Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  Bob responded that if rebaptism was a requirement for us to be married in the church of my choice, he would go through with it, but he would regard it as a meaningless ritual. The rector was, naturally, appalled, and at our next session he reported triumphantly that he had obtained permission from the bishop to waive the rebaptism requirement. When Bob told this story to his mother several years later, she burst out laughing. It turned out that, although he had been raised a Unitarian, he had been baptized in the Congregational Church, which was acceptably Trinitarian, so the whole imbroglio had been totally unnecessary.

  Every detail of our very traditional ceremony seemed perfect: I wore my mother's heirloom Brussels lace veil, attended by six bridesmaids in the excessively bouffant pastel (in my case pink) dresses that were the fashion of the day. And the mountain laurel was in full bloom at the reception, held on the patio and in the garden of my mother's home with its stunning view of Long Island Sound. But there was one painfully discordant note. Although my father couldn't be there, his mother, my beloved Granny Gitta, was. The guests were shocked, though, that as we were reciting our vows, she turned her back to the altar. She died of cancer herself a few months after the wedding, and those who saw it tried to attribute her peculiar behavior to the fact that she was already ill. But I believe she knew exactly what she was doing: exhibiting a silent protest at the joyous ceremony that was taking place as her oldest and favorite son was dying. Fortunately, my back was to her as I faced the altar, so I didn't learn of her silent protest until much later, when it could no longer mar the joy of the day.

  After I changed into the matching blue and white dress, coat, and remarkably unbecoming hat that constituted my going-away outfit, Bob and I ran down the front steps of the Villa Francesca through a shower of rice. Our wedding trip consisted of a hurried one-day drive to Camp Chewonki in Maine, where Bob would be in charge of the junior division of the camp. Only the dead fish that my brother and Bob Ganz had thoughtfully wired to the car radiator as a going-away gift marked us as newlyweds. It was discovered when we stopped for gas and asked the attendant to track down the source of the odd smell coming from under the hood of the car.

  Our summer as Mama and Papa Woodchuck to a bunch of eight- to ten-year-old boys took the place of a honeymoon, which would have to wait until we could afford it. But, in an odd way, that summer served as a kind of prolonged honeymoon, by providing an interlude that postponed the beginning of real married life together, with its attendant routines, roles, and responsibilities. It also gave us the leisure and privacy to explore together, for the first time, the delights of sexual intimacy.

  The camp provided us with our own little cabin off in the woods and excused Bob from having to spend more than a few nights in a cabin with the campers. His duties were not onerous and left us with a good deal of time together, without any of the pressures of a career-oriented job. We ate all three meals every day in the camp dining room, consuming institutional food in a huge hall filled with more than a hundred shouting, jumping, food-tossing boys. But it postponed for a couple of months the need to test my nonexistent cooking skills. My housekeeping consisted mainly of sweeping out our tiny cabin with a broom, and about all the camp expected of me was to give the nurse an occasional hand in the infirmary and, once in a while, drive into town on an errand. I was also asked to give a weekly bath to some of the junior boys, but that job came to naught when the boys protested violently. Somehow they sensed that I wasn't a legitimate stand-in for their mothers.

  All in all, I had plenty of time to write thank-you letters for wedding presents and think about what the future held. I was determined to make a success of my brand new marriage without the tensions I saw in those of both my parents, and Bob and I definitely wanted to have children. At the same time, I knew my father was right. Unlike most of my classmates and female contemporaries, I also wanted a career that would carry the opportunity for both high impact and high earnings. But I hadn't the slightest idea what that career would be or how to go about finding it.

  You Can't Go Home Again

  “I regret, Mrs. Whitman, that it is impossible for us to accept a student of your caliber into our graduate program, but we just don't have facilities to accommodate women students.” With this apology for its lack of sufficient bathrooms for women, Princeton's president shot down my plan to begin graduate work in economics at the university where my father had begun his American career and my husband was now teaching. Frustrated and furious, I couldn't foresee that the world of the 1950s, reflected in President Dodds's response, would be swept away by seismic changes in the national culture before the next decade was over, opening up new opportunities for me. Even less could I imagine the public violence and serial assassinations that would mark these changes' bloody birth.

  Arriving in Princeton after our honeymoon summer, Bob at last carried his bride over the threshold. As we kissed, I tried to hide my dismay at my first glimpse of our new home, a sharp contrast to the large, gracious one of my Princeton adolescence. I was standing in the visible, tangible evidence of our lowly status on the academic totem pole, a cramped apartment far on the other side of town, in a group of wooden military barracks (bachelor officers' quarters, Bob insisted, but the distinction was lost on me) hastily constructed on the university's polo fields during World War II. They had been built to last only as long as the war did. Instead of tearing them down, though, Princeton took them over and today, more than sixty-five years after the war's end, married graduate students and members of the university's maintenance staff still inhabit both the original buildings, shored up with aluminum siding, as well as look-alike new ones built to house the overflow.

