An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Ruth's own family was as inimitable as her husband's, but the Shearmans (as the English branch of the family had been known, being manufacturers of cloth—thus "shear men") had been prosperous, respected merchants who valued education. They sailed from Bristol in 1634 on the Elizabeth and Ann, bound for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and then moved on to Connecticut. Down the line, other Shermans would make their way into the history books: the Honorable Roger Sherman, an unheralded Founding Father, was one of five men appointed by the new U.S. Congress to a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, along with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams.8

  A generation or so later, Ruth's great-grandfather Walter Rowe Sherman would study to be a doctor, marry an Ohio girl, then push west again to Indiana, and the booming railroad town of Washington, not far from the Kentucky border. Walter settled his family into one of the big houses in the center of town, horse and buggy at the ready for country calls. On the eve of the outbreak of war, Walter's wife gave birth to twin sons. Then, not yet forty, he died, leaving little Walter and Warren to be reared by his wife's relatives. The war raged on without young Dr. Sherman of Washington, Indiana, but with a distant relative, William Tecumseh Sherman, a general in the Union Army. He would make the family name famous, or infamous, in the South, as his army burned everything in his path all the way to the sea.

  In 1892, Warren was ordained a Presbyterian minister. The twins courted and married local girls; Warren chose Lillie Belle Graham from a prosperous Kentucky merchant family.9 In 1886, Warren and Lillie Belle had a baby girl and named her Lillie Margaret; seven years later, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, another girl was born. She was called Ruth.

  After the Civil War, the great, empty country beyond the Sierra Nevada Mountains beckoned, and another migration got under way. Sometime before 1883, Walter—now a doctor—and his wife and their children settled in Fresno, in California's Great Central Valley. Reverend Warren moved to Sacramento with his wife and two daughters; he became the pastor of one of the state capitol's largest Presbyterian churches. Lillie Margaret and Ruth were close friends with their cousin, Alma, all their lives.

  HAD EITHER JEAN OR RUTH had any desire to trace her roots back through the litany of names of those Europeans who braved the Atlantic crossing in the 1600s, through all their convoluted permutations, they might well have found connections to one other. Both families—the Tatlocks and the Shermans—had been part of America's history since the earliest colonial days. Their innate belonging must have been important to Robert Oppenheimer, who, as the quintessential outsider, understood what it meant not to have come over on the Mayflower.10

  Robert's father had come to America from Germany in the huge, late-nineteenth-century migration, when the holds of ships steaming across the Atlantic from Europe were packed. It was 1888 when seventeen-year-old Julius Oppenheimer arrived in New York; he had little or no English. Julius's story has been told as literally one of rags to riches, a tale beloved in the era: his father may have been an "untutored peasant and grain trader who had been raised in a hovel" but his uncles who had emigrated earlier were prosperous and well-connected in New York Jewish society by the time Julius arrived.11 An ebullient, energetic young man, he quickly learned the language, taught himself to read, and devoured books on American history; he haunted museums and artists' galleries and learned how to dress tastefully—essentially, he invented himself. Everything worked; he would make a fortune supplying linings for men's suits.

  By 1903, Julius could afford to court the lovely Ella Friedman, from a cultivated Baltimore family of Bavarian Jewish heritage,12 and after marriage, move her into a Riverside Drive apartment. Ten years later, they had two much adored young sons who would have all their hearts' desires, if their father had his way. If he could not change their ancestry, he would do his best to deflect it by sending the boys to an innovative new school in New York City. As its name—Ethical Culture School—implied, it distanced itself from historic forms of Judaism, even as it emphasized an individual's responsibilities, social and moral—many of the same themes the Puritans had preached on the rocky New England shores almost three centuries earlier: duty and purpose and ethical living, without the immediate imperative of a relationship with God.

