In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  4

  On June 30, 1948, we heard from Stuyvesant Town. They wanted us to come in for an interview immediately after the Independence Day weekend. On July 6, Gertrude went there, the round trip costing $.20. (The subway fare had gone up to $.10 on July 1, doubling the longtime traditional nickel fare, and I thought enough of that to enter it indignantly into my diary.)

  It was clear that the Stuyvesant Town people were ready to give us an apartment, but Gertrude did not like to take the responsibility herself, so I went there with her the next day and we agreed to take Apartment 9-C on 273 First Avenue. This was at East Eighteenth Street.

  The rent was going to be $65 a month. It was the highest rent we had ever paid, but then I had never been making $4,500 a year before, either.

  To us, it was a clear-cut case of an improvement. It was a modern apartment, new and clean, with a modern (if small) kitchen and a modern bathroom. It was only three rooms and there was neither cellar nor backyard, but then it was nine floors up, there was plenty of light and air, and there were a whole group of apartment houses in which we might find friends.

  To my parents, of course, it was a horrible blow. They felt hurt, naturally, at my not wanting to live with them—but the fact was that I didn't. The apartment we were living in was dreary and the neighborhood was decaying and, frankly, living near the candy store was de-

  pressing. It reminded me of a life I thought I had left, and I felt as though I had regressed badly now that I had returned to it.

  It would mean no financial suffering for my parents. In fact, they told us, rather defiantly, that they already had a prospective new set of tenants who would be willing to pay $90 a month. It proved necessary, in fact, to plead with my father (who was angrier than my mother was) not to make definite arrangements about the apartment before July 20. That was the day we were to sign the lease and, in my usual hunger to keep all options open, I didn't want to find myself unable to back out if I wanted to.

  My father agreed reluctantly, but it was quite a while before he and I were on a friendly basis again.

  Despite all this, I finally managed to finish "The Red Queen's Race" on July 11, and I mailed it to Campbell the next day. I did not take it in since some months before, Street & Smith had moved its operations to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Campbell had gone there. The move was better for him since he lived in New Jersey, not far away, but it tended to reduce the number of my visits.

  On July 16, I received a check from him for $190. That was rather better than $.025 a word, since the story was only seven thousand words long. It was the first sale I had made to him—or to anyone, for that matter—in thirteen months. It was also the only story I wrote and sold while I lived at 192 Windsor Place.

  On that same July 16, we gave away Putchikl, who was not well and whom we'd be unable to take with us when we moved. Gertrude wept bitterly for days.

  Also on that same day, I met Lloyd Roth briefly at lunch. He was passing through New York. He had turned completely gray and a third child was on the way.

  5

  On July 20, 1948, we signed the lease at Stuyvesant Town, and on July 29, we moved. We had stayed at 192 Windsor Place only ten months. It was our sixth move since marriage and this time the moving cost $45.

  John Blugerman helped us move, which made it bearable and, at the end of the day, all three of us had dinner at the Kavkaz, a Russian restaurant in the neighborhood. John and I had shishkebab, but Gertrude ordered beef stroganoff, which was described as consisting of chunks of beef in a sour cream sauce.

  The thought of beef in a sour cream sauce seemed stomach-turning to me, and when it arrived, with the sauce looking oddly gray, I made a

  face. Gertrude, however, talked me into trying one mouthful and I was an instant convert.

  When I showered and turned in that night, it occurred to me that in all my New York years, I had lived only in Brooklyn. That was true for Gertrude, too. Now, for the first time in our lives, we were Manhat-tanites. It was a belated way of celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary, which had passed almost unnoticed on the twenty-sixth as we were beginning our packing.

  In all the years I lived in Brooklyn as a youngster, I had known nothing of the glamor of Manhattan. It was only a name on the map to me and I knew it was smaller than Brooklyn. (I was very much a Brooklyn patriot.)

