I put my scarf over my head before ringing the doorbell. Lili opened the door, paler than usual.
“What’s happening, darling? Has someone died?”
She put a finger to her lips. In the living room, Albert was just finishing a tense phone conversation. All faces were turned toward him. Lili, Kurt, Oskar, and Albert’s assistants, Helen and Bruria, were holding their porcelain cups suspended in midair. Helen motioned me to take her place and poured me a cup of tea. I’d have preferred a strong drink. Albert hung up the phone, livid with rage, and collapsed on a chair.
“They have concluded that there is no proof or evidence of disloyalty. But it does not mean, as far as they’re concerned, that our friend is not a danger. Masters of litotes!”
“Good God! Will Robert be removed from the IAS? Or worse?”
“Let’s not lose our heads, Lili. The Oppenheimers are not in the same situation as the Rosenbergs. He will lose his position in Washington and his security clearance at the AEC. It was expiring in any case. They are planning to keep him at a distance from any sensitive work or policy decisions.”
“Why in God’s name did he want to appear before that trumped-up panel? You told him it was a bad idea, Herr Einstein.”
“He wanted to clear his good name. And I believe he wanted to make expiation for his part in Los Alamos.”
“That Teller is one goddamn bastard!”39
“Adele!”
“It’s all right, Gödel. Your wife is not wrong. Their whole file of accusations is based on Teller’s supposed intuitions. The warmongers now have a free hand at the AEC. And that’s what they wanted from the first. To discredit Robert and dispel his influence.”
No one dared to answer Albert, who seemed overcome with sadness. The old physicist wore himself out fighting battles for everyone else, whereas Kurt had never fought for anyone but himself. The German disaster was starting all over again. We were too old or too cynical to be surprised by it. Hitler, too, had conjured up the figment of a Communist conspiracy to weaken democracy. America would take the same path, unless people like Einstein who were both sagacious and willing to sacrifice themselves intervened.40
“Gödel, you discovered a flaw in the American Constitution. No one would listen. Well, here we are! We have put a foot in the shit of dictatorship.”
“Don’t say that sort of thing. Our conversations are monitored.”
The old man sprang from his seat, grabbed a lamp with a beaded shade, and held it to his mouth like a microphone.
“Hello! Hello! Radio Moscow, here! Albert Einstein speaking. I have sold the recipe for pea soup to Stalin, may he choke on it, and Senator McCarthy too! What? Stalin is already dead? Ah!”
He shook the poor lamp.
“Do you copy? What, there’s no one on the line? They should invent a direct line between Moscow and Princeton. Communications are in terrible disrepair.”
We wavered between laughter and anxiety. Bruria, fearing for the general safety, took the lamp from his hands.
“Calm down, Professor! Don’t go looking for trouble!”
He patted his pockets searching for his faithful companion. Helen picked up the beads that had fallen on the rug. As she walked out of the room, she put a placating hand on her employer’s shoulder. Collapsed once more in his chair, he was tugging at the ends of his yellowing, tobacco-flecked mustache. Though his sagging features spoke of his great age, his eyes had lost nothing of their youth: two black stars.
“Unless there is a price to pay, courage has no value. Since I publicly supported Robert, I have had fifty more trench coats dogging my steps! And have you seen what the newspaper boys are writing about me? Thank goodness my Maja is no longer here to read such garbage!”
“You’ve been so brave, Herr Einstein.”
“What can they do to me, Lili? Take away my American nationality?41 Throw me in prison? It is the one good thing about this goddamn fame! It keeps them from doing anything they want!”
He lit his pipe and drew several puffs on it, which seemed to calm him.
“Poor Kitty. She defends Robert tooth and nail although they’ve dug up an affair he once had with a Communist girlfriend! What depths will they not sink to?”
“It doesn’t concern us, Adele! I hate this fishwives’ gossip.”
