Reclaiming History (154 page)

Oswald turned up the next morning, ludicrously attired for the summer heat in a heavy gray flannel suit and atrociously clunky Russian shoes. Gregory gave him a passage from a high school text in Russian to read aloud and then asked him to translate it into English. Oswald did very well on both tests, and Gregory had no hesitation in writing out a “To Whom It May Concern” letter attesting to his qualifications, that he was “capable of being an interpreter and perhaps a translator.” Gregory warned Lee that there were no jobs for translators in Fort Worth, but asked for his address and a way to reach him.
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A week later, Gregory and his son, Paul, a college student, visited the Oswalds at Robert’s home and arranged for Marina to give Paul lessons in Russian during the summer, Gregory feeling that his own conversational Russian had probably deteriorated after living in this country for forty years.
⁸⁷⁷

That night, Lee jubilantly told Marina, “Mama, Mama, I’ve found you some Russians in Fort Worth. Now you won’t be lonely anymore.” Curiously, though, he lied to Marina about how he located the engineer—claiming to have gotten his name and address from the public library rather than the Texas Employment Commission. What he thought to gain from the lie is a mystery, but Lee seldom resorted to the truth when he thought a lie would do. Although here, perhaps, he wanted to convince Marina he had gone out of his way to get her the information.

He was less successful with the other name he had been given by the Employment Commission, Gali Clark, the Russian-born wife of Fort Worth attorney Max Clark. Clark was not as forthcoming as Gregory—unlike him, she had an inkling of who Lee was from a news story in a Fort Worth paper describing him as a defector. She didn’t like the sound of him, and she fobbed him off, saying she had to speak to her husband. However, following the suggestion of her husband, she called back the following Sunday and invited Lee to bring Marina to her house, but apparently miffed by her earlier chilly reception, he told her they could not come.
⁸⁷⁸

That night at Robert and Vada’s dinner table Lee told Marina—in Russian—about his telephone conversation with Gali Clark. Marina thought he had been rude to Mrs. Clark, and scolded him for it, the conversation developing into a fight. Lee, humiliated by the fact that Robert and Vada could certainly understand the tone of their interchange, if not the words, ordered Marina to smile. When she refused, he called her a dirty word in Russian and she left the table. Lee followed her into the bedroom, and with a coldness she had never seen before, and as quietly as he possibly could, so Robert and Vada would not hear, hit her several times across the face, then told her he would kill her if she told Robert.

Marina spent the next couple of hours wandering alone around the neighborhood, stunned by the realization of the degree to which she was now at his mercy—there was no Aunt Valya in Fort Worth, Texas, to run to. She was also amazed at his capacity to mask his cruelty to her behind the affable exterior he presented to his brother and sister-in-law. Eventually, she returned—where else was she going to go? He was lying awake in bed when she came in, but he said not a word to her.
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H
owever interested Lee may have been in making a splash in the American press on his return from the Soviet Union, he thought better of it once he settled down at Robert’s home in Fort Worth. He fended off inquiries from several reporters. But there was one interview he could not so easily fend off. On May 18, 1962, Fort Worth FBI agent John Fain had interviewed Vada Oswald, Robert’s wife, who informed him that Lee and his wife were going to return to the states. She promised to advise him when they did, but when he learned on June 22, from the New York office of the FBI and independently from an assistant manager of Holland-America Line, that Oswald and his wife and child had arrived in the United States on June 13 and their destination was 7313 Davenport, Fort Worth (Vada and Robert Oswald’s address), he contacted Vada by phone on the morning of June 26. Vada confirmed that Lee and his family had arrived in Fort Worth on June 14 and had been living at her and her husband’s residence since then.

“Why didn’t you let me know about it?” Fain inquired.

“Well, actually the whole family had been so harassed and…he just didn’t feel like letting his face be shown outside of the house.”

