Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (10 page)

Occasionally my father would take me to the ritual four o'clock tea in the institute's vast and elegant common room, where the resident geniuses would gather daily for cookies and conversation. Albert Einstein generally stood off in one corner, either alone or in close conversation with his one good friend, the brilliant but mentally unbalanced mathematician Kurt Gödel. My father didn't try to intrude on Einstein's isolation. The two had once been both socially and scientifically intimate, but they had grown increasingly apart, both personally and in their views on developments in physics—whereas my father had embraced quantum mechanics, Einstein rejected the uncertainty that was fundamental to that theory with the much-quoted comment, “I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.”

My father had become an insider in both the world of mathematics and physics and the American military-industrial complex, as comfortable speaking and writing in English as in Hungarian. Einstein, a steadfast pacifist during the heat of the Cold War, remained “an outsider in his adopted country, never accepting the professional mores or mastering the national language.”
³
This outsider status was solidified by his widower status and his growing frustration over his inability to achieve his life's goal—the development of a unifying theory to explain within a single framework the four fundamental forces that bind all matter.

My attitude toward the unique experiences afforded by living under
my father's roof was ambivalent. I was stimulated by the range of intellects and personalities I encountered there, but I was discomfited by the growing recognition, as I compared my world to that of my classmates, that ours was hardly a regular American family. I relished opportunities to visit households very different from my own and become part of them, however temporarily. I spent every moment I could with one particular friend, Leslie, even though she lived in a cramped apartment where I had to sleep on the couch when I spent the night and it was difficult to escape the presence of her alcoholic parents. The offbeat casualness of their world attracted me, and it was only in adulthood, as I saw Leslie's own life gradually destroyed by alcohol, that I recognized I had been witnessing not an enviable family life but a multigenerational tragedy.

While I was absorbing the complexities of social interactions among grown-ups, I was having the usual adolescent struggles over my own relationships with the opposite sex. My Miss Fine's classmates and I were labeled “townies” by Princeton undergraduates, potential dates when older and more desirable female companionship, imported from Smith or Vassar or other points north, was unavailable. We knew full well how we were regarded, but that didn't prevent us from responding eagerly to invitations to parties at the eating clubs that were, in those days, the center of undergraduate social life at Princeton. By the time I was a senior, my father and Klari succumbed to my unrelenting pressure and, somewhat reluctantly, allowed me to participate in these events as long as I obeyed the curfew they set.

I soon figured out how to turn my position of weakness into strength. Princeton undergraduates were not allowed to have cars and, given the tendencies of many of them to overimbibe, a number of lives were doubtless saved as a result. I, on the other hand, did have a car and was by nature abstemious. The party evenings often ended with me unceremoniously depositing my inebriated date on the sidewalk in front of his dormitory. This early role reversal reassured my parents and may well have helped stiffen my spine for future academic and professional competition with the opposite sex.

My mother may not have been the custodial parent during my adolescence, but she remained a forceful presence in my life and was the source of some very mixed signals I was getting about what was important and
what my priorities should be. The example she set by her life was of a smart, strong, energetic woman who could not only succeed in a man's world but also leave her mark on it. Yet she was constantly anxious that I not “let my brains show too much,” lest I scare off the boys and find myself a permanent wallflower. Always glamorous herself, she put a heavy stress on physical attractiveness, and her very efforts to improve mine made it clear that she wished she had better material to work with.

She made that clear when she was helping me to get ready for a dance at the country club near their home on Long Island, where I spent my summers. I was an awkward sixteen, mildly overweight and recovering from a bad case of poison ivy that had left my face red and scaly. She had bought me a very pretty dress—white, off the shoulder, and sprinkled with dainty flowers—and worked what magic she could with my makeup and hair. When she was done, she stood back to survey her handiwork and commented, “Jesus Christ, I'm glad I'm not sixteen!” I got the message and went off to the party feeling more than ever like a clumsy cow; my social self-confidence, always shaky, took a steep downward plunge. Between my father's expectations for academic performance and my mother's about appearance and social success, I had my work cut out for me.