I swallowed the insult. I wasn’t fooled: Oppie hardly came out of this business pure as the driven snow. I was ready to acknowledge that he had helped us a great deal, but he had also played with fire. This parody of a trial had brought to a close, to his advantage finally, what the press called the “Chevalier affair.” In this time of anticommunist hysteria, anyone who was against using the bomb was considered unpatriotic. Einstein had publicly warned against the H-bomb during a televised interview. The fusion bomb would be a thousand times more destructive than the fission bomb.42 This statement had brought down on Albert the fury of every anticommunist and of their puppet master, J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful and long-standing head of the FBI. After working zealously with the military as the director at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had tried to put the brakes on nuclear proliferation. I had heard him discuss it with his colleagues around a barbecue grill. He claimed that the U.S. arsenal was already big enough to bomb Siberia into the Pacific—big enough to give our Red “opponents” a good scare. When the news emerged in 1949 that the Russians had detonated their first atomic bomb, a wave of espionage fever swept over America, culminating in the arrest and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were supposed to have sold nuclear secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets. And just the summer before, with the witch hunt in full swing and U.S. forces mired in Korea, we learned that the Russians had set off their first H-bomb, less than a year after “Ivy Mike,” the American one. The speed with which the Soviets had developed a thermonuclear bomb gave further grist to Senator McCarthy’s mill. Those commie bastards had the gall to piss as far as we did! Who had sold them their new toy? Suspicion again fell on the Manhattan Project regulars. By posting a moderate stance, Oppenheimer drew fire. Edward Teller had never forgiven him for choosing Hans Bethe to head the theoretical physics department at Los Alamos. Teller had rolled up his white-coated sleeves and set to work digging Oppie’s grave. Robert was no plaster saint. He’d already named names, a common practice at the time, when ancient forms of inquisition were being revived. To cover his rear, he’d had to confess in later hearings, muddling his story, to having been invited, although he never accepted, to give secret information to certain “persons.” He eventually denounced his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor at Berkeley. The new commission charged with investigating Robert’s “loyalty” had quickly picked out the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony. It also probed his past leftist sympathies, exhumed a militant girlfriend and his wife Kitty’s ex-husband, a soldier in the antifascist forces in Spain. The Oppenheimers were predictably enough caught in a web of allegations. With his arrogance and his undeniable intellectual superiority, Oppie offered a perfect target for petty spirits. An excellent chess player, he had taken the calculated risk of positioning himself as a victim: now History would remember him as a martyr, not a craven informer. His darker aspects didn’t negate my affection for him, just the opposite. The all-powerful boss had his flaws too.
On that afternoon, it was still too early for nuances. Indignation was the order of the day. Anger kept our minds from being numbed by fear, but only momentarily, because whose name would be blacklisted next? Kurt had done nothing to be ashamed of. He lacked the soul of a traitor and had no valuable information to offer. Why would the Russians take an interest in his work? Yet given the demented logic of the times, no one was safe, not even Kurt. A simple summons to testify would have been fatal to my husband.
We sipped our cold tea, hoping for better days. I looked at the clock: it was time to go. I was afraid that Kurt would use the momentary silence to initiate a conversation of the kind he particularly specialized in: obscure and supremely irrelevant. He leapt at the opportunity.
“Oppenheimer’s trial is not the first of its kind. The great scientists have always been subjected to cabals by the powers-that-be. Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz …”
Albert hesitated a few seconds. He knew where this would lead if he picked up the cue. In the end, he couldn’t resist the chance to needle his friend a bit. Morgenstern made an effort to mask his impatience by draining his already empty cup. Lili crossed and uncrossed her legs in anticipation of the ordeal.
“I wondered how long you would hold out before bringing good old Gottfried into the picture, Gödel. What is he doing in this list of brave martyrs? Leibniz was never persecuted, so far as I know!”
“Newton had powerful political allies. He brazenly robbed Leibniz of the credit for inventing the differential calculus.”
“That has nothing to do with a plot! Newton was a horrible man. But I settled his hash, don’t worry!”
