"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (11 page)

Gradually, the mood turned serious once again, as the old friends finished their breakfasts of eggs and a tasty, spicy meat Frankie could not recognize, bathed in some sort of bright red sauce that reminded him of the rooster's blood flying about the previous night. Well, he suggested, these gnats likely would not be much of a problem for the well-trained soldati Luciano would import as a counter-measure.

Charley nodded grimly but said nothing. Perhaps he saw more difficulty on the horizon than did his guest.

*

Before the limo headed out to the airport, Frank Sinatra's first of many visits to Cuba nearing its end, the man who would owing to the enormity of his talent rightly become known as The Main Event ordered his driver to swing by the Malecon for one final glance at this twisting street and adjoining cityscape. Gaily dressed Cubans proudly marched up and down, as if in a constant state of celebration. Every day in this city seemed a spontaneous carnival, the excitement infectious to all who came to visit from the U.S. or any faraway land. Here, people danced rather than walked along the streets! How wonderful ...

Sinatra gazed over the rough sea wall that, back in the halcyon era of pirates several hundreds of years earlier, had provided a natural fortress straddling Havana's northern rim. The sight remained as awesome now as it must have been then, to the eyes of people whose exploits had become the stuff of rich legend: a mean-looking yet assuring buttress of rock, able to withstand any assault by man or the elements that happened to drift this way.

Exiting the limo, Sinatra again stood, as he had on his second afternoon here, on the storm-shattered precipice. A south-bound wind carried brine across the bay, up to where he'd positioned himself, feeling for the moment like some ancient conqueror of an unknown kingdom, all things possible. The smell of sea-salt seemed appealingly fresh here, not mingled with trash and dead fish, the case back on his beloved Jersey shore.

Breathing deeply, Sinatra enjoyed the rich aroma and its perfect symbiosis with those vast indigo waters that eventually segued with the soft turquoise skyline, the two blending into a shade every bit as seductive as Frank's infamous bedroom eyes.

He hated to leave. Then again, nothing lasts forever. When he did return, as Sinatra knew he would, here is where he would come first. A sentimentalist at heart, for Sinatra Malecon would always represent the essence of Havana. Not that he'd overlooked much of what the island offered.

What had Charley said? Bring Nancy and the kids along! Hell, no; they won't go. Frank hoped instead to escort Norma Jean, her name recently changed by the Fox studio to Marilyn Monroe, down to stroll alongside him by the sheltering pines.

As soon as possible. Hopefully, those insurgents Charlie mentioned would not interfere with Frank's plans for seduction.

“The Marine Corps wants a few good men!”

—recruiting poster, 1957

 

The sunny day of October 24, 1956, just three months shy of a decade before The Voice arrived in Cuba for the double duty of performing a concert and acting as Mob courier, a then-17-year-old boy marched back and forth across a small stretch of cracked pavement right outside the U.S. Marines Recruitment Office in downtown Dallas.

I think I can, I think I can. Isn't that what a character in some book Marguerite read to me as a child tells himself?

At last, Lee summed up his courage, opened the glass-and-steel-frame door and, pushing his shoulders back and upward in hopes of appearing taller than his 5' 8" frame, stepped inside.

Frankie? Stay with me now, will you?

Though Lee had been concentrating on a favorite moment from a Sinatra movie to inspire him,
Suddenly
was not it. Instead, nearly 2 1/2 years following his earlier attempt to enlist, Lee focused on
From Here to Eternity
. Compared to the larger men in Angelo Maggio's company, Sinatra's character appeared something of a runt. That didn't prevent the soldier from being popular, thanks to his good-natured humor and a basic sense of likeability.

This is my chance! Re-invent myself, turn my life around. Put the old Lee behind me. Step up to the desk where that all-American Tab Hunter type sits, banging away at his typewriter.

All this is a living movie. I am its star. Can I write, direct, produce this scene so that it turns out the way I want?

Lee had expected to encounter a lieutenant but the sergeant seated here would do. “Hello there, you fightin' leatherneck!”

