They were driven to the house of Jesse Curry to await further news. Marina remembers that the house was beautiful, that everyone was quiet and kind to her, and Mrs. Curry even brought her a glass of water. Marina sensed that it might be a few days before she returned to the Paines’, and she telephoned Ruth to ask her to gather together some of her clothing, some of the children’s things, Lee’s wedding ring, and the money he had left her.
When she was back in the living room, Peter Gregory came up to her, and Marina could tell from his expression what he was going to say. “Marina,” he said. “Get hold of yourself. He’s dead.”
Marina felt her heart turn to stone. So her children, too, were orphans, Rachel only four weeks old and June just learning to walk.
Her one thought was to see Lee. Peter Gregory tried to dissuade her. It might be dangerous, he said. There would be an angry crowd outside the hospital, and she had no right to risk the children. Marina surmised that it was his own life Gregory feared for. She did not wish to place him in danger, but she and Marguerite were agreed. “We’re going,” Marguerite said.
The doctors at the hospital were kind, but they did not want Marina to see Lee. “He doesn’t look good,” one of them said. “It’s terrible,” said another. “We don’t want you to see.”
Lee did look terrible. His face was yellow and unshaven, and his nose stuck out. Marina wanted to see the wound that had killed him, she had to see it, but he was covered by a sheet. She reached out to lift the sheet away, and someone arrested her arm. So she kissed Lee and touched his hand. It was like ice.
Marina was angry as well as sad. “In Russia,” she thought, “it wouldn’t have happened. They would have taken better care of him.”
From Parkland Hospital the Secret Service drove all of them, including Robert, to a new hideaway, the Inn of the Six Flags, near Fort Worth. Word had come from the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, and the new president, Lyndon Johnson, that the Secret Service was to protect the Oswald family. Within an hour the inn was an armed camp, with men patrolling outside armed with carbines. “All we need is to have one more of you killed,” one agent said, “and we’re in real trouble.”
Marina was unable to eat. Although the agents solicitously brought her food, she only smoked and drank coffee. Robert cried, and little June was sick. And all afternoon and evening they were not allowed to watch television or see the newspapers. They were wholly cut off from the outside world.
Except for one thing. It had fallen to Robert to arrange Lee’s funeral.[6] It was not easy. One cemetery after another refused even to countenance the suggestion that they sell Robert a plot for his brother’s body. A funeral director took up the search and finally found a cemetery in Fort Worth.
The same thing happened with ministers. Four of them turned Robert down. The office of the National Council of Churches in Dallas asked two Lutheran ministers to go to the inn and offer help. Only one dared visit Robert in person. The funeral was arranged for four o’clock Monday afternoon, and the minister, with a hesitation that to the grief-stricken Robert was all too apparent, reluctantly agreed to officiate.
On Monday morning Marina heard that President Kennedy’s funeral was being shown on television. She whispered to Robert that she wanted to watch, and Robert switched on the set. A Secret Service man switched it off.
“No,” said Marina, “I watch.”
And watch she did, right up to the moment when she left to attend Lee’s funeral.
The Oswalds arrived at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth to find it, too, heavily guarded, with policemen stationed all along the fence that surrounded the burial ground. They drove to the chapel, expecting to have a religious ceremony. They found the chapel empty and unprepared. They realized with a shock that all they were to be allowed was a hurried service at the grave.
Robert had forgotten to select pallbearers. Without the family’s knowing it, a group of reporters who were covering the funeral volunteered. It was they who, even before the Oswalds arrived, had carried Lee’s body down from the chapel to its grave.
Word arrived that the Lutheran minister who had promised to officiate would not be there after all. But a minister named Louis Saunders of the Council of Churches in Fort Worth had driven out on his own to Rose Hill Cemetery to see if he could help the family. It was the Reverend Saunders who pronounced the simple words of Lee’s funeral ceremony.
Marina was humiliated. It had been furtive and meager.
That night, the lowest of her life, Marina received a telegram. She could not imagine who had sent it, unless a friend in Russia. It was from a group of American college students. Marina could hardly believe the words Peter Gregory read to her:
We send you our heartfelt sympathy. We understand your sorrow and we share it. We are ashamed that such a thing could happen in our country. We beg you not to think ill of us. You have friends and we are with you.
There was a long list of names at the end.
It was Marina’s first hint that in the life ahead of her she did not have to be an outcast.
EPILOGUE
After Lee’s funeral Marina expected to go on living at Ruth Paine’s. But Robert Oswald was firmly against it. He had taken one look at Ruth and Michael Paine at the Dallas police station on the afternoon of November 22 and decided that if Lee had indeed killed President Kennedy, then these tall Eastern stringbeans, whom he had never heard of as being friends of his brother, must be behind it somehow. The Secret Service men who were assigned to protect Marina seconded Robert’s advice. Ruth was not under suspicion, they said, but she and Michael were active in the ACLU, an organization many Americans considered left-wing. Moreover Michael was under a special cloud, the nature of which was not made clear, but that seems to have derived from the fact that his father had once been a Trotskyite. Marina was allowed to understand that if she wished to remain in the United States, she had better put distance between herself and the Paines. Thus in one of the first acts of her widowhood, Marina did what she had sworn she would never do—she turned her back on Ruth Paine.
Marina was incommunicado, living at the Inn of the Six Flags Motel and cut off from everyone except government agents and members of the Oswald family when, on November 30, 1963, Ruth took to the Dallas police station two books in Russian that Marina had often used and that Ruth thought she might need. One was on baby care, the other a book of household advice on matters such as cooking and sewing. On December 2 two Secret Service agents confronted Ruth with a Russian-language note that had been found inside one of the books and accused her of having tried to convey a secret message to Marina. Ruth had never seen the note before. On December 5 Marina herself was confronted with the note, which proved to be the one Lee had left for her on the night he tried to shoot General Walker.
Marina had previously decided not to say anything about the Walker attempt, and she had forgotten the note entirely. She was still distraught by Lee’s death and felt that she ought to be all the more on his side since he was dead. Besides, Walker was still alive and the attempt had come to nothing. She freely admits to being “tricky” with the FBI in those days, and Robert Oswald says that from the outset the FBI was “extremely hostile” toward her.[1] In any case, she explains, “Lee had too many murders on his soul already.” She would be a witness against him if she had to be, but only where she thought it really mattered.