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one that wasn’t swollen). There was a lot of talk in Russian. The younger Gregory was lost, but Marina
was found: she lit up like a neon sign. She invited them in. Soon they were sitting in the living room,
drinking iced tea and talking. Marina’s hands flew like excited birds. June went from hand to hand
and lap to lap.
I was fascinated. The Russian émigré community had found the girl-woman who would become
their darling. How could she be anything else? She was young, she was a stranger in a strange land,
she was beautiful. Of course, beauty happened to be married to the beast—a surly young American
who hit her (bad), and who believed passionately in a system these upper-middle-class folks had just
as passionately rejected (far worse).
Yet Lee would accept their groceries with only occasional outbursts of temper, and when they came
with furnishings—a new bed, a bright pink crib for the baby—he accepted these, too. He hoped the
Russians would get him out of the hole he was in. But he didn’t like them, and by the time he moved
his family to Dallas in November of ’62, he must have known his feelings were heartily reciprocated.
Why would they like him, he must have thought. He was ideologically pure. They were cowards who
had abandoned Mother Russia when she was on her knees in ’43, who had licked the Germans’
jackboots and then fled to the United States when the war was over, quickly embracing the American
Way . . . which to Oswald meant saber-rattling, minority-oppressing, worker-exploiting cryptofascism.
Some of this I knew from Al’s notes. Most of it I saw played out on the stage across the street, or
deduced from the only important conversation my lamp-bug picked up and recorded.
10
On the evening of August twenty-fifth, a Saturday, Marina dolled up in a pretty blue dress and
popped June into a corduroy romper with appliquéd flowers on the front. Lee, looking sour, emerged
from the bedroom in what had to be his only suit. It was a moderately hilarious wool box that could
only have been made in Russia. It was a hot night, and I imagined he would be wringing with sweat
before it was over. They walked carefully down the porch steps (the bad one still hadn’t been fixed)
and set off for the bus stop. I got into my car and drove up to the corner of Mercedes Street and
Winscott Road. I could see them standing by the telephone pole with its white-painted stripe,
arguing. Big surprise there. The bus came. The Oswalds got on. I followed, just as I had followed
Frank Dunning in Derry.
History repeats itself is another way of saying the past harmonizes.
They got off the bus in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Dallas. I parked and
watched them walk down to a small but handsome fieldstone-and-timber Tudor house. The carriage
lamps at the end of the walk glowed softly in the dusk. There was no crabgrass on this lawn.
Everything about the place shouted America works! Marina led the way to the house with the baby in
her arms, Lee lagging slightly behind, looking lost in his double-breasted jacket, which swung almost
to the backs of his knees.
Marina pushed Lee in front of her and pointed at the bell. He rang it. Peter Gregory and his son
came out, and when June put her arms out to Paul, the young man laughed and took her. Lee’s mouth
twitched downward when he saw this.
Another man came out. I recognized him from the group that had arrived on the day of Paul
Gregory’s first language lesson, and he had been back to the Oswald place three or four times since,
bringing groceries, toys for June, or both. I was pretty sure his name was George Bouhe (yes, another
George, the past harmonizes in all sorts of ways), and although he was pushing sixty, I had an idea he