Before Lee could stop himself, the words were out. He'd twisted his face up into an imitation Humphrey Bogart, drawing back his lower lip, extending his teeth forward. The marine raised his head from the paperwork, coldly considering Lee.

“Hello,” the sergeant responded. “What can I do for you?”

Dropping the gag, Lee drew himself up straight and tall, as high as his 135 lb. body would reach. “I'm here to enlist.”

Apparently unconvinced, the marine sergeant slowly rose from his seat behind a functional, nondescript office desk, looking Lee over. “Is this some sort of a joke?”

“Not at all,” Lee whimpered, any energy he'd been able to muster draining out of him. “I want to be a marine,” he added with a touch of desperation. “More than anything.”

Realizing that this boy was sincere, the sergeant, sorry now he'd assumed this to be some wise-ass Beatnik, nodded affirmatively while bringing up his hand for a shake.

“I'm Lee Oswald,” the would-be recruit smiled, noticing the firmness of the sergeant's grip. “I'd like to serve my country.”

“Sit down, please.” The sergeant indicated a chair adjacent to his desk. Lee pulled it up and did as told. His host eased back down into his own chair, Lee wishing he'd navigated his own move with such relaxed grace.

“Tell me as simply as you can why you want to be a marine.”

I can't tell him the truth, about the Sinatra movie back in New Orleans. Johnny Barrows got his gun and I want one, too.

“My brother Robert enlisted right out of high school,” Lee began. “So it's something of a family tradition.”

*

That much was true. In 1952, Lee then twelve and a half, Robert joined the Marines. Two years earlier, half-brother John Pic had enlisted in the Coast Guard. He was now married to Margy.

Could there be something to John, who so feared and dreaded Marguerite, marrying a woman with the same name? Coincidence or ... What's the phrase ... the Oedipal Complex?

*

“Guess what? Lee and I are moving to Manhattan!” Marguerite had jovially announced in an impulse phone call. Mother and son had been back in New Orleans for several months. As always, she became antsy, obsessing on another move. Cross town or cross-country. Anywhere other than wherever they were at the moment.

“Why?” John asked, stunned, from the small, neat, cramped Brooklyn apartment that he and Margy shared.

“Why not?” Marguerite followed this with a mad laugh.

“Well, my wife and I will be glad to have you stay with us until you can find a place of your own.”

That was only half true. John's bride detested Marguerite. Margy insisted they live in the New York City area to keep her new husband apart from what his wife considered an evasive, intrusive, unhealthy influence. Wasn't it just like that crazy harridan, damn her self-important hide, to follow them north?

“That will be wonderful,” Marguerite said.

When she and Lee arrived, a myriad of luggage including the TV set Lee had grown addicted to, following, Margy gasped. No matter what John had explained, however clear he tried to make himself, the Oswalds had arrived for a long stay.

“Our family, together again. I've dreamed of this!”

Marguerite made no moves to find a job to help pay for groceries or locate their own apartment. For a while, John tried to make the best of it, more with Lee, whom he adored, than his mother. John knew Lee to be what the military referred to as the walking wounded, those who silently suffer from some invisible hurt. The kid had been dragged from the solid middle-class home of Lee's late father, who passed of a heart attack months before the boy was born, to a virtual slum. After that, hurried off to an upper-middle-class existence when Marguerite up and married Mr. Ekdahl, an electrical engineer. Originally from Boston, the fellow relocated them near Fort Worth, Texas.

Momentarily it had appeared that all truly was well that ended well. This guy was great to Lee and the boys when they returned home from a military school he'd sent John and Robert to and which they loved. Shortly, Marguerite, being Marguerite, decided that her husband was a philanderer. True or false, she divorced him, receiving a little more than a thousand dollars as a settlement and no future support.

