Oswald's Tale (82 page)

MR. JENNER.
Did you ever have any conversation with him about [the letter]?

MRS. PAINE.
No. I came close to it . . . He was sitting up watching a late spy story, if you will, on the TV, and I got up and sat there on the sofa with him saying, “I can’t sleep,” wanting to confront him with this . . . But on the other hand, I was somewhat fearful, and I didn’t know what to do.

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
Fearful in what way?

MRS. PAINE.
Well, if he was an agent, I would rather just give it to the FBI . . .

MR. JENNER.
Were you fearful of any physical harm?

MRS. PAINE.
No, I was not . . . though I don’t think I defined my fears. I sat down and said I couldn’t sleep and he said, “I guess you are real upset about going to the lawyer tomorrow.”

He knew I had an appointment with my lawyer to discuss the possibility of divorce the next day, and that didn’t happen to be what was keeping me up that night, but . . . it was thoughtful for him to think of it. But I let it rest there, and . . . then I excused myself and went to bed.
¹²

On Friday the fifteenth, when Lee called at mid-day to talk about his next weekend trip to Irving, Marina suggested that Ruth and Michael might need some time to themselves. Of course, Marina might also have been seeking a little rest from Lee. His intense reaction to Hosty’s second visit had left her exhausted, and that could hardly be good for her milk. She did not say as much, but then, he readily accepted her suggestion, said that it was all right; he had things to do over the weekend in Dallas.

No one knows what, other than work, he did do in Dallas between Monday, November 11, and Wednesday, November 20. On the twenty-first, a Thursday, the night before President Kennedy would come to Dallas, Oswald went out one night early to Irving, and his time is accounted for that evening, but the gap of those ten days from November 11 to November 20 is marked only by his unsuccessful visit to FBI headquarters on November 12 to see Hosty.

Gerald Posner made a large point of quoting Earlene Roberts’ statement that she never saw Oswald go out at night, but omits her subsequent remark to the Warren Commission: “If he did, it was after I went to bed, and I never knew it.”
¹³

His room, small and narrow, was on the ground floor, but it had low windows on the outside wall, so he could have slipped out whenever he wished. This is not to insist that he kept late hours but to point out—one can never do it too often—that many a hard fact cited with authority is about as hard and as longstanding as an eggshell.

Certainly, by Sunday night, November 17, after Lee, as agreed, had not come to Irving for the weekend but had not called either, Marina was feeling uneasy:

McMillan:
. . . when she saw Junie playing with the telephone dial, saying, “Papa, Papa,” she decided impulsively, “Let’s call Papa.”

Marina was helpless with a telephone dial, so it was Ruth who made the call . . . and a man answered.

“Is Lee Oswald there?” Ruth asked.

“There is no Lee Oswald living here.” . . .

The next day, Monday, November 18, Lee called as usual at lunchtime. “We phoned you last evening,” Marina said. “Where were you?” . . .

There was a long silence on the other end. “Oh, damn. I don’t live there under my real name.”

Why not? Marina asked . . .

“You don’t understand a thing,” Lee said. “I don’t want the FBI to know where I live, either.” He ordered her not to tell Ruth . . .

Marina was frightened and shocked. “Starting your old foolishness again,” she scolded. “All these comedies. First one, then another. And now this fictitious name. Where will it all end?”

Lee had to get back to work. He would call later, he said.
¹⁴

Marina was now feeling no small rage that he was using a false name. To her, it was equal to concluding that he would never give up his larger ideas; with considerable justice from her point of view, she saw his political commitment as poison to their marriage. His ideas were equal to his need to lie.

She would not forgive him for this alias—O. H. Lee. She kept refusing to forgive him. It would even ruin their last night together. Her timing, as is true of most mates’ in marriages that work by half, is, at the least, askew.

Then Lee made the mistake of calling her later that Monday evening, November 18, and getting into a fight. He commanded her to take his number out of Ruth Paine’s telephone book. She was to do this so that the FBI could not get hold of it. Marina told him she would not touch Ruth’s property.

“I order you to cross it out,” said Lee. His voice was so ugly that she said, “I won’t,” and hung up on him.

He did not call her Tuesday or Wednesday. On Thursday, November 21, he approached Wesley Frazier during work hours:

MR. FRAZIER.
. . . I was standing there getting the orders in and he said, “Could I ride home with you this afternoon?”

And I said, “Sure. You know, like I told you, you can go home with me anytime you want to, like I say, anytime you want to go see your wife that is all right with me.” [Then] I come to think it wasn’t Friday and I said, “Why are you going home today?”

And he says, “I am going home to get some curtain rods.” He said, “You know, put in an apartment.”

. . . I said, “Very well.” And I never thought more about it . . .”
¹⁵

Oswald has come, by now, to a serious decision. It is still preliminary to his final determination, but he has decided to take his rifle to the School Book Depository on Friday, November 22. All week, the talk at work has been concerned with President Kennedy’s visit. The route has been published in the newspapers. The official motorcade will pass by the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street. Our man, who has spent half of his life reading books and now works in a place that ships out textbooks to the children and college youth of America, may be preparing to engage in an act that some huge majority of the people who read books devotedly would be ready to condemn.

MR. RANKIN.
Did he tell you he was coming Thursday, [the 21st]?

MARINA OSWALD.
No . . .

MR. RANKIN.
And the assassination was on the 22nd.

MARINA OSWALD.
This is very hard to forget.

MR. RANKIN.
Did your husband give any reason for coming home on Thursday?

MARINA OSWALD.
He said that he was lonely because he hadn’t come the preceding weekend and he wanted to make his peace with me . . .

MR. RANKIN.
Were you upset with him?

