The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

  36

  1949

  The Goddess of Small Victories

  First make the strudel, then sit down and think.

  —Austrian proverb

  How I loved that house! Linden Lane is where I was finally able to set down my luggage. The victory cost me a hard struggle, as Kurt didn’t want to hear anything about it. Nothing was to disturb his peace of mind. This time, it was my battle.

  I’d ventured down Linden Lane by chance on the way home from a routine walk. The name intrigued me. I discovered a For Sale sign in front of a small, white, modern house that seemed almost austere in comparison to Princeton’s pretty neo-Victorian homes. It was modest but charming, with a dark roof and ironwork columns. I examined the garden before leaving, my mind full of thoughts.

  The next day, my steps led me back irrepressibly to 129 Linden Lane. It was my house.

  I telephoned the broker: $12,500 not counting transfer costs, well beyond our budget. I dragged Kurt there for a visit and, when the seller finally left us alone, painted a lively picture of all its advantages: the house had a new air-conditioning system, numerous windows, a garden where he could rest his nerves, and a separate room that he could make into an office. In addition, the neighborhood was very quiet and, being somewhat higher than the rest of Princeton, would be cooler in the summer. Kurt considered it in silence on the way home. He said, “The living room is very big, you could give a party for fifty people there.”

  Cautious, I let the dough rest. When I saw that there was no movement, and being afraid the property would slip through our fingers, I decided to harass Kurt in any way I could. Disturbing him at work was my only means of forcing him to react. His friend Oskar was pushing from the other side. In his snobby opinion, the house was too expensive, too far from the Institute, and located in a lackluster neighborhood. Oskar always reacted suspiciously to my ideas. I telephoned Kitty Oppenheimer on the sly: a more bourgeois level of comfort would be beneficial to the fragile genius. She mentioned this to her husband, the director. The IAS would stand as co-guarantor to the mortgage. Caught in a crossfire, Kurt opted for domestic peace. He gave in, anxious about our assuming such a large loan. What didn’t make him anxious? I had the good fortune to be fighting at home, and I won.

  Did I keep him from working, as Morgenstern had said? Of course! Kurt naturally wrote all about it to his mother, who probably coughed up her strudel over it. That house represented my salary as a nurse, which was twenty years past due.

  I wiped my hands and took off my apron before going to the door.

  “Willkommen auf Schloss Gödel!”

  Standing there was my friend Lili Kahler-Loewy with a bottle of champagne in either hand. Next to her was Albert, juggling an enormous package.

  “My dear Adele, here is my modest contribution to this memorable day. You are finally going to stop changing addresses.”

  “We spent at least an hour at the antique dealer’s. The salesman couldn’t get over having Albert as his client.”

  “Where is Gödel?”

  “He’s coming, Herr Einstein. He’s working.”

  “How is he? We haven’t seen much of each other recently. I’ve been traveling constantly.”

  My husband stepped into view behind me, as though fresh from the mold. He was wrapped in his impeccable double-breasted suit, his tie knotted to the millimeter.

  “I am in excellent shape. We are finding 1949 to be a good year for us. See how lovely my wife looks!”

  “Do you mean this dress? It’s just an old thing. We need to tighten our belts more than ever now.”

  It was a small domestic lie, one of many. I had bought this white dress with blue patterns for myself to celebrate my victory. For being forty-nine in 1949, I surely deserved a dress at $4.99! Knowing that his cautious nature would disapprove, I said nothing to Kurt, though he would have appreciated the numerical symbolism. Anyway, he couldn’t have told a new outfit from an old rag.

  I invited our friends to make themselves at home before opening Albert’s package. Inside was a magnificent Chinese vase.

  “From now on, Adele, you can devote your time to interior decoration, the favorite sport of ladies of leisure.”

  Albert followed Kurt into the garden, leaving Lili and me to our talk between women. I was a little disappointed not to be doing the honors of showing Albert our new home. But I took my friend by the arm and led her on a guided tour before our other guests arrived—the Morgensterns and the Oppenheimers. Kurt hadn’t wanted more people than that.