How could this sad little kid,
John mused,
establish a solid personality when one moment he was wearing decent clothes, the next reduced to hand-me-downs from Marguerite's older sister?
Earlier, John, age ten, had cared for Lee when all three brothers lived in Bethlehem Orphanage. John cleaned up three-year-old Lee's mess when the child lost control and went in his pants. As he had no kids of his own, John determined to treat Lee now as if his brother were his own son.

“Just you wait and see,” John assured Lee the moment they were reunited at the subway stop. “We'll have a great time!”

So off they went to the Museum of Natural History, which Lee liked a lot. And the Bronx Zoo, which the boy delighted in. John could tell that Lee had an affinity for animals. Sadly, that was not the case with neighborhood kids. On the second day after arrival, John walked Lee over to where a bunch of boys played stickball in a corner lot of Yorkville. As man and boy approached the noisy group, Lee froze up, panic-stricken.

“What's wrong? Lee, these are ‘the guys.' I'll—”

“Please! Can't we just go home?”

Stunned, John tried to draw Lee into the crowd, but it was too late. The other boys, pausing in their sport, witnessed Lee writhing in desperation and laughed. Minutes later Lee and John were back inside the apartment. Lee ran to the room he and his mother shared. He turned on the TV, then spent the rest of the day watching his favorites, old movies and live news: a frozen idealization of the past alternating with today's passing parade.

John learned from Marguerite that, after the Fort Worth disaster, on their return to LA she landed a managerial job at Everybody's Department Store, making $25 a week. This required her to be there full-time, six days a week. The room Marguerite had found for them was located in a crime-infested area, so Marguerite instructed Lee to run home from school every day.

“Tightly lock yourself inside, and wait for my return.”

That's when Lee's TV addiction begun. During commercial breaks he would tip-toe over to the window and peek out at other boys, playing on the street. More than ever, Lee sensed his own difference, for the first time wondering why that was so. He was a freak, like those he had once observed at a circus sideshow.

Different, or ... dare he hope? ...
special!
Unique, and meant for more important things he had yet to discover.

Yes, that must be it! I'll just have to wait, bide my time, learn my higher purpose. Or maybe I could kill myself ...

Soon the show resumed. Lee would rush away from his window on the world, back to watch, sitting on the edge of the bed he and Marguerite shared each night, glued to the grainy black and white image. At the next advertising break he would return to the window. This became ritualistic, Lee not yet aware of that term. Though Lee could hardly guess it at the time, from that point in his life, his future was forever set in cement.

However addicted to TV he might be, Lee found one show repulsive.
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
featured members of the Nelson family, mom and dad and two sons, all playing themselves. They lived in a wholesome looking neighborhood, got along great. No one ever raised a voice. Lee smelled a rat.

People weren't like that. How dare they put on a show that dangled an ideal family in front of the eyes of all those who could barely, and rarely, achieve even a little happiness?

He abruptly turned the channel and never watched it again.

*

On one of their sojourns into the affordable fun places in and around the New York City area, John had offered to buy Lee a souvenir. The boy picked out an inexpensive pocket knife. Sheer horror would result from this seemingly innocuous incident.

Over the past two weeks, Margy had grown frustrated, then furious, with the intensifying realization that Marguerite had arrived with plans for her and Lee to become permanent fixtures. Not that Mama ever said this outright; Marguerite's manner of dealing with situations was to remain silent and hope, even assume, what she wanted would transform into reality.

Margy set out to do something about that. She began dropping hints that the apartment was too small. Marguerite responded that in time “we'll get a bigger one.”

We? You were invited for
a few days
!

Margy complained that Lee ate a lot for a skinny kid, hoping Marguerite would take the hint and offer to find work. “He's a growing boy,” Mama shrugged. That
did
it! Margy wandered around her limited space, only days earlier her domain, now clearly her mother in law's, ever more depressed.

One day shortly thereafter, Margy stepped zombie-like into the kitchen area and happened upon Lee, sitting at the table, dutifully employing his new penknife to carve a miniature ship.

“Look!” Margy over-reacted, pointing at a small mess on the floor. “You're getting wood chips all over
everything
.”