During the summer vacation before I started college, I bowed to my mother's pressure to improve my appearance and had cosmetic surgery done to change the shape of my nose. I hesitated to tell my father because I was sure he would disapprove. But the letter he wrote in response to my news reassured me. After congratulating me, as he always did, on my excellent report card, noting that “of course, we have grown used to this,” he added, “I also think that it [the nose job] was sillyness [
sic
], 200 proof, but then that's the normal condition of the world. It must be admitted, though, that at least according to one usually well informed source, had Cleopatra's nose been half an inch longer the course of whatever it was would have been different.”

In that same letter, he replied to one I had apparently written him, thanking him for the years I had spent under his roof: “For me, too, the years that we spent together are unforgettable, and the more so, because that phase of our lives is past. It has all the heartrending quality of a very fine and delicate thing that is gone. The future might be good—for you it should be better—but it will not be the same. Yet, since we will now
both be “adults” (Heaven knows what that means…) we will have more to say to each other, and I hope that we will say it. There is a well-defined limit up to which I should interfere or appear in your life, but I hope that we will, even so, have much in common.”

I was deeply moved by my father's marking this rite of passage with such tenderness, and such a touching sense of vulnerability. At the same time, now that I was going off to college, I was relieved that I would no longer have to cope full time with the emotional whirlwind at 26 Westcott Road. And I was exhilarated by my newly acquired independence from my parents' divorce agreement, which gave me the freedom to make my own choices about where and with whom I would spend my time. Both my father and I believed that we had used the years together to establish a solid basis for our relationship as two adults. We could not foresee that this relationship would be cut mercilessly short, and that it would be marred by a more painful conflict than either of us could imagine.

“May I cut in?” With this courtly, old-fashioned request, Bob Whitman entered my life. The occasion was an informal dance, innocently called a “jolly-up,” at Holmes Hall, my dormitory at Radcliffe College, where I had started as a freshman a few weeks earlier. Among the Harvard undergraduates who came to try their luck at meeting a new crop of girls were two somewhat older graduate students, both veterans of World War II, who had “gone slumming” to unwind and celebrate having just passed the dreaded oral exam for the PhD in English. One of them, Bob Ganz, was my graduate instructor in the writing course required of all freshmen. He dutifully asked me to dance but was clearly uncomfortable fraternizing with one of his own students. Seeing his discomfort, his friend gallantly relieved him by cutting in.

Bob Ganz's rescuer was Bob Whitman, with whom I danced most of the rest of the evening and went out for coffee with afterward. I don't remember exactly what we talked about, but I do remember how taken I was not only with his blond good looks and obvious erudition but with his understated Yankee manner, so different from the explosive Hungarian interchanges I was used to. It didn't take me long to discover that, although not particularly religious, he had a strong commitment to the moral life, which he interpreted as having a positive impact on the lives of others, as well as a reluctance to let his emotions show, both inherited from his Puritan ancestors.

Bob was, in fact, related through both his paternal and maternal lines to five of the voyagers on the
Mayflower
, including the military leader, Miles Standish, and the spiritual leader, Elder William Brewster. His parents were both Whitmans (very distant cousins) and both social workers; they had met when they were seated alphabetically, next to each other, at a professional conference. The family was rich in education and culture but not in worldly goods. Bob told me that, during the Depression, his father would often make some excuse to stay home from a family outing to the movies in order to save a quarter, while his mother would never turn away empty-handed the homeless, penniless men who knocked so frequently at their backdoor. These habits, so different from the spendthrift ways of my own family, stayed with the senior Whitmans throughout their lives and were firmly imprinted on their son.

Back in my dorm room at the end of the evening, dazzled by the intensity of my reaction to a man I had just met, I told my roommate, “I've met the man I'm going to marry.” She replied with something like, “Oh, you're just a starry-eyed seventeen-year-old freshman impressed by an older man.” That same evening Bob wrote in a spiral notebook, which he still won't let me see, “have I finally found her?” Improbable as it may seem, the stars we both saw that night were real. Bob followed up in that same journal a few weeks later, “and now I am mooing like a love-sick calf until I see Marina again…She can wrap me around any finger—including 4th finger, left hand.” In 2006, Bob Whitman and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. And that same roommate was among the guests at the elegant dinner party our children hosted to celebrate the occasion.

