I was on my own for much longer trips as well. With wartime restrictions, there was only one way to go from my mother's home in Cambridge to my father's in Princeton, and that was by train. My brother and I had a nanny who might have been called on to escort me on these journeys, but she was Austrian and, classified as an “enemy alien,” was forbidden to travel across state lines. So my mother would buy me a first-class ticket, tip the railroad car porter five dollars to keep an eye on me and make sure I got off at the right stop, and send me on my way. I didn't see anything remarkable about this; I thought the wartime trains, jammed with young soldiers and full of hustle and bustle, were rather fun. The independence I learned early from these experiences has been invaluable many times along my adult career path.
The unconventional family arrangements that defined my life had other profound effects on my growing up. At least in those days, most families were defined by parents and children together in a single household. For me, though, family meant two households, four adults, all brilliant and all emotionally complex, with me shuttling back and forth between them and adapting on the fly. Without being conscious of it, I became precociously adept at figuring out the soft spots in their personalities and relationships and exploiting them to my advantage.
Dealing with this complicated situation also developed in me an emotional self-sufficiency that was reinforced by my mother's parenting style. In some ways we were very close; she took me and my concerns seriously and never condescended. But she was prone to fly into sudden rages, and her humiliating slaps in the face, sometimes in front of other people, continued until I was well into my teens. Nor did she make any bones about the fact that, if the exigencies of wartime forced her to choose between being separated from her husband or from her children, she would leave us in the care of others in order to stick with the person who would be her lifetime companion after we grew up and left home. In the face of all these challenges, I developed a surface unflappability and unwillingness to examine my own feelings, traits that have lasted all my life and made writing this memoir inordinately difficult.
While my mother and stepfather were busy making their contribution to the war effort in Cambridge, my father's much higher profile role had him commuting between Princeton and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In that supersecret location, he was a major participant in the Manhattan Project and one of the very few people permitted to go in and out of Los Alamos while the war was on. He was even involved in selecting the sites in Japan where the two atom bombs then in existence were to be dropped, displaying in that task the cool rationality that dominated his thinking about any decision that affected the ability of the United States to win the war. In one of history's finest ironies, the signatures on a patent filed on the US government's behalf for a method to set off a hydrogen bomb were those of two Los Alamos colleagues, John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British citizen who, as a spy for the Soviet Union, gave the Russians crucial information about first the atomic and later the hydrogen bomb.
As if the Manhattan Project wasn't enough to keep him busy, my father made a secret trip to England in 1943 to apply his game theory to the problem of sweeping highly sophisticated German mines from the English Channel. This last assignment was extremely dangerous: not only was there the possibility of being blown out of the sky on the flight over or killed by a bomb in ravaged London, but there was also the danger of being taken prisoner should the Germans manage to invade Britain. With this latter exposure in mind, he was temporarily assigned a high military rank, so that he would fall under the rules of the Geneva Convention for officers if taken prisoner. The ever-present danger did not, however, prevent him from including the latest additions to his store of dirty limericks in the letters he wrote to his wife back in Princeton. All of them were clever, but most of them were not as clean as this one.
There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time.
When asked, “why the third?”
He said, “One's absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”
All this activity meant that my vacation visits with my father were somewhat catch-as-catch-can as long as the war lasted.
The other half of the Princeton household, my father's new wife Klari, was an excellent writer, even in the English she learned only as a teenager at a British boarding school, and a remarkably perceptive observer of people. The chapter in her autobiography entitled “Johnny” captures the many aspects of my father's complex personality as no one else could. “I would like to tell about the man,” she begins, “the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions—an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved.”2
Sadly, Klari was also profoundly insecure and intensely neurotic, as the letters my father wrote to her during their engagement attest. Her view of herself in relation to the world around her is reflected in the title she chose for her autobiography: “A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass.” From the very beginning of their relationship, this insecurity had imposed an enormous burden of constant reassurance on my father, one that continued to be reflected in the many letters he wrote to her during his frequent trips away from home during and after the war: “You are scared. Your fear is only to a very small extent based on reality…You are not old, you are attractive.”3 Apologies for some perceived misbehavior on his part and pleas for her forgiveness were also a recurring theme: “Why do we fight when we are together? I love you. Do you loathe me very violently? Let's forgive each other!”4 These outpourings continued even when he knew that he was dying: “Let's not quarrel. Believe me, I love you and more than ever before.”5
Despite the fact that her formal education had ended with high school, Klari wasted no time in finding a way to partner with my father in one aspect of his all-consuming work. As he was developing the modern stored-program computer, he trained her, at her request, to become one of the original programmers, writing instructions for different computational tasks in a form that the machine could understand. She was a quick study, and I remember the flowcharts she produced, filled with rectangles and arrows and circles, on huge sheets of white paper that spilled over onto the floor. The Princeton household, like the one in Cambridge, was totally consumed in the job of winning the war. And, by failing to pay attention and never learning to make sense of Klari's flowcharts, I passed up completely the unique opportunity to become an early expert in computer programming. To this day, I'm profoundly ignorant of what is going on inside my desktop computer, or how to fix it when something goes awry.
