She loved grocery shopping. Lee would steer her to a delicatessen and say: “Look, Mama. No need to be homesick. You can get the same things as in Russia.” He bought her the foods she liked especially—sour cream, sauerkraut, pickles, kidneys, herring. “Mama, would you like some caviar?” He would lift a jar of the red variety off the shelf. And for all it cost him, he stuffed it in the shopping basket and took out something he had chosen for himself. When they got home, he sat at the dining table and looked on with a rapturous air while Marina ate the caviar. It was one of the few Russian foods he liked. But he refused to touch it, not even when she tried to feed him with a spoon; he did not want to deprive her.
A few days after their move, a ripple crossed the surface of their tranquillity—a visit from the FBI. It was a hot night, Thursday, August 16, and Marina was about to serve dinner. The front door was open, the screen door on the latch. Lee was sitting on the sofa, reading the Worker in English. She was setting the table. All of a sudden they heard a knock at the screen door. Lee got up, glanced at the door, then quickly stuffed his newspaper under the sofa cushion. He opened the screen door and invited the caller to come in. A man entered, showed his documents to Lee, and, apologizing to Marina for delaying supper, asked him to come out to a waiting car.[10]
Marina peered out and saw Lee in a car with two men. He was gone a long time, at least an hour, and she had to heat up their dinner, she says, “ten times.” She was furious by the time he came back. Who were those men, anyway?
Lee was gloomy and dispirited. “They were the FBI.”
“And who are they?”
“They’re the security organs. In Russia it’s the KGB. Here it’s the FBI.”
Marina was angry about dinner, angrier still to hear the dread initials KGB.
“They asked about Russia,” Lee said. “They wanted to know if Soviet agents had been here and asked me to work for them. I said no. They said, if anybody comes, please let the FBI know. I told them: ‘I will not be an informer for you. Go ahead and do it if that’s your job, but don’t ask me to do it for you.’”
He ate very little and talked very little, and his eyes had a troubled look. “Now it’s begun,” he said. “Because I’ve been over there, they’ll never let me live in peace. They think anyone who’s been there is a Russian spy. Let them think it. It’ll just give them more work.” He was upset, and the bad mood lingered for several days. He did not tell Marina that he had seen the FBI once before, at the downtown office in Fort Worth.
Agent John W. Fain reported on this second interview with Oswald in detail.[11] He told Oswald that he had not gone to see him at work because he did not wish to embarrass him with his employer; and he chose to interview him in the car, not the house, because he did not want to upset Marina. Oswald pounced on this remark, stored it up, and later on used it again and again.
Fain was impressed by the change in Oswald, who showed no reluctance to see him and even invited him into the house. “He had gotten a job, and he wasn’t as tense.” Fain thought he talked “more freely” and not so evasively as during their previous interview. But he still refused to answer, to their satisfaction, the question of why he went to the USSR. It was “nobody’s business,” he said. “It was something that I did. I went, and I came back.”
Oswald repeated most of his old lies and added a new one: that he had moved to Mercedes Street in mid-July, and not just the week before. This time he confided his fears of prosecution on returning to the United States and admitted that he had been interviewed by officials of the MVD, the Soviet interior ministry, twice: on his arrival in the USSR and again before his departure. But noting that he was not employed in a sensitive industry and that the company he was working for had no government contracts, Oswald played down any importance he might have to the Russians. Contrary to what he told Marina afterward, he did, in fact, promise for the second time to inform the FBI should there be any undercover Soviet effort to contact him.
The interview, plus a report that he received from two confidential informants the next day to the effect that neither Lee nor Marina Oswald had anything to do with Communist Party activities in Fort Worth, led Fain to recommend that the FBI close its case on Lee Harvey Oswald.[12] This the FBI did—not long after the moment when Oswald, speaking of FBI persecution, made the gloomy prediction: “Now it’s begun.”
Oswald made one pregnant remark during the interview. He said that “he might have to return to the Soviet Union in about five years to take his wife back home to see her relatives.”[13] And in a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, written within a day or two of his meeting with the FBI, Oswald tossed out another hint. He asked the embassy to send “periodicals or bulletins which you may put out for the benefit of your citizens living for a time in the U.S.A.”[14]
Oswald said nothing to Marina about any plan to return to the Soviet Union, and it is not clear why, less than a week after moving into his first home in the United States, he suggested twice in as many days that Marina and their child, or all three of them together, might go back to Russia. It is clear, however, that his return to the United States had had a contingent character in his mind from the outset and that already he was contemplating a way out. Up to now he had always had help in caring for his family, help from the Soviet government and Marina’s relatives, help from Robert and his mother. Now he was on his own. He profoundly wanted to be, but perhaps the responsibility made him anxious. Possibly he anticipated trouble of some kind. The probable truth, that the Soviet government would never allow him, a malcontent and an ex-defector, inside its borders again, does not seem to have entered his head.
Marina’s pleas to him—“Do anything, Alka, but don’t ever make me go back”—suggest that perhaps she guessed what was in his mind. And her unconscious awareness and anxiety must have made the adjustment to her new life much harder. Thus, in involuntary ways, Oswald was ruffling the surface of his married life and rendering his existence more turbulent. The conflicts that had sent him to Russia in the first place had been resolved neither by his defection nor by his decision to come home. Emotionally, he was in the same place he had always been.
The chief source of those conflicts, his mother, soon reappeared, wholly unchastened, on the steps of his house on Mercedes Street. No one quite knew how she got there, since both Lee and Robert had been at pains to conceal the address.
Marina remembers her visit with merriment. About three days after their move, she heard a knock at the door. She looked out, and there, to her astonishment, stood “Mamochka,” looking just as blithe and unconcerned as if the hysterical scene of parting had never occurred. Marguerite brought a high chair for the baby and silverware, dishes, and utensils for Marina and Lee. Marina welcomed her in, Marguerite played with the baby, then left.
10
Agent John W. Fain differed from Marina in his memory of how his second meeting with Oswald began (Testimony of John W. Fain, Vol. 4, pp. 420–423). He testified that he and another agent, Arnold J. Brown, staked out the house and waited down the road in a car. About 5:30 they spotted Oswald walking home from work. They moved up in front of the house. “Hi, Lee,” Fain called out from the car. “How are you? Would you mind talking with us just a few minutes?” According to Fain, Lee did not object, and he climbed into the back seat of the car. Marina recalls that Fain came to their door, and that recollection seems more likely to be correct, since it was her first contact with the FBI, the effect on her husband was vivid, and she remembers it in detail. Fain, on the other hand, paid many such calls in a year, and his recollection may have been fuzzy. For him the visit was routine; for Marina it was unique.
Another point on which Fain seems to have been in error is the time at which he and Brown spotted Oswald coming home. It was probably not at 5:30, as he reported, but a few minutes after 4:30, the hour at which Oswald got out of work. The interview probably lasted, as another FBI report stated, for an hour and a quarter, from 4:45 until 6:00.