Reclaiming History (168 page)

For once Oswald did not disdain the proffered help. He cashed in the extra bus ticket and gave Marina some of the money. Since his bus did not leave until that evening, they all went, after he had checked in his baggage, back to Neely Street. He had taken virtually all of their things, leaving behind only what Marina and the baby would need for a brief period, such as the crib, playpen, stroller, some dishes, and some clothing, and he loaded all that into Ruth’s car. About four that afternoon, Ruth drove Marina and June back to Ruth’s home in Irving, leaving Oswald alone at the apartment.
¹¹⁹⁴

Around three weeks later, FBI agent Jim Hosty decided he had given the Oswalds enough time to cool off, so Hosty drove over to Neely Street to interview them. This time they had disappeared without a trace. Neither the INS nor the post office had an address for them. Hosty wrote up a report but he wasn’t too concerned—he was sure they would turn up somewhere before long. He had other more pressing matters on his mind anyway. He was investigating former major general Edwin Walker. Even though the case against Walker for his involvement in the riot at the University of Mississippi had been dismissed by the court back in January, the bureau saw that Walker’s group was clearly a militant right-wing organization that had to be investigated, and it had put Hosty under intense pressure about it. In fact, he had made it his top priority. As far as he was concerned, the problem of locating the Oswalds could be put on the back burner for awhile.
¹¹⁹⁵

Lee rang his Aunt Lillian Murret, his mother’s sister, from the bus station in New Orleans on Thursday, April 25. He didn’t know how he would be received, since the conservative Catholic Murrets had never replied to the one letter he had written them from the Soviet Union. He needn’t have worried. Lillian was glad to hear from him again. He told her that he was married and had a baby daughter, which she didn’t know. She was taken aback at the prospect of putting up his whole family, but he was alone for the time being, and Lillian, as kind as ever, welcomed him to their house at 757 French Street, where he could stay until he found work. He came out right away on the streetcar and arrived with just one small bag. That evening, Lillian had her husband Dutz drive Lee back to the bus station to pick up the rest of his things, which Lee stored in their garage.
¹¹⁹⁶

Lee wrote a postcard to Marina at the Paine residence: “All is well. I am living with Aunt Lillian. She has very kindly taken us in. I am now looking for work. When I find it I will write you.”
¹¹⁹⁷

On Friday, the day after his arrival, he registered at the Louisiana Division of Employment Security, seeking work as a commercial photographer, shipping clerk, or darkroom man.
¹¹⁹⁸
After the weekend he went back to file a request for reconsideration of the ruling by the Texas Employment Commission denying his claim for unemployment benefits.
¹¹⁹⁹
On May 3, he wrote another postcard, this one to the “Girls” (Marina and June), saying he had not yet found work, but “Uncle [Dutz]” had offered him “a loan of two hundred dollars if needed. Great, eh?”
¹²⁰⁰

On May 8, his request was ruled valid and he was granted maximum benefits of $369, payable at the rate of $33 per week.
¹²⁰¹

Life with the Murrets was peaceful and pleasant. The Louisiana Division of Employment gave Oswald some referrals, but primarily he sought jobs on his own. Every morning he checked the small employment ads in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
and then went out, newspaper in hand, and applied for jobs until the end of the workday.
¹²⁰²
After supper, he would watch television with the Murrets for a while and then retire early.
¹²⁰³
Only two of his five cousins were living at home—John, the youngest, and Marilyn. John, or “Bogie,” was four years older than Lee. The Murret’s other daughter, Joyce, was married and living in Beaumont, Texas; another son, Eugene, was studying for the priesthood in Mobile, Alabama; and a third son, Charles, was a dentist in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette.

John had trained to be a high school teacher and played professional basketball but was now working as a salesman for E. R. Squibb and Company. Lee’s cousin Marilyn was thirty-five, a graduate of Tulane and a teacher, and somewhat of a kindred spirit to Lee insofar as travel and adventure were concerned—she had spent three and a half years traveling on tramp steamers and teaching in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
¹²⁰⁴
One evening Marilyn tried to engage Lee on the subject of religion—Marilyn was a practicing Catholic—but Lee announced he was an atheist and otherwise avoided the discussion.
¹²⁰⁵
The Murrets were all distressed by Lee’s lack of suitable clothes, but Lee refused his aunt’s offer to buy him new things.
¹²⁰⁶
He wore his heavy woolen Russian suit on his first visit to the unemployment office,
¹²⁰⁷
which was clearly impractical in sultry New Orleans. Eventually, John almost bullied him into accepting a short-sleeve white shirt, which John claimed was too small for himself, and a tie, insisting Lee take them to help him get a job.
¹²⁰⁸

