Lydia was disgusted with both of them by the time she dropped them off, but much more disgusted with Marina. “No wonder he’s so mean to you,” she said to her later on. “In his place I’d be the same. I’m sorry for Lee. I don’t see how he stands it. You have a dreadful disposition. I couldn’t live with you a single second. You simply ate him alive.”
Self-critical as ever, Marina agreed. She thought she did, indeed, have a dreadful disposition and maybe a dreadful character as well. She actually liked Lydia for criticizing her to her face. But mentally she remarked: “Just you try living with Lee, and then see how you behave.”
Marina had caught her husband in another lie that afternoon, and that, in addition to the lies he told at Parkland, had been responsible for her vehement outburst. Sometime earlier Lydia had asked her to send back a pair of dictionaries loaned to her by Bouhe and Anna Meller. Marina answered, in all truthfulness as far as she knew, that Lee had already returned them. But when he came home from work, she found out that he had not returned them at all, as he had told her he had. In fact, he had even hidden them so that she would not find out.
Marina was furious. All through their marriage it was Lee’s lying and Marina’s telling him frankly what she thought of it that caused the worst fights between them. His lies were bad enough, but what made her even angrier was that he often placed her in a position where, knowingly or unknowingly, she ended up telling a lie, too. Marina hated lying; it was alien to her nature. Yet she found herself caught between two fires: either she told the truth and was a disloyal wife, by her lights, or she was compelled to lie to cover up for her husband. It was the sorest point of their life together as far as she was concerned.
When the Russians heard of Lee’s behavior at Parkland and Marina’s tongue-lashing, they were confirmed in their hands-off policy toward the Oswalds. What was the point of helping people who were hellbent on hurting themselves? George Bouhe was incredulous. “Just think!” he said. “Lee took help from the doctors. He was rude and contemptuous to the nurses, he told innumerable lies to get out of paying—two dollars!” Lee did indeed get a bill from Parkland in the mail for exactly $2. He paid it without a murmur and even mentioned how little it was.
Bouhe understood by now that Lee’s energies were so drained by inner turmoil that he had nothing left for anybody else. But his sympathies, as always, were with Marina. De Mohrenschildt said that Bouhe was still worrying about her as if she were his daughter. If Marina had behaved badly at the hospital, Bouhe said to himself, it could only have been because Lee had goaded her beyond bearing. Bouhe thought and he thought, and he came up with the direst of prophecies. “Just you wait,” he announced to the other Russians. “He’ll get her pregnant again.”
Alone among the Russians, the de Mohrenschildts did not give up on the Oswalds. George dropped by every other week or so, and he generally brought Jeanne. The couples presented quite a contrast: the hearty, high-spirited George and the flamboyant, energetic Jeanne, side by side with the grave and humorless Lee and the drab, dispirited Marina. “Ho, ho, ho, how are you getting along these days?” George would greet them as he came in the door. Then, to Marina, “And are you planning to leave Lee again?” No, not right away, she would say. Jeanne would remark that Marina’s return to Lee had all but killed George Bouhe, and this brought another roar of laughter from de Mohrenschildt. His high spirits had a way of rubbing off on those around him, and he always left the Oswalds in a far more cheerful mood than he found them. But Marina noticed that his visits left her with very little else—a few anecdotes and dirty stories but no residue, nothing of substance at all. Yet she was always looking forward to the next encounter.
It pleased George to get along with someone the other Russians had written off. It gave him a chance to tell them they were stuffy and narrow-minded. He particularly liked to show up George Bouhe on this score. Maybe it was a class thing—de Mohrenschildt was an aristocrat; Bouhe was not—but he felt distaste for Bouhe’s bourgeois, bookkeeping approach. One of the reasons he liked Lee was that he was “not a beggar, a sponger,” and he had bridled at taking help from Bouhe.[3] If de Mohrenschildt gave you help, he promptly forgot all about it. There were no strings attached; it never occurred to him to ask afterward what you had done with it.
George was delighted to discover in Lee a pearl, where the other Russians had found only a prickly oyster. Besides, George thought that in Lee he had found an original. The émigrés were disgusting because Oswald, having seen Soviet reality, still had not given it up, still was reading Marx and praising Khrushchev. George, on the other hand, was enchanted when he asked Lee why he had left Russia and he answered simply, “Because I did not find what I was looking for.” “I knew what he was looking for,” George was to say later. “Utopia, and that does not exist any place.”[4] But he was overjoyed to have found a fellow seeker.
Both George and Jeanne, however, also found him an enigma. “He switched allegiance from one country to another,” George remarked, “and then back again, disappointed in this, disappointed in that. He did it without the enjoyment of adventure. For him it was a gruesome deal.”[5] Lee did not have any fun. His lack of gaiety, indeed, what might be called the deadness of his spirit, was a puzzle to the de Mohrenschildts, who had suffered and enjoyed so much. What to them would have been a glorious adventure to Lee was just another drink from life’s long, cold bucket of disappointment. But they resolved to back him up. When Katya Ford gave it as her view that Lee was “all mixed up and not very bright,” the two of them sprang to his defense. “No, no,” George objected. “He’s all right. The boy is thinking.”
Marina got the impression that as the de Mohrenschildts saw him Lee was an unbourgeois, uncalculating spirit who had dared go to Russia without giving a damn for the consequences—in short, a young man who was as unconventional as they were. Whatever it was they saw in him, both the de Mohrenschildts, and George in particular, gave Lee a warmth, an approval, and an emotional support that, after his return to America, he got from nobody else. And unlike the other Russians, they seemed, after the separation at least, to prefer Lee and look down on Marina. Part of the reason, of course, was George’s rebelliousness against his fellow émigrés. But there was another aspect to their relationship. George said of Lee: “He could be my son in age, you see.”[6] George’s only son had died, and he had not recovered from the loss. That fall he was losing one son-in-law by divorce, Gary Taylor, with whom he was on good terms politically, and for political reasons he was on deteriorating terms with Jeanne’s son-in-law, Ragnar Bogoyavlensky-Kearton. Jeanne, too, was underfulfilled as a mother. She had no son of her own, and other things being equal, she liked men better than women. But the great thing both de Mohrenschildts shared was a passion for underdogs. As Jeanne was to put it later, Lee could be “disagreeable, very very disagreeable. The personality he had would make anybody miserable to live with.” But they also saw him as “a puppy dog everybody kicked.”[7] For the two of them, that was enough.
If George considered Lee one of those rare Americans who cared nothing for money or possessions, he viewed Marina, by contrast, as a real American in spirit, a more or less “normal” person, a “happy-go-lucky” bourgeois mouse who was bewitched by the gadgetry of American life and wanted more of it. They saw her as Ulysses saw his son, Telemachus: as a more or less “blameless” being, “centered in the sphere of common duty.” She seemed simply buried in problems: a baby, diapers, beatings, no money, no friends. Even Jeanne, a woman so generous that one friend said she had “an overdeveloped mother tendency,”[8] appears to have been irritated by the bottomless pit of need that Marina represented. Moreover, the de Mohrenschildts felt that Marina always had her hand outstretched, that she would take anything you gave her. Not Lee—Lee had pride.