  “I was forgetting! Erich sends his regrets. His mother is feeling unwell and he wanted to stay with her today.”

  “You’re lucky to have a mother-in-law like Antoinette. Mine is a real dragon.”

  “It took me two marriages to find a proper one!”

  She then changed the subject, a little too quickly for me not to feel there was some awkwardness.

  “Are you getting along better with Oskar?”

  “We tolerate each other.”

  “He takes good care of Kurt, you have to admit it. It would be a lot harder without him.”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “Are you still smoking? Your husband hates it.”

  “Just to irritate Mr. Morgenstern! Would you like a drink?”

  “You’ve started without me, Adele.” She gave me a friendly tap in reprimand.

  It was good to have a friend like Lili: a sister in exile, a companion who guided you upward, without condescension. She was richer, more intelligent, more cultured, and more sociable than me—she had all the basic virtues of a Princeton spouse. But she had a quality rare in that little world: none of it mattered to her any more than her first permanent. My friend Lili was no beauty. She had a big nose and thick lips, but her eyes were direct and enormously kind. She was a haven of compassion for a tired soul. Albert, whose standards of friendship were high, liked her a lot.

  I opened my arms wide, aping an eager salesman, to present the living room to her. We hadn’t had to buy any new furniture, we already had too much. Kurt complained about not having an entrance hall as in Europe. The open American plan was an assault on one’s privacy. I shared the pragmatic view of the locals: an entrance hall was a waste of space. We had two bedrooms, giving us a substantial area in which to spread out. I had lots of plans: I was going to change the back of the main room into a dining area and set up a soundproofed office behind the kitchen. That way, I wouldn’t have to hear him complain about my restlessness. Lili listened to me prattle on with her best smile.

  “I’m so happy for you, Adele! You’re finally going to be able to invite people over. You spend too much time alone.”

  “You know Kurt. He doesn’t like social occasions.”

  “Still, he might concede that there are points on the scale between seclusion and perpetual partying.”

  “At his age, I’m not going to change him. We could have hoped for so much more, like the Oppenheimers. Robert is someone who knows how to make his talents pay off.”

  “Glory isn’t everything, Adele. Or money either.”

  “Stow it!”

  Lili frowned imperceptibly.

  Deep inside, I still had the outlook of a Viennese working girl, which surfaced at times despite my being a “lady of leisure.” I had never held a factory job, but I’d shown my legs on an assembly line of sorts. It all came down to the same thing. I envied the Oppenheimers’ position. The couple lived with their two young children in a huge eighteen-room house on Olden Lane, right at the entrance to the IAS, at the same time enjoying the income from Robert’s many outside activities. Kitty’s future was secure. She staved off boredom by gardening and mixing gin and tonics. She had abandoned her studies to play the lady of the manor in her oversized schloss. I’d heard many spicy stories about her from Kurt’s secretary. “Oppie” was her fourth husband. His predecessors had been a musician, a politician, and a radiologist. The next to last, a militant Communist, died fighting in Spain. I wondered ho
w Robert, who had worked for the government during the war, managed to live with that.

  “Come see the kitchen. It’s a little too modern for me, but I’ve got an idea for it. I’d like to turn it into a Bauernstube. Something warmer, with wood, like in the old country.”