Fain had Vada put Oswald on the phone, and Lee agreed to come downtown to talk with Fain and a colleague that afternoon. Fain had set up a file on Oswald when Oswald defected in 1959, and had interviewed Marguerite and Robert while Lee was in Russia, Marguerite for the first time in January of 1960 when she purchased a “foreign money transfer” of twenty-five dollars to send to Lee in Russia.
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Though he already had a moderately comprehensive file on Oswald, the afternoon of June 26, 1962, was the first time Fain met Oswald face to face. Another agent, Tom Carter, sat in on the interview. They found Oswald “tense, kind of drawn up, and rigid. A wiry little fellow, kind of waspy.” Lee declined to discuss his reasons for going to the Soviet Union as he was unwilling to “relive the past.” He told the agents that he did not try to renounce his citizenship and had not tried to acquire Soviet citizenship. He also said the Soviets had neither asked nor had he offered them information about his experience in the U.S. Marines. He promised to notify them if he were ever contacted by Soviet agents.
*
He also reminded the FBI that Marina was required by Soviet law to keep her embassy in Washington informed of her whereabouts, so they would have to have at least that much contact with Soviet authorities.
⁸⁸¹

As little as Fain liked Oswald, he was inclined to be charitable. “He had just come to town and he was out there at his brother’s place,” Fain explained to the Warren Commission. “He had a wife and a little four-month-old baby that he had brought from Russia, and he didn’t have any established place to live, and I can see how the newspapers may have harassed him.” Reflecting on Oswald’s arrogance and insolence later, Fain suspected that Oswald might well have been “just scared.”

Fain was not, however, entirely satisfied with Oswald’s answers. The FBI agent’s information was that Oswald had in fact attempted to renounce his American citizenship and had applied for Soviet citizenship, and Fain felt that under the circumstances “he ought to be talked to again, he ought to be interviewed in detail about these same things.”
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Lee never mentioned the interview to Marina, but he did tell Robert about it that evening, saying that he had been treated “just fine.” He told Robert that at the end of the interview, “they asked me was I a secret agent” for the U.S. government. He laughed at recalling his retort to the agents: “Well, don’t
you
know?”
⁸⁸³
—a rather illuminating observation for those conspiracy theorists who believe he was.

In early July, Marguerite Oswald followed through on her promise to move from Crowell back to Fort Worth. She took an apartment at 1501 West Seventh Street. Lee, perhaps feeling that he had imposed on Robert’s hospitality long enough—almost a month—agreed to move in with her. She would later say that the month Marina and Lee lived with her was a “very happy month,” but Robert claims it was only two weeks and Lee told him that he quarreled constantly with his mother. Marina agreed. Although she got on well enough with Lee’s mother at first, Marina remembered times when Lee would not talk to Marguerite, and it became apparent to Marina that Lee “did not love his mother, she was not quite a normal woman.” She was amused to note, though, that he, always a finicky eater, lustily demolished everything Marguerite cooked for him. Lee didn’t even bother to file a change of address with the post office, so it is likely that he never meant to stay with his mother a moment longer than necessary.
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Marguerite eventually began to complain about her son’s wife. Marguerite, who slept on a couch in the living room so the young couple could have the bedroom, said that Marina let her do the lion’s share of the housework. She also complained that Lee made no effort to include her in their conversations. Marguerite even began to suspect that Marina was a spy because she heard her singing “Santa Lucia” and didn’t realize that it was a song known abroad as well as in the United States. Lee paid no attention to her complaints, so Marguerite took to scolding Marina directly. During one particularly unpleasant scene, Marina was able to make out Marguerite’s English: “You took my son away from me!”
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Shortly after Lee and Marina moved to West Seventh Street, in the third week of July Lee found, through the Texas Employment Commission, a job as a sheet metal worker at the Louv-R-Pak Division of Leslie Welding Company, and started work there on July 17,1962. He didn’t like the work, but it paid $1.25 an hour and made an early escape from Marguerite possible.
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Lee didn’t even tell Marguerite he was looking for a place, but in late July he was finally able to rent a furnished one-bedroom apartment at 2703 Mercedes Street. He paid $59.50 in advance for the first month’s rent. That same night, he called Robert and asked him if he could help them move the next day. When Robert drove up the next morning, he heard Marguerite screaming even before he got to the door. Marguerite was hysterical, Lee stony, and Marina somewhat bewildered, but Robert and Lee carried the suitcases and boxes to the car and left Marguerite to her own devices.
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The new apartment was half of a shabby bungalow across an unpaved street from a Montgomery Ward store. It was a neighborhood with a lot of duplexes and small bungalows, and Marina was especially pleased with it—it was the first chance that she and Lee had had to live alone together since they left Minsk three months before. Later American friends of theirs, used to a higher standard of living, thought it atrocious, “a shack,” “a slum,” but the apartment was reasonably clean and had a bedroom, living room, dining area, kitchen, and bath, even a little yard with some grass. Marina told author Priscilla McMillan that in Russia she and Lee could have worked a lifetime and not had so much space.
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In early August, Oswald resumed his nexus with Marxism by mailing in his $2.00 three-month subscription to the
Worker
(formerly the
Daily Worker
), and the
Midweek Worker
, newspapers of America’s Communist Party.
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On August 16, Special Agent Fain came to interview Lee again. He told the Warren Commission that he and Special Agent Arnold Brown waited in their car down the street out of sight of the Oswalds’ home and approached Lee as he walked home from work, but Marina told Priscilla McMillan it was a hot summer night, the front door was open, and one of the agents came to the screen door just as she was about to serve dinner. Lee, sitting on the sofa, was reading the
Worker
, which he hastily stuffed down between the cushions. He invited the agents into the house, but they asked him to come out to their car. She had to keep warming up the dinner while Lee spoke to them.
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Lee got into the backseat with Brown and talked with Fain in the front seat. Fain explained that they didn’t want to embarrass him by contacting him at his work, and they preferred to keep the conversation informal. Fain found Lee less tense than before, perhaps because Lee now had a job and a place to live, and he talked more freely with them. He told them that he had notified the Soviet embassy in Washington of Marina’s whereabouts, and he answered all of their questions readily except when they again asked why he had gone to the USSR. That, Lee told them, was no one’s business except his own. “I went and I came back,” he said. “It was just something I did.”

