De Mohrenschildt took the reasonable approach. “Think, my friend. This way there’s still a chance. If she sends the police…” He gave a shrug and lifted his hands to the sky.
“Give me an hour, then,” Lee said. He was showing teeth, but that expression was the farthest thing in the world from a smile. “It’ll give me a chance to put a knife through ever one of her dresses and break ever one of the toys those fatcats sent to buy my daughter.”
“What’s going on?” a young man asked me. He was about twenty, and had pulled up on a Schwinn.
“Domestic argument, I guess.”
“Osmont, or whatever his name is, right? Russian lady left him? About time, I’d say. That guy there’s crazy. He’s a commie, you know it?”
“I think I heard something about that.”
Lee was marching up the porch steps with his head back and his spine straight — Napoleon retreating from Moscow — when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt called to him sharply. “Stop it, you stupidnik!”
Lee turned to her, his eyes wide, unbelieving… and hurt. He looked at de Mohrenschildt, his expression saying
Jeanne: “If you love your wife, Lee, for God’s sake stop acting like a spoiled brat. Behave.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.” Under stress, his Southern accent grew stronger.
“I can, I will, I do,” she said. “Let us get her things, or I’ll call the police myself.”
Lee said, “Tell her to shut up and mind her business, George.”
De Mohrenschildt laughed cheerily. “Today you
Lee’s shoulders slumped and he stood aside. Jeanne marched up the steps, not even sparing him a glance. But de Mohrenschildt stopped and enveloped Lee, who was now painfully thin, in a powerful embrace. After a moment or two, Oswald hugged him back. I realized (with a mixture of pity and revulsion) that the boy — that was all he was, really — had begun weeping.
“What are they,” the young man with the bike asked, “couple of queers?”
“They’re queer, all right,” I said. “Just not the way you mean.”
Later that month, I returned from one of my weekends with Sadie to discover Marina and June back in residence at the shithole on Elsbeth Street. For a little while, the family seemed at peace. Lee went to work — now creating photographic enlargements instead of aluminum screen doors — and came home, sometimes with flowers. Marina greeted him with kisses. Once she showed him the front lawn, where she had picked up all the garbage, and he applauded her. That made her laugh, and when she did, I saw that her teeth had been fixed. I don’t know how much George Bouhe had to do with that, but my guess is plenty.
I watched this scene from the corner, and was once more startled by the rusty voice of the old lady with the walker. “It won’t last, you know.”
“You could be right,” I said.
“He’s probably goan kill her. I seen it before.” Below her electric hair, her eyes surveyed me with cold contempt. “And you won’t step in to do nothing, will you, Sonny Biscuit?”
“I will,” I told her. “If things get bad enough, I will step in.”
That was a promise I meant to keep, although not on Marina’s behalf.
The day after Sadie’s Boxing Day dinner, there was a note from Oswald in my mailbox, although it was signed A. Hidell. This alias was in Al’s notes. The
The communication didn’t disturb me, since everyone on the street seemed to have gotten one just like it. The flyers had been printed on hot-pink paper (probably filched from Oswald’s current place of employment), and I saw a dozen or more flapping up the gutters. The residents of Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood were not known for putting litter in its place.
