“Do you like James Brown, Adele?”
“I adore him. Why?”
“I think of you more as a Perry Como fan.”
At the mention of the old crooner, Gladys oohed with pleasure, her tools tracing dangerous arcs. “Don’t get me started on Perry Como!” Anna tried hard not to think of anything but her hair.
“This music reminds me of Louis, a gorgeous light-skinned black from Louisiana …” Adele interrupted Gladys sharply: she was happy to call on her services but not to listen to her blathering. Unruffled, the diminutive woman stowed her memories away. The widow Gödel knew how to make herself obeyed, less because of her rich past than her nasty character. At first, the other residents hadn’t believed a word about her friendship with Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. But Gladys had been there when the attending physician confessed his admiration for Kurt Gödel, and since then she had toed the line set by Adele. Anyway, there were plenty of others at Pine Run who were willing to listen without interrupting.
“Being a chatterbox is one of the hazards of the trade. But I have to say that you aren’t much of a talker, young lady. You’re all tense.”
“She is more at ease with scientists than with hairdressers, although I have warned her against them!”
Anna relaxed her shoulders. She must get on the wavelength of these two dotty old ladies.
“I am surrounded by them! What about women scientists? Did you meet any, Adele?”
“Very few. It was a world of men.”
“Olga Taussky-Todd, Emmy Noether,32 Marie Curie?”
“Albert thought of them as exceptions. He used to say, ‘Madame Curie is highly intelligent, but she has the soul of a herring.’ ”
“I’m very fond of herring for breakfast.”
“We couldn’t care less, Gladys.”
“Einstein wasn’t known for being indulgent toward women. He was said to be full of humanity, though.”
“You’re confusing humanity and kindness, dear girl. Aren’t humans more noted for their greed, violence, and mean-heartedness?”
Gladys didn’t dare say anything. Adele raised her eyebrow threateningly at her before continuing.
“I’m exaggerating. Albert’s character wasn’t like that, in fact just the opposite. He was a little macho, as we say now. He always overplayed his feelings, because he was constantly being observed. There were some who didn’t appreciate his caustic humor.”
“His wife must have found it difficult too.”
“His wives! He divorced the one who saw him through the difficult years so that he could marry his cousin. And I won’t even mention his mistresses! But let’s not judge him. Each of us has a complicated personal history. There is no great scientist, and no great artist, who is not selfish. And my husband was a great scientist! Kurt was a child. The world orbited around his head. Until the day when he came face-to-face with difficulty. He didn’t want to accept it.”
Gladys showed her approval by snipping off a long strand of hair.
“Men are selfish! You can take my word for it, I’ve tried boatloads of them!”
Adele ignored her and went on: “Why does genius come at such a young age? As it does with poets. Do the doors to the realm of ideas close with maturity?”
Gladys weighed in: “It must be hormonal. Afterward, they grow a paunch and think only about dinner.”
Exasperated, Adele brushed the remark aside. She had always bowed to the intelligence of those around her, but she took pleasure now in being condescending.
“Experience can’t replace the brilliant flashes of youth. Mathematical intuition vanishes as quickly as beauty. They talk about a mathematician having been great the way they talk about a woman having been beautiful. Time knows no justice, Anna. You’re no longer very young for a woman, and even less so for a mathematician.”
Anna thought of Leo. How would he take this curse? Used to succeeding easily, he had never accepted failure. His parents had even had to ban sports from his life, as every defeat triggered violent rages and insulting language, followed by an oppressive silence. As the years went on, he avoided any activity not directly related to his native gift. He would perhaps become one of those men forever maundering over what once they were, denying that they were now anything else, walled up within a closed and sterile world, too lazy to take stock of reality. She didn’t want to be on hand to pick up the pieces, as Mrs. Gödel had done.
“Would you have liked to be a scientist, Adele?”
“I would have liked to be Hedy Lamarr.33 Do you know her?”
Gladys couldn’t resist butting in. “She had fabulous hair, but she can’t be very attractive these days. The newspapers say she’s been caught shoplifting.”
