For weeks the Oswalds’ neighbors had been troubled by the sounds of discord from their apartment. As far back as December, a comparatively peaceful time, the noise already was ominous enough so that one neighbor went to Mahlon Tobias, the building manager, and complained, “I think he’s really hurt her this time.” Mrs. Tobias cooked up a pretext and dropped by to see if Marina was all right.[8]
When the noise grew even louder, and the frightened baby began to wake up, wailing, in the middle of the night, another neighbor complained to Tobias: “I think that man over there is going to kill that girl.”[9]
Tobias went to Mr. and Mrs. William Martin Jurek, the owners of the building, who in turn paid a call on Lee, warning him that he and his wife would have to stop fighting or move. Lee tried to shrug it off, but the visit told him what he was uncomfortably aware of already. He had too many neighbors on Elsbeth Street, too many eyes and ears upon him. His movements were being observed. People knew he was beating his wife. What might they notice next?
Lee kept the Jureks’ visit a secret from Marina. But he made up his mind to move. As usual, he scouted “For Rent” signs in the neighborhood, not newspaper ads, and before the week was out, he announced to a startled Marina that he had found them a new place to live. If she liked it as well as he did, they would move.
It was on the second floor of a building at 214 West Neely Street, only about a block from the Elsbeth Street apartment. It was cleaner than the place they had, and the rent was less, $60 a month instead of $68. But the big attraction was a balcony. “Just like our balcony in Minsk,” Lee said. “You can plant flowers on it. And it’s healthier for Junie. She can crawl out there, and you needn’t watch her all the time.” He also pointed out one of the apartment’s other advantages. There were fewer neighbors there, fewer witnesses to their comings and goings. He would like that, he said.
The greatest attraction, however, as far as Lee was concerned, was a tiny room, not much bigger than a double coat closet, that he could use as a study. And this “study” had a strikingly unusual feature: two entrances, one from the stairs outside the apartment and one from the living room. Lee could lock both doors and enter and leave the apartment without Marina’s knowledge.
Marina was content on Elsbeth Street. She had fixed up the place so it suited her perfectly. Even more important, she hated to hurt the Tobiases’ feelings. They had been good to her. She knew nothing of the warning Lee had received, and it embarrassed her to leave for no reason people who had befriended her. But she gave in, as usual. “After all,” she said to herself, “it doesn’t really matter to me. And I like the balcony, too.”
So on Saturday, March 2, they piled their belongings—Lee’s books, the baby’s things, a few dishes—on top of the baby’s stroller. With that, the clothing in their arms, and the baby herself, they walked away from Elsbeth Street, owing a couple of days’ rent.
Tobias and his wife looked on. They were sad to see Marina go. A few days later Mrs. Tobias told the FBI that the Oswalds had moved. A report by Agent James P. Hosty, Jr., of the Dallas office of the FBI, dated September 10, 1963, contained this item:
On March 11, 1963, Mrs. M. F. Tobias, apartment manager, 602 Elsbeth, Dallas, Texas, advised [that] on March 3, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina moved from that apartment building to 214 West Neely Street in Dallas, Texas. Mrs. Tobias advised they had considerable difficulty with Mr. Oswald who apparently drank to excess and beat his wife on numerous occasions. They had numerous complaints from the other tenants due to Oswald’s drinking and beating his wife.
Lee’s suspicion that he was being watched was not altogether ill founded.
— 23 —
“Ready for Anything”
General Walker left Dallas on February 28, two days before the Oswalds moved to West Neely Street.[1] Lee’s plan had to be postponed, and the move itself may have been a welcome sidetrack. Now he had time. Walker would be gone for five or six weeks. During that breathing space, Lee could reconsider his plan; he would compose his mind as he had not been able to do before; and above everything, he could write the justification for history that appears to have been nearly as important to him as the deed itself. Now that he had decided to go ahead, but in his own way and in his own time, Lee’s behavior changed dramatically. His violence toward Marina almost stopped, and he hit her rarely, if at all. From having been absorbed by turmoil within, he now shifted to the world outside, and in that world he moved with speed and efficiency.
Marina supposed his new calm to be a product of their move, experience having taught her that any move to a new apartment bought her a few days of peace. Sure enough, Lee devoted his first two evenings on Neely Street to fixing up the apartment. He was handy at carpentry, building window boxes for the balcony and painting them green. He also built shelves for his special room and moved in a chair and a table, creating his own tiny office. Marina realized that it was this “office,” and not the balcony he had used as bait for her, that was the reason he had moved them to Neely Street.
“Look,” he said to her. “This is my little nook. I’ve never had my own room before. I’ll do all my work here, make a lab, and do my photography. I’ll keep my things in here. But you’re not to come in and clean. If ever I come in and find that one single thing has been touched, I’ll beat you.”
Marina, who had been warned often enough not to pry into her husband’s affairs, of course complied.
They again had something of a life together as man and wife. Once or twice, Lee asked her if she loved him.
“I do,” she said.
“Why?”
“For your beautiful legs and your bottom and your ugly disposition.”
He removed his trousers and stared at himself in the mirror. The sight seemed to please him. “Do I really have beautiful legs?” he asked.
“You do.”
Trousers off, he would sit with legs extended on the coffee table, or he would drape a leg and a thigh over one arm of the sofa, his way of asking for a kiss or, if they had had an argument, of asking to make up.
When he took a bath, he would ask her to wash him. First he stretched one leg in the air. When she had finished and was ready to do the other leg, he would say no, the right one wasn’t clean yet. He made her wash one leg four or five times before he would consent to raise the other. “Now I feel like a king,” he would say, beatifically. But he cautioned her to be more gentle. “I have sensitive skin, while you have rough, Russian ways.”
Next, he would refuse to get out of the tub, his complaint being that the floor was cold, and he told her to put a towel down for him. When she had done as he asked, she would say, “Okay, prince, you can get out now.”
At her urging, Lee at last read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a great favorite in Russia. He was not impressed. He closed the book with a disgusted air, went to the public library, and took out a biography of Leon Trotsky. That was more to his liking.
One evening, in a romantic mood, he asked her to put on the red brocade dress she had worn on the evening they met. Marina was amused, reflecting that she was not a Cinderella at a ball any more, but a wife who was pregnant with her second child.
He even remembered that she was pregnant. Whenever Marina saw Lee on the bed, his arms folded under his head, gazing up at the ceiling, she knew he was thinking about the new baby. Once or twice he asked her to lie down beside him. Which side ached most, he wanted to know, and what were her other symptoms? He was heartened to hear that her symptoms were different from those while she was carrying June.