Marina, meanwhile, had found a friend, her first since she had given up her Russians. She was an American named Ruth Hyde Paine.
They had met at a party on February 22 given by Everett Glover, a chemist at Socony Mobil Oil in Dallas and a tennis-playing friend of the de Mohrenschildts.[7] Glover knew that Marina was badly treated by her husband and was in need of a friend with whom she could speak Russian. He invited six or eight guests to the party, among them Ruth and Michael Paine, who were in a madrigal-singing group with him. Michael was unable to come, but Ruth attended the party. Most of the evening she chatted with Marina in her halting Russian while Lee held forth on his experiences in the Soviet Union. Ruth was studying Russian and hoped to teach it. If Marina needed a friend who spoke Russian, Ruth did, too.
Ruth drove to Neely Street to visit Marina twice during the first half of March, and the two women took their children to the park. June Oswald was one year old, and Ruth’s two children were two and three years old. The two mothers talked while their children played together. Ruth’s spoken Russian was hesitant, and Marina’s English was almost nonexistent. Still, Marina, frank as always, managed to convey the worst of her troubles: she was pregnant again and ashamed to let the Russians, who were her only friends in Dallas, know it; her husband wanted to send her back to Russia, a sort of divorce without a divorce, and Marina did not want to go. Ruth, who at thirty-one was ten years Marina’s senior, felt that this girl did indeed need a friend. On her third visit, toward the end of March, she picked up June and Marina and drove them to her house in Irving, Texas, a suburb on the other side of town. Marina enjoyed the outing hugely.
Ruth and Michael Paine invited the Oswalds to supper at their home on Tuesday, April 2, and undertook to arrange transportation. Michael Paine was a research engineer at Bell Helicopter Corporation, on the road between Dallas and Fort Worth. He left work sometime after five that afternoon and drove to Oak Cliff. He found the apartment on Neely Street and arrived just before seven o’clock.[8]
Marina was not yet ready. She had not packed the baby’s diapers, bottles, and toys and could not decide what to take. Michael welcomed the delay. He had heard about Lee’s experiences in the Soviet Union and was glad of a chance to talk to him before the evening got under way. He was curious to find out what made Lee “tick.” But from the outset Michael was upset by the scene before him: Lee Oswald ordering his frail-looking wife around (in Russian) like a drill instructor, telling her in a loud, harsh voice what to pack but doing nothing to help. He sat on the sofa talking to Michael, interrupting himself only to bark out a new order. “Here is a little fellow who certainly insists on wearing the pants,” Michael thought. And he considered Lee’s treatment of Marina “outrageous.”
Nevertheless, Michael said later that their conversation was “the most fruitful half-hour” he and Lee ever spent.[9] Lee was as frank as he had it in him to be. Why, Michael asked, had he gone to Russia? Lee said he hated exploitation, adding with an edge in his voice that the company that employed him—a printing and engraving plant—earned a lot more from his labor than it ever paid back to him. He did not mention that he had just been fired.
Michael noted that Lee’s voice was laced with scorn for both Russia and America. In Russia, he said, you could not choose your job or where you were going to live; why, you could not even own a rifle unless you belonged to a club that was really a paramilitary organization. Lee clearly adored rifles.
Marina had now packed, the car was bursting with baby things, and they were off to Irving. On the way, Marina recalls, Lee was shy, and Michael did most of the talking. Once they were at dinner, however, the feeling crept over Michael once again that Lee’s treatment of his wife was “medieval torture.” Marina caught snatches of the conversation, and Lee had to translate the rest, which he did with an air of supreme annoyance, as if it were an imposition. So perfunctory were his interpolations that Michael did not trust them and wished that Ruth were translating instead. She might not be as fluent as Lee, but she would be at pains to give a full account. Michael was appalled that Marina had no way of communicating with anyone except through Lee and was dependent on him for everything she knew. “Take that away,” Michael thought a trifle grimly, “and he will lose his power over her.”
Lee was scrupulously polite to Ruth. He asked where she had learned Russian and whether she had found it hard, adding that he was delighted that Marina now had a friend with whom she could speak her own language.
