— 38 —
An End and a Beginning
The following morning, Saturday, November 23, evidently with Marguerite’s consent, reporters from Life magazine whisked Marina, Marguerite, and the children from the Paine house in Irving to the Hotel Adolphus in downtown Dallas. Shortly after they were installed there—with reporters and photographers from Life, a woman interpreter, an FBI man named Bardwell Odum, and a clackety teletype machine—Marina and Marguerite were told that they could see Lee. They went to the city jail about 1:00 P.M.
Marina had now convinced herself that Lee was innocent after all and was under suspicion merely because he had been to Russia. His arrest had been a mistake. It would be straightened out soon.
Such thoughts were cut short the moment she caught sight of Lee. He looked pitiful, his eyes full of trouble. She could not reach out to him or kiss him because a glass partition separated them. They could talk only over a pair of telephones.
“Why did you bring that fool with you?” Lee said, glancing over at Marguerite. “I don’t want to talk to her.”
“She’s your mother,” Marina said. “Of course she came. Have they been beating you in prison?”
“Oh, no, Lee said. “They treat me fine. You’re not to worry about that. Did you bring Junie and Rachel?”
“They’re downstairs. Alik, can we talk about anything we like? Is anybody listening in?” Marina had folded the photographs of Lee dressed in black with his rifle and revolver and tucked them carefully inside her shoe. She had them there that very moment, and she wanted to ask Lee what to do with them.
“Oh, of course,” he said. “We can speak about absolutely anything at all.”
From his tone Marina understood that he was warning her to say nothing.
“Alka,” she began again,” “they asked me about the gun.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said, “and you’re not to worry if there’s a trial.” His voice was high, and he was speaking rapidly. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “I’m not guilty. There are people who will help me.” He explained that there was a lawyer in New York on whom he was counting for help.
His words were the old Lee, full of bravado, but Marina could tell by the pitch of his voice that he was frightened. She saw fear in his eyes, and the tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“Don’t cry,” he said, and his voice became tender and kind. “Ah, don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry about. Try not to think about it. Everything is going to be all right. And if they ask you anything, you have a right not to answer. You have a right to refuse. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Marina said.
Lee had tears in his eyes, too, but he did his best to hold them back, and he talked for a few minutes with his mother. Then he asked to speak to Marina again.
“You’re not to worry,” he said. And in words almost identical to the ones he had written her in the “Walker note,” he added: “You have friends.[1] They’ll help you. If it comes to that, you can ask the Red Cross for help. You mustn’t worry about me. Kiss Junie and Rachel for me.”
“I will,” Marina promised.
The guards stood behind him now, ready to take him away, yet trying to give them an extra minute.
“Alka,” Marina said. “Remember that I love you.” She was telling him that he could count on her not to say anything that would betray him.
He got up and backed out of the room, edging toward the door so that he could see her until the very last second. He was saying goodbye with his eyes.
Marina was now certain that Lee was guilty. She saw his guilt in his eyes. Moreover, she knew that had he been innocent he would have been screaming to high heaven for his “rights,” claiming he had been mistrusted and demanding to see officials at the very highest levels, just as he had always done before. For her the fact that he was so compliant, that he told her he was being treated “all right,” was a sign that he was guilty.
Was he sorry for what he had done? Marina’s impressions were mixed. Lee seemed to be closing in on himself like a sea creature, a contented mollusk or a clam, trying not to show what was inside. After the Walker affair, when he failed at what he had set out to do, he had remained keyed up and tense until the “Nixon” charade eleven days later somehow relieved him of strain. Now he was altogether different. He had succeeded. The inner tension was gone. Marina sensed in him a glow of satisfaction that she had not seen there before.
She thought that he was glad he had succeeded, and yet at the same time sorry. What he had done so impulsively could not now be undone. In spite of his obvious satisfaction, it seemed to her that he was also carrying a burden of regret heavier than he, or anyone, could bear. He was on the edge of tears all the time they were together and was barely holding them back. He did not want to break down and show himself, or his fear, to the police. And while much of his anger was spent, Marina saw that Lee’s act had failed to lift off him the inner weight he had with him all the time, nor had it made him any happier. He had looked at her, altogether uncharacteristically, with supplication in his eyes. He was pleading with her not to desert him. He was begging for her love, her support and, above all, her silence. He knew that this was the end.
Marina did not see Lee alive again. As she, Marguerite, and the children left the city jail, she was pelted with questions from reporters. “What did he say? What did he say? What did your husband say?” Some of them spoke to her in Russian. Marina did not answer. “Leave me alone,” she wanted to say to them. “It is hard for me now.”
Marina was tired. She had not had much sleep, and she was not accustomed to having policemen and reporters around her. She felt that everyone must be looking at her with hatred because of what Lee had done. And that was one of the heaviest things to bear, her feeling that the world was against her.
Isolated by language; not seeing television much; busy, in fact, nursing Rachel, Marina had less idea than most people what had happened to her husband since they had said good-bye on Friday morning. She did not know that on leaving the Book Depository Building with only $15.10 in his pocket, he had gone to his rooming house, fetched his pistol, and run in the direction of their old homes on Neely and Elsbeth Streets. She did not know that in the very vicinity where they had lived the previous spring, a patrolman had stopped him, and he had shot the patrolman dead. She had never heard of J. D. Tippit. It was only on Saturday that somebody told her of his murder. Until then, she knew only that her husband was suspected of killing President Kennedy.
In fact, Oswald had been suspected of killing Kennedy from the moment Captain Fritz learned that he was missing from the Book Depository Building. And when Fritz returned to police headquarters to discover that the man he was looking for was already there, he did not waste a moment. He sent a posse to the Paine house. And, in his glassed-in office on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building, he started to question Lee Oswald.
Fritz had been trying for months to obtain a tape recorder for the homicide and robbery bureau. But he had not succeeded. As a result, the only record of Oswald’s twelve hours of interrogation that weekend comes from the notes and memoranda of those who happened to be present. There were seven or eight men moving in and out of the room—detectives from the homicide squad, a Secret Service inspector, a pair of FBI agents—but no one was there the entire time. If Fritz was called out to interview a witness or give an order, others picked up the questioning. “We were,” Police Chief Jesse Curry said later, “violating every principle of interrogation.”[2]
1
Oswald told his brother, Robert, later that day that he considered the Paines to have been true friends to him and Marina, and that he believed the Paines would continue to care for Marina and the children (Robert Oswald,