Marina was in a quandary. Just as she had been as a child with her mother and stepfather, she felt again that she was “between two fires,” too torn to steer a tactful middle course. But she would not give up her new friends any more than she would give up Lee. She was grateful for their kindness. She felt lucky to have found in George Bouhe an older man who was good to her, whom she trusted, and with whom she could be utterly frank.
During one visit Bouhe noticed that Marina had a black eye. “Did you run into the bathroom door?” he inquired sympathetically. That was what she had told Anna Meller.
“Oh, no,” Marina answered matter-of-factly. “Lee hit me.”
Bouhe was shocked. “Can it be,” he asked himself, “that a civilized man in this day and age would hit his wife?”
Bit by bit the Russians woke up to the reality of Lee’s treatment of Marina. They were indignant. And the more they saw of it, the more indignant they became. They sensed Lee’s contempt for them, his feeling that they were people of petty, material interests, whereas he cared for higher things. They saw, too, that he had by no means given up his romance with the Soviet Union and with Communist ideas. They spotted volumes by Lenin and Marx on the Oswalds’ coffee table and current Soviet magazines that they knew he could ill afford. There was something in Lee’s attitude, moreover, that led them to believe that he hated anyone in a position of authority simply because he wanted to be there himself. They joked in their Russian idiom—to them it was a joke—that he wanted to be “at the top” and “a big wheel.” He was not really for anything. He was, Mrs. Meller later said, “all anti, anti- the Soviet Union, anti- the United States, anti- society in general and anti- us.”[2]
They went on helping, nevertheless, but it was Marina and the baby they tried to help, not Lee. Bouhe saw storm signals in the marriage, and he gave Marina some advice: “If you are a brave girl, if I were you, I would prepare to stand on my own feet before long. But before you start anything, you have to speak English.”[3] He asked if Lee would object if he tried to teach her. “Let’s try,” Marina said, and they did. Bouhe gave her a first-rate dictionary compiled by Russian émigrés in the United States during World War II as a guide for American officers. He wrote out a few sentences in Russian; under each sentence she was to write a translation and mail the result to him in Dallas. Each week Marina mailed Bouhe a lesson, and he mailed it back, corrected and with a new lesson. This went on for five or six weeks until Marina gave up, largely because she felt that Lee did not approve.
Other men besides Lee might have resented the Russians’ help. It was said that Bouhe, who had been an accountant all his life, had a way of making some people feel accountable for his acts of kindness. He was free with his advice, exhorting Lee to get an education and lift himself up by his bootstraps. As Bouhe said later, “I think he began to hate me very early.”[4]
Lee felt the Russians were bending his priorities. They thought that he ought to take better care of his wife and child, that he ought to feed them and clothe them better. Lee, on the other hand, wanted to spend as little on his family as he could and save the rest to pay off his debts. What the Russians took to be necessities, he considered luxuries, and he resented having to thank them for presents that he did not want and that he thought his family did not need. Thus, when the Russians brought a crib and mattress for June, he accepted it. But when Bouhe and Mrs. Meller drove up a week later with a playpen, he was furious. “I don’t need it,” he said and condescended only with reluctance and an air of affront to help unload it from the car.
In reality Lee was accepting the Russians’ help, and in his own backhanded, ungracious manner, he even encouraged it. On September 22, at Lee’s request, Robert Oswald cosigned an application by Lee for a charge account at Montgomery Ward. His first purchase was a surprise—a television set. He told Marina that he had bought it to keep her from being lonely, and that weekend they had an orgy of television watching. But on Monday Lee took the set back to the store. The Russians, he said, would be criticaclass="underline" they would think the Oswalds were “playing poor to get help, yet all the time they could afford a TV.”
Lee had decided to continue “playing poor.” Evidently, he did feel accountable to the Russians. Moreover, he was always especially kind to Marina just before any visit from them so she would not tell them he beat her. Yet he did have a choice. He could have refused to see the Russians, or he could have consented to see them but refused to take any more help. Instead, he sank back into his familiar dependent stance: that of accepting help and even feeling entitled to it but at the same time disguising the fact that he was taking help by acting churlish toward those who gave it. What the Russians saw was his erect posture, the swagger of independence, the stiff arm that kept everybody at a distance and seemed to be saying, “Don’t help me—I don’t need it.” What they did not see at first, and what some never noticed at all, was the position of the other arm. The elbow was bent, the hand slightly outstretched, and with it Lee Oswald was taking all the help that came his way. Had he been halfway gracious, he could have had a great deal more.
The hectic Sunday of October 7 tells the story. The first to arrive that day was Marguerite Oswald, who, while still unwelcome at her son’s house, nevertheless dropped in from time to time. Next were Gary and Alexandra Taylor, a young couple who arrived from Dallas about four in the afternoon, bringing their baby son. Alexandra Taylor was the daughter of George de Mohrenschildt, an émigré in Dallas who had met the Oswalds about three weeks before. Apparently, Alexandra, too, had met Marina, but it was her husband’s first encounter with the Oswalds. The Taylors put their eight-month-old son in the playpen with Junie, who was five days younger than he. There, with varying degrees of inattention and apprehension, their mothers kept an eye on them for the rest of the afternoon.
Gary Taylor later observed that Lee’s mother was “a plump woman, out of place in the crowd that was there that afternoon,”[5] who did not seem very interested in what was going on and who left about 4:30. She was not to see her son again for more than a year.
The “crowd” that had gathered included George Bouhe and Anna Meller, and Lyolya Hall and her estranged husband John, who was also meeting the Oswalds for the first time. As usual, there was no food or drink; the Oswalds’ was simply a meeting place. But there was a lot of talk, and most of it was Russian.
At some point that afternoon, Lee announced that he had lost his job. Saturday had been his last day at work. It was “seasonal” work, he said, and he had been laid off. He had no other job in view, and his rent was overdue. In spite of their feelings about Lee, the Russians were ready to help. Since Dallas was bigger than Fort Worth, they thought Lee would have a better chance of finding work there, and John Hall, together with George Bouhe and Gary Taylor, worked out a plan to help Lee move and look for a job. It was decided that Marina, who had a dental appointment the next day in Dallas, would leave that night with the Taylors, stay there two or three days, then return to Fort Worth and stay with Lyolya Hall until Lee had a job in Dallas.
Lee did not object, and that evening, after most of the visitors had left, Marina and the baby drove with the Taylors to Dallas. The next evening Robert Oswald joined his brother at Mercedes Street and helped him pace his bigger belongings. John and Lyolya Hall then arrived, loaded the Oswalds’ possessions into a pickup truck belonging to the Patterson Porcelain Laboratory, where Mrs. Hall worked, and stored them in the Halls’ garage. On the night of Monday, October 8, Lee took the bus to Dallas.