If a visitor turned sharply left on entering the front door, he stepped through a curtained archway into Stephan Pearson’s bedroom, which is where guests were invited to put their coats. A single window on the far wall looked out through a mass of bushes into the open fields beyond and admitted a dim glow into the room with its simple furnishings: a single iron bed, a dresser, a kitchen chair, a lampstand, and a free-standing armoire.
In contrast to the drabness of everything else in the room, on the lampstand facing the bed stood a framed portrait of a very lovely young woman with tender features and soft doelike eyes. On the wall above the lampstand was a framed letter that began with the words, “Dear Steve,” and ended with the words, “Love, Irv and Ellie.” No one, as far as I could tell, ever managed to induce him to speak either of his unusual living room wall decorations or of the mysterious girl in the portrait. This silence of his, together with the “previously committed” indifference with which he treated all women, led to the general assumption among his colleagues that he must have sustained a great heartache at some point in his life. They wondered if he had been jilted.
Dr. Pearson’s social contacts were rather rare during this period in his life. His only real friend was Dr. Niessen, and their friendship was on a professional level. As a matter of solemn fact, Dr. Pearson seemed largely oblivious to any other level. One could say that he abandoned the trivialities and dynamics of ordinary human life to take up residence in the mesmerizing world of theoretical physics with its inanimate mysteries and mathematical regularities. You yourself had to take up residence in that strange world if you wanted to meet the Stephan Pearson of those days, and Dr. Niessen had done that. They shared the keen delight of learning the secrets of this new world whose existence was not in the least dependent on theirs. As two of the very few spectators in the astonishing amphitheater of minute existence, they were welded by their mutual awe into an unseverable comradeship.
There were two exceptions to Stephan Pearson’s seclusion from daily life. Each Thanksgiving he would invite Dr. Niessen and half a dozen indigent students from the nearby university to his home for turkey dinner, rearranging the living room to accommodate a table and chairs borrowed from the church he attended. This act of unfeigned goodwill was relegated by some of his associates to his increasing fund of eccentricities. It was noted that he even offered a prayer of thanksgiving prior to serving the food.
The other exception was his practice of attending Mass every Sunday at the church just down the road from his house. He normally went to the High Mass at 11:00 a.m. since the organist who accompanied that Mass knew how to bring sublime sounds out of the instrument.
One might suppose that these were lonely years for him, and it is true that they were pockmarked by occasional periods of engulfing sadness, especially at the approach of Christmas. Dr. Niessen also told me of one startling occasion that sent Steve suddenly plunging into depression. It seems that the two of them were working on an electronic device near a window when suddenly his mentor’s eyes froze on the window and followed, as in a trance, the form of a slender blonde young woman passing in front of their building walking down the sidewalk. He began to tremble, like a man with the palsy, and was useless for the rest of the day. The effect of this incident was weeks in wearing off. During these rare relapses into what appeared to be a state of mourning, he became impenetrable and performed his work in the perfunctory manner of a machine.
But as a rule, his work was his wife, and the fruits of his work were his children. They made a good family—no quarreling, no dissension ever. It was a much happier family than he had known in his youth. The world of symmetry and orderly balance that had become his home must have led him by degrees to making the tacit assumption that the world of ordinary human intercourse could be expected to behave in a similar way.
He certainly displayed a kindly and generous attitude toward others. He had nothing against anyone, and he had no reason to believe that the daily occupation of most people was any less fulfilling to them than his was to him. Besides this, he had received directly from Cecilia a vocation to love the people he met. And so the taciturn scientist, normally all wrapped up in his work, would now and then demonstrate absurd extremes of personal sacrifice for the presumed good of someone else. The following anecdote was told to me by one of Steve’s associates during my visit to Boston in the fall of 1938.
It seems a university student who had been hunting in the marshes of southeastern Massachusetts one rainy Saturday morning stopped at the research center on his way home to flaunt his string of ducks. Just before leaving, he took one fat mallard off the stringer and tossed it into the corner with the remark, “Here’s a little fresh protein for you, Dr. Pearson.” The doctor nodded without interrupting his train of thought.
That evening, donning the slick raincoat and fireman’s hat and the floppy galoshes he had worn in the morning, Dr. Pearson noticed the duck sprawled out in the corner, its head tucked under its wing. Supposing that the student had forgotten the bird of which he had been so proud, he picked the thing up by the neck and trudged halfway across town under the bright moonlight to return it.
The student claimed that when he opened the door at 10:30 p.m. and saw Dr. Pearson standing there in fireman’s clothes holding the duck out to him, his mind went blank. Then, quickly realizing what had happened, and not wishing to disillusion the good doctor, he thanked him kindly and asked him into the house. But his night caller politely refused, insisting that as it was past his bedtime, he needed to get on home. With that, he departed into the starlit shadows, raincoat, rubber hat, and galoshes.
From what I have gathered, it seems this is a fair representation of Dr. Pearson’s infrequent excursions into the world during these years.
