World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in history; Europe's losses were in the millions. A whole generation was shattered; too many young men died on the Western Front, too many women became widows or were destined to remain single. The U.S. entered the conflict late and took far fewer casualties than the other countries—some 300,000 compared with the British Empire's three million. Yet the Yanks had gone "over there," had helped turn the tide, had come home on the side of the victors. For those who had not lost someone dear, it was a heady experience. For others, like Richard Tolman, who had served, it would not only cause a delay in their lives, but inure them to the reality of war.
With the war over and the 1920s beginning, the country could turn its attention to other things besides death and deprivation. Inventions, innovations and experimentation flourished; the pulse of life quickened. American steel mills were blazing, the combustion engine made automobiles affordable and city streets were alive with Model T Fords. Tractors and fertilizers and hybrid corn increased production on farms. Prairies appeared, almost to the horizon, as great oceans of grain.
In New York City, Julius Oppenheimer, having added considerably to his fortune during the Great War, began filling the walls of the family's Riverside Drive apartment with canvases by Renoir and Vuillard, Picasso and Van Gogh. Julius, enchanted by Van Gogh's Enclosed Field with Rising Sun, which had been painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, would urge visitors to sit in front of the painting long enough to observe its transformation in the changing New York light. Robert would leave the inner sanctum of Riverside Drive for Harvard and, in 1925, he was on to Cambridge in England. After an emotionally difficult year, which included a holiday in Corsica, he would reclaim his equilibrium and cross the English Channel to Göttingen in Germany.
At the beginning of the 1920s, at some of the most venerable centers of learning, including Cambridge and Göttingen, a small cadre of physicists and mathematicians were studying the universe on the smallest scale—molecules and atoms—and creating a theory called quantum mechanics that was poised to shake the world. Leading the effort were Denmark's Niels Bohr and Germany's Werner Heisenberg.
The century's first sexual revolution was also underway, especially on college campuses. Dating was the new rage, petting was permissible, and the taboo around sex before marriage was under siege. One report even claimed that in the 1920s, 51 percent of young unmarried women had lost their virginity.29
In the nineteenth century, women in the more urbane classes who developed strong emotional relationships with other women were referred to as "loving friends." Diaries and letters spill over with a romantic passion that today read like love letters. In the early twentieth century, a woman's increasing access to higher education came with a decreasing chance for marriage. Society demanded, however, that she sublimate her own desires, including career, in favor of husband and children. Some independent women chose career. The term Boston marriage was used to describe women who shared homes with one another—many were well educated, or independently wealthy. Some of these Boston marriages were simply practical, others romantic. In either arrangement, women were accepted as "loving friends."30 If others whispered among themselves within these distinguished bastions of civility, and they did, seldom were there accusations that led to scandal.
However, psychologist Havelock Ellis, along with Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a neurologist known for his studies of sexual deviance, began to talk and write about sex between women. They decided that these relationships were not loving at all, but abnormal. Homosexuality was a congenital malady, they contended. The women were labeled "inverted," a word that swept into the public vernacular, to be used with derision. In response, novelists began to write explicitly about sex and love between women, raising public awareness while at the same time alarming young women who suddenly found themselves troubled about their loving feelings for their girlfriends. They wondered if this meant that they, too, were "inverted."31
This immoderate decade would affect each of these three key women—Jean Tatlock, Kitty Puening and Ruth Tolman—as she moved in her own trajectory, until the time when she would encounter Robert Oppenheimer.
RUTH AND HER OLDER SISTER, Lillie Margaret, grew up in the Protestant Church; their father ministered to one of the largest Presbyterian parishes in Sacramento, a state capital that remained a small western town. Both daughters and their cousin Alma would choose to go to college at the University of California, Berkeley, established only twenty-five years before Ruth was born. When Ruth graduated from Sacramento High, her father retired as an active pastor and the family moved seventy miles west to a big, comfortable house on tree-lined Ashby Avenue in Berkeley, in a neighborhood of established professors and professionals.
The Sherman girls came from a perfectly respectable family, but they hailed from the Midwest before they'd come to California's agricultural valley, so they were branded country girls on campus (their Founding Father ancestor notwithstanding). Lillie Margaret was said to have "a wonderful, friendly spirit, contagious sense of humor."32 But it was cousin Alma—pretty, effervescent and talented—who set the pace for the cousins. She joined a sorority, was elected to honor societies, and both acted in and wrote plays.
Ruth entered college as a member of the class that would graduate in 1916; she threw herself into college life, signing on for classes in philosophy, Greek, German and Sanskrit. After all those Sundays of doing God's work, it was as if her energies had been set loose in this broader expanse of possibilities to explore. She followed her sister and cousin into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, she sang with a choral group, volunteered at the YWCA where her older sister was now on staff, and played the piano with enthusiasm and skill.33 While Lillie Margaret was friendly and funny, if plain, Ruth was open, eager and uncommonly pretty.
Without warning, in her third year, Ruth's energy ebbed; she was ill. Doctors were consulted. The diagnosis was tuberculosis. One of the leading causes of death in the country, tuberculosis was a scourge that paid little attention to social class or age. There was no cure, and no treatment other than fresh air, warmth and rest.