  KATHERINE PUENING—KITTY—ARRIVED IN America in 1913 at the age of three, an only child, probably traveling in first class with her German parents, who were neither impoverished nor persecuted. Her grandfather had been a professor at the university in Munster and his son, Kitty's father Franz, reputedly had leftwing political views.13 Franz became a chemical engineer working in metals, and he emigrated to America, in part, because he had invented a new model of blast furnace which he felt would be in demand in the Iron Belt of the United States. He was also, according to his daughter, eager to dwell in America, with its promise of equality.14 His wife, Kaethe, was not so eager to shed her German social standing. She brought with her a cache of stories about her family's aristocratic connections, which would set the Puenings apart from the mainstream of German immigrants arriving in America in unprecedented numbers in that second decade of the twentieth century. Her daughter need not feel inferior to anyone in a country that called itself a melting pot.

  Kitty would always insist that her father had asked her not to speak of his family's past, which she hinted was ever so much more regal than anyone could imagine. The King of Belgium, yes. Victoria of England, oh yes, Kitty might very well be a German princess.* And while her father wanted nothing to do with royal titles—he had supposedly renounced his position as a "princeling"—she said her mother had taken her to Europe every summer, to stay with various royal families.15

  * * *

  * Ulrich Vissering, Kitty's great-nephew, put to rest the question about any Vissering "royal" connections when he wrote that Kitty was "story telling" about the relationship between the Visserings and the "Belgian King or any other European kingdoms." He said that there may be "some little 'blue blood' in our veins, in its core . . . the Vissering family stands on civic, maybe sometimes a little bourgeois ground." July 30, 2013, note to Patricia Klaus

  By the early 1920s, the Puenings had moved to Aspinwall, a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. Franz made an excellent living as an engineer; they had an impressive house. It didn't matter that Kitty went to public schools, which after all were very fine, or that her family didn't socialize with the Carnegies or the Mellons.

  2

  ROBERT WENT TO CAMP WITH GEORGE ELIOT'S MIDDLEMARCH AND WROTE HOME TO SAY THAT HE WAS GLAD HE HAD COME, BECAUSE HE WAS GETTING AN EDUCATION N THE FACTS OF LIFE FROM THE OTHER BOYS. IF HE THOUGHT HIS PARENTS WOULD FIND THAT AMUSING, HE WAS WRONG.

  Robert Oppenheimer's love story begins, as so many love stories do, with his mother, Ella Friedman. Her love story, in turn, was captured in breathless notes written in her flowing artist's hand near the end of the Victorian era, a decade before Proust published In Search of Lost Time.

  Julius Oppenheimer was clear about what he wanted, and it required a wife with interests that mirrored his own—a woman with elegant taste, not so much his equal as his counterpoint. After Christmas of 1902, Ella used one of her special Florentine monogrammed note cards to write Julius a thank-you for the vase he had given her. The missives began to fly back and forth across New York City; if mailed in the morning, a letter could be delivered within a few hours. She confessed that she and her sister Clara had "talked a long while last night. Can you guess about whom, dear?" And she signed it, "Ever so much love to you from yours truly and only." He proposed, and she accepted. Some days later, her need for him spilled out with urgency: "My own dear fellow, I am so wide awake that I just must talk, and no one else will listen to me, so will you? Strange to say you are the only one to whom I feel like speaking at any and all times about everything."16

  JULIUS WAS GREGARIOUS, SUCCESSFUL AND sentimental enough to save her letters for the rest of his life. She was "bright" and "clever"—clever being a euphemism for sma
rt and ambitious—but that was only part of Ella Friedman's appeal. The intelligent eyes, the tenuous smile, the refined taste—what is known of her suggests that she was a woman not only willing to venture into uncharted territory, but to do so with a physical handicap. Her right hand was congenitally deformed; she wore a crude prosthetic device that included a spring between the artificial thumb and forefinger. Always, a chamois glove fit snugly over her mechanical hand, and she favored long-sleeved dresses as camouflage. Yet the damaged hand had not deterred her from embarking on a career as an artist and a teacher. With intense determination, she had taught herself not just to get by, but to draw and paint and maneuver in the world.

