A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  “What? What was I blinded by?” Iris is being sincere; she genuinely wants to know. Everyone else avoids the subject of her thwarted career, but Mileva thinks that she and Iris are two of a kind, that if they just share their data, together they can figure out what went wrong, and so, how to fix it.

  “That’s just it,” Mileva says. “Neither of us has the first idea. That’s why I’m suggesting the talking cure. Someone ought to find out what goes on in the brains of women like us.”

  When Lehrer responded to Iris’s letter—the one in which she referenced Henry VIII—he’d been as comforting as one could be in a situation where there was no solution. “My dear Anne Boleyn,” he wrote. “The only way a woman can avoid waking up next to Henry is to model herself after his daughter Elizabeth and sleep next to no one at all. Look at Meitner,” he added, leaping centuries, switching countries. “All alone in life, but able to do her work because of it.”

  Mileva drains the last drop of her brandy. “So what did Lehrer write in return?” she asks. “Did he throw Meitner in your face?”

  Iris smiles faintly. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But yes, he mentioned her.”

  “They’re always throwing her at us. I like her, I do, but enough already.”

  “The virgin queen,” Iris murmurs.

  “Hardly. She’s been sleeping with Hahn all this time, you know.”

  “Who doesn’t know? Besides Hahn’s wife, that is.”

  “So she has it over us on two counts. No husband. Illicit sex, which, if I recall, is the best kind.”

  I wouldn’t know, Iris thinks. But says, “And a career. So three counts.”

  Forgetting that her glass is empty or perhaps hoping for a last drop to miraculously appear, Mileva lifts the snifter to her lips, tips it nearly upside down. Nothing. Naughty as a cat, she darts her tongue out, licks the inside of the rim.

  “Goodness,” Iris has to say. “Let’s just have another.”

  Outside, the boisterous laughter of young men. Inside, the delicate clinking of crystal.

  “Why don’t they ever bring up Marie?” Mileva asks. “Just once I’d like one of them to bring up Marie.”

  “Richard did, actually.” The brandy is sticky on Iris’s lips, thick on her tongue. It tastes medicinal, it tastes like a grimace, and yet she’s acquired a taste for it, she has to admit. “He went on to say it wasn’t fair of him to mention Meitner, but leave out Curie. But then he added, ‘However, if Lenz doesn’t see the Curies as exemplars, then what good does the fact of them do you?’”

  “You know it by heart.” Mileva’s black eyes glint with pity, leaving Iris no choice but to smile broadly.

  “Someone writes you an elegy,” she says, “it stays with you.”

  “To us.” Mileva offers the rim of her glass once again. “To the women behind the men.”

  “Far behind them,” Iris says. She forces another smile. She glances out the window to the weedy flower beds behind the house. She knows what’s coming next.

  “I’m as responsible for special relativity as Albert,” Mileva says, her glass still aloft. “We are Germany’s Curies, Albert and I. It’s just that no one is allowed to know it.”

  “Only Albert and God,” Iris says, though she knows the only way Mileva has ever assisted Einstein in his work has been by preparing dinner and running the household—and she didn’t do even that well.

  “And you and Lenz are Curies too,” Mileva says ardently. She returns the glass to the table where it wobbles. “You’re as responsible for the manna process as he is.”

  This isn’t true either. But it’s at least truer. Iris understands every aspect of Lenz’s work. When he was working on the process, she made suggestions, offered opinions. She not only edited and typed his manuscript, she rewrote parts of it. She saw where his research was heading, she steered him in profitable directions, she was of use. She had, after all, that piece of paper under that piece of glass. But she says none of this to Mileva. She says only, “Another thing you and I have in common, then.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so blasé about it. Our own husbands. They took our careers. They stood in our light.”

  “Maybe we should start sleeping with Otto Hahn,” Iris says. “Apparently that’s the path to success.”

  Mileva laughs. “Shtupping Otto. Have we not suffered enough?”

