The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

  “You know very well what I think of that, Adele.”

  “I can’t stand Princeton anymore. Why not accept the offer from Harvard? The people there are very friendly.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  The thunder of the drum prevented us from carrying the conversation any further. The session was over.

  “We’re making progress. My assistant will schedule you for your next appointment.”

  Kurt rose and paid the psychoanalyst, who walked us to the door of his office. I was pulling on my gloves in the lobby, a little shell-shocked, when Hulbeck stuck his shaggy dog’s head around the edge of the door.

  “By the way, Adele. I keep that death mask for a particular reason. Anger has its good side too. I try never to forget it. I intend to keep shitting on Goethe until the day I die. Will we see you at Albert’s on Sunday?”

  41

  Anna, not wanting to arrive early, walked around the IAS on foot. She had followed Adele’s advice and bought herself a new outfit. Under her severe coat, she wore a red crepe dress with a neckline scooped too low for her small bust. She felt dolled up. She had put on makeup and, at the last moment, loosened her hair, all the while questioning the point of assembling such an arsenal when the war was already lost.

  At the appointed hour, which she allowed to slip past until she was fashionably late, she walked up the driveway toward Olden Manor, the opulent neo-Victorian mansion whose twenty or more rooms had been the prerogative of the IAS director since 1939. It was in that house that Robert Oppenheimer’s children, among others, had grown up. As a child, Anna had explored its every nook and cranny, but she hadn’t set foot inside for years. Its heavy freight of memories added to her anxiety. She was on the point of turning and walking away when the door opened onto the beaming face of Ernestine.

  Of Creole stock, Ernestine had been working for the Adamses for almost twenty years. She was part of the furniture, as were the flamboyantly colored blouses she invariably wore. Despite Virginia Adams’s best efforts, Ernestine stayed true to her tropical tastes and refused to adopt the sober uniform of a traditional nanny, more in keeping with the family’s social position. Indeed, with the passage of time, Ernestine’s plumage had grown bigger and brasher. She had never conceded on a single point, including her unsettling habit of sprinkling her speech with obscure French expressions.

  “Anna, mon bel oiseau, my beautiful bird! I’m so happy to see you!” She straightaway kissed the young woman on both cheeks. Anna recognized her particular smell: vanilla and yeast.

  “You haven’t changed, Tine.”

  “Taratata, je suis une vraie baleine, I’m an absolute whale! But look at you, you’re pretty as a picture.” She pinched her waist. “If you were eating my food, there’d be more flesh around those bones. Good God. Young women today!”

  Anna handed her a small package. Both of them gave a sudden start at the sound of a hysterical summons from the second floor. Ernestine sighed, her hands pressed into the small of her back. Calvin Adams appeared in the hall. He had chosen to dress casually in a warm-toned flannel shirt over a white turtleneck sweater. Anna suspected him of hiding an incipient goiter behind his dandyish affectation. “You look lovely in your new haircut, Anna.” This time, she managed not to touch her hair. She wouldn’t be caught out again by easy compliments. Calvin’s always had the effect of a sweaty palm placed on her breasts. Luckily he didn’t dwell on the subject but asked Ernestine to go upstairs and give Mrs. Adams a hand.

  Virginia Adams materialized in a thick cloud of heady perfume, a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other. This was how Anna had always known her.

  “You’re early. Nothing is ready yet.”

  Anna let it pass. She had been inoculated against Virginia Adams’s venom during childhood. She wondered how long it would take her hostess to spoil her perfect makeup with one of the theatrical crying jags she was prone to. Virginia still knew how to make herself stunning, although age had forced her to increase the dose of artifice. She was a spectacular grenade, pin pulled and ready for launch, whose explosion her husband had been trying for years to retard.

  Anna stood there with her arms full until her hosts condescended to take her things from her. Mrs. Adams put her through the customary inspection. She fingered the red dress without letting go of her cigarette. Anna prayed that the lighted tip wouldn’t set fire to the delicate fabric. She had never bought herself such a costly rag before. Still, she fell a long way short of the luxury exhibited by Virginia, who was draped in a silk caftan.

