About mid-January, however, Lee began to have trouble at work—trouble with the job itself and trouble with the other men. Everything had been going smoothly up until then. For his first three months there, he had been a trainee, and as promising as any other. But in January his status became about the same as that of any other employee. He was expected to take more responsibility for the company’s clients and see each piece of work through from start to finish. According to his supervisor, John G. Graef, who had hired him and had a stake in keeping him, Lee started to make mistakes—“too many mistakes.” “It wasn’t that he lacked industry or didn’t try,” Graef recalls; “he somehow couldn’t manage to handle work that was that exact.” Moreover, in the extremely tight confines of the darkroom, Graef concedes, Lee’s “personality began to come out.”[7]
Dennis Hyman Ofstein, who was a year younger than Lee and the closest thing he had to a friend at the plant, described Lee’s behavior in more detaiclass="underline" “Well, we work in a rather tight area. There is little room to move around in the darkroom, just about enough room for a man to stand by the developing trays and allow one person to squeeze behind him and get by, and he would make it a habit of just bursting through there head-on with no regard to who was in the room… I think he thought he had the right of way in any case—either that or he was just in a hurry to get through, and through his hurrying he made no regard for anyone else’s well-being or anyone else’s jobs.”[8]
At home, too, Lee began to make more trouble than usual. His quarrels with Marina now occurred over trifles. He was often cruel and capricious and treated her harshly without any pretext. Sometimes he got so angry that he would stalk out, cursing her in English. “That’s lovely, Alka,” Marina laughed. “Go right ahead. You can swear at me that way all night and all day, and I won’t understand a word.”
Marina was more and more puzzled. One day Alka was the perfect husband, affectionate with her and the baby, while the next day he hit her for no reason. “I don’t see how you can kiss me one day and beat me the next,” she complained.
“We’re young,” Lee said. “We haven’t yet learned to give in to each other yet. All couples quarrel over something.”
“I know,” she answered, commonsensically. “But not all husbands beat their wives.”
They had their moments of tenderness. Lee worked on Saturday, January 26, from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon. They went to bed early that evening, and about three the following morning Marina woke him, feeling sexual desire.
“What do you want?” he mumbled.
“I want a son,” she said.
“But only last time you were crying. I thought you didn’t want a baby.”
“I want you to have a son.”
“I want a son very much.”
Marina did not want another child. But she felt lazy. She did not want to get out of bed, and they made love without taking precautions. It was a “wonderful night” for Marina. She felt closer to Lee and closer to being satisfied by him sexually than ever before. But the next day she regretted what she had done. Nor did Lee show any happiness over the night before, or elation over the possibility of another child.[9] He had his mind elsewhere.
Lee had managed to save $600 to pay back his loans from Robert and the US Department of State. Robert had been repaid by October 7. On January 25, in the form of two postal money orders totaling $106, he paid the final installment of the State Department loan. And on Sunday, January 27, free of debt for the first time since his return from Russia, Lee filled out a form and sent it to Seaport Traders, Inc., a mail-order firm in Los Angeles. He enclosed $10 in cash and ordered the first of two weapons he was to acquire that year, a .38 special caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, whose barrel, originally 5 inches long, had been shortened to 2¼ inches. The balance of the cost of the revolver, $19.95 plus shipping charges, was to be paid on delivery.[10]
Lee did not order the gun in his own name. The form was signed “A. J. Hidell.” The order had to be witnessed by someone who could attest that the signer was an American citizen and had not been convicted of a felony. The “witness” was “D. F. Drittal.” Experts later testified that the signatures of “Drittal” and “Hidell,” as well as the form itself, were in Oswald’s handwriting.[11] The form contained one other lie: “Hidell” said he was twenty-eight years old. Oswald was twenty-three. The address to which the revolver was to be sent was Post Office Box 2915 at the Dallas General Post Office. From October 9, 1962, to May 14, 1963, this was the mailing address of Lee Harvey Oswald, at which he had also authorized “A. J. Hidell” and Marina Oswald to pick up mail.
The day after he ordered the revolver, on Monday, January 28, Lee committed himself to the typing course for which he had signed up tentatively two weeks earlier. He put down his $9 enrollment fee in cash and started to attend typing classes at Crozier Technical High School, which was only a few blocks from where he worked. George Bouhe had advised him to take the course. Typing, in combination with the photographic skills he was acquiring at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, would enable him to get a better job. They might even qualify him for a newspaper job, and as a matter of fact, Lee had already put out feelers for part-time work as a stringer in photography.
Soon after going to work at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Lee had persuaded his colleague, Dennis Hyman Ofstein, to teach him techniques he did not know, using the company’s lab and materials after hours, a practice the company tried to discourage. First, Lee made sample calling cards for himself and for George de Mohrenschildt.[12] Then he made other samples of his work, which he sent to two left-wing newspapers in New York: the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyite party in the United States; and the Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party. Lee had begun corresponding with both organizations soon after his return from Russia, and he subscribed to both newspapers. Now he offered his services in printing and photographic work. In reply, the Worker thanked him for his “poster-like blow-ups” and said that “from time to time we shall call on you.”[13]
The typing class, his photographic skills, and his effort to obtain freelance work on a left-wing newspaper fitted well with the peaceful expression of Lee’s political ideas. But the night typing course fitted in with something else as well. It gave Lee a cover, so that he would not have to account for his evenings to anyone.
The typing class met three nights a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, from 6:15 to 7:15, but when he started the course, it seemed to Marina that Lee was never home any weeknight before seven, and he often came in even later. Marina also noticed that her husband spent a great deal of time by himself in the kitchen. He did not have a typewriter to practice on, but he had a large textbook with a printed keyboard. He sat bent over the textbook and seemed to be writing out lessons. But he had a bus schedule, too, and two or three maps of Dallas. He was studying a layout of the city, and Marina, of course, asked why. He answered that he was trying to figure out the quickest way from work to night school, and he told her not to make any noise. Marina never looked closely at the maps, never realized that Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall and Crozier Tech were only a few blocks apart, and never stopped to ask herself—he had trained her that way—why it seemed to be taking him so long, hunched over the kitchen table, to puzzle out so straightforward a question. In fact, Lee now had three, not two, ports of call in downtown Dallas: his job, night school, and the main post office at Bryan and Ervay Streets, where he had his post office box. All three were within easy walking distance. The bus schedules and maps had almost certainly nothing do with his work or night school.
9
This may actually have been the night Rachel Oswald was conceived. Marina’s menstrual period started on January 11, and she could have been fertile on the 26th. Rachel was born on October 20, weighed nearly 7 pounds, and was said to be full term. From January 26 to October 20, 267 days had elapsed, the average length of a full-term pregnancy. Moreover, Marina remembers no other occasion around this time when she failed to take precautions.
11
Testimony of Alwyn Cole, documents expert of US Department of Treasury, Vol. 4, pp. 375–377; Testimony of James C. Cadigan, documents expert of the FBI, Vol. 7, p. 424.