Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (13 page)

I was deeply moved by the love and concern expressed in this letter. But, even as I recognized the truth of many of my father's observations about me, I remained firm in my belief that Bob was the person I wanted to spend my life with, and that I would somehow manage to avoid the limitations and frustrations the letter had described. Wanting to respond positively to my father's outpouring of emotion, I tried to reassure him by saying that a year's separation, while I finished my senior year in Cambridge and Bob spent his first year teaching at Princeton, would give us time to test our relationship.

For my father, happiness was found first and foremost in the world of the intellect; for my mother, its wellspring was social relationships. True to form, she was as delighted with my marriage plans as my father was horrified. Her fear had always been that, by “letting my brains show,” competing with men in the intellectual sphere, I would reduce my chances of finding a mate, which in any case would become more difficult after the college years were over and there were fewer single males at hand. Whereas my father's mantra was “Don't marry until you have established your own professional persona,” hers was “Marry early, even if it means marrying often.” Her enthusiasm, tinged with relief, was enhanced by the fact that my chosen mate was a certified New England Yankee, whose
Mayflower
pedigree laid to rest her fears about my Jewish origins by guaranteeing my social acceptability and that of our future children.

Soon after my exchange of letters with my father, I went off to Europe for six weeks with four of my college classmates, including my old friend Margaret Rabi. We had a fine time on our mini-grand tour, visiting all the major tourist sites in England, France, and Italy that we could cram in, engaging in a variety of mild flirtations while fending off the more annoying amorous advances of French and Italian males, and discovering that if we ate enough croissants and drank enough café au lait at our
“free” breakfast, we could make it until dinnertime, thus saving the price of lunch.

We even survived without mishap the ocean crossings over and back on a creaky Italian ship called, euphemistically, the
Castel Felice.
We didn't tell our parents until we were safely back home that we generally slept on deck in preference to the crowded, smelly dormitory to which we were assigned, or that a couple of the young ladies in other groups who did likewise became pregnant by members of the ship's crew.

Hoping, once again, to give my father pleasure, I picked up a couple of mementos to bring home to him. One was a statue of a rotund, smiling ivory Buddha, the symbol of wisdom, which bore a more than passing resemblance to its intended recipient. The other was a slim volume of pornographic limericks to add to his vast collection—
Count Palmyra's Book of Verses
—whose cover left no doubt about what was inside. By the time I delivered these gifts, neither one of us had much heart to laugh together over them.

I had just returned to my mother's house from our European jaunt when a call came from my stepmother, telling me that my father had just been operated on for a malignant tumor so large that it had led to a spontaneous fracture of his collarbone. On hearing the news, Desmond, whose career in health physics had made him wise to such matters, immediately told me to ask whether the tumor was primary or secondary. On hearing that it was secondary, he gently explained to me that the cancer had metastasized from some other site. In the days before chemotherapy, such a diagnosis was a certain death sentence.

My father knew only too well what he was facing, but he told the truth to as few people as possible and carried on with his busy life as before. When I visited him and Klari in Washington, he clearly preferred to avoid any discussion of what lay ahead. I went along with his unspoken desire to pretend that everything was normal, although I cried myself to sleep many nights after I returned to my final year of college. But at the same time, I asserted my growing independence in a particularly painful way, by truncating the “test year” I had promised him. The summer's brief separation had only strengthened my conviction that I wanted to be reunited with Bob as soon as possible; we made plans to announce our engagement at Christmas and marry in June, as soon as I graduated.

Confronting both his imminent mortality and the knowledge that I was determined to take the step he had so vehemently argued against, my father wrote me a letter that was both angry and anguished.

I feel thoroughly shocked…A person of your intelligence and sensitivity cannot fail to know that you are breaking a gentleman's agreement. Your lightness in glancing over this does you very little credit…

I am sorry, but I must mention one more thing. At the time of the rather depressing episode of your worries, that my nomination to the AEC might lead to a public disclosure of your jewish origin, I wrote you…that I would, if you wish, put up and cooperate as far as I can with your desire to “pass” as gentile. However, I also wrote you, that there is one exception to this. I would consider it as definitely unconscionable if you concealed—by commission or by omission—from your future husband the fact
that you are 100% jewish on both sides and no nonsense about it.
¹¹

On this score, at least, he had no reason to worry. It had never occurred to me not to tell Bob everything I knew about my origins, and he regarded my ethnicity as just one interesting but not particularly important piece of the mosaic that made me the person I was.