  The brandy throughout the day. That’s the only thing keeping her sane, the only thing keeping her from screaming all morning, all afternoon, and then, at night, baying at the moon along with the wolf-dog next door. A headache is almost always erupting behind her brow. Her eyes throb. She glances out the window, where Richard is roughhousing with the Einstein boys. She clenches her fists. Her gentle son.

  Sometimes Richard Alter wakes in the middle of the night to find his mother propped on her elbow, watching him from the cot alongside his bed. It’s neither a shock nor an invasion. She’s slept beside him his entire life.

  He’s heard the story many times, how sickly he was as a baby, how close she needed to be. She insists she still needs to be that close, and who is he to doubt her? It’s never crossed his mind to question the arrangement.

  Because she worries, he worries too. Not as much as she does; that would be impossible. “Take a sweater in case it gets cold,” she tells him on warm spring days, “and a salt pill in case it gets hot.”

  Every now and then, he dares to ignore her. Sweaterless, he sneaks out of the house, feeling as guilty and giddy as he assumes he would if he had a flask of whisky in his pocket. The guilt persists long after the giddiness dissipates.

  Still, the larger part of him takes her concerns seriously. He will remain sharply aware of any shifts in the external temperature for the rest of his life; he’ll retain an abiding suspicion of perfect weather and a grave mistrust of inclemency and cold. In 1914, a boy on the fulcrum between childhood and adolescence, he frets over his health as if he were an old man. His weak and tentative heart. His limited lung capacity. Heart attacks come about quickly and unexpectedly, Iris reminds him. He’s only twelve, and, yes, he looks so much younger, but he is not to let chronology or physiology fool him. Terrible things happen at every stage of one’s life if one doesn’t watch out, and discretion being the better part of achieving old age, he declines his father’s occasional invitations to engage in strenuous outdoor activities—biking, hikes, the constitutional.

  It’s true that the doctors say he’s better now, perfectly fine in fact, but as Iris says, who is one going to trust, a doctor with hundreds of patients or a mother with just one son?

  “You do know, don’t you,” his father says at the breakfast table—they rarely see each other anywhere else—“that the only person who hasn’t recovered from your childhood illnesses is your mother?”

  It doesn’t occur to Richard that his mother’s hovering may be not merely unnecessary but also embarrassing until the Einsteins move in. “You’re how old, and your mother still sleeps with you?” Hans says. “Does she still bathe you too? Does she change your diapers?”

  The thing is, she does still bathe him. Richard puts an end to that immediately, though it isn’t easy. His mother is grief-stricken. Richard has to agree to a compromise: Iris will still run the bath, lest he get caught up in daydreaming and wind up stepping into a tub of scalding water. The rest of it—Iris sitting alongside him, their meandering conversations amid the warm steam, the two of them sometimes singing together, his little zipfel bobbing on the surface, then Iris holding out the big towel, Iris tousling his hair dry—

  All right, she says glumly, he can tend to it on his own from now on.

  The shared room, though—she won’t budge on that. That, she says, is a matter of life or death. And because he has never really objected to her in the cot next to him and because he doesn’t know who to believe when it comes to his health, he doesn’t argue. He has no interest in dying in his sleep just so Hans Einstein will deem him manly. In fact, when you think about it, it�
��s Hans Einstein’s fault that Richard isn’t pushing his mother out the door, back into her own room. Now that Hans and his brother and mother are living with the Alters, the only time Richard can really talk to Iris is when he wakes up in the middle of the night to find her awake too, staring at him.

  “Bad dream?” she asks. “You were tossing.”

  “No,” he says.

  “Things on your mind, then?”

  He hesitates, then—the hell with Einstein—he initiates the night game he and his mother made up years ago.

  “If you want to know the truth,” he says, “Hans and Eduard threw rocks at the ducks on the pond yesterday. I had to run over and stop them.”

  The game has no name, but it has rules. You tell the truths one can only reveal in the dark.

