A still more colorful story concerned the scene of reconciliation at the Rays’. No sooner had the couple made up, the story went, than Lee plucked the cigarette from his wife’s lips and snuffed it out on her shoulder. The Russians recalled that in the early days of the Bolshevik régime, officers of the Cheka, as the secret police were called, used to extinguish a cigarette on human flesh when they were trying to break a prisoner. Marina denies that her husband did any such thing to her ever. But the Russians believed that he did—stunning testimony as to how they felt about Oswald.
Distracted by the sounds of battle and utterly repelled by Lee’s violence, the Russians, with the exception of Katya Ford, misunderstood the heart of the relationship between Marina and Lee, which was founded on a mutual willingness, indeed a mutual need, to inflict and accept pain. They were deeply and reciprocally dependent. The Russians were puzzled and angered by Marina’s decision to return to her husband because they misunderstood her motive for marrying him in the first place. They thought she had married him to come to the United States, and far from considering such a motive reprehensible, they approved and respected it. Several of the women among the émigré group had done the same. Having come to the United States, they had tried their best to make their marriages work; if they had divorced, it was only because the marriage was impossible. But not one of them would have stayed five minutes in Marina’s marriage. They underestimated the strength of the tie that bound her to Lee.
Marina had married Lee not to come to America, but because he was an American. His choice of her had bolstered her self-esteem and confirmed her feeling that she was special. Marriage to an American gave her a way of expressing her rebelliousness and her lack of conformity to Russian ways. Once she was in the marriage, however, Marina’s motives for staying in it were deep indeed. Language, the question of whether or not Marina would learn English, tells a good deal of the story. It is virtually a paradigm of their marriage. Marina was quick. She could easily have learned English if she had wanted to. And yet after only a few weeks she gave up her lessons with Bouhe. The de Mohrenschildts gave her a small Victrola with some language records, and she never used them. She abandoned any effort to learn English because Lee did not want her to, and she was afraid of him. Moreover, she sensed that he wanted her to be dependent on him, and she was content to leave it that way. Dependence and low self-esteem had carried her into the marriage, and together with a willingness to suffer, they were enough to make her stay.
As for Lee, he wanted Marina dependent on him because it enhanced his control over her. He even wanted control over every penny she spent. He did not allow her to buy groceries, and he no longer took her to the grocery store with him. Instead, he had her make out a shopping list and bought everything himself. Lee wanted control not only over their money but absolutely over Marina herself. For him there was no in-between: either he controlled everything or he controlled nothing at all.
Lee was right in one thing. His control over Marina was precarious. She had entertained telephone calls from her old boyfriends most of the time they had lived in Minsk. Even in the United States she had only to meet a handful of her compatriots and they were willing to rush to her rescue. As Lee looked at it, if Marina mastered English, her life might become one long escape hatch from him. She would have neighbors to appeal to; she would have friends; she might even meet other men. His control over her would be jeopardized, and he might easily lose her. Indeed, he had nearly lost her to her Russian friends already.
Lee had other reasons for keeping Marina from learning English. He truly did want to keep his command of Russian. Even in Minsk before coming to the United States, he had in the back of his mind the idea that he might return to live in Russia, and he wanted to keep his Russian for that. Moreover, knowing Russian gave him a reputation for being intelligent, and that helped make up for the profound feeling, stemming from his reading disability, that his intelligence did not receive its due.
Finally, apart from his desire to control all circumstances of his existence, including his wife, he needed to keep Marina ludicrously, outlandishly dependent on him to mask the fact that he was deeply and humiliatingly dependent on her. Indeed, in the view of those who knew them best, Marina, not Lee, was the fulcrum of their marriage. Dependent as they both were emotionally, he seems to have been even more dependent on her than she was on him. He was exasperated by the fact that for the second time in his life he found himself dependent on a woman. And at times it made him so angry that he was driven to strip Marina not only of autonomy in the matter of language but, by his beatings, of any sense that she was a human being at all. The beatings, in turn, depressed her and made her even less capable of breaking away from him than she had been before.
Dependence was, indeed, the glue of the Oswalds’ marriage, and it held them together to the very end. But in the meantime Marina had temporized and had lost her advantage. She had lingered with her Russians to gain leverage and make her life more bearable with Lee. But typically, she had lost more than she had gained, for she had now relinquished their support. Even the de Mohrenschildts, who were the most sympathetic to the marriage, were “disgusted” when she failed to make a real separation of it and stay away two or three months. “We wasted the whole day,” Jeanne says. “So much aggravation, and then she dropped the whole thing. So why bother, you know?”[15] As for her truest friends, Bouhe, Mrs. Meller, and the others who had been willing to open their homes to her, they were no longer standing by for the rescue. They had offered her a way out, they had given her her chance—and she lost it. Lee had her in his power once again.
At first, after their reconciliation, Marina and Lee were like children together, and like children they had a good time. Grinning, holding aloft a cup of cocoa in one hand and a doughnut in the other, Lee did the twist in the kitchen a night or so after her return. “Come dance with me,” he said. “I can do it without spilling.” Marina declined out of fear of looking ridiculous.
Every night he took her walking and bought her doughnuts and coffee. He escorted her to a bowling alley down the street and suggested that he teach her to bowl. Again she declined, this time because the balls were too heavy. He played “Moscow Evenings” on the jukebox while they watched others bowl, and he crooned the words to her in Russian. “No one but us here speaks Russian,” he said, well pleased with himself.
For a few days he approved nearly everything she did. Fired by a new spirit of independence, Marina refused to draw his bath. It was three days before he objected. “Do you think you’re a prince?” she told him. “You always complain, anyway. First I make it too hot, then I make it too cold. Jeanne doesn’t draw George’s bath.”
And that was that. Except for a few occasions when she felt like “spoiling” him, Marina never drew his bath again.
Thanksgiving fell on Thursday, November 22. They went to the bus station that morning. They had to wait, so the three of them squeezed into a booth and had themselves photographed.
“In real life you’re not bad to look at,” he said, examining the result, “but you take a terrible picture. You’ve no idea how to pose.”
Marina responded with a criticism of his hair. He had had it cut short in back and long on top in imitation of his brother Robert.