VII
The official reason for my trip to Boston in the fall of 1938 was an interdenominational missionary conference being held there, but actually I was more interested in seeing Steve than I was in attending the conference. I hadn’t seen him in over fifteen years, and in the interim the few things that I had heard about him triggered my interest in reconnecting with him. Naturally, I was curious to find out what had become of his commitment to be the fruit of Cecilia’s tragic death. As the evening approached which I had set aside to spend with him in his home, I found myself caught up in a tangle of poignant memories.
In a way, I suppose, I can be thankful that Steve’s head was so full of the stuff of his daily work that evening because it afforded me an open window into his daily life. He gave me the impression that the prospect of my visit had had a sobering effect on him. To be sure, he was not unhappy to see me. He showed me through his house, including the bedroom, making sure that I took note of Cecilia’s quite stunning portrait so near his bed and of the letter from Uncle Irv and Aunt Ellie in a frame on the wall above it. I would say that my visit had a religious significance for him which induced him to welcome me as far into the world of his research as he could draw me. I think he wanted me to experience that world for myself so that I would have some appreciation of how his work was allowing him to fulfill his mandate from Cecilia.
It was very clear to me that no day went by for him without his experiencing Cecilia’s hand of blessing upon him. He even told me, with some hesitation, that his weekly contact with the Catholic Church down the road had helped him realize how strongly connected he and Cecilia were and would always be through the Communion of Saints. She remained for him, he assured me, the reason why he still had what he called “a firm grip on life,” though he knew his grip on life would never match the grip she had had.
With that, he led me across the threshold into that world in which his grip on life was solid and firm, never to cross back over it again until near the end of my visit. And I simply followed meekly behind.
Over the next hour or so he touched on a number of subjects all related in some way to his daily work. His comments were dense and often suggestive of more than they actually described. I had no sense tha
t he was trying to conceal anything. He spoke without affectation and with great, if quiet, sincerity. I believe the following observations are an accurate reflection of his convictions at that time.
It was evident that his current understanding of life derived from his implicit reliance on the mathematical regularity and simplicity of all relationships in the world of minute particles in which he was working every day. It is not too much to say that he stood in awe of this world. His grip on life amounted to his underlying confidence that all of life is necessarily as sane as the special sector of it into which he had so fervently plunged. The reason he could allow himself to make this assumption in good conscience was that in dealing with “fundamental particles,” he was in constant touch with the amazing orderliness and consistency of the basic building blocks of every phenomenon in the created universe.
Leaning back in his armchair, he drew deeply on his pipe and declared, “Discovering that all of creation is founded on perfect and ultimately explainable regularity has profoundly affected my own attitude toward life. There is nothing in you, Paul, and there is nothing in me that is not systematically integrated into the forces of the entire universe. The gap between science and religion is fast closing.”
As our leisurely conversation moved along, I saw that for Stephan Pearson the gap had all but closed already, and by a process not by any means peculiar to him. In his own mind he could not conceive of the universe without a Prime Mover, to use a philosophical category of our forefathers. The daily applications of thermodynamics kept in front of him, he explained, the evidence that the universe can only have been initiated in an act of creation. It was not that he had intensely sought out an answer to a question that had been plaguing him, but rather that the answer confronted him wherever he turned in his work. There is a Creator, or little practical sense could be made of such demonstrable and useful principles at the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To him, one glance at the physical state of the universe, in which all components are racing away from a central point towards infinite space, strained to the breaking point any theory of origins other than an act of creation. And this, in a word, was to a large extent his God, tempered by the continuing warmth and wonder of Cecilia’s Jesus. Requiring an independently existing Will for the satisfactory solution to the problem of origins, Steve tended to merge the Originator with that which He had originated once its existence was assured. I came away from my evening with Dr. Pearson with the impression that his own personal and practical trinity-construct consisted of the Creator God, the Systematic Unity of all Creation, and the Inevitability of Scientific Advancement. To this trinity he was dedicated heart and soul, and was serving it at this point in his life with a certain serene enthusiasm and peace of mind.
In short, during these fourteen years of relative seclusion, Dr. Stephan Pearson experienced almost nothing to shake the foundation of his faith in human progress as the vehicle for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth or his conviction that Cecilia was happy with him for what he was doing with his life. The Great Depression served only to underscore for him humanity’s need for the universal prosperity science was prepared to offer it. In addition to the lure of his work itself, he had, as it were, a divine mandate to forge ahead so that humanity would not dally on the threshold of its New Era. This too eventually settled down within him into a pervasive sense of combined urgency, vocation, and approval. With this support he lacked nothing to satisfy fully his impulse to “launch out into the deep.” He was being borne on the crest of the rising tide of optimism. He was contributing in a major way to the spirit and substance of scientific advancement. He was heeding the call first heard at Christiania College “to eradicate the evils on earth in the name of God.” And he was perfectly clear in his own mind that he knew exactly what that call meant for him.
VIII
One evening in the spring of 1940 as Dr. Pearson was in the process of typing the final copy of an article he had been asked to write for the Scientific American, he was interrupted by a sharp rap at the door. Answering the door, he was taken aback to see the uniformed figure of a special government courier standing erectly before him.
