In Minsk Lee had been able to condescend. He was no better educated than his listeners, but he had spent his life outside Russia, and they were eager to hear anything he had to say. Here it was the reverse. The émigrés were better educated, more widely traveled, and more experienced than he was. Apart from information about wages and prices, he did not have much to tell them—that they wanted to hear, anyway. They sized him up as a half-educated American boy, and they would have considered his Marxist views gauche—if he still held them. To them such opinions were painfully naïve. Besides, the émigrés were encrusted with good manners. Evenings such as this were a time for polite feeling out, not open confrontation. They wanted no offense to anyone’s feelings—his or hers.
The evening was a turning point for Lee and Marina. It might be supposed that Lee would have a rough go in Texas. There he was, a former defector to Russia, in an anti-Communist corner of the United States, encumbered by a Soviet wife and an undesirable discharge from the US Marines. Surely he would meet hostility everywhere, have trouble finding work, and suffer one rejection after another until he became hopeless and embittered. The reality was altogether different. Because of his meeting with the Russians, especially George Bouhe, Lee’s homecoming was warmer and more welcoming than anyone might have supposed. The Russians were to be extraordinarily kind to him. They would surround him and his wife with concern. They would place at his service a flourishing grapevine and see to it that he found a job he liked. They helped Lee as much, and as long, as he would allow—and as they could stand.
In Russia Lee Oswald had been a guest, the Russian people his hosts, and he was given the full measure of that country’s magnificent hospitality. Incredibly, the same thing was now to happen again—and in his own corner of his native Texas. For no other reason than the breadth and generosity of the Russian soul, Oswald was once again to be treated, in his own country, as if he were the guest and this handful of émigrés, some of them hardly any better off than he, the hosts. Far from encountering hostility and rejection because of his past, he was accepted more readily than if he had never been to Russia at all.
The evening was a turning point for the Oswalds in another way as well. Their marriage had been undergoing a sea change from the moment they stepped aboard the Maasdam. The encounter with the émigrés helped crystallize that change, and the relationship between Lee and Marina was never to be the same again.
— 16 —
Ingratitude
After the dinner party at the Gregorys’, George Bouhe and Anna Meller drove to Fort Worth nearly every weekend to see the Oswalds. They noticed immediately that the refrigerator was bare, that Marina and the baby looked ill-fed and ill-clothed, and that the baby was sleeping in a bureau drawer. They appealed to all their friends for hand-me-downs and gave them to the Oswalds. They noticed, too, that Marina’s front teeth were rotting, and they drove all the Oswalds to see Mrs. Elena (“Lyolya”) Hall, a Russian émigré who lived in Fort Worth and worked as a dental technician. Mrs. Hall told them where they could obtain low-cost dental care, and she also started soliciting her friends and her employer’s wife for money and clothes for the Oswalds. One day, during her lunch hour, she took Marina shopping and bought her a couple of dresses. Bouhe and Mrs. Meller, meanwhile, decided that Marina needed training as an American housewife, and they took her to a supermarket to show her the way around.
On Sunday, September 9, using $5 given them by George Bouhe, the three Oswalds took a bus to Dallas. Bouhe met them and drove them to the apartment of Anna Meller and her husband, Teofil, where they had lunch and spent the afternoon. They were joined by Declan and Katya Ford, an American geologist and his Russian wife, and by their baby, Gregory. The Oswalds had brought photographs of themselves and their friends in Minsk, and there was talk about how people lived there.
Lee liked Katya Ford, a dark-complexioned, down-to-earth woman in her early thirties. At first, she was impressed by him, too, especially when with utmost politeness he insisted at the end of the afternoon on carrying her baby’s paraphernalia to the car. As for her husband, Declan Ford, he felt “like a piece of air whom Oswald was looking around.”[1] The Fords were struck, as people often were, by Lee’s eyes. He looked at you with a steady, wide-open stare. He never seemed to blink, but from time to time it was as if clouds moved across his eyes and the expression in them changed.
The afternoon contained an eye-opener for George Bouhe. As tactfully as he could, he asked Lee whether the bus fare he had given him had been sufficient. “Oh, yes,” Lee answered. But he offered no thanks and no change.
Bouhe and Mrs. Meller continued to visit the Oswalds’ Mercedes Street apartment, and on one occasion Lee’s ingratitude became even more apparent. Bouhe brought him a pair of old shirts, and Lee looked at them appraisingly, measuring and remeasuring them. Bouhe suggested that he wear them a few times to work, then throw them away. Lee folded the shirts and handed them back to Bouhe. “I don’t need them,” he said.
One day Lee came in while Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were at the apartment, peered into the refrigerator, noted that it was full, and asked where the groceries came from. When Marina said they were from Bouhe, Lee was openly displeased. Indeed, he looked displeased so much of the time, and maintained such an air of disapproving quiet, that Bouhe and Mrs. Meller rather quickly learned to come at three in the afternoon on Saturdays, their free day, and stay only an hour or so in hopes of missing Lee, who returned home from work about five.
Bouhe soon realized that Lee resented being helped. It was Marina, of course, who bore the brunt of his resentment. After every visit he pointed to some item that Bouhe or Mrs. Meller had brought and warned her: “They’ll want payment for that.”
When Marina asked what sort of payment, he replied: “You watch. They’ll make you dependent on them.”
Lee could not conceive that anyone might be generous and kind-hearted without any ulterior aim. In his view Bouhe and Mrs. Meller were helping Marina to humiliate him. “It’s not that I don’t want to buy you things,” he told her in one angry session, “but I can’t. I haven’t any money to spare.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “You can’t right now. So what’s wrong with accepting their help? They only do it to be kind.”
“I can’t let them buy my wife. Besides, they’re spoiling you.”
“Since you can’t spoil me,” Marina said, “why shouldn’t they?”
He hit her, hard, across the cheek. “Don’t ever say that again.”
“What did I say wrong?”
“I’ll be the one to spoil you—when I can. I don’t want you depending on other people any more. You chase after anyone who’ll spoil you.”
The beatings, which began on a regular basis when Marina opened the door to Lee’s mother, now continued because of her friendship with the Russians. He reproached her constantly, accused her of “never supporting” him, complained that her friendship with other people was itself a “betrayal.” Yet, curiously, he did not forbid her to see them. Nor did he tell them to stop bringing gifts.