MARINA OSWALD.
I was angry, of course [and] he was upset . . . He tried very hard to please me. He spent quite a bit of time putting away diapers and playing with the children on the street.

MR. RANKIN.
How did you indicate you were angry with him?

MARINA OSWALD.
By not talking to him.

MR. RANKIN.
And how did he show he was upset?

MARINA OSWALD.
. . . He tried to start a conversation with me several times, but I would not answer and he said that he didn’t want me to be angry with him because this upsets him [and] he suggested that we rent an apartment in Dallas. He said that he was tired of living alone and that perhaps the reason for my being so angry was the fact that we were not living together, that if I want to, he would rent an apartment in Dallas tomorrow . . . He repeated this not once, but several times, but I refused. And he said that once again I was preferring my friends to him and I didn’t need him.

MR. RANKIN.
What did you say to that?

MARINA OSWALD.
I said it would be better if I remained with Ruth until the holidays . . . because while he was living alone and I stayed with Ruth, we were spending less money, and I told him to buy me a washing machine, because with two children it became too difficult to wash by hand.

MR. RANKIN.
What did he say to that?

MARINA OSWALD.
He said he would buy me a washing machine.

MR. RANKIN.
What did you say to that?

MARINA OSWALD.
Thank you, that it would be better if he bought something for himself, that I would manage . . .

MR. RANKIN.
Did this seem to make him more upset . . . ?

MARINA OSWALD.
Yes. He then stopped talking and sat down and watched television and then went to bed. I went to bed later. It was about 9 o’clock when he went to sleep. I went to sleep at about 11:30, [and] it seemed to me that he was not really asleep, but I didn’t talk to him.
¹⁶

He has gone from demoralization in Mexico to a subtler set of defeats. Marina, living with Ruth, is now relatively liberated. She no longer needs him to survive. We can deduce from the petty tyrannies he has exercised upon her since their marriage just how deep is his lonely and fearful conviction that if she did not need him, she would never have anything to do with him. So his need for love (as opposed to his ability to love) was profound. Love was a safeguard against physically attacking the human species itself. If Kennedy was at the moment the finest specimen of the American species available, Lee’s anxiety over Marina’s love or lack of it was bound to be large on the night before Kennedy arrived. Kennedy was the kind of man any woman (most certainly Marina) would find more attractive than himself. So, yes, he was agitated by whether she had any real love for him. No pit was so deep for Oswald as the abyss of unrequited love.

That evening as the twilight deepened, it was still warm enough in Texas in November to fool around outside:

McMillan:
Lee went out on the front lawn and played with the children until dark—the Paine children, the neighbors’ children, and June. He hoisted June to his shoulders and the two of them reached out to catch a butterfly in the air. Then Lee tried to catch falling oak wings for June.
¹⁷

One can have a sense of final moments—the last time we catch oak wings together.

McMillan:
The evening was a peaceful one. Lee told Ruth, as he had Marina, that he had been to FBI headquarters, tried to see the agents, and left a note telling them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their visits. Marina did not believe him. She thought that he was “a brave rabbit,” and this was just another instance of his bravado. After that, the conversation at supper was so ordinary that no one remembers it; but Ruth had the impression that relations between the young Oswalds were “cordial,” “friendly,” “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.”
¹⁸

Ruth is right on the nose again, right on the nose of total error. Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life.

McMillan:
Marina was still at the sink when Lee turned off the television set, poked his head in the kitchen, and asked if he could help. Marina thought he looked sad.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I probably won’t be out this weekend.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too often. I was here today.”

“Okay,” Marina said.
¹⁹

MR. JENNER.
What did you do that evening? Did you have occasion to note what he did?

MRS. PAINE.
We had dinner as usual, and then I sort of bathed my children, putting them to bed and reading them a story, which put me in one part of the house. When that was done I realized he had already gone to bed, this being now about 9 o’clock. I went out to the garage to paint some children’s blocks and worked in the garage for half an hour or so. I noticed when I went out [to the garage] that the light was on . . .

MR. JENNER.
Was this unusual?

MRS. PAINE.
Oh, it was unusual . . . I realized that [Lee] had gone out to the garage [before me.] They were getting things out from time to time, warmer things for the cold weather, so it was not at all remarkable . . . but I thought it careless of him to have left the light on.
²⁰

Possibly, he had gone out there to break down his gun and put the stock and barrel in the long paper bag he had glued and taped together at the Book Depository and had brought back with him to Irving this evening.

McMillan:
Marina was as usual the last to bed. She sat in the tub for an hour, “warming her bones” and thinking about nothing in particular, not even Lee’s request that she move in to Dallas. Lee was lying on his stomach with his eyes closed when she crept into bed. Marina still had pregnancy privileges; that is, she was allowed to sleep with her feet on whatever part of his anatomy they came to rest. About three in the morning, she thinks, she put a foot on his leg. Lee was not asleep and suddenly, with a sort of wordless vehemence, he lifted his leg, shoved her foot hard, then pulled his leg away.

“My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thought.
²¹

The domestic intimacy of her foot must have felt suffocating to Lee at that instant—a false promise designed to divert him from any kind of daring project.

McMillan:
Lee usually woke up before the alarm rang and shut it off so as not to disturb the children. On the morning of Friday, November 22, the alarm rang and he did not wake up.

Marina was awake, and after about ten minutes she said, “Time to get up, Alka.”

“Okay.”
²²

He did not kiss her when he left. He merely told her that he had left some money on the bureau.

When she did get up, she discovered that the sum was nothing less than $170. If we know with hindsight that it left him with only a few dollars for a getaway, it was also his way of suggesting that she could still call him at work. But she was not about to. Her warning system was not on alert. She did not even discover that he had left his wedding ring in a cup on the dresser, and that was something he had never done before.