“If you don’t want to come, then I’ll take Junie and Rachel. They love their papa, and you don’t love me.”
“That’s fine,” said Marina. “Just you try nursing Rachel. You know what that’s like. It’ll be less work for me.”
Lee then spoke of the FBI. “I went to see them,” he said. “I told them not to bother you any more.”
Marina left the bedroom and went outside to bring the children’s clothes in off the line. Lee went to the garage for a few minutes, then the two of them came inside and sat on the sofa in the living room folding diapers. “Why won’t you come with me?” Lee begged. “I’m tired of living all alone. I’m in there the whole week long, and my girls are here. I don’t like having to come all the way out here each time I want to see you.”
“Alka,” Marina said, “I think it’s better if I stay here. I’ll stay till Christmas, and you’ll go on living alone. We’ll save money that way. I can talk to Ruth, and she’s a help to me. I’m lonesome by myself with no one to talk to all day.”
“Don’t worry about the money,” Lee said. “We have a little saved up. I’ll take an apartment, and we’ll buy you a washing machine.”
“I don’t want a washing machine. It’ll be better if you buy a car.”[13]
“I don’t need a car,” he said. “I can go on the bus. If you buy a used car, you have to spend money to get it fixed. It’s not worth it. I don’t want my girl to have to do all the laundry in the bathtub. Two babies are a lot of work.” Lee pointed to the pile of clothing. “See what a lot of work it is? With two babies you just can’t do it all alone.”
“We’ll see,” Marina said.
Just then Ruth drove up to the house. The car was filled with groceries, and Lee, followed by Marina, went out to help. He picked up a load of groceries and went in the house, while Marina lingered outside and apologized to Ruth for his unexpected arrival. The two women guessed that Lee had come to make up.
As Ruth went into the house, she said to Lee: “Our president is coming to town.”
“Ah, yes,” Lee said and walked on into the kitchen. He used the expression so often that Ruth paid no attention to his extraordinary casualness.[14]
Marina had also mentioned the president’s visit. While they were sitting on the sofa folding diapers, she had said: “Lee, Kennedy is coming tomorrow. I’d like to see him in person. Do you know where and when I could go?”
“No,” he said blankly.
Just for a second it crossed Marina’s mind that it was odd that Lee, who was so very interested in politics, was unable to tell her anything about the president’s visit.
Lee went out on the front lawn and played with the children until dark—the Paine children, the neighbors’ children, and June. He hoisted June to his shoulders, and the two of them reached out to catch a butterfly in the air. Then Lee tried to catch falling oak wings for June.
Marina stood nearby as Lee and June sat on a red kiddie cart together. Lee spoke with all the children in English, then turned to Marina and said in Russian. “Good, our Junie will speak both Russian and English. But I still don’t like the name Rachel. Let’s call her Marina instead.”
“Two in one family are too many.”
It was while they were outside, Marina thinks, that Lee asked her for the third and last time to move in to Dallas with him. His voice was now very kind, quite different from what it had been in the bedroom. Once again he said that he was tired of living alone and seeing his babies only once a week. “I’ll get us an apartment, and we’ll all live peacefully at home.”
Marina, for a third time, refused. “I was like a stubborn little mule,” she recalls. “I was maintaining my inaccessibility, trying to show Lee I wasn’t that easy to persuade. If he had come again the next day and asked, of course I would have agreed. I just wanted to hold out one day at least.”
Marina expected to be with Lee after the New Year. But she enjoyed being in a position where Lee for once had to win her over, persuade her, prove again that he loved her and that she was not utterly at his mercy. He had given her a horrible scare with his alias, and she wanted to teach him a lesson.
