One evening as they were all leaving the house together, Paul got a glimpse of how Lee often treated Marina. She fell off the steps, and she and the baby sprawled on the ground. The baby began to cry, and Paul thought Marina had hurt her back. But Lee did not even notice her. He rushed over and picked up the baby, furious at Marina for allowing his baby to fall. Marina thought he was going to kill her. It was “a real hot moment,” Paul recalls, but husband and wife ran indoors, consulted a Russian book on baby care, and together applied a Band-Aid to Junie’s head.
In sum, Paul considered Lee “hot tempered, not very smart, and slightly mixed up.” He was “a small person” who was “always ready to flare up.” In his normal conversations with Marina, he “would always shout.” Paul thought that Lee had an “inability to grasp things.” And yet he could not say that he “disliked” Lee. “I enjoyed being with him,” although “I enjoyed Marina more. She was a very pleasant person, very pleasant to be with, interesting.”
On Friday nights Paul used to take them shopping in his car. They would go to Leonard’s department store, noted for its low prices, to buy groceries. Paul was amazed at how little the Oswalds bought. Lee always haggled over the meat, to be sure they got “the cheapest possible cut.” They were, in fact, getting by on very little. They did without milk because Marina was nursing the baby, and they had fashioned a crib by putting two chairs together between their bed and the wall. True, the baby once fell into the crack between the chairs, but Lee wanted to save money more than he wanted to buy a crib. Marina says that he treated his financial obligations to Robert and the Department of State, which he was not under pressure to repay quickly, as “a holy debt.” During the month of August, for example, when he netted about $200, Lee spent two-thirds on living expenses and nearly one-third in partial payment of his debts.
It never entered Marina’s head that her husband was penurious. From her excursions to Montgomery Ward, she knew that all kinds of things such as nice dresses, cribs, and playpens existed. But it did not occur to her to want them. And when Paul Gregory, shortly before leaving for college, handed her a check for $35, she was overwhelmed. She had never in all her life had so much money. She felt that she did not deserve it. She suspected that the Gregorys, father and son, simply wanted to help her and, rather than offend by giving her money, had devised the pretext of the lessons. Marina knew what she wanted to do with it. She went across the street to Montgomery Ward and bought a pair of shoes for herself ($3.98) and for Alka green work pants, two flannel shirts, and another pair of shoes ($11).
Marina was right, the Gregorys did want to help. Peter Gregory, Paul’s father, had been in the Oswalds’ apartment, and the sight of it evoked his sympathy. He found the living room “practically bare… and the rest of the house was the same way.”[2] During his visit Gregory suggested that Marina start to study English. Lee would have none of it. He did not want Marina to learn English, he said, lest he lose his own fluency in Russian. To Gregory, Oswald’s answer signified that he cared nothing for his wife, only for himself. But Gregory was a fair man, and slow to judge.
Meanwhile, news of the Oswalds’ arrival had spread like a prairie fire among the twenty-five or thirty Russian émigré families in Dallas and Fort Worth. Into that landscape of freeways and flat red earth, of live oak trees and wide Texas sky had come, a decade earlier, fifty or sixty refugees from various parts of Eastern Europe. Some were Russians, a handful were Poles or Rumanians, the rest were from the fringes of the Soviet Union: Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians. Displaced or uprooted during World War II, every one of them had preferred anything, any fate at all, over a return to the countries or territories dominated by Communism. Eventually, after years of hardship and uncertainty, they had made their way to the United States. A few of the women had married American soldiers in West Germany; the rest came by other routes. But the point was that they had arrived, they were on American soil, and the Russians would never lay hands on them again.
Some of the men were lucky. They had geology or engineering in their backgrounds and were able to find jobs in what was then the major industry of the Dallas–Fort Worth area—oil. The others, many of them men and women of some education who would have had fine professional careers back home, had to settle for such jobs as they could find. But before they could even do this, they had a major obstacle to overcome. Most of them had arrived in the United States unable to speak a word of English.
It was at this point that George Bouhe stepped into the lives of many of the émigrés. Bouhe, who had grown up in St. Petersburg as a member of the educated middle class of czarist Russia, had been living in the United States since 1924, and in Dallas since 1939. A lively, inquiring man of fifty-eight, he had become the trusted personal accountant of one of the most powerful men in Dallas, Lewis W. MacNaughton, chairman of the board of the huge and immensely wealthy geological and engineering firm of DeGolyer and MacNaughton.
Bouhe knew very well that it was impossible to get by in America without speaking English. He had personally taken several of the émigrés “by the hand” and led them to Crozier Technical High School, where they learned the rudiments of the language. He had helped them in other ways, too, and over the years he had become the patriarch of the Russian émigré community.
In spite of the hardships that lay behind them, the émigrés had made a remarkable adjustment to Texas life and to what must, to them, have been a totally incongruous world of suburbs, supermarkets, and air-conditioned ranch houses. They were tearfully grateful to the United States, the country that gave them life when they had lost it. But in one sense, the political sense, the section of the country to which they had gravitated was not incongruous at all. It could hardly have been more congenial. For this was deep anti-Communist country, and the émigrés, with an exception or two, were virulent anti-Communists. For them it had not been a case of arriving in the Southwest, then adapting to its extreme political conservatism. They were conservatives when they came and would have remained so anywhere on earth. The political climate of Texas may actually have helped them adjust to American life. It was certainly a feature of the country that they liked.
It was an extraordinary community. Nearly all its members were generous, outgoing, and warm. Because they had suffered so much themselves, they could not see another person suffer without doing what they could to help. While they embraced wholeheartedly the American ethos of individualism and hard work, they had also kept the values they brought over from Eastern Europe: the spirit of community, of sharing, of the responsibility of each for all. And they were curious about the country they had left behind. When word got around of the Oswalds’ arrival, many of the émigrés were curious to meet them, especially Marina, a member of the younger Soviet generation, with whom none of them had had any contact.