Now that her prodigal had come home, she fed him, and he took a nap. A little sheepishly, he confessed on awakening that there was supposed to be a trial. “If I pay ten dollars, there will be no trial.”
Marina was terrified of trials. “Pay, of course,” she said. “We don’t need any trials. But do you see where your little jokes lead?”
That evening Dutz Murret, home from the retreat, went immediately to the Oswalds’. He noticed with horror Castro’s photograph pinned to the wall and asked Lee straight out if he was part of any “Commie” group. Lee answered that he was not. Dutz told him in no uncertain terms to show up in court the next day and, after that, go out, get a job, and support his family.
Lee appeared in court on schedule, sat squarely in the middle of the black section of the segregated courtroom, pleaded guilty to the charge of “disturbing the peace by creating a scene,” paid his $10 fine, and left.
— 30 —
“You Understand Me”
One night just before he was arrested, Lee was shaving in the bathroom. June asked him for a piece of soap from the cabinet, and he absentmindedly gave her Marina’s makeup mirror instead. She banged it on the toilet seat, and the mirror slid out of its frame and shattered against the toilet pipes. Marina cried. To her superstitious mind the shattered mirror meant bad luck. She was afraid that something was going to happen to her or the baby she was expecting in October.
President and Mrs. Kennedy were expecting their child just a few weeks before that. The Oswalds had been discussing Mrs. Kennedy’s pregnancy ever since it had been announced. Lee hoped it would be a girl; Marina wanted them to have a boy. She expected a son and wanted Jackie to have the same. One day in August—the 7th—Lee came home looking cheerful.
“Guess what, Mama? Jackie’s had her baby, and it’s a boy.”
He asked Marina, not for the first time, what sex their child would be, and again she predicted a son. “I can believe you this time,” he said, “especially since you were right about theirs.”
Gently, because he knew Marina was worried about their own baby, he went on to break the news that all was not well with the Kennedys’. The doctors were afraid for his life and had rushed him to a special hospital. The doctors, Lee added, would be the best, and the baby would probably survive.
The next day Lee listened to bulletins on the radio about the baby. Each time she heard the name “Kennedy,” Marina asked the news. “Still the same,” he would say, but Marina noticed that he was anxious and more and more reluctant to tell her anything. As evening came on, he admitted that Patrick Kennedy was very sick and the doctors did not have much hope.
Coming on top of the broken mirror, the news signified to Marina that things would go badly for their baby, too. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Lee, “if it’s a choice between me and the baby, keep the baby.”
“Other babies we can have,” he said. “Junie has to have a mother.”
Marina had not yet even seen a doctor, and she thinks that both she and Lee were anxious about the same thing: if the president’s baby could not be saved—the president, for whom everything could be done—then what about their baby?
“If anything happened to our baby, who would care?” Marina asked.
“No, no, you’re not to worry,” Lee tried to reassure her. “You’ll be taken care of. Once you’re in the hospital, the doctors don’t care whose baby it is. They do the same for everyone. I’ll borrow money. I promise you, you’ll never be thrown out of the hospital.”
When the news came over the radio early on August 9 that Patrick Kennedy had died during the night, Marina wept. Lee tried to comfort her. Maybe it was better for the baby to die rather than be sick all its life.
Jackie was frail, he said. She had lost other babies. He thought he had even read somewhere that she got sick on planes.
“We’ll have an easier time,” he said. “We haven’t any money, and maybe we can’t get good doctors. But you’re strong. We’ve got a baby already. Ours will be healthy. Everything will be all right.”
Friday, August 9, the day Patrick Kennedy died, was the same day Lee was arrested. And as soon as he was released, he started stamping leaflets again. He and Marina sat many nights after that, she sewing and he pausing now and then to listen as she tried to talk him out of it. Sometimes he stole the leaflets from the closet when she was not looking and tried to stamp them on the sly. She told him to do it openly. “Up to your old games again, are you, big boy?” she said.
“For God’s sake shut up,” he said. “Why did God send me a wife with such a long tongue? I’ve been a good boy all day. Why can’t you leave me be at night?”
Marina was trying to drag him back to reality and make him see himself as others saw him. She told him he was no genius, “not like a tall pine tree on a flat plain,” towering above everybody else. Even if he were clever and everyone else stupid, he still had to understand how others looked on things before he could win them over. How could you convince anyone, living in the clouds and taking into account nobody’s views but your own?
“Be content to be an ordinary mortal, as you are,” Marina said. “You’re nobody special. Cuba has lived without you, and it can continue to get along without you now. One Lee Oswald can’t do anything. Do you think you’re such a great man that you’re the only one who can help?”
Cuba was “a tiny country surrounded by enemies,” Lee explained. “If only everyone would do a little, the way I do, then we could help Uncle Fidel. With these leaflets I can wake up the American people.”
Marina said sarcastically that she had never seen leaflets passed out except in old movies of the Russian Revolution. It surely would be fascinating to see it happen in real life. “Look at our neighbors,” she said, “the people living all around us. They don’t care about leaflets. They are peace-loving people, busy with their families. They don’t want a revolution. No one does, here. If it’s a revolution you’re waiting for, I tell you, this country isn’t ready for it yet.”
“You’re right,” Lee sighed. “I ought to have been born in some other era, much sooner or much later than I was.” “I know, but you were born now,” Marina said. “Better forget the whole thing.” Lee added that he had no desire to be like their neighbors. “They’re petty bourgeois. I’m not interested in the stupid things they care about.”
Marina did not mention the obvious—that he ought to be out looking for work rather than spending the little money they had on guns and leaflets and fines. But she did say, “Poor great man sits here all by himself. He’s part of a great cause, and yet he has nothing to eat. Nobody sees that he’s a genius.”
“You laugh now,” Lee said to her. “But in twenty years, when I’m prime minister, we’ll see how you laugh then.”
Their conversations went on like this for weeks, and it seemed there was nothing Marina could say to convince her husband that he was only an ordinary person. Her efforts were further subverted by the letter Lee received in early August from Arnold Johnson of the Information and Lecture Bureau of the Communist Party. Perfunctory as it was, this letter, together with Vincent Lee’s letter of May 29, contributed, Marina thinks, to Lee’s feeling that he was a great man—a man of loftier concerns than the common herd.
“Okay,” she said to him, as he was stamping leaflets one night. “So you take two hundred of these things. You go out on the street and give them to people. They toss them away. Has one person come to you as a result of them? People don’t care about that here.”