“Hedy was a stunning actress. She had a perfect complexion and extraordinary blue eyes. She acted in the first nude scene in the history of cinema. The film is called Ecstasy. It made quite a scandal!”
“My second husband used to photograph me naked. I could have been a model.”
“Miss Lamarr was a Jew from Vienna. She immigrated to the United States just like us. During the war she worked on a radio-guidance system for torpedoes. And she kept acting the whole time!”
“A character out of a novel.”
“Out of the movies, young lady! She lit up the screen.”
Using both hands, Gladys held up a chrome gadget.
“I’ve finished. Now I’m going to dry your hair. I don’t know the first thing about torpedoes, but you’d better believe that I’m the queen of blow-drying.”
Anna clenched her teeth. Any further attempt at conversation was drowned out by the roar of the hair dryer. The pink demon went about her task with such energy that it was useless to intervene. Anna would wash her hair that night when she got home as she did after every session at the hairdresser’s.
“Easy on fluffing it out. I don’t want to look like Barbra Streisand!”
38
1950
Witch
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
I hate him. I bang around from room to room. I hate him. I stop in front of the living room mirror. I see my haggard, unrecognizable face. I am a witch. A ball of pure anger. A bomb. I break the goddamn mirror. Ten years of bad luck? I’ve paid at the office! What could be worse than what I’ve already been through? I stare at the broken glass at my feet. I cut myself picking up a shard. It doesn’t make me feel any better. I cook for myself alone. I stand there stuffing my face right from the pan. I eat, and I eat, and I eat. I’d swallow the whole world if it didn’t taste so rotten. And shit it out. I can’t calm my heart. My mind is racing. I am a steam engine. My guts hurt, my chest hurts, my uterus. I am going to swell up from all this anger and fly away somewhere else. No, it isn’t elsewhere that I want. What I want is before. Before him. When will the earth stop turning around his navel? What am I? His governess? The one who wipes his shit for him! A big piece of furniture he doesn’t know how to get rid of. All those years I spent mopping up his fears. I thought that happiness would finally come with this house. Only to learn that I’m to blame? That does it! I’m angry, angrier than I’ve ever been. My life is a gigantic waste. My one mistake was to have been so stupid. He rubs his stomach. I’m going to feel sorry for him? Let him retreat into his shell and lock the door! Does it hurt? He’s always hurting somewhere! Why should I worry? He has cried wolf too often! If he knew what I think of him. A crybaby. I never asked to be his mother. His fucking liebe Mama! I want a man, a real man! One who isn’t always getting migraines. I’m a loudmouth? Damn right! I have to fill the silence. He doesn’t say anything. He falls asleep in front of the TV. He walks around with Papa Albert. Supposedly he works. So, yes, I sound off! What else can I do? I vomit my anger all over him. What have we become? Who is this fat, shrieking woman? Why is she yelling at that poor skeleton? Dr. Rampona said I shouldn’t distress him. I don’t give a damn that he�
�s friends with Einstein! For twenty years I’ve heard him whine about his charlatan doctors! Now I’m responsible for his ulcer? He can gnaw at his own gut very well without me. Don’t count on me to keep mothering him. He can go to the hospital, it’ll be a break for me! I’m an old woman with a dried-up belly. I’m past caring for him like the child he never bothered to give me. He dragged me into exile with him because he didn’t have the courage to live alone. It was always “tomorrow,” always “soon,” and now I’m fifty years old. It’s too late. And they want me to shut up? Around all these great men with their frigid middle-class wives, I’m nothing. Some little old lady. I never see anyone. I waited for him to stop feeling ashamed of me before he introduced me to his mother. I watched his crises coming on. I sprung him from the loony bin. I married him on the rush. I’ve pissed my life away waiting for him. He finds my language “inappropriate”? I’ll show him inappropriate! He doesn’t understand anything except his stinking mathematics! I’ll turn his goddamn notebooks into confetti! Confetti to celebrate his new delusion! He’s afraid of me. I keep him from working. Is anything more precious to him? But the world doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his scribbling! Even his friends laugh behind his back at his stories of a revolving cosmos! The man is a black hole, a