Fain was particularly interested in whether the Soviets had made a deal with him for permission to leave with Marina, whether they had asked any favors of him? “No,” Lee answered, adding “I was not that important,” and Fain was inclined to agree with him. But Oswald again said he would contact the FBI if the Soviets did try to contact him.
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Although Fain was dissatisfied with Lee’s refusal to talk during the interview about why he went to the USSR, he did not really think that Lee constituted any serious security risk, and, after dictating a report of the interview, he closed his file.
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Ironically, just as the FBI was closing its file on Oswald, Lee thought the two interviews with the FBI were going to be the beginning of his “persecution” by the bureau. “Now it’s begun,” he told Marina gloomily. “Because I’ve been over there they’ll never let me live in peace. They think anyone who has been there is a Russian spy.” The next few days he remained in a bad mood.
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Shortly after Marina and Lee settled into their new abode, Marguerite somehow located them, and when Lee was at work one day, she showed up at their front door laden with gifts. Marguerite had recently gotten a job as a private nurse in Fort Worth, the first time she had ever received a regular nurse’s salary. She was earning sixty-three dollars a week, very good money for her, and she wanted to bring clothes for Marina and Baby June, kitchenware for Marina and Lee, and a high chair for June. The latter puzzled Marina, who had never seen one before. In Russia, babies are held on the mother’s lap when they are fed.

Lee was furious when he came home and discovered that his mother had been there. He told Marina never to let her in again. When she protested that Marguerite was, after all, his mother, he snapped, “You know nothing about her. You’re not to let her in again.” The next day Marguerite came again, this time bringing the green and yellow parakeet Lee had given her nearly seven years earlier in New Orleans, the one he bought with the wages of his first job. She was taking snapshots of the baby when Lee came home from work, and he told her to leave, but she stood her ground, insisting on her right to see her grandchild. He also told her he did not want her to buy any gifts for his family, that he would take care of whatever they needed. Besides, he said, if Marguerite got sick, he’d have to take care of her because she was spending all her money on them.