  The apartment's two miniscule bedrooms—one served as Bob's study—had no doors; we separated them from the living room with sackcloth curtains hung on wooden poles. The floors were cement, painted red, and the bathroom, which housed a grimy galvanized metal shower along with a sink and toilet, was cut off from the living room by a louvered door that let every sound through. The paper-thin walls that separated our unit from the one next door made us an unwilling audience for our neighbors' constant fights and the orders and admonitions they barked at their children. And, as we were trying to get to sleep, we could watch the smoke from their cigarettes curl over the top of the wall that separated our bedroom from theirs.

  Most daunting of all was a large black kerosene heater, the only source of heat, which sat against a living-room wall. The previous occupants of our apartment had installed a gravity feed, bringing the kerosene in from outside; without it, we would have had to go outdoors every morning and carry in the day's supply in a bucket. This convenience feature very nearly caused my premature demise. On the first cool day, I flipped the switch on the heater to activate it. When nothing had happened after several hours, I called Bob at his office to complain and ask for advice. “Well,” he asked, “did you light it with a match?” I'd never before encountered a furnace that required a match but said I'd go do it immediately. “Good Lord, no,” he shouted. “Don't touch anything, and I'll come home right away.” When he did, he bailed several cooking-pots full of kerosene out of the heater, enough to have burned the place down if I had tossed in a lighted match.

  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the incongruity as I set out our elaborate wedding presents, heavy on sterling silver and leaded crystal, against this drab background. But I got a new perspective when my mother brought as guests a family of Hungarian refugees, including two teenagers. The four, led by their sixteen-year-old son, had risked their lives to walk across the Austro-Hungarian border in the midst of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and had wound up in a hastily established refugee camp at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Fresh from communist Hungary and several stopovers as refugees, the whole family couldn't stop exclaiming how wonderful it must be to start off married life in such a cozy apartment of our own. Seeing it through their eyes gave me a new appreciation of our surroundings.

  Our summer as Mama and Papa
Woodchuck had postponed a test of my abilities as a homemaker, but now that honeymoon was over. Things had gotten off to a bad start on our first morning together in Princeton, when I attempted to make coffee for my husband, even though I never drank it myself. He thought the result had a rather peculiar taste but attributed it to the exotic Hungarian brand of coffee my grandmother had given us at the end of our brief visit to Washington. Only as I was washing the dishes did I discover that every drop had been filtered through the cardboard packing that I had neglected to remove from our new coffeemaker.

  Like many university towns, Princeton had more bright, well-educated young faculty wives than there were interesting jobs for them. In the usually brief interim between marriage and motherhood, these women were expected to occupy themselves with “little jobs,” most of which were excruciatingly boring and made inadequate use of their intelligence and education. I considered myself fortunate to have been hired as an administrative assistant in the planning department of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the producer of the College Boards and a variety of exams required for graduate school admission. But I soon chafed at the vague, ill-defined nature of my job and the fact that I was sent off to perform technical tasks, like time-motion studies, for which I had absolutely no expertise. I felt both that my talents were being underutilized and that I wasn't doing a very good job on the assignments I was given.

  Most of my friends from high school had moved away by the time I returned to Princeton, and my father's friends belonged to a different generation, so our social life tended to center on the English Department faculty. A few of the other junior newcomers became good friends, but the Princeton English Department was not a very welcoming place to our small cohort. Many of the older members of the faculty had started teaching at Princeton when it was a traditional WASP institution that reflected its southern origins—most of the town's black residents were the descendants of slaves that undergraduates had brought to college with them before the Civil War. That ambience was reflected in the stir created when, the same year we arrived, the English Department hired Princeton's first black faculty member.

  Some of the senior faculty members, with private sources of wealth, owned elegant homes, while others rented one of the large Tudor houses that had been built for Princeton faculty decades earlier. They were an ingrown, clubby group, without the cosmopolitan diversity that had characterized my father's intellectual circle. I was relieved to learn that the wives of senior faculty members had recently abandoned the tradition of a formal visit to newcomers, with white gloves and calling cards. Being condescended to by people who would have sold their souls to be invited to one of the von Neumann cocktail parties while I was growing up would have been bitter medicine.

  By the time Bob and I arrived in Princeton, my father had already been in Walter Reed Hospital for several months. He and Klari had moved to Washington when he became a member of the AEC, and he continued to try to carry out his duties as his physical condition steadily worsened. Knowing that time was short, Admiral Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, saw to it that my father was awarded two of our nation's highest honors. He went in a wheelchair to the Oval Office, where President Eisenhower presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As the president was pinning the medal on him, my father commented, “I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor.” “You will be with us for a long time,” the president replied, glossing over the obvious, “we need you.”1 That same year, 1956, my father became the first recipient of the government's highest accolade in science and technology, the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award.

