Michael realized that Lee’s beliefs implied an advocacy of violence. He saw this clearly one day when he mentioned to Lee that the qualities he believed in most profoundly were diminished by violence. Lee did not answer, and Michael interpreted his silence as disagreement.[26] What he did not perceive was that Lee himself was capable of acting violently.
It is natural that it was the intellectual side of Lee that Michael, an intellectual himself, was best equipped to grasp, and that Michael, a man of reason, failed to perceive that Lee’s “reasons” were mainly on the surface. What mattered most with Lee were the tumultuous emotions underneath. But some inexplicable inner principle in Michael resisted probing any deeper. Lee was ungracious, intractable, dogmatic; so much Michael could see. He did not take the step that followed and see that Lee was irrational as well.
In this regard it was Ruth who understood Lee better. She realized that he was “primarily an emotional person” and saw that while he talked of ideology and philosophy, he acted, and reacted, emotionally. Ruth thought he was vulnerable, “tender,” and “unusually sensitive to hurt.” But she, like her husband, was not only charitable in her judgments but a devoted pacifist. Apart from a fleeting moment the summer before, when she had confided to a friend that she thought Lee might be capable of a crime of passion if he thought someone was trying to take Marina away, Ruth considered it unlikely that Lee would spill over from “mild maladjustment to active, violent hostility.”[27]
If Ruth inhibited her insight, cultivated the quality of opacity with respect to Lee, and kept herself from fully apprehending in him what a part of her suspected, Michael also operated under comparable restraint. During the summer he, too, had discussed with a friend whether Lee might be capable of violence. Now, the Oswalds’ belongings were stored in the Paines’ garage, and Michael was constantly moving Lee’s “camping equipment” from place to place because it was in the way of the drill press and other shop tools he came home specially to work with on Sundays. The “camping equipment” was tied up in what Michael calls a “greenish rustic blanket,” and despite himself he realized that the bundle was too heavy, and the shape not quite right, to be camping equipment of the type manufactured at that time. It was, of course, Lee’s rifle, dismantled, with its telescopic sight. Michael wondered about the bundle, suspecting nothing definite but simply that the bundle was not what it was said to be; and he was tempted to peek inside. But he never did. He had too much respect for Lee’s privacy. Michael himself was a pacifist, opposed to owning firearms. But whatever it was that Lee had in that mysterious bundle, he had a right to keep it in Michael’s garage.[28]
Lee was on his good behavior at the Paines’, and he treated Marina better there than at any time since the two of them left Russia. Yet his demands were still incredible. He brought his dirty laundry to the house each weekend for Marina to wash and iron, and he often refused to wear a shirt she had just ironed on the grounds that she had failed to do it exactly right. No sooner would they sit down at the dinner table than he would snap at Marina: “Why didn’t you fix me iced tea? You knew I was coming out.” Or he would put on a baby face and complain in baby talk that he couldn’t eat because Marina had forgotten to give him a fork and a spoon. He never once got up to fetch for himself or help a wife in the final stages of pregnancy, nor when she had just had a child and was nursing it.
Sometimes Lee finished eating ahead of the others and simply got up, left the table, and went into the living room to watch television. Sometimes he refused to eat what Ruth had cooked for them and demanded immediately afterward that Marina fix his favorite Russian dish, pan-fried onions and potatoes. Marina was ashamed and embarrassed. “Stop being so capricious,” she said. “You can’t carry on like that here. It’s not as if you’re in your own house. You are a guest in this house.” Sometimes she did, and sometimes she did not, fix him his pan-fried potatoes.
It was the football season, and Lee spent more time than ever watching television. He would wolf down his lunch at high speed, hoping Ruth would not notice how much of her food he was eating; and then during the game he would race to the kitchen and ransack the cupboards and refrigerator for apples, bananas, raisins, cookies, and milk. Even though Lee had a job, he still did not contribute to the household expenses.
The Paines gave no sign of resenting his behavior. Ruth admits that Lee was never very gracious, but he did try to stay out of her way. Anything she asked him to do, like gluing together Junie’s training chair, he did gladly. Both Paines understood that Lee was saving money so that he could get an apartment for himself and Marina. They had no thought of his contributing to the expenses, and it never so much as occurred to Michael to resent the fact that he was supporting Lee’s family. As Michael looked at it, Marina was a companion to Ruth and a help to her with her Russian. That made it an equal exchange, not an act of altruism on his part.
Lee and Marina had no big fights during the weekends they were together at the Paines’, nothing that caused them to stop speaking, just spats. Still, there were enough minor irritations for Marina to say to Ruth: “You see that we fight and that Lee doesn’t love me at all.”
“You fight because you do love each other,” Ruth replied. “You wouldn’t fight if you didn’t care.”
Marina made no effort to hide their disagreements. Whether Lee loved her or not was a major topic in her weekday conversations with Ruth, which had now become close and confidential. She wanted Ruth to see Lee in all his guises so that she could get her opinion on this most crucial of questions. Ruth continually reassured Marina that Lee did, in fact, love her.
Lee’s attitude toward Ruth, however, had taken a turn for the worse after he came back from Mexico. He started to make fun of her. He said it was ridiculous for “such a long, tall, stringbean” to jump around and dance with her children, as Ruth did. And he made fun of her for working so hard on her Russian. “Better she should finish college than sit and study Russian all these years.” (Ruth had finished college years ago.) He thought it “stupid” of Ruth to be religious.
None of this surprised Marina, who knew that her husband considered himself an unrecognized authority on everything and felt that if others did not agree with his ideas, it was merely because they were “stupid.” Then, too, Marina knew there were times when Lee hated and despised a woman simply for being a woman. He felt that way toward her sometimes, and she could see that he felt the same way toward Ruth. But after her phone call to Truly, Lee’s attitude toward Ruth changed. He knew that it was to this call he owed his job. And Ruth never mentioned it, never asked for his gratitude. After that, apparently, it dawned on Lee that Ruth’s kindness was genuine—she wanted nothing from him.
Marina helped the change along. “You know, Lee, you mustn’t just use Ruth,” she said to him the last weekend in October.
“Why not?”
“Ruth doesn’t need me. She doesn’t need my company or my Russian. I may even be in the way. She only has me here to help me out.”
Marina, who can be reticent with the confidences of others, now told Lee a little more than before about the Paines’ marriage. She told him of an occasion when Michael had been there for supper, then left, and Ruth cried. When the Paines were married, Marina said, Michael had not wanted children right away and had left home shortly after their second child was born. Ruth still loved Michael deeply. She did not know whether to give up or keep trying.
28
Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 414–418, and Vol. 9, pp. 437–448. Marina has been criticized for her failure to tell Ruth that Oswald had his rifle in her garage. But until mid-November, when Ruth happened to remark that she refused to buy toy guns for her children, Marina did not know Ruth’s feelings about weapons. Even then she did not know that the Paines were pacifists, or exactly what this meant. But Marina did realize that Ruth would not want the gun in her garage, and she still kept her silence. Her reasoning was that it was safer, especially now that they were back in Dallas, for the gun to be with