monster that sucks up all the light in the universe. They’d be surprised, all those fine folk, to hear me talk like this! The little cabaret dancer learned a few things along the way. As if I could have lived with him for twenty-five years and never understood anything. Twenty years of begging him for a crumb of his venerable attention. I don’t give a good goddamn about his delusions anymore. No one follows him. No one believes him. No one is still interested in him. Kurt Gödel is a has-been who is burying the both of us alive. I was guardian to an idol. Now I’m the prisoner of a madman. Yes, a madman! Where has the man I loved gone, where is the music, the party? Where has my youth gone? With all his intelligence he could have been rich, if it hadn’t been beneath him. The others live in palaces with more servants than they know what to do with. My poor darling is too fragile to take on any responsibilities. Too much a perfectionist to publish. He refuses to fight. I have to do it for him. So Adele lives in a cardboard house. Adele saves up her pennies to buy nylons, but Kurt insists on having impeccable suits and brand-new shirts. A spoiled child. An ingrate. Let him tell his mother all about it! He can write and complain about all the pain I put him through! Not to forget how much my cooking disgusts him! How afraid he is of being poisoned by his own wife! He’d rather eat nothing but butter. If I’d wanted to kill him, I’d have let him die in Purkersdorf! He feels pain? All the better! It means he’s still alive.
39
Anna stopped on the steps of Pine Run to say hello to Jean, Mrs. Gödel’s favorite nurse, who was juggling a cup of steaming coffee and a cigarette. “You look really great, Miss Roth! Did you do something to your hair?” Anna instinctively raised a hand to her head. To her utter surprise, the pink demon had done a nice job. The young woman could tell as soon as she’d rushed to a mirror after the session. Jean gave her an update on Adele’s state of health. The old lady was very agitated, and they couldn’t manage to bring down her blood pressure. Anna pursed her lips. Their escapade had exacted its price.
The nurse stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of her clog, then slipped the half-smoked butt into her pocket. “Gladys gave you a haircut, and you took Adele to the movies. You’re quite the adventuress!” She walked off laughing.
Adele had gone back to looking like a sulking little girl. She was bored stiff.
“You don’t want to watch TV?”
“It’s shit in a glass jar!”
“What if I read to you for a change?”
“Anything but that! I much prefer conversation. You are too fond of books and not enough of people. You remind me of my husband.”
Anna had been hearing this reproach all her life. As a child, she was always being made to get some air. She would hide in the closet so she could keep reading. Since her empty-handed return to Princeton, she had been devouring crime novels one after another, as though fictional mayhem could somehow make her own unhappiness more bearable. While others fed on cloying, sentimental novels, Anna, under the guilty tent of her duvet, wolfed down murders, rapes, whores, pimps, dealers, and blow jobs. She needed the alternate dimension from which these dark words issued. Once the book was closed, she washed her hands, drank a glass of wine, and felt a momentary relief, despite her soiled heart.
“I have the impression that reading helps me understand others better.”
“No one can go into another person’s head. You have to learn to live with solitude. None of your books will change that. A fuck is the one honest thing.”
Adele looked at her out of the corner of her eye. The young woman hadn’t flinched.
“Do you miss sex at this point?”
Mrs. Gödel smiled. That she had taken a step closer to the Nachlass crossed Anna’s mind, but she didn’t dwell on it. She surprised herself by her indifference.
“I miss the desire more than I miss the pleasure. I was quite ravenous in that department. Kurt stopped his attentions toward me too early. He neglected his body and by the same token he neglected mine.”
“How did you manage?”
“Was I an adulteress? No. I had a very strict upbringing. It never goes away. I suffered so much from the years when we lived in sin, as we used to say, that I swore I would be a model wife. And I was. Yet men were still attracted to me. I was good-looking before I became this … thing.”
She weighed her enormous bosoms in her hands with an air of disgust.
“I look like an ocean liner. It’s horrible to feel that you are imprisoned in a strange body. Inside, I am twenty years old. No, actually, I am your age. My age at the time I met Kurt.”
