(9 of 9)
Next morning at Fort Worth's Rose Hill Cemetery, Marina and her two babies, her mother-in-law and her brother-in-law Robert buried Lee Oswald in a plain pine box. Save for a group of newsmen, Secret Service agents and police officers, the rite was unattended.
The burial symbolically sealed off for all time the best witness in the extraordinary case. The President has instructed the Warren Commission to "satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered, and to report its findings and conclusions to him, to the American people and to the world." The commission has managed to avoid the natural impulse to weave a webwork of sinister motivations and complex conspiracies to satisfy a puzzled nation. Instead, it has found so far that the act was committed by a rootless, aimless, driven young man. It was a bizarre coming together of circumstances that gave Lee Oswald the time, the place and the opportunity to placate the demons that consumed him.
Like the act of violence itself, Oswald was a phenomenon of his time.
The Gifts. There was, as well, a happier phenomenon. From all parts of the U.S., money and bundles of clothing began pouring in for Marina. Virtually penniless all her life, she has received about $36,000 in gifts from sympathetic Americans. At the advice of lames Martin, who quit his job as a Dallas motel manager to become her business agent, Marina has set up a $25,000 trust fund for the children. It took some doing. Dallas' big First National Bank ("Give Us the Opportunity to Say Yes") said no. The fund was finally lodged with a small bank in nearby Grand Prairie.
For the time being, Marina and her children are living with Business Agent Martin's family. Outside is a parked car with two Secret Servicemen, who, with two other pairs, stand guard 24 hours a day. But the worst seems to be over. "I think," Marina says, "I am more happy now." She helps with the cooking and cleaning, plays with her children, takes long evening walks. She likes Dallas, wants to stay on there, become an American citizen and resume her work in pharmacy. Remarriage? "No! Please!" she cries. "I have crazy letters from men who want to marry. I think these silly men." She does not hide the fact that she dislikes her mother-in-law. "I don't want to talk with her. This is too much bad for me."
Marina and Marguerite Oswald are likely to meet hereafter only by chance along the blacktopped road that winds far to the back of Rose Hill Cemetery. Both women visit Lee Oswald's grave once or twice a week. It is marked with a small cross cut into a simple granite plaque, which carries the man's name and the dates of his first and last days on earth. The bare cedars quake on wintry, windy Texas days, and the grass is brown and forlorn. Here and there a leaf flutters and a sudden swarm of starlings lights in a tree for a moment, only to take off like a cloud in the bleak sky. And on the grave are a pot of withered chrysanthemums, some carnations and nine sprays of pretty pink roses. The roses are plastic.