After his long cri de coeur about what he regarded as both a personal betrayal and a seriously unwise decision on my part, my father drew a line in the middle of page 8 of his letter and launched into a long, detailed, scholarly discussion of the proposed topic for my senior thesis. I was planning to write on the political theories of an obscure seventeenth-century theologian called Bossuet, a proponent of the absolute divine right of kings. In his response to my query, my father wrote knowledgeably about that bishop's theory of history, monarchism, and anti-Protestantism and suggested that I compare his theory of the state to that of Calvin, quoting in French, from memory, the essence of the latter's views on the subject. Never once, in a letter that ranged from outraged anguish to an intellectual tour de force, did my father refer to his own dire situation.
¹²

Despite the pain he felt at my unshakeable decision, my father acquiesced in our plans with the outward graciousness that was his hallmark. Although by the Christmas vacation of 1955 he was confined to a wheelchair,
he traveled from Washington to New York, where we had arranged to hold our engagement party in a hotel rather than at my mother's home on Long Island, in order to make the logistics easier for him. He captivated the guests with his wit and charm, never referring to his condition or revealing his true feelings about the event.

Soon after the beginning of the New Year, my father entered Walter Reed Hospital, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. Given the gravity of his illness, both of my grandmothers urged me to postpone our wedding, feeling that such a celebration would be inappropriate while he lay dying. Although I respected my grandmothers' traditionalist views, I didn't see that waiting for him to die before going ahead with our plans would either give my father comfort or show him respect. And I certainly didn't intend to deceive him by pretending that I had followed his wishes by breaking the engagement.

Despite my firmness, or rather because of it, I was an emotional wreck during the last term of my senior year at Radcliffe, knowing that I had reneged on a promise to the father I had spent my whole life striving to please. What's more, I had done it when we both knew he was dying. I actually took my final exams in the college infirmary, having been felled by a variety of symptoms that, though real enough, were almost certainly emotional in origin. No one from my family was there to see me receive the prize for the highest-ranking academic record in my class at graduation; my mother was also ill at the time, my stepfather was recovering from major surgery, and my stepmother was looking after my father in Washington. But Bob and his mother provided my cheering section, and I did the same for him when he received his PhD from Harvard the following day.

Our wedding took place just ten days after these academic rites of passage. The Episcopalian service was held in the beautiful, whitewashed, eighteenth-century Caroline Church, which my mother and stepfather attended in Setauket, a few miles from their home. That, too, had its complications. During one of the premarital sessions with the rector that were required of all couples intending to be married in the Episcopal Church, Bob mentioned that he was a Unitarian. This threw the good clergyman into embarrassed confusion; apparently baptism in a Trinitarian sect—one that accepts the reality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—was a requirement for an Episcopalian church wedding.

Bob responded that if rebaptism was a requirement for us to be married in the church of my choice, he would go through with it, but he would regard it as a meaningless ritual. The rector was, naturally, appalled, and at our next session he reported triumphantly that he had obtained permission from the bishop to waive the rebaptism requirement. When Bob told this story to his mother several years later, she burst out laughing. It turned out that, although he had been raised a Unitarian, he had been baptized in the Congregational Church, which was acceptably Trinitarian, so the whole imbroglio had been totally unnecessary.

Every detail of our very traditional ceremony seemed perfect: I wore my mother's heirloom Brussels lace veil, attended by six bridesmaids in the excessively bouffant pastel (in my case pink) dresses that were the fashion of the day. And the mountain laurel was in full bloom at the reception, held on the patio and in the garden of my mother's home with its stunning view of Long Island Sound. But there was one painfully discordant note. Although my father couldn't be there, his mother, my beloved Granny Gitta, was. The guests were shocked, though, that as we were reciting our vows, she turned her back to the altar. She died of cancer herself a few months after the wedding, and those who saw it tried to attribute her peculiar behavior to the fact that she was already ill. But I believe she knew exactly what she was doing: exhibiting a silent protest at the joyous ceremony that was taking place as her oldest and favorite son was dying. Fortunately, my back was to her as I faced the altar, so I didn't learn of her silent protest until much later, when it could no longer mar the joy of the day.