When I entered Radcliffe—the women's division of Harvard—in the fall of 1952, I returned to Cambridge, the city of my childhood. But contained within it was a world I hadn't known anything about during those earlier years, a world that, in the richness of its offerings and the protection it gave its inhabitants from the problems and tragedies of the world outside, seemed like a modern Garden of Eden. In these new surroundings, linked to family only by an infrequent phone call, I could begin to define myself and my goals in my own terms, rather than struggling to meet my parents' expectations.

Radcliffe women of the 1950s were among the last beneficiaries of a
special privilege, the freedom to enjoy learning for its own sake without much concern about what it was useful for or how it would enhance our job opportunities, which we knew would be limited by our gender, no matter how smart we were. And we exercised this privilege in the most stimulating intellectual community in the world, guided by a brilliant faculty and surrounded by Harvard/Radcliffe classmates who were—as we were frequently reminded by our teachers and each other—the cream of the crop. This perspective faded in the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, as women began to challenge the cultural barriers that had prevented them from entering the man's world of career competition and advancement. Although I was one of the earliest and most determined of those challengers, I still look back nostalgically on the freedom my classmates and I enjoyed to pursue whatever subjects we found interesting.

Established in 1879 as an experiment in “separate but equal” education for women, giving them access to Harvard faculty while keeping them in a strictly single-sex learning environment, Radcliffe College had become increasingly integrated with Harvard. Finally, in 1999, it was fully merged into Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and ceasing to exist as an undergraduate institution. In the 1950s, Radcliffe was in the midst of that long transition. Thanks to the pressures of World War II, all our classes, with the exception of gym, had become fully shared with Harvard, and our instructors made no distinctions based on gender when they admitted students to courses or handed out grades. But the Radcliffe dormitories were at least a mile away from the Harvard campus, and women were not part of the social and intellectual world of the Harvard Houses, as the handsome living quarters strung along the edge of the Charles River are called.

The gracious, protective cocoon of Holmes Hall would look like an alien planet to today's students. We sat down to dinners served formally by our freshman classmates, at polished dark wood tables set with real china and flatware. After dinner, we drank coffee from demitasse cups, poured by our elderly but gracious housemother, in a living room that looked for all the world like an enlarged version of those in the affluent suburban homes many of us came from. We lived under strict parietal rules, signing in and out when we were going to be absent after 6:00 p.m., and alert to the fact that we would turn into pumpkins at mid-night.
During daylight hours, when the front door was unlocked, a bell desk, guarded on a rotating basis by the hall's residents, prevented any male, including our fathers, from penetrating above the first floor without special permission.

Partly because of the physical separation of our living quarters, but even more because of long-standing tradition, women were allowed to participate in Harvard's rich extracurricular life only on a very limited basis. Radcliffe had its own Choral Union, its own Dramatic Club, and its own newspaper, the
Radcliffe News.
This last was an amateurish effort, vastly inferior to the royalty of all college newspapers, the
Harvard Crimson
, and as female undergraduates were somewhat grudgingly beginning to be allowed to work on the latter, my coeditor Jody Fisher and I were delighted to preside over the dignified demise of the
News.

The blatancy of the many gender-based barriers to Radcliffe women's full participation in Harvard's undergraduate life was matched by the passivity of our response. We never thought to question why we were not allowed to study in Lamont, Harvard's undergraduate library, or be admitted to the Harvard Business School. When the overweight French graduate student with bad teeth who served as my thesis adviser made clumsy amorous advances, it never occurred to me that the problem of fending him off without jeopardizing my chances for a summa cum laude was anyone's but mine. My success in doing both turned out to be good practice for dealing with the episodes of sexual harassment—although the term had not yet entered everyday vocabulary—that I encountered during my professional life.

This achievement gave a boost to my self-confidence, but I still meekly accepted put-downs that would be unthinkable today. When an IBM recruiter abruptly terminated a job interview by remarking curtly, after a glance at my left hand, “We have a policy of never hiring engaged girls,” I stood up, smoothed my skirt, apologized for taking up his time, and left the room.