“How did you win his affections? I know you were attractive physically, but Mr. Gödel was not an ordinary man.”
Adele twisted her wedding ring around her swollen finger. It hurt Anna to see it. The old woman couldn’t bring herself to wear it around her neck. She preferred mild pain to symbolic betrayal.
“Scientists are men like the rest. Genius or not. I applied Adele’s theorem. It has never let me down. But the world has changed, as you have pointed out to me.”
Adele smiled impishly. Two rays of light came to tickle the wall. Where they crossed, a perfect, dazzling square seemed to open another window. “God is with us,” breathed Adele. The two women stared at the poetic and ephemeral undulation, until a cloud dissolved it.
“First, you must learn how to listen to men. Let them talk, even if they are sermonizing on a subject you know more about than they do. Especially then! And if the subject is foreign to you, soak up their words like manna from heaven. Inside each man, there is a prophet sleeping. If his liebe Mama ignored him at all as a child, you will appear a godsend to him. With your fresh face of a Virgin Mary, it shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
“Is there a word for female machismo?”
“So what? All that matters is the result.”
The young woman didn’t tell Adele that she reminded her of her mother. Rachel had always granted herself permission to play every angle. Anna, by contrast, had never resolved the ambivalence of her upbringing, which enjoined her to be a seductress and also an intellectual. One always detracted from the other. And mixing the two felt inappropriate, shameful. She preferred to wait for someone to seduce her.
“I follow the basic principles of metallurgy. First, heat up your work piece! I don’t need to explain how, you are not so naïve. Then make it cold all of a sudden. It works every time.”
“You applied this method to Kurt Gödel?”
“He was always very susceptible to my flattery.”
She cupped both hands under her chin and spoke in an admiring voice: “ ‘Kurtele, your talk was by far the best!’ I would watch his smile appear. Even if, between you and me, I had quietly grabbed a few winks during the lecture.”
> “But according to Adele’s theorem, we have to willingly subordinate ourselves in order to seduce. I’m sorry, Adele, but it’s a reactionary idea.”
“Seduction is nothing. Constancy is what is difficult. And it was worth it. In spite of everything. In the end, it all depends on how the mother of the chosen male brought her son up. If he was the center of everything, he will insist on staying at the center. If he was neglected, he will need to be reassured.”
“And which upbringing did your husband have?”
“His was at the exact intersection of the two.”
Anna thought about the letters from Marianne that Adele had burned. Relations between the two Frau Gödels must have been exceptionally violent.
“Let us leave my mother-in-law to one side! I will be seeing her again soon enough. If you don’t believe my theory, try this experiment. Look a man straight in the eyes. But pay attention! There cannot be the slightest trace of sarcasm! Then purr at him, ‘You’re so strong …!’ ”
Anna stifled a fit of giggles. She couldn’t decide just how seriously to take the conversation. Nor where the trap lay.
“You’ll see. Not one of them can resist. The sentence freezes their brains. Of course, some are more resistant than others. Still, the information neutralizes their thought process for at least a moment. It strokes their prehistoric brain. It is a shortcut implanted in little boys by their mother.”
This time, Anna smiled happily. She could easily imagine the young Adele’s blandishments.
“It is all in the conviction of your voice and the ingenuousness of your gaze. My theorem also works on cats.”
“I’ll try it on mine. Before attacking the human species.”
“I thought I noticed cat hair on your clothes! My favorite are the Manx cats from the Isle of Man. They have no tail. My neighbors had three of them. One day I told them I was going to cut off the tail of my alley cat to make it look more like theirs. They implored me to reconsider. ‘Mrs. Gödel, cats need their tails in order to maintain their balance!’ And blah, blah, blah. They didn’t see the joke. A few days later, my hairdresser in Princeton tried to talk me out of committing such a horrible act. Hulbeck, our psychiatrist, had been telling everyone in sight. The madman’s wife, is she crazy? Yes! The genius’s mate, is she a genius? Certainly not! That’s how they thought of me in the neighborhood.”
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 25