  “It will never stand up to being cleaned. Still, that red does make a statement.” Virginia was one of those people whose every pronouncement had to be read in the contrary sense: her enthusiasm as an insult, and a vague reproach as a hidden compliment. The young woman handed her hostess a bottle of Orvieto, an Italian white she had enjoyed a little too much during her stay in Umbria with Gianni. Virginia accepted the humble offering without interest. Calvin, a practiced diplomat, invited his employee to take a seat in the living room. “This house is your home. As you well know.”

  Anna chose a remote spot in the depths of one of the overstuffed sofas by the fireplace with her back to the library. The smell of leather was somehow reassuring. She had good memories of this room. As a schoolgirl, she had done her homework here with Leo while Ernestine made them waffles in the kitchen. Before she could compose herself, Leonard walked into her field of vision and collapsed on the couch across from her.

  “Elegant as ever, Leo.”

  “I did make an effort. Did you notice the necktie?”

  “You look awful. Your shirt is all wrinkled.”

  She straightened his necktie, thinking of all the times she had tied his shoelaces, rounded up his schoolbooks, and rescued him from punishment with an apt lie. He drained his glass in one gulp, his eyes studiously avoiding the library. The same memories must have been flooding through his mind. Anna kicked herself for having gone back so quickly to maternal gestures. Under his sloppy clothes, she recognized the tight-lipped boy who was either too shy to show his teeth or too clever to let his self-satisfaction show. His nose, which was extraordinarily large for such a narrow face, had given Leo quite a complex at puberty. Without his dark, laughing eyes, he could have been ugly. Embarrassed at being examined so closely, he waggled his eyebrows like a dime-store crooner.

  “Did anyone offer you a drink?”

  “I need to keep a clear head. I’ve been pressed into service as an interpreter for the French mathematician.”

  “Totally unnecessary. His English is excellent. My father played the same trick on me. He’s hoping I’ll cozy up to Richardson III. Or is it IV? A goldbrick of the first water.”

  Anna felt caught in a trap. So it wasn’t Leonard who had contrived their meeting. The door to the library had been closed for a long time. She said yes to the drink. Her friend slouched over to the bar. His formal shirt looked wrong on him. Anna had grown used to his inevitable T-shirts with their obscure taglines. His extreme sloppiness could easily fool an unwary observer. The younger Adams hid his crystalline mental rigor under the trappings of a two-bit rebel. He was nonetheless a pure analytic machine, like the computers that he had discovered at a young age and that had sealed his fate. His determined nonconformism had been partly responsible for his father’s thinning hair and his mother’s alcoholism, though it may also have been their natural consequence.

  He returned with two glasses the size of soup tureens. Judging from the quantity of scotch in his glass and the sparsity of hair on his forehead, Leo had inherited from both his parents. Calvin Adams poked his head into the room and waved at them: the guests were arriving. His son responded with a blink. Anna wondered at his unusual docility. She remembered a night when he had walked out of the house barefoot, slamming the door behind him. He hadn’t managed to run very far. His parents sent Tine down to the police station to pick him up. Leo had refused to speak to his progenitors for more than three weeks. He h
ad just turned ten.

  “I hear that your father married one of his grad students. That must have given Rachel fits.”

  “Ancient history. Since then she’s found herself a tanned anthropologist from Berkeley. Some catch!”

  “Don’t complain. It could have been the other way around.”

  She smiled, imagining her white-maned and patrician father in his gold-buttoned blazer on the arm of a wiry con man in khaki fatigues. Her mother with a pretty young minx was less hard to imagine.

  Leonard lit a cigarette. Anna had stopped smoking on her return from Europe, not without difficulty. She stifled the impulse. Over the past several days, her hunger for cigarettes had sharply revived. Everyone in the world smoked except her.

  “Why did you come back to Princeton, Anna?”