“And what do you say to this? Certain works of Leibniz have disappeared from the Princeton library! Oskar is my witness.”
Morgenstern, embarrassed, nodded his assent. The university had acquired an extensive collection of the German scientist’s papers, but some of the documents were missing. According to Kurt, Leibniz had kept all his writings, his drafts and notes, for posterity. He couldn’t have destroyed the documents himself. Oskar believed the gaps reflected an oversight on the part of the catalogers, not a plot of any sort. My husband, eager to support his pet mania, would hear nothing of it.
“Certain texts have been secretly destroyed by those who want to prevent mankind from progressing in intelligence.”
“Who in God’s name would do that? McCarthy? He barely knows how to spell his own name!”
“Leibniz anticipated modern scientific research. He pointed to the paradoxes of set theory two hundred years before the fact. He even stole a march on my friends Morgenstern and von Neumann by developing game theory!”43
Oskar had been the stoic target of many previous attacks; he took no offense at this one.
“Don’t try to sell me a conspiracy by the Rosicrucians or some other secret order. We have enough thugs in our own day and age. Politicians persecute in broad daylight now. And let’s be frank. The modern world doesn’t give a damn about your Leibniz!”
“The general indifference is further evidence of machinations! What I do is to encrypt my notes in Gabelsberger. You should too, Herr Einstein.”
“No point. Even I can’t read my own handwriting.”
I smiled at the elderly physicist’s attempts to lighten the tone. Kurt had such faith in their friendship that he couldn’t conceive of Herr Einstein’s total disinterest in the subject and continued to harp on about the extraordinary relevance of his idol’s research. Leibniz apparently worked, like Kurt himself, on a universal language of concepts. Although his attempt was successful, he never published his results because they were too far ahead of their time. To this, Einstein invariably responded, “Gödel, you became a mathematician so that people would study your work. Not so that you could study Leibniz, for God’s sake!”44 And we would be off on another round.
“Like Leibniz, I seek Truth. And for that reason, I, too, am targeted. They want to get rid of me.”
“Who is this ‘they’? Does Hilbert’s ghost come tickle your feet at night?”
“I’ve uncovered foreign agents trying to introduce themselves into my house. Several poisoning attempts have been made against me. If I weren’t a reasonable man, I’d even say that our refrigerator has been sabotaged!”
“Don’t mention that accursed refrigerator to me again, Gödel! I am begging you. I would rather face another McCarthy hearing.”
It was time to slip away before my husband dug himself a deeper pit. His friends showed great patience toward him, which he abused all too often. Mine was now unshakable. I had put away anger. Had therapy been successful? I like to say that it helped me understand the pointlessness of my open battle. I’d gone back to our old way of operating: I watched him teeter on his aerialist’s wire and readied the mattress to catch him.
Anger purges you. But who can live with it for any length of time? Repressed anger eats at you. Then it escapes in little venomous farts that only stink up an already insalubrious atmosphere. What to do with all this anger? For want of a better alternative, some spew it at their children. I didn’t have that misfortune. I therefore kept it for others: incompetent officials, venal politicians, officious store clerks, nosy hairdressers, unattractive weather announcers, and the ass-faced Ed Sullivan. For all the pains in the rear I had no use for. I’d become a shrew to protect myself. I had never felt better. From that time on, whenever my barometer showed a storm brewing, I left on a trip. I practiced the art of flight until old age took away the option. Kurt encouraged me in this, despite the expense, although I always found him thinner and more taciturn on my return. If hope germinated in me at a distance, it rotted away after two hours back in Princeton: nothing would change him.
I was no longer tempted to return to Europe and live. My family had disappointed me. The previous spring, I had been summoned back to Vienna to see my sister on her deathbed. Lies. Believing it an emergency, I had taken an airplane for the first time in my life, spending money needlessly. We were comfortably off, but not as rich as they imagined us. I’d become their milk cow. I offered them love; they wanted money. In the end, what might have destroyed me in fact saved me: my real family, for what it was worth, was him.