On the first Sunday Lee spent with the Murrets, he suddenly showed an interest in his family, asking Lillian if she knew anything about the Oswalds. She didn’t. She had known only his father and had met one of his uncles one time. “Well, you know,” he said to her, “you are the only relative I know.” That Sunday he took the Lakeview streetcar, which ran past the Murrets’ home, to the end of the line, where there’s a cemetery. A cemetery worker helped Lee locate his father’s grave. He also called all of the Oswalds in the New Orleans phone book and managed to locate an elderly aunt, Hazel Oswald, the widow of his father’s brother, William Stout Oswald. Lee paid her a visit out in Metairie. She had never met Lee and she had last seen Marguerite in New Orleans when Lee was about fourteen. She had had no idea what had become of Marguerite and her three boys, although she had seen something in the papers about Lee’s defection to Russia. Lee said he wanted to visit and obtain some information about his father’s relatives. They talked about the family, including Lee’s grandfather, Harvey Oswald, and Hazel gave Lee a large picture of his father. She told Lee she had a son and grandson in New Orleans. Lee thought Hazel was “very nice,” though he winced when he showed her a photograph of Marina and she asked, “Is she Russian?” Hazel said she hoped Lee would drop by again, but she never heard from him.
¹²⁰⁹
*
The photo of Lee’s father eventually disappeared—it was not found among his possessions after his death.

On May 9, two weeks after his arrival in New Orleans, his job seeking paid off: he was taken on at William B. Reily and Company Inc. (a coffee company) at 640 Magazine Street as a sort of general laborer, cleaning and oiling the heavy equipment used in the grinding, canning, bagging, and sale of coffee, and started to work the next day, May 10. On his application he had listed as references, in addition to John Murret, “Sgt. Robert Hidell” (a composite of his brother Robert and his own alias, Hidell) and “Lieut. J. Evans,” the surname and initial of the husband of Myrtle Evans, Marguerite’s old friend.
¹²¹⁰
His pay was to be sixty dollars a week, about what he had made at Leslie Welding and Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall.

“I got it, I got it,” he exclaimed happily as he got back to the Murrets’ residence.

“Well, Lee, how much does it pay?” Lillian asked.

“It don’t pay very much,” he told Lillian, as he hugged and kissed her, “but I will get along on it.”
¹²¹¹

On May 9, the day before he started work, Lee went to the apartment of his mother’s old friend Myrtle Evans, who had known him as both a child and a willful teenager. Lee rang the doorbell and Myrtle’s husband answered the door. Lee said he wanted to rent an apartment. Myrtle told him she didn’t have any apartments in the building but she was fixing up another building and she might be able to find something suitable for him. He told her he had a wife and child in Texas and that he was going to bring them over as soon as he could find an apartment.

“I want something right away,” he told her.

It wasn’t until they were walking down her steps that she took a hard look at him and asked, “I know you, don’t I?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m Lee Oswald. I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.”

She was surprised. She thought he was still in Russia. She wanted to be helpful, and she called a friend who had a place to rent, but it was too small and had no laundry facilities. Myrtle suggested they drive around the area and look for signs. They drove up and down Baronne and Napoleon, Louisiana Avenue, Carondelet, and finally down Magazine Street. Since the Reily coffee company was on Magazine, Myrtle said, “You might as well get as close to your work as possible.”

They spotted a sign at 4907, pulled up around the corner, and went to have a look. There were two apartments available. Lee liked the one that had a large living room, a screened-in front porch, and a long yard. He also liked the “Page fence,” a metal latticework fence characteristic of New Orleans that would easily keep little Junie in the yard. Myrtle thought it was all right and very good for the money.

The caretakers, a cabdriver named Jesse Garner and his wife, Lena, lived in the rear on the other side of the house, at 4911 Magazine. Lee paid Mrs. Garner the monthly rent of sixty-five dollars and a five-dollar deposit so the electricity and lights could be turned on right away. This made Lee a little short on money, and he would borrow a few dollars from Dutz around this time, which he repaid when he got his first check from his job.