  She finished her scotch in a single long swallow. The question was too direct to elicit a considered answer. Leo lacked nuance. As he had often said to her, “There are ten different kinds of people: those who understand binary numbers, and then everyone else.” His world was peopled with 1s and 0s, in black and white, while Anna’s harbored every gradation of gray. He was discrete, she continuous. They had never managed to define a border between them that was both simple and permeable yet also watertight enough that neither would dissolve in the other. Unlike in mathematics, Leo’s infinity seemed more voracious than Anna’s.

  The Florence caper two years earlier had cut off their debate. One morning the doorbell rang in the distance in Gianni’s vast palazzo. He was asleep. He slept like a log, and the activities of the previous night gave him little reason to rise from his torpor. Anna had crawled out of bed, grabbed a man’s shirt off the floor, and yelled in Italian at the jerk who had the gall to come knocking at that hour to be patient. She’d opened the door to discover Leonard. He had a duffel bag in one hand and an indecipherable smile on his face. “Surprise!” was all he said in explanation. And surprised he had been to see a half-naked Gianni appear behind Anna. Leo had turned and walked away without a word. She hadn’t seen him since.

  Gianni hadn’t made a scene of any kind, hadn’t asked her to “choose.” She’d had no choice to make. Everything was already ruined. He had let her go with only one reproach: “I wish you had told me about it first, Anna. It’s never pleasant to realize that you’re a stand-in. Especially when, like me, you spend your life tracking down forgers.” But he didn’t accept her apologies.

  Leo punched her on the shoulder. He hated it when she drifted away from him.

  “What happened to the Italian guy?”

  “I guess it didn’t work out.”

  Virginia Adams was waving her veils to draw them toward the table.

  “Save me a place next to you.”

  “So glad to be your all-purpose stopgap.”

  “Same here.”

  42

  1954

  Alice in Atomicland

  If you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,”

  it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  “The L fifty-one is available in two colors. The baby blue is particularly popular.”

  “I don’t trust the Prescot line. The L eighteen had definite safety issues. Were they able to fix the Freon leak?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Gödel. No one has ever complained about it. Except you.”

  Our prosperous appliance salesman shifted his weight from one leg to the other, all the while admiring his nails. With his rabbit’s teeth and a smile that promised heaven on the installment plan, Smith looked like a Mickey Rooney gone to seed. He endured my husband’s interrogation with a lack of interest that bordered on insult. In his defense, this was only the latest of numerous sessions in which his patience had been tested.

  “You don’t carry any European models?”

  “Why not Russian while you are at it? Your husband sure is a card, Mrs. Gödel!”

  Kurt dodged a manly punch on the arm. Smith had to recover his balance by making an awkward lunge.

  “There is a whole world between the USA and the USSR. Are you unaware of it?”

  “They’re all commies! What we sell here, Mr. Gödel, is good old U.S. technology.”

  “Smith! You can’t suspect an appliance of being Communist, now, can you?”

  “I know what I know, ma’am. And I’ll give you a $25 rebate on the Golden Automatic because you’re such good clients.”

  “It costs $400, Kurt! We can’t afford to buy ourselves a refrigerator at that price every year!”

  Ignoring my distrust, Smith polished a dazzling, chrome-appointed Admiral Fridge, priced at $299. He tried to clinch the sale with a series of unanswerable arguments: the model had an extra freezer compartment and the door opened either to the right or to the left. I hadn’t suffered the conversation of the greatest visionaries of the century to take the oily condescension of a local hardware man lying down. I dragged my husband outside.

  “Adele, we need a new refrigerator! Ours is a hazard. We’re liable to get gassed by it.”

  “We’ll have one sent to us from New York. Smith is too certain that we’ll buy from him. He’s stopped making any effort. He’s robbing us.”

  “You’re wrong, Adele.”

  “It’s fascinating, Kurt. You see plots everywhere except where they really exist!”

  I pushed Kurt ahead of me down the sidewalk, the salesman’s sardonic grin boring into my back.

