Lee’s conquest of his mother made it hard for him to grow away from her in another way as well. Was he not the sun of her universe? As long as he was the light of her eyes, he had a stake in her view of things. Her view of things was to become his. And here lay a fresh side of Lee’s tragedy, for his mother’s view was monstrously misshapen. Somehow, as she grew up, half an orphan, in New Orleans, Marguerite too had acquired the notion that she was special. She felt entitled to what she wanted and to a better life than she had. And this feeling alone made her life a hardship, since life could not meet her expectations. Everyday vicissitudes, burdens others manage to accept, were to her a gratuitous imposition. Marguerite became convinced that life was unfair to her and that she was not getting a “square deal.” She felt, and felt strongly, that she had a right to do anything she could to even up the score and bring a little perverse justice into the world. She acquired a bias against society, and she transmitted that bias to Lee.
Marguerite’s feeling that she and Lee were both special, and that Lee was, in fact, the physical and spiritual extension of herself, was to emerge later when she testified before the Warren Commission. Marguerite acknowledged that she had certain “gifts,” a gift for singing and a gift for sewing. “So those are gifted things I can’t explain,” she said. “Lee had certain gifted ways about him also.”[32]
The profound resemblance between mother and son came out in many ways. They were alike in a linguistic overreaching, a use, and misuse, of words that were too big for them. The ambitiousness they shared crept even into their language.
The two also shared an uncanny constellation of emotions that had its outcropping in an extraordinary congruity of behavior. Feeling, as they did, that “the world owed them a living,” they both carried around with them a prickliness, a miraculous capacity for ingratitude. Marguerite’s relatives, the Murrets, saw her only occasionally, between marriages, when she showed up needing help. They always answered her call. They gave and gave, but Marguerite never gave in return. She was even able to accept what they gave in such as way as to deny that they had given her anything at all. They were only giving her her due. Her son Lee was the same. He, too, bristled with an independent aura—“I don’t need anything from anybody.” But he, too, was forever accepting favors and failing either to reciprocate or to thank anyone. As he saw it, it was not favors or help he was getting—it was his due. Lee, like his mother, was obsessed by his rights. And every now and then he gave the game away by standing on his hind legs and roaring for them.
Since both felt that they were at the center of the universe, they assumed that others were thinking about them, and even plotting against them. Both were attuned to a whole world of hidden motives. Both loved mystery and intrigue, both suspected others of carrying on secret activities. Lee adored spy novels and spy films. And as for Marguerite, Robert Oswald says she “still sees a spy behind every door and tree.”[33] Mother and son were like twin antennae vibrating to the possibility of conspiracy.
Other things followed from this. Neither Lee nor his mother could open up or allow themselves to be vulnerable to anyone. They had to keep others from glimpsing what was inside their minds. And since they were holding together a view of the world that was not in accord with reality, they spent a great deal of energy tuning out signals that did not fit. By the age of four, Robert knew that his mother was deaf to anything she did not want to hear. His brother Lee was the same.
As a result neither knew what reality was. Since the truth was weightless and elusive, they felt entitled to play fast and loose with it. Both of them lied. But in this they differed from one another, for Marguerite apparently had enough contact with reality to control her abuse of it. This was not true of Lee. His sense of reality appears to have been so badly impaired that the line between truth and falsehood was wavy, and falsehood was often truer than truth. He lied pointlessly, to no purpose and all the time, even when he had nothing to hide. Marina says Lee told three kinds of lies. One was vranyo, a wild, Russian, cock-and-bull lying that has a certain imaginative joy to it; another was lying out of secretiveness; and still another was lying out of calculation, because he had something to hide. Lying claimed much of Lee’s energy and complicated his life a great deal. But he had no choice. He had to keep his reality in and the reality of other people out. Somehow he realized that the two were not the same, and some desperate, animal-like sixth sense told him that he had at all costs to keep outside reality from breaking in and shattering his precarious inner equilibrium.
Since mother and son both assumed that other people were thinking about them, publicity was essential to them. It did not matter if the publicity was negative, as it had been after Lee’s defection, for it confirmed what they had known all along, that the world was against them. Publicity held their world together. It proved that they were the center of the universe.
Mother and son were, indeed, in a state of symbiotic nourishment and support. During Lee’s time in Russia, his mother decided that he must be a spy, very likely an American one. Lee had the same idea. He, too, loved to imagine that he was spy, and on balance an American one. Each had the same fantasy, yet not as a result of any communication that had actually passed between them. It was a case of two minds with but a single thought, and that thought the totally congruous product of two very similar personalities.
Lee would willingly have gone further, would have become a spy and acted out his mother’s fantasy for her. It was not his fault that nobody asked him to be one. The same was true of his notorious acts, those that put his mother in the limelight, beginning with his defection to Russia. Marguerite never knew what Lee had done, exactly, since he did not tell her, but she always knew within seconds of the first call from a reporter how to make the most of it. Lee was not only acting out his own fantasies and imaginings, he was acting out hers as well.
In the end he was to act on a really grand scale, a scale Marguerite had not dreamed of. But she adjusted right away and took credit for what her son had done. She told the writer Jean Stafford that if it was from her Lee had learned the “truths” that American society was not perfect, then, “I make no apology.”[34] Lee’s brother John, too, was to say that his mother’s feelings against society had given Lee “a little extra push” toward what was to be the climax of his life.[35]
Marguerite had not known what was coming, but she reacted as if to the manner born. It was for this she had been waiting all her life.
PART THREE
Texas, 1962–1963
— 13 —
Family Reunion
On Wednesday, June 13, 1962, the Maasdam slid into its pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Oswalds were packed and waiting below. Tense and nervous throughout the voyage, Lee literally jumped when they heard a knock at the door of their cabin. He stepped back, whirled around, and stood confronting the door. It was their waiter, Pieter. He had come to say goodbye. Shyly, he showed Marina a photograph of the French girl he was meeting in New York. When he left and the door had closed behind him, Marina sensed the tension seeping out of her husband’s body. He had been expecting the police.
34
Jean Stafford,