Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  During all the time that I was going to graduate school and embarking on motherhood, I was in a constant state of anxiety about my husband's career prospects. I nagged him constantly to write more and publish faster in order to enhance his chances for promotion in a department that put a heavy emphasis on scholarly output. But Bob, who preferred to let his ideas germinate at their own pace before committing them to paper, and who devoted as much care and time to the preparation of a lecture for his students as on research for his next journal article, felt that I was trying to impose on him priorities different from his own.

  Having grown up in two households where emotions were quick to surface in shouts and arguments, it took me a while to realize that Bob's New England reserve was suppressing the tension and unhappiness created by my nagging. I, on the other hand, assumed that his lack of overt response meant that he didn't share my concerns, increasing my fears about the future. If he didn't get the promotion required for tenure, he would have to leave Princeton, and heaven knows where we would end up. Perhaps my father's fears about exile in some academic outpost, far from the world with which I was familiar and offering little or no professional opportunities for me, might come true.

  As it turned out, Bob didn't get tenure at Princeton and had to start looking for a job somewhere else. Over the next few months, he received several job offers and decided to accept one at the University of Pittsburgh, whose ambitious new chancellor, backed by Mellon money, was determined to raise it from a largely commuter school to national status as a research university. My mother, who believed, along with the New Yorker magazine, that civilization stopped at the Hudson River, was appalled. She asked if I would come back to New York to buy my clothes. But I took comfort from the fact that we were going to a good-sized city with several universities, offering the possibility of interesting friends and decent opportunities for me.

  One of the first things I discovered about my new hometown was that it didn't deserve its bad rap. Like almost everyone else, I had an image of Pittsburgh as the city where coal-fired steel mills and home furnaces belched smoke that produced actual “darkness at noon” on winter days. Stories about executives going through two white shirts a day and housewives washing their window curtains every week were legion. My own memory of Pittsburgh, where my father and I had spent a night on the homeward leg of our cross-country car trip in 1946, was of a darkened sky and black smoke belching from the “dark satanic mills” that ringed the city's downtown.

  By 1960, though, Pittsburgh had undergone the first of several transformations: a drastic cleanup of its polluted atmosphere. What emerged from the murk was a very livable city that converged on a compact downtown located at a point where two rivers, the Allegheny and Monongahela, meet to form the Ohio. Approached from the west, the first view of the city as one emerged from the Fort Pitt tunnel onto the Fort Pitt bridge was—and is—positively stunning: a city bordered by rivers, with high hills on one side and a downtown of landmark corporate headquarters, which became increasingly elegant as the building boom progressed, on the other.

  By the time moving day came, I had started to look on the bright side: we were starting the next chapter of our lives in a new city, where no one knew me or my family. “Here's the first chance I've ever had to establish myself as my own person, on a blank slate rather than a template formed by other people's expectations,” I told myself. It was an exhilarating thought. As for my own next steps toward a career, as I commented years later, “I had this kind of innocent, sublime self-confidence that something would turn up.”4

  We had been in town only a few weeks when unexpected good fortune walked into our lives in the form of Josephine Pierce. Josephine was a divorced African American single mother of two school-age daughters, girls who called her faithfully every day when they got home from school. It seemed perfectly natural to both of us that she should take on the washing, ironing, and housecleaning, on top of taking full charge of first one and later two small children while Bob and I were at work—a set of duties that would require two or three different people today. She stayed with us for twenty-three years, even moving with us to California, Washington, and Princeton, once her daughters were grown. By the time she retired our own children were adults and, sadly, she was in some ways the only child left, having suffered a series of small strokes that neither she nor we were aware of. In the days before widespread day care, I could never have achieved my twin goals of career and motherhood without such loyal assistance.

  While I was still in the midst of finishing my dissertation, I met Benjamin Chinitz, a senior faculty member in the economics department at the University of Pittsburgh. Ben was teaching a course in econometrics at the time and asked me if I would be his teaching assistant. Although my knowledge of econometrics could have gone through the proverbial eye of the needle and left room for the thread, I saw the offer as an interesting challenge, as well as a potential learning experience, and said yes. By dint of some late nights poring over the textbook, I managed to stay a chapter ahead of the students and apparently did a good enough job to persuade Ben to offer me a much more ambitious assignment.

  Ben was not only a professor of economics; he was also codirector of an ambitious multiyear study of the economy of the six-county Pittsburgh region, which was beset by a steady decline in employment in the steel industry, the traditional core of its economy. Money for the project was running short, and the academic economists who had been brought together in Pittsburgh to do the research were scattering back to their home institutions before the final volume of the study, a forecast of the region's economic future, had been written. Desperate to finish the project within their rapidly shrinking budget, Ben and his codirector, Ed Hoover, took a chance on an unknown with a PhD completed only a few months previously (in 1962). They asked me if I would be willing to pull together the pieces of the forecast, the work of several different researchers, into a coherent volume.