  Despite his illness and the overly full schedule demanded by his AEC appointment and his membership on a number of military advisory committees, my father somehow managed to find time to start preparing his Silliman lectures, a prestigious series originally scheduled to be given at Yale in the spring of 1956. This project was particularly important to him because in it he extended the insights that had made the development of the modern computer possible into what was for him a totally new area, neurobiology. The lectures were to be a comparison between the logical processes of the human brain and those of the stored-program computer.

  When he entered Walter Reed Hospital for the last time, in April of 1956, the notes for these lectures went with him, and when I visited him that same month he gave me bits and pieces of his ideas. I found these conversations an enormous relief, a positive note in his world, which was becoming increasingly dark. And they helped us avoid a discussion of personal matters, especially my approaching wedding, which gave him so much mental anguish and me such a deep feeling of guilt at being the cause of it. It is one thing for a daughter to defy a father who is in good health, quite another to defy one who is dying.

  The Silliman lectures remained unfinished because, as Klari put it in her touching preface to the published version, eventually “even Johnny's exceptional mind could not overcome the weariness of the body.”2 But the unfinished manuscript set forth the reasons for his conclusion that the brain's method of operation is fundamentally different from that of the computer; that while the computer's “von Neumann architecture” means that it operates sequentially, one step at a time, the human brain is “massively parallel,” that is, it performs an enormous number of operations simultaneously. Increasingly intensive explorations in neuroscience over the last fifty-plus years have shown this insight to be not only pioneering but prescient. One of my father's most overwhelming fears as he lay dying was that his work would not endure and he would be forgotten; the unfinished Silliman lectures are but the final addition to a body of work that has given the lie to his fears, though too late for consolation.

  We had been in Princeton only a few months when, in February 1957, my father died. Many of his friends and colleagues had been amazed when, a few months before his death, he had expressed a desire to return to the Catholic Church, in which he had been baptized many years before, and asked for the assistance of a Catholic priest. He and Father Anselm Strittmatter, a Benedictine monk, spent many hours together while he could still communicate, and even after he fell silent. His brother, my uncle Nicholas, believed that his request arose primarily out of a desire to talk about the world of Greece and Rome with a fellow classics scholar, but I knew differently. My father had told me more than once that Catholicism was a difficult religion to live in but the best one to die in. Terrified of his own mortality, he found comfort in the promise of personal immortality in an afterlife. Although I didn't share that belief, I had never argued with him about it; I was grateful that he could find some comfort in the midst of his despair.

  The funeral mass, held in the chapel of Walter Reed Hospital, was attended by a considerable array of the city's notables and scientific colleagues from around the country. In his homily, Father Anselm spoke eloquently of my father's inquietude of soul: “But as he came more and more to realize that the control over the physical forces of nature which he and his co-workers had placed in the hands of their fellow men could be used for evil as well as for good, that as the world is moving today this control might quite possibly be used for destruction rather than up-building, he felt with steadily increasing intensity the moral problems bound up with the greatest of scientific triumphs…It was not easy for one who had never known frustration, still less failure, to submit to the designs of an inscrutable Providence, to say ‘Thy Will be done,’ once he had come to realize that science could not check the progress of his disease.”3

  In contrast to the very public service in Washington, my father's burial next to his mother in the Princeton cemetery was a brief, quiet ceremony, attended by family and a small group of intimates, including both Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, who delivered the graveside eulogy. I was dry-eyed at both events. I had done my mourning months earlier, when the father I knew had already slipped away, leaving only a shrunken shell of a body to linger a little while longer. Although I had long known that it was coming, the finality of his death left m
e with a lingering sadness and sense of deep regret that my last conversations with my father had been marked not by the epiphany of mutual understanding that so often marks deathbed scenes in novels and plays but by tearful intransigence on my side and a profound sense of disappointment, tinged with betrayal, on his.

  During the spring following my father's death, and perhaps accelerated by it, my dissatisfaction with the job at ETS, and with the unfamiliar and humiliating second-class citizenship in Princeton's intellectual circles it represented, crystallized into the recognition that if I wanted to prepare myself for the kind of challenging and rewarding career that was a rarity for married women in the 1950s I had better go to graduate school. During my brief time in the Planning Division, I had discovered that most of the more interesting problems that crossed my desk seemed to relate to economics. Combining that interest with the enthusiasm for journalism nurtured during my college summers at the Long Islander, I decided to pursue two master's degrees, one in economics and another in journalism. The combination, I fancied, would prepare me to write insightful articles on business and economic issues for the New York Times or some equally respected journal.

  By the time these plans had crystallized in my mind my new boss at ETS, John Valentine, had been on the job only a week or two. I didn't know him very well, so it was with some embarrassment that I told him I was going to resign and become a graduate student. In a well-meaning if slightly condescending way, John tried to persuade me not to do anything so rash but rather to stay on at ETS and, if I was really serious about a long-term career, work my way up the ladder there. But I held firm; the emotional turmoil caused by my father's decline and death had only intensified my determination to equip myself for professional achievements that lived up to his, and my own, expectations, while at the same time fulfilling my commitment to a family life with my husband and our future children at its center.