From my vantage point, the adults saw the war as an onerous task that required maximum effort from everyone, but one in which we would ultimately be successful. I knew nothing of the extent to which European civilization was being destroyed by the horrors inflicted on huge swaths of civilian populations—Jews, Poles, Russians—by the Nazis and their allies. It never occurred to me, listening to the conversations that swirled around me, that the conflict would end any way other than with a victory for our side. I was startled to learn years later, from old copies of Life magazine when I was helping to clean out my father's Princeton home after his death, that in the dark days of 1943 an Allied victory was by no means assured.
By the spring and summer of 1945, the job was finished. Although the radar and other electronic technology developed and produced at RadLab had played an important role in the Allied bombing attacks that inflicted huge damage on Germany's industrial structure and civilian population, it was the capture of Berlin by Russian infantry that brought about Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, V-E Day. My friends and I joined in the shouting and hugging and banging of pots and pans in the streets until dark, when my mother, fearing for my safety in the general crush, made me come inside.
Although the war in the Pacific still raged, the general sentiment was that the outcome wa
s a foregone conclusion. The big question, we learned later, was whether the United States should proceed with an invasion of Japan, which was sure to produce enormous casualties on both sides, or take the shortcut offered by the fearful new weapon my father and his colleagues had developed at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb. President Harry Truman authorized the dropping of two such bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a week later World War II was truly over.
I don't recall, though, the same unalloyed jubilation in August that had filled the streets in May. Whether this feeling of anticlimax arose from a sense that the issue was no longer whether we would win but when, or whether relief was clouded by a sense of foreboding regarding the new and terrible weapon we had unleashed, I don't know. But for one young lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, who had just received orders to leave for the Pacific as navigator, photographer, and nose gunner on one of the B-29s that would fly over Japan to map it for the invasion, there was no ambiguity. Facing an assignment in which the mortality rate was said to be 70 percent, Robert Whitman—the man who would become my husband a decade later—felt certain that the bomb had saved his life.
With its job completed, RadLab was disbanded and its scientists dispersed to old jobs or new ones. My mother and Desmond found jobs in New York, she doing for the Sperry Gyroscope Company the same kind of training of women technicians that she had pioneered at RadLab, he as a department head at the Federal Communications Laboratory. There was a severe housing shortage, but my mother, master networker that she was, managed through friends to ensconce us, in return for paying the annual tax bill, in the unoccupied brownstone mansion of an oil millionaire.
The house, fully furnished, reeked of the grandeur of a vanished age. The kitchen and dining room were just below ground level; the front steps led up to a first floor fully occupied by a reception room and a grand ballroom complete with crystal chandeliers and Louis XVI furniture. The master bedroom, sitting room, and bath were just above; then there were two more floors, each with two bedrooms and a bath, with the degree of luxury declining as one ascended successive flights of stairs. There was no elevator, but a small rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter was available for delivering necessities from the kitchen. The house stood on the corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Frick Museum, and was an ideal vantage point for viewing the many colorful parades that passed beneath our windows.
Just as we were settling down to life in the big city and my mother and Desmond into their new jobs, my mother's reputation as a hostess, facilitator, networker, and people motivator led to a truly extraordinary job offer. A group of eminent physicists, led by I. I. Rabi of Columbia, had conceived the idea of a government-funded laboratory to do peacetime research in a variety of areas of physics and the nuclear sciences. The new entity would be managed by a consortium of universities and have as its core a nuclear reactor to be built in an as yet unspecified location near New York City.
The scientists and science administrators representing the nine participating universities quickly set out on a search for their first employee, a jack-of-all-trades (or a jill) who “would have to do everything: secretarial work, serving as liaison with [General] Groves and top-ranking scientists, investigating Columbia's government contract to see what costs it covered, and setting up the machinery to run the IUG [Initiatory University Group] accordingly.”6 It didn't take them long to find Mariette Kövesi von Neumann Kuper. Her dense network of friends and acquaintances in the world of physics, her I-can-do-anything self-confidence, and her irresistible charm, fortified by her exotic Hungarian accent—throughout her life, thick and thin became sick and sin on her tongue—made her the ideal choice.
My mother's first task in the challenging job she had accepted with alacrity was to figure out how to get herself officially on the employment rolls, obtain security clearance, and generate a paycheck. That done, she launched herself on a career as senior administrator, confidante, housemother, and chief of protocol of the as yet unnamed laboratory, a career that would end only with her health-enforced retirement twenty-eight years later. Shortly after taking the job, she set out with a subcommittee of the IUG to find a site for the new venture.