Ruth withdrew from the university in 1914 and left cool, foggy Berkeley. Perhaps she was sent inland to sunny Fresno, where her doctor uncle could look after her, or to one of the sanatoriums that had blossomed in the desert. Wherever it was she went, it took a year and a half for Ruth to regain her health and return to classes at Berkeley. By then, some of her optimism was gone, replaced with a more tempered outlook on life, and a solemn determination to make up for time lost.
In January of 1916—the year she was to have graduated—she reappeared for the spring semester with resilience restored, took a double load of classes, and graduated in May of 1917 with honors in philosophy. But the illness would forever change her, followed, as it was, by the country's entrance into the First World War. Some of the men on campus would leave to serve their country; Ruth kept up a spirited exchange of letters with at least one who had gone off to war.
For the next several years she stayed in Berkeley; at the YWCA with Lillie Margaret she helped female foreign students adjust to life on an American campus, and played the piano, including giving private lessons. She was thirty by the time she met Richard Tolman. He was forty-two, tall and handsome, a veteran. Richard came from a formidable New England family and there was much of the patrician about him. A Renaissance man, he was interested in everything: music, philosophy, politics. Richard ranked among the most important chemical physicists in the country, and was dean of the graduate school at the most prestigious scientific university on the West Coast—the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He was also, perhaps, more of a bachelor than Ruth might have wished, with at least one broken engagement in his past. But she had been confronting spinsterhood, so under the circumstances, he was the most distinguished husband she could have imagined, no matter his thinning hair.
They were married in the spring of 1924, and suddenly she had almost everything she had eve
r wanted: a husband of substance whom she adored, and an exciting new life. That summer Richard took his bride to an island off the New England coast to meet his family. His mother regularly rented a summer place where her large brood could gather. Richard's nieces would remember their arrival; Uncle Dickie was a family favorite, and everyone was interested in his new wife.34
Tall and slender, with warm brown eyes and glowing olive skin, Ruth favored uncluttered, beautifully made clothes, and wore her dark hair in a chic bob. She smiled often with a grace that was practiced, and exuded warmth that was not. Her lips were thin and bow-shaped, which gave her a charming quality, as if surprise might be lurking underneath her managed exterior.
In Pasadena, Ruth and Richard moved into a house in the Spanish Colonial style, with softly rounded colonnades, high-timbered ceilings—a house both historic and fashionable. Mrs. Tolman launched into her new role with verve; she ran their home with precision, hired help, developed appealing menus, befriended his friends. She was determined to be the best, most loving dean's wife she could be, which included providing Richard with children. That accomplished, she would have everything.
Ruth's childhood had been highly disciplined, structured around Sunday services, prayer meetings, Bible studies and music lessons. The Sherman girls had grown up to the cadences of the King James Bible, absorbing the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" and the Corinthians' "though I's"—Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. Ruth would consider the meaning of charity all her life.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY WAS SCARCELY THIRTY years old in 1920, and still trying to establish itself as the "Harvard of the West." Professor John S. P. Tatlock spent ten years as head of the English Department in this far-west upstart before moving his family back to Harvard in 1924.35
Jean Tatlock was ten years old when the family moved east. That summer, her mother, Marjorie, packed up jodhpurs and riding jackets and, with Jean and twelve-year-old Hugh, climbed aboard one of the great steam trains to Denver. There they met Marjorie's best friend, Winifred Smith, who had traveled west from Poughkeepsie, New York, with a nephew and a niece, Priscilla Smith. All the children were between the ages of ten and fourteen. Priscilla was the daughter of Winifred's brother, Preserved Smith (one in a long line of Preserveds; the first was born in one of the original ships to arrive on the New England shores, and his survival was regarded as so miraculous that he earned the name). When Priscilla was just four, her mother was felled by typhoid and died quickly. Winifred became a mother to Priscilla.
Marjorie and Winifred were such close friends that they "seldom let geography keep them very far apart."36 Marjorie was angular and measured and had accepted the role of professor's wife; she did the requisite typing and proofing of manuscripts and earned praise on the acknowledgments page. But she also had her own passions. One was theater, the other a penchant for radical thinking; both explain her connection to the small and plainspoken Winifred, who already had a reputation as a rebel. She had earned a Ph.D. at Columbia, then taught English and drama at Vassar. (At one of the college's convocations, she addressed the students: "There are still many people who are afraid of letting girls go out into the world alone, afraid of their earning a living, of their getting ideas, of their being highbrows, of their looking or acting like thinking, grown-up individuals. It is your task to convince such people that experiments sincerely made, and new ideas actively held, do not hurt girls any more than they hurt boys, but on the contrary strengthen them; that you are human beings first and well brought up young women second.")37
From Denver, the two women and four children headed for one of the dude ranches in the Rawuneeche Valley, in the shadow of Colorado's Never Summer Mountains. Priscilla was four years older than Jean, yet she bowed to the younger girl's seeming invincibility. Mornings were given over to long trail rides. The valley floor was dry and strewn with tough grasses, but the wooded mountains were scattered with trails that climbed to the fittingly named Lake of the Clouds. There and back was a full day's ride. The women hired a guide to help keep the little troop—Jean especially—out of harm's way on the trip. The slender, intense little girl was in the habit of riding far ahead, at times pushing out of sight, and then wandering away from the trail. Marjorie understood that she needed to be cautious with her tightly wound daughter, so moved was she by the wild sky scape, the high-wheeling birds, the clouds that piled up over the Never Summer range. Eventually, unable to make Jean understand the risks inherent in the wilderness, she had to forbid her to leave the group. The horses reached the tree line and pushed on, their footing unsure as they climbed up and over a field of rocks and slippery talus. Finally the group reached the summit and the lake, well above 11,000 feet, its glacially cold waters shimmering in the cool midday sun. Jean was the only one to plead to go in for a swim.