  Although I couldn’t restrain myself from the guilty pleasure of gossiping, I enjoyed the Oppenheimers’ company. Robert became director of the IAS in 1946, shortly after leaving the Manhattan Project. Only forty-two years old, he had acquired considerable influence thanks to his work at Los Alamos and his contacts in the political and military spheres. Behind the wall of his cryogenic arrogance, Oppie had a dangerous charm, and it owed much to his being known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Like my husband, he had a stringy body and an emaciated face—the austere look of a pastor, its wattage increased by a disturbing gaze. His light blue eyes seemed to dissect your soul and your anatomy along the way. Those near to him said he threw himself into his work and hardly ever slept. His wife had to make him eat, a tiny point of commonality between us, because unlike Kurt, he also had a side that was fond of good living. I never saw him without a cigarette dangling from his lips, the last one lighting the next, an index of his inexhaustible inner fires. If Kurt was taciturn and asocial, Robert was a leader, a man of words and power, able to master any subject however far removed from nuclear physics, his field of expertise. He aspired to transform the IAS into an interdisciplinary team of excellence, recruiting from every point on the compass beyond the usual breeding pools of mathematics and physics. Unlike the livestock at his previous stable, the Los Alamos lab, the thoroughbreds at the Institute—my husband and Einstein included—had a tendency to trot alone. And in different directions.

  “I’ve planted camellias in the garden. I’m going to build a fountain. And why not an arbor? I’ll invite you to tea there. Like a real lady! Speaking of real ladies, would you like a cocktail, darling?”

  “Ease up on the martinis, Adele.”

  Lili was right, I’d drunk more than I ought. I was nervous about having people over. Compared to Lili, Kitty, and the Dorothys of this world, women who had been steeped since childhood in an intellectual milieu, I was countrified in my tastes, I knew. But I had no others to draw on. What was the point of aping an upper-middle-class décor? This odd and possibly shabby house was my home, a world in my image. I wouldn’t apologize for it, even if I needed a few glasses of alcohol to bolster my pride. Dismissing her protests, I fixed us a couple of stiff martinis. We sipped them, watching the two men amble back and forth across the lawn.

  “How is Albert? I notice he seems tired since his operation. He always works too hard.”

  “He hides his fatigue behind his humor. The other day he gave me a photo with the dedication: ‘What a shame that you won’t spend the night with me!’ ”

  “You’re already his chauffeur. Try not to fall for his dusty charm!”

  “Albert is like a father to me.”

  “Watch your ass all the same.”

  I stuck out my tongue at her, in a parody of the famous snapshot of the physicist that had rocketed around the globe.26 The venerable elder statesman never censored his salty language. One day at table when the others were talking in guarded terms about sex, I’d heard him say, “The whole thing lasts two minutes and it’s over!” Kurt almost fainted. Albert hated the hypocrisy of social conventions such as marriage, which he thought incompatible with human nature. I followed his thinking, but if he hadn’t acted on this postulate—any more than I had—he at least had managed to profit from his freedoms as a man while holding on to the comforts of home. Some principles have only relative weight.

  “The steaks are ready.”

  “Adele! What has happened to your Viennese cooking?”

  “I am an American, Herr Einstein. I own an American house. And I cook in the A-me-ri-can style.”

  “We are all Americans, don’t make too much of it. And if you really want to be a patriot, then you should know that in this country, barbecuing is a man’s job.”

  These sunny days in early September were a magical interlude. Kurt was in relatively good form, and I had my house, good company, and enough alcohol in my veins to believe the moment imperishable. I wasn’t the only one drinking. The Oppenheimers were always a length ahead when von Neumann wasn’t around to lead the pack. I’d worked night and day since we’d moved in. To my surprise, I’d even found myself humming: my husband had showed me a few miraculous signs of affection.

  I looked around at my world with warm feelings. Kurt was dissecting his steak, trying in vain, despite his talents as a topologist, to reconstitute it into a smaller portion. Lili and Albert were laughing over a story. Robert was eating with one hand and smoking with the other, while Kitty daydreamed. The Morgensterns were cooing over each other in the way of young couples. I couldn’t stop myself from needling them.

  “Still uncertain about our investment, Oskar?”

  “I gave my honest opinion. This neighborhood isn’t the most practical to live in.”

  “So Kurt will walk an extra twenty minutes. The broker told us that the house was sure to increase in value.”

  “He could hardly say the opposite.”

  My husband looked up from the puzzle on his plate.

  “I hope this house won’t be too much for us. I hate the idea of being chained to such a big loan.”

  “Why? Are you planning to return to Europe? You won’t even consider going to visit your sainted mother! Would you prefer to live in a student’s apartment until the day you retire?”

