That guy Gregory sent some coupons for the ShopRite, Lee had told his mother, perhaps to explain the meat in the stew, maybe just to inform her that he and Marina weren’t alone and friendless in Fort Worth. That appeared to have passed unnoticed by Mamochka, but it didn’t pass unnoticed by me. Peter Gregory was the first link in the chain that would lead George de Mohrenschildt to Mercedes Street.
Like de Mohrenschildt, Gregory was a Russian expat in the petroleum biz. He was originally from Siberia, and taught Russian one night a week at the Fort Worth Library. Lee discovered this and called for an appointment to ask if he, Lee, could possibly get work as a translator. Gregory gave him a test and found his Russian “passable.” What Gregory was really interested in-what all the expats were interested in, Lee must have felt-was the former Marina Prusakova, a young girl from Minsk who had somehow managed to escape the clutches of the Russian bear only to wind up in those of an American boor.
Lee didn’t get the job; Gregory hired Marina instead-to give his son Paul Russian lessons. It was money the Oswalds desperately needed. It was also something else for Lee to resent. She was tutoring a rich kid twice a week while he was stuck putting together screen doors.
The morning I observed Marina smoking on the porch, Paul Gregory, good-looking and about Marina’s age, pulled up in a brand-new Buick. He knocked, and Marina-wearing heavy makeup that made me think of Bobbi Jill-opened the door. Either mindful of Lee’s possessiveness or because of rules of propriety she had learned back home, she gave him his lesson on the porch. It lasted an hour and a half. June lay between them on her blanket, and when she cried, the two of them took turns holding her. It was a nice little scene, although Mr. Oswald would probably not have thought so.
Around noon, Paul’s father pulled up behind the Buick. There were two men and two women with him. They brought groceries. The elder Gregory hugged his son, then kissed Marina on the cheek (the 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 emigre 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 crypto-fascism.
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.
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 appliqued 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.