After supper Ruth and Marina washed dishes and spoke Russian in the kitchen, while the men sat in the living room and picked up their conversation where they had left off. They discussed Russian and American politics, and when the name of General Walker came up, Michael later remembered, Lee smiled an “inscrutable” smile.[10]
When the women rejoined them, Michael tried to include Marina in the conversation. But once again, Michael recalls, Lee kept “slapping her down” and “calling her a fool.” The whole evening left Michael “shocked” and “offended.” He thought that Lee’s behavior toward Marina, his treating her like a vassal and enjoying it, was in cruel contrast with the affection he showed toward his child. Then and there Michael conceived the idea of helping Marina “escape,” of freeing her from “her bondage and servitude to this man.” The idea was uncharacteristic, for Michael Paine was a man who respected privacy above everything. He would not for the world intervene in someone else’s affairs unless goaded by outrage and an inner, irresistible prompting. But so appalling was Lee’s treatment of Marina, so offensive to his notion of human dignity, that a reservoir of charity opened up in him that he would have denied he possessed at all. Still, Michael kept his calm politeness. On the way home in the car, Marina remembers that the two men talked again about politics.
Lee’s feelings about the evening contrasted sharply with Michael’s. He was elated when he got home. “Look,” he said, “I’ve found you a friend to talk Russian to. You will help her with her Russian and she will help you learn English.” Lee was also pleased that Ruth was the mother of small children. That way neither of the women would have time for “foolish” things. “She will be good for you,” he told Marina. “She’s a fine, upright person and she’ll have a good influence on you. She’ll show you how to be an American mother.”
“Am I a bad mother, then?” Marina asked.
“No. I didn’t mean that. But she can tell you better than I can how things are done over here.”
Lee also liked Michael, who had listened, or so it seemed to him, to his political ideas with respect. As for Marina, she was grateful to her husband for sanctioning this new friendship, for she had nobody else. It was one of the very few times Lee ever mentioned that she might learn English, and that pleased her, too. It did not occur to her that Lee may have been looking forward to a moment, in the not too distant future, when she would need an American friend who spoke Russian. Ruth and Michael Paine fitted very neatly into his plans.[11]
Lee had not yet tried out his new weapons. As nearly as can be determined, it was on Wednesday, April 3, the day after the dinner at the Paines’, that he used his rifle for the first time.[12] He signed out of work at five, rode the bus home, slipped upstairs to fetch his rifle, and slipped out again without Marina’s hearing him. Moving as rapidly as he could, he walked a half-dozen blocks to the corner of Sixth Street and Beckley Avenue and boarded an inbound bus. He rode a mile and a half, a five- to seven-minute ride, to the intersection of West Commerce Street and Beckley Avenue. He got off the bus and strode quickly down the levee to an uninhabited area 35 feet below called the Trinity River bottom.[13] There he practiced with his second-hand Mannlicher-Carcano C2766 and his four-power telescopic sight. He did not have much time, for the sun set at about 6:45 P.M.
11
Once again Oswald’s timing was remarkable. He had been fired from his job and knew that he would be making his attempt on Walker within a few days. Marina and June might soon need help, and once he had been at the Paines’, he saw that they were in a position to help and might be disposed to do so. Marina has said that “from the moment he met Ruth, Lee think only how to use her,” and indeed, in his “Walker note” only a few days later, Oswald told Marina that they had “friends” who would help. After the Kennedy assassination, he used the same words and made plain to his brother Robert that the friends he was referring to were the Paines (Robert Oswald,
It is also noteworthy that from the moment he returned to the United States, Oswald always had help from outsiders when he needed it: from his mother and the Robert Oswalds, the Russian émigrés, the Paines, the Murrets. The one time he was completely on his own was, interestingly, the one time he did not need help, while he was working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, October 12 to April 6. It is uncanny that the Paines should have entered his life, together, on April 2, one day after he was fired.
12
The Warren Commission investigated data about bus routes, practice sites, and places where ammunition could be bought but did not put forward a definite theory about where or when Oswald practiced.