Marina slipped out of the house in a state of shock. For two hours she walked alone around the neighborhood, trying to make sense of her situation. Now she knew what it was to be completely helpless. She did not speak a word of English. She knew no one. There was no one who could understand her even if she did try to explain her plight. Alka was all she had, her only friend and her support. And he was changing toward her. She was stunned by his capacity for hypocrisy: his ability to be nice to outsiders and at the same time cruel to her, behind their backs. She felt that she would never be able to count on him again.
As Marina walked alone that night, she glanced into the windows of people’s houses, saw them watching TV, saw them leading normal lives. Why on earth had she ever left Aunt Valya? She was unhappy about staying with Robert and Vada. It was wrong to live off other people and not know how to help them, how they cooked and cleaned house. She believed that Vada did not like her, and Robert had witnessed the angry scene at the dinner table without saying a word to defend her. But the main thing was Alka. She was beginning to be afraid of him.
She had no choice but to endure. She had the baby. The baby depended on her, and neither had anybody else. With a heavy, automatic feeling, Marina went back—back to Alka and the baby. He was awake in bed, but he did not speak to her.
The next day, things were smoothed over with Alka, somehow, and that day she met Peter Gregory. She did not think of it at the time, but it was her first encounter with someone who could rescue her, someone to whom she could, if she chose, explain her plight in her native tongue.
— 14 —
Summer in Fort Worth
Lee’s arrival in Fort Worth did not go unnoticed. He had several calls from newspapermen, with whom he declined to talk. And he had a call from the FBI, which he could not so easily put off. He agreed to an interview at 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday, June 26, at the FBI office in downtown Fort Worth.
Lee arrived ten minutes early, but Special Agent John W. Fain and his assistant, B. Tom Carter, sat him down and started pelting him with questions.[1] From the outset they found him “tense, kind of drawn up, and rigid. A wiry little fellow, kind of waspy.” The question to which they returned again and again was why Oswald had gone to Russia. Finally, in what they took to be a “show of temper,” Lee said that he did not “care to relive the past.” He would say only what he had told the Russians when they asked him the same question: “I came because I wanted to.”
The agents’ real purpose that day was to try to find out whether Oswald had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence, possibly as the price for bringing out Marina. Again and again Lee denied it, stressing how hard it had been to get Marina out, how long it had taken, and how much paperwork it had required. He sketched Marina’s life for them but refused to give names and addresses of any of her relatives, lest it get them in trouble.
The interview lasted about two hours, and in the course of it, Lee repeated familiar untruths, among them that he never sought Soviet citizenship and never offered radar information to the Russians. He stated that because his wife held a Soviet passport, he would be getting in touch with the Soviet Embassy in Washington within a few days to give them her address. But he said that he held “no brief for the Russians or the Russian system” and promised to get in touch with the FBI if Soviet Intelligence made any effort to contact him.
When he filed his report a week or so later, Agent Fain described Oswald as “impatient and arrogant during most of the interview.” He felt that Oswald had been “evasive” and recommended that he be interviewed again. Later, looking back at a distance of two years, it occurred to Fain that behind the “arrogance” and the “coldness,” Oswald might have been “just scared.”
That night, Robert asked Lee how the FBI men had treated him. “Just fine,” Lee answered. He then told Robert the most staggering untruth he had perpetrated in quite a while. The FBI, he said, wanted to know whether he was an agent of the United States government. “Don’t you know?” Lee said he had asked them. And he laughed as he told Robert how he had turned the tables on the FBI.[2]
As for Marina, he told her nothing at all, not even that the interview had taken place. She thought he was putting all his energies into job hunting and asked every night how it was going. But after a few days she stopped, for she could see that he was getting nowhere. Marina was not surprised. She had heard all her life that unemployment was a problem of crisis dimensions in the United States, and Lee did nothing to disabuse her of the idea. He stressed it, in fact, since it gave him a built-in excuse. Marina did not hound him; she accepted his explanations and gave him her sympathy and support.
But Lee had liabilities in the job market. He had no high school diploma. He had an undesirable discharge. And he had spent three years in the Soviet Union, a fact he probably did not confide to would-be employers, which left him with an abbreviated job history. The skills he had—radar training, the ability to speak Russian—were not in demand in Fort Worth. He did not want blue-collar work of the kind he had had in Minsk, yet he lacked the education for the white-collar work he would accept, to say nothing of the intellectual work he really wanted. Nor is it clear how hard he was looking for a job. Vada noticed that he spent a good deal of time at home, working for “hours at a stretch going over his notes and adding to them.”[3]
Lee and Marina had been living with Robert and Vada for four or five weeks when Marguerite Oswald once again appeared on the scene. She gave up her job in Crowell and took an apartment in Fort Worth so that she, her Prodigal Son, and her Russian daughter-in-law could be united under one roof. According to Robert, Lee was “not overjoyed.” He told his mother that he would soon be working, and he and Marina would then want to live on their own.[4] But Marguerite got her way, not so much by arguing the point as by acting as if it were already settled. So it was that Marina, Lee, and the baby moved to the Rotary Apartments at 1501 West Seventh Street in Fort Worth and settled in a two-room apartment Marguerite had found for them. Lee did not leave a forwarding address at the post office. It was a sign that he did not expect the new arrangement to last.
Marguerite paid the rent. She slept in the living room, while Lee, Marina, and the baby had the bedroom to themselves. Marina found her mother-in-law a superb housekeeper, meticulously neat, and one who used up every scrap of food. Moreover, it was she and she alone who held the key to Lee’s appetite. With everyone else, his wife included, he was a finicky eater. But he demolished everything Marguerite cooked for him. Had the way to Lee’s heart lain through his stomach, relations between mother and son would have been peaceful indeed.
Marguerite had a car, and the first few mornings she drove Lee around, tracking down leads he got from newspaper ads and the state employment commission. Marguerite would later claim that her son “met obstacles all the way.”[5] But on July 17, only a few days after moving in with his mother, Lee started work as a sheet metal helper for the Leslie Welding Company, manufacturers of louvers and ventilators in Fort Worth. He stated falsely on his application that he had had sheet metal experience in the Marine Corps. Lee did well in the job. The manager of the Louv-R-Pak Division of the company for which Lee worked later recalled that he was “one of the best employees” he ever had.[6] Lee’s foreman, however, remembers him as a laconic fellow: “He didn’t talk to nobody about nothing, so nobody ever messed with him.” But he came to work on time and might have become “a pretty good sheet metal man” if he’d stayed in it.[7]
1
The report of Special Agents John W. Fain and B. Tom Carter, dictated July 2, 1962 (Exhibit No. 823, Vol. 17, pp. 728–731); Testimony of John W. Fain, Vol. 4, pp. 403–418. It does not appear to have been unusual in any way for the FBI, and not the CIA, to have interviewed Oswald on his return from the USSR.