After I changed into the matching blue and white dress, coat, and remarkably unbecoming hat that constituted my going-away outfit, Bob and I ran down the front steps of the Villa Francesca through a shower of rice. Our wedding trip consisted of a hurried one-day drive to Camp Chewonki in Maine, where Bob would be in charge of the junior division of the camp. Only the dead fish that my brother and Bob Ganz had thoughtfully wired to the car radiator as a going-away gift marked us as newlyweds. It was discovered when we stopped for gas and asked the attendant to track down the source of the odd smell coming from under the hood of the car.

Our summer as Mama and Papa Woodchuck to a bunch of eight- to
ten-year-old boys took the place of a honeymoon, which would have to wait until we could afford it. But, in an odd way, that summer served as a kind of prolonged honeymoon, by providing an interlude that postponed the beginning of real married life together, with its attendant routines, roles, and responsibilities. It also gave us the leisure and privacy to explore together, for the first time, the delights of sexual intimacy.

The camp provided us with our own little cabin off in the woods and excused Bob from having to spend more than a few nights in a cabin with the campers. His duties were not onerous and left us with a good deal of time together, without any of the pressures of a career-oriented job. We ate all three meals every day in the camp dining room, consuming institutional food in a huge hall filled with more than a hundred shouting, jumping, food-tossing boys. But it postponed for a couple of months the need to test my nonexistent cooking skills. My housekeeping consisted mainly of sweeping out our tiny cabin with a broom, and about all the camp expected of me was to give the nurse an occasional hand in the infirmary and, once in a while, drive into town on an errand. I was also asked to give a weekly bath to some of the junior boys, but that job came to naught when the boys protested violently. Somehow they sensed that I wasn't a legitimate stand-in for their mothers.

All in all, I had plenty of time to write thank-you letters for wedding presents and think about what the future held. I was determined to make a success of my brand new marriage without the tensions I saw in those of both my parents, and Bob and I definitely wanted to have children. At the same time, I knew my father was right. Unlike most of my classmates and female contemporaries, I also wanted a career that would carry the opportunity for both high impact and high earnings. But I hadn't the slightest idea what that career would be or how to go about finding it.

“I regret, Mrs. Whitman, that it is impossible for us to accept a student of your caliber into our graduate program, but we just don't have facilities to accommodate women students.” With this apology for its lack of sufficient bathrooms for women, Princeton's president shot down my plan to begin graduate work in economics at the university where my father had begun his American career and my husband was now teaching. Frustrated and furious, I couldn't foresee that the world of the 1950s, reflected in President Dodds's response, would be swept away by seismic changes in the national culture before the next decade was over, opening up new opportunities for me. Even less could I imagine the public violence and serial assassinations that would mark these changes' bloody birth.

Arriving in Princeton after our honeymoon summer, Bob at last carried his bride over the threshold. As we kissed, I tried to hide my dismay at my first glimpse of our new home, a sharp contrast to the large, gracious one of my Princeton adolescence. I was standing in the visible, tangible evidence of our lowly status on the academic totem pole, a cramped apartment far on the other side of town, in a group of wooden military barracks (bachelor officers' quarters, Bob insisted, but the distinction was lost on me) hastily constructed on the university's polo fields during World War II. They had been built to last only as long as the war did. Instead of tearing them down, though, Princeton took them over and today, more than sixty-five years after the war's end, married graduate
students and members of the university's maintenance staff still inhabit both the original buildings, shored up with aluminum siding, as well as look-alike new ones built to house the overflow.

The apartment's two miniscule bedrooms—one served as Bob's study—had no doors; we separated them from the living room with sackcloth curtains hung on wooden poles. The floors were cement, painted red, and the bathroom, which housed a grimy galvanized metal shower along with a sink and toilet, was cut off from the living room by a louvered door that let every sound through. The paper-thin walls that separated our unit from the one next door made us an unwilling audience for our neighbors' constant fights and the orders and admonitions they barked at their children. And, as we were trying to get to sleep, we could watch the smoke from their cigarettes curl over the top of the wall that separated our bedroom from theirs.

