Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  The lengths I would later go to in order to shape my four-year-old's world by sheer force of will also showed up in other ways. Apparently concerned about my strong resistance to change in any detail of my life, my mother and Desmond followed the advice of a child psychologist and completely rearranged the furniture in my room. They were taken aback when they discovered, a few hours later, that everything was back in its original position. My only comment was “Please, dear Desmond, don't move it again; it's so heavy.” Confronted with my stubbornness, the adults capitulated and the furniture stayed.

  Expecting to live in the DC area more or less permanently, my mother and Desmond immediately hired an architect and built a house, with my mother playing a hands-on role in the design and Desmond supervising the construction almost day by day. Its location, on 30th Place just off Ellicott Street, was at the time right at the edge of urban Washington; just beyond their block were untouched woods. Today those same houses are very much in the midst of a city that has expanded well beyond the Maryland state line.

  Of particular interest to me and my best friend, Mariana Moran, was the fact that J. Edgar Hoover, at that time at the height of his formidable powers as head of the FBI, lived next door. Mariana, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, Spanish-style beauty, daughter of an American naval officer and a wealthy Panamanian mother, grew up to be a fashion model and a pillar of Washington society. At the time, though, she was my partner in juvenile—very juvenile—delinquency. Looking for some excitement to spice up our lives, we delighted in thumbing our noses at the nation's most feared authority figure by spreading mud on Mr. Hoover's laundry hanging on the line and writing the naughtiest words we knew in chalk on his sidewalk. To our disappointment, he didn't call on the resources of the FBI to catch us in the act, probably because his housekeeper didn't bother to tell him about our desecration of his property. But we didn't escape unpunished; when my mother found out, she responded with a solid spanking for me and a sharp report to Mariana's parents.

  On many weekends during the hot Washington summer, my mother, Desmond, and I would make the two-hour drive to the seashore at Rehoboth Beach for the day. Returning from one such outing in early September of 1939, we heard over the car radio that war had been declared in Europe. This didn't mean much to a four-year-old, but it clearly shook up the adults in the front seat. They knew then that the pleasant flow of their lives was about to be totally disrupted. My maternal grandparents and great-aunt were in the midst of a holiday visit, their first to the United States, and my mother realized that they would be stuck on this side of the Atlantic indefinitely, with only the clothes they had brought in their luggage. Suddenly, she was responsible for finding them permanent housing and became their sole means of support. Their return tickets to Europe, booked for November in cabin class on the luxury liner Normandie, still lie in my safe deposit box, “refundable only in Paris,” where they had been bought.

  As refugees in the United States, my grandparents reversed roles from the domineering, philandering husband and bored hypochondriac wife they had been in Budapest. My grandfather, too old to resume his profession in a new country and an unfamiliar language, became gentle and passive, spending his days listening to his beloved classical music on the radio with his dog at his feet. My tiny, fragile-appearing grandmother, who for the first time in her life was needed and had something to do, became a first-class housekeeper and budgeteer (she was acutely conscious that they depended on my mother for their livelihood), an outstanding cook, and a social butterfly.

  Among the elderly grandes dames of Washington, DC, Paulette Kövesi was much sought after for her skills at bridge, which included never arranging the cards in her hand, because that might give something away, or inquiring sternly of her talkative companions, “Are we here to chat or to play bridge?” The small but comfortable apartment on Connecticut Avenue—it even boasted a new innovation, central air conditioning—became the scene of many elegant ladies' luncheons and bridge teas. My grandmother, dressed in vintage black lace, was undaunted by her triple role of hostess, cook, and dishwasher.

  In October of 1940, soon after we moved into the new house, my brother and only sibling was born. Christened George Henry Kuper III, he was known to the family as Gorky until he was old enough to insist on George as more appropriate to his dignity. Miss Levesconte, or “Vee,” the beloved French Canadian nursemaid who had cared for me from infancy until I outgrew her by going off to school, returned to play a similar role for the new member of the family. She had been my constant companion and had relieved the restlessness of a precocious only child by helping me learn to read when I was three. I was delighted to have her back in the household again, even though the main focus of her attention was now my brother rather than me.

  My mother was clearly delighted with this new infant; the fact that she now had a boy as well as a girl, and a child by each of her husbands added to her satisfaction. But, true to her hands-off parenting style, she left his care mainly in Vee's capable hands. Her role as the gracious and elegant hostess at frequent parties in her up-to-the minute new home continued undeterred by dishes or diapers. Some of my clearest memories are of her playing that role in flowing hostess pyjamas—a new and rather daring style at the time, and one that emphasized both her vivid persona and her graceful femininity. I was proud of having such a glamorous mother and yet discomfited by the certainty that I would never, even as an adult, acquire her aura of drop-dead elegance, her ability to turn heads in any room she entered.