  Although she had not married in her twenties, neither had she withdrawn into her well-to-do family, as some other daughters with a physical flaw might be inclined to do. She studied art in Paris and when she returned to the family apartment at 148 W. 94th Street, she arranged for a private rooftop studio, where she drew and painted, and took on a few students. And she taught in an art school, possibly at Barnard School for Girls.17

  She was thirty-three when she married Julius, beyond the usual marriageable age yet still within childbearing years. Julius's interest in her had taken her by surprise. He was more than a year younger and, in her circles, considered rough around the edges. (The novelist Paul Horgan, one of the few of Robert's boyhood friends who spent time with the family, would offer this description: "Mr. Oppenheimer was a short, small man with high shoulders and an ant-like head which seemed to dominate his body because it was very small, funny, little. And desperately amiable, anxious to be agreeable, received with pleasure . . . and, I think, essentially a very kind man."18) Ella would have seen the possibilities: He was a shrewd businessman, even if he was entirely self-educated. And he had an insatiable appetite for learning, an instinctive artistic taste and an infectious delight in life itself. On the eve of their wedding, she wrote: "I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest."19

  Ella had the style and elegance Julius lacked. She possessed a serene demeanor that would compensate for his happy, outgoing—and at times overenthusiastic—nature. The word most often used to describe Ella Oppenheimer was discreet. Although Julius was not, she would have appreciated his inquiring mind and his excitement about music and art.

  Five months after their honeymoon, when Ella was at home in New York and he was out of town, she wrote, "It seemed so strange to go to bed alone . . . I did not sleep well. . . . Take care of yourself, dearest. The thought of you . . . is more sweet to me than I can tell."20

  Their first child was born on April 22, 1904. The name they had selected was Robert, but—against the Jewish tradition that a child not be named for a living relative—the proud father could not resist adding his own name: Julius Robert Oppenheimer. The boy would be presented to the world as J. Robert Oppenheimer. In spite of a birth certificate that proved otherwise, Robert would always insist the J "stood for nothing."21

  Soon after Robert's birth, the family moved into an entire floor of a building at 155 Riverside Drive, at West 88th Street. It was spacious enough for several servants and an Irish nanny. Automobiles were beginning to replace horse-drawn carriages, and the Oppenheimers had their own car and a uniformed chauffeur.

  In the ideal Victorian marriage, the husband took care of his wife and their children. The wife's place was on a pedestal. Ella's art was now focused on making their home elegant; she supervised the staff and children, and lived very much within the cocoon of home and family. This Victorian ideal, enshrined in so many novels of the era, applied only to a small group of upper-middle-class women. Ella Oppenheimer was one of them.

  FELIX ADLER'S CONCEPT OF "RIGHT LIVING" captivated Julius and he became an active participant in Adler's Ethical Culture Society, an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism dedicated to "social action and humanitarianism." It was an approach to living that suited secular upwardly mobile German Jews like the Oppenheimers, who wanted to be assimilated into American life and culture.22

  When Robert first became interested in rocks and was studying formations in Central Park, he began a correspondence with local geologists of some note, plunking away on the family typewriter, not mentioning in any of his letters that he was only twelve years old. Robert's epistles must have been impressive, because one of the geologists put his name up for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and before long he was invited to deliver a paper to the membership. The boy begged not to go. Julius—thrilled by the prospect—would not hear of it. Both Ella and Julius watched as he climbed onto a box so he could see over the podium. The paper was read, Robert was roundly applauded, and the story was duly recorded as an early entry in what was to become the legend of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Much later, Robert would say that his mother would have preferred he be "like other boys."23

  The legend of Robert grew while he was at the Ethical Culture School. The faculty was composed of carefully selected devotees of the progressive education movement, who were well aware of the exceptional mind in their midst, and the challenge it presented. Jane Didisheim, Robert's schoolmate and one of his few friends there, described Robert at fifteen as "still a little boy; he was frail, very pink cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant, of course. . . . he was physically rather, you can't say clumsy exactly; he was rather undeveloped." She went on, eager to get the description just right: "he wasn't childish, really. Just different."24