Most daunting of all was a large black kerosene heater, the only source of heat, which sat against a living-room wall. The previous occupants of our apartment had installed a gravity feed, bringing the kerosene in from outside; without it, we would have had to go outdoors every morning and carry in the day's supply in a bucket. This convenience feature very nearly caused my premature demise. On the first cool day, I flipped the switch on the heater to activate it. When nothing had happened after several hours, I called Bob at his office to complain and ask for advice. “Well,” he asked, “did you light it with a match?” I'd never before encountered a furnace that required a match but said I'd go do it immediately. “Good Lord, no,” he shouted. “Don't touch anything, and I'll come home right away.” When he did, he bailed several cooking-pots full of kerosene out of the heater, enough to have burned the place down if I had tossed in a lighted match.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the incongruity as I set out our elaborate wedding presents, heavy on sterling silver and leaded crystal, against this drab background. But I got a new perspective when my mother brought as guests a family of Hungarian refugees, including two teenagers. The four, led by their sixteen-year-old son, had risked their lives to walk across the Austro-Hungarian border in the midst of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and had wound up in a hastily established refugee camp at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Fresh from communist Hungary and
several stopovers as refugees, the whole family couldn't stop exclaiming how wonderful it must be to start off married life in such a cozy apartment of our own. Seeing it through their eyes gave me a new appreciation of our surroundings.

Our summer as Mama and Papa Woodchuck had postponed a test of my abilities as a homemaker, but now that honeymoon was over. Things had gotten off to a bad start on our first morning together in Princeton, when I attempted to make coffee for my husband, even though I never drank it myself. He thought the result had a rather peculiar taste but attributed it to the exotic Hungarian brand of coffee my grandmother had given us at the end of our brief visit to Washington. Only as I was washing the dishes did I discover that every drop had been filtered through the cardboard packing that I had neglected to remove from our new coffeemaker.

Like many university towns, Princeton had more bright, well-educated young faculty wives than there were interesting jobs for them. In the usually brief interim between marriage and motherhood, these women were expected to occupy themselves with “little jobs,” most of which were excruciatingly boring and made inadequate use of their intelligence and education. I considered myself fortunate to have been hired as an administrative assistant in the planning department of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the producer of the College Boards and a variety of exams required for graduate school admission. But I soon chafed at the vague, ill-defined nature of my job and the fact that I was sent off to perform technical tasks, like time-motion studies, for which I had absolutely no expertise. I felt both that my talents were being underutilized and that I wasn't doing a very good job on the assignments I was given.

Most of my friends from high school had moved away by the time I returned to Princeton, and my father's friends belonged to a different generation, so our social life tended to center on the English Department faculty. A few of the other junior newcomers became good friends, but the Princeton English Department was not a very welcoming place to our small cohort. Many of the older members of the faculty had started teaching at Princeton when it was a traditional WASP institution that reflected its southern origins—most of the town's black residents were the descendants of slaves that undergraduates had brought to college
with them before the Civil War. That ambience was reflected in the stir created when, the same year we arrived, the English Department hired Princeton's first black faculty member.

Some of the senior faculty members, with private sources of wealth, owned elegant homes, while others rented one of the large Tudor houses that had been built for Princeton faculty decades earlier. They were an ingrown, clubby group, without the cosmopolitan diversity that had characterized my father's intellectual circle. I was relieved to learn that the wives of senior faculty members had recently abandoned the tradition of a formal visit to newcomers, with white gloves and calling cards. Being condescended to by people who would have sold their souls to be invited to one of the von Neumann cocktail parties while I was growing up would have been bitter medicine.

By the time Bob and I arrived in Princeton, my father had already been in Walter Reed Hospital for several months. He and Klari had moved to Washington when he became a member of the AEC, and he continued to try to carry out his duties as his physical condition steadily worsened. Knowing that time was short, Admiral Strauss, the chairman of the AEC, saw to it that my father was awarded two of our nation's highest honors. He went in a wheelchair to the Oval Office, where President Eisenhower presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As the president was pinning the medal on him, my father commented, “I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor.” “You will be with us for a long time,” the president replied, glossing over the obvious, “we need you.”
¹
That same year, 1956, my father became the first recipient of the government's highest accolade in science and technology, the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award.

Despite his illness and the overly full schedule demanded by his AEC appointment and his membership on a number of military advisory committees, my father somehow managed to find time to start preparing his Silliman lectures, a prestigious series originally scheduled to be given at Yale in the spring of 1956. This project was particularly important to him because in it he extended the insights that had made the development of the modern computer possible into what was for him a totally new area, neurobiology. The lectures were to be a comparison between the logical processes of the human brain and those of the stored-program computer.