  I regarded baby Gorky as an interesting curiosity; it was not until he became the golden-haired darling of a succession of maids and nannies that I became fiendishly jealous. The contrast was particularly painful once I, five and a half years older, had turned from a Shirley Temple look-alike—I was occasionally mistaken for her in Hungary—into a plump, pigtailed, bespectacled little egghead, always at the top of her class in school but notably lacking in social graces.

  My ambivalent emotions regarding this baby, who quickly developed into a boy of irresistible appeal, were reflected in a piece I wrote for a school assignment when I was a teenager: “His most endearing yet often most annoying quality is his charm, which makes women of any age love him at first sight. After being a little hellion all day, he can go down to a party and, with one smile, captivate everyone in the room. ‘Isn't he an angel?’ they all say. It is then that I feel a desire to wring his angelic little neck!…Gorky's thoughtful, unselfish nature makes me love him with all my might, but he's enough of a little boy to make me think sometimes he should be caged.”

  At about the time of Gorky's birth, the pleasant rhythm of my family environment was unsettled by the question of what role Desmond, a physicist whose specialty was studying the effects of various types of radiation on human health and designing instruments to measure it, would play in the fast-approaching war. The US Congress had authorized compulsory military service, even though we were not yet officially at war; at about the same time, the Radiation Laboratory, or RadLab, was established at MIT as a joint Anglo-American project for the further development and production of radar, which had recently been invented in England. After several months of cat and mouse between the highly placed scientists assembling a RadLab team and Desmond's local draft board, the civilians won, and we moved from Washington to an old but spacious rented house in Cambridge.

  My mother wasted no time setting up her household and establishing our home as the social center for the group of scientists and their spouses who were rapidly being assembled in Cambridge from all over the country. But it soon became clear that the role of well-off housewife was not going to be enough for her quick brain or her boundless energy and dominant personality. As a European whose parents had just lost their home, their belongings, and their country, she was passionate about the importance of an American victory in World War II and felt an increasing urge to play a more direct role. She was egged on by her husband's half-teasing insistence that keeping household servants in wartime was d
ownright unpatriotic; either the maids would have to go or she would have to justify their existence by going to work herself. And now that her parents and aunt were totally dependent on her for their financial support, she felt an obligation to earn much of their keep herself.

  The question of what kind of job she should apply for was a real one, since nothing in her education or experience had equipped her for the world of paid work. So she joined the army of Rosie the Riveters who made up an increasing part of the civilian work force as their husbands and brothers went off to war. Risking her long, elegantly manicured fingernails, she started out assembling radar sets at the Harvey Radio Laboratories in Cambridge. “You're just another socialite who'll quit as soon as you're bored,” was the response she recounted to a reporter who interviewed her for the women's page of a Boston newspaper. Instead, she was promoted to foreman within three months and, six months later, became the supervisor in charge of training women technicians at the same RadLab that had recently recruited her husband.

  My mother was long on conviction and self-confidence and short on patience, a combination that made her a tough but fair taskmistress in the workplace as well as at home. When the women she supervised were asked to vote on whether they were willing to have “Negroes” as coworkers, she drew on the sheer force of her personality, along with some well-placed Hungarian profanity, to ensure that they voted yes. When she organized annual reunion dances for RadLab and Los Alamos alumni during the spring meetings of the American Physical Society after the war, she was equally adamant. These meetings were held at posh Washington hotels, which, at the time, were strictly whites only. Her insistence that a black physicist and his wife be included in the party meant that she had to find a different hotel every year in which to hold it. These events were, in the words of one of the participants, “the first unsegregated dances at first class hotels in Washington D.C.”1 Although her enormous energy had been focused virtually 24–7 on winning the world war against the forces of darkness, my mother also seized opportunities to conduct her own small battle against the injustices rampant in her adopted country.

  While World War II was engulfing the world, my life in Cambridge was astonishingly, even embarrassingly, normal. Although the rationing of meat, butter, sugar, and gasoline may have made household management a bit more complicated for my mother, about all I remember of it is that mixing yellow coloring into the margarine, so that it would look more like butter and less like lard, was my job. And why was the margarine white? Because Wisconsin farmers, fearful that the substitution of margarine for butter might become a habit that persisted even after the war was over, managed to push through a regulation requiring that it be sold in its original, pasty-white state. Packagers, ever creative, promptly attached little cellophane packets of coloring to each container of margarine.

  That manual mixing task, along with collecting tin foil into shiny round balls for recycling and remembering to pull down the blackout shades when the lights went on in the evening, constituted my contribution to the war effort. And, oh yes, I was responsible for pasting the ration stamps that ruled our lives as consumers into the proper booklets and keeping track of the piles of little round cardboard circles, some red and some blue, that represented fractional values of the rationing “points” assigned to each family. This last responsibility made me feel very important.

