Mrs. Paine's Garage by Thomas Mallon

Author:Thomas Mallon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375421921
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Two

The Kennedy assassination is still regularly presented—to those Americans who remember it and to the large majority who don’t—as a milestone of modernity, the weekend that television news, however gruesomely, “came into its own.” But to anyone reconstructing the event’s aftermath, the months following November 1963 now seem a low-tech, slow-moving affair, almost sepia-tinted.

When Mrs. Hyde writes her daughter on December 3, she types up, rather than Xeroxes, an AP article she’s found at the Oberlin College library. In another letter, she urges Ruth to telephone “if there should be occasion to do so.” But FBI records show that, between November 22 and December 18, the Paines allowed themselves to make only fourteen long-distance calls from BLackburn 3-1628—not because they feared the wiretap no doubt on the line, but because, no matter how odd one’s current circumstances, even fifteen toll calls was a lot in those pricey, pre-deregulated days.

The Dallas police department had not yet acquired a tape recorder to preserve anything said, in the last forty-eight hours of his life, by the most notorious suspect it would ever hold. When the Warren Commission decided, during his testimony, that it needed Michael to provide a sample of the packing tape Oswald had available to him at the Paines’ home, he was told he could just mail it once he got back to Texas. A letter from Ruth to the Commission justified an 8¢ airmail stamp, the fastest means available. Some of the witnesses’ depositions—bearing TOP SECRET rubber stampings that now look like comic epaulets atop each page—were run off in purple ditto-machine ink. There is even a Cold War antiquity to Ruth’s Hallmark datebook, which, along with a chart showing the appropriate gift for each wedding anniversary, presents a guide for interpreting siren alerts in the National Civil Defense Code.

The blankness of that calendar’s December pages bespeaks no sudden leisure in the owner’s life, but rather something like the opposite. During the last weeks of 1963, as the datebook remained in the hands of investigators, Ruth was trying not only to locate Marina and take care of her own family, but also to deal with the continuing interest of the world press. “For Ruth Paine it was a new and exciting existence,” Jim Bishop would write in The Day Kennedy Was Shot (1968). “Within the span of one afternoon, she had been whirled up and out of the drab life of dirty diapers and high chairs and the Book-of-the-Month Club and set onto the edges of the story of the century. She was a celebrity. Policemen, reporters, and photographers hung on her words . . . To a woman hitherto stranded on the sandbars of marital discord, this was an exciting ride down the rapids.” Today, Ruth responds evenly to this overwritten bit of sarcasm: “He makes it sound like I’m having a good time. Less bored I was, but very sad, through all of that period.”

She mostly fought to contain, not capitalize on, the excitement. The closest she had

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