Lee and Myrtle drove back to her place, where she fixed a lunch of ham sandwiches and Cokes and they spent a while chatting. Lee was happy. “I have wanted to move back to New Orleans,” he told her. “New Orleans is my home…I felt like I just wanted to come back. You know, I like the old high ceilings and the trees and the French Quarter, and everything in New Orleans.”
¹²¹²

Later that day, Lee telephoned Marina at Ruth Paine’s and asked her to come to New Orleans. Marina was ecstatic, crooning over and over to baby June, “
Papa nas lubet
”—“Daddy loves us.” Characteristically, he lied about his new job, saying it was photographic work similar to the work he had done at Jaggers.
¹²¹³

The two young mothers had gotten along well at Ruth’s home in Irving, although their differences were considerable. Ruth, older, better educated, and in many ways more experienced, was nevertheless at one distinct disadvantage with Marina because of her limited ability to speak Russian, and the situation could not have been easy for Marina, who was wholly dependent on Ruth’s generosity, hardly having a penny of her own. Marina had no way of knowing whether her predicament was permanent or only temporary. Lee, after all, had been trying to force her to return to the USSR. Marina, ashamed of her dependence on Ruth, did what she could to help with the housework, and tried to help Ruth with her Russian, but she felt she was an imposition on Ruth and had no idea how long that might be necessary. “She was never comfortable accepting bed and board from me,” Ruth would later recall. “I don’t think I was ever able to convince her how valuable it was to me to have a resident nonpaid tutor [in Russian].” In the meantime, Marina enjoyed Ruth’s friendship and liked her, soon calling her “Aunt” Ruth, a common appellative in Russia for close female friends of one’s family.

As dissimilar in background as they were, the two young women had two things in common, small children and very unsatisfactory marriages. But Ruth, for all her mature acceptance of Michael’s lack of feeling for her, was still hoping for a reconciliation, and she looked forward to his regular visits two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, when she served dinner by candlelight. Marina was equally encouraged by the postcards Lee sent from New Orleans and his demeanor when they spoke on the phone. Both women hoped things could be patched up with their husbands, and both of them drew comfort from each other.
¹²¹⁴

There was much that Marina could not or would not tell Ruth. She could not reveal anything about Lee’s attempt on General Walker’s life, nor would she tell Ruth anything about the physical abuse to which Lee had subjected her. They did talk about Lee’s plan to send Marina back to Russia, though, and Ruth again offered her the haven of her home if Marina chose to stay in the United States. In any case, Ruth suggested that Marina come back to her house from New Orleans to have her baby. She knew Lee had not bothered to send Marina to a doctor for prenatal care, and she was equally aware from her own experience of how hard it is for a woman with a child barely out of infancy to have another baby. Although little Junie did not take readily to strangers, she seemed to be comfortable with Ruth, and Ruth felt it would be ideal for her to take care of Junie while Marina was in the hospital.

Nothing Ruth knew about Lee Oswald encouraged her to like or trust him very much, and she was sure that Marina, with her help, could make it on her own in America. Despite Lee making it almost impossible for Marina to learn English by never speaking it to her, Ruth knew that Marina did have an interest in the language and she ordered a book in Russian for her,
The Self Teacher in the English Language
.
¹²¹⁵

On May 10, the day after he was hired, Lee started work at Reily, and Marina, June, and Ruth, with her two kids, set out for New Orleans, five hundred miles away, in Ruth’s station wagon, spending the night in Shreveport and arriving at the Murrets on May 11. After a happy hour of reunion (highlighted by Lee’s delight over seeing Junie walking for the first time) and introductions to the Murrets, Dutz Murret drove Lee to the apartment on Magazine Street, Ruth following in her station wagon with Marina and all the kids.

Lee tried hard to sell Marina on the apartment, which he had already cleaned up the night before, but she was not pleased. “This is lovely. How pleased I am,” she said tartly. In the confusion, she had thought the home Ruth had first driven her to, the Murrets’ cozy house, was where she was going to be living, and the apartment, for all of its attractions, could not match that. Now he led her about, hopefully pointing out the attractions. It was larger than their last apartment in Dallas, the living room was quite spacious, there was a fenced-in yard where little June could safely play and where fresh strawberries could be picked and eaten. Also, it was on the ground floor and there was a screened porch, both of which would be wonderful for baby June. The furnishings were not terrible—Mrs. Garner had described them as “early New Orleans style.” But Marina was not impressed and she let Lee know it. It was dark, none too clean, and shabby. And there was little ventilation but many evident cockroaches, which Lee was doing his best to get rid of as he expectantly showed Marina the apartment. To Marina, it was nothing at all like the Murrets’ house, or Ruth’s house in Irving, which she had enjoyed so much the past two weeks.