“Dr. Stephan Pearson?” the courier demanded.
“Yes.”
“Please sign here,” the courier ordered, thrusting at him a receipt snapped to a clipboard on top of which was a large envelope.
Dr. Pearson took the board and glanced at the envelope. The return address stated: THE WHITE HOUSE.
Quickly he scribbled his name on the receipt and the courier disappeared. Ripping open the envelope with trembling hand he withdrew a heavy sheet of paper, unfolded it, and read:
Dr. Stephan Pearson:
May I respectfully request that you present yourself in the Oval Office at -:-- a.m. on -------- --, 1940, to discuss a matter of the utmost importance, and may I further request that you inform no one of this meeting.
I am not at liberty to disclose further details. You will be fully apprised of the matter in the course of our meeting.
This letter will gain you admittance into White House and the Oval Office at the stated time.
Sincerely,
Franklin D. Roosevelt (signed)
President
United States of America
Steve refolded the letter and tucked it back into the envelope. He sank down on the sofa, his head in his hands. A wave of sickening loneliness passed through him. What in the world was this all about?
The meeting was only four days away.
He got up and stumbled into the bedroom. He turned on the lamp on the stand and then sat down on the bed facing it.
“Don’t leave me now, my love!” he whispered.
Taking the frame containing her portrait in both hands, he looked at her long and hard and then clasped her to his bosom and hung on.
IX
Five days later a 1933 Ford light delivery truck drove into the driveway and stopped beside the house. A small man with graying hair on his temples got out and went into the house. Once inside, he methodically went from room to room, removing things from drawers and cupboards and putting them into packing boxes. He took only small and strictly personal items, such as clothing, and left nearly everything else untouched. And as he was doing this, he kept on muttering to himself.
“Barbaric forces have once again arisen in the world, forces bent on destroying all that is good and noble and hurtling civilization back into pre-Christian darkness. Gentlemen, to counter this evil and to come to the defense of human freedom and dignity will require the devotion and sacrifice of enlightened men everywhere….
“The cry of all humanity under siege for its very life is summoning you. Your country is summoning you. I am asking you in the name of all that is good and decent, in the name of God, to respond to the call of your country and dedicate yourselves without reservation to the cause of preserving democracy and freedom for our children and our children’s children.
“This is what we are asking of you….”
And at that point the President spelled out in detail what was being asked of the handful of extraordinary human beings sitting across the desk from him.
Steve paused in his packing, sat on his bed, and bowed his head.
“Who would ever have believed that eradicating evil on the face of the earth would come to this?…”
Looking up into her innocent eyes, he stared at her and slowly shook his head. Hands trembling, his breath short and rapid, he took her picture and placed it in a large leather briefcase. Then he took down the framed letter from Irv and Ellie and inserted it into the briefcase beside the photo. He went into the living room and removed the six frames from the wall over the sofa. They just fit into the briefcase next to the other two frames.
Within an hour the truck was packed. On his final inspection of the house, he picked up a sign and a hammer and some nails that were lying on the kitchen table. Then, walking slowly through the house, he stopped at the front door and turned around. Lifting his a
rms into the air, he said out loud, “Thank you, Cecilia’s Jesus, for giving me this little haven for all these years.” Turning about, he emerged from the front door and with difficulty locked it with a rusty key. He nailed a “SOLD” sign beneath the front window, got into his truck, and disappeared from view for some five years.
Incidentally, I discovered after his death that he had not actually sold the house. He had given it to an elderly couple he had met at church who had fallen on hard times and lost their home.
At this point a dark and impervious veil falls over the life of Stephan Pearson. Rumor had it that he was in the Chicago vicinity for a time. Other rumors put him in Tennessee, and still others located him in the American Southwest. The fact is that for over five years neither former colleagues nor old friends heard a single word from him or received any news of him. Even his widowed mother, whom he had contacted just before disappearing, died in complete ignorance of his whereabouts. He ceased to exist for everyone he had known. The only creditable information about him was what he had shared with his mother. He had told her that he was safe and was involved with the government in the war effort. She had passed that on to Uncle Irv and Aunt Ellie.
X
If, during the course of World War II, someone had been sitting on the rocky eminence several hundred feet above the village of Ciel des Montagnes, Vermont, he would never have guessed that the nations of the world were engaged in mortal combat. Only the most astute would have taken note of the few hints of it that were visible there in those sorry years. Early in 1942 one might have noticed the drab brown US Army bus that wound up the road from Montpelier, stopped in front of the schoolhouse to pick up half a load of young men drafted for military service, and then continued on to the next village. Or one might have observed the flag that flew at half-mast much more often than usual throughout the next four years. And, of course, one could hardly have missed the wild jubilation that rocked the town in the fall of 1945. But never could anyone have culled from the changeless calm of the old rolling mountains and the picturesque rock-strewn farms dotting the valley any hint of the blood and gore of Iwo Jima, the suicidal assault on Anzio, or the monstrous holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, young men from Ciel des Montagnes and District were directly involved in all of these horrors.
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