It was as if he hadn’t spoken. “It would upset my stomach. Besides, I don’t want to be on a city bus after eight o’clock. There are too many drunk men on them after eight o’clock. Lee, honey, you need to fix that step before someone breaks a leg.”
He muttered something, but Marguerite’s attention had moved elsewhere. She swooped down like a hawk on a fieldmouse and grabbed June. With my binoculars, the baby’s startled expression was unmistakable.
“How’s my little CUTIE tonight? How’s my DEAR ONE? How’s my little DEVUSHKA?”
Her little devushka, scared shitless, began to scream her head off.
Lee made a move to take the baby. Marguerite’s red lips peeled back from her teeth in what could have been a grin, but only if you wanted to be charitable. It looked more like a snarl to me. It must have to her son, too, because he stepped back. Marina was biting her lip, her eyes wide with dismay.
“Oooo, Junie! Junie-Moonie-SPOONIE!”
Marguerite marched back and forth across the threadbare green carpet, ignoring June’s increasingly distressed wails just as she had ignored Lee’s anger. Was she actuallyfeedingon those wails? It looked that way to me. After awhile, Marina could bear it no longer. She got up and went to Marguerite, who steamed away from her, holding the baby to her breasts. Even from across the street I could imagine the sound of her big white nurse’s shoes:clud-clump-clud. Marina followed her. Marguerite, perhaps feeling her pointwas made, at last surrendered the baby. She pointed at Lee, then spoke to Marina in her loud English instructor’s voice.
“He gained weight… when you were staying with me… because I fixed him… all the things he LIKES… but he’s still TOO… DAMN… SKINNY!”
Marina was looking at her over the top of the baby’s head, her pretty eyes wide. Marguerite rolled her own, either in impatience or outright disgust, and put her face down to Marina’s. The Leaning Lamp of Pisa was turned on, and the light skated across the lenses of Marguerite’s cat’s-eye glasses.
“FIX HIM… WHAT HE’LL EAT! NO… SOURED… CREAM! NO… YOGRIT! HE’S… TOO… SKINNY!”
“Skeeny,” Marina said doubtfully. Safe in her mother’s arms, June’s weeping was winding down to watery hiccups.
“Yes!” Marguerite said. Then she whirled to Lee. “Fix that step!”
With that she left, only pausing to put a large smack on her granddaughter’s head. When she walked back toward the bus stop, she was smiling. She looked younger.
8
On the morning after Marguerite brought the playhouse, I was up at six. I went to the drawn drapes and peeked out through the crack without even thinking about it—spying on the house across the street had become a habit. Marina was sitting in one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing pink rayon pajamas that were far too big for her. She had a new black eye, and there were spots of blood on the pajama shirt. She smoked slowly, inhaling deeply and staring out at nothing.
After awhile she went back inside and made breakfast. Pretty soon Lee came out and ate it. He didn’t look at her. He read a book.
9
That guy Gregory sent some coupons for the ShopRite,Lee had told his mother, perhaps to explain the meat in the stew, maybe just to inform her that he and Marina weren’t alone and friendless in Fort Worth. That appeared to have passed unnoticed by Mamochka, but it didn’t pass unnoticed by me. Peter Gregory was the first link in the chain that would lead George de Mohrenschildt to Mercedes Street.
Like de Mohrenschildt, Gregory was a Russian expat in the petroleum biz. He was originally from Siberia, and taught Russian one night a week at the Fort Worth Library. Lee discovered this and called for an appointment to ask if he, Lee, could possibly get work as a translator. Gregory gave him a test and found his Russian “passable.” What Gregory was really interested in—whatallthe expats were interested in, Lee must have felt—was the former Marina Prusakova, a young girl from Minsk who had somehow managed to escape the clutches of the Russian bear only to wind up in those of an American boor.
Lee didn’t get the job; Gregory hired Marina instead—to give his son Paul Russian lessons. It was money the Oswalds desperately needed. It was also something else for Lee to resent. She was tutoring a rich kid twice a week while he was stuck putting together screen doors.
The morning I observed Marina smoking on the porch, Paul Gregory, good-looking and about Marina’s age, pulled up in a brand-new Buick. He knocked, and Marina—wearing heavy makeup that made me think of Bobbi Jill—opened the door. Either mindful of Lee’s possessiveness or because of rules of propriety she had learned back home, she gave him his lesson on the porch. It lasted an hour and a half. June lay between them on her blanket, and when she cried, the two of them took turns holding her. It was a nice little scene, although Mr. Oswald would probably not have thought so.
Around noon, Paul’s father pulled up behind the Buick. There were two men and two women with him. They brought groceries. The elder Gregory hugged his son, then kissed Marina on the cheek (the one that wasn’t swollen). There was a lot of talk in Russian. The younger Gregory was lost, but Marina was found: she lit up like a neon sign. She invited them in. Soon they were sitting in the living room, drinking iced tea and talking. Marina’s hands flew like excited birds. June went from hand to hand and lap to lap.
I was fascinated. The Russian émigré community had found the girl-woman who would become their darling. How could she be anything else? She was young, she was a stranger in a strange land, she was beautiful. Of course, beauty happened to be married to the beast—a surly young American who hit her (bad), and who believed passionately in a system these upper-middle-class folks had just as passionately rejected (far worse).
Yet Lee would accept their groceries with only occasional outbursts of temper, and when they came with furnishings—a new bed, a bright pink crib for the baby—he accepted these, too. He hoped the Russians would get him out of the hole he was in. But he didn’t like them, and by the time he moved his family to Dallas in November of ’62, he must have known his feelings were heartily reciprocated. Whywouldthey like him, he must have thought. He was ideologically pure. They were cowards who had abandoned Mother Russia when she was on her knees in ’43, who had licked the Germans’ jackboots and then fled to the United States when the war was over, quickly embracing the American Way… which to Oswald meant saber-rattling, minority-oppressing, worker-exploiting crypto-fascism.
Some of this I knew from Al’s notes. Most of it I saw played out on the stage across the street, or deduced from the only important conversation my lamp-bug picked up and recorded.
10
On the evening of August twenty-fifth, a Saturday, Marina dolled up in a pretty blue dress and popped June into a corduroy romper with appliquéd flowers on the front. Lee, looking sour, emerged from the bedroom in what had to be his only suit. It was a moderately hilarious wool box that could only have been made in Russia. It was a hot night, and I imagined he would be wringing with sweat before it was over. They walked carefully down the porch steps (the bad one still hadn’t been fixed) and set off for the bus stop. I got into my car and drove up to the corner of Mercedes Street and Winscott Road. I could see them standing by the telephone pole with its white-painted stripe, arguing. Big surprise there. The bus came. The Oswalds got on. I followed, just as I had followed Frank Dunning in Derry.
History repeats itselfis another way of saying the past harmonizes.
They got off the bus in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Dallas. I parked and watched them walk down to a small but handsome fieldstone-and-timber Tudor house. The carriage lamps at the end of the walk glowed softly in the dusk. There was no crabgrass onthislawn. Everything about the place shoutedAmerica works!Marina led the way to the house with the baby in her arms, Lee lagging slightly behind, looking lost in his double-breasted jacket, which swung almost to the backs of his knees.
Marina pushed Lee in front of her and pointed at the bell. He rang it. Peter Gregory and his son came out, and when June put her arms out to Paul, the young man laughed and took her. Lee’s mouth twitched downward when he saw this.
