Libra - Don Delillo [190]
“Who can blame you?”
“It’s the worst thing ever in our city.”
“One little man comes along and turns everything upside down. And we’ll get the blame for him.”
“Don’t say his name,” Jack said. “It has an effect of making me worse in my mind. Like I’m watching a dog playing in the dirt with my liver.”
Saturday afternoon. Lee Oswald sat in a small glass enclosure with a phone on a shelf to his right. The door across the room opened. Here she came moving toward him, bandy-legged, dry-eyed, jowly, hair pure white now, long and white and shining. She sat on the other side of the partition. She looked at him carefully, taking him in, absorbing. They picked up the phones.
“Did they hurt you, honey?” she said.
She went on to tell him how she heard the news on the car radio and turned around and went home and called the Star-Telegram and asked them to take her to Dallas in a press car. Then she was interviewed by two FBI men, both named Brown. She told them for the security of the country she wanted it kept perfectly quiet that her son Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States from Russia with money furnished by the State Department. This was news to the Browns and they were pop-eyed.
“They’re taping this, Mother.”
“I know. We’ll be careful what we say. I told them I haven’t seen my son in a year. ‘But you are the mother, Mrs. Oswald.’ I told them I’ve been doing live-ins as a nurse and they didn’t tell me where they’d moved to. ‘But you are the mother, you are the mother.’ I told them I didn’t even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news every minute on the radio.”
These men, Brown, were looking for suspects in every direction. Magazine people were keeping the family in a room at the Adolphus Hotel. It was kept extremely hush hush. They were whisked from place to place with precautions. All of them. The accused mother, the brother, the Russian wife, the two little babies. Accompanied by approximately eighteen to twenty men who were suspicious of them and of each other. These were FBI, Secret Service and Life magazine. There was a man continually taking pictures. And Marguerite rolled her stockings down and he took that picture too, of the mother rolling her hose after a day that made history.
“Things were done without my consent,” she told Lee. “But I’m checking every quote I make to them and if there are mistakes coming out, I’ll know it is all stacked up against us, going back to Russia. ”
The babies had diarrhea in their hotel surroundings and there were diapers strung across the room from wall to wall. A president had to die before she could learn she was a grandmother again.
When Marina went into the room to talk to Lee she didn’t know the police had found prints of the photographs she’d taken in the backyard on Neely Street. They were with Lee’s belongings in Ruth Paine’s garage. Marina had found two prints herself, overlooked by the police, in little June’s baby book. The pictures with the fateful rifle. The gun in one hand, then the other.
She had both pictures folded inside her shoe.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said into the phone. “You have friends to help you.”
It was painful seeing him in this state. Not just the bruises and scratches. This was a man who appears in a dream, a distorted figure in some darkness outside ordinary night.
She thought of the mild face of the boy she’d married, the unexpected American who asked her to dance. The face was almost plump then, rosy with cold, and the hair neatly parted, the clothes pressed. He was even cleaner than she was, very clean coming to bed, clean in every habit.
Then the worker in Texas and Louisiana, sometimes grease-spattered, losing weight, losing hair, dog-weary, suffering nosebleeds in his sleep, refusing to change his clothes.
Now this vision, this man with a beak nose and dark eyes, one brow swollen, clothes too big for him. This specter with gray skin. She looked at the lumpy Adam’s apple, the prominent nose. His cheeks were sunk under the bones, leaving this nose,