Libra - Don Delillo [202]
Hurrying clouds now. The wooden coffin rested on a bier above the open grave, with a massive concrete vault below, vandal-proof, a thousand years of peace. The family sat in dented metal folding chairs under a faded canopy. Robert Oswald was between the widow and the mother, each woman holding one of the little girls. Reporters were restricted to the far fringes. No friends or well-wishers allowed, not that any were clamoring to attend. Secret Service men and uniformed police stood around the canopy, many with hands folded in front of them, dipping their knees in turn, and there were armed guards stationed along the cemetery fence. The joke among reporters was that Fort Worth was taking better care of Oswald dead than Dallas did when he was alive. Robert was trying not to break down again. He was a man of earnest bearing, dark-browed, with neatly trimmed hair, a sales coordinator, a hard worker, looking older and more responsible than any twenty-nine-year-old from here to Texarkana, as if young Lee’s truancy, the defection, the undesirable discharge, the lost jobs, all of it, had planted him in a stiff shirt for life.
Your honor, I cannot state the truth of this case with simple yes and no. I have to tell a story. This is a boy the other children teased. It was torn, torn shirts and a bloody nose. Listen to me. I will write books about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have information pertinent to the case. I am all over the world. I have struggled to raise my boys on mingy sums of money and today I am everywhere, newsreel and foreign press, but where are the funds for a decent burial? There are stories inside stories, judge. Lee collected stamps in a book and practiced chess alone at the kitchen table and they sent him to Russia to infiltrate. I will wear a camera and make a photographic record of Lee’s life, getting houses and rooms on the record. I will tell how I worked at many jobs to raise my boys, leading up to practical nurse. I know what sickness looks like. I know low pay. I have worked for nine dollars a day, live-in, twenty-four hours’ duty. I wore my nurse’s uniform three days, sneaking from hotels with the secret police of different branches, with Life magazine running alongside, and a translator, and a photographer, and the Russian daughter-in-law, and the two sick babies. Marina stands and smokes a cigarette plain as day. I am in my uniform and they bring clothes for her. There are diapers hanging everywhere. TV gave the cue and Lee was shot. They kept it from us, being women, and then in the car to the next hotel something came over the radio and the agent said, “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” And I said, “Is that my son?” And he didn’t answer. So then I said, “My son is shot, isn’t he?” And he said into the mike, “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” So then I said, “Answer me, I want to know.” “Do not repeat, do not repeat.” So then they showed it on television in the room but Marina and I were not shown the sequence. They made us sit behind the television and the agents all crowded around in front and watched. And the back of the television was to us. And fifteen to eighteen men crowded in to watch on the other side. They gave us coffee and they watched.
I am going through a death and it is hard.
I intend to research this case and present my findings. But I cannot pin it down to a simple statement. I came home to find red welts on his legs at the age of two, where Mrs. Roach whipped him on Pauline Street, and then I placed him in a home and he slept with his brothers in a big long dormitory, one hundred little boys in rows and rows of cots. He attended six schools by the age of ten. They will search out the environmental factors, that we moved from home to home. Judge, I have lived in many places but never filthy dirty, never not neat, never without the personal loving touch, the decorator item. We have moved to be a family. This is the theme of my research.
I am smiling, judge, as the accused mother who must read the falsehoods they