As I recounted this episode to my daughter and her closest friend shortly after they graduated from college, their faces fell in disappointment—they had expected a sharp departing put-down from me, at the very least. How could I make these children of the postfeminist era understand that arguing or making a scene would have been futile? No laws
existed to prohibit such policies, and there was no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with which to lodge a complaint. Luckily, I didn't take this dismissal as an indication of my own inadequacy, but rather as an example of the idiocy rife in a world where I would soon have to make my own way. I was to call on this self-confidence many times as I elbowed my way into a man's world, though always with a smile on my face that belied my stubborn ambition.

We Radcliffe women were, in fact, curiously detached from the world outside, oblivious to the sexism and racism that marked the era. No one I knew ever disrupted the smooth academic rhythm to do volunteer work on another continent or work in an election campaign. The only student protest I can remember was aimed at winning the right to wear jeans instead of skirts to dinner—and we lost. And when the college rented television sets for the dormitories so that we could watch the Eisenhower-Stevenson election returns, it never occurred to any of us to ask why the sets had to vanish once the returns were in.

Part of the reason we were so oblivious to the gender-based limitations that surrounded us is that we were the good girls of the 1950s, members of the “silent generation” that was swept away by the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. But the arbitrary boundaries that limited our full access to Harvard's offerings were also obscured by the richness of what
was
available to us. We studied with the greatest academic stars of the era, whose lectures and questions expanded our intellectual horizons as far as they would stretch. My senior thesis adviser in the Government Department, Carl Friedrich, periodically left my supervision to that amorous graduate student because he was off in Europe, writing new constitutions for several of the war-torn countries there. My graduate student instructor in Government I was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later headed the National Security Council under President Carter; Henry Kissinger was a graduate student in the same department. Many of my generation of government majors at Harvard remember Brzezinski's impersonation of a Soviet commissar, with a brush of blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a genuine accent (he was Polish, not Russian, although the distinction was lost on us). Most of his listeners were convinced that he was the real thing, only to discover later that he was, and remained, a fiercely anti-communist Cold War hawk.

The professor who had the greatest impact on me, fixing his laserlike gaze on the students as he outlined the roots of American democracy and why it is such a fragile plant, in need of constant nurture, was the political scientist Louis Hartz. He combined professorial rigor with a romantic streak. I will never forget wrestling on his final exam with an analysis of a couplet by e.e. cummings.

While you and i have lips and voices which are

for kissing and to sing with

Who cares if some one-eyed son-of-a-bitch

invents an instrument to measure Spring with

At the peak of a brilliant academic career, Hartz vanished. I learned from reading his obituary in the
New York Times
some thirty years later that he had spent the rest of his life wandering in Europe, homeless, alone, and mentally ill—evidence of the unsettling truth that creativity and madness can be closely linked.

Some of the most mind-stretching experiences I had in college, to my surprise, came in one or another of the three much-maligned Gen Ed (General Education) courses every student was required to take during the first two years. I chose Natural Sciences 1, widely dubbed “science for poets,” as well as a quick trip through the history of philosophy and a survey course in intellectual history. In them I wrote papers on such varied subjects as “Science as an Agency of Social Change,” “Religious Truth and Its Relevance for Mankind,” and “Freedom and Security: The Problem of Planning in a Free Society.” Such courses have often been criticized as encouraging dilettantes rather than serious scholars. But for me, at least, they succeeded in their goal—to expose me to some of the greatest thinkers and most difficult questions of all time—and thereby laid a foundation for the sort of critical thinking and analytical dissection of issues that have proved invaluable in every facet of my professional life.

In fact, along with many of my friends, I took what might be called a “smorgasbord” approach to the whole of undergraduate education, sampling tastes of whatever subjects interested us, without worrying about how it all hung together or whether it was preparing us for working lives, which, in any case, were expected to end with marriage. One area I left largely untouched, to my later regret, was math and science. And at least
part of the reason was the burden of the expectations I carried as John von Neumann's daughter.

My progress through the first term of freshman calculus was uneventful; I did the work that was required without either huge effort or great enthusiasm. But just after the term ended, two things happened. First, I learned through the grapevine that the young teaching assistant, cowed by my name, had assumed that whenever I asked a question in class I was baiting him. He didn't realize that I was simply a conscientious Radcliffe student who wanted to make sure that I had understood everything.