Lee was upset when he came home that night and heard that his mother had been there. He instructed Marina not to let her in next time. Marina objected. “She’s your mother, Alka. How can I not let her in?”
“You know nothing about her,” he said. “You’re not to let her in again.”
The next day Marguerite came again, with a live green and yellow parakeet inside a cage. Lee had given the cage and the very same parakeet to his mother nearly seven years before, in November 1955, when he was sixteen years old, with money earned from his first real job as office boy at Tujague’s shipping company in New Orleans. Again, Marina welcomed her mother-in-law. She was sorry for her, sorry she had to live alone, and she still thought Alka was to blame.
Marguerite had a camera with her, and she was snapping a picture of the baby when Lee walked in. He started to scold her immediately. Marina thinks he told Marguerite not to come again, but she stood her ground and said she had a right to see her grandchild.
Marguerite would recall a different version of the argument. She said that Lee merely told her not to bring presents any more. She realized, she said, that he was “perfectly right. I should save my money and take care of myself.”[15]
The moment Marguerite was gone, Lee turned on his wife. “Why didn’t you obey? I told you not to open the door.”
“But she’s your mother,” Marina said. “I’ve no right to shut the door in her face.”
“You know nothing about it. She brings these things and is nice to you now. Next, she’ll move in. You’ll never be able to get rid of her. You’ll be sorry then.”
“You ought to be ashamed. You’ve no right to behave as if your mama didn’t exist.”
Lee was shouting now. “I have a right to tell you what to do! I told you not to open the door!”
“I will not obey.”
“You will not open the door!”
“I will, too.”
He hit her four or five times across the face.
One day, about a month later, Marina came home to find the parakeet gone. Lee had taken it outdoors and let it fly out of the cage.
Despite her son’s hostility, Marguerite came to the apartment fairly often. On one visit she found Marina in the bedroom, nursing the baby with her head down. Eventually, she looked up, and Marguerite saw that she had a black eye.
“Mama—Lee,” was all Marina was able to say.
Marguerite strode out to the living room, where her son lay reading. “Lee, what do you mean by striking Marina?”
“Mother, that is our affair,” he answered.
Marguerite, on balance, agreed. “There may be times,” she remarked later, “that a woman needs a black eye.”[16] Just as Lee had hit her when he was growing up, now he was hitting his wife. And Marguerite Oswald, as she had done then, condoned it.
In fact, from the moment of Marguerite’s first visit to Mercedes Street, the beatings had become routine—once or twice a week. Typically, after Lee had beaten her, Marina would say: “Alka, I am not your maid. I am good enough not to have you hit me.” He, after an hour or two, would repent and beg Marina to forgive him. And the next day he would buy her caviar or a trinket for the baby.
At the smallest sign that he valued her and the baby, Marina forgave him. She forgave and forgot, until the next time. Their sexual relationship also began to deteriorate. Worn out by heavy physical work in hot weather, Lee did not want sex more than once a week or so, and Marina, dispirited at the turn things were taking, did not want sex much, either.
Still, there were happy moments. Marina was grateful for the good times, fatalistic about the bad. Her stepfather, after all, had beaten her, and he had done it exactly as Lee did, with the flat of his hand, across her face. He, too, had had an icy, inhuman anger in his eyes. But he had hit her once, then stopped; Lee hit her again and again. Marina decided that it was God’s judgment on her for having been cruel to her mother.
The beatings were a humiliation. They devalued Marina in her own eyes, and she feared that they would devalue her in the eyes of anyone who knew of them. Thus she tried to make light of them. She told herself, and later told others as well, that she had a fair skin that bruised easily and exaggerated the effect of every blow. If they suggested that she had brought the beatings on herself by talking too sharply to Lee when he was under strain, she agreed. In a way, Marina believed that she deserved to be beaten.
She took the very Russian view that beatings are a private affair between man and wife, as private as sex. Still, she hoped that Robert might intervene, just as members of Russian families often did. But in this Robert disappointed her. He had dropped by to see them one day, and Marina, who had a black eye, lingered unobtrusively in the kitchen. But she thinks Robert saw her black eye. If he did, he chose to do, and say, nothing. Robert had suffered from Lee’s anger in the past, and whether he was loath to invoke his brother’s wrath again or was simply the nonintervening sort, he stayed out of Lee’s marital affairs. Any thoughts he may have had about his brother’s harshness to Marina, Robert kept to himself.
But by this time Marina was no longer bereft. All her life she had been charming people, attracting them to her, and making them want to look out for her. Her charm had given her nine lives already: it was about to give her a tenth.
— 15 —
The Émigrés
Around the middle of August, young Paul Gregory returned from his summer trip to San Francisco. Eager to improve his Russian, he started showing up twice a week in the late afternoons or evenings for Russian lessons with Marina. His visits quickly became a pleasure and a resource to both the Oswalds.
At twenty-one, Paul Gregory was a year and a half younger than Lee and a full-time college student.[1] Lee may have envied him, for he was out on the evening Paul arrived for his first lesson and returned home brandishing a catalogue of night courses he said he hoped to attend at Texas Christian University. Other evenings, too, Lee used to come home late, laden with books from the public library. He said he wanted to go to college, to Texas Christian or Arlington State, and get a degree in history, philosophy, or economics. Both Lee and Paul had attended the same high school, Arlington Heights in Fort Worth. Lee implied that he had graduated, when, in fact, he had been there only a few weeks in the tenth grade. The barrier to a college education for him, Lee suggested, was the need to support his family. But both in the United States and in Russia, where Lee also had to work, he appears to have lacked motivation to study at night to obtain first a high school and then a college degree.
When Lee was out, Paul’s “lessons” consisted largely of Russian conversations with Marina, during which she told him all about how she met Lee and their courtship in Minsk. Paul got the impression that she had been a rebel and a nonconformist, and that this was one of the main reasons for her early interest in Lee. Marina also corrected Paul’s grammar in an essay he was writing on a play called Man with a Gun, by Nikolai Pogodin. She and Paul huddled together over the dining room table while Lee sat reading Lenin on the sofa. When all three of them spoke Russian together, Paul noticed that Lee’s Russian, while fluent, was “very ungrammatical” and that he spoke with “a very strong accent.” When Marina corrected his errors, “he would get peeved at her. He would wave his hand and say, ‘Don’t bother me.’” But according to Paul, he was able to “express any idea he wanted to in Russian.”
Inevitably, they talked about politics, and as far as Paul could tell, Lee thought the world’s troubles were caused not by “the people,” but by leaders. When it came to specific leaders, however, he did not seem to harbor grudges. He expressed no hostility toward any of them. He was enthusiastic about Castro, and, remarkably, continued to respect Paul in spite of their differences over Cuba. As for Khrushchev, Lee described him as “simply brilliant.” He was “rough” and “crude,” but “you cannot read a speech of his without liking the man.” He also liked John F. Kennedy. On their living room table, the Oswalds kept, more or less permanently, a copy of Life magazine with a cover photo of the president. Marina pointed at it once and said, “He looks like a nice young man.” Lee added that Kennedy was “a good leader.”