He had rejected Marguerite first when he joined the Marines. But his dependence remained so great that he was able to transform even that institution into a kind of mother. The Marine Corps—the “mother of men”—failed him, too: and in rejecting the Marines, he was, symbolically, rejecting his mother again. Then he defected to Russia, contriving in a single exquisite gesture to reject his real mother, the Marine Corps, and his mother country all at once. So doing, he transformed an unresolved personal conflict into a political act.
Now he had rejected Russia, once more reenacting the central drama of his life. Mother Russia had failed him not because it was authoritarian or because it lacked Marxian “equality.” It failed him because it did not meet all his needs. No country, no mother, could—his needs were bottomless. But this rejection was the most portentous one so far, for while rejecting his mother symbolically yet again, he was returning to her physically for the first time. He was returning to the real mother who was the cause of it all.
Marina had no idea of the danger her husband was running in going home. She was hurt and depressed by his shipboard behavior to her. But she had no way back. She was committed to Alik and June, and to the decision she had made in leaving Russia. And she was looking forward with the eagerness of a child to a great adventure that lay ahead. Besides, she was young and forgiving, fully capable of laying aside Alik’s cruelty and the warning signals he had given her. She saw in Alik’s suddenly altered behavior only his fear of being punished in America. She was right. But she failed to perceive the depths of his turmoil. As he approached the emotional orbit of his mother, he started to behave like a compass approaching its magnetic pole. The needle of his emotions began to swing, wildly and more wildly still, until eventually he was to forfeit his control.
— Interlude —
During the summer of 1964, I was in the Irving, Texas, home of Ruth Paine, a woman who befriended Lee and Marina Oswald in 1963 and with whom Marina was staying at the time President Kennedy was shot. Ruth and I were talking about Lee Oswald and about the last evening he spent with Marina at the Paines’ house, the evening before the assassination.
Suddenly, Ruth broke into our conversation with a warning that an uninvited visitor was walking up the drive. The visitor entered—a small, plump woman, immaculately groomed, with her hair upswept in a bun and a white blouse neatly tucked inside her skirt. I recognized her right away. She was Marguerite Oswald.
She and Ruth started talking, and I was surprised at how sensible Mrs. Oswald seemed to be. I had read that she was a mixed-up, contentious woman, who believed the world was against her and was very much concerned with money. Now I thought that what I had read must be wrong. Mrs. Oswald’s conversation appeared to be just as well put together as her costume.
She was wearing a flash camera around her neck, and she announced that she had come to take photographs: one of the bedroom in Ruth’s house “where they slept”; one of the living room sofa, “where I slept that sorrowful night” (Mrs. Oswald spent the night of November 22, 1963, at the Paines’ house); and one of what she called the “famous” garage where Lee kept his rifle. Mrs. Oswald explained that she wanted the photographs to add to a scrapbook for Lee’s children. “Who would keep it if I didn’t?” she asked. Apparently, she was compiling a photographic record of Lee’s life, for she mentioned that she wanted Marina to give Lee’s baby book back to her. “Marina didn’t know him that long,” she said.
Mrs. Oswald did all the talking, oblivious to Ruth and me, and she was obviously preoccupied with two topics—money and Lee’s innocence. She was suing one national magazine, she said, for a false statement about the amount of money she had received “for one lousy speech” about her son. She had allowed another to publish Lee’s letters to her because they showed “what a good boy he was” but added mysteriously that she had so far refrained from publishing another twenty-five letters “for security reasons.” Proudly, she told us that she frequently went to her son’s grave to tidy up, and that ninety thousand visitors had been to see it already. “Who would get down on their knees and sweep up the mess and plant plastic flowers if I didn’t?”
“Wait a minute,” I said to myself. “This lady is claiming that her son is innocent, and at the same time she is making money off the deed he is supposed to have committed.” Mrs. Oswald was falling apart in front of my eyes, just as surely as if her blouse had come untucked and her tidy bun come tumbling to her waist. “Who am I?” I thought. “Where can I turn to touch something real?” I looked at my watch and saw that Marguerite Oswald had been in the house seven and a half minutes.
She was born Marguerite Claverie in 1907 in New Orleans, the fifth of six children of a streetcar conductor. Her mother died when she was four years old, and Marguerite was raised by her father, her older brothers and sisters and, she says, by housekeepers. She was a pretty child, and she grew up an attractive young woman. She quit school after the ninth grade, falsified her school documents, and got a job.
At the age of twenty-two, she married Edward John Pic Jr., a shipping company clerk. They separated a year or so later, when Marguerite was three months pregnant. She claimed that Pic did not want the child and refused to support her. The child was a boy, John Edward Pic, and his father contributed to his support until he reached the age of eighteen. But Marguerite told the boy that his father contributed nothing to his support and that his birth had been the cause of her divorce.[1]
Marguerite met Robert Edward Lee Oswald during her separation from Pic. Like her he came from a Catholic family of French and German descent. And like her he was married and separated. In 1933 both obtained divorces and were married. Marguerite objected when Oswald wanted to adopt John; it might mean the end of support payments from John’s father. Their first son, Robert Jr., was born in 1934. The second, Lee Harvey, was born on October 18, 1939, two months after his father’s sudden death of a heart attack. The accounts of his death vary. Marguerite’s sister, Lillian Murret, who also lived in New Orleans, says that he was mowing the lawn when he felt a pain in his arm. He told his wife to rub his arm and give him aspirin, which she did, but while she was telephoning the doctor, he keeled over dead.[2] Years later, however, Marguerite told a social worker in New York that her husband died at 6:00 A.M. and, in order to spare herself and the child she was carrying, she had him buried the same day, an act that so horrified his relatives by its “coldness” that they had avoided her ever since.[3]
But Marguerite’s feelings for her husband had not been cold. According to one member of her family, Oswald gave her what she wanted—a car, a house, financial security. To this day when she speaks of him, she says, “There goes the only happy part of my life.”[4] At the time of his death, the couple had been hoping for a baby girl.
Now Marguerite was on her own, with three small sons to provide for. She was not destitute. She had her support payments from John’s father and, according to a friend, a $10,000 insurance policy from Oswald. In addition, the house she lived in was at least partly paid for. But money was on Marguerite’s mind. She rented the house and moved to a cheaper place. And so that she could go to work, she put the older boys, first in a strict Catholic boarding school, and then in the Bethlehem Children’s Home, a New Orleans orphanage, despite the fact that neither was an orphan and John had two parents living.
1
John Pic learned while he was growing up that his father did contribute to his support, although his mother told him constantly that the amount was not enough, only $18 a month. But according to Pic’s father, the amount was actually $40 (Testimony of Edward John Pic Jr., Vol. 8, p. 199). Pic was not disabused of his other illusion, that he had been the cause of his parents’ divorce, until years later, after the Kennedy assassination, when he was thirty-one years old and read about his parents in