  Never one to just say no to a new challenge (my stepfather Desmond once said I needed “a chastity belt for the mouth”), I took on what all three of us thought would be a fairly simple job of assembling and editing the material. Actually, the task was more complicated; I had to do most of the writing and even fill in some of the gaps in the research. I was driven to the edge of despair several times, but the book, Region with a Future, was completed and published in 1963.5 The two directors of the project were relieved and delighted that I had been able to pull it off. And I could say, only half jokingly, that I written one more book in the field of regional economics than I had read.

  With that project completed, Ed Hoover and Ben Chinitz returned to full-time teaching at Pitt, and they took me along with them into my first academic job, as a part-time lecturer teaching the introductory course in international economics to evening students. Most of these people, all men and usually in midcareer, came to class after a full day's work, and it wasn't easy to hold their attention. The fact that I was female, and younger than any of them, made it all the harder to establish my classroom authority.

  Just as the first class began, a tall, gray-haired man near the front said, “Excuse me, but are you the teacher?” My yes was followed by a pause. Then he blurted out, “Oh. You see, at U.S. Steel, we don't pay women to think.” Covered with confusion, he tried unsuccessfully to backtrack. I'm sure he blamed his mediocre grade in the course on that revealing gaffe, but I hadn't taken it personally. He had simply stated a fact; an accurate reflection of the culture that prevailed, not only at U.S. Steel, but at other big industrial firms as well. And Pittsburgh, then one of the country's main manufacturing centers, had cleaned up its air but not its social structure, represented not only by its attitude toward women but by the fact that it was a town divided into bosses and workers; there wasn't a group of middle-class professionals large enough to buffer the city's “us against them” mentality. Up until that moment, I had studied and worked in academic environments. When the man from U.S. Steel blurted out his surprise, t
he extent of male domination in the “real world” hit me full force.

  With a toddler at home and now another child on the way, I found part-time teaching was just the right amount of professional involvement. But on the first day of the fall term in 1963, the senior professor in my field dropped dead of a heart attack in the departmental office. Desperate to fill the holes in the teaching schedule, and without knowing that I was pregnant, Ben, the department chairman, asked me to change my status from part-time lecturer to full-time assistant professor and take on the two courses now without a teacher. With some misgivings, but with the “I can tackle anything” enthusiasm of youth, I agreed. It turned out that hiring the spouse of a faculty member into a full-time position violated the university's strict nepotism rules, but by the time the bureaucrats in the personnel department noticed I was settled into my courses, and no one wanted to do battle with the economics department to dislodge me.

  The course I was most excited about was one on the interactions between international trade and economic development that I developed and taught with a friend and colleague, Jerry Wells, who had spent several years in Nigeria doing field research for his PhD. Jerry and I both were committed to the idea that being open to economic relationships with other countries was a distinct plus for countries trying to mount the ladder of economic development. Ours was a contrarian view; the theory of development popular at the time called for government dominance of economic activity, high import barriers, and an economy as self-sufficient as possible. We were ahead of the curve, but the mainstream began to move gradually in our direction. And we pulled at least some of our students along with us, although we didn't find out how successful we'd been till decades later. One of the most radical and anticapitalist of those students, who later became a distinguished professor and department chairman at Bryn Mawr, teaching courses in business, as well as economics, wrote me that “the seminar the two of you taught changed my life.”

  While Bob and I were settling into our family and professional lives in Pittsburgh, all hell was breaking loose in the world around us. Two events in 1961 escalated the temperature of the Cold War with the Soviet Union: President Kennedy's failed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba through the Bay of Pigs; and the Soviets' construction of the Berlin Wall, which isolated the population in the eastern part of the city from their counterparts on the western side. The Cold War very nearly boiled over into a hot one the following year, when American ships blockaded Cuban ports in order to prevent the Russians from placing missiles with atomic warheads in that country, only sixty miles from US shores. I walked into Ed Hoover's office when we got the news, to ask him if he thought this meant the onset of atomic war. Ed, ever calm, was reassuring, but it was a couple of days before the nation was sure that the Soviets had backed down.

  Worse was yet to come. I was sitting under a hair dryer on the Friday before Thanksgiving 1963, heavily pregnant with our second child, when word came that President Kennedy had been shot. As our disbelief was gradually replaced with horrified acceptance, my colleagues and I wandered around the department offices in a daze, trying to figure out how to respond to a national tragedy far beyond our experience. At home, Bob and I struggled to explain to four-year-old Malcolm what had happened. He found the permanence of death a hard concept to absorb and, at one point, shouted triumphantly, “Mommy, Daddy, he isn't dead; I just saw him on TV.”