When he entered Walter Reed Hospital for the last time, in April of 1956, the notes for these lectures went with him, and when I visited him that same month he gave me bits and pieces of his ideas. I found these conversations an enormous relief, a positive note in his world, which was becoming increasingly dark. And they helped us avoid a discussion of personal matters, especially my approaching wedding, which gave him so much mental anguish and me such a deep feeling of guilt at being the cause of it. It is one thing for a daughter to defy a father who is in good health, quite another to defy one who is dying.

The Silliman lectures remained unfinished because, as Klari put it in her touching preface to the published version, eventually “even Johnny's exceptional mind could not overcome the weariness of the body.”
²
But the unfinished manuscript set forth the reasons for his conclusion that the brain's method of operation is fundamentally different from that of the computer; that while the computer's “von Neumann architecture” means that it operates sequentially, one step at a time, the human brain is “massively parallel,” that is, it performs an enormous number of operations simultaneously. Increasingly intensive explorations in neuroscience over the last fifty-plus years have shown this insight to be not only pioneering but prescient. One of my father's most overwhelming fears as he lay dying was that his work would not endure and he would be forgotten; the unfinished Silliman lectures are but the final addition to a body of work that has given the lie to his fears, though too late for consolation.

We had been in Princeton only a few months when, in February 1957, my father died. Many of his friends and colleagues had been amazed when, a few months before his death, he had expressed a desire to return to the Catholic Church, in which he had been baptized many years before, and asked for the assistance of a Catholic priest. He and Father Anselm Strittmatter, a Benedictine monk, spent many hours together while he could still communicate, and even after he fell silent. His brother, my uncle Nicholas, believed that his request arose primarily out of a desire to talk about the world of Greece and Rome with a fellow classics scholar, but I knew differently. My father had told me more than once that Catholicism was a difficult religion to live in but the best one to die in. Terrified of his own mortality, he found comfort in the promise of personal immortality in an afterlife. Although I didn't share that belief, I had never
argued with him about it; I was grateful that he could find some comfort in the midst of his despair.

The funeral mass, held in the chapel of Walter Reed Hospital, was attended by a considerable array of the city's notables and scientific colleagues from around the country. In his homily, Father Anselm spoke eloquently of my father's inquietude of soul: “But as he came more and more to realize that the control over the physical forces of nature which he and his co-workers had placed in the hands of their fellow men could be used for evil as well as for good, that as the world is moving today this control might quite possibly be used for destruction rather than up-building, he felt with steadily increasing intensity the moral problems bound up with the greatest of scientific triumphs…It was not easy for one who had never known frustration, still less failure, to submit to the designs of an inscrutable Providence, to say ‘Thy Will be done,’ once he had come to realize that science could not check the progress of his disease.”
³

In contrast to the very public service in Washington, my father's burial next to his mother in the Princeton cemetery was a brief, quiet ceremony, attended by family and a small group of intimates, including both Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, who delivered the graveside eulogy. I was dry-eyed at both events. I had done my mourning months earlier, when the father I knew had already slipped away, leaving only a shrunken shell of a body to linger a little while longer. Although I had long known that it was coming, the finality of his death left me with a lingering sadness and sense of deep regret that my last conversations with my father had been marked not by the epiphany of mutual understanding that so often marks deathbed scenes in novels and plays but by tearful intransigence on my side and a profound sense of disappointment, tinged with betrayal, on his.

During the spring following my father's death, and perhaps accelerated by it, my dissatisfaction with the job at ETS, and with the unfamiliar and humiliating second-class citizenship in Princeton's intellectual circles it represented, crystallized into the recognition that if I wanted to prepare myself for the kind of challenging and rewarding career that was a rarity for married women in the 1950s I had better go to graduate school. During my brief time in the Planning Division, I had discovered
that most of the more interesting problems that crossed my desk seemed to relate to economics. Combining that interest with the enthusiasm for journalism nurtured during my college summers at the
Long Islander
, I decided to pursue two master's degrees, one in economics and another in journalism. The combination, I fancied, would prepare me to write insightful articles on business and economic issues for the
New York Times
or some equally respected journal.