  The summer he was fifteen, Robert was sent to summer camp. While the others went off sailing and swimming, he withdrew, read George Eliot's Middlemarch, and went on solitary rock-hunting expeditions. He wrote home that he was glad he had come, because he was getting an education in the facts of life from the other boys. If he thought his parents would find that amusing, he was wrong. Ella and Julius quickly appeared for an unscheduled visit. Soon after their departure, the camp director announced a ban on all salacious stories. Retribution was swift and cruel. After dark one night, a group spirited Robert off to the camp icehouse, where he was stripped naked. Even more humiliating, they painted his genitals green and locked him inside, where he spent a cold and miserable night.

  Long after, a boy who had been there said, "I don't know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks, not many boys would have—or could have—but Robert did. It must have been hell for him."25 Robert Oppenheimer was, in fact, tougher and more resilient than anyone would have guessed.

  PAUL HORGAN, CLOSE BOYHOOD FRIEND of Robert, also remembered that "Robert had bouts of melancholy, deep, deep depressions as a youngster. He would seem to be incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time. That happened while I was staying with him once or twice, and I was very distressed, had no idea what was causing it."26

  There was a radical counter to these bouts of depression, one which began to reveal itself at the Oppenheimers' summer home on Long Island's Bay Shore, off the coast of which Robert and his brother learned to sail on small boats. On Robert's sixteenth birthday, his always generous father presented him with a twenty-eight-foot sloop. He quickly learned that summer storms were a challenge; he would race against the tides through the inlet at Fire Island and into the Atlantic. In high school and later when Robert was at Harvard, he would often invite friends to the beach. With Robert at the helm and his friend Horgan on board, the sloop got caught in a strong ebb tide and almost swept out to the enormous breakers at the mouth of the inlet, but Robert "tacked magnificently, back and forth, back and forth, and . . . finally got us back in the bay." Not long after their seventeenth birthdays, Robert took another friend, Francis Fergusson, for a sail. Fergusson would report: "It was a blowy day in spring—very chilly—and there was rain in the air. It was a little bit scary to me, because I didn't know whether he could do it or not. But he did; he was already a pretty skilled sailor. His mother was watching
from the upstairs window and probably having palpitations of all kinds. But he had induced her to let him go. She worried, but she put up with it. We got thoroughly soaked, of course, with the wind and the waves. But I was very impressed."27

  Sometimes his adoring younger brother, Frank, would tuck into the cockpit, while Robert would sail past the inlet, stand tall into the wind, pelted by rain, and eventually work the sloop into Great South Bay and home. When the waiting got too intense, Julius would take the motor launch out into the bay and shepherd the boys back, muttering "Roberty, Roberty,"28 in an effort to rein his son in, to make him understand the risks he was taking. The admonitions went unheeded; Robert had discovered the excitement of sailing in demanding seas. At the tiller, on a roiling ocean, there was nothing of the shy young man prone to hiding in his room.

  The Oppenheimers watched their elder son swing from painful withdrawal to wildly reckless, exhilarating behavior. They must have wondered about the source of this contradiction: a young man, a boy still, who could sit quietly at the easel and paint with his mother, who at times was awkward and withdrawn and yet could be charming and gracious, and who would challenge an angry ocean with a sense of his own invincibility. Robert's long and troubled adolescence was underway. He was going to have to cope on his own. At Harvard first, then on to England and Cambridge. It was not going to be an easy passage.

  II

  THE EXUBERANT YEARS

  3

  IN AMERICA, KITTY LEARNED TO BEHAVE LIKE A GOOD LITTLE GERMAN GIRL: TO SIT QUIETLY, HANDS FOLDED, NO FIDGETING; SHE WOULD PLEDGE NEVER TO TURN INTO ONE OF THOSE STERN GERMAN OGRE-PARENTS WHOSE CHILDREN ARE SO WELL TRAINED THAT THEY SEEM MORE LIKE LITTLE MONSTERS THAN LIKE CHILDREN."