Nuclear reactors do not sit well with neighbors, so a location with lots of empty space around it was essential. Various possibilities were eliminated, one by one, until only Camp Upton, an army base located in Yaphank, Long Island, some sixty miles from New York City, remained. When my mother and the new venture's only other employee went to look at Camp Upton, most recently a prisoner of war camp, they found that “Their future business address was a muddy army camp in the middle of rural Long Island, with pitched tents, temporary wood shacks, and drafty barracks with broken windows.”7 It required a stout heart and a vivid imagination not to be discouraged.
Nothing could dampen my mother's enthusiasm for her new job, though. In a radio interview she gave shortly after the new enterprise was under way, she described her response to the job offer: “I broke into what could best be described as a new type of Indian Victory Dance…Who wouldn't be exuberant when privileged to be in on the birth of a new venture which would have as far-reaching significance as I now know Brookhaven National Laboratory will have.”8
Asked what impact she thought her job was having on her children (a standard question put to working women in those days), she replied, “As a mother, I consider myself unusually fortunate. When my children hear the words ‘atomic energy,’ their minds do not immediately jump to ‘the bomb’…My seven-year-old is not building an atomic pile to blow up the neighborhood. Instead he pretends to treat the sick cat with radiation…My thirteen-year-old daughter commented to me ‘…Mother, I am glad you are not making hats, designing clothes, or other stuff like that. I like your job much better…’ I am quite sure that the men who were smart enough to make the atom bomb will be smart enough to use it for something which is not only used in war, and I am glad we are all in on it.”9
In a high-school graduation speech delivered that same year, she elaborated on the need for the younger generation to be actively involved in world affairs. Citing the mistake her own generation had made in believing, after World War I, that if “each nation paid strict attention to its own business…there would be no more war,” she urged her listeners “to take an active, living interest in these two things, government and science.”10 The lessons of their youth were never far from the minds of either of my parents. My stepfather soon joined my mother in the new venture, first as a consultant and later as a department head. But until the site could be cleared and the necessary structures built, Brookhaven National Laboratory operated out of offices at Columbia University. So we stayed on for a year or so in our elegant digs in the heart of New York City. My new school was as dull and stuffy as Shady Hall had been open and stimulating. And the independence I had been so proud of in Cambridge now marked me as an outsider. I soon discovered that I was the only girl in the fifth grade who made it to school—a distance of three blocks—without either a chauffeur or a nanny.
While I was plodding my way dutifully but unenthusiastically through school days, intellectual stimulus arrived from an unexpected source. George Gamow, a brilliant physicist who was a friend of both my parents, had embarked on writing what he thought would be a book on modern science for children. After he had finished a draft of the first section, he looked around for a real child to try it out on and settled on me. I adored Gamow, a wild-haired Russian who suited perfectly a child's vision of a mad scientist, and I worked hard to carry out the task he set me. I spent evenings and weekends making notes on all the things I didn't understand, which was just about everything.
Gamow's acknowledgment in the preface to the published version of One, Two, Three, Infinity describes the outcome of my labors: “Above all my thanks are due to my young friend, Marina von Neumann, who claims that she knows everything better than her famous father does, except, of course, mathematics, which she says she knows only equally well. After she had read in ma
nuscript some of the chapters of the book, and told me about numerous things in it which she could not understand, I finally decided that this book is not for children as I had originally intended it to be.”11
This well-intentioned bit of teasing, aimed at my father as much as me, was to cause me painful embarrassment when, as a high-school senior, I started dating Princeton freshmen who read Gamow's book as a textbook. Talk about a reputation as a bluestocking—a female egghead—scaring off the men! But when it was published, I was only eleven. Concerns about boys and dating had not yet entered my head, and I was proud and delighted by such public recognition of my efforts.
My father may not have been a constant presence in my life during my first twelve years, but he clearly adored me and worked hard to create and maintain a father-daughter intimacy. His concern on this score had shown even in the letters he wrote to Klari soon after his separation and divorce from my mother, when I was a toddler: “Marina came over…she loved all the postcards I sent…she told me she put on her beautiful rosy dress for me.”12 And “In my role as a father I have some success because Marina shows some sentimentality toward myself.”13
Once I could read, my father wrote to me often, and his letters were filled with terms of endearment and expressions of affection. They contained, as well, constant reminders of the relentlessly high expectations he held for my academic performance. Regarding one of my sixth-grade report cards, he notes, “I saw your report, I am very glad that you have shown in French and mathematics that you can do it well, but what about English?”14 Nothing short of perfection would satisfy him, and it didn't take me long to internalize those standards. Oddly enough, though, his demands didn't cause me particular stress during my precollege years because I loved learning new things, was both very competitive and very successful where school was concerned, and found meeting his expectations an enjoyable challenge.
Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Page 6