  Most of my waking hours, of course, were spent in school. I had entered first grade, in the middle of the school year, at Shady Hill, at the time one of the leading “progressive” schools in the country. Its reputation arose from its uniqueness in a variety of ways. One was physical; Shady Hill consisted of a cluster of small wooden structures scattered about on its own campus, one for each grade. Running between buildings during the cold New England winter helped to toughen both bodies and minds, in the British tradition.

  What really set the school apart, though, were the new ideas about children's education that underpinned it. The academic requirements were demanding, but much of the teaching and learning took the form of individual or group projects, with teachers acting as coaches and guides as much as authority figures standing at the front of the classroom. We reenacted the original Olympic Games as part of our third-grade study of Greek civilization, a project that included making our own garments and athletic props, after appropriate research to ensure authenticity. In the fourth grade, we had a contest—participation required—to see who could draw the best map of the world from memory. This sort of education had two very positive effects. It pushed me, along with my classmates, to value independent thinking over rote learning, to be active participants in our own intellectual development. And it opened our eyes—far more effectively than just reading and memorizing could—to the world's infinite variety, both in the past and in different places during our own time. Even today, when many of these so-called progressive approaches are no longer novel, the Shady Hill School continues to be recognized as one of the best of the breed. And it reinforced my own appreciation of all kinds of people, places, and experiences that I was already absorbing from my family life.

  The richness of our school experience was enhanced by an unexpected fallout of wartime: the international element it brought into our classrooms. Most of my classmates were the offspring of successful local lawyers, doctors, professors, and businessmen. But scattered among us were a number of British children who had been packed off by their parents to escape the bombing they knew would strike their homeland, crossing the Atlantic alone on some of the last nonmilitary ships to make the voyage. Once landed in Boston, some of them lived with relatives, while others were taken in by volunteer families. Although these boys and girls were at first traumatized at finding themselves alone in a strange land, they soon fitted quite naturally into our world, and many of them have, in fact, maintained close relationships with their American families throughout their adult lives. But their initial panic at suddenly being torn from everything familiar brought home to us the reality of a war that was leaving the security of our own lives pretty much untouched.

  My mother's first parental encounter with the formidable headmistress of Shady Hill, Miss Katharine Taylor, was not exactly felicitous. She was greeted by that lady's comment, “You know, Mrs. Kuper, I don't approve of mothers who work.” The meeting continued for the appointed forty-five minutes, at the end of which, as my mother rose to leave, Miss Taylor fired her parting shot: “On the whole, Mrs. Kuper, it is probably better for your children that you are working.” My mother laughed as she told this story, but Miss Taylor had a point. George and I were fortunate that our mother's boundless energy and fierce competitive spirit were not focused exclusively on us; surely we would have shriveled in the flame.

  While I was going about my routine of school, dancing school, skating lessons, and playing with my friends, the adults around me were working harder, and playing harder, than they ever had in their lives. For my mother and Desmond, long workdays at RadLab were punctuated on most weekends by large, raucous parties at our house where they and their colleagues drank a lot, danced a lot, and made up clever, mildly dirty ditties about their lives. Mingling with the guests during the early hours of these parties, I got to know many distinguished scientists in their more relaxed moments. Margaret, the daughter of the Nobel Prize—winning physicist I. I. Rabi and, like me, a high-powered scientist's child dropped into new surroundings by the demands of the war effort—Rabi was a professor at Columbia University in normal times—became my closest friend and playmate, and remains my friend today.

  Even this life of hard work and hard play did not exhaust my mother's boundless energy. To take up the excess, she volunteered with the Red Cross at least one night a week, serving coffee and doughnuts to policemen and firemen at the sites of fires or large accidents. Thus it was that she found herself at the scene of one of the most horrific fires in our country's history. The Coconut Grove, one of Boston's largest and most elegant nightclubs, was packed well beyond capacity on the night of November
28, 1942, when it caught fire. Many of the exit doors were locked, and the main revolving door was soon jammed with people, turning it into a death trap. Nearly five hundred people, many of them servicemen on leave celebrating with their girlfriends, died there.

  Although my mother must certainly have edited out the most graphic parts when she recounted to us what she saw that night, the memory of the report she gave was burned indelibly into my brain. American civilians never experienced the carnage of World War II firsthand, but that fire gave us a glimpse of what people in many other cities around the world were going through on a daily basis.

  My mother's penchant for benign neglect and the exigencies of wartime combined to give me a degree of freedom and independence unthinkable today. From the time we moved to Cambridge, when I was in the first grade and not yet six, I walked the mile or so to school and home again alone—my mother was too busy with work and rationed gasoline too scarce to expend either time or fuel on getting me back and forth. I wasn't much older when I began to take the streetcar to Harvard Square to attend Saturday afternoon movies at the University Theater with my friend Margaret. On one of those afternoons, we were so mesmerized by The Song of Bernadette that we sat through it twice. It was dark by the time we got home, and even my doughty mother was beginning to panic. Her fear turned to anger, though, when we showed up, and I was subjected to a sound spanking. I felt it was unjust that Margaret didn't get spanked also.