  “Try to understand that our wanting to change refrigerators as often as we do makes people take us—if we’re lucky!—for thorough lunatics. And right now, it’s best to keep a low profile.”

  “It’s such a shame that Herr Einstein never marketed his patent!”38

  “He has plenty of other projects to occupy him. If you keep on with him about your fridge, he’s going to lock you up inside it! Get a move on. You’re late for your appointment with Albert, and I’m late for mine with the hairdresser.”

  Rose had set my hair and was preparing to take the rollers out. From the shampoo onward, I had sensed that she had a juicy bit of gossip that she couldn’t wait to pass along. Knowing the likely subject, I played deaf to her hints. Finally she couldn’t wait any longer: restraint was just too painful for this professional gossip.

  “So, did he or didn’t he? All of Princeton is buzzing about it. Your husband’s director is supposed to have sold the bomb to the Russians. It was in the papers this morning.”

  “If you believe everything the papers say, Rose, I can’t help you.”

  She roughly unrolled a lock of hair.

  “But the Oppenheimers are your friends.”

  I hesitated to say anything. In Princeton, a harmless lie could come back at you like a meteorite after orbiting the town three times.

  “I trust them completely.”

  “Mrs. Oppenheimer does seem to think she’s better than everyone. Don’t you think?”

  “Rose, just because you lost her as a client doesn’t give you the right to accuse her of horrible crimes!”

  She removed the last roller with a yank.

  “Selling our secrets to the Communists. All the same. If the Russians have the bomb, it’s surely because one of ours who knows something gave it to them!”

  “You don’t think they could have made one all on their own? You don’t think that they have their own quota of mad scientists?”

  Rose’s comb stopped in midmotion. The idea had never occurred to her.

  “The Oppenheimers are not members of the Communist Party, Rose. I’m sure of it.”

  She looked at me in the mirror. “You don’t understand, Mrs. Gödel. The most important figures in the Communist Party aren’t actually members, because it would restrict their activities. I read it in the newspaper.”

  “You should stick to Harper’s Bazaar!”

  I felt like walking out right then, even with my hair a mess. But run away from stupidity? Bad idea. It always outruns you and catches up
in the end. Maybe you could ignore it. But never again would I run from it.

  “Please hurry, Rose. I am expected at Professor Einstein’s.”

  She digested the information. Albert was still widely admired by the public. To punish me for boasting, she sprayed me with an extra coat of lacquer.

  I arrived at Albert’s house at teatime. I stank of cheap lacquer and the rancid sweat of perpetual anxiety. I hated this period of my life in America. It reminded me too much of prewar Vienna. And the rotten political climate was having a terrible effect on Kurt. The permanent suspicion, now falling on the scientific community itself, fueled his anxiety. He was brewing his usual unhealthy stew by appropriating the very real problems of others to himself—those of Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, who was suspected of espionage. My husband saw enemies everywhere. The milkman changed the schedule of his rounds: he was spying on us. A student tried to reach Kurt to discuss his thesis: my husband locked and bolted the door and stopped answering the telephone. Someone contradicted him during a meeting: he accused the entire IAS of being in league against him. Our apartment was bugged, our mail was being read, we were being followed, they wanted to poison him. Only his closest friends were willing to listen to him and not scream with boredom. Of course a scientist of his kind would advance in his career with suspicious slowness. Where did the fault lie if not in his lack of political savvy? He attributed the unflattering rumors and comments supposedly aimed at him to professional jealousy. His colleagues, particularly those with no reason to indulge him, found his quirks more fascinating than his scientific work. Kurt saw this as an incipient plot, while I recognized it as a defensive reflex: what they really wanted to know was whether he was going to snap like a twig right in front of them. The upshot was that Kurt wouldn’t eat, or only a very little. I reassumed the role of official taster. But he managed to go on working, as though there were a watertight compartment in his mind, a space that resisted submersion when the rising flood-waters drowned everything else.