But this stiff and snappish man had another face to him. “You’d think at first he was a tough, hard-bitten person,” says Charles Cummings. “He was also very kind and generous, a side he didn’t always want people to see.” As a young and middle-aged doctor, Dr. Sam squired several different Newark City Hospital nurses about Newark. He never married any of them, but he was a loyal and supportive friend right through their dotage, making his money and medical skills freely available to them and to their families. His cousin Elizabeth Shames thinks that all these relationships were platonic, and Barbara Irwin, a Newark librarian who knew Dr. Sam well, has the impression that “it was almost as if Newark City Hospital took the place of a warm family for him.”
There was something austere about Dr. Sam. When he contributed a “Timely Medical Topics” column to the Newark Evening News, he wrote it anonymously. Toward the end of his life, he walked around Newark with a camera, systematically, lot by lot, with a tax map, taking thousands of photographs of streets and houses, to record the vanishing city of his childhood. Cummings called him the Samuel Pepys of Newark. “That’s stupid,” Dr. Sam would bark, but he loved it.
DR. SAM DID not, on the balance, enjoy the seventeen years he lived with his brother, Moe, in the trim house on Roseville Avenue, but they had some pleasant times together. On their happiest days, Berg awakened first. Wearing a rubber suit, he went for a run through Branch Brook Park and then walked from Roseville, on the outskirts of Newark, to a newsstand at Broad and Market streets, in the heart of the city, where he bought two copies of the New York Times. He passed by the house to give Dr. Sam his Times, and then Berg read his paper while drinking several cups of coffee at a drugstore or a lunch counter. In nice weather, Berg would sometimes spend an entire day seated on a bench in Branch Brook Park, reading newspapers. On weekends, Dr. Sam might go on outings with him. Both liked distance walking and, side by side, they covered many paved miles of Newark and Manhattan. Once they took a walking vacation alongside the Erie Canal. In Manhattan, they might turn off the sidewalk into bookstores. Berg always preferred owning books to borrowing them from the library, and Dr. Sam indulged him. Each would choose five or ten volumes; Dr. Sam paid for them, and had them sent to Newark. When Dr. Sam came upon Lord Macaulay’s bon mot “I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading,” he copied it onto a piece of cardboard and hung it in Berg’s room. He did his best to overlook his brother’s habit of underscoring almost every line in almost every book he read with a thick dark pencil.
Berg could be thoughtful too. Dr. Sam liked to bathe before going to bed, and often fell asleep in the tepid water. Terrified that he would drown, Berg checked on his brother every few minutes, and buttonholed several of Dr. Sam’s friends and colleagues, beseeching them to convince his brother that he should take shorter baths. On a trip to Atlanta, Berg was browsing in a used-book shop when he came upon a copy of William Beaumont’s seminal 1833 text, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. Here seemed to be a treasure. Berg later told Dr. Sam what happened next. “As Moe told it to me, he acted very nonchalant, picked up two other nondescript books, and asked the dealer how much he wanted for the three. A buck. Actually, the book is so damaged as to be worthless, except to me.”
As children in Newark they had largely gone their separate ways, but as adults, in Manhattan, they pranked together. Sam would point at the top of a tall building and Berg would say, “Oh, yes, I see him.” As a crowd assembled, the Berg brothers would slip off to the side and giggle at all the dupes craning their necks for a look at nothing.
Berg was always pumping Dr. Sam for information and reading his anatomy books and medical journals. Dr. Sam saw that Berg could talk about anything from physics to geology to semantics, or he could hold forth on the origin, development, and essential characteristics of Siamese cats, as he did one day when they met a woman who owned one. Dr. Sam found that unusual things were always happening with Berg. Another time, they were riding in a taxi up Fifth Avenue when Dr. Sam noticed Berg staring fixedly out the window. Dr. Sam looked that way himself and saw a striking woman’s face staring at his brother from a taxi one lane over. At the first stop light, Berg got out of his cab, opened the door to the woman’s cab, climbed in, and drove off with her. Later, when Dr. Sam asked him about it, Berg said he had never seen the woman before.
When Dr. Sam went out with women, he would sometimes ask his date to find one for Berg. Then the foursome would set out for restaurants as far away as Long Island. Dr. Sam dated a nurse named Margaret McNamara for many years, Berg occasionally went out with the middle McNamara sister, and as for Nettie, the youngest and still a schoolgirl, Berg taught her how to swim at a public pool. It seemed to some of the women who dated them in pairs that the Berg brothers got along famously.
Berg did not find dates for his brother. Dr. Sam had sensed the sort of company Berg kept when Chico Marx joined them for dinner in California during the war, and although Berg once offhandedly offered to introduce Dr. Sam to Albert Einstein, he generally maintained a policy of keeping his brother and his friends separate. An exception was the famous Broadway restaurateur Leo Lindy. For their mother’s seventieth birthday, the brothers took Rose Berg to Lindy’s, where birthdays were a specialty. A cheesecake decorated with lighted sparklers was always carried out by a waiter while the other waiters led a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday.” All this happened on Rose Berg’s birthday party too, except that when the cake appeared, it had an escort—Leo Lindy. Setting down four glasses on the table, Lindy opened a bottle of wine, poured it himself, and toasted Rose. Dr. Sam picked up the check for the birthday party, just as he paid for his brother’s clothes, food, travel, and books. There was no question about that. Dr. Sam knew his brother was penniless. What he didn’t know was why.
On January 6, 1957, Rose Berg’s health was obviously failing as she went to bed. Her two sons spent the night taking turns sharing her bed. The next morning, she was dead. Dr. Sam described it as a peaceful death.
By the late 1950s, Dr. Sam had begun to notice stranger things. There were periods when Berg didn’t like to leave the house. Wearing a faded black kimono, with nothing on underneath it, he lolled in the one armchair he kept free of clutter, reading and napping. He didn’t take most telephone calls or reply to most letters, and he took pains to avoid people. On days when he did dress and go outside, Berg walked the Newark streets aimlessly, with a glazed, distracted look. As often as not, people who said hello to him were ignored. He took to carrying an umbrella on sunny days.
Berg had always read several afternoon newspapers, besides the morning Times, and although he was still buying them all, these days he was not reading them. Drowsiness would overcome him, his head would sag, and the paper drifted to the floor. The unread papers began to accumulate, but Berg would not hear of throwing any of them away. They were alive. “I’ll get to them” was the terse reply when Dr. Sam complained about the accumulation. Like the dust in Miss Havisham’s manse, yellowed stacks of newspapers and piles of pencil-ravaged books stole over every available surface—tables, chairs, corners, and couches. Eventually Dr. Sam was forced to do his evening leisure reading in his office waiting room, which had a separate entrance, off the front hall, from the rest of the house. In the living room, the peripatetic Moe Berg had become sedentary.
Dr. Sam could have responded to such aberrant behavior by sending Berg for a psychiatric evaluation. He did not. He had Berg’s blood tested for syphilis, and after the results came back negative, he made no further medical inquiries. He knew that his brother was acquainted with Albert Einstein, and later explained that nobody who could keep up conversations with Einstein could be experiencing the dulled faculties Dr. Sam associated with psychosis. But schizoid personalities are capable of periods of remarkable lucidity. Perhaps Dr. Sam did nothing because he was simply overwhelmed. If he was, that was understandable. The situation called for unus
ual sympathy from a man whose faculties of compassion had already been mightily extended. For Sam Berg, such sympathy was impossible, because roiling in his gut was an ambivalence about his strange and brilliant brother that had begun in childhood. As he watched his home disappear under layers of newsprint, powerful tension crackled inside him, and so did spite.
IT COULD NOT have been easy to be Moe Berg’s brother. Not only was Berg good at a great many things, he was famous for being good at a great many things. Dr. Sam, predictably enough, was jealous. He had been since boyhood. “I was the favorite of both my father and mother,” Dr. Sam liked to tell people. Not quite. He was the model Berg child, but not the favorite, and he knew it. What was never clear to him was how that could be.
Sam had been a sober, easily bullied little boy. He studied hard, and he became the kind of professional his father said he prized. Yet his parents didn’t seem to notice. They were always preoccupied with Sam’s little brother. First it was the astounding news that Berg was the rare Jew going to one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. “What the hell are you doing in Princeton?” was Dr. Sam’s response when Berg told him about it.
In March of Berg’s freshman year at Princeton, he wrote “A Sonnet on Becoming Eighteen.” It was a light bit of verse, full of references to “happy times at school,” and Berg sent his brother a copy. Dr. Sam responded with hostility. “That sonnet … that you wrote was mistitled; it should have been entitled “A Sonnet on Becoming Crazy,” he began. “It is doomed to become popular with idiots and others whose minds run in the same channels as yours.” He proceeded through a six-page letter to refer to Berg as “dysphasiatic,” “hallucinatory,” “absolutely hopeless,” and concluded with a satire of Berg’s sonnet, which reads in part: “When I reflect upon my saphead days / I think of wasted years I spent at school, / How teacher worked like hell to teach a fool …” He was always bitter, terribly so.
After Princeton came baseball. Bernard Berg didn’t talk about his son the doctor, he complained about his son the “sport.” And Rose Berg? In Dr. Sam’s words, “She exulted in Moe being a ballplayer.” Observing this, Dr. Sam took it upon himself to join forces with his father in trying to hector Berg into giving up baseball and becoming a lawyer. After the baseball crisis came one over women, or rather, one woman. While the Berg family was dividing itself on the issue of Berg’s romance with Estella Huni, Dr. Sam was falling in love with her. In 1944, he sent her a deluge of postcards while Berg ignored her. “I would have married her at the snap of a finger,” he once told Goudsmit. He was kidding himself. Estella had eyes only for Berg. She visited Dr. Sam in Newark shortly after the war to ask about Berg, and Dr. Sam told her “to have nothing to do with him.”
After Berg’s death, when people came to ask Dr. Sam about him, they were greeted by a painfully conflicted man. Sometimes he spoke with admiration for his brother, referring to him as “a cultivated, diversified man of letters.” Moments later he would be reviling him as a “fitzgo,” which, he said, meant “a young fellow, well educated, very polite, kind and courteous, but who prefers to be a bum.” Or he might explain to strangers that his brother had been “a mutation.” Dr. Sam also took to seeding conversations about his brother with descriptions of his own accomplishments. To hear him tell it, he could run faster and walk longer distances than Berg, the athlete, could, and was much more of a war hero besides. He referred to his Nagasaki assignment as “the most important military medical assignment of the century” in his letters.
Dr. Sam went to lengths to befriend his brother’s friends Sam Goudsmit and Earl Brodie, and although the catalyst for all conversations was the amazing behavior of Berg, Dr. Sam always brought matters around to himself. He sent Brodie Newark newspaper articles he’d written about himself, and made him a present of a cup and saucer he’d carried home from Nagasaki. With that went a note. “This cup and saucer,” he wrote, “I assure you, is of extreme historic importance. When you see fit to dispose of them, I suggest you offer them to a major museum in your area.”
Estella Huni may not have sensed the jealousy that ate at Dr. Sam, but a lot of other people did, and one of them, of course, was Berg himself. His response to a brother who admired and envied him was to punish him with silent contempt. “We were close in many ways, but not to the extent of sharing personal or intimate matters,” wrote Dr. Sam after his brother’s death. Dr. Sam lived with his brother for close to two decades, and Berg never told him anything about what he had done during the war or for the CIA. Dr. Sam eventually learned about Heisenberg and the rest by reading a story in the Newark Evening News. When Dr. Sam ventured a question that touched on something Berg didn’t want to talk about, he put a finger to his lips and refused him with a sibilant hushing noise. It all left Dr. Sam bursting with questions. Why did Berg wear those clothes every day, why didn’t he get a job, what did he do all day? Berg came and left the Roseville Avenue house as he pleased, sometimes leaving for an afternoon, sometimes for a month, and what happened to him after his thick black shoes touched the sidewalk, he wasn’t saying. Like everyone else, Dr. Sam learned not to ask, but it rankled. Everyone else wasn’t supporting Berg.
For a while their relationship was amicable enough, but gradually essential differences of personality polarized the household. During the 1956 presidential election, when Dr. Sam announced that he was voting for Eisenhower, Berg, who adored Adlai Stevenson, was appalled. Dr. Sam, in turn, was irritated by the telephone messages he was constantly scribbling down for Berg and thoroughly disgusted by his brother’s slovenly domestic habits. Dr. Sam liked to keep up respectable appearances before his patients, and he found the possibility that a full waiting room might be treated to the sight of his scantily clad younger brother unnerving. In the late 1950s, with Berg increasingly uncouth and Dr. Sam ever more perturbed, they stopped speaking to each other. If they had to communicate, they left written messages on the newel post at the bottom of the banister. Berg, who was never emotional in public, sometimes referred to Dr. Sam as “that son of a bitch.”
Yet, like Dr. Sam, Berg had a strict, somewhat skewed sense of fraternal protocol. In 1958, Dr. Sam suffered a severe heart attack, and was hospitalized. The next day, Berg arrived at the Clara Maass Medical Center. He wanted to know everything. What did the cardiogram show? What was his brother’s blood count? What was the sedimentation rate? What did the cardiac enzymes show? “It was like talking to another specialist, not just a general practitioner,” remembers Dr. Murray Strober, Dr. Sam’s physician. Dr. Sam was in the hospital for more than three weeks. Berg made a vigil of his brother’s illness, sleeping in a lounge at the end of a hall near Dr. Sam’s room for all but two of those nights. Dr. Strober visited Dr. Sam each morning at 8:00 AM, and afterward, there would be Berg, wielding a New York Times and questions about “how my brother is doing.” On the two nights Berg slept elsewhere, he called the hospital early the next morning for a report. Yet, never once during this time did he enter Dr. Sam’s room or make any attempt to talk with him.
Berg stayed at Dr. Sam’s house in Newark because it was free and convenient, and because at times he must have tired of scavenging for lodgings. Sam’s house became his security residence. That never meant he liked it. Liked it? He hated it, hated living with his brother, hated Newark, hated the whole thing. But there was another advantage to compensate for the unpleasant aspects of life with Dr. Sam. Berg didn’t feel he had to impress anyone.
BEFORE THE WAR, Berg had been a remote but reasonably good-natured relative. His cousin Frances Book hadn’t seen him in years when she bumped into him on a Newark sidewalk in 1941. “Oh! My! How you’ve grown,” he said with a huge smile, before telling her how glad he was to see her. A few months later, after Bernard’s death, when the family was sitting shivah, Berg looked over at Frances and said he didn’t like to see her there with a long face and began to tell her jokes. “He was such a warm, friendly, jolly person,” she says. “I really loved him.”
After th
e war he was different. Elizabeth Shames, Berg’s cousin, came upon him by chance at the airport shuttle bus stop across the street from Grand Central Station in 1948. At the sight of her, Berg’s eyes narrowed to slits and began darting from side to side. He got up, tucked a wad of newspapers under his arm, and looked at her, eyes flicking back and forth. Other people, in Newark, found him suspicious. For a time in 1948 or 1949, Berg would walk into Baker’s Pharmacy every morning after his jog, drink eight cups of coffee in an hour, read the newspaper, and cut out articles he wanted to save. If anyone asked him what he was cutting out, he’d hiss at them, “No questions.” Generally he rejected conversations, but if he did begin to say something and someone else offered a thought, Berg would fold up his newspaper and leave. Joseph Brodsky, who worked at the store, once asked him why. “I want full attention” was Berg’s reply. “If you interrupt me, you aren’t paying full attention.” One day, something was said to him—it was never clear what—and Berg got up, said, “I’ll never be in this store again,” and left for good. “When he walked out of the store, you’d think he disappeared into space,” says Brodsky.
He did the same thing at Gruning’s, a Newark luncheonette popular for its fresh ice cream. Berg began to go to Gruning’s every night he was in Newark. There were booths at Gruning’s, but Berg always sat at the counter, looking, with his hat on, like one of the lonely men in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. He would read a book or a newspaper and sometimes consent to conversation, while a counterman named Mike poured him cup after cup of free coffee. Berg told Mike that he had done important things during World War II. One day someone asked Berg if he’d really played baseball with Babe Ruth. “Of all the things I have done, that was probably the least important,” he replied.
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