  In the days that followed, Jack Ruby emerged from obscurity to shoot and kill John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in full view of millions of Americans glued to their television sets. And, in La Jolla, California, my father's widow, my stepmother Klari, now remarried to a research physicist, fulfilled her father's legacy of suicide by walking into the Pacific Ocean to her death. Sadly, there could be no question as to her intentions. In ruling that her death was attributable to “suicide by drowning,” the Coroner's Office of San Diego County noted that the skirt of her elegant black cocktail dress had been rolled up to hold “approximately 15 pounds of wet sand.”6

  Although her emotional demands had driven my father crazy throughout most of their marriage, Klari had turned into a dedicated caretaker, closely attuned to his needs, exhausting herself both physically and emotionally after he fell ill. I had hoped that in her marriage to the gentle, low-key Carl Eckart she would at last find the tranquility that had eluded her throughout her life. For a time, she thought she had. In one draft of her autobiography, she describes her life in California: “I have met and made friends with many new people, I also get to see many of my old pals, Carl works at his desk, I swim and loaf and, for the first time in my life, I have relaxed and stopped chasing rainbows.”7

  I will never know what happened to move Klari from satisfaction to suicide. Whatever it was, her death revived my guilt at having unwittingly contributed to her deep-seated insecurity, by rejecting her efforts to serve as a stand-in for my mother during my teenage years. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, the pileup of tragedies made the idea of a day commemorating our blessings seem like a cruel irony.

  True to her academic heritage, Laura Whitman was born during Christmas vacation, on January 3, 1964. Her timing allowed me to finish the teaching term, despite my mother-in-law's admonitions against exposing myself to “the young people” in such a delicate condition—then a common view among the older generation. From the start, Laura was a placid and cheerful baby; a good thing since, thanks to her brother's vulnerability to childhood illnesses, the circumstances surrounding her arrival were anything but.

  Just before Christmas, Malcolm had come down with chicken pox. My obstetrician told me, first, that my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, who was visiting for the holidays, might contract the disease in the form of painful shingles and, second, that if I hadn't had chicken pox and did contract it, the baby might actually be born with it, which meant I certainly wouldn't be allowed to deliver at the maternity hospital. Fortunately, I did have the disease in childhood, and Laura was born in Magee-Women's Hospital without incident.

  On the day that she and I came home from the hospital, though, Malcolm developed scarlet fever. He wasn't dangerously ill, but it meant that an infant who was fed every six hours had to be awakened to take a preventive dose of penicillin every four, rendering her parents even more sleepless than usual. Malcolm topped off the plague-house syndrome by coming down with German measles when his sister was less than a month old. It was a mild illness but dangerous to the fetuses of pregnant women, and no vaccine was yet available, so I thought it might not be a bad idea for Laura to get it over with early in life. My mother-in-law was horrified at the idea, and, despite my efforts to expose her, Laura remained robustly healthy.

  When I returned to teaching from maternity leave, the economics department had a new chairman. Mark Perlman was an economist with an impressively broad knowledge of history, literature, and philosophy, in addition to his own field. He was also a deeply religious Conservative Jew, who viewed the world through a moralistic lens without the narrow-mindedness that is so often associated with the word. The formality of his dress and manner of speech was leavened by the brightly colored bow ties he habitually wore and by sudden, surprising bursts of humor.

  Mark was a wise and generous professional mentor to me, the first person who took seriously my goal of climbing the academic ladder, and gave me practical advice on how to go about it. He asked me to spend a year as the department's associate chairman, handling all the applications for graduate admissions and financial aid, while he got his bearings in a new environment. In return, he promised to guide and encourage me through the steps required for promotion. He was as good as his word; within two years of his arrival I was promoted to associate professor and received the lifetime job security of tenure that went with it.

  At a time when women were first entering this man's world, managing my relationships with male colleagues was not always so smooth. Over several years, I wrote a series of articles with a somewhat younger junior colleague. As coauthors, ou
r skills were complementary: I was good at formulating ideas about how international monetary interactions worked, and he had the statistical skills needed to test how well these hypotheses fitted the facts. But after we'd been working together for a while, he started touching me “accidentally” and hinting that we should make our relationship more than professional. “Back off,” I growled. When he didn't take the hint, I told him that he would have to behave or our collaboration would stop. Our joint articles, which appeared in several leading economics journals, were an important part of the publications portfolio he needed to be promoted to tenure, so my threat had the desired effect. But this was neither the first nor the last time, beginning with my evasive action to keep my senior thesis adviser at Radcliffe at bay, that I had to use my wits to keep relationships with male colleagues from straying off the reservation.

  As I was climbing the academic ladder at the University of Pittsburgh, Bob was moving upward a couple of rungs ahead of me. Recruited as an assistant professor in 1960, by 1967 he had become both a full professor and chairman of the English department, having published a well-received book on dramatic literature the preceding year. During the four-plus years of his chairmanship, he rejuvenated that department, recruiting a number of talented young PhDs from leading universities, many of whom became widely recognized scholars during their careers at Pitt.