the time of year—what psychiatrists call “anniversary reaction.” Many, if not most, of the critical events in Lee’s life had taken place about this time: his birthday (October 18), his enlistment in the Marine Corps (October 24), his self-inflicted gunshot wound in Japan (October 27), his arrival in Russia (October 16), and his attempt at suicide in Moscow (October 21). He had last seen his mother on October 7 of 1962; Marina had left him, ostensibly never to return, on November 11–17 of the same year; and Lee had last seen his favorite brother Robert on November 22 the year before. Because so many important events in Lee’s life, mostly sad ones or events that signified failure, were clustered in October and November, the autumn may have been a troubled time for him.[4]
And now there was something else, the birth of Rachel, which not only added to Lee’s burdens but placed him in a position that was curiously similar to the position his own father would have been in had he been alive when Lee was born. For Rachel was a second child, as Lee had been. She was a girl following a girl, while Lee had been a boy following a boy, but in each case a child of the opposite sex had been desired. And what Lee’s father had done to him by dying before his birth, Lee was to do to Rachel shortly after hers.
Whatever the subtle influences on Lee’s thoughts may have been, it is clear that now that he was settled, with a job, a place to live, and the baby’s birth out of the way, he had time for politics again. On Wednesday, October 23, only two nights after his first glimpse of Rachel in the hospital, he went to a right-wing meeting at which General Walker addressed thirteen hundred people.
Two nights later, at the Paines’, Marina remembers that Michael attempted to draw Lee out on the subject of politics. Michael was there each Friday when Lee came to Irving. He sensed that Lee needed an older brother or a friend, and he tried to reach out to him. Michael knew that Lee called himself a “Marxist,” and yet he had turned his back on Russia. Why, Michael wondered? How had Lee’s values changed; what were his ideals and his vision of a better society? Lee refused to say. He refused to talk about the better world that might lie ahead but only about what was wrong with the world today. Michael kept asking how the changes Lee wanted were to come about—and Lee never answered. Michael inferred that Lee had given up on changing things peacefully, since he never mentioned any sort of peaceful, evolutionary change he might favor. He did not consider it worthwhile “fussing around” trying to change anything.
3
Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 164; Testimony of Daniel Arce, Vol. 6, p. 364; Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, p. 218; Testimony of Billy Lovelady, Vol. 6, p. 337; and Testimony of Charles Douglas Givens, Vol. 6, p. 352.
4
In August 1964 Marina came across several of her husband’s possessions that the Secret Service had accidentally failed to confiscate. Among them was an English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary inscribed, in Lee’s hand, “Lee Harvey Oswald, Hotel Metropole, Moscow, November 22, 1959.” The date, of course, is coincidence, yet it underlines an impression that autumn was a time of unhappy events in Oswald’s life. His happier anniversaries appear to have been in the spring.