  Iris says, “If you want to know the truth, Hans and Eduard are very angry little boys. Their papa is having a dalliance with his own cousin. He’s not even trying to hide it. The whole world knows.”

  “If you want to know the truth, even I know.”

  “If you want to know the truth, many men are like Hans and Eduard’s father.”

  “If you want to know the truth, when Hans told me about Uncle Albert, I told him about Papa. So he wouldn’t feel so alone.”

  “You know about Papa? Who in the world told you?”

  “You didn’t say ‘if you want to know the truth.’”

  “If you want to know the truth, I would like to know who told you.”

  “If you want to know the truth, you and Papa are not the most talented of whisperers.”

  “Oh, God in heaven. What terrible parents you have . . . if you want to know the truth. We should be protecting you from this sort of domestic mayhem.”

  “If you want to know the truth, I think it’s good for me to know. I think it’s helping to form my character. When I grow up, I’ll never treat my wife so poorly.”

  “We have each other,” his mother says. “That’s the most important thing. The most important truth.”

  “If you want to know the truth, I feel sorry for Hans and Eduard. Their father is just like Papa, but their mother is nothing like you. That means they have no one.”

  This last truth is a paraphrasing of something she has told him more than once: that no mother cares about her child the way Iris cares about Richard, that other children are so much more alone in this world than he. It’s not unusual for his truths to be recycled versions of hers. Other than his occasional failure to pack a sweater, other than the times he tosses his salt pills into the pond, he has no misdeeds, no youthful crimes to confess. Also, because he restricts his sporting life, which in turn restricts his social life, he has few opportunities to accumulate interesting secrets.

  So he appropriates her secrets and her ideas. That, or he downright lies. It keeps the game going, and if Eduard Einstein is utterly bewildered when Iris takes him aside and gently lectures him about the importance of kindness to animals, what does it matter? Eduard doesn’t know why she’s telling him all this, but he vigorously agrees with her. Stoning ducklings is a horrible thing for a person to do.

  August 4, 1914

  On the first day of the Great War, the Alter family breakfasts together. Lenz looks appraisingly at Richard, still so boyish, with the towhead and peach fuzz, the knobby elbows, the soft jaw. His facial features are those of his mother. Both are fair and their noses narrow, their eyes that pale and eerie blue. At least one of Iris’s ancestors must have been intimately acquainted with a gentile across the nearby Polish border.

  “Did you know that blind men’s eyes sometimes turn that same shade?” Lenz teases. He waves a hand in front of Richard’s face. “Can you see me? How many fingers?”

  “Stop it,” Richard says, brushing the hand away. “I see you. Believe me, I see you.”

  None of this strikes Iris as funny or even harmless. “Don’t curse his eyes,” she says.

  She’s not superstitious except when she is. There’s a limit to what science can accomplish or explain. As a scientist, she knows this better than anyone. She sometimes wishes she’d paid attention to her aunts’ remedies for dispelling a careless curse. Is this when you throw salt over your shoulder? Is this when you spit on the floor? Maybe this is the time when you spit on your husband; maybe a divorce is what’s called for, maybe a person should steel herself to what seems to be her fate, should open the door, invite that fate in.

  Mileva is gone. A few weeks before the war began, the two couples, Lenz and Iris, Albert and Mileva, sat at the formal dining room table, as Mileva silently read a document Albert had prepared for her signature: the terms by which he would permit the marriage to continue. When she finished reading, she’d requested a pen. “Will you witness?” she asked the Alters. Lenz had recoiled. “I’m sure that’s not necessary,” he said. “I’m sure if you live up to your end of things, so will Albert.”

  “I’ll sign,” Iris said.

  They’d left that day, the four Einsteins, the boys subdued and, Iris thought, apprehensive. The wisdom of children: the marriage had ended the day before Germany declared war on Russia. In the Einstein’s case, each side had failed to uphold its end of the alliance.

