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ack. I listened to the comment twice before it clicked: it was almost exactly the same phrase Mimi
Corcoran had used when asking me about The Catcher in the Rye.
“I think she’s swallowed the poison bait,” Oswald said. “Now she’s making money by selling it to
other people.”
“Exactly, my friend. I’ve never heard it put better. There will come a day when the Rands of the
world will answer for their crimes. Do you believe that?”
“I know it,” Lee said. He spoke matter-of-factly.
De Mohrenschildt patted the couch. “Sit by me. I want to hear of your adventures in the
homeland.”
But first Bouhe and Orlov approached Lee and de Mohrenschildt. There was a lot of back and forth
in Russian. Lee looked dubious, but when de Mohrenschildt said something to him, also in Russian,
Lee nodded and spoke briefly to Marina. The way he flicked his hand at the door made it pretty clear:
Go on, then, go.
De Mohrenschildt tossed his car keys to Bouhe, who fumbled them. De Mohrenschildt and Lee
exchanged a look of shared amusement as Bouhe grubbed them off the dirty green carpet. Then they
left, Marina carrying the baby in her arms, and drove off in de Mohrenschildt’s boat of a Cadillac.
“Now we have peace, my friend,” de Mohrenschildt said. “And the men will open their wallets,
which is good, yes?”
“I get tired of them always opening their wallets,” Lee said. “Rina’s starting to forget that we
didn’t come back to America just to buy a damn freezer and a bunch of dresses.”
De Mohrenschildt waved this away. “Sweat from the back of the capitalist hog. Man, isn’t it
enough that you live in this depressing place?”
Lee said, “It sure idn’t much, is it?”
De Mohrenschildt clapped him on the back almost hard enough to knock the smaller man off the
couch. “Cheer up! What you take now, you give back a thousandfold later. Isn’t that what you
believe?” And when Lee nodded: “Now tell me how things stand in Russia, Comrade—may I call you
Comrade, or have you repudiated that form of address?”
“You can call me anything but late to dinner,” Oswald said, and laughed. I could see him opening
to de Mohrenschildt the way a flower opens to the sun after days of rain.
Lee talked about Russia. He was long-winded and pompous. I wasn’t very interested in his rap
about how the Communist bureaucracy had hijacked all the country’s wonderful prewar socialist ideals
(he passed over Stalin’s Great Purge in the thirties). Nor was I interested in his judgment that Nikita
Khrushchev was an idiot; you could hear the same idle bullshit about American leaders in any
barbershop or shoeshine parlor right here. Oswald might be going to change the course of history in a
mere fourteen months, but he was a bore.
What interested me was the way de Mohrenschildt listened. He did it as the world’s more
charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting
or taking his eyes from the speaker’s face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable,
brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet. This might have been the first time in his life
that Lee had been listened to in such a way.
“There’s only one hope for socialism that I see,” Lee finished, “and that’s Cuba. There the
revolution is still pure. I hope to go there one day. I may become a citizen.”
De Mohrenschildt nodded gravely. “You could do far worse. I have been, many times, before the
current administration made it difficult to travel there. It is a beautiful country . . . and now, thanks
to Fidel, it’s a beautiful country that belongs to the people who live there.”
“I know it.” Lee’s face was shining.
“But!” De Mohrenschildt raised a lecturely finger. “If you believe the American capitalists will let