I was bundled into a rawhide ranch coat; a felt cap with flapswas jammed down over my ears. I was sitting on a bench in front of the Texas Cattle Raisers’ Association, looking down West Seventh. I had been there for almost an hour, and I didn’t think the young man would visit with his mother much longer than that; according to Al Templeton’s notes, all three of her boys had gotten away from her as soon as they possibly could. What I was hoping was that she might come out of her apartment building with him. She was recently back in the area after several months in Waco, where she had been working as a ladies’ home companion.
My patience was rewarded. The door of the Rotary Apartments opened and a skinny man who bore an eerie resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald came out. He held the door for a woman in a tartan car coat and blocky white nurse’s shoes. She was only shoulder-high to him, but solidly built. Her graying hair was scooped back from a prematurely lined face. She wore a red kerchief. Matching lipstick outlined a small mouth that looked dissatisfied and pugnacious—the mouth of a woman who believes the world is against her and has had plenty of evidence over the years to prove it. Lee Oswald’s elder brother went quickly down the concrete path. The woman scurried after and grabbed the back of his topcoat. He turned to her on the sidewalk. They appeared to argue, but the woman did most of the talking. She shook her finger in his face. No way I could tell what she was scolding him about; I was a prudent block and a half away. Then he started toward the corner of West Seventh and Summit Avenue, as I had expected. He had come by bus, and that was where the nearest stop was.
The woman stood where she was for a moment, as if undecided.Come on, Mama,I thought,you’re not going to let him get away that easily, are you? He’s just half a block down the street. Lee had to go all the way to Russia to get away from that wagging finger.
She went after him, and as they neared the corner, she raised her voice and I heard her clearly. “Stop,Robert, don’t walk so fast, I’m not done with you!”
He looked over his shoulder but kept walking. She caught upto him at the bus stop and tugged on his sleeve until he looked at her. The finger resumed its tick-tock wagging. I caught isolated phrases:you promised,andgave you everythingand—I think—who are you to judge me.I couldn’t see Oswald’s face because his back was to me, but his slumped shoulders said plenty. I doubted if this was the first time Mama had followed him down the street, jabbering away the whole time, oblivious of spectators. She spread a hand above the shelf of her bosom, that timeless Mom-gesture that saysBehold me, ye thankless child.
Oswald dug into his back pocket, produced his wallet, and gave her a bill. She stuffed it in her purse without looking at it and started back toward the Rotary Apartments. Then she thought of something else and turned to him once more. I heard her clearly. Raised to shout across the fifteen or twenty yards now between them, that reedy voice was like fingernails drawn down a slate blackboard.
“And call me if you hear from Lee again, hear? I’m still on the party line, it’s all I can afford until I get a better job, and that Sykes woman from downstairs is on itall the time,I spoke to her, I gave her a real piece of my mind, ‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said—”
A man passed her. He stuck a theatrical finger in one ear, grinning. If Mama saw, she took no notice. She certainly took no notice of her son’s grimace of embarrassment.
“?‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said, ‘you’re not the only one who needs the phone, so I’d thank you to keep your callsshort.And if you won’t do it on your own, I may have to call a representative of the telephone company tomakeyou do it.’ That’s what I said. So you call me, Rob. You know I need to hear from Lee.”
Here came the bus. As it pulled up, he raised his voice to be heard over the chuff of the air-brakes. “He’s a damn Commie, Ma, and he’s not coming home. Get used to it.”
“You call me!”she shrilled. Her grim little face was set. She stood with her feet planted apart, like a boxer ready to absorb a blow. Any blow. Every blow. Her eyes glared from behind black-rimmed harlequin glasses. Her kerchief was double-knotted beneath herchin. The rain had begun to fall now, but she paid it no mind. She drew in breath and raised her voice to something just short of a scream.“I need to hear from my good boy, you hear?”
Robert Oswald bolted up the steps and into the bus without replying. It pulled away in a chuff of blue exhaust. And as it did, a smile lit her face. It did something of which I would have thought a smile incapable: it made her simultaneously younger and uglier.
A workman passed her. He didn’t bump or even brush her, as far as I could see, but she snapped: “Watch where you’re going! You don’t own the sidewalk!”
Marguerite Oswald started back toward her apartment. When she turned away from me, she was still smiling.
I drove back to Jodie that afternoon, shaken and thoughtful. I wouldn’t see Lee Oswald for another year and a half, and I remained determined to stop him, but I already felt more sympathy for him than I ever had for Frank Dunning.
CHAPTER 13
1
It was seven forty-five on the evening of May 18, 1961. The light of a long Texas dusk lay across my backyard. The window was open, and the curtains fluttered in a mild breeze. On the radio, Troy Shondell was singing “This Time.” I was sitting in what had been the little house’s second bedroom and was now my study. The desk was a cast-off from the high school. It had one short leg, which I had shimmed. The typewriter was a Webster portable. I was revising the first hundred and fifty or so pages of my novel,The Murder Place,mostly because Mimi Corcoran kept pestering me to read it, and Mimi, I had discovered, was the sort of person you could put off with excuses for only so long. The work was actually going well. I’d had no problem turning Derry into the fictional town of Dawson in my first draft, and turning Dawson into Dallas was even easier. I had started making the changes only so the work-in-progress would support my cover story when I finally let Mimi read it, but now the changes seemed both vital and inevitable. It seemed the book had wanted to be about Dallas all along.
The doorbell rang. I put a paperweight on the manuscript pages so they wouldn’t blow around, and went to see who my visitor was. I remember all of this very clearly: the dancing curtains, the smooth river stone paperweight, “This Time” playing on the radio, the long light of Texas evening, which I had come to love. Ishouldremember it. It was when I stopped living in the past and just starting living.
I opened the door and Michael Coslaw stood there. He was weeping. “I can’t, Mr. Amberson,” he said. “I just can’t.”
“Well, come in, Mike,” I said. “Let’s talk about it.”
2
I wasn’t surprised to see him. I had been in charge of Lisbon High’s little Drama Department for five years before running away to the Era of Universal Smoking, and I’d seen plenty of stage fright in those years. Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous. I’ve seen girls who were quick studies and beautifully natural in rehearsal freeze up completely onstage; I’ve seen nerdy little guys blossom and seem to grow a foot taller the first time they utter a line that gets a laugh from an audience. I’ve directed dedicated plodders and the occasional kid who showed a spark of talent. But I’d never had a kid like Mike Coslaw. I suspect there are high school and college faculty who’ve been working dramatics all their lives and never had a kid like him.
Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she who coaxed me into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the math teacher who had been doing it for years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments. I tried to refuse on the grounds that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn’t going there very much in the winter and early spring of 1961. Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke needed an English sub during that half of the school year, I was usually available. When it came to Dallas, I was basically marking time. Lee was still in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and white shoes.
“You’ve got plenty of time on your hands,” Mimi had said. Herown hands were fisted on her nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that day. “And itpays.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I’ll be living large in the hood.”
“In thewhat?”
“Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I’m doing all right for cash. Can’t we leave it at that?”
No. We couldn’t. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly immovable object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher. Without me, she said, there wouldbeno junior-senior play for the first time in the high school’s history. The parents would be disappointed. The schoolboard would be disappointed. “And,” she added, drawing her brows together, “Iwill bebereft.”
“God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi,” I’d said. “Tell you what. If you let me pick the play—something not too controversial, I promise—I’ll do it.”