Another morning the group rode across a hot, dry part of the valley floor, the horses lethargic in the heat. Their destination was a small village, with little but the remains of a deserted Catholic church. In an alcove, the children discovered an old trunk and pulled out the dusty remnants of priests' robes. Jean delivered a short sermon on her definite opposition to the ritual of religion, the "claptrap" of it. She announced that she was scrubbing her forehead every day, determined to wipe off the spot where she had been christened.38
Winifred Smith must have laughed out loud at the incident. Her own father, Henry Preserved Smith, was a leading Biblical scholar who had questioned the literal truth of the Bible, and had been convicted of heresy by his church. Winifred, thirteen at the time, was enraged at the church's proclamation; from then on, she introduced herself as "'the daughter of a heretic' and an atheist."39
No matter that the Tatlocks came from a long line of clerics. Young Jean became adamant: she was done with religion. And her mother's best friend agreed wholeheartedly. Yet Jean was not so much a contrary child as a passionate one, prodigiously bright. After mornings in the saddle, the small group spent afternoons reading aloud. Jean would be remembered for her rendition of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Jean recited the sad tale of the old seaman who killed the magical albatross, condemning the ship and its crew to death. Her voice building dramatically, she read:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Jean, at ten, might have been considered little more than a bright and charming child, except for the determination in the directness of her gaze, in her straight back, in the long pauses while she considered how to do what she wanted to do. Even Pris, two years older, sensed that there was something unique and unnerving about Jean.
At the end of summer, the friends packed up the children, left the mountains and headed east. With Winifred in Poughkeepsie and Marjorie in Cambridge, they would be 200 miles apart now rather than 3,000. John Tatlock was back in the place he felt he belonged, as head of the Harvard English Department. A medievalist, he was an authority on Chaucer, Dante, Middle English and Latin—a man perfectly at ease in the fourteenth century. Yet he could not comprehend a ten-year-old daughter with an ardent soul.
FOR THE OPPENHEIMER BROTHERS, SUMMERS in the high mountains of New Mexico became a yearly ritual beginning in 1922—the year Robert was to have enrolled at Harvard. Always seen as physically fragile, Robert had come down with a siege of trench dysentery in Europe early that summer. After that, he was diagnosed with chronic colitis, and tuberculosis was mentioned. What he needed, his parents decided, was warm, dry weather and a change of scenery. Julius quickly employed
Herbert Smith, a popular young teacher at Ethical Culture School, recently out of Harvard, to take their delicate son west to a guest ranch called Los Pinos, near Cowles, New Mexico. The ranch, situated in the Sangre de Cristo Range, northeast of Santa Fe in the Pecos Valley, was owned by the Chaves family. Lineal descendants of a Spanish conquistador, they were the early aristocracy in the wild mountainous land of New Mexico. Don Amado was the current patron; his daughter, Katherine Chaves Page, was, at twenty-seven, tall, beautiful and as imperious as Smith's title for her—the "reigning princess of the House of Chaves." The year before, she had married a Chicago businessman old enough to be her father, and quickly regretted it. Having taught Spanish at the elite Finch School on New York's Upper East Side, Katherine had connections to many of the private schools, and a steady stream of young students—most from wealthy families—began making their way to Los Pinos, on the theory that horseback riding and fresh mountain air would invigorate them. Each season, Katherine had a swarm of adolescent boys competing for her favor. In 1922, she christened Robert her favorite, which put him squarely in the middle of the in crowd—a heady experience for a shy and spindly boy genius.40
The princess knew these mountains intimately, and spent many days leading her young charges on long trail rides; soon she was trusting Robert with the most challenging mounts. He could stay in the saddle all day and survive on graham crackers, and he was willing to risk trails that gave others pause. Smith would report that this was the first time in his life that Robert "found himself loved, admired, sought after."41 By the end of the summer, those who knew the western Robert would no longer think of him as frail or delicate. And neither, it seemed, would Robert.
Robert returned to New York free of all signs of colitis or any other ailment. What he did have was a throbbing crush on Mrs. Page and an enduring love for the Pecos Valley and the Rio Grande, and the memory of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising around and above him in a kind of exultation. For many summers to come, the Oppenheimer family would go to Los Pinos. The parents would stay at the ranch keeping Mr. Page company, while Robert, Frank and Katherine would mount up to explore the slopes and valleys in all directions.
An Atomic Love Story Page 4