The Gregorys decided to introduce the Oswalds to two members of the émigré community. Marina and Lee were invited to a dinner party on Saturday, August 25, at the Gregorys’ home in Fort Worth. There they met Anna Meller, forty-five years old, a large and dramatically handsome blonde from Belgorod, southern Russia, who had been living in the United States since 1952. She had driven over from her home in Dallas with the Gregorys’ other guest, George Bouhe.
Bouhe was a bachelor, or a grass widower, with time and sympathy to spare. But he was also cautious. He looked and listened before he leaped. He was eager to attend the dinner party and hear about conditions in his homeland, but he all but burned up the telephone wires between Dallas and Fort Worth before accepting the Gregorys’ invitation. Was it prudent to meet Oswald? Was there a danger that this defector, who had accomplished the supposedly impossible feat of leaving the Soviet Union and bringing a Russian wife with him, might turn out to be a Soviet spy?
The man to whom he directed these questions was Max Clark, the Fort Worth lawyer whose wife had had a brief and abrasive contact with Oswald shortly after he arrived in Texas. By virtue of the respect in which he was held in Fort Worth and his marriage to a member of the princely Shcherbatov family (the family that Leo Tolstoy rechristened “Shcherbatsky” and used as models of the Moscow nobility in Anna Karenina), Clark was like a highly placed in-law to all the Russians. He and his wife Gali stood at the very apex of the émigré community, maybe a touch above it, and were often called upon as arbiters of its frequent clashes of politics and personalities. Moreover, Clark, as a lawyer for General Dynamics, was thought to have dealings with the FBI. Did the FBI have anything against Oswald? That was what Bouhe wanted to know. If so, Bouhe, who was as anti-Soviet as was humanly possible, and a super-patriot for Texas besides, wanted nothing to do with him.
Clark spoke from common sense and experience only. He did not work for the FBI, nor had he talked with anyone in the FBI about Oswald. But he could see no risk in meeting the man. Doubtless, Oswald was under FBI surveillance and would not be back in this country if he were thought to present any danger. Thus assured, Bouhe accepted the Gregorys’ invitation.
From a social standpoint it was the Oswalds’ finest hour. No one who was there that evening has forgotten the picture they presented as they came in: Lee, immaculate in jacket, tie, and a white shirt with French cuffs, and Marina, his pretty, frail-looking wife, holding their baby daughter in her arms. Everyone was aware that Lee was a poor man, and they were impressed at his being so meticulously dressed. They were impressed, too, by his quiet manner and his grave, courteous air. They were prepared to respect him as a man who had taken the Soviet Union seriously enough to go and see it, yet was sensible enough to come back. And they were impressed by his affection for his baby, whom he held all evening on his lap.
But Marina was the real sensation. Not only did she appear a childlike, innocent waif, but her use of Russian—and Russians tend to judge other Russians by the way they speak the mother tongue—was very cultivated. Bouhe immediately surmised that Marina had been well brought up, that she had “received good care from some person of the Old Regime,” someone “religious, well-mannered and such.”[3] His good impression was in no way diminished when Marina told him that she had indeed been taught to speak Russian by her grandmother, who had also taught her to be religious.
The Russians were surprised. They expected Marina, as a member of a generation that grew up long after they left the country, to be what they thought of as “Soviet”: sturdy and purposeful; literal, direct, and not very well educated; self-consciously “proletarian,” with scorn for good manners and good speech. In every one of their expectations they were confounded. Marina was tiny and thin. She chain-smoked and drank a little wine. She was well mannered, and above all, she spoke that pure Leningrad Russian, innocent of jargon or slang, that to them bespoke intelligence and education. She was like a fragile fossil, a relic of their old and much-loved homeland, that had suddenly been dug out of the Russian earth.
Marina was equally intrigued. To her, meeting these people was like seeing the characters in the plays of Chekhov and the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy come to life. If they were sizing her up, she was doing the same. “At first,” she said to herself of one of the women, “you’d think she was from a good background—but only at first. Peter Gregory does not speak a very pure Russian. He must have come ‘up’ from somewhere. Bouhe—he’s from the Old Intelligentsia.” In manner and speech Bouhe reminded Marina of her beloved aunt, Maria Yakovlevna, and she liked him right away. She liked him even better when he told her, in a way that probed and divined her thoughts, that he did not work for any intelligence service and she could therefore speak to him frankly.
Bouhe had brought with him a huge album with maps of St. Petersburg from 1710 to 1914. This he spread out on the floor and, inviting Marina to join him there, peppered her with questions about whether this or that old school, church, or outdoor market was still standing. Marina felt that she was being examined, and not only for her intelligence. She was from a district in which members of the working class and the new Soviet intelligentsia lived, whereas Bouhe was asking about the heart of Old St. Petersburg, where the aristocracy used to live, and where descendants of the Old Intelligentsia, of people like Bouhe himself, were still living. Marina thought he was an aristocrat, and because she was not she felt anxious and self-conscious. She wondered what these people would think of her when they found out where she really came from.
If it was a test, Marina passed it, for Bouhe liked her very much. He felt stirrings of protectiveness toward her, the beginnings of what was to become a father-daughter relationship.[4] As for Lee, everyone tiptoed around the question in all their minds: Why, having defected to Russia, did he decide to come back? They guessed that his decision signified failure, if only the failure of having to admit that he had been wrong, then leaned over backward not to embarrass him. The venturesome Bouhe teetered up to it, indeed, by praising people with the courage and good sense to change their minds. At this he felt Lee bristle and draw away.
Politics was touchy for them all, for no one was certain whether or not Oswald had renounced his Communist proclivities. The émigrés asked many questions about living conditions, prices, wages; about the smaller freedoms and how life had changed in little ways. And in Lee’s answers they took soundings as to where he really stood. Some of those present considered him a trifle quick to protest the virtues of the USSR They sensed in him a trace of the nashi luchshe mentality, a special Soviet attitude that “ours is better,” that anything Soviet—a head of cabbage, a pair of shoes, life in general—is better than its counterpart anywhere else simply because it is Soviet. It was only a feeling, of course. But there was no doubt in the mind of anybody there that, of the two, Marina was far more critical of Russia. They agreed with her, and they liked her for it.
By the end of the evening, the verdict on her was favorable. As for him, they found him well mannered but cold. He was, in any case, much better than the émigrés expected of a man who had once been fool enough to defect to Soviet Russia.
Lee had his own feelings about the party. Marina sensed in him that grudging edge of ungraciousness that told her he was doing it for her, so she could meet her countrymen—it was not an evening he would go through for himself alone. In fact, a failure of sympathy between Lee and the émigrés appears to have had its origins that night. In Russia Lee had grown accustomed to being asked about conditions in America, and he expected to be asked similar questions here. But in his heart of hearts he was scornful of people who appeared to be interested mostly in money and material things. In his scheme of things, they were “bourgeois.” Besides, he wanted to talk about bigger things, about political differences between Russia and America, about Castro, Khrushchev, and de-Stalinization. But the émigrés had politely avoided such discussions.