  He frowned and pawed at his stomach, his usual answer to recriminations. Lili put a calming hand on my knee under the table. I pushed her away. Kurt wasn’t made of glass. Albert tried to smooth over my aggression by asking about my husband’s health, but I was in no mood to drop the subject.

  “You’ve given him a new source of worry, Herr Einstein. Kurt worked for months on your birthday present.”

  “You mean the engraving? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m talking about his article on relativity.27 It got to the point where he stopped sleeping, poor dear.”

  “Your husband was not the only one to suffer over that business. The editor was on the verge of a mental collapse. The text only reached him at the last moment and even then … If Gödel could have been at the foot of the printing press to go over his galleys once more, he would have done it!”

  “You should have seen him picking apart the sales contract for this house!”

  “If my presence is disturbing you, I can go and take my nap.”

  “Don’t be upset, my friend. Your contribution didn’t get the reception it deserved, perhaps, but not because of the quality of your work. Who nowadays takes any interest in relativity?”

  I now had the explanation for Kurt’s renewed insomnia. Again, all that effort for nothing. Would his time ever come? The curse of being always ahead. Or always a step to the side.

  I’d had my own disappointment. I’d knitted a sweater for Albert in honor of his seventieth birthday, only to learn from Lili that he was allergic to wool. The useless sweater had gone to charity. The Gödels were both disappointed: Albert had expressed no more than polite enthusiasm for the engraving and for Kurt’s article. What is more unpleasant than being disappointed by a gift, unless it’s being the person whose gift is unappreciated? Lili had hit the jackpot: she had given Albert a heavy cotton pullover from Switzerland that she’d bought in an army surplus store, and the old codger wore it constantly. What an irony for a pacifist!

  “What did this birthday present consist of, exactly?”

  Oskar patted the hand of his young wife. “It’s too complicated to explain, Dorothy. Adele knows nothing more about it either.”

  “I am perfectly well informed! Nothing he does can surprise me anymore. We might be able to travel through time? So what! Albert said it himself the other day: you can prove anything with mathematics.”

  “You’re gallo
ping a bit too far and too fast, Adele. You’ve probably taken on too much fuel.”

  Lili walked right over Oskar’s acerbic comment.

  “Is that really true? Then we actually do live in a sciencefiction world!”

  My mollusk of a husband, sensing the energy levels growing more intense, retreated into his shell.

  “Our friend Gödel is not a charlatan! Who does not know this?”

  “Explain it to us, Herr Einstein! I’ll be able to tell my children that I had you as a teacher.”

  Dorothy clapped her hands in excitement. She knew how to make men talk. I had a head start of twenty years in the matter, she had just as many years less on her hips. And Albert was not unswayed by her charms.

  “Tell it to my children! They haven’t yet recovered from the experience.”

  “Pour another glass for the master of time!”

  “What I really need for this sort of performance is my pipe.”

  I saw his young colleagues snort when he launched into a brief explanation of the mathematics of general relativity. His vocabulary was not unfamiliar to me. From listening to conversations, I’d acquired some basic notions of physics. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture his four-dimensional Jell-O: three dimensions in space and one in time. Maybe I didn’t have enough fingers. From what I’d understood, the ingredients Einstein assembled allowed a number of recipes to be prepared. His equations admitted of different solutions, each modeling a different possible universe. Even if it was difficult to imagine the existence of other worlds, it wasn’t impossible to conceive: with the same starting ingredients, I sometimes cooked very different dishes, from heavenly to horrible.

  With his own mathematical cookery, my husband had exhibited the possibility of universes with indigestible geometry. In these worlds, space-time trajectories were closed loops in time, folding back on themselves. He had explained it to me by twisting my sewing ribbon. In other words, you could arrive at a station in the past with a ticket for the future. According to Kurt, if we traveled in a spaceship along a sufficiently large curve, we could, in this universe, go to any place in time and come back from it, just as in our universe we traveled through space.