He played with the baby daily, and most evenings it was he who gave the baby her bath. He did not trust Marina and was afraid she would drown the child. He drew the water and tested its temperature with great care before he lowered the baby into the bathtub. Then, to Marina’s horror, he would step in himself, utterly naked, with the exception of a washcloth over his private parts. Then he would splash June and play with her as if he longed to be a little child himself.
“Mama,” he would shout to Marina, “we got water on the floor.” Marina would tell him to mop it up himself. “I can’t,” he would shout back to her. “I’m in the bathtub with Junie.”
“Mama,” he would call out again, “bring us our toys.” And she would bring them.
“Mama,” came the call a third time, “you forgot our rubber ball.” And to the baby’s delight he would splash the rubber ball in the water.
“Mama,” he would call out one last time, “bring us a towel, quick. We have water on our ear.” Junie could not have cared less, but Lee was squeamish about his ears (he had had a mastoid operation as a child) and tenderly wiped the water off the baby’s ear, as if she were squeamish, too.
The first weeks of the New Year were fairly peaceful for Marina. Lee was happy in his work and able to control himself at home. He continued to hit Marina, but their battles were within limits both could bear. Toward the middle of January, however, things somehow, subtly, began to change. Marina’s letter to Anatoly may by itself have been the cause. But a series of other events occurred at about this time that may have led to what was to be a dramatic shift in his behavior.
One morning at the beginning of January, George de Mohrenschildt came by the Elsbeth Street apartment for a brief visit. Lee was at work, George was in Oak Cliff on business, and he felt like gossiping. He and Marina chatted about the Fords’ party, and as he was leaving, George asked her how she found Lee sexually?
“Oh, nothing special,” she answered cheerily.
“How about I show you sometime?” George said.
It was a parting remark, the only one of its kind ever to pass between them. As George’s suggestions to women went, it was nothing, a mere way of getting out the door. But Marina remembered it long afterward.
Lee was fiercely jealous of his wife. Marina never told him of George’s remark, but since he suspected everyone, Lee may have suspected that George, too, was attracted to Marina. Whenever they were going to the de Mohrenschildts’ and Marina put on a dress, Lee told her to take it off; a sweater and slacks were enough. It was the same when they went anywhere, to the park or even the grocery store; Lee was taking no chances. So jealousy may have been still another of the emotions he felt for George de Mohrenschildt.
On January 10 Marina suddenly was afraid that she was pregnant. She sat in the kitchen and sobbed, while Lee tried to comfort her. “It’s nothing to cry about,” he said. “I’ll be glad if we have another.” In fact, he told her, he would be glad to have a child every year, “enough for a whole football team.” The scare came to nothing, however.
A few days later, on January 14, Lee signed up for a nighttime typing course at Crozier Technical High School, which was to start at the end of the month. But he did not commit himself; he did not pay the enrollment fee.
Then one night after the middle of January, Lee and Marina had an extraordinary conversation, another in the chain of events that may have harmed Lee’s peace of mind. They were lying in bed together, the light out, in a companionable mood. It was one of those times when it seemed as if there was an alliance between the two of them against the rest of the world. Speaking Russian, they were using the lingo of children, and Lee was describing his old girlfriends. Marina asked him to tell her in advance if ever he was planning to be unfaithful. “If I were planning it, I wouldn’t tell you,” he said, teasing. Suddenly he scrunched up his eyes. “Have you been with any other man since we got married?”
“Yes,” she said.
“When?”
“When you were in Moscow.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
“You took the plane to Moscow. Leonid phoned the same day. We made a date for the evening. We had a wonderful dinner. He had bought wine at the French exhibition, and we had a very good time.”
“Then what?”
“Then it was a very sad story. He wasn’t able to do a thing. He was impotent.”
“Why?” Lee asked.
Marina noticed that he was smiling and appeared uncertain whether to believe her or not. He was straining to catch every word.
“Because he was a virgin. And I wasn’t about to be his teacher. I never wanted to see him again.”
“And you didn’t?”
“I ran into him once or twice on the street.”
“And nothing happened?”
Marina, laughing: “You were home. Where on earth could we go?”
“You’re making the whole thing up.”
“No, I’m not,” Marina said, adding that there had been nothing good in the experience. It had been a lesson to her for the whole of her life and had killed her desire for anyone but Lee.
Lee switched on the light and leaned over her. He had a skeptical, untrusting expression. “Look at me,” he said. “Do you give me your word of honor that it really happened?” They had a game that whenever either of them said “word of honor,” the other had to tell the truth.
“Word of honor,” she answered.
“Enough of your lies,” Lee said. “I want to sleep.”
The next morning, as he was dressing for work, he brought up the subject again. “Is it true what you told me last night?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe it. You women are all alike. You want to make a man jealous.” Then, suddenly: “If ever I see you with another man, I’ll kill him right off.”
“And what will you do to me?” Marina was amused.
“We’ll see about that.”
Marina made her confession out of a desire to bid up her own value, a wish to make a clean breast of things, and a momentary lapse into the old trust and frankness that cropped up from time to time between them, especially on her side. Lee, for his part, refused to believe a word she had told him. He decided that her letter to Anatoly had been a ruse and her infidelity with Leonid a lie, and that both had been concocted by Marina to make him jealous. As usual he denied the plain truth and thought up other “truths” instead.
Lee loved working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He signed in promptly every morning by 8:00 or 8:15 and stayed until 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon, often later.[6] He begged for overtime because it meant extra pay, and he came to work eagerly every Saturday whenever he was asked. He never missed a single day’s work. Marina for the life of her could not understand what he did there, although he explained it in detail.
He would point to an ad in a Dallas paper. “See that!” he would exclaim. “I did that! Isn’t Papa wonderful?”
“Why boast?” she would ask. “Why not leave it to others to praise you? Nice people don’t’ praise themselves.”
6
Oswald’s time sheets at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Exhibit No. 1850–1856, Vol. 23, pp. 529–625.