  “Quelle surprise,” Iris said to Lenz, who glared at her. Unable to save the Einstein’s marriage—a personal defeat—he was now working out the terms of their divorce. When Albert received the Nobel—he would, of course; no one doubted that—the prize money would go to Mileva. Even Elsa, the cousin, the mistress, still years from becoming Albert’s second wife, agreed.

  “I’m so grateful to Lenz,” Mileva writes Iris from a boardinghouse in Zurich. “When the Nobel money comes, the boys and I will be comfortable at last.”

  “She resides in a fantasy land,” Iris writes the late Richard Lehrer. “Yes, it’s a satisfactory arrangement in theory, that is, if the theory in question is Albert’s theory regarding time, which argues that Mileva is living in comfort in what we perceive to be the future, but, given time’s fluidity, is actually occurring now. Unfortunately, she’s impoverished in what we perceive to be the present.”

  As Iris would be if she left Lenz. If Lenz left her.

  EINSTEIN’S CONDITIONS (ABRIDGED)

  A. You will make sure:

  1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

  2. that my bedroom and study are kept neat.

  B. You will forgo:

  1. my sitting at home with you;

  2. my going out or traveling with you.

  C. You will obey the following points:

  1. you will not expect any intimacy from me;

  2. you will stop talking to me if I request it.

  It’s like a horror movie, isn’t it? It makes our eyes go wide and our jaws drop. And yet, like a horror movie, there’s something about it we find riveting, almost delicious. Maybe it’s that it lets us feel that in one way—basic kindness—we are superior to Albert Einstein. But also—we can’t help it—we love its strict adherence to the outline form. We love the perfect punctuation. We love the pleasing repetitions. We like reading the first word of each sentence out loud, as if it’s a kind of a poem—one of those minimalist Japanese poems like haiku or tanka—but a poem not about nature or love, but about the nature of love, the nature of marriage and human relationships:

  that that

  my my

  you you

  Bicker bicker bicker. Mine all mine. I blame you you you.

  Of course it isn’t Japanese in its meaning. Orderly, formal, degrading, it’s very much what the three of us, products of the twentieth century, descendants of refugees, have come to think of as German.

  December 1914

  Lenz Alter has stepped up his work in the lab. The windows remain lit until dawn. Whatever he’s doing in there, it’s all still a secret. No one is supposed to know a thing about it.

  “I’m the opposite of a blind man,” Richard says when his father teases him about his eye color, his vision. “I see everything. I see thro
ugh walls. I see in the dark. I see under water. I see the past and the future. I see ghosts and goblins dancing in our reception rooms, and when I look up at the sky at night I see Martians. Of course that means I also see what you’re up to in the lab. That secret project of yours? The one you think I know nothing about? I see it all.”

  Unlike her son, who is only teasing back, who is all cunning and bluster, Iris is a chemist, and she does know what Lenz is working on, the kind of potions he’s concocting.

  “I see what’s in your mind,” Richard says. “I see the formulae in your head. I jot them down in my secret notebooks. I analyze them all through the night. I have a few improvements to suggest.”

  “You’re not so funny either,” Iris tells him.

  He spends much of his winter break from school in his room. From his window he can see Prinz asleep in the garden’s weak sunlight. He can also see into the lab. Especially when he’s down with a cold—now, for instance, a late afternoon, his eyes and nose runny and his heart, in his opinion, beating a little faster than normal, which he decides not to tell his mother about, at least not right away—he kneels on his bed for hours, watching the students inside the lab running around, sometimes indulging in a spate of back-patting and hand-shaking.

  Such a difference, he feels, between being eleven and being twelve. Or maybe it was all the time spent with Hans. Iris’s reticence when he asks legitimate questions is beginning to make him feel less protected, more vulnerable. He’s not angry exactly—he’s incapable of getting angry with her—but he’s frustrated. He wants to know what his father is up to. He has a right to know, he tells both parents. He gets irritated when Lenz won’t tell him, but he’s flabbergasted when Iris won’t, not even under the cover of darkness. A betrayal, he thinks. She’s taking the wrong side. And who else does he have, really, but her?