The evening was a peaceful one. Lee told Ruth, as he had Marina, that he had been to FBI headquarters, tried to see the agents, and left a note telling them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their visits.[15] Marina did not believe him. She thought that he was “a brave rabbit,” and this was just another instance of his bravado.[16] After that, the conversation at supper was so ordinary that no one remembers it; but Ruth had the impression that relations between the Oswalds were “cordial,” “friendly,” “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.”[17]
After supper Marina stacked the dishes by the sink. Ruth bathed her children, then read to them in their bedroom for an hour. Marina nursed Rachel, and Lee put Junie to bed. Then he cradled Rachel in front of the television set and got her to sleep, while Marina put away the toys. Lee went on watching television, a movie about World War II, and Marina went in to do the dishes.
Despite the banality of the evening, there was an undercurrent of tragedy, a ludicrous lack of symmetry between what husband and wife were doing. They were apart. In the kitchen, engaged in her tasks at the sink, Marina was no longer angry at Lee over his use of an alias, although she still could not understand why he bothered with such childish games. She was wondering as always whether Lee loved her. And Lee—what was he thinking? Marina had refused his pleas that she move in to Dallas with him “soon.” He would not be looking for an apartment “tomorrow.” He now had no need for “curtain rods,” but earlier in the evening he had spent time in the garage. Did his requests to Marina have a deeper meaning, a desperation, even, that was masked by his calm acceptance of her refusals? Alone that evening for the first time and staring at the television, what were Lee’s thoughts?
Marina was still at the sink when Lee turned off the television set, poked his head in the kitchen, and asked if he could help. Marina thought he looked sad.
“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I probably won’t be out this weekend.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too often. I was here today.”
“Okay,” Marina said.
Ruth was aware of Lee padding back and forth between his bedroom and the bathroom getting ready for bed. It was about ten o’clock, an hour earlier than was usual for him before a workday. Ruth went to the garage and painted blocks for her children for half an hour or so. Someone had been there before her, left the light on, and moved a few things around.[18] She supposed that Lee had gone there to fetch some clothing, for the weather was turning cool and the Oswalds had their warm clothes in the garage. But Ruth did think it careless of Lee to have left the light on.[19] When she returned to the living room, she and Marina sat on the sofa, folded more laundry, talked of nothing in particular, and said good night.
Marina as usual was the last to bed. She sat in the tub for an hour, “warming her bones” and thinking about nothing in particular, not even Lee’s request that she move in to Dallas. Lee was lying on his stomach with his eyes closed when she crept into bed. Marina still had pregnancy privileges; that is, she was allowed to sleep with her feet on whatever part of his anatomy they came to rest. About three in the morning, she thinks, she put a foot on his leg. Lee was not asleep, and suddenly, with a sort of wordless vehemence, he lifted her leg, shoved her foot hard, then pulled his leg away.
13
In her testimony before the Warren Commission (Vol. 1, p. 66), Marina said that it was she who asked Lee that evening to buy her a washing machine and that after he agreed, she told him not to bother but to get something for himself instead. Thus the story arose that the Oswalds had a fight over a washing machine on the night of November 21, and that this was a pivotal event—a story that was widely circulated after the assassination among newspapermen and lawyers for the Warren Commission. But in the many interviews I have had with Marina, she says, and I believe her, that each time the subject of a washing machine came up (and it seems to have arisen three to five times in New Orleans and Irving), it was Lee who raised it, not Marina. On November 21 he apparently mentioned it as an inducement to get her to move to Dallas; and on that evening, Marina stresses, he did not say, “I’ll buy a washing machine,” but, “We’ll buy a washing machine.” Lee and Marina did not fight that evening about a washing machine. As for the car, on the long Veterans Day weekend of November 9–11, Marina and Lee had admired a secondhand car that Michael had just bought for $200. So there was a question about what the Oswalds would buy first after they had saved enough for an apartment: a car for Lee or a washing machine for Marina.
16
It is possible that Oswald waited what appears to have been nine days to tell Marina in person that he had been to the FBI, because he feared the Paines’ telephone was being tapped. He had not, after all, signed the FBI note, and as long as he did not mention it over the telephone, the FBI would not know for certain who it was from.