“Let’s say our goodbyes, Kurt. We’re late. We’re attending the Metropolitan Opera tonight. Die Fledermaus, a limousine, champagne, the whole nine yards!”
“What has gotten into you, Gödel? You’re throwing away your salary now? Have you been selling secrets to the Russians?”
“Strauss is perfectly bearable for two hours, and I wanted to please my wife. She certainly deserves it.”
All heads nodded. I ordered my husband out the door by handing him his overcoat. I hoped to spare our friends a final wacky monologue. My hand was already on the knob when he turned on his heels and reentered the living room.
“You all take me for an eccentric. Believe me, when it comes to logic, I don’t need to take lessons from anyone! I may have little proof for what I’ve said, but I see the pattern. I see it!”
43
“Pierre, I’d like you to meet Anna Roth. She directs the archives at the Institute. She is almost a daughter to us.”
Anna wondered what lay behind this show of affection and her abrupt promotion to director. Calvin Adams had been very insistent that she attend the dinner. She had the sudden suspicion that he wanted to offer her as a bonus to his prestigious guest. Lectures and young flesh: the local specialties. She admonished herself. Even she was starting to get paranoid.
She greeted the mathematician in his own language. He answered in impeccable English with the slightest trace of a southern accent. Pierre Sicozzi had some of the features of a Roman bust: an aquiline nose, a curly beard and hair. He looked like the profile of Archimedes engraved on the obverse of the Fields Medal. Casually elegant, he wore a simple white shirt. The rolled sleeves revealed tanned forearms: this scientist didn’t shy away from the outdoors.
The young woman knew him by reputation. He held a chair at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies near Paris and had in fact just received the prestigious Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematicians, awarded to scientists under forty. She thought back to her discussion with Adele on the precocity of mathematical genius. She wondered if Sicozzi considered himself a high-level athlete in retirement. A question she wouldn’t ask him. As to his research topics, von Neumann algebras in particular, she knew nothing beyond the name, though it drew on the work of another illustrious Princeton figure. The man had a reputation for being accessible and an excellent teacher.
“I apologize, Mr. Sicozzi, I’m no scientist. We won’t be able to discuss mathematics.”
“All the better. You’ll keep me from being ripped
to shreds and eaten by those young sharks.”
He nodded discreetly toward the three Institute fellows with stiff manners who were ogling him hungrily, excited to be included at the table.
“It’s not every day they get to see a Fields medalist.”
“In this town, you bump into one on every street corner.”
The entourage of Director Adams was all present and accounted for, each having brought his partner. At the far end of the table, the Richardson heir appeared to be bored stiff under the rapid-fire questioning of Virginia Adams. Anna greeted several Princeton residents, among them a highly sought after Nobelist who often visited her department. All of a sudden, Leonard materialized beside her. He introduced himself to Pierre Sicozzi as “the prodigal son and child prodigy of the house,” then plunked himself down next to his childhood friend. His mother glared at him, which he ignored. Calvin Adams was forced to take the seat intended for his son, next to Richardson, and the arrangement gave him no view of the Roth girl’s neckline, nor of the more ample cleavage of the guest across from her. He consoled himself as he tossed back his whiskey: one was too skinny, the other too old.
Anna wondered how to start the conversation. The alcohol she had drunk on an empty stomach was tormenting her insides, and Leo’s stony presence on her right was hardly calculated to make her feel comfortable.
“Thanksgiving is a special day. We are meant to give thanks to God for all the year’s blessings.”
“And what do you do to punish him for everything else?”
“The same. Indigestion, drunkenness, and family tension.”
“In France, we count on Christmas to provide that kind of explosive chemistry.”
Anna fought her nausea by drinking a sip of water.
He leaned toward her. “I’m a bit worried at the prospect of eating turkey.”
“The French have so little faith in foreign cooking.”
“We do make certain assumptions. Just as the Americans make assumptions about us. But you and I share a sense of pessimism. You dread the ambience, and I the turkey.”
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 28