  Nor did trips to Manhattan enlighten me as to its special characteristics. On the rare occasions that the family went to Radio City Music Hall, or when I commuted to Columbia, or visited Campbell's office, it was by subway and I saw none of it except for whatever track I followed from a subway station to my destination. (And it was characteristic of me that I never looked to the right or to the left.)

  It was only when I moved to Stuyvesant Town and began to live in Manhattan that I became aware of its unusual characteristics, its skyscrapers and canyons, its stores and restaurants, and, above all, its incredible intellectual ferment.

  Even allowing for this, though, the new apartment wasn't a total joy. Stuyvesant Town was still being built, so that there was the noise of construction through the day. Worse than that, there were puddles and standing water, which bred mosquitoes, and the fancy windows needed special screens, which had not yet been installed. Consequently, there was a mosquito plague such as I have never lived through before or since, and mosquito repellents didn't seem to help. One evening, I managed to stalk and kill ten mosquitoes on the wall and ceiling in twenty minutes.

  One of the factors that made the first month in Stuyvesant Town bearable was that we were looking forward to going off on vacation. We hadn't had one since the disastrous Hilltop Lodge venture of 1944. In 1945, the draft situation made it impossible. In 1946 I was in the Army. In 194-7 * was wor king on research and "Grow Old with Me."

  In 1948, we were determined to go, and Gertrude picked out a likely spot from advertisements. It was a place called Chester's Zunbarg in the Catskills.

  On August 15, in beautiful weather, we left for the place, and as

  soon as we had arrived it seemed we had made the right choice. We got there at 2:00 p.m., just as Sunday midday dinner was concluding, but we were quickly served a steak apiece. Later, after we had unpacked Gertrude went for a swim (she could swim like a fish and dance like a sylph, which made it hard for her, since I could neither swim nor dance).

  The people we met were pleasant indeed, especially a nice couple at our table, Jack and Ida Saltzman, who lived in Seagate at the western tip of Coney Island. What's more, the entertainers included one Bernie Hearn, who had amused and pleased us at Allaben Acres in 1942, a connection that was pleasantly nostalgic for me.

  We spoke to him afterward quite enthusiastically and described the earlier period of pleasure he had given us. He looked pained and it occurred to me that it might bother him that after six years, his role in show business was still confined to the borscht circuit. I sympathized rather achingly when I thought of all the years that had passed leaving me still at Columbia.

  The Saltzmans left on Tuesday morning, but in came Ruth and Isaiah Frank, with whom we grew friendly at once. Isaiah (the only person I ever met who bore the name) worked at the State Department, which was impressive.

  Then, too, we met Jack and Shirley Segal (he was tall and a little stout, and she looked rather like Mazie back in Decatur Street). They were going to be moving into Stuyvesant Town soon. We fell on each other's neck, of course.

  Also with us was a young woman named Edith, rather small and with a large nose, but quite attractive. She could speak Yiddish even more fluently than I could. I called her "Mammalooshen" (mother tongue), a term often used to mean Yiddish, and we amused ourselves by swapping jokes in Yiddish.

  Gertrude joined the arts and crafts group and made a copper pin with a G on it. At the last minute I suggested a slightly asymmetric design that would cause the pin to seem to lean along with the G. I was instantly considered by the arts and crafts teacher to have an artistic talent, which was ludicrously wrong, of
course. In any case, it was a success, and Gertrude wore the pin for years afterward.

  We square danced, took tango lessons, and played Ping-Pong and charades. We had a good group for the last—the kind that could quickly work out "neutron-induced uranium fission."

  I shone when we quickly discovered that out of a nine-word phrase the second word was "the" and the fourth word "river." I made the necessary intuitive leap and said, "And even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea," and created quite a stir in doing so.

  On the last day, I learned the words and tune to all four verses of "Venezuela/' which is one of my favorites to this day. Add to this the fact that the food was good, copious, and frequent, even to regular midnight snacks, and I think it must rank the best resort vacation we ever had. I have always regretted that we only stayed a week.

  We got back to Stuyvesant Town on August 22 to find that John Blugerman had been there the day before to bring in the mail and to check that everything was all right. (We had given him the keys for that purpose.)

  He also left a note in which he rather hilariously paid tribute to my intelligence. It seemed that I had carefully guarded the apartment against burglary by putting our radio and typewriter in an unlocked closet, and doing other things of equal subtlety. I had made a careful list on a piece of paper of all the shrewd things I was going to do: "Place radio in hall closet. Place typewriter in linen closet under sheets." Then I had forgetfully left that piece of paper on the desk in plain view.

  Fortunately, no burglar had entered to take advantage of the kind help I had offered him.

  7

  The weather had been beautiful at Chester's Zunbarg, with only one cloudy day. It was rather less than beautiful in New York. On August 25, a heat wave of nearly record proportions began. The average temperature, day and night, remained above 90 for three straight days, with highs of 98, 101, and 98, respectively.

  Those were the days before everybody and his dog had air conditioning and before apartment houses were built with central air conditioning as a matter of course. In any case, Stuyvesant Town wasn't air conditioned. That, compounded with the mosquito problem, enabled us, involuntarily, to test how long the human body could exist without sleep.

  For relief, we went to the nearby movie house, the RKO Jefferson, and stayed there as long as we could. On Saturday, August 28, we spent five hours there, seeing one show that included two features, a Movietone news, a travelogue, three cartoons, and five vaudeville features. Everything was wonderful, everything was marvelous—as long as the temperature was 70.

  The program, fortunately, changed that night, so the next day we were back for five more hours without having to repeat.

  Jack and Shirley Segal, whom we had met at Chester's Zunbarg, moved into Stuyvesant Town at the start of the heat wave and in the

  months afterward we were close friends, visiting back and forth constantly. Another couple from Chester's Zunbarg also lived in Stuyvesant Town, and we often made a sixsome. In no place in which we had ever lived before had there been such offhand social contacts, and that began to make up for the heat and mosquitoes.

  Of course, the heat passed eventually and as construction proceeded, the mosquitoes passed, too, and even the worst of the noise.

  By September 1, I had settled down sufficiently to begin a new science-fiction story, "Mother Earth."

  8

  We did some visiting outside Stuyvesant Town, too. On September 2, Gertrude and I visited my parents back on Windsor Place and tried to make friends again. It was difficult. My father stubbornly remained aloof.

  On the fourth, we visited the Saltzmans, whom we had met in Chester's Zunbarg. We managed to find the Saltzmans' place at Seagate only with difficulty (stopping in briefly at the Blugermans' first) but managed to be the first to arrive anyway. My inability to force myself to be late has universally annoyed those who come with me and those whom I visit. My own attitude is that someone has to be first and if we come first we can make up for it by being the first to leave—and that if a hostess says six-thirty, she should be ready at six-thirty.

  All this closely reasoned logic has never impressed anyone, but in this case at least, it was just as well we arrived early. The Saltzmans had a television set and they allowed us to watch it for half an hour before the remaining guests started to dribble in. It was the first time we had ever seen television. We were fascinated, of course. It seemed a way of watching something very like a perpetual movie and doing it at will and without charge.

  I often said, in the days when we went to the movies two or three times a week, and had just finished sitting with a crowd of talkers, rustlers, smellers, and in-the-wayers, that the only civilized way of watching a movie was in one's own home—and here we had something that seemed to be my ideal come true, although with commercials. That first time I watched television, even the commericals seemed fascinating.

  When the rest of the party arrived, the talk turned to politics. It was a presidential election year. Truman was running for election in his own right and opposing him was Dewey, who had failed against

  Roosevelt in 1944. The southern conservatives were running Strom Thurmond on what was popularly called a "Dixiecrat" ticket. Also in the field was Henry A. Wallace, who had been Roosevelt's Vice-President from 1941 to 1945 and who tried to rally the New Dealers.

  Everyone at this particular party was pro-Wallace and that was when I decided to vote for Wallace, too. I was convinced that Truman couldn't win and that Dewey would be the next President. All the newspapers said so; all the pollsters said so; and, frankly, my own estimate of the situation said so. I might as well, then, cast a protest vote for Wallace.

  My postdoctoral work was going on unimpressively. I was running tests of all kinds on antimalarials, making observations, preparing graphs, trying to find out what happened to it in living tissue in order to decide whether it was changed into some intermediate form that was itself more active. Then, perhaps, the intermediate could be isolated, analyzed, synthesized, and used directly.

  The trouble was that I didn't see anything coming out of my efforts. I was constantly terrified that Elderfield would say so and kick me out—not that I was afraid either of him or of being kicked out in themselves—but the specter of unemployment was a very fearful one for anyone who had spent his second decade of life in the Great Depression.

  On September 7, however, the Segals dropped in and Jack asked me what kind of work I was doing. They knew I was doing chemical research at Columbia but knew no details. My mind was full of it at the time so I explained the importance of antimalarials, the nature of quinine, atabrine, and quinacrine, using my hands and fingers to represent chemical formulas. I explained that what we wanted to know was what happened to these substances in the human body to see if these were changed into the real antimalarial and what that might be.

  They listened in apparent absorption, and, at the end, Jack said to me, "You're a very good explainer. I wouldn't have thought anyone could have made that clear to me."

  I laughed, and was pleased, and we went on to other things, and eventually the Segals went home.

  The effect on me, however, was similar to the one that had followed young Emmanuel Bershadsky's praise of The Greenville Chums at College. I had on that earlier occasion begun to think of myself as a

  writer; now, as a result of Jack's remark, I began to think of myself as an explainer. I never forgot, and the desire to explain began to grow on me from that day.

  What's more, I stopped worrying about Elderfield and his opinion of me. I decided I was good at my work.

  Thank you, Jack Segal, wherever you are.

  10

  On September 24, we actually had a phone installed. For the first time since that forty-day period in Dean Street a little over a year before, we could call and receive calls at will.

  The very first call we got on our new telephone was a wrong number. We thought that was amusing but it didn't seem so after a while. The French Hospit
al had a similar number differing only by the inversion of the first two letters. It was a natural error to dial us instead of the hospital.

  The hospital received hundreds of calls each day, and of these calls, one out of ten, perhaps (from those with the dimmest minds, of course), would reverse the letters. Up to a dozen times a day, then, the telephone would ring, and some semiliterate voice would say, "French Hospital?"

  Each person called us only once, of course, and we would then tell them they had dialed wrong and sometimes they would express regret. (Mostly they would hang up with a bang as though it were our fault they had lost a dime.) To us, though, it seemed as though it were the same person calling us over and over again, stupidly oblivious to his continuing mistake.

  I used to have daydreams in which someone would call and say "French Hospital?" and I would say, suavely, "Whom would you like to speak to?" and they would say, "Jane Doe," and I would say, "I'm sorry, but she passed away last night in great agony," and hang up.

  Naturally, I never said anything of the sort and wouldn't have said it in reality for anything—but it was a satisfactory daydream.

  11

  The Orson Welles disappointment (I had long ago given up hope of "Evidence" ever being turned into a movie) had an odd offshoot. On September 28, 1948, I received a letter asking for permission to use "Victory Unintentional" in an anthology that would bear Welles' name as editor. He offered $75 and I accepted.

  This was the story Campbell had characterized as "butyl mercap-tan" six years before. It had only netted me $70 when I had first sold it and so this, my third anthologization, was the first that brought me more money for the anthology than for the original sale.

  12

  The first indication, in my diary, of my growing hatred for the smell of tobacco came on October 7. We went to the movies with the Segals and my diary states: "We sat in the balcony because the Segals wanted to sit there (so they could smoke, I suppose) and, as a result, we couldn't hear well and were choked with tobacco." I